The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [2]
ART WILLIAMS WAS THIRTY-TWO YEARS OLD and already a dying breed. In an era when the vast majority of counterfeiters are teenagers who use ink-jet printers to run off twenty-dollar bills that can’t even fool a McDonald’s cashier, he was a craftsman schooled in a centuries-old practice by a master who traced his criminal lineage back to the Old World. He was also an innovator who combined time-tested techniques with digital technology to re-create what was then the most secure U.S. banknote ever made.
“He put a lot of work into his bills,” Lorelei Pagano, a counterfeit specialist at the Secret Service’s main lab in Washington, D.C., would later tell me. “He’s no button pusher. I’d rate his bills as an eight or a nine.” A perfect 10 is a bill called the “Supernote” that many believe is made by the North Korean government on a ten-million-dollar intaglio press similar to the ones used by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.
Art would eventually reveal to me his entire process of making money, and I’d be awed by the obsession, dedication, and exactitude it had taken him to achieve it. But as extraordinary as his formula was, it defined his story about as much as a mathematical equation can capture the mystery and terror of the universe. Far more interesting were the forces that created and compromised him, and those could not be easily explored in a magazine article. Art had too many secrets to share, many of which he had hidden even from himself. He’d spent half his life pursuing verisimilitude in an idealistic attempt to recapture something very real that he believed had been lost, or stolen, or unfairly denied. What enthralled and terrified me the most was that his pursuit had very little to do with money, and the roots of his downfall lay in something impossible to replicate or put a value on. As he would say himself, “I never got caught because of money. I got caught because of love.”
BOOK ONE
1
SENIOR
“Yo’ ole father doan’ know yit what he’s a-gwyne to do. Sometimes he spec he’ll go ’way, en den ag’in he spec he’ll stay. De bes’ ways is to res’ easy and let de ole man take his own way. Dey’s two angels hoverin’ roun’ ’bout him. One uv ’em is white en shiny, en t’other one one is black. De white one gits him to go right a little while, den de black one sail in en bust it all up. A body can’t tell yit which one gwyne to fetch him at de las’. But you is all right. You gwyne to have considable trouble in yo’ life, en considable joy.”
—WHAT THE HAIRBALL TOLD JIM ABOUT
HUCK’S FUTURE, AFTER THEY PAID IT WITH A
COUNTERFEIT QUARTER. The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn, MARK TWAIN
Stateville Correctional Center in Joliet, Illinois, sits back from the Des Plaines River on a low rise, its thirty-three-foot-high walls and ten guard towers a vision of medieval austerity amid cornfields and plains. Built in the 1920s and inspired by designs from the English social philosopher Jeremy Bentham, the prison’s centerpiece is a “panopticon”—a four-story circular cell block with a guard tower in the dead center. Bentham theorized that the layout would project a “sentiment of invisible omniscience” to the inmates, who would never know when the guards in the tower were watching. For guards and inmates alike it’s a world out of Dante: a giant, clamorous cylinder hiving some of Illinois’s most violent and deranged criminals.
It was in Stateville’s visiting room, in the winter of 1978, that Art Williams Jr. had his earliest memory of his father. He was six years old, sitting on his daddy’s lap, happy in the knowledge that he would soon be getting out.
By Joliet standards, Arthur Williams Sr.—inmate number C-70147—was a small fish. He’d been convicted two years earlier for robbing a truck in DuPage County. While the crime was nonviolent, it was part of a long line of similar offenses that stretched back to his teens, and so Judge William V. Hopf had rewarded Williams’s felonious consistency with a stay in what one former warden called “the world’s toughest prison.”
That winter, there were some signs that