The Art of Making Money (29 page)

After that little laugh at God’s expense, they kept moving across the North Dakota plains. For hundreds of miles the land was empty and bright and mostly free of civilization. At that point they couldn’t be criminals anymore; just father and son, stuck inside a speeding shell that could have doubled as a time capsule. Art couldn’t help remembering that the last time he had been on the road with his dad, the trip had ended with his father dumping him off on a Chicago curbside, then abandoning him for good.

 

 

 

BY THE END OF THE FOURTH DAY they had made it into Minnesota. Senior wanted to hit Minneapolis, so they spent the next day milking the gas stations there before bearing south for Chicago. Two hours from the city, Art called his sister from a gas station pay phone.

“I’ll be arriving tonight, and I have a surprise for you,” he told her.

In keeping with his practice of never allowing anyone to know his plans or his location, Art hadn’t told Wensdae that he and his father were coming to the city. As far she’d known, they were still in Alaska. Her boyfriend at the time, a man who was, ironically enough, a successful Chicago printer, had a fifty-foot yacht that they lived on during the summers, and she was relaxing on deck when Art came aboard alone.

“Ready for your surprise?” he asked her, then shouted, “Okay!”

Senior, who had been waiting on the dock, ambled onto the deck and toward his daughter. “I was freaked out and happy,” Wensdae remembers, “also relieved. Suddenly I had a parent that wasn’t fucked up in the sense that I could talk to him and have a normal conversation. My mom’s sickness made talking to her pretty much impossible. Now I had this whole other parent who wasn’t crazy. I had decided long ago to forgive him for what happened at Uncle Rich’s. Life was too short to hold that against him, and I needed a father in my life.”

While Wensdae and Senior visited all the next day, Art began a mad dash for supplies. Flush with cash, he rented a truck, then bought a used AB Dick offset from a shop on the Southwest Highway for three thousand dollars. He took it back to the storage space, where he still had his process camera and plate burner. Over the next two days he bought inks, blank plates, and various small items. He crated it all up, took it to a shipper, gave a false name and the address of one of Senior’s friends in Alaska, and slapped down a wad of cash. It was the fastest he’d ever equipped a shop.

With the supplies taken care of, Senior decided that it would be fun for all three of them to hit the road together, so they jumped in the car and headed south. It went without saying that it would be a spending trip, but their first stop wasn’t a mall. It was the Menard Correctional Center in Chester, Illinois. Only a year and half after his release from the boys’ home, Jason had sold some cocaine to an undercover police officer. He was carrying a 9mm at the time, and the state threw him right back into maximum security, this time for five years. “They only got an hour together, but Jason was excited,” remembers Wensdae. “We let them catch up alone. My dad was shaken up to see him in there. Every one of his kids had problems, but Jason had no real memory of our dad before he left us.”

Seeing their son and brother in prison didn’t deter them from the spree that ensued. The first mall they hit was in Kentucky. Tired from all the gas stations, Art and Senior took a rest, sticking to surveillance while Wensdae hit the stores. Prior to that, Art had given Wensdae a few hundreds to spend, and she had sneaked a few when he wasn’t looking, but this was the first time Art had ever allowed her to accompany him on a full-blown slamming trip. And once he saw her in action, he regretted he hadn’t brought her along earlier. Wensdae turned out to be a spending machine.

“I’m a girl, I love to shop, and I used to be a model,” she says. “And when I say I love to shop you have to understand that there is nothing, nothing in the world I like to do more. I’m a born shopper. Art gave me all kinds of instructions about how to spend, but they just went in one ear and out the other. I
know
how to spend money. His money was so good that I just treated it like real money, and so did everyone else.” Even on crutches, Wensdae could drop five thousand dollars a day. The crutches helped—no one was inclined to suspect a handicapped woman of handing over a fake hundred-dollar bill. Also, Wendz loved to chat up the cashiers and bond with them. She’d ask the ladies behind the counter if they liked the color of a bra, or which scented soap a man might find most appealing. She had the rare gift of being able to forget that she was committing a crime, at least during the act itself.

Wensdae tore it up through Kentucky, where Art insisted that they drive by Fort Knox and make a symbolic gesture of spending counterfeit as close to the depository as possible. It wasn’t until they swung back up into Indiana that it occurred to Wensdae that her reunion with her father was massively dysfunctional. Fittingly, the revelation came on Father’s Day, when the three of them went out for a celebratory breakfast at a diner in Kokomo. At the table, she handed him a three-dollar card that she’d purchased with a fake hundred-dollar bill. Both she and Art had signed it. After reading it, Senior reached out to give her a hug.

