The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [110]
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he calmly told the agent. “Anice is lying. Take a close look at that woman and you’ll realize it’s all bullshit.”
“Okay Art,” Andrews said, “we’re going to bring you and Natalie in, then. We’ll sort this out behind bars.”
“Do whatever you need to,” Art said. All he wanted was to get the agents out of the room and away from the computer as quickly as possible. He was doing visual calisthenics to not keep staring at it himself, and the fact that nobody had seen it yet gave him hope. “It was right there at his fucking feet!” he says. “All he had to do was just look fucking down. Everything he needed to bury me, literally right next to his shiny shoes.”
As they got up to leave, one of the sheriff’s deputies suggested to Andrews that they search the house.
Art watched Andrews’s face as he turned to the deputy; the agent’s eyes turned inward, as if he were calculating the benefit of spending an hour obtaining a search warrant, then another digging through closets and drawers. The agent’s response had an almost biblical mercy to it.
“Nah, there’s probably nothing here,” he said.
LATER THAT EVENING, both Art and Natalie visited the interrogation room at the local sheriff’s office. Natalie entered first. She came out five minutes later in tears. “They told me I was never going to see my children again,” she says. “They said that my mother would go to prison, my life as I knew it was over. They didn’t mess around. It was, ‘Either you cooperate or everybody goes to prison.’ ” When she came out of the room, she had just enough time to tell Art, who was waiting outside, that everything would be all right. From that, Art knew that Natalie had told the agents nothing. Andrews confirmed it minutes later when it was Art’s turn on the hot seat.
“Your woman must really love you,” he said, “because I pretty much used everything I could in the short period of time she was here. She didn’t say anything. I suppose you’re not going to be any different, are you?”
“No, because I don’t know anything.”
“Okay,” the agent said obligingly.
Art was beginning to like Andrews. He knew that the agent had just been doing his job when he tried to turn Natalie, and now that he’d failed, he seemed relaxed and surprisingly respectful.
Andrews indeed released Natalie that evening, but the following morning Special Agent Clark e-mailed him two photographs from Anchorage. One was a photo Vicki Shanigan had taken of Natalie during a family outing; the other was a photo taken by an employee from a camera store in Anchorage’s Fifth Avenue Mall who suspected the bill Natalie had handed him was counterfeit. Pretending to test a digital camera, he had snapped a shot of her before she left the store. Once Andrews compared the photos, he immediately worked up an arrest warrant for Natalie. Keeping with the original plan, she’d fled to the ranch in Longview after leaving the sheriff’s office, but with two children to take care of she was in no position to stay on the lam for long. Within six weeks, she’d turn herself in.
By July 17, the Secret Service had effectively shut down Art Williams’s counterfeiting operation—a criminal spree that had spanned fourteen years, minus the four he’d spent in Texas. How much money he had made, sold, and passed during that time is impossible to say. “I figure it was somewhere around ten million,” he says, but Art was never one to keep records. If he made only half of that, then it was an extraordinary run, given that the vast majority of counterfeiters are arrested long before their first million ever hits the streets. He had taken one of the oldest criminal arts, evolved it, and—for a sweet time—defeated the most secure bill the United States government had ever created. And for an even briefer time he had made one thing that can never be counterfeited—his father—proud.
Now it was time to pay.
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