The Art of Making Money (16 page)

Having been caught with the stolen goods, Art knew that he had little chance of beating the rap. He could have attempted to cut a deal by testifying that Pettis had been the mastermind behind the burglary, but in his mind he was still in Bridgeport, where the only certain honor is resisting the opportunity to become a rat. Unhampered by any such code, Pettis told prosecutors that the burglary had been Art’s idea and agreed to testify against him, winning himself probation. On the advice of his court-appointed lawyer, Art pleaded guilty to second-degree burglary of a habitation.

On January 12, 1996, a Denton County judge sentenced Art to six years in prison. With time served and good behavior, he and his lawyer calculated he’d do only three. But that would be plenty of time to reflect on the fact that he’d lost his freedom over a crime that, compared with his earlier stint as a counterfeiter, was low-rent, lowbrow, and high risk. Perhaps in that regard the reformatory powers of Texas’s prison system would work; Art would never rob from an individual again, drug dealer or otherwise. From that point on, only one crime would consume his thoughts. What he didn’t realize was that the rules of the world’s second oldest profession were about to change.

BOOK TWO

7

BATTLE OF THE BILL

Scarcely was the ink dry on the first note from the press of the Treasury, before its bogus counterpart appeared in circulation.

—LA FAYETTE CHARLES BAKER, 1867

 

 

 

 

On April 30, 1999—three years, two months, and nine days after his robbery arrest—Art Williams stepped out from behind the security gates of the Holiday Unit in Huntsville like a man preserved in ice. He was dressed in the same pair of jeans and white T-shirt he’d worn on the night of his arrest, and in terms of his plans for the future, he hadn’t evolved much further. He had spent most of his time coping with the present realities of one of America’s worst correctional systems.

While serving out his sentence, Art had gotten the grand tour of Texas’s penal system, which at the time was the second-largest in the country and the fastest-growing system in the world. After riding the merry-go-round through transfer and processing units like Gurney, Moore, and Huntsville, he finally wound up at the Lopez State Jail, which was both geographically and spiritually the ass end of the system. Located at the southernmost tip of Texas in the town of Ed inburg, it sat twelve miles from the Mexican border, in a parched, three-hundred-acre parcel that the twelve hundred prisoners farmed for vegetables while shotgun-bearing guards on horseback watched over them like extras from every bad prison movie ever made. During the summer, temperatures routinely broke a hundred degrees Fahrenheit while humidity from the Gulf of Mexico turned the whole place into a soul-sapping sweatbox. Although the unit was brand new, it was brutally Spartan: there was no air-conditioning to speak of, and prisoners often had to boil their own water to make it drinkable. The running joke among the inmates was that they were no longer in the United States. “We’re in fucking Mexico,” they’d say, and invent stories about how then-governor George W. Bush had struck a deal under NAFTA to export Texas’s prisoners south of the Rio Grande.

“It was just hell,” Art remembers. “It was a hundred degrees in a tin box, and people were so angry because of the heat. At different times of the season we’d have billions of mosquitoes and they had to cancel rec because people were getting eaten up. When you could go to the rec yard, there were also rattlesnakes. You’re hitting iron, and fucking baby rattlesnakes are coming up behind you!” The social ills weren’t much better. Statistically, Texas was the state where an inmate was most likely to be raped, and most likely to die in prison. A few years after Art was sentenced, a federal judge (who was aptly named William Justice) declared that Texas’s penal system was rife with “a culture of sadistic and malicious violence.” Art participated in it firsthand. Early on, another inmate had demanded he hand over some of his commissary goods, a brief exchange that resulted in the other inmate winding up in the hospital and Art spending a month in solitary confinement. That was the only time he was attacked, but on numerous occasions he faced down other inmates, mostly blacks and Mexicans, who are disproportionately represented in Texas. Having come from Chicago, where race is less important than your gang affiliation, Art found the self-segregation utterly weird. Most of the time he read books and kept to himself. As one of the few inmates who could read and write well, he ended up working in administration, which was considered a cushy job.

