The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [76]
By the time they reached St. Louis, Art had about four hundred dollars in singles alone, so he took the whole crew out to a strip club. He waved the brick-thick wad in front of a host, then gestured to his friends. “I want the best-looking girls in this place to be entertaining these guys at our table until this pile runs out,” he said, then handed the host a fifty. The host happily complied.
ART ESTIMATES he printed four to five million dollars of his New Note within the first two years of its creation, and his money only got better over time. Small changes he made in printers, inks, and processes constantly added verisimilitude and allowed him to speed up production, so much so that he came to view his earliest versions of the Note with almost as much disdain as he did the pre-’96 money.
Yet despite how good the bills looked, they had an Achilles’ heel. Art first noticed it at a mall in New Orleans while on a spending trip with Natalie. He was waiting outside a store, watching her do her thing at the counter, when suddenly the cashier—a young woman—exited the store and entered the shop next door. Art didn’t think much of it, since cashiers commonly trot over to the neighbors for change. He had seen it a dozen times, but this time things played out differently.
When the cashier entered the adjacent store and approached the register, the male clerk didn’t reach for the till. Instead he held up the bill and began picking at it. Art watched, horrified, as the clerk completely peeled away both sides of the bill as if it were a piece of single-wrapped American cheese. “Their eyes just popped, and the woman’s mouth literally dropped open. And as soon as I saw that I ran into the first store and got Natalie. I told her it was time to get the fuck out of there and we did, fast.”
It was the humidity. Art had assembled the bills in one of the nation’s most tropical climates, and the glue had never quite dried. When he went back and inspected the rest of the stash, he found loose corners on many of them. He tried blow-drying them and taping them up to air conditioners and in front of fans. Nothing worked—the southern air was just too moist. He had to stop spending in Louisiana, and from then on he made a rule to never assemble his bills in a humid climate.
One of Art’s friends from Chicago, Eric Reid, would learn that even bills made in dry conditions could also be susceptible to climatic influence. Reid was one of Art’s square friends, a regular guy with no criminal history who worked as a personal trainer. He knew that Art counterfeited, but had never once asked for bills or requested to go on a spending trip. Under the right circumstances, however, there were very few people Art knew who were never tempted to spend a note or two, either for the spontaneous thrill of it or because they felt certain they wouldn’t be caught. So he wasn’t surprised when Reid nervously approached him one day and asked if he could buy a few thousand dollars. He and some buddies had long been planning a trip to Jamaica. Given that it was a foreign country, he figured that no one would be wise. “Eric was such a nice guy, I told him I wouldn’t sell them to him, but that I’d throw him enough to have fun with. This was when it was fall. It wasn’t hot or humid. I was able to do my thing and they came out beautiful. So I gave him four thousand dollars. I figured that would be plenty for him to go down there and have fun with, right? He comes back ten days later, and he looks all fucked up. He has a beard, eyes all blood-shot, he’s looking stressed.”
Reid explained that everything had gone well at first. Reid had no problem passing the money and was having such a good time with it in Jamaica that he gave some to his pals. Out of what he thought was discretion, he didn’t tell them it was fake. Toward the end of their trip, the group went wild at a strip club in Montego Bay, ordering an expensive dinner followed by off-the-books backroom liaisons with some of the girls. When it came time to pay the