The Art of Making Money (19 page)

—WILLIAM SAFIRE, IN
The New York Times
,
COMMENTING ON THE HIGH FOREIGN DEMAND
FOR THE NEW NOTE AHEAD OF ITS RELEASE,
DECEMBER 4, 1995

 

 

 

 

Tony Puntillo—Art’s old wheelman from the Dungeon days—remembers being at a party in the fall of 1999 when Art walked in the door, Texas-tan with eyes bright with secrets. Puntillo hadn’t seen Williams in four years, not since he’d run off to Texas after his relationship with Karen fell apart. After the two caught up over a few beers, Art asked him to step outside for a moment.

“We went out the front door, then he just sorta smiled and handed me a hundred-dollar bill, one of the new ones,” Puntillo remembers. “I looked at it and my first reaction was, ‘What’s this for?’ Last I knew he didn’t owe me any money. He just kept smiling and said, ‘Just look at it.’ So I did. He made sure I looked at everything. The watermark, the strip, the ink. Then he tells me it’s one of his. I didn’t believe the jagoff at first because I honestly couldn’t tell the difference. It blew my mind. He’s gone four years and then he shows up with
this
.”

Art told Tony that he’d be calling and made sure he remembered the pager code they’d used back in the Dungeon days. He left one of his bills with him as a gift. They were about to become the most effective business cards in the Chicago underworld.

Over the next few weeks, Art made the rounds, always showing up unannounced and with a casual attitude before springing the new bill on his old clients. When they saw it, their reactions were universally ecstatic and so similar that he would later give it a nickname—the Glow. “They would get this look on their face,” he says, “a look of wonder, almost like they were on drugs. It was like they were imagining the possibilities of what it could do for them, and they wanted more.” Sandy immediately asked for three hundred thousand dollars, while Dmitri was so enthusiastic that he tried to convince Art to print millions. “He told me he’d set me up anywhere in the world, with bodyguards from St. Petersburg to protect me. He was serious. It sounded pretty good and I even thought about it for a moment, but the problem was that then I’d be working for him. Once I left the country, I’d lose control. I’d be like a bird in a cage.”

Only the Horse was circumspect. While Art had been away in prison, he had gained intermittent access to what may well have been the only note on the planet better than Art’s—the hundred-dollar bill that the Secret Service calls the “Supernote.” Like Art’s bill, the Supernote contained every security feature of the New Note, the major difference being that it was produced on an intaglio press similar to the ones used by the U.S. government. All of the bill’s features and production processes, in fact, were so identical to real currency that distinguishing the notes usually required lab analysis. It had first appeared in Hong Kong in 1989 and since then the Secret Service has been oddly ambivalent about its origins. At different times, experts have linked the Supernote to Iran, East Germany, China, and, most often, North Korea—the sole agreement being that the only entity capable of creating it is a national government with accesses to tens of million of dollars. Some have even theorized that the Supernote is created by the United States government itself and used abroad to fund “black” operations outside of the national defense budget.

Whatever the Supernote’s origins, On Leong had gained access to it during Art’s hiatus from counterfeiting, and upon seeing Art’s bill the Horse acknowledged as much, throwing him a backhanded compliment. “This bill is really good, Art,” he said, “but we’ve still got you beat with the Supernote.”

He then placed an order for a hundred thousand dollars, at thirty cents on the dollar.

Art found himself in the awkward position of telling all of his clients that they had to wait. Although he’d guessed that his new bill would be a hit, he had no idea that demand would come so quickly and with such high numbers—way beyond both his production capacity and his nerve. “They all wanted so much, and right then,” he says. “And of course they had no idea how hard it was to make. Hell, at that point, I was still figuring out how to produce it on a large scale.”

Mikey was at his lifeguard post at the Sheridan Park pool when Art showed up with the note. As his most trusted adviser, crime partner, and friend, he had bitter feelings when Art had left Chicago. “We had made good money together, and Arty had thrown away a profitable business only to wind up in prison because of a stupid move,” he says. But once he saw the new bill, his feelings of abandonment dissipated like midwinter spindrift off Lake Michigan. “He’d done it. That’s all there was to it. He’d beaten the new bill. I wasn’t surprised in the sense that it was him, because I always knew the boy had brains, but this was something special. That bill was perfect. You really couldn’t tell the difference. Oh, I knew right away that we were going to make a lot of money.”

