The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [120]
Art applauded vigorously, his hands like wings beating against a free fall. As soon as the old man stepped off the table, he ran out the front door, laid his back to the wall, and started sobbing.
EPILOGUE
I went to Missouri, then to Minnesota, then up and down
the west. I lectured in many places on the art of detecting
counterfeit money, and did well. Then I shoved a good
many notes, as I traveled—and the officers got upon my
trail again. I knew it. I watched them, while they watched
me. . . . I had no peace for a long time—anywhere.
And I wanted to get out of the business. But I couldn’t
see my way.
—PETE MCCARTNEY, INFAMOUS COUNTERFEITER
When I decided to write this book, I had high hopes that Art Williams would be the next Frank Abagnale Jr.—the young criminal genius who had exchanged his life of crime for a lucrative career as a document-security consultant. Despite Art’s long history as a counterfeiter, by the time I met him in the spring of 2005 there were many reasons to believe this was not only possible, but likely.
First there was the extreme price he had paid for his crime: It had cost him the life of his father, who he had dreamed about reconnecting with since the day he had left. That alone, I believed, had been enough to scare him away from ever taking the same road again. Then there was the additional fallout from Alaska. On March 21, 2004, Jim Shanigan failed to return home after spending a day in Anchorage. Three days later his wife reported him missing. His fate would remain uncertain until April 26, 2006, when a surveyor working in some woods in Wasilla came across his skeleton. State coroners were unable to determine the cause of death, but according to several law-enforcement sources who wish to remain anonymous, there were rumors floating around that the Hell’s Angels hadn’t been happy about the fact that Jim and Vicki had testified in a case related to one of their associates.
Anice, despite her stubbornness and bottomless capacity for denial, arguably didn’t deserve the five years she got for her role in the operation. She was no princess and she paid a traitor’s price, but she was so hapless in her own defense that it’s impossible to not wonder if her mental capacity was compromised after all. Claiming phantom illnesses even after her trial, she served out most of her sentence at the Federal Medical Center in Fort Worth, Texas, and was released in February of 2006. Only seven months later she was found dead in her apartment in Wasilla, apparently of heart failure. According to Chrissy, right up to the end Anice refused to admit her guilt, even though by then the only judge she faced was in the mirror.
Though Art wasn’t to blame for the choices of his confederates, all of these losses were devastating testimony to the destructive power of his bills and counterfeiting in general. He knew that more than anyone, and there were people who still needed him. Natalie, who joined Art in Chicago after her probation was up, gave birth to their second child, a baby boy, in late 2004, bringing his total brood to four. During the writing of this book, Wensdae lost her long battle to save her leg. Doctors amputated it just below the knee, but due to complications it’s still uncertain whether or not she’ll have to undergo further surgeries. Succinctly, Art had abundant reasons to speak out against the very crime he had perfected.
Not long after the Rolling Stone story came out, he was approached by Document Security Systems, Inc., a publicly traded company based in Rochester, New York, that specializes in state-of-the-art protection systems against document theft, counterfeiting, and fraud. When they read about Art’s innovative techniques for replicating the New Note, they offered him a speaking gig at a conference of law enforcement officers that included members of both the FBI and the Secret Service—the kind of men Art had spent much