The Art of Making Money (11 page)

Adding on the process camera, plate burner, hydraulic cutter, inks, lights, tables, tools, and chemical solutions, he stocked his shop for about five thousand dollars. It was a bare-bones setup befitting the name of Art’s hideout. But in one regard it was also advanced: In addition to the other equipment, Art also picked up an Apple computer, a scanner, and a diazotype blueprint machine—a high-end architectural printer.

In 1992, less than one half of one percent of counterfeiters used desktop-publishing equipment, but Williams had long wondered if there was a way to integrate the new technology into a counterfeiting operation. Wired into a Macintosh computer running the image-editing program Photoshop, he’d have the option of playing with bill images and cleaning them up on the screen, then printing them out on the diazotype. He had no idea how well the technology would work and decided to stick to the tried-and-true method Pete had taught him, but he wanted to experiment in the future—an inclination that would later define his criminal career. “Da Vinci never messed with computers and printers—he was strictly old school—but I knew they had possibilities,” says Art. “It was just something I wanted to play with.”

At the same time Art was accumulating all his printing supplies, he set aside one room in the apartment for a new “hobby”—a hydroponic marijuana grow room. On the streets “Dro,” as it was called, was becoming all the rage. It was selling for $350 an ounce, and Art figured that the weed operation would be a good fallback, with the added benefit that he’d be able to smoke as much as he wanted, for inspiration. He needed to rig a fan and duct system to get rid of the smell of printing chemicals anyway, and it would also work just as well evacuating the skunky-sweet stench of a roomful of Dro.

Two months went by before he had all the equipment ready, and by then he was missing the one crucial counterfeiting element that can’t be easily obtained: the paper. United States currency is printed on a paper composed of 25 percent linen and 75 percent cotton. Da Vinci’s Royal Linen had done a good job of mimicking the material, but the old man had never told Art where he got it. All Art knew was that it was lightweight newsprint, the kind of industrial publishing paper that generally comes in refrigerator-sized rolls that often weigh several tons.

Knowing that da Vinci had used a connection at one of the many local printing houses, Art improvised a plan for acquiring paper. After running through a list of larger printing houses in the Yellow Pages, he targeted one on Dearborn Street, a low-lying redbrick monster that specialized in printing trade magazines, brochures, and newsletters by the millions. He dressed up in khaki slacks and put his glasses on, then drove over to the printing house in a pickup truck borrowed from a friend. After walking in through the loading dock, he asked to see the manager.

A few minutes later Art was a greeted by a short, jocund man with white hair, bright blue eyes, and a round face. Drawing on his days of begging paper for school, Art told him that he was a student who was working on a presentation that would cover a whole wall of the gym. He needed a roll of light newsprint, but he didn’t have much money. Specifically, Art asked the manager if he had any “butt rolls.” Also called “stub rolls,” they’re the unused cores of the huge industrial rolls—the publishing equivalent of those last, untappable sheets on a roll of toilet paper, with the exception that butt rolls typically weigh a couple hundred pounds. Too small for a large-scale print run and too large to throw away, most printers send them to the recycling bins. For a flourish, Art told the manager that he was also interested in becoming a printer someday. The manager, who was South Side Irish to the core, perked right up.

“Look, if I got some in the bins, you can take ’em,” he told Art, “but since you’re interested in becoming a printer, wouldn’t you like to take a look around?”

Art said yes.

The manager proceeded to give him a tour of the whole building, from their computerized design studio to their roaring, forty-foot-long presses that devoured ink by the barrel. As they came to each machine, he’d tap a supervisor on the back, introduce Art as an aspiring printer, and have him explain the details of his post. Art peppered them with questions, and enjoyed the tour so much that he almost forgot why he had come, until the manager pointed out the recycling bins.

Rummaging around inside the bins, he found three butt rolls of light newsprint that fit his need to a tee. Not only did the manager give them to him for free, but he even shouted a couple workers over to load them into the pickup.

He drove off waving to the manager, with enough paper to print millions of dollars.

