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By Root 808 0

had inflamed Art’s resentment toward Morty for paying him so little during the two years he’d toiled for him. He calculated that if Morty had paid him merely minimum wage, he would have had tens of thousands of dollars more, but what really angered Art was that he had allowed his feelings for the gypsy to make him vulnerable to exploitation. That anger, along with the date, had hibernated in his head for months, and when May rolled around, his criminal alarm clock started clanging as surely as Big Ben. Having gone all that time with barely a thought of crime, he was now confronted with a decision: stay clean, or rob the most despicable man he knew. “As the calendar got closer and closer, I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” says Art. “I was really enjoying my time with these girls, and I knew if I went back to Chicago I’d be taking a risk. But that date . . . it was really the only opportunity I’d ever have to get revenge on this guy.”

He called some of his old robbery crew members and, on Friday, June 4, drove the marathon 940 miles from Valley View to Chicago. Sure enough, on the following morning Art watched from a car up the street as Morty and his retinue filed out of the house, boarded cars, and left for the wedding. He waited a few minutes to make sure nobody was left in the house, then broke in through the back door. Inside Morty’s bedroom closet, Art found a steel lockbox, which he opened with a pry bar. “We got the box and pulled about sixty thousand in cash out of there,” Art remembers, “but that wasn’t everything. We also pulled diamonds and emeralds! They were folded real nice in rice-paper envelopes, and there was also a little box inside the big box. Inside that there were earrings and jewelry and watches and gold necklaces.”

After dividing the take with his crew and fencing it, Art returned to Texas with about forty grand. “I figure it was about as much as Morty had shorted me over the years,” he says. As usual, he began burning through the cash with a vengeance. “I was taking all four girls out, partying a lot,” he explains. “I was still working, but construction pay in Texas was low because there you’re competing with Mexicans. But the thing about the Morty job was that, when I did it, all the thrill came back.”

That thrill was fresh in his mind a few months later when his first Texas criminal temptation presented itself. By then, Art and Janet had broken up and he’d started to pursue Susan—the artsy brunette. Art sensed that Susan was more infatuated by his bad-boy image than any of the other girls, and he put it to the test one day after she came home from a shopping spree loaded up with new clothes and jewelry.

“Where’d you get all this stuff?” Art asked her.

“A friend of mine took me shopping,” Susan said. “Her boyfriend’s a huge drug dealer in Denton, and she was telling me he’s got like stacks of money underneath his bed. She just goes in there and snatches some whenever she wants to shop.”

Art’s clean future in Texas disintegrated as she spoke. Up until that point, he hadn’t really given the girls many specifics about his criminal activities. He’d mentioned that he’d been in a gang and even the counterfeiting operation, but he had billed it all as a dark past that he was trying to put behind him, which had been true enough when he’d said it.

“Back in Chicago I used to rob drug dealers like him,” he told Susan. “I made good money at it.”

“Really?” Susan said, fascinated. “How’d you do it?” He told her a few stories from his drug-pirate days, watching her eyes get bigger as she realized that he wasn’t kidding. Once she was immersed in the criminal contact high, he engaged her in playful interrogation. Within ten minutes he knew where the dealer lived, what he drove, and what he sold. Susan had no criminal background, but by the time he was done with her she was helping him plan the job.

The dealer’s name was Clayton. He lived in an apartment complex on the other side of town. He drove a black Mustang and peddled pot and Ecstasy. Susan didn’t know which apartment was his, so Art hid in some