The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [104]
Senior refused to leave the car. By now, he knew his son well enough to know that Art wouldn’t strike him. He sat stoically in the passenger seat while Art screamed at him, throwing back admonish ments for him to shut up and listen. Art finally let his father have his say, but since Senior had already broken his vow to not tell anyone, his new promises about Shanigan’s reliability were meaningless. Art got back in the car, turned it around, and finally told him what he’d come to say.
“We’re done,” he told Senior. “You were a shit when you left us and you’re a shit now. I’ll probably always love you, but I can’t do this with you. We’re leaving.”
Senior begged him to stay. When he failed to convince Art that he was overreacting, Senior told him that they didn’t have to counterfeit at all. He still meant what he’d said about Art and Natalie building a house on his property. The Trans Am was still his, whether he stayed in Alaska or not.
“I don’t want your car,” Art told Senior. He said he’d leave the vehicle at Chrissy’s house, then sped away without saying good-bye.
MINUTES AFTER ART ARRIVED BACK IN ANCHORAGE, he and Natalie began executing their plan to return to Texas. Since most of their equipment was at Senior’s, the only evidence they needed to destroy was Natalie’s laptop computer, along with about five thousand dollars in counterfeit. Both of these presented problems. The laptop contained Natalie’s beautiful images of the Series 2001 fifty, as well as a new computer program they wanted to try out—a random-number generator that they could use to print variegated serial numbers. While the files could be transferred to CDs, a disk was just as incriminating as a computer, and by now—especially after the loss of the Ryobi—they were weary of constantly having to reequip themselves. They decided to risk keeping it.
The five thousand in counterfeit was also too juicy a nugget to just throw away. As usual, Art had burned through the fifty thousand dollars they’d built up over the summer. All the new equipment, traveling, plane tickets, and partying had left them preciously little to start on once they got back to Texas. Knowing that they’d need to lay low once they returned to the lower forty-eight, they decided to spend a day hitting the malls around Anchorage hard in a furious attempt to unload as much counterfeit as possible before skipping town.
At the same time Art and Natalie began spending, they had no idea that Jim and Vicki Shanigan were busy passing the five thousand that Senior had given them. Amateurs when it came to passing, Senior had provided them with no special instructions when it came to surveilling malls or selecting stores and cashiers. They were out on their own, dropping counterfeit with no method or understanding of how to pass.
On Wednesday, July 11, the Shanigans visited the Fifth Avenue Mall in downtown Anchorage, a high-end, four-story structure that constitutes the city’s largest shopping center. The couple had already passed bills at the mall at least once before, and businesses were on the lookout for counterfeit. That day cashiers from at least two different stores noticed that the bills the Shanigans gave them were slightly hazy and flat to the touch. The couple was still ambling through the mall obliviously when officers from Anchorage PD approached them.
At first the Shanigans tried to the use the oldest excuse in the book: They played dumb, pretending that they didn’t know they’d been in possession of bogus bills. While that denial often works in isolated cases, they’d already peppered the mall, and the officers knew full well that the couple was passing. Anchorage PD detained them on the spot, leading them to the headquarters of mall security.
Two U.S. Secret Service agents arrived within an hour: Resident Agent Michael Sweazey and Special Agent Robert Clark. The agents read the couple their Miranda rights, then sat down and examined some of the bills recovered from the mall. Both