The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [51]
CRIME SO OFTEN POISONS RELATIONSHIPS that it’s easy to forget its power to feed them. Although the Clayton robbery was a fiasco, for Art the episode’s most surprising aspect wasn’t getting caught: It was the women. “They were frightened, but they stood strong,” he says. “And in spite of everything, they had a taste for it. I blame myself for that. I think in order to be a criminal, to a certain extent one has to have it in them, but I was the catalyst that brought it out. I straight-out corrupted them.”
Art wasted little time devising a way he could use two of the women, Susan and Lucy, to hit drug dealers. On a trip across the Mexican border to Nuevo Laredo, he obtained a bottle of Rohypnol— better known as the “date rape drug”—and starting taking the girls to honky-tonks. The group would perch themselves at a table where they could watch the bar, and Art would scout for cowboy drug dealers. Except for the boots and hats, they were as conspicuous as Chicago dealers. They carried the fat billfolds and beepers, and came and left the bar every ten minutes. After Art zeroed in on a mark, one of the girls would sidle up to the bar, take a nearby stool, and chat him up. Over the course of a few hours, the girls would let the dealers buy them drinks, growing increasingly flirtatious until coyly suggesting that the dealer take them back to his place. And when they’d pull out of the parking lot, Art and the other girls would be sharking right behind them.
Once a girl got inside a dealer’s house, she’d fix him a drink and drop in the Rohypnol. The drug was infallible and magnificently fast, usually about fifteen minutes before a dealer passed out. The girl would open the front door and Art and the others would breeze right in. With the dealer out cold, they’d leisurely rifle the house until they found the drugs and cash, then drive away. “It was so easy it almost wasn’t fair,” Art muses.
Now fully back in the criminal life—and with a harem for a crew no less—Art wasn’t so sure that staying straight was his best move. “There was too much opportunity in Texas. These rednecks were just clueless, the girls were down, and it wasn’t like we were robbing nice people. These guys were dirtbags and we were kinda their reckoning.” After getting into an argument with a coworker at a construction site, he quit his day job, rationalizing that the wages were too low anyway thanks to an overabundance of migrant workers from Mexico.
Not long after he and the girls began pulling the Rohypnol gambits, Art met Dave Pettis, a local from Denton who rode a motorcycle and seemed to share Art’s appetite for excitement. Like Art, Pettis talked big when he had a few drinks in him and came off as fearless, though in his case it was mostly a front. He had very little criminal experience, but Art took him under his wing, thinking that it might be useful to have a male crew member around. And within a week of meeting him, Pettis approached Art with a potential score. Pettis had a girlfriend whose father was a struggling jeweler. Times being tough, he was looking to liquidate his business, and figured the fastest way was to cash in on theft insurance. All he needed was someone to break into his house and steal his inventory; he’d report the theft and file his claim, and the hired thief would get to keep about twenty-five thousand dollars’ worth of gems and precious metals. “I’d do it myself,” he told Art, “but you have more experience with this than me, and we’ll still have to break in and be smooth about it. He works from his home and he has neighbors and everything.”
Art was not only flattered, but it sounded like a dream opportunity. Even if they somehow got arrested the jeweler wasn’t going to press charges, and there’d also be no need for surveillance