The Art of Making Money (25 page)

To get real cash to pay for the land, all Art needed was a client willing to buy his biggest batch of counterfeit ever, and he already had a buyer in mind. As one of his oldest clients and friends, Sandy Sandoval not only trusted him completely, but for the last year he’d been begging Art for larger batches of money, five hundred thousand dollars and up. Art had always declined on the grounds that it was too dangerous. For this one-time deal, however, he was willing to make an exception if Sandy told him precisely how the money would be used.

Sandy jumped on the opportunity. “Okay, the money isn’t for me,” he told Art over a pay phone, “I’m just a middleman. The guy who wants it is my supplier, Beto.” Beto, Sandy went on to explain, was even deeper into the cocaine business than he—one of five Mexican Mafia-affiliated suppliers in the Chicago area. Every month, each of the suppliers deposited anywhere from seven hundred thousand to a million dollars into the walls of an RV, which was basically a traveling bank. From Chicago, the RV went on to California, then Tijuana, Mexico, where the money was laundered and exchanged for more cocaine. “Beto wants to pad his shipment,” he explained to Art, meaning that the supplier would mix the counterfeit into his deposit and pocket the savings.

Art liked the idea. Not only would the money be leaving the country, but he soon confirmed that Beto had been the one that Sandy had been selling to all along. In other words, the counterfeit-for-coke scam had a proven track record. After a few negotiating sessions over a pay phone, Art arranged to print the most exorbitant sum he had ever attempted: $750,000 at thirty cents on the dollar. Not all of it would be for Sandy; $250,000 would be for himself—rainy-day money that he intended to shrink-wrap and bury in the woods at his new place in Arkansas. “This was going to be it,” he says. “One sweet move. Just print a shitload of money, then build my own place like I’d always dreamed about. Land, horses, the whole thing. I was going to design it and build the house with my own hands. I even had some kick-ass tools that I’d gotten from Home Depot stores. That was one of the places I’d hit hard over the years.”

 

 

 

SEVEN HUNDRED AND FIFTY THOUSAND meant at least 15,000 bill faces. It meant 7,500 security strips and watermarks, and more print cartridges than many businesses use in a year. Since every bill had to be hand-assembled, Art and Natalie were looking at a minimum of two weeks of nonstop production, not to mention buying new computer equipment, arranging for a temporary hole where they could work, and transporting paper and supplies. Fortunately, the one problem they didn’t have was getting the money to pay for it: Sandy agreed to front them five thousand dollars to pay for the production costs.

The operation would have to be done in Chicago—a sacrifice that Natalie conceded to, given the one-time scenario of the deal. Her only condition, which Art was happy to comply with, was that as soon as the deal went down they would hit the road for a long trip before setting up in Arkansas. Both of them were hungry to rekindle the romance from their earlier trips, and they wanted to do it before the baby arrived.

Setting all these plans in motion helped Art to forget about the letter. But as he and Natalie drove back to Texas, the possibility that his father had responded—or worse, hadn’t—snowballed into an anxiety that grew with each mile. He suppressed it by mentally preparing himself for disappointment. It was certainly possible that the man in Alaska was a different Art Williams; if it was his father, why would he be willing to reconnect with him now after having remained silent for so long? And the way his father had always moved around, the address could be old, a cold lead. When they finally pulled into Sharon’s driveway, he had primed himself for the inevitable letdown.

“Guess who called my office.” Sharon said to him the moment he walked in the door. “He left a number; he wants to talk to you.”

 

 

 

ART DIDN’T EVEN BOTHER UNPACKING. He drove straight to a 7-Eleven, got five dollars’ worth of quarters, and dialed the number on a pay phone outside. A female answered. Despite the barricade of time, Art thought he recognized the voice. But given how impossible it seemed that his dad could be with the same woman, and the advantage of anonymity, he simply requested to speak to Arthur Williams.

“Just a moment, I’ll get him.”

Footsteps went away, then new ones approached.

“Hello?”

That voice he was sure of.

“Dad.”

“Hello, son!” said Senior. He sounded more cheerful than Art had ever imagined.

