The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [64]
Over the next few weeks, Art made the rounds, always showing up unannounced and with a casual attitude before springing the new bill on his old clients. When they saw it, their reactions were universally ecstatic and so similar that he would later give it a nickname—the Glow. “They would get this look on their face,” he says, “a look of wonder, almost like they were on drugs. It was like they were imagining the possibilities of what it could do for them, and they wanted more.” Sandy immediately asked for three hundred thousand dollars, while Dmitri was so enthusiastic that he tried to convince Art to print millions. “He told me he’d set me up anywhere in the world, with bodyguards from St. Petersburg to protect me. He was serious. It sounded pretty good and I even thought about it for a moment, but the problem was that then I’d be working for him. Once I left the country, I’d lose control. I’d be like a bird in a cage.”
Only the Horse was circumspect. While Art had been away in prison, he had gained intermittent access to what may well have been the only note on the planet better than Art’s—the hundred-dollar bill that the Secret Service calls the “Supernote.” Like Art’s bill, the Supernote contained every security feature of the New Note, the major difference being that it was produced on an intaglio press similar to the ones used by the U.S. government. All of the bill’s features and production processes, in fact, were so identical to real currency that distinguishing the notes usually required lab analysis. It had first appeared in Hong Kong in 1989 and since then the Secret Service has been oddly ambivalent about its origins. At different times, experts have linked the Supernote to Iran, East Germany, China, and, most often, North Korea—the sole agreement being that the only entity capable of creating it is a national government with accesses to tens of million of dollars. Some have even theorized that the Supernote is created by the United States government itself and used abroad to fund “black” operations outside of the national defense budget.
Whatever the Supernote’s origins, On Leong had gained access to it during Art’s hiatus from counterfeiting, and upon seeing Art’s bill the Horse acknowledged as much, throwing him a backhanded compliment. “This bill is really good, Art,” he said, “but we’ve still got you beat with the Supernote.”
He then placed an order for a hundred thousand dollars, at thirty cents on the dollar.
Art found himself in the awkward position of telling all of his clients that they had to wait. Although he’d guessed that his new bill would be a hit, he had no idea that demand would come so quickly and with such high numbers—way beyond both his production capacity and his nerve. “They all wanted so much, and right then,” he says. “And of course they had no idea how hard it was to make. Hell, at that point, I was still figuring out how to produce it on a large scale.”
Mikey was at his lifeguard post at the Sheridan Park pool when Art showed up with the note. As his most trusted adviser, crime partner, and friend, he had bitter feelings when Art had left Chicago. “We had made good money together, and Arty had thrown away a profitable business only to wind up in prison because of a stupid move,” he says. But once he saw the new bill, his feelings of abandonment dissipated like midwinter spindrift off Lake Michigan. “He’d done it. That’s all there was to it. He’d beaten the new bill. I wasn’t surprised in the sense that it was him, because I always knew the boy had brains, but this was something special. That bill was perfect. You really couldn’t tell the difference. Oh, I knew right away that we were going to make a lot of money.”
Mikey wasted no time setting up Art’s first firm deal with the new money. The client was a bookmaker he knew, Jimmy Amodio, who also ran a social club near Taylor Street. All he had to do was present Jimmy with