The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [111]
Punishment is a fruit that unsuspected ripens within the flower of the pleasure which concealed it. Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit, cannot be severed; for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end preexists in the means, the fruit in the seed.
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON, “COMPENSATION,” Essays, First Series, 1841
In the final, heartwarming sequence to Over the Top, Lincoln Hawk’s estranged son shows up in Las Vegas to root for his father at the National Arm Wrestling Championship. Hawk has bet everything he owns on the outcome, and in true hang-lipped fashion, Stallone’s character defeats his nemesis in the last round, securing a financial windfall and, most importantly, symbolically defeating the troubled past that separates him from his son. They drive away into the Vegas sunset, joshing about plans to form their own company.
For the Williams family, the contest would be United States vs. Arthur J. Williams Sr., et al. It would take place in an Anchorage courtroom, and this time no technicalities offered easy salvation. Agents Clark and Sweazey had been cautious and calculating. They had produced more than a hundred pages of phone and wire transcripts detailing the counterfeiting activities of what was now referred to by the Anchorage Daily News as the “Mat-Su” counterfeiting family, after the Matanuska-Sustina Valley where Senior lived. They had written confessions from Anice, Vicki, and Jim Shanigan. Senior’s home had supplied them with physical evidence, including receipts of converted cash, and they had counterfeit currency from several stores in the Anchorage area. In Natalie’s case, one of those stores had provided a photograph of her, taken moments after she passed a bogus note.
Every one of the six conspirators faced at least one count of utterance, while Art, Natalie, Senior, and Anice were also looking at one count of manufacturing each. But counterfeiting wasn’t their only crime. Under federal law, all six were also charged with “conspiracy,” which holds that anytime two or more people plan to commit an offense against the U.S. government, that, too, constitutes a crime punishable by up to five years. Of all the defendants, Senior had it the worst. The weapons the ATF had confiscated in his home severely violated his parole conditions, meaning that regardless of the federal charges he was most likely facing prison time.
Vicki and Jim Shanigan were in the best position of all. They had turned against their best friends and performed masterfully for the Secret Service, and in addition they had agreed to testify against the Williamses come trial. As a reward, the Service recommended that they do no prison time. But in the more ambiguous system of justice among thieves, they were rats, the lowest form of criminal. Their best defense against that was that Senior and Anice had been using them to do their dirty work, stringing them along with promises of riches that they were pathetically incapable of delivering.
James Singleton, the federal judge assigned to the case, recognized the fact that all of the Alaskans in the conspiracy were small-fry compared with Art. Senior, Anice, and Vicki and Jim Shanigan all made bail. With long histories of residence in the state, and their relatively advanced ages, none of them were considered flight risks. All of them had cooperated, and they basically told the same story: They’d been seduced by the authenticity of Art’s bills, tempted by the prospect of money that appeared so real that it was easy to pretend that it actually was. They were scavengers. The real prize for the feds had always been Art, and they had wanted him long before he ever set foot in Alaska.
ART HARBORED NO ILLUSIONS about making bail himself; his history and ability to produce counterfeit on the run made him a tremendous flight risk. But only three weeks after he was arrested, Art would learn just how small an enemy of the federal government he was. He was in the federal transfer facility in Oklahoma City, in transit back to Anchorage to face arraignment, when the planes