Mikey wasted no time setting up Art’s first firm deal with the new money. The client was a bookmaker he knew, Jimmy Amodio, who also ran a social club near Taylor Street. All he had to do was present Jimmy with the new money and a proposition: With the NFL play-offs approaching, what better way to cover his losses than by using this new
fugazi
for payouts? The bookmaker jumped on the idea and ordered up fifty thousand dollars. As always, there was a catch.

“He wants it tomorrow,” Mikey explained to Art. “How can we make this happen?” Art told him that it was impossible. Although he and Natalie had printed and cut about a hundred thousand dollars in fronts and backs before leaving Texas, he had no place to assemble, dry, and wrap it, and it was a task he could never complete on time by himself. Mikey’s solution would reveal one of the greatest strengths of Art’s design.

“If I understand it correctly, your bill is kinda like a kit, right?” he asked Art.

“More or less.”

“And you have all of the components made?”

“Yeah.”

“So you just need a safe spot where you can assemble the bills, and some help. Does there need to be anything special about the place?”

“As long as it’s indoors, not too small, and nobody will find it, theoretically I could assemble anywhere,” Art explained.

That’s how the filtration room beneath Sheridan Park’s pool became the first printing hole for Art’s new note. Since Mikey was a lifeguard there, they waited until after hours on a weekend, then snuck in with equipment and set up shop between the pipes and pumps. Bolstered by half an eight ball of cocaine, they had more than five hundred bills drying on clotheslines between the pipes in just under four hours, with time to kill. “It was probably one in the morning when we got finished,” Mikey remembers, “so after we were done we called up some hookers and told them to bring beer. They had a great time and so did we. They were swimming in the pool naked and we were literally throwing money at them all night. They had no idea all of it was fake.”

The following morning, Mikey delivered the product to Jimmy, who put it into circulation with magnificent results. None of Jimmy’s clients had any idea, but that year they were walking around with fistfuls of Art’s money. Jimmy was so pleased with the NFL operation that he invited Art and Mikey to sit in on a weekly Texas Hold’em game that he ran in the back room. Provided that he kept twenty percent of their winnings, Jimmy allowed them to throw as much counterfeit on the table as they wanted.

No one appreciated the homemade nature of Art’s bills as much as Wensdae, who allowed Art and Natalie to stay at her place while they looked for an apartment. A few days after Art and Natalie arrived, she came home from work to find a half-assed spider’s web of clotheslines across her living room and kitchen. Hanging from them like spring leaves were dozens of freshly made, air-drying bills that Art and Natalie had been gluing and stamping all day. Up until that moment, she didn’t even know that her brother was a counterfeiter. “I was pissed at him for about five minutes. I mean, what kind of fucking asshole would do that to his own sister? But you gotta understand that when you look at those things, you can’t tell the difference. I don’t care who you are. If you had seen those bills, and fucking Art with all his assurances, you wouldn’t be any different. You just want to spend them.”

Art refused to give her any, which infuriated her even more. But in what would become an irresistible tradition for his friends and family, Wendz snuck a handful when he wasn’t looking. “I went to Navy Pier, and I was dropping them like water,” she remembers. “I’m a shopaholic, and I was in candyland.”

 

 

 

DESPITE ART’S FLEXIBLE ASSEMBLY METHOD, he now had a supply deficit. In legal business, it’s generally a good problem that can be overcome by partnerships and loans. In the criminal world, it’s one of the most dangerous positions a crook can be in. Nothing increases a criminal’s profile like expansion, and Art had not forgotten da Vinci’s advice about occupying too much space. At the same time, he had to strike while the bills were hot, so to speak. And yet he lacked that most American of business essentials, the capacity for mass production.

