The Art of Making Money (31 page)

After some small talk, Vicki wound up the conversation by making plans for Jim to stop by later that day to drop off the money and the receipts. Anice consented, telling her that they had “a few more” at the house, and that they were planning to “get more” from Art junior in Anchorage.

As planned, that afternoon Jim Shanigan showed up at Senior’s house with a manila envelope. It contained the change he and Vicki had received from passing counterfeit, along with the receipts. Senior and Anice greeted him warmly and led him to a back bedroom. There, Anice counted the proceeds and tallied them in a notebook.

“Look how good they’re doing!” she told Senior, showing him the notebook. Anice then tore out the sheet with her notes, stuffed it in the envelope with the cash, and placed it behind the bed’s headboard.

Senior was equally enthusiastic. He told Jim that he was planning on picking up another twenty thousand dollars in counterfeit from Art that night, and that the Shanigans would get half of it the next day. Senior was presumably convinced that he could talk his son into printing more or, more likely, just talking big. But whatever his motives for the statement were, he knew that there was no twenty thousand dollars waiting for him in Anchorage, and he stayed home that night.

By now Senior was realizing that if he wanted to make a fortune in counterfeit, he was probably going to have to produce the bills himself, without the expertise of his son. Despite his complete lack of experience, he embraced the idea that he could make bills as well as Art, latching on to the layman’s knowledge about procedures and equipment that Art had shared with him. The following day, when Jim and Vicki visited yet again, he and Anice reported that Art and Natalie were leaving, but it was no matter: Senior was now the new master printer, and he gave them a shopping list of supplies he needed. He threw out terms he’d heard from his son, asking them to buy “eighteen-bright newsprint” and a “sixty-four-bit color laser scanner” and acid-free gelatin—as if creating convincing counterfeit were simply a matter of following a recipe. Vicki, who had somehow become the workhorse of the group, promised to visit a paper mill, as well as get on the Internet and start ordering supplies.

“We need that stuff now,” Anice told her, spurring her on.

Toward the end of the meeting, the two couples sat down in the living room and began waxing fantastic again about what they would do with the money. Once the bills were made, Senior’s latest plan was to have Jim fly them all into Dawson City, Canada—a casino town about five hundred miles from Anchorage in the Yukon Territory. They would take ten thousand dollars in counterfeit each, using it to gamble and pass in the local gift shops.

“We could go through customs in the Prudhoe area,” Senior explained. “They’re looking for drugs. They don’t give a shit about money.”

“That’ll be a nice vacation too,” Vicki said.

“We’ll be habitual gamblers.” Senior laughed.

“Watch it, because I hit the pot,” Anice chimed in. “I do hit the pot.”

Underlying all the talk of crime was this sense of possibility and dreams. Only Vicki seemed nervous. “I don’t know if I’m going to be able to do it, because I don’t know anything about it,” she said to Anice in reference to all the supplies Senior was asking her to acquire.

“You’ll figure it out,” Anice assured her. “And so will I. We will do it. I’m confident. I’m so fucking confident.”

 

 

 

AGENTS CLARK AND SWEAZEY must have swooned in laughter, and maybe even pity, when they heard Anice’s declaration of faith. They were apparently the only souls in Alaska more confident than she was that day, because they had taped every conversation the Shanigans had had with Senior and Anice since the arrest at the Fifth Avenue Mall. The investigation had required three days of intense handling and coaching, and Anice’s statement was perfect proof that their infiltration of one of the biggest counterfeiting rings to ever appear in the state had proceeded flawlessly.

The number Vicki had used to call Anice on Thursday hadn’t been her fax machine, but a line at the State Troopers’ office in the town of Palmer. The phone had been wired up to a minicassette recorder, and both agents had been sitting within feet of her when she made the call. When Jim had delivered the envelope containing the change and receipts to the Williamses later that day, every item inside of it had been photocopied and registered as evidence, and he had been wired. Those two operations alone had provided Clark and Sweazey with enough evidence to obtain a search warrant for Senior’s home, and the third meeting had come as an unexpected bounty, providing them not only with technical details concerning manufacturing, but the kind of cocky, conspiratorial dialogue that prosecutors love serving up at jury trials. Clark and Sweazey may not have been in the most glamorous post of the Secret Service, but they had rolled by the book, quickly producing dramatic results.

