The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [81]
Natalie was devastated when Amy told to her the story about the arrest. She was furious at Art, not because she thought anything would’ve happened with her sister, but because he hadn’t been more careful about security. They were now on the Secret Service’s radar, which meant that she herself would be under investigation. She had no doubt that the Service would obtain a search warrant for the house in Marshall, which still contained a computer they had used to work on scans. To top it off, she’d learned a few months earlier that she was pregnant, and she was now five and half months and showing. “Yeah, I was worried for Art,” she says, “but I also had a baby to worry about. I was afraid he’d wind up in jail and I’d have to raise the baby alone. I was a wreck.”
Luckily, Art’s phone call had given her a head start. Within minutes of hanging up, she was stuffing a computer tower into plastic garbage bags, which she then hauled to a dumpster in downtown Marshall. Despite her rush, the Service didn’t show up until the following afternoon. The women were away in Indianapolis dropping off the rental car at the time, but when they came home they saw the warrant taped to the front door. Despite the fact that Natalie had locked all the windows and dead-bolted the doors, they had entered without a scratch and searched the entire premises. The only thing they took was a camera containing undeveloped family photos. They never gave it back.
ART WAS ARRAIGNED A DAY AFTER HIS ARREST and charged with one count of counterfeiting United States currency, a crime that carried a maximum sentence of twenty years. But even as he stood haggard before the judge and heard the charge, agents and lab technicians were poring through bill databases and pulling up potential matches for other bills that might be linked to him. They turned up more almost immediately.
Six weeks earlier, Art, Natalie, and a couple of friends had taken a spending trip into Oklahoma, knowing that the post-Christmas bargain crowds would make a great slamming environment. Along Interstate 44, they had absolutely papered the Central Mall, near the town of Lawton. When the Secret Service later sent a couple agents from the Oklahoma City field office to investigate, they found that a whopping 80 percent of the merchants—or about sixty stores—had received counterfeit bills. In the report, they noted that the bills “differed in serial number, but possessed many of the same characteristics [as the Chicago notes] to include: mismatch Federal Reserve Bank number and letter, unique two-part note defeating the CFT detection pen, watermark and security fiber representations, unusual paper.”
Proving that Art had made the Lawton bills would be difficult without his equipment, but if they could establish that just one of those bills was his, then there was a good chance he could also face at least one count of “uttering” counterfeit—an Old World term for passing. Uttering carried a fifteen-year maximum, but that wasn’t the end of the bad news for Art. If they could trace any of the bills to another criminal he’d sold them to, then he’d also be facing a “dealing” charge, which also carried a twenty-year max.
The federal government enjoys a ninety-five percent conviction rate when it comes to criminal cases. Its law-enforcement officers enjoy the best training, equipment, and funding in the world, and their investigations produce evidence for not just a single prosecutor, but typically a team of a highly talented attorneys who often find themselves facing a lone defense lawyer or, in the case of multiple defendants, a loose and conflicted confederacy. The Department of Justice is also infamously selective; it likes to choose opponents it knows it can beat. In cases involving the Secret Service, the conviction rate is 98.8 percent, the highest rate of any law enforcement agency in the land.
Needless to say, Art needed a very good lawyer, which came down to money. Yet despite the millions in fake cash he had made and sold over the years, he had