“Don’t touch me,” she suddenly snapped. “You disgust me. This is all wrong.” She began crying.

Senior and Art were taken aback. They asked her what was wrong.

“Here it is, after all these years and we’re out here on the road spending,” Wensdae sobbed. “Is this what we are to you? Accessories? You’re supposed to be our father. Fuck you.”

It was her dog-food moment. She railed on Senior much the same way Art had, reciting the litany of Bridgeport sufferings. But this time Senior didn’t take it. Hurt, he stepped outside of the diner. Art ran after him.

“We’re done,” Senior told him. “I’m going back. You can drop her off, stay here if you want. I don’t care. This is too much.”

“She’s just overwhelmed, what do you expect?” Art said. He talked his father down, then went back into the diner to try to soothe his sister. He made no attempt to downplay Senior’s shortcomings as a role model. Wensdae was right; their father was a shit, but neither of them was going to change that. They might as well make the most of the time they had with him, and no one was going to feel good if the trip ended prematurely. Wendz settled down, then crutched back to the car and made up with her dad.

They continued on, all the way up to the tip of the Michigan Peninsula, where they hopped a ferry to Mackinac Island, and rented a beach house on Lake Huron. They were all exhausted, and Wensdae’s leg was hurting her, but on their first night there Art wanted to go out and hit some more stores on the island. Before he left the house, Senior took him aside.

“We’ve done enough,” he told his son. “Let’s just cool it while we’re here. No more passing.”

Art was relieved to see his father put some brakes on the spree; he attributed his hesitancy to the fight with Wendz. But once they left Mackinac Island, the respite ended and they were soon slamming malls again, this time as they headed West. Wensdae wanted to see Senior’s place in Alaska, and the plan was for all of them to drive back to Seattle and take a plane back to Anchorage. But the closer they got to Seattle, the more Art began having doubts of his own, both about the money, and about where he was headed with his father.

 

 

 

THREE MONTHS EARLIER on Sharon’s porch in Texas, Art had envisioned a far different reunion with his father. He’d pictured his pops living a more or less straight life, one that perhaps even inspired him to go clean too. Wishful thinking or not, it was a vision he had latched on to. But like always, he’d allowed the counterfeit into the fabric of their relationship. It was now dominating everything they did, becoming inseparable from not only the future, but also the past. Even now they were traveling the same sad highways that Art would forever associate with his dad’s abandonment, except now Art was the one doing the driving. Twenty years earlier, his father had been the one in control, but as the creator of the counterfeit, Art was the one in charge. It was this realization that made him stop short of getting on the plane once they reached Seattle.

“I’m not going back with you,” he told them at the airport. “I have some things I need to pack up in Texas, and you two should spend some time together alone.” It was half true at best. Art indeed had a stash of Abitibi paper in Texas that he wanted to ship north, but he also felt the need to get away from his father. He needed space to think.

Senior was annoyed by his son’s change in plans. He tried to talk Art into staying, but once he saw that Junior wouldn’t be swayed he wished him luck and told his son that he’d see him in a week or so. Before they parted, Art gave Senior nine thousand dollars in counterfeit. He told his dad that he and Wensdae could have fun with it in Seattle, but warned him that if there was any left over he should not spend it in Alaska. They hugged each other good-bye, and Pops and Wensdae walked off to rent a car so they could spend a few days knocking around Seattle before heading home. “I got the feeling that that was the last time I was ever going to see him,” says Art. “I was wrong, but it felt that way.”

Now completely alone, Art embarked on the most forlorn spending trip of his life. He still had about fifteen thousand dollars in counterfeit, but the bills felt like a burden. Like an addict who’s tired of doing drugs but still has an abundant supply, he wanted to blow it all and be rid of it. As he beelined for Texas, he hit every mall he saw, sleeping in his car along the way. He didn’t even attempt to hide the remaining bundle of bills, but tied it with string and placed it on the passenger seat, almost as if he wanted to get caught. By the time he was nearing Oklahoma, there was still seven thousand in the pile, and finally he just pulled over, left the car, and walked down to the edge of the Cimarron River. He tossed the remaining bills into the water, feeling an immense relief as they drifted off to the east.

