The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [67]
His first hundred-thousand-dollar batch of the New Note was destined for the Horse, his oldest and most reliable client. With Natalie helping, they went from raw material to fully assembled bills in about ten days, twice as long as Art would have liked. There were paper jams, glue problems, cutting problems. Perfecting his methodology into a fluid system would take him many more months, but when they were finished and staring at ten shrink-wrapped piles of ten thousand, he knew that he was back in the game in a big way. “I felt like the caveman who had discovered fire,” he says. “The bills looked so good I almost didn’t want to sell them. I wanted to spend them.”
During Art’s hiatus from counterfeiting, the FBI had raided the On Leong Building several times, and the once legendary gambling den in the basement had passed into history. This time around, he met the Horse in his car at Ping Tom Park, and afterward they went out to a downtown nightclub.
“You’ll have to be careful with these new bills,” the Horse warned him at one point. “Everybody will want.” Art was already seeing it. While superficially good for his ego, his social calendar exploded as clients, crooks, and even family members jockeyed for position next to the goose who was laying the golden eggs. “Everyone wanted money faster than I could make it,” he says. “They all had big plans, they all wanted me to become exclusive with them. I could see that it wasn’t really about me or my interests, but the money. It bothered me.”
Dmitri was still pushing Art hard to travel with him abroad, specifically to St. Petersburg. Sensing Art’s earlier reluctance, the Russian now talked about a short trip—three months—in which they would basically hang out and explore the architecture, but Art knew that once he was there he’d be seduced by Dmitri’s friends and relatives into printing, or at least selling some of his secrets. At the time, the city was one of the largest producers of U.S. counterfeit in Europe, and all Dmitri needed to return as a conqueror was an unlimited supply of Art’s bills.
One of the worst changes Art saw was in Tim Frandelo, an old friend he’d grown up with at the Bridgeport Homes. It had been Tim’s little brother, Darren, who was gunned down outside the Dunkin’ Donuts next to the projects. Back in the Dungeon days, Tim had helped Art out with a few deals, but once Frandelo saw the new bill, he pressed hard to become Art’s full-time partner. Since Art desperately needed someone besides Natalie to help him with the backlog of orders, he brought Frandelo in on a trial basis. But from the very first print run Tim was frustrated.
“I don’t understand why you’re doing fifty- and hundred-thousand-dollar deals when we can be printing millions,” he complained. “I know people who would buy a million.”
Art didn’t doubt it. Tim had solid Outfit connections, and that worried him. He explained da Vinci’s rule about occupying too much “space” and the certainty that the Secret Service would catch them if they printed too much, but Frandelo derided him as being too cautious. “When you have an ability like you got, you need to use it to its full extent,” Frandelo pressed. “These little batches will never make us rich, but with this product we could be.”
A few weeks after they started working together, Tim informed Art that he had been offered another job; an Outfit associate named Ron Jarrett was smuggling cocaine into the city from an Indian reservation upstate, and he needed foot soldiers to help him move it. Since it was much better money than the five thousand dollars per batch that Art was paying him, Tim was seriously considering taking it.
“If you can promise me we’ll print larger amounts, I’ll stick with you,” Frandelo told him. Art not only wouldn’t budge, but he was incensed.
“You go with Jarrett and we’re