The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [121]
Art accepted the offer. He spent days composing a twenty-minute speech and wrangling with his parole officer to obtain permission to leave Illinois, and in February 2006, he finally flew to Rochester for the big reckoning. A few hours before he was supposed to speak, he called me. He was absolutely terrified.
“I don’t know if I can go through with this,” he said. “There’s gonna be a lot of cops there. Feds.”
“You already talked to me,” I told him. “These guys will appreciate what you have to say even more. You’re all in the same business, they’re just on the other side of it.”
“Dude, it’s my stomach. I really feel like I’m about to throw up.”
He actually did throw up, dry heaves about twenty minutes before he was scheduled to take the podium. He had peeked into the conference room and seen dozens of men and women filing in. Some were in uniform, but many of them were dressed sharply and conservatively, carrying themselves with the same confident poise and authority he had long come to dread.
Every instinct told him turn away, but he didn’t. Pale and sweating, he stepped from the side entrance and stood before six hundred law-enforcement professionals. He had his speech typed out in front of him, but as he stared at the words, he found himself unable to begin. Awkward, silent seconds pressed down on the room, and finally he stepped back, took a few deep breaths, and abandoned his prepared speech.
“I’m sorry,” he said to the crowd of cops. “I gotta tell you people that I’m really nervous. You gotta understand. I know I’m supposed to do this speech, but you people need to put yourselves in my shoes for minute. My whole life—a huge amount of it—I’ve spent trying to avoid you. I’m looking out at you and do you know what I am seeing? I am literally seeing my worst nightmare.”
A dam break of laughter filled the room. From that moment on he had them. Soon he was rolling along, leading the crowd through his tutelage with da Vinci, his early life as counterfeiter, and eventually his campaign against the New Note. He focused mainly on the technical and business aspects, avoiding the personal details. By the time the question-and-answer session was finished, his twenty-minute speech had run to an hour. He exited the podium to applause and smiles, then snuck out a back entrance to the hotel and cried.
Art called me the next day with the play-by-play. I wasn’t surprised by the warm reception he had received, nor was I a week later when Document Security Systems offered him a high-paying job as a speaker and consultant. He began calling me every day, telling me about ideas he was sharing with DSS and things he was learning from them, plans to move to Rochester. With each piece of good news, I saw another line of this epilogue writing itself.
Then suddenly his calls became fewer and farther between, and often he’d take a week to respond to mine. Every time we did speak, the news worsened; he couldn’t work for DSS because his parole officer had refused to let him leave the state; he and Natalie had had a falling out, and she had taken the kids back to Texas. The most positive development in his life was a rekindling of his relationship with his oldest son, Art III—or the “Kid,” as Art called him. The Kid had in fact moved in with Art, and showed extremely promising talent as a budding rap artist. When the subject of how he was supporting everybody came up, he told me he was working as a foreman for a contractor friend.
Six months after his speech, on August 14, 2007, he was arrested for counterfeiting.
It’s unclear when he became active again. Because the statute of limitations has yet to expire, Art refuses to discuss the circumstances of his latest operation in detail. It certainly wouldn’t have been out of character for him to have been printing even when we met and he told me (not to mention six hundred cops) that he was retired. That’s what everyone, including himself, wanted to believe, and telling his story was an attempt to force his life as a criminal