The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [34]
And heavy equipment
We’re in the basement,
Learning to print
All of it’s hot
All counterfeit
—B-52’S, “LEGAL TENDER”
Starting a counterfeiting operation from scratch is a formidable task for a crew of men; for a single man, it’s a protracted logistical battle in which a hundred items must be acquired, prepared, and studied—all before ink wets paper. Four years after learning the basics from da Vinci, Art possessed the maturity and patience to pursue the endeavor, but as he set about his mission it was no less daunting. Pete had taught him only everything that took place in the shop, and production is only part of counterfeiting. Art didn’t know where the old man had gotten supplies, how he found clients, or how to conduct deals.
By necessity, Art’s first acquisition had to be a safe house, or what the Secret Service calls a “printing hole.” Like the song says, counterfeiters like to operate in basements, and for good reason: Chugging along at full speed, even a small electric offset press generates vibrations rivaling an off-balance washing machine full of shoes. Ideally, the press should have solid ground beneath it and thick walls around it, or be located far from any other building. With limited resources, Art didn’t have the option of renting an isolated space somewhere in the sticks or even an industrial spot like da Vinci’s. He needed to stay as local as possible.
Luckily, it turned out that one of his friends, Chris Bucklin, was the son of a local real estate baron. Chris’s dad lived in Ireland and delegated the management of his properties to his son. After a few vague descriptions, Art was able to pay Chris cash for a three-bedroom basement apartment on Halsted Street, the kind of gloomy subterranean den that few people passing on the sidewalk above ever notice.
He called the apartment “the Dungeon,” and immediately went shopping for equipment. Offset printing supplies are easy to find in most large cities, but Chicago in particular offers a bountiful hunting ground. Just like the meatpackers, printers were drawn to the city by its central location, and by the early twentieth century it hosted the greatest concentration of printers in the world. Companies like RR Donnelley & Sons grouped along Chicago’s South Loop in an area that became known as Printer’s Row, eventually spreading their industry outward. To this day, the graphic-arts industry remains the city’s largest single employer, and the heart of America’s printing industry still lies within a two-hundred-mile radius.
State-of-the-art small-sized presses can cost upwards of ten thousand dollars, so Art focused his search on used presses. He checked the For Sale sections of local newspapers and called local print shops, asking if anyone had a press they wanted to unload. At a going-out-of-business sale, he picked up an old AB Dick for five hundred dollars. “It was the lowest end of the line,” he says with a tinge of embarrassment. “It was literally something out of the nineteen seventies, sitting abandoned in the corner of the print shop.”
Adding on the process camera, plate burner, hydraulic cutter, inks, lights, tables, tools, and chemical solutions, he stocked his shop for about five thousand dollars. It was a bare-bones setup befitting the name of Art’s hideout. But in one regard it was also advanced: In addition to the other equipment, Art also picked up an Apple computer, a scanner, and a diazotype blueprint machine—a high-end architectural printer.
In 1992, less than one half of one percent of counterfeiters used desktop-publishing equipment, but Williams had long wondered if there was a way to integrate the new technology into a counterfeiting operation. Wired into a Macintosh computer running the image-editing program Photoshop, he’d have the option of playing with bill images and cleaning them up on the screen, then printing them out on the diazotype. He had no idea how well the technology would work and decided to stick to the tried-and-true method Pete had taught him, but he wanted to experiment in the future—an inclination