The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [38]
Despite his great expectations, Mikey was happy to help Art unload the twenty large. A week later, he called Art and presented him with his first “deal.” There was a pot dealer, a young guy who was growing hydroponic weed in his home, who would take the whole batch in exchange for six pounds. But there was a catch: The dealer, Mikey told Art, would have no idea that the money was counterfeit. Art felt like he was headed right back into the racket he’d been trying to escape, but he needed the money.
“By the time he realizes the money is fake, we’ll be long gone,” Mikey assured him. “And if he does realize it, fuck him. What’s he gonna do? Call the cops?”
“Where’s he from?” Art asked.
“Kenosha,” Mikey replied with a smile.
And that sealed it. Everyone on the South Side knew that guys from Kenosha were “soft”—suburban kids unaccustomed to having to fight for their meat. A few days later they met the dealer in the parking lot of a local gas station.
Art had stashed the money in a large-sized manila envelope. When the dealer opened it and flipped through the bills, centuries passed between the beats of Art’s heart.
“Go ahead and count it,” Mikey said amicably, but after running his thumb through the two-inch-thick bricks, the dealer was satisfied. By the time they got back to their own car, Art was uncharac teristically nervous, insisting that they speed away immediately. He still thought the bills were too dark, and was certain the dealer would recognize this.
“Relax,” Mikey told him. “The money will pass.”
The dealer called Mikey two hours later.
“Your guy gave me counterfeit bills,” he said. Mikey played dumb and told the dealer he wanted to come over and inspect the bills himself. The dealer was hesitant, and gave Mikey vague warnings that there’d be “repercussions.” Unfortunately for the Kenosha Kid, it was just the kind of threat that Pepitone’s inner thug delighted in answering. Mikey had a cop friend run the Kid’s license plate for an address, then went to his house and popped him over the head with a tire iron. “It was too bad it ended that way,” says Mikey, “because I was looking forward to establishing a relationship with him so I could fuck him again.”
They never heard from the Kenosha Kid again. Art split the six pounds with Mikey, and within two weeks he had unloaded most of his half for a profit of twelve thousand dollars. He kept a few ounces for himself and stuffed it in the Dungeon’s freezer.
Although the pot deal had been lucrative, Art cringed at the fact that a bumpkin had identified his bills as fake after a mere two hours—a vulnerability that could have gotten him killed by a more streetwise dealer. It was also the kind of reckless, bottom-dwelling deal that his old mentor would have sneered at. “Da Vinci would have been appalled,” says Art. “Something like that was way beneath him. And I wanted to do the kind of deals he had done, big batches with deep-pocketed clients.”
The only way to do that was to improve his bills, so he went back to the print shop. And this time he threw out the rulebook.
Part of the reason his bills had been too dark had to do with his press. Thanks to its advanced age, it lacked agility when it came to registering fine lines off a plate. To compensate, Art had darkened his colors, sacrificing detail for the illusion of substance. He guessed that the dealer in Kenosha had been convinced enough in the dim light of a car ceiling bulb, but once he’d taken them home and counted them in good light, the faces caught his attention. His suspicions piqued, the dealer probably then compared serial numbers and noticed the same four again and again—the final tell.
The only way to eliminate the darkness and improve his lines was to buy a better press, but Art was curious about