The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [106]
“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