The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [69]
On the morning of December 23, 1999, fifty-five-year-old Ron Jarrett stepped outside his bungalow on Lowe Street, a quiet, middle-class section of Bridgeport that had long been a bastion of the Mafia. Like many reputed mobsters who lived in the area, Jarrett felt safe in the neighborhood. That morning, which was clear and cold, he was on his way to the funeral of a family member.
A few blocks away, two men started up a yellow Ryder moving truck and began driving toward Jarrett’s house. The truck slowed as it drew up alongside Jarrett, then a man jumped from the passenger seat. He walked directly up to Jarrett, who turned to face him just in time to see a pistol aimed directly at his head. The gunman squeezed off at least five rounds, shooting Jarrett in the face, chest, right shoulder, and both arms. Jarrett would die in the hospital a month later.
The hit had all the earmarks of a classic Outfit operation. Police would later find the Ryder truck torched in an alley up the street, but they would have no good witnesses. In earlier eras, a single shooting might have drawn little law enforcement attention, but this was the first mob killing in Chicago in four years—one of the quietest periods in Outfit history. During that time the FBI had basked in the credit for tamping the organization’s profile, a development that had more to do with the Outfit’s self-policing than any law enforcement effort. For the Bureau, it was both an affront and a golden opportunity, a chance to take on its favorite Chicago nemesis.
Art heard about the hit from Jarrett’s own son, Ron junior, who he frequently played basketball with at McGuane Park. He immediately knew that it was bad news. Since Tim Frandelo was a Jarrett associate, it meant that the FBI would probably haul him in for questioning or at the very least put him under surveillance. Frandelo’s associates, which included Art, would be looked at as well. Art had no intention of being around when that happened. “Within two days after the Jarrett hit, the FBI was all over Bridgeport,” he remembers. “You could actually see it. There were undercover vehicles everywhere and people were getting hauled in. Jarrett had so many enemies. It was a shitstorm. There was no way I was staying in that city.”
It was time to print and run.
FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS in bill components, a box of equipment, a silver Mustang convertible, each other, and the clothes on their backs—that’s all Art and Natalie had when they left Chicago (at the time Natalie’s son was staying with his grandmother in Texas). No bags, no toothbrushes or maps, no reservations. They didn’t bother packing anything. Their plan now was to buy everything they needed as they went—and make money doing it.
Their first stop was a sporting goods store, where they dropped about eight hundred dollars in fakes for camping supplies that included a high-end tent large enough to fit a portable table, a double sleeping bag, mats, toiletries, backpacks, cooking supplies, beach towels, hiking boots, canteens, flashlights, a first-aid kit, disposable cameras, suntan lotion, plastic containers, mosquito repellant. Within four hours of leaving, they had enough equipment to survive comfortably off the map for weeks.
Their plan was to keep moving west and see as much country as possible while changing up the counterfeit for real money. For the first time in his life as a counterfeiter, Art intended to go on a balls-out, hedonistic spending spree with his own product. He was going to ignore da Vinci’s advice about not spending his own money and “really see what it could do” out in the world. Pete’s advice was no longer applicable, he reasoned, because Pete had never possessed a bill like his.
Neither Art nor Natalie knew precisely how they were going to convert fifty thousand dollars counterfeit into genuine, but math led the way. Buy an item worth twenty dollars or less with a fake hundred-dollar bill and you get at least eighty dollars back in genuine currency. The faster you can drop the Benjamins, the more money you make. To spend money