The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [42]
Sandy liked the idea from the first moment Art showed him a bill, a reaction that Art thought was hilarious because it was well known that Sandy had vision problems. “Sandy was blind as a bat,” Art says. “He had glasses and contacts but he didn’t like to wear them if he wasn’t driving, so he’d go around squinting all the time. I could have given him Monopoly money and he would have said it looked great. With him, it was all about trust, and he trusted me implicitly.”
Just to test the water, Sandy started out slow, ordering twenty-five grand from Art to see how the money played once it left his hands. When no one made a stink, he quickly upped his orders to a hundred thousand dollars—the maximum amount that Art agreed to make per da Vinci’s rules. Art didn’t ask Sandy many questions about where the money was headed; he knew that Sandy’s uncle got his cocaine from out of state, and given the quantities of cocaine he’d seen at Sandy’s house, it was safe to assume that his uncle was moving much larger quantities. Although Sandy offered, Art had no interest in meeting his uncle. “I never want to see his face,” he told his friend.
Art’s other client, Dmitri Kovalev, was a Russian he met at a party thrown by one of his Italian friends from Taylor Street. Thick chested, with brown hair and a heavy accent, Dmitri was a party animal who Art liked from the moment he saw him sitting at a table surrounded by friends and slamming five shots of vodka in a row. “This guy was the biggest party animal I’d ever seen,” Art remembers. “There aren’t many people I know who can outdrink me, but he could every time. He was one of those guys who seems to get more sober the more they drink. He liked booze and girls, but he wasn’t obnoxious. He was extremely polite and polished, a classy guy. And he was very Russian. The one way you could tell he was getting drunk was because he’d never shut up about how great Russia was and how much he missed it.” Dmitri was from St. Petersburg, which is perhaps best known for two things: its magnificent architecture and its Mafia, the latter of which is the most resilient and powerful in all of Russia. He liked to praise the merits of both. “He’d tell me that the United States was a pain in the ass. He’d say that in Russia, no one had to worry about cops or crackdowns because everyone was paid off. They could do anything they wanted. He always told me that one day he’d take me there.”
Dmitri was evasive about why he was in the U.S., and Art suspected it had to do with mob trouble. He ran a social club on the North Side, and after a few all-night visits, Art gleaned that gambling and prostitution orbited there. Each time Art came, Dmitri treated him like an old friend, and on a hunch Art decided to lay a note on him to see if he was interested in buying.
“Falshivki!” Dmitri declared with a smile as he fondled the bill. “Pretty good. But in St. Petersburg we make better.”
“So you don’t want any?”
“I didn’t say that. How much?”
“Thirty cents on the dollar.”
The Russian said he’d think about it. Once again, within a week they had negotiated a hundred-thousand-dollar order, this time for the requested thirty-cent rate. And when Art posed his question about the direction his money would take once it left his hands, the Russian’s response was music to his ears: “Don’t worry, Arty,” Dmitri told him. “It will leave the country fast.”
AS THE DUNGEON TOOK OFF, Art realized that his apprenticeship with da Vinci had probably been more than a generous criminal scholarship; satisfying multiple orders for counterfeit is heavy work for a lone operator. He soon enlisted some help of his own, drawing on friends from Taylor Street and Bridgeport who were willing to risk federal time for a quick profit. He intentionally kept them largely ignorant of each