The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [36]
He didn’t even consider printing da Vinci’s preferred product—hundred-dollar bills—because they were the most scrutinized denomination. His plan was start with twenties, working his way up as his bills improved.
To his surprise, his plates came out okay. Not quite as crisp as da Vinci’s, but his mentor had drummed into him the importance of taking precise measurements before shooting the negatives, and this had stayed with him. It wasn’t until he moved to the offset press that he realized his education was woefully incomplete.
Art did everything the way he remembered—mounting his plates on the roller, mixing his inks, and firing up the AB Dick—but as his first batch emerged on the delivery tray he didn’t see the bright, fine rectangles of mint that he remembered from the da Vinci days. Instead, he had a batch of purple bills. He turned off the press and went back to the ink palette, adding more green and yellow. But his next batch of bills was almost chartreuse and looked like they had been exposed to radiation. Again and again he’d adjust his color and run off a few hundred sheets, only to find he’d created some new perversion of the twenty-dollar bill, like a mad scientist with a labful of mutants.
“I got discouraged,” says Art. “When I was with Pete, I never got to run the press or mix the inks. I just watched him, so I tried to go off what I had watched. I knew how to turn the press on, raise the paper, put the plate on, get it to run, but I didn’t know how to do it all by myself.”
He took a week off and spent the time hanging out with his friends from Taylor Street, mulling over what had gone wrong. The problem, he knew, was one of attention and patience: Rather than letting the press rip away and hope for the best, he needed to control the pace. So on his second attempt he began stopping the press every fifteen or twenty sheets, then adjusting his colors and alignment. He did this dozens of times, losing himself in the process.
After hours of tweaking, he went to the tray and saw something that made his heart pound: All of a sudden he was looking at money. A little dark, but it was there.
Like a roughneck striking oil, he quickly turned the press back on and ran off more than two thousand fronts. Then came the seals and serial numbers. From experience, he knew that the backs—which consisted of only one color—would be far easier, and they were. In a matter of a few more hours of printing and cutting, he was sitting at the kitchen table in the Dungeon, exhausted. In front of him was twenty thousand dollars in counterfeit.
“There were a lot of feelings going through me. I felt really good, but I also felt alone, like I was in this all by myself because Pete wasn’t there. I remember thinking, ‘Man, I wish you could see me now, Buddy. You never got to finish teaching me, but I went ahead and finished for you.”
DESPITE HIS ELATION, Art was now confronted with a much bigger problem than the mechanics of making money. Obsessed with remembering the details of how to counterfeit, he’d given little thought to what he’d do if he actually succeeded, and when it came to the second half the business—unloading it—da Vinci had provided him no training whatsoever. And so he went to the one person he knew who would have a plan.
Back when he was learning how to counterfeit, Art hadn’t exactly kept his promise to da Vinci about not telling a soul. “I had to tell someone,” he admits with embarrassment. “It was too intense to keep all to myself. So I told one person.”
His confidant had been Michael Pepitone, a nineteen-year-old from Taylor Street who was one of the most peculiar specimens of Chicago criminal Art had ever met, beginning with his looks. With a lithe build, bright blue eyes, a crew cut, and light Mediterranean skin, Pepitone was by no means unattractive, but he had a gawkish tendency to carry his head out in front of his chest, sometimes moving it in a herky-jerky