 

 

 

WITH HIS SHOP FULLY EQUIPPED, Art hunkered down in the Dungeon and began the exacting process of re-creating everything da Vinci had taught him. Like a pilot attempting his first solo flight four years after his lessons, he was shaky and tentative, operating mostly on guts and general memory. Time’s dulling flow had softened his appreciation of the crime’s fundamental truth: Counterfeiting is immensely difficult.

He didn’t even consider printing da Vinci’s preferred product—hundred-dollar bills—because they were the most scrutinized denomination. His plan was start with twenties, working his way up as his bills improved.

To his surprise, his plates came out okay. Not quite as crisp as da Vinci’s, but his mentor had drummed into him the importance of taking precise measurements before shooting the negatives, and this had stayed with him. It wasn’t until he moved to the offset press that he realized his education was woefully incomplete.

Art did everything the way he remembered—mounting his plates on the roller, mixing his inks, and firing up the AB Dick—but as his first batch emerged on the delivery tray he didn’t see the bright, fine rectangles of mint that he remembered from the da Vinci days. Instead, he had a batch of purple bills. He turned off the press and went back to the ink palette, adding more green and yellow. But his next batch of bills was almost chartreuse and looked like they had been exposed to radiation. Again and again he’d adjust his color and run off a few hundred sheets, only to find he’d created some new perversion of the twenty-dollar bill, like a mad scientist with a labful of mutants.

“I got discouraged,” says Art. “When I was with Pete, I never got to run the press or mix the inks. I just watched him, so I tried to go off what I had watched. I knew how to turn the press on, raise the paper, put the plate on, get it to run, but I didn’t know how to do it all by myself.”

He took a week off and spent the time hanging out with his friends from Taylor Street, mulling over what had gone wrong. The problem, he knew, was one of attention and patience: Rather than letting the press rip away and hope for the best, he needed to control the pace. So on his second attempt he began stopping the press every fifteen or twenty sheets, then adjusting his colors and alignment. He did this dozens of times, losing himself in the process.

After hours of tweaking, he went to the tray and saw something that made his heart pound: All of a sudden he was looking at money. A little dark, but it was there.

Like a roughneck striking oil, he quickly turned the press back on and ran off more than two thousand fronts. Then came the seals and serial numbers. From experience, he knew that the backs—which consisted of only one color—would be far easier, and they were. In a matter of a few more hours of printing and cutting, he was sitting at the kitchen table in the Dungeon, exhausted. In front of him was twenty thousand dollars in counterfeit.

“There were a lot of feelings going through me. I felt really good, but I also felt alone, like I was in this all by myself because Pete wasn’t there. I remember thinking, ‘Man, I wish you could see me now, Buddy. You never got to finish teaching me, but I went ahead and finished for you.”

 

 

 

DESPITE HIS ELATION, Art was now confronted with a much bigger problem than the mechanics of making money. Obsessed with remembering the details of how to counterfeit, he’d given little thought to what he’d do if he actually succeeded, and when it came to the second half the business—unloading it—da Vinci had provided him no training whatsoever. And so he went to the one person he knew who would have a plan.

Back when he was learning how to counterfeit, Art hadn’t exactly kept his promise to da Vinci about not telling a soul. “I had to tell
someone,
” he admits with embarrassment. “It was too intense to keep all to myself. So I told one person.”

His confidant had been Michael Pepitone, a nineteen-year-old from Taylor Street who was one of the most peculiar specimens of Chicago criminal Art had ever met, beginning with his looks. With a lithe build, bright blue eyes, a crew cut, and light Mediterranean skin, Pepitone was by no means unattractive, but he had a gawkish tendency to carry his head out in front of his chest, sometimes moving it in a herky-jerky pivot when he spoke. This little head-dance placed him squarely in the odd-bird family—an image that was bolstered by his unnatural obsession with details. “Every morning, the first thing Mikey did was change his voice mail,” says Art. “He’d say, ‘Hello, this is Michael Pepitone. The date is Tuesday the twenty-second. . . .’ If you called him the next day he would say exactly the same thing, but it would be the twenty-third. It didn’t matter what day you called, he’d always have it current. He’s a fucking madman. But I like that about him.”