“Oh my God, I can’t believe it’s you.”

“It’s me. I’m so glad you wrote me,” Senior said. “I’ve been waiting for your call. When I got your letter, it made me so happy.”

“That’s good,” Art said, and then they began the awkward process of reconnecting. With sixteen years and a continent between them, it was easiest for both of them to pretend like they’d last seen each other a few weeks ago. They stretched to speak in the possessive tones of family while touching on subjects that exposed just how much of strangers they’d become to each other. “It was simple things first,” remembers Art. “I told him that he was a grandfather, that I had a wife who was pregnant. It was . . . there was too much to talk about over a pay phone. Baby steps. Of course, I had a shitload of questions I wanted to ask him, but I wasn’t gonna do it over the phone.”

Art was able to get some basics. After he’d left, Senior had driven back West and then moved Anice and her children to Alaska. He’d worked as a mechanic, had a house there in the mountains, and was “semiretired.” Every subject led to more questions, but it was easier to stay general and keep to small talk. As Art suspected, the woman who had answered the phone was Anice. Senior had stayed with her the whole time. This both surprised and bothered him. Part of him had hoped that abandonment was congenital with his dad, a trait that hadn’t centered on just the family he had left in Chicago.

“How are your brother and sister?” Senior asked at one point.

“They’re good,” Art lied. “They miss you.”

“I miss you too,” Senior said. Then he told Art exactly what he wanted to hear. “Why don’t you come on up here? Why don’t you just come as soon as possible?”

“Right now?”

“Right now.”

Art didn’t even stop to think before responding.

“You know what? I am,” he said. “I’m coming as soon as I can.” He explained that there were a few things he had to take care of first, but that a visit within the next few months was a given. They made plans to talk to each other again in a few days. Art hung up and raced back to Natalie to tell her the news that they would soon be heading north.

“He didn’t even ask me if I wanted to go to Alaska,” she says. “He just told me that that was what we were doing. He was excited; he needed to see his dad. I thought it was a good thing for him.”

 

 

 

ART HAD NEGLECTED TO MENTION to Senior that he happened to be on the run from the United States Secret Service for perfecting a counterfeit of the 1996 New Note. Not the kind of detail you give your long-lost father if you want to rekindle a relationship, or even just get an opportunity to confront him face to face. Art wanted to do both, so when he touched base with his dad over the next few days he kept the calls short, light, and slim on specifics. Had Senior known his own son better, he might have interpreted that forced brevity as a sign that Junior was making serious criminal moves.

The day after Art contacted his dad, he and Natalie drove back to Chicago and started ramping up for the big print run. Sandy gave Art the five thousand dollars, and he bought a scanner, an Apple laptop, and a printer. He already had many of the smaller items—the glues, carrier sheets, hardening sprays, and hand tools—stashed away with the Ryobi at the warehouse. The run, Art decided, would take place in two locations; rather than breaking down the Ryobi and moving it from Giorgi’s warehouse, Art would use it in situ to color his paper and print security strips and seals. He’d also take care of the faces and the color shifts. He would then take everything to Natalie, who’d have her own little shop set up in Sandy’s back bedroom. She’d ink-jet the serial numbers and the “100” over the treasury seal, then they’d assemble the bills with the help of Big Bill, who Art hired on as a much-needed extra hand.

As the deal grew closer, in typical fashion, Art latched on to an even more grandiose scheme—one that could potentially turn the five hundred thousand he was making for Beto into millions. When Sandy had told him that his bills were destined to be stuffed into the walls of an RV full of cocaine money, the old drug pirate in Art began salivating. “Oh, God, I wanted to hit that thing,” he laughs. “Can you imagine? You’re talking five dealers depositing six or seven hundred thousand each. That’s at least three million dollars inside that thing. Pose as a cop, pull it over on the road at night . . . that would set me up for life!”

Art had no way of locating the RV without tipping Sandy off to his plan, a risk that would not only ruin their relationship but probably also get him killed, so he visited his friend Mark Palazo, an electronics expert up in Des Plaines. He wanted to know if there was a GPS device small enough to fit inside a bill. “He told me there was no way he could do it,” says Art, “and said that I was the craziest person he’d ever met.”

