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By Root 749 0

into Texas in the late sixties that he met Malinda Williams. She was a dark-haired beauty of seventeen who was waiting tables at a diner in Dallas. A country girl who’d grown up in the small town of Valley View, she’d moved to the city after her father got a job as a Dallas police officer. She’d been raised by conservative, evangelical parents, and was just beginning to taste her independence right at the time that half her generation needed little more excuse than rumors of a party six states away to leave home. Luciano regaled her with tales of the big city and his travels across the country, and within days she’d quit her job and joined him on the paper-hanging trail. Truth was, parts of Malinda were just as wild and unhinged as Luciano. Neither of them knew it then, but she suffered from bipolar disorder, and for the first few years there were a lot of highs. The couple latched on to the hippie movement, following the sun to places like southern California and Florida, then eventually gravitated back to Illinois and settled down in the Chicago suburb of Schaumburg, where Luciano worked various jobs in construction with his brother Richard. At some point, presumably either to avoid the draft or the law, Luciano changed his last name to his wife’s—Williams. Whatever his motivation for the name change, in March of 1972 his draft number indeed came up and Uncle Sam found him. He was briefly stationed in Texas at Fort Bliss, but according to his military records he struck his commanding officer shortly after discovering that the army planned to ship him off to Vietnam. He spent the rest of his service, 533 days, in Fort Leavenworth. He was there on Thanksgiving Day, 1972, when Art junior was born.

He rejoined his wife and son after his dishonorable discharge. They moved back to Schaumburg and picked up where they’d left off. Over the next two years, the couple had two more children, Wensdae and Jason, and for a little while it looked like Art senior would reform. Then, in December of ’77, he was arrested for robbing the truck in DuPage County and wound up in Stateville.

On the day he visited, Art junior was too young to think of his father as a “criminal”—a distinction that comes naturally only to those of us lucky enough never to have had a family member behind bars. In a vague way, little Art knew that his dad was “in a bad place full of bad men, but it was unfathomable that he was one of them.” All he remembers was sitting on his daddy’s lap in the visiting room, being perfectly happy that he indeed had a father, and ecstatically cognizant of the fact that in a few months his “pops” would be leaving Stateville to become, once and for all, a permanent presence in his life.

THINGS WENT ACCORDING TO PLAN at first. In March of 1978, Senior left Stateville to serve out the remaining six months of his sentence at a halfway house in Bensenville. During the day he worked at a wire-manufacturing plant, a job at which he excelled. Malinda visited him at night and on the weekends with the kids, and his reintegration into both his family and law-abiding society progressed smoothly. By the time he left the halfway house and rejoined his family, Magnum Wire was so impressed with Senior that the company made him a foreman, and he was able to begin anew his life as a father and husband in a three-bedroom home that was as respectable and as congruous as that of any workingman in town.

Art remembers that taste of normality with the possessiveness and incredulity of an old exile. “You wouldn’t believe it, but there was a time when I was a kid when I had pretty much a normal life,” he says. “I was a suburban kid. We had a nice home. We were a family. We did normal things like go to the movies. I remember my dad taking me to see Superman, you know, with Christopher Reeve, and holding his hand in line and thinking that was just the coolest thing.”

Despite Senior’s appearance of becoming a family man, what little Art and none of the other Williamses knew was that he had been seeing another woman even before leaving the halfway house.