The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [45]
Beyond the disposable spending, there were the goods and toys, like a high-end Kenwood stereo system for his car, new computer equipment, and Armani shirts, which he had tailored because he was big in the shoulders. An unwritten rule of criminal masterminds is that they must also have a collection, the more bizarre the better; Escobar had a zoo, Capone had jewelry, and though Art wasn’t exactly an underworld emperor he wasn’t about to be kept out of the club. He took to collecting antique money, especially notes from the “Golden Age” when each bank printed its own currency. He bought hundreds of bills from dealers and fences that he knew; old Wells Fargo notes from the California gold rush, silver notes with portraits of Indian chiefs, and bills with tall ships, locomotives, and intricately engraved scenes from Americana. He cared less for their market value than for their aesthetic impression. His prize pieces were a set of three immaculate “fractional notes”—five-, fifteen-, and twenty-five-cent bills that the Union printed during the Civil War because of metal shortages. “I told Karen they were quite valuable, so what does she do? She takes them and has them laminated, thinking she’s doing a good thing. They were completely ruined.”
HIDING HIS CRIMINAL ACTIVITIES from Karen became an increasingly high-stakes game for Williams. Each weekday he would eat breakfast with his wife and son, put on a Windbreaker bearing a “Bello Construction” logo, then Karen would drop him off at one of Morty’s construction sites. He’d kiss her good-bye, throw in a workingman’s sigh at the prospect of another day of manual labor, and wait until she turned the corner. Afterward he’d make his way to the Dungeon or over to Taylor Street. If he wasn’t printing, he’d meet up with his pals for cappuccinos, then head to the basketball courts at Sheridan Park, the horse track at Arlington, or maybe a White Sox game. Or they’d just spend the day partying at a bar or a friend’s house.
“I never knew what he was up to, but I had my suspicions,” says Magers. “He always had money, and I’d ask him how he got it. He’d say it was payday, then I’d ask him for a stub and he’d have another excuse. I was always the investigator trying to crack the case! But then I’d just get tired of arguing with him.”
Williams found the double life exciting, Karen’s inquisitions a turn-on. “I’d tease her,” he says, “I’d tell her she was a wannabe cop.” Their fights, which were frequent and fierce, often led to explosive sex, and as long as it didn’t interfere with his new lifestyle, Art was content to let the loop play out and reset indefinitely. He attributed Karen’s outbursts to jealousy over the fact that he was happy with his life, even if it was a lie.
“I was jealous,” she admits. “Here I am taking care of the baby, and he’s doing whatever the hell he wanted, lying to me about it. Things always came easy to him. I didn’t know he was counterfeiting, but when I found out years later I wasn’t surprised. He was good at anything he set his mind to. If he put half the energy into just a job, he’d probably make good money anyway.”
But pretending to be a cop was more than a game to Karen. The baby had merely put a hold on her dream. When Art III was four years old, she placed him in day care and took a job waiting tables. And just as Art’s own mother had fallen in love with a criminal by serving him coffee, she met a cop.
His name was Ned Fagan. He was a Chicago PD lieutenant, in his late forties and on the verge of retirement, and ran a security company on