Throughout it all, the one bright spot in his life was the quiet girl he’d barely gotten to know before he went to prison: Natalie Silva. Prior to his arrest, he’d had a couple romantic encounters with her, but after he went to jail she’d had a brief fling with another man that resulted in a son, Alex. Art naturally assumed she’d fade away, but she’d surprised him by visiting him early on, then followed up by writing him letters. She was the only one of the four girls who stayed in contact with him once he was sentenced, and over the years the letters never stopped, nor did her visits. She trailed him throughout the system, filing her name on visitor-request forms and driving hundreds of miles to whenever he was transferred. “I was in love with Art the first moment I saw him,” she’d later confess, “but I would have been stupid to tell him that. I was young, he was dating my friend, and he definitely wasn’t husband material. But he was unlike anyone I’ve ever met. I have very little tolerance for stupid people, and the thing about Art—other than the fact that he is very, very good-looking—is that he has brains. Yeah, he was a criminal, but to me that always came second.”

For both of them, Lopez—576 miles from Denton—was the ultimate test. Art would have understood if she’d visited him once a year, but once a month Natalie would hop in her Toyota on a Friday and set off on a ten-hour drive. She’d pop Metabolife diet pills to stay awake and sleep at rest stops when they wore off. After washing her hair and doing her makeup in a gas station restroom, she’d show up in Lopez’s visiting room on Saturday afternoon looking like she’d just stepped off a private jet. The permissible visiting time was four hours, and when it expired she’d turn right back around to be at her ticketing-agent job at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport by Monday morning.

Natalie was right outside the gate when Art was released. She drove him back to her place, made love to him, and over the next few weeks offered him encouragement as he looked for a legitimate job. “Initially he had a positive attitude about going straight. He got up early every day and found a job framing houses, like he did before. And he went to work. But after a couple weeks he became quiet, depressed. And then he started complaining about the jobs not paying enough.”

Art was earning seven dollars an hour for backbreaking labor. Since the work itself was intermittent, and he was wrestling to help support his nine year old son up in Chicago, he began to slip into the old victim’s mind-set. “I know every criminal says this,” he says, “but it’s almost like the system
wants
you to commit another crime. Since you’re a felon, nobody wants to hire you, and those who do are paying you shit because they know they can get away with it. At the same time, most prisons don’t do shit to give you skills. They get the more educated inmates to teach classes. Needless to say, they aren’t the best teachers. I know it sounds lame, but if you’ve never stood in those shoes, you don’t know. You start thinking about how much money you used to make as a crook. And once you start thinking like that it’s hard to stop. Then that opportunity comes along, and suddenly you’re back in it.”

A few weeks after Art was released, he and Natalie visited a local Barnes & Noble. Feeling depressed about his work situation, he wanted to pick up a copy of the
Tao of Jeet Kune Do
by Bruce Lee, who he’d found inspiring ever since he was a kid. Art hadn’t been paid yet from his construction job, and as they stood in line Natalie gave him a brand new C-note to pay for the book. He had barely gotten a look at the bill before handing it to the cashier, but in those brief seconds his curiosity ignited with the shattering alacrity of buried ordnance.

The hundred-dollar bill, he was astonished to see, had changed.

 

 

 

AMERICA’S CURRENCY had already begun to change as early as 1990, the year the Bureau of Engraving and Printing instituted the security strip and microprinting. Hold any bill except a dollar note in front of a light source, and the strip appears as a vertical line, with “USA,” the denomination, and an American flag running its length. Made of a 1.4mm-wide polyester thread, the strip is embedded in the bill and invisible unless it’s backlit. It foils counterfeiters who use copiers because the flash bulb exposes the strip, leaving a jarring black line across the copy. If exposed to ultraviolet light, the thread will also beautifully fluoresce: red for a hundred, yellow for a fifty, green for a twenty, and so on. Microprinting, the second change, installed the words
The United States of America
in the window framing the portraits, in letters six to seven thousandths of an inch wide—too small for most copiers or scanners to register without blurred results. Over the ensuing three years, the measures were extended to all but the dollar bill.

