The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [68]
Everybody in Bridgeport knew Ron Jarrett. A key member of the Twenty-sixth Street Crew, Jarrett had recently been released from prison for a 1980 jewelry heist, and since returning to the streets he’d been throwing his weight around the neighborhood, extorting money from locals and aggressively trying to tax any crook who smelled faintly of money. He was known for being a brute and a bulldog, and it was widely believed he was positioning himself to take over the Crew. That Frandelo was now associating with Jarrett spelled bad news to Art. “I figured it could be only a matter of time before I got on Jarrett’s radar,” he says. “If that happened I’d get taxed. The guy had a high profile. It was the kind of circle I didn’t want to be anywhere near. Those guys are always watched by the feds.”
As Art feared, Frandelo took the cocaine job, and he broke off all contact with his old friend. Worried that Jarrett or law enforcement would catch wind of his operation, Art grew intensely paranoid. He began spending thousands of dollars at the SpyShop USA, a “discreet electronics” store in downtown Chicago that specialized in high-tech countersurveillance equipment. Art bought a police scanner, bug and wire detectors, even night-vision goggles so he could look for stakeout cars in the dark. At the same time, he rarely answered his phone or allowed people to know where he was. When he and Natalie finally found their own apartment near Comiskey Park, he rented it under a false name and invited no one over but family. “I was like a ghost,” he says. “Nobody could ever find me. People hated it, but it kept me safe.”
“He was nuts,” says Tony Puntillo. “I remember one day Art shows up at my apartment. He was worried that he was being followed. He comes in and he has this little box with an antenna sticking out of it—a bug detector. He starts poking the antenna around the whole place, the walls, the furniture. I’m like, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ The jagoff’s walking around my house acting like he thinks he’s James fucking Bond.’ Then he goes to the window and shuts the blinds and keeps peeking through them. He’s convinced that one of the parked cars is following him.”
Even though nobody knew where he and Natalie lived, Art decided that Chicago wasn’t anonymous enough for him. The couple began searching downstate for a safe house, a country home where they could lay low and print if necessary. Eventually they found a farmhouse in Marshall, an agricultural community of about four thousand not far from the Indiana border. Located at the end of a dirt road, it literally sat in the middle of a cornfield. “No one was going to find this place,” Art says. “I paid cash for six months’ rent up front, used a false name. We didn’t go there all the time, but when we did we usually printed. We did all the digital stuff there. My plan was to operate out of there and do what Pete had always said: Keep my batches small, avoid too much attention, and live a comfortable life. Things didn’t work out that way, of course.”
9
THE ART OF PASSING
“Papa! What’s money?”
The abrupt question had such immediate reference to the subject of Mr. Dombey’s thoughts, that Mr. Dombey was quite disconcerted.
“What is money, Paul?” he answered. “Money?”
“Yes,” said the child, laying his hands upon the elbows of his little chair, and turning the old face up toward Mr. Dombey’s; “what is money?”
Mr. Dombey was in a difficulty. He would have liked to give him some explanation involving the terms circulating-medium, currency, depreciation of currency, paper, bullion, rates of exchange, value of precious metals in the market, and so forth; but looking down at the little chair, and seeing what a long way down it was, he answered: “Gold, and silver, and copper. Guineas, shillings, half-pence. You know what they are?”
“Oh yes, I know what they are,” said Paul. “I don’t mean that, Papa. I mean what’s money after all.”
—CHARLES DICKENS, Dombey