The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [19]
ART HAD OTHER THINGS TO WORRY ABOUT than his mother’s love life. Karen gave birth to a son on August 28, 1990. Few things are more telling about Art than the name he insisted on calling him. Of the all the shoes in the world a boy can be asked to fill, he picked the ones made biggest by their emptiness: Arthur J. Williams III.
To raise money for the new arrival, Art, like his mother, took a job. It came to him one morning shortly after Karen became pregnant, when a young man driving by in a pickup truck spotted him and a friend throwing a football around in the project’s parking lot.
“You guys want some work?” he asked. All he told Art was that he’d be working at a construction site. The pay was low—$3.25 an hour in cash—but Art needed the money, so he jumped in the back. He was taken to the North Side, where a crew was reroofing an old woman’s house. There, he met his new boss, Morty Bello.
Morty was infamous in Bridgeport, though Art was too young to have heard of him. He was short, fat, and charming, with dark circles under his eyes and a deep Romanian accent—a bona fide gypsy. Morty made his living by looking up the addresses of elderly people—usually women—then sending crews to their houses to knock on their doors. They’d point out problems with their roofs or siding and offer to fix everything for a bargain rate. By the time Morty’s crew was done, half of the old women’s savings—along with various heirlooms—would be in his pocket. He paid poor kids like Art chicken feed to create the pretense of labor, doling out plati tudes and encouragement to hide the fact that he was exploiting them. He was the first in a long line of paternal misfires that Art would glom on to.
“I really liked Morty,” says Art. “He definitely liked me, or at least acted like he did. Sometimes he’d take me to his home and feed me dinner. He had a nice house on Parnell Avenue, a big family, and he treated me like a member of the family. He did all that to make it easier to use me.”
Sometimes Morty wouldn’t even pay Art; he’d cry poor and promise to reimburse him come the next job. But whether Morty paid or not, Art wasn’t making anywhere near enough to support his girlfriend and their child. After consulting with a few Disciples, he opted for a side job that was almost as conventional in Bridgeport: auto theft.
Halsted Street was Chicago’s chop-shop capital, and since the age of thirteen Art had been hotwiring vehicles for fun. It wasn’t a big step to simply drop the cars off at a garage, and depending on the make and model he could earn up to two thousand dollars per vehicle. Cars were usually insured, he rationalized, and in the event of discovery the stolen item itself offered a mode of escape. Best of all, at seventeen he was also too young to go to prison; if caught, he faced no more than a few months in juvie. And every bit as enticing as the fast money was the excitement and a chance to prove his manhood.
About four months after Karen gave birth, Art hotwired a Buick Regency on Poplar Avenue, a long block from the projects. As he was pulling away, his jittery teen reflexes got the better of him and he clipped a nearby parked car, smashing the Buick’s front. He quickly abandoned the Buick, then sprinted back toward the projects. But an elderly woman, drawn by the noise of the crash, had seen him. By now Art was well known to the Ninth District, and the woman’s description of him was good. Twenty minutes later, two Chicago PD officers knocked on the door of the Williamses’ apartment.
Pete da Vinci answered.
Art’s delinquency had been a story to Pete until that moment, told by an aggravated mother to