And now they made their first mistake: They decided to wait until Monday before serving the search warrant. Why they waited is known only to them, but it’s quite possible that they believed they had plenty of time to establish Art’s location and reel him in. Or they may have thought there’d be even more counterfeit at Senior’s by Monday. And as it is with any bureaucracy, there are always logistical hurdles. To serve the warrant, they needed to coordinate with local agencies, which takes time. Whatever the cause of the delay, two days was a long time to let a couple like Art and Natalie run loose.

That was all the time they needed to unload the rest of their counterfeit. Over the weekend, they hit Anchorage hard, spending the last of their stash on Sunday at the Fifth Avenue Mall—the same shopping center where the Shanigans had been arrested five days earlier. It also gave Art time to call a friend of his in Texas, Will Grant, who owned a ranch in Longview, and obtain permission to use it as a hideout until Art was confident that whatever heat had been generating in Alaska had died down. By Sunday evening, as they packed up their stuff at Chrissy’s and prepared to head for the airport, they had a brick of cash, a solid safe house, and designs for a new bill, which in Art’s world was a winning trifecta.

Just before they left for the airport, to Art’s surprise, Senior’s dually pulled up to Chrissy’s house. He had come to say good-bye.

Art hadn’t talked with his father since their last fight. He was still infuriated at his dad for including outsiders in their plans, and at himself for having introduced the money to Senior in the first place. For his part, Senior finally seemed resigned to the fact that Art was leaving. During the last minutes they spent together in Anchorage, he tried, however late, to patch things up with his son. He told Art that he was sorry that they’d had a falling-out and that things hadn’t gone the way they had planned. Despite everything, he was grateful that Art had visited and given him a second chance. He told Art that he loved him, and fought to leave things on a hopeful note.

“I’d like to come visit soon,” he said. “Call me when you get situated.”

Art felt like that last statement about visiting was bullshit, but he was certain that his dad, as flawed as he was, did love him.

 

 

 

SHORTLY AFTER EIGHT A.M. ON MONDAY, JULY 16, 2001, Special Agent Clark sat in the lead car of a convoy of law enforcement vehicles barreling down the Glenn Highway toward Senior’s house outside of Chickaloon. The knowledge that Senior possessed weapons, not to mention an army of dogs, meant that Clark was taking no chances. Accompanying him were at least twenty men, including a unit from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and a narcotics unit from the Alaska State Troopers. At Mile 70, the convoy pulled off the highway and rumbled up Senior’s driveway to his doorstep.

One of the ATF agents banged on the front door and shouted, “Police!” then another one bashed it open with a ramming cylinder. Then the snake-chain of agents moved in, screaming at the top of their lungs. The couple made no attempt to resist. Senior fell to the floor, and Anice, still on crutches from her car accident, was already sitting when they entered. Once the ATF team cuffed them and secured the house, Clark read them their rights, served them the warrant, and sat them down in separate rooms while he conducted his search.

In terms of raw hardware for evidence, Clark was not disappointed. In Senior’s coach house he found an HP Deskjet printer, an HP Scanjet scanner, a Gateway computer tower, a Magnavox monitor, and an HP Color LaserJet printer. He also found a can of acid-free adhesive spray, an industrial paper cutter, and a box of newsprint. But interestingly, he found no counterfeit, nor did he find the genuine currency that Jim Shanigan had delivered three days earlier. When it came to currency, fake or real, all he found was the burnt corner of a genuine hundred-dollar bill, resting in an ash pile in Senior’s woodstove.

The only logical conclusion was that, somehow, Jim or Vicki Shanigan had managed to notify them of their impending arrest. Given that the Shanigans’ phone was tapped, Jim could have slipped Senior a written note during the “controlled delivery” the previous Friday. If that’s true, then why Senior hadn’t gone ahead and destroyed the equipment and paper as well is a mystery. The hardware was worth thousands of dollars, and he might have hoped that he could pass it off as simple office equipment, especially since Art and Natalie possessed the most incriminating evidence—the scans.

