The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [58]
“I bet you could do it,” Natalie said gamely. Seeing her interest, Art started to wonder himself.
Once again a conversation had begun. When they got home, for the first time since his release, Art became animated and hopeful. Over beers, he told Natalie stories about da Vinci and the Dungeon days; about how he had learned from the best and, for a brief while, lived the good life. He told her about how he’d been treated like a king by Chicago’s biggest criminal organizations, and the incredible feeling of seeing sheets of freshly minted counterfeit slide off a press. The hundred-dollar bill came out of Natalie’s purse again and Art began theorizing about inks and chemical reactions, paper density and polymers.
By the end of the night, Natalie had agreed to front him three thousand dollars and let him set up a temporary print shop in her apartment. But this time it would function more as a laboratory. Its main purpose would be for experimentation, because their goal was not to merely print counterfeit, but to pursue what would become a Holy Grail quest: creating a perfect replica of the 1996 New Note.
CHOOSING WHICH DENOMINATION to counterfeit was a no-brainer for Williams. Even though the new fifty- and twenty-dollar notes were also circulating by 1999, the hundred-dollar bill offered the greatest potential profit, and it was the security prototype for every other denomination. If he could crack it, then the entire currency line would be vulnerable. He knew that there could be little room for error. The new hundreds were more scrutinized than any bill ever created before—a quality that made the potential reward all the more enticing.
Knowing that breaking the New Note could take months, Art planned to initially print and sell pre-Series 1996 twenties and tens, bills that were rarely subjected to the Dri Mark pen. The proceeds from these lower denominations, he figured, would allow him to upgrade his equipment and keep afloat while he experimented. He was so confident that no one would inspect the small denominations that he didn’t even bother going to a printer for high-quality newsprint; instead, he bought several stacks of high-quality printer paper and ran off fifty thousand dollars in old twenties, then approached a friend he’d made at Lopez in the hopes of turning a fast deal. His friend was a stocky, amicable Irish kid named Toby McClellan, but Art called him “Garfield” because of his pudgy face and red hair. Like Art, McClellan was fairly fresh out of prison and low on cash, so Art fronted him twenty thousand dollars in counterfeit on the condition that he’d get paid as soon as McClellan moved it. True to his word, McClellan unloaded the money within a week, paid Art, then presented him with another proposition.
“I know a heroin dealer who’s interested in counterfeit,” McClellan explained, “but he’s cash poor right now and doesn’t want to pay for it upfront. He wants you to front him so he can mix it into a heroin buy, then pay you after he’s turned it around. Or he can just give you some of the dope.”
Art was dubious. He had never fronted a stranger counterfeit before, much less a heroin dealer. But he was desperate for funds, so he agreed to meet McClellan’s friend. The junk dealer, a guy named Ritchie, seemed serious enough when Art met him. He explained that he already had the heroin buy lined up with some Mexicans in Dallas—reliable sellers who he’d done business with before. Despite his misgivings, Art agreed to front Ritchie twenty thousand dollars with one provision:
“I’m going with you on the buy,” Art told him. “I don’t know you, and I’ve done this kind of thing before.” Ritchie agreed, but what neither he nor McClellan told Art was that the counterfeit he had fronted McClellan a few weeks earlier had gone to the same Mexicans they were about to meet. In his haste to raise funds for his work on the New Note, Art had never asked