The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [79]
“I didn’t see anything in there at first,” remembers O’Flaherty. “I was about to close the door again, but something made me run my hand over the top shelf. That’s when I found this fat pile of cash, sixty grand.” O’Flaherty assumed the money was real. But he took a closer look, holding the bill right up to his face. It was then that he noticed that the paper contained no red and blue silk fibers.
Art had easily simulated the fibers many times in the past, usually by taking hair from his own body, then burning a plate just for them, but he found that nobody really looked for them anymore after the ’96 note was released. He had spent so much time perfecting the new security features that, on that particular batch, he had neglected to include the oldest one in the book.
O’Flaherty turned to Art and smiled.
AS AMY REMEMBERS IT, Art stayed “real calm” when O’Flaherty discovered the counterfeit. “He immediately told the officers that I had nothing do with it. He said that everything was his fault and that they should let me go.” But the CPD was just getting started. After allowing Amy to dress, they cuffed and escorted both of them down to the hotel’s garage, where the cops searched the rental car. Finding nothing of interest, the officers then hauled them to the Eighteenth District precinct house. It was there, at about eight that morning, that Art finally came face-to-face with the Secret Service.
There were two agents, a man and a woman, both in their mid-thirties and well dressed. The Service had been studying Art’s bills for months, unaware as to who was creating them or where they’d been made. By the time agents showed up at malls or banks to inspect the bills, Art was always long gone, leaving no trace of his identity. To the agents, his only identity was his bills, and as soon as they inspected the notes that O’Flaherty had recovered, they became convinced that Art was the one they’d been after.
The male agent was pissed. Because the Secret Service had reason to believe that Art had been spreading bills across state lines, he’d been called in from D.C. on a red-eye. He was bleary-eyed and irritable, as tired as his suspects.
“I just left President Bush,” he groaned to Art at one point, “so please, don’t fuck with me.”
Anytime the Service gets its hands on a counterfeiter, the first priority is almost always obtaining more evidence. They go after equipment, because seizing it is the best and often the only way to prove that a suspect is the creator of the notes as opposed to just a passer. When there are two or more suspects, standard interrogation procedure is to separate them and question the weakest one first.
That meant Amy. Young, frightened, and vulnerable, she was most likely to crack and provide them with information they could leverage against Art. While Art waited in a holding cell, they had at her. After confirming her identity—which also established a baseline for her truthful responses—the pair immediately demanded to know where the money had been made and who else had made it with her.
Amy was, of course, completely innocent. She knew nothing and told the agents as much. That’s when the threats began. Interestingly, it was the female agent who played bad cop. “It was only the woman who was mean to me,” she says, “the guy from D.C. was nice. But I hated her. She told me that I’d never see my mother or sister again. She said they’d arrest my mother, although that was ridiculous because my mother had nothing to with anything.”
The agents brought up names and places: St. Louis, New Orleans, Minneapolis. They knew she had been involved. They even brandished a folder. Most of it was probably filled with blank paper, but it looked intimidating as they declared they knew everything, so there was no use holding back. Crying now, Amy reiterated that she knew nothing. This went on for eight hours, as the agents moved back and forth between her and Art. Other than a bag of M&M’s, neither of them would be given any food or sleep.
“They absolutely tortured that girl,