The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [27]
The biggest mystery of all to Art was how da Vinci sold his money. How did he find his clients? How should a deal go down? What was the most he’d ever printed? Da Vinci surrendered only the most rudimentary details. His main clients were not from the United States, but overseas—somewhere in Europe. He wouldn’t reveal how the money got there or who was involved, but he did tell Art that he charged thirty to thirty-five cents on the dollar—the top rate—and he decreased his rates for amounts over one hundred thousand dollars. At the same time, he was extremely reluctant to produce batches over a hundred grand, and did so only if he was satisfied with the way a client intended to distribute the bills.
“Always find out where the money is going,” he explained, “because if too much winds up in one place, you’ll be in trouble. Counterfeit spreads like a virus once it hits an area, with bills popping up everywhere, in banks, shops, bars, people’s pockets. It moves outward like an explosion, occupying a bigger and bigger space. If your space gets too large, you’ll attract way too much attention. That’s when the Secret Service puts your case on the top of the pile.”
It was a lot to assimilate for a sixteen-year-old: advanced printing techniques, abstract concepts of monetary “space,” law enforcement tactics of one of the world’s most elite agencies. Art started to feel a bit like James Bond, an adopted persona that he would embrace and never quite get over. “Years later, I would think back on how I had learned from the best, telling myself that I knew what I was doing, and the arrogance it would inspire was ridiculous.”
At the time, of course, he quickly learned that the act of counterfeiting itself is less than glamorous. Eliminating evidence was essential to Pete, and Art came to loathe the endless precautions. They never began work in the shop without first applying superglue to their fingertips to avoid leaving prints. A stray print on a bill spells instant doom for a counterfeiter, especially if it can be linked to a shop or a press peppered with the same prints. Pete was militaristic when it came to cleanliness, and one of Art’s prime responsibilities was to rub down every surface at the day’s end, then throw the rags in the washing machine—an act he thought unnecessary since they’d be right back at it the following morning. But Pete was insistent that the Service could very well raid or conduct an extralegal visit to the shop while they were away, and if that happened they had to make it as sterile as possible. When Art was finished, the master counterfeiter would inspect the job, grousing about a stray ink stain here or a paper shred there.
Gardeners have “green thumbs,” and Williams learned the hard way that counterfeiters get them too. To clean the press, Pete insisted on using a powerful, alcohol-based degreaser. “Never let this get on your skin,” Pete had warned Art, but one day during the middle of wiping down the press he went to the bathroom still wearing rubber gloves. He was instantly crippled by a tremendous burning sensation. “It burned like a motherfucker, but that wasn’t the only bad part! I had green money ink all over my dick. And then I had a hard time getting it off. I couldn’t use the degreaser, because that’s what made it sting. Basically I just jerked it off over the next couple days—that’s one way to clean it! I was too embarrassed to tell Pete about it. I still had cleaning to do and the whole time my penis was burning. It was the worst.”
Every bit of garbage had to be burned, and at the end of each day Art carried piles of chemical-saturated paper towels and printing stock to the back lot, threw it all into