A few hundred miles later, he was back in Sharon’s driveway, the very spot where the whole trip to Alaska had begun. He walked through her front door like a ghost.

“Where’s Natalie?” was the first thing Sharon asked him. He found himself stammering to explain that she was still in Anchorage with their newborn baby. “Why aren’t you with them? What are you doing here?” Sharon asked.

Breaking into tears, he confessed to her everything that had gone on with his father—the counterfeit plan, the road trip, his feeling that everyone was headed for disaster. The only thing Sharon could do was to throw out her hand to his and hope that he could hold on.

“We need to get Natalie back from there,” Sharon told him. “Get her back here, then you two can break away. You can leave the counterfeiting behind. You have three wonderful children.” She handed Art the telephone and told him to call Natalie and tell her to get on the next plane back to Texas. He dialed Chrissy’s, but he had been largely incommunicado for the last two weeks. When he got Natalie on the line and told her she needed to fly back, she was pissed.

“I’m not coming back unless you come get me,” she told him. “I’ve got two kids here and there’s equipment to destroy. You think you can just leave me to clean up the whole fucking mess you started up here? You’re wrong.”

Art and Sharon pleaded with her to come back on her own, but Natalie didn’t budge. She had compromised her needs for Art’s all summer, and unless he came and helped, she was planted. Reluctantly, he agreed to return to Anchorage the following day.

 

 

 

ART’S SENSE THAT HE WAS LOSING CONTROL OF EVENTS was not misplaced. Anice was not enthused that her husband had spent three weeks visiting with his first family, spending time among both the offspring and the turf of her old rival, Malinda. When Senior and Wensdae arrived at the airport in Anchorage, the reception she gave her stepdaughter was almost inhumanly cold. “Anice didn’t even say hello to me at the airport,” Wensdae recalls. “She ignored me, like she was looking through me. I haven’t seen this woman in twenty years and she’s still pretending I’m not there. It was disgusting. She was mad at my dad, probably for bringing me up there. Then they dumped me off at Chrissy’s. I knew it wasn’t my dad, but her.”

Senior knew of only one surefire way to disarm the situation with Anice, who after twenty years of having him to herself was now far less interesting to him than his children. He showed her some of Art’s bills, telling her excitedly about how they’d crossed the country, twice, dropping notes the entire way without receiving so much as an eye bat from a single cashier. He also told her that they had obtained equipment, and that he would soon learn Art’s secret of making the money himself. Thanks to Junior, they were about to become rich beyond their wildest dreams.

Art’s bills, combined with Senior’s story about the road trip, had an immediate and positive effect on Anice’s disposition. To bolster it even more, Senior gave his wife eleven hundred dollars as a taste, along with some basic instruction on how to pass. A few days later, she passed her first fake C-note at a local store, using it to buy two cartons of cigarettes. Senior and Anice had now broken one of da Vinci’s most important rules—they had spent money in their hometown.

It only took them a few more days to break another one. Having experienced the thrill of passing, Anice was thoroughly hooked. She grilled Senior for everything he knew about how Art made and passed the fakes. Since traveling with his son, Senior had become an armchair expert, and he regaled his wife with stories about Art using groups of passers to quickly convert large amounts of counterfeit. “That’s what we should do,” she told her husband. “Why expose ourselves when we can get other people to pass it for us?” she told Senior. She even had a couple of people in mind.

A few days later, Senior and Anice visited Vicki and Jim Shanigan, their friends from Wasilla, the latter of whom was also Senior’s partner in the pot and OxyContin operation. They were slightly younger than Senior and Anice, and in addition to their “business” partnership the two couples often spent a lot of time socializing together. Anice thought of Vicki almost like a daughter, while Jim had looks remarkably similar to Senior himself, with a thin mustache and square-framed glasses. Since Wasilla was as comparatively populated as Chickaloon, and closer to Anchorage, Jim covered the distribution end of their drug business, dealing much of their product to local Native American tribes. With these connections, the Shanigans were the natural choices to include in a passing scheme. To boot, Jim Shanigan was a licensed bush pilot who owned a float plane, meaning that he could fly them to far-flung destinations in Alaska, Canada, and, theoretically, even eastern Russia, where they could pass or sell counterfeit at a safe distance from their home.