The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [105]
With their curiosity piqued, the agents separated the Shanigans and began interrogating them. At first both Vicki and Jim continued to deny knowing the bills were counterfeit, but Clark pressed Vicki hard. Exactly what he told her is unknown, but his tactics probably weren’t much different from those employed on Natalie’s little sister after the House of Blues bust. Her freedom, her family, and her future were now all but gone unless she cooperated quickly.
Vicki caved fast and thoroughly. She revealed that Senior and Anice had provided the bills, and that Art junior had made them. She even gave them Senior’s address.
“Jim knows about all of this as well?” Clark asked her, forcing her to choose between telling the truth and protecting her husband.
“Yes,” she told Clark, but the confession would have little impact. Minutes later, Jim himself broke. He corroborated Vicki’s story and told the agents of Williams’s plan to use the coach house as a printing hole. They also admitted to passing at least thirty bills in Anchorage and Wasilla. After their interrogations were over, they led Clark and Sweazey to their car, which the agents searched. Inside, they found several bags of merchandise from the mall, and a fanny pack containing bundles of genuine currency, with store receipts paper-clipped to each one. The agents photocopied everything.
Once they were finished, Clark and Sweazey, like true Alaskan fishermen, allowed Jim and Vicki to return home, releasing them back into the stream of their lives. The agents had caught their bait, now they were after bigger fish.
THE NEXT MORNING, the phone rang at Senior’s place in Chickaloon. The number on the caller ID was unfamiliar to Anice, but when she picked up she immediately recognized the voice of her friend Vicki.
“I’m calling from my fax because my stupid phone battery—I need two batteries for my phone,” Vicki explained, but Anice wasn’t interested in such mundanities. She had news to report. A day earlier, she had attempted to pass money at a Kmart in Anchorage, and noticed copies of Art’s bills taped above every cash register. She desperately wanted to warn Vicki not to pass counterfeit there, but she didn’t want to be specific over the phone.
“Listen up. Kmart has bad PR, so you really don’t want to go shopping there, okay?” she said, improvising a code.
“Okay,” said Vicki, who was decisively less cautious. “Hey, we did really good in Anchorage yesterday.”
“Good, I’m glad.”
“We dropped just about all of it.”
“Uh-huh. I’ll talk to you in person,” Anice said, fighting to stick with the program. But she found Vicki, a novice in the criminal world, annoyingly difficult to direct when it came to protocol. Vicki told Anice that she and Jim were “nearly finished with the money” that she and Senior had fronted them. “I’ve been pretty good for being at it for, what, just four days?” Vicki chirped.
“Good girl,” Anice laughed, wanting to encourage her. When Vicki asked Anice for more money, the latter said she was expecting more from “the associates” in Anchorage—a thinly veiled reference to Art and Natalie.
“They need to start cranking that money out,” Vicki said.
“I already know, Sis,” Anice said, giving into emotion. “You’re not telling me something I’m not aware of, because I want to go to [South Africa] too. I need a vacation.”
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