The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [70]
According to the most recent statistics from the International Council of Shopping Centers, there are 48,695 malls in the United States. They range from quaint, open-air strips to megatherial indoor chambers replete with roller coasters, aquariums, and petting zoos. Collectively, they bring in about $2.12 trillion a year, accounting for 75 percent of all “nonautomotive” retail sales in America. During any given month, two-thirds of all Americans will visit a center, where they’ll spend an average of $86.30 per visit. Malls even outnumber towns in America. The true cathedrals of capitalism, many of them rank among the largest indoor structures in the world. They employ more than twelve million people, and are so woven into the social fabric of suburbia that they are destinations in themselves and monuments of collective memory. As kids we wander their climate-controlled chambers looking for action and each other. As teenagers they become proto-mating grounds where girls test their first lipsticks while boys lurk hoping to test them too. We return to them as adults, working our first jobs in them and sneering at the kids we once were. We meet and sometimes even get married in them. We may detest their superficiality, but we never leave them.
Art and Natalie decided to rob them. America’s malls were about to become gigantic, cash-spitting ATMs that would fuel a lifestyle that most of us only dream about.
PASSING MONEY INVOLVES ALMOST AS MUCH ART as making it. When Art and Natalie intended to hit a mall, he’d spend an hour leisurely driving through the closest town, noting the location of the police station, highway on-ramps, and general layout. If someone at the mall reported a bad bill, he wanted to know how long units might take to respond.
After surveying the town he’d move on to the mall itself, first prowling the entire parking lot for police cars. If he saw any, he would either wait for them to leave or abandon the operation altogether because “there was always another mall up the highway.” Mall security guards were unavoidable, so in their case he at least made sure to register their vehicles and faces, get a feel for how they liked to conduct their rounds.
Most large malls, especially the older ones, are anchored by marquee department stores like Sears, Macy’s, or JCPenney’s. Art would usually park as close to them as possible, enter through their outer doors, then access the rest of the mall via their interior entrances. “We would never spend in that store, ever,” he notes, “that was our getaway plan. And usually it would be through the department store door, to the car, then an exit to the highway in one fucking sweet move.”
Once inside the mall, Natalie shopped while Art waited outside the stores and did his best to look like just another bored, dutiful husband beleaguered by an acquisitive wife. He’d keep an eye out for security guards and watch Natalie closely as she “did her thing.” Natalie was a pro. She wore wigs and often sunglasses to avoid being identified on security-camera tapes, her favorite of the former being a black bob, like Uma Thurman’s in Pulp Fiction. She’d pick an item under twenty dollars, browse for a few minutes more, then head for the cashier. If there was more than one register, she’d pick the attendant least likely to scrutinize the bill: “An old woman with thick glasses, or a young kid who looks like he doesn’t give a shit about anything—those are the best people to drop money on. The worst is a woman in her mid-thirties who looks conscientious about her job.”
Demographics also had a lot to do with how closely people inspected their bills. In populated, affluent states like California and New York, where counterfeits abounded, almost everyone would mark the bills with the pen or look for the watermark; in the Midwest and South, Art and Natalie might go all day without seeing the pen. Not that it mattered that much where