Both of those changes—neither of which affected the look that U.S. currency had maintained since 1929—had been instituted to combat rapidly developing reprographic technology, which by the mid-1980s had become so good that even nine-to-fivers were increasingly flirting with counterfeiting. Every month newer, more advanced color-copiers, printers, and scanners were entering offices, where one of the first things curious employees did was lay a twenty on the glass, press start, and see what came out of the dispenser—call it the counterfeiting reflex. For the overwhelming majority it was an innocent game that resulted in a momentary thrill followed by a trip to the shredder. But by 1985 the copiers were becoming so advanced that the Treasury Department commissioned the National Materials Advisory Board to research ways of making U.S. currency more secure. The resulting report recommended sweeping changes to the currency, including the institution of a watermark, more complex printing patterns, and an invisible “security thread” specifically meant to foil color copying machines. In the best bureaucratic tradition, Treasury shelved the report, only to commission another study two years later that reached virtually identical conclusions. But the department worried that radical aesthetic changes in the currency would undermine the distinctiveness and continuity of the dollar—and therefore the value of the dollar itself. Compromising, they ignored most of the second report and adopted the two least intrusive changes.

The 1990 modifications failed dismally. Despite an extensive publicity campaign, few people ever knew the strip existed, and since the average lifespan of a hundred-dollar bill is about seven and a half years, counterfeiters simply continued running off older bills. People were equally oblivious of the microprinting because all but the most hawkeyed needed a magnifying glass to see it. Treasury had been so obsessed about preserving the continuity of the greenback’s appearance that they had effectively minimized their anticounter feiting improvements. Back in his Dungeon days, Art hadn’t even bothered with the strip because he’d never seen anyone look for it, and he’d found that as long as he could approximate the size and spacing of the microprinted words, no one closely inspected those either. “I was far more worried about the pen,” he says.

The counterfeit-detector “pen”—patented only a year after the security strip was introduced—was a felt-tipped marker with a yellow, iodine-based ink that turned dark brown when it reacted to the starch binding agent contained in most paper. Since currency is starch-free, the ink stays yellow on cash—a fast, apparently simple way to test a bill. By 1995, a company called Dri Mark was selling about two million pens a year for approximately three dollars each, and promoting them as a pen “that detects authenticity of U.S. currency instantly.” Major chains like 7-Eleven were using the pens to test all hundred-dollar bills. The pen was so effective and popular that, toward the end of his Dungeon days, Art had started printing twenties and tens on specific occasions just to avoid it.

By 1993, only three years after the Series 1990 note entered circulation, the amount of counterfeit bills produced using electrophotographic equipment was doubling every year. Scanners, ink-jet printers, and computers were developing so fast that they were even beginning to replicate microprinting. Many of the new counterfeiters were teenagers, natural masters of new technology who wanted spending money. They’d run off a few twenties and try to pass them at music stores or McDonald’s. The Secret Service dubbed them “digifeiters,” a name that offered little consolation to elite agents who were now spending much of their time chasing kids. Under pressure from both the Service and the Federal Reserve, the Treasury Department decided to take drastic measures. America’s currency, it concluded, needed a complete overhaul. For the first time in sixty-six years the almighty dollar was going to change.

Treasury formed the New Currency Design Task Force, a group of a dozen men and women led by a bright, career BEP official named Thomas Ferguson who had been skeptical of the 1990 changes as being too moderate. With free rein to design a completely new currency, Ferguson immediately went about implementing security measures the likes of which Americans had never seen. The final product, which Art first glimpsed that day in the bookstore, was the Series 1996 hundred-dollar note, and it was so unlike every other bill before it that Treasury simply called it the “New Note.”

The first change—and the most visually dramatic—was Franklin’s portrait. Using the original Duplessis painting as a guide, BEP engravers enlarged it by fifty percent. The new, “supersized” portrait accommodated much greater detail and line count, making it far more difficult for scanners to render. A straight scan would also produce a “moiré pattern”—an optical effect that turned the portrait’s otherwise muted background into a jarring mess of geometric waves upon printing. Even Franklin’s lapel was microprinted with the words
United States of America
.