When it came to damaging evidence, the ATF and Alaska State Trooper’s drug unit did just as well as the Secret Service. According to state law, Senior wasn’t allowed to possess firearms because of his robbery conviction in ’92. But the ATF seized a Glock 10mm pistol, a Ruger .458, a Winchester mag rifle, and a Coast to Coast 12 gauge shotgun, along with several boxes of assorted ammo. The troopers got their hands on 267 pills of OxyContin, six marijuana pipes, four containers of weed, a digital scale, and a prescription pad. They also found a bug detector that Art had left behind. Clearly, Senior hadn’t used it.

The haul, coupled with the Shanigans’ cooperation, was overwhelming and both Senior and Anice knew it. After arresting them both, Clark took them back to the jail in Anchorage, where he and Sweazey sat them down in the interrogation rooms. While Clark had been raiding Senior’s, Sweazey had served another warrant on Chrissy’s house in Anchorage, with far less success. He came up with absolutely zero evidence, and Chrissy had stood strong under interrogation. When Sweazey grilled her as to her stepbrother’s whereabouts, she told him she wasn’t sure, but “thought they might have gone to Phoenix.”

Having failed with Chrissy, Clark and Sweazey were unequivocal with Senior and Anice.

“If you ever want to see your children again, you need to tell us, right now, where we can find Art junior,” they told each of them.

Senior hawed. He admitted that Art had made the counterfeit that the Shanigans had passed—and that he and Anice had passed at least fifteen hundred dollars’ worth of it themselves—but he did not initially disclose Art’s location. Like Chrissy, he said he wasn’t sure.

Anice was another story.

“He’s in Dallas, and all of this is his fault,” she told the agents. By the end of her interrogation, she had written and signed a two-page confession detailing her involvement, with certain curious caveats. She claimed that she didn’t know the money that Senior had initially given her was counterfeit, and that it was only later, after the plan was well under way, that she embraced it.

Art has always been reluctant to believe what happened next. But it’s there in the arrest report. The agents returned to Senior and asked him to confirm that Art had flown to Dallas.

“Yeah, they’ve gone to Dallas,” he said.

For the second time in his life, he had given up his son.

 

 

 

ART AND NATALIE had not flown to Dallas. Though that had been their original itinerary, Art started “getting a bad feeling” during the layover in Seattle. On a hunch, he exchanged their tickets for a flight to Houston, deciding that it would be safer to head for Longview from there. He then called Will Grant and arranged for him to pick them up at the new location. The strategy was sound. Two Secret Service agents were in fact waiting for him at the gate at DFW when his original flight arrived.

In Houston, Art, Natalie, Alex, and Andrea piled into Will Grant’s car and struck out for Longview. As they cruised up U.S. 59, Art could feel the dread that had been hanging over him for weeks now begin to slip away with the new course. Then, halfway to Longview, Natalie received a cell phone call from her mother.

Sharon explained that she had scheduled a photo shoot for Alex, and needed him in Dallas that afternoon.

Art thought it was a little strange that suddenly they were hearing about a photo shoot for Alex right after they’d decided to avoid Dallas, but he trusted Sharon implicitly. She had been the one to convince him to follow his instincts and abandon Alaska, and had been there for him more than his own mother. But even with that faith, Dallas still felt like a bad move.

“Tell her there is no way we’re heading back there,” Art instructed Natalie. “We just went out of our way
not
to go there. She can reschedule the shoot.”

Natalie was conflicted. She was tired of taking Art’s orders, especially when they seemed driven by paranoia. In this case, her mom had made a commitment, and her boy had an opportunity to put away some money for college. They argued, inevitably drawing Will Grant in as the referee.

“If there was something going down in Dallas, you’d know it,” was Grant’s take. “Sharon would figure out a way to let you know.” He was perfectly willing to divert there, although he didn’t want to stay for long. After some argument, Art finally agreed to wait in a restaurant while the others swung by Sharon’s. But Dallas was three hours away, and by the time they reached the city Art had relaxed enough to think that maybe it was safe enough to take a quick shower at Sharon’s before heading toward Longview again. He wanted to clean up, and it would give his mother-in-law some time to visit with her new granddaughter. He was in the front hallway bathroom, enjoying the soft drum of water on his tired head, when four loud bangs came through the din like underwater explosions. They were followed by four words.