Long after his childhood, Mikey would learn that he suffered from attention deficit disorder. But what was truly bizarre about Pepitone was that although he showed definite strains of geek, he was one of the fiercest boys on Taylor Street. A lifeguard by day, he spent his nights working as a debt collector for independent bookmakers, who knew him as Mikey “Bad to the Bone” Pepitone, one of the most successful amateur boxers in the city. At six two and 175 pounds, he had a nasty left hook and would end his amateur career with a 19-2 record. The bookies took notice and offered him thirty to fifty percent of everything he could collect, depending on the age of the debt. He’d show up at a debtor’s doorstep, try to gab his way to the money, and if that failed he’d go from zero to Nero almost instantaneously. “I wouldn’t say I
liked
roughing people up,” explains Mikey, “but you have to understand where Arty and I came from. If somebody gets over on you and you let it happen, that’s on you. When I was collecting, those guys knew why I was there. Once he paid, a guy might invite me to sit down and have a coffee with him. Yeah, that was weird, especially if he had bandages. But they didn’t blame me. They blamed themselves.”

Williams and Pepitone actually met during a street fight. One day while Art was walking down Taylor Street, two kids from the nearby Jane Addams Homes stopped him and demanded his shoes, a brand-new pair of high-tops. Art immediately started swinging, and as he struggled to hold his own, he suddenly found Mikey fighting alongside him, whipping his fists with such speed and ferocity that the two assailants quickly backed off. Pepitone’s fearlessness earned tremendous respect from Williams, and as the boys came to know each other better they discovered that they had more in common than the ability to use their fists. Mikey was yet another paternal amputee. He had never met his dad, who had abandoned his mother before he was born, and she’d raised him with the help of a stepfather who came along later. “Arty’s life and my life were very similar, and we recognized that right away,” says Mikey. “The only thing I was thankful to my dad for was that he made me a hundred percent Italian.”

Unlike many other street criminals Art knew, Mikey rarely boasted when it came to his exploits as a shakedown man, and Art sensed that the older boy was cautious and enterprising when it came to crime. It had been all these factors—Pepitone’s street smarts, his courage, cautiousness, and spiritual brotherhood—that led Art to break his second promise to da Vinci and tell Mikey that he was learning an esoteric criminal art.

“We’d been shooting some hoops at Sheridan Park and afterwards Art pulls me aside,” Mikey remembers. “He told me he had learned this new trade, then he showed me one of these hundred dollar bills, and my penis became erect. I couldn’t believe it. That was a rare thing he was learning, and he was just a kid. Where we come from, learning something like that was almost a privilege. We call the stuff he made by its Italian name,
fugazi,
and guys who can do it well are rare. I said, ‘Don’t be a jagoff and pay the fuck attention to everything this guy is showing you.’ ”

Now three years on, Art approached Mikey at the basketball courts once again, this time handing him a bill made entirely by him. Pepitone’s nose for profit immediately kicked into overdrive.

“How much do you have?” he asked.

“Twenty thousand.”

“That’s it?” was Mikey’s response. Art would hear similar complaints from many friends and associates over the years. No one would ever appreciate the effort it took to create a convincing bill, or the dangers of making too many. Everyone but the counterfeiter himself assumes that if you can make a thousand, then the logical thing to do is to go ahead and print a million.

Despite his great expectations, Mikey was happy to help Art unload the twenty large. A week later, he called Art and presented him with his first “deal.” There was a pot dealer, a young guy who was growing hydroponic weed in his home, who would take the whole batch in exchange for six pounds. But there was a catch: The dealer, Mikey told Art, would have no idea that the money was counterfeit. Art felt like he was headed right back into the racket he’d been trying to escape, but he needed the money.

“By the time he realizes the money is fake, we’ll be long gone,” Mikey assured him. “And if he does realize it, fuck him. What’s he gonna do? Call the cops?”

“Where’s he from?” Art asked.

“Kenosha,” Mikey replied with a smile.

And that sealed it. Everyone on the South Side knew that guys from Kenosha were “soft”—suburban kids unaccustomed to having to fight for their meat. A few days later they met the dealer in the parking lot of a local gas station.