The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [84]
He started thinking about establishing a new printing hole, someplace even farther off the map than Marshall, where they’d never find him. Although Natalie had been forced to destroy the computers and printers, the Ryobi press and process camera were still safe in Chicago, and he had plenty of paper stock in Dallas. If he could find a spot, then pull off a large, swift sale, he’d be able to disappear—this time for good. “I still wanted to find a place and finally do it like da Vinci had taught me. Keep it small and contained, not occupy too much space, and just live well. I had wanted to do that in Marshall. Now I felt like I had learned my lesson and this was it. I wanted to get out, get a place where I could breathe some.” It was classic criminal logic: He wanted to do a big sale so he could get back to doing small ones.
Finding a new house in rural Illinois was out of the question; not only was it too hot as far as law enforcement was concerned, but the House of Blues bust had given Natalie her fill of the state. “I told Art that I was never going back there,” she says. “If he wanted to be with me, then we’d have to live somewhere closer to Texas.” Using the Internet and want ads, they started shopping for real estate within a few hours of Dallas. Since the humidity was worse to the south, they concentrated their search north so as to avoid the sticky problem of having bills peel apart. Eventually they found a listing for about a hundred acres of land in northwest Arkansas east of Fay etteville. Early one morning when the street looked clear of surveillance, they slipped out of town to take a look.
Both of them immediately fell in love with the plot. It included a small, one-story house, along with a twelve-acre lake, several streams, and it was thick with forest. The seller was an elderly woman who’d grown up on the land, and she was asking for $500 per acre. When Art asked her if she was willing to drop her price to $350 per acre in exchange for fifty percent cash up front, no questions asked, her generational preference for hard currency perked right up. “That would be wonderful,” she told him.
To get real cash to pay for the land, all Art needed was a client willing to buy his biggest batch of counterfeit ever, and he already had a buyer in mind. As one of his oldest clients and friends, Sandy Sandoval not only trusted him completely, but for the last year he’d been begging Art for larger batches of money, five hundred thousand dollars and up. Art had always declined on the grounds that it was too dangerous. For this one-time deal, however, he was willing to make an exception if Sandy told him precisely how the money would be used.
Sandy jumped on the opportunity. “Okay, the money isn’t for me,” he told Art over a pay phone, “I’m just a middleman. The guy who wants it is my supplier, Beto.” Beto, Sandy went on to explain, was even deeper into the cocaine business than he—one of five Mexican Mafia-affiliated suppliers in the Chicago area. Every month, each of the suppliers deposited anywhere from seven hundred thousand to a million dollars into the walls of an RV, which was basically a traveling bank. From Chicago, the RV went on to California, then Tijuana, Mexico, where the money was laundered and exchanged for more cocaine. “Beto wants to pad his shipment,” he explained to Art, meaning that the supplier would mix the counterfeit into his deposit and pocket the savings.
Art liked the idea. Not only would the money be leaving the country, but he soon confirmed that Beto had been the one that Sandy had been selling to all along. In other words, the counterfeit-for-coke scam had a proven track record. After a few negotiating sessions over a pay phone, Art arranged to print the most exorbitant sum he had ever attempted: $750,000 at thirty cents on the dollar.