The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [66]
The very thing that made his bills great—the fact that they were handmade—was also a limitation. Unlike da Vinci had done, it wasn’t just a question of plates, paper, ink, and a press. Breaking the new note had required all those elements plus many more. Polyester paper, color-shifting paint, ultraviolet reactive inks, watermarks on tracing paper, spray glues and glosses, high-end scanners and printers and computers, plus a dozen other small steps like carrier sheets and spacers that could only be applied manually—they were all infuriatingly labor intensive. In his efforts to become perfect, he had become boutique.
To meet even a small portion of the demand, Art needed better equipment, a printing hole, and a labor force. Once again, Chicago turned out to be a propitious location. Every year, printers from around the globe converge on the McCormick Place convention center for Graph Expo—the world’s largest graphic-arts convention. For three days the center’s nearly three million square feet of display space exhibit the latest hi-tech presses, inks, papers, scanners, and computer programs—every innovation the industry has to offer. For a counterfeiter, standing above the South exhibition hall and looking across the floor of Graph Expo is perhaps the closest thing to a view of heaven on earth.
Counterfeiters aren’t invited to Graph Expo, of course. Conventioneers pay thousands of dollars for the right to display and attend, and access to the floor is strictly regulated. But it is a little-known fact outside of Chicago that McCormick Place itself is heavily manned by Bridgeporters. From the suited managers to the back-braced laborers who set up the displays, most are either from the South Side or know somebody from the South Side who got them their union jobs, which at forty-five dollars an hour to start are among the best blue-collar gigs in Chicago. And so it was that in October of ’99, Giorgi gave Art the keys to heaven.
Giorgi was working as a floor manager at McCormick Place that year, a job that gave him unfettered access to the entire exhibition floor. After seeing one of Art’s New Notes and hearing about his need for good equipment, Giorgi personally saw to it that Art was given a necklace pass, complete with a photo ID, to the convention. He walked onto the floor that year with as much access as the president of Xerox.
His name was James Salino, and he was a small printer from the South Side. He spent three days roaming the floor, chatting up representatives from Adobe and Lexmark and Hewlett-Packard, attending demonstrations, and asking questions. At the same time, he was also shopping, because Giorgi made it clear to him that if he saw something he liked, then arrangements could made to obtain it.
On the first day he attended the Expo he fell in love. As he roamed the South Hall, his eyes fell upon a compact, two-color offset press made by Ryobi that was unlike anything he had ever seen before. Instead of using metal plates, it used plasticized paper plates, which distributed ink with far more uniformity and detail than aluminum sheets. Being mostly paper, the plates also burned quickly, which made getting rid of evidence a cinch. On top of all that it was downright sexy, “silver and yellow, like a race car.” Plain and simple, it was “a bad motherfucker.”
The Ryobi retailed for twelve thousand dollars. On the last night of Graph Expo, after the convention closed, a small army of South Siders assaulted the exhibition floor with forklifts and dollies to crate up the millions of dollars of equipment. McCormick Place is one of the best-run convention centers on the planet, and prospective visitors to those great exhibition halls would disservice themselves to be dissuaded by this anecdote. But that night, not everything made it safely to the loading dock.
ART SET THE RYOBI UP at an empty warehouse that Giorgi found for him on the South Side. Within a day he was experimenting, using it to color bill backgrounds and seals. Compared with his earlier offsets, it was a Rolls-Royce, with a touch so light and reliable