The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [39]
At the same time, Art saw the limitations. There were things the digital equipment just couldn’t do well: the faint, almost imperceptible green background of bills, the sharpness of the seals and the serial numbers, and the minuscule red and blue silk fibers all looked pixilated and artificial. Every advantage the computer technology gave him came with a weakness. The solution he came up with was almost unheard of at the time: a hybrid bill that utilized both offset and digital. He employed the offset for his background, seals, serial numbers, and fibers, then moved his sheets to the inkjet to print his faces. Overall, it was no more or less time-consuming than purely sticking to the offset, but it gave him more control, and the results were immediate and dramatic. “I don’t want to say that they were as good as da Vinci’s bills . . . ,” Art hems. “They were different. He probably wouldn’t like them because he was old school. But they were infinitely better than that first batch. I was pretty sure I could get thirty cents on the dollar, in daylight.”
ART KNEW that if he wanted to sell a hundred thousand dollars in counterfeit at thirty cents on the dollar, then he needed clients with both the cash to pay for his product and a network to distribute it. That meant he really had only one choice.
Organized crime loves counterfeit money. Since their own businesses are illegitimate, their patrons are usually in no position to complain. If you’re running gambling rackets, you can mix counterfeit into the payoffs and people are not only unlikely to protest, but they won’t be in a hurry to seek the police. If you’re smuggling, the fakes go abroad, where a third-worlder is as likely to stuff American dollars under his mattress as he is to deposit them in a bank. It’s even better if you’re running drugs, because then you’re dealing with so much cash that a hundred thousand dollars in counterfeit may well be a drop in the pond. And there are always the middlemen, the ones who buy counterfeit for thirty cents on the dollar and sell it downstream for fifty cents to guys without connections.
Fortunately for Art, Chicago was about as bountiful in Mafia as it was in printers. The most accessible group was the Outfit, which had dominated the city since the days of Al Capone. Having grown up in Bridgeport and made a second home of Taylor Street, Art personally knew Outfit associates from two of the six different “crews” that ran the city much in the same way that New York’s Five Families divided up their turf. The Twenty-sixth Street or “Chinatown” Crew was right there in Bridgeport and specialized in truck hijacking, gambling, extortion, and juice loans. Some of its members even lived on his street (albeit on a nicer block) and he knew them on a first-name basis. Art was even better connected to the Taylor Street or “Ferriola” Crew, which was heavily involved in gambling and bookmaking. With one phone call, he could have arranged a meeting with a made man who was sure to want hundreds of thousands of dollars.
But there were problems when it came to doing business with the Outfit. As every crook in Chicago knew, once a crew had you on their radar, you risked becoming their personal ATM. If they didn’t try to run Art’s operation outright, at the very least they’d force him to pay a “street tax” of twenty-five percent on everything he made—under penalty of death. For this reason, Art not only discounted doing business with