The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [77]
The JCF arrested the entire bachelor crew. During a night of interrogation, Reid—aided by the otherwise high quality of Art’s money—was able to convince the cops that they’d had no idea that the money was fake. The JCF released them the next morning, but the saga wasn’t over. Waiting outside the police station was the strippers’ pimp, along with two muscular guys. They shadowed Reid back to his hotel room, knocked on the door, then bum-rushed their way in when he opened it. They wanted real money. In tears and lying to save his hide for the second time in twenty-four hours, Reid begged them to believe that he had had no idea, then ended up giving them whatever real cash he had left. “It ruined my vacation,” he told Art. “I’ll never spend that shit again.”
The friends had a good laugh over the Jamaican episode, and Art learned that using his bills in the tropics could be just as dangerous as assembling them there. In the end, that seemed like a small limitation given that he could take steps to prevent it. Unfortunately, the next time someone found a flaw in his bills the results would prove far more costly.
10
HOUSE OF BLUES
The counterfeiter, the educated in his calling, and prince among the rascals of his clique, still finds his trade full of danger and difficulty.
—The Merchants’ Magazine and Commercial Review, 1858
There’s a sequence toward the end of Martin Scorsese’s 1990 mob masterpiece, Goodfellas, in which the coked-up protagonist, Henry Hill, spends a long, exasperating day dashing around town performing errands for the mob while simultaneously arranging a feast for his family. In a wonderful rendering of the banalities of criminal life, Hill fights to stay in control as meat-balls and marinara mix with cocaine and gun running. Meanwhile a police helicopter shadows ominously above the whole time. Just when Hill reaches the point of heroic exhaustion the trap is sprung; his street erupts in floodlights, cops come charging up his driveway, and out come the handcuffs. His babysitter/drug courier has made the mistake of using his home phone to arrange a deal. No matter how hard a criminal tries, there’s always a wild card he cannot control, and that is usually what brings him down.
On February 19, 2001, Art woke up in Marshall with a similarly hectic day in front of him. He and Natalie had been up most of the previous night finishing a $160,000 print run, most of which he had to deliver to Dmitri in Chicago that night. At the same time, Natalie’s mother and little sister were flying in from Texas that afternoon to visit for a few days and pick up Alex, who’d been selected to appear in a Sears children’s catalog that was being shot in Dallas. So Art had to remove all traces of counterfeit supplies and chemicals from the house, drive 100 miles to Indianapolis to meet the family at the airport, rent them a car, then race another 180 miles back to Chicago and rendezvous with the Russians.
Everything went off without a hitch until they met Natalie’s mother and sister in Indy. When Art explained that he had to run off to Chicago, Natalie’s little sister, Amy, begged him to come along. Art didn’t object. At eighteen, Amy had never seen the city, and she was also vaguely aware of Art’s “business.” The fact that she was a cute, precocious brunette like her sister didn’t hurt either. Before leaving Marshall, Art had even grabbed an extra sixty thousand dollars to hit the town with after his deal. Having Amy along for company on the long ride and then showing her the city was what he needed to take the edge off the day.
After he’d rented Natalie and her mother a car, Art and Amy split for Chicago, arriving about two and half hours later. He arranged for the deal with Dmitri to go down at the House of Blues Hotel, a modern, tourist-oriented hot spot adjacent to one of the city’s premier music venues on Dearborn Street. With a plush lounge and hip bar, it was the kind of place that a small-town