Early retirement plans dashed, Art raced back to Chicago to begin work on the largest batch of counterfeit currency he’d ever attempted. By now, he had a commanding knowledge of a once tortur ous process, and production ran smoothly. Every morning, he and Big Bill ferried cardboard boxes of prepped faces and strips to Natalie, then returned to the warehouse to make more. Beholding the completed bills still gave Art a powerful rush, but laced into that feeling was now a persistent fear. The arrest, the prospect of seeing his father again, and Natalie’s pregnancy reminded him that he was risking more than he ever had before. He wanted no evidence remaining. Two days into the print run, he visited Natalie with a somber air.

“Baby, I’m breaking down the Ryobi and destroying it after this is over,” he told her. “I’m done. So make these bills good.”

Natalie had heard similar resolutions before. It meant that in six months or a year, when they were out of money, they’d have to wrangle all the equipment again and start from scratch—easy enough to do with digital equipment. But the Ryobi was a special machine. When it came to shading the paper and the delicate printing on the strips, it was like a grand piano; it hit notes that no synthesizer ever could.

“Don’t do it,” she told him. “We might need it.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

She didn’t really believe he’d throw away the best press he’d ever owned, and he didn’t mention it again until a few nights later when he dropped off the last box of finished sheets and strips. Although it was midnight, he told her he was heading back to the warehouse. It was time to dispose of the press. Tired of arguing, she told Art to do what he needed to do.

Killing the Ryobi wasn’t nearly as hard as he’d imagined. He and Bill broke it down within an hour, loaded the components into Bill’s van, then drove to the Canal Street Bridge. They hurled the pieces through the bridge’s old steel struts and into the South Branch of the Chicago River, where the press’s final imprint was into the sediment, next to the bones and ballot boxes and rusting answers to questions best never asked in Bridgeport.

 

 

 

IT TOOK ART LESS THAN A DAY TO RUE THE RYOBI’S DESTRUCTION. When he swung by Sandy’s the next morning to check on Natalie’s progress, he picked up a bill front and noticed that the “100” mark over the seal wasn’t black. It was blue.

“What’s this?” he asked her. Before she could reply, he began thumbing through her piles of completed fronts. All of them bore similar blue marks.

While working on the mark in Photoshop, rather than destroying her early versions of its image file, she had separately saved all of them, until there were dozens of similarly named files on her computer. When it had come time to print, instead of using the final, finished file, she had used one of these old files, and the color was wrong. Art had warned her about destroying older files many times, but she’d been so busy with other details of the run that she’d forgotten.

Panicking, they tallied the misprints. The damage came to $400,000—more than half the deal money.

Art screamed at Natalie, who fired back that however bad her mistake was, it was at least an accident; she hadn’t been the one idiotic enough to intentionally destroy the one device that would have allowed them to fix the problem. Their yelling tired into tears, as they both realized that buying the land in Arkansas was now impossible. Later that day, they dumped the bad money into the bowl of a Weber grill in Sandy’s backyard, doused lighter fluid over it, and torched it. “That was the biggest burn I ever did,” says Art. “I mean, I was in physical pain watching that shit go up, because my dreams went with it.”

They still had enough good sheets to print a little more than $350,000, but the vast majority had to go to Beto. Because Art had promised the dealer $500,000, in order to keep things civil he had reduced his rate. After giving Sandy his cut, reimbursing him for expenses, and paying off Bill, Art and Natalie walked away with about $30,000 real, along with another $60,000 in fake that they assembled from extra paper they’d reserved for emergencies. While it wasn’t a bad profit for a deal gone sour, it was nowhere close to the amount they’d need to quit, as if such numbers had any meaning left at all anymore.

Exhausted in body and heart by the end of the print run, both of them were eager to get out of Chicago. When it was all over, they beelined for Texas, where they bought a used Toyota off Natalie’s friend Susan and hit the road within a day. Their plan was to take Alex, who was now five, to see the Grand Canyon and the Southwest, then hook north through Utah and work their way toward Seattle. From there, they would make the jump to Alaska.