The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [65]
“He wants it tomorrow,” Mikey explained to Art. “How can we make this happen?” Art told him that it was impossible. Although he and Natalie had printed and cut about a hundred thousand dollars in fronts and backs before leaving Texas, he had no place to assemble, dry, and wrap it, and it was a task he could never complete on time by himself. Mikey’s solution would reveal one of the greatest strengths of Art’s design.
“If I understand it correctly, your bill is kinda like a kit, right?” he asked Art.
“More or less.”
“And you have all of the components made?”
“Yeah.”
“So you just need a safe spot where you can assemble the bills, and some help. Does there need to be anything special about the place?”
“As long as it’s indoors, not too small, and nobody will find it, theoretically I could assemble anywhere,” Art explained.
That’s how the filtration room beneath Sheridan Park’s pool became the first printing hole for Art’s new note. Since Mikey was a lifeguard there, they waited until after hours on a weekend, then snuck in with equipment and set up shop between the pipes and pumps. Bolstered by half an eight ball of cocaine, they had more than five hundred bills drying on clotheslines between the pipes in just under four hours, with time to kill. “It was probably one in the morning when we got finished,” Mikey remembers, “so after we were done we called up some hookers and told them to bring beer. They had a great time and so did we. They were swimming in the pool naked and we were literally throwing money at them all night. They had no idea all of it was fake.”
The following morning, Mikey delivered the product to Jimmy, who put it into circulation with magnificent results. None of Jimmy’s clients had any idea, but that year they were walking around with fistfuls of Art’s money. Jimmy was so pleased with the NFL operation that he invited Art and Mikey to sit in on a weekly Texas Hold’em game that he ran in the back room. Provided that he kept twenty percent of their winnings, Jimmy allowed them to throw as much counterfeit on the table as they wanted.
No one appreciated the homemade nature of Art’s bills as much as Wensdae, who allowed Art and Natalie to stay at her place while they looked for an apartment. A few days after Art and Natalie arrived, she came home from work to find a half-assed spider’s web of clotheslines across her living room and kitchen. Hanging from them like spring leaves were dozens of freshly made, air-drying bills that Art and Natalie had been gluing and stamping all day. Up until that moment, she didn’t even know that her brother was a counterfeiter. “I was pissed at him for about five minutes. I mean, what kind of fucking asshole would do that to his own sister? But you gotta understand that when you look at those things, you can’t tell the difference. I don’t care who you are. If you had seen those bills, and fucking Art with all his assurances, you wouldn’t be any different. You just want to spend them.”
Art refused to give her any, which infuriated her even more. But in what would become an irresistible tradition for his friends and family, Wendz snuck a handful when he wasn’t looking. “I went to Navy Pier, and I was dropping them like water,” she remembers. “I’m a shopaholic, and I was in candyland.”
DESPITE ART’S FLEXIBLE ASSEMBLY METHOD, he now had a supply deficit. In legal business, it’s generally a good problem that can be overcome by partnerships and loans. In the criminal world, it’s one of the most dangerous positions a crook can be in. Nothing increases a criminal’s profile like expansion, and Art had not forgotten da Vinci’s advice about occupying too much space. At the same time, he had to strike while the bills were hot, so to speak. And yet he lacked that most American of business essentials, the capacity for mass production.