The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [63]
“The moment we saw it we knew we’d done it,” he says. “It was just there. It sent chills up my spine. It was beyond anything I’d ever done. Even that first crappy drawing on tracing paper looked real. It scared me. That was something way beyond what Pete had taught me. He never did anything like that. That was me, my own innovation.”
The beauty of the “twin sheet” solution to the watermark was that it also solved the problem of the security strip: Minicounterfeits of both could be slipped between sheets bearing the front and back images of the bill, which Art could then glue together and solidify using a select group of over-the-counter sprays. Once he realized this, he went out and bought red UV ink for his ink-jet printer (amazingly, that is an over-the-counter product too), then printed his own security strips on the same tracing paper he used for the watermark.
The final security feature of the New Note—the microprinting—turned out to be the easiest to defeat. Just as Treasury had miscalculated how fast reprographic technology would progress back in ’89, by 1999 the ink-jets and software were good enough to render a convincing replica in the right hands. Those hands turned out to be Natalie’s; she spent days working over scans in Photoshop until they shone like the real thing to all but the most trained eye. Even then, Art insisted that they still use an offset press for the seals and to color the background of the bill. “I don’t care how good the technology gets. There are things an offset press can do that a computer never will. If I thought a computer could do those things better, I would have used it. But for me it wasn’t about easy, I was obsessed. The funny thing was that there was this point when it wasn’t about profit anymore. It was about the art, seeing if I could do it.”
When the prototype of their New Note was finished—a good four months after Art had gotten out of prison—he and Natalie bought a digital scale. They’d been so caught up with how the bill looked that they’d never considered weight during their research process, and were now happy enough with the results that they didn’t really care. But Art, as always, was curious, so they laid it on the scale. Their bill weighed exactly one gram. Precisely the weight of all genuine U.S. currency.
8
“EVERYBODY WILL WANT”
Despite all the grumping here about unresponsive
government; and despite the tut-tutting abroad about
American hegemonism and cultural decay—the eager
acceptance of the new U.S. C-note proves that people
everywhere have faith in the stability that flows from
freedom in the United States of America.
—WILLIAM SAFIRE, IN The New York Times,
COMMENTING ON THE HIGH FOREIGN DEMAND
FOR THE NEW NOTE AHEAD OF ITS RELEASE,
DECEMBER 4, 1995
Tony Puntillo—Art’s old wheelman from the Dungeon days—remembers being at a party in the fall of 1999 when Art walked in the door, Texas-tan with eyes bright with secrets. Puntillo hadn’t seen Williams in four years, not since he’d run off to Texas after his relationship with Karen fell apart. After the two caught up over a few beers, Art asked him to step outside for a moment.
“We went out the front door, then he just sorta smiled and handed me a hundred-dollar bill, one of the new ones,” Puntillo remembers. “I looked at it and my first reaction was, ‘What’s this for?’ Last I knew he didn’t owe me any money. He just kept smiling and said, ‘Just look at it.’ So I did. He made sure I looked at everything. The watermark, the strip, the ink. Then he tells me it’s one of his. I didn’t believe the jagoff at first because I honestly couldn’t tell the difference. It blew my mind. He’s gone four years and then he shows up with this.”
Art told Tony that he’d be calling and made sure he remembered the pager code they’d used