The very thing that made his bills great—the fact that they were handmade—was also a limitation. Unlike da Vinci had done, it wasn’t just a question of plates, paper, ink, and a press. Breaking the new note had required all those elements plus many more. Polyester paper, color-shifting paint, ultraviolet reactive inks, watermarks on tracing paper, spray glues and glosses, high-end scanners and printers and computers, plus a dozen other small steps like carrier sheets and spacers that could only be applied manually—they were all infuriatingly labor intensive. In his efforts to become perfect, he had become boutique.

To meet even a small portion of the demand, Art needed better equipment, a printing hole, and a labor force. Once again, Chicago turned out to be a propitious location. Every year, printers from around the globe converge on the McCormick Place convention center for Graph Expo—the world’s largest graphic-arts convention. For three days the center’s nearly three million square feet of display space exhibit the latest hi-tech presses, inks, papers, scanners, and computer programs—every innovation the industry has to offer. For a counterfeiter, standing above the South exhibition hall and looking across the floor of Graph Expo is perhaps the closest thing to a view of heaven on earth.

Counterfeiters aren’t invited to Graph Expo, of course. Conventioneers pay thousands of dollars for the right to display and attend, and access to the floor is strictly regulated. But it is a little-known fact outside of Chicago that McCormick Place itself is heavily manned by Bridgeporters. From the suited managers to the back-braced laborers who set up the displays, most are either from the South Side or know somebody from the South Side who got them their union jobs, which at forty-five dollars an hour to start are among the best blue-collar gigs in Chicago. And so it was that in October of ’99, Giorgi gave Art the keys to heaven.

Giorgi was working as a floor manager at McCormick Place that year, a job that gave him unfettered access to the entire exhibition floor. After seeing one of Art’s New Notes and hearing about his need for good equipment, Giorgi personally saw to it that Art was given a necklace pass, complete with a photo ID, to the convention. He walked onto the floor that year with as much access as the president of Xerox.

His name was James Salino, and he was a small printer from the South Side. He spent three days roaming the floor, chatting up representatives from Adobe and Lexmark and Hewlett-Packard, attending demonstrations, and asking questions. At the same time, he was also shopping, because Giorgi made it clear to him that if he saw something he liked, then arrangements could made to obtain it.

On the first day he attended the Expo he fell in love. As he roamed the South Hall, his eyes fell upon a compact, two-color offset press made by Ryobi that was unlike anything he had ever seen before. Instead of using metal plates, it used plasticized paper plates, which distributed ink with far more uniformity and detail than aluminum sheets. Being mostly paper, the plates also burned quickly, which made getting rid of evidence a cinch. On top of all that it was downright sexy, “silver and yellow, like a race car.” Plain and simple, it was “a bad motherfucker.”

The Ryobi retailed for twelve thousand dollars. On the last night of Graph Expo, after the convention closed, a small army of South Siders assaulted the exhibition floor with forklifts and dollies to crate up the millions of dollars of equipment. McCormick Place is one of the best-run convention centers on the planet, and prospective visitors to those great exhibition halls would disservice themselves to be dissuaded by this anecdote. But that night, not everything made it safely to the loading dock.

 

 

 

ART SET THE RYOBI UP at an empty warehouse that Giorgi found for him on the South Side. Within a day he was experimenting, using it to color bill backgrounds and seals. Compared with his earlier offsets, it was a Rolls-Royce, with a touch so light and reliable that he wondered how he’d ever done without it. “That press even
sounded
good,” he remembers. “It had a nice electric hum to it. I loved the feeling of turning it on, because when that fucker was rolling it was moneymaking time. It was going down.”

His first hundred-thousand-dollar batch of the New Note was destined for the Horse, his oldest and most reliable client. With Natalie helping, they went from raw material to fully assembled bills in about ten days, twice as long as Art would have liked. There were paper jams, glue problems, cutting problems. Perfecting his methodology into a fluid system would take him many more months, but when they were finished and staring at ten shrink-wrapped piles of ten thousand, he knew that he was back in the game in a big way. “I felt like the caveman who had discovered fire,” he says. “The bills looked so good I almost didn’t want to sell them. I wanted to spend them.”