The Art of Making Money - Jason Kersten [86]
“How are your brother and sister?” Senior asked at one point.
“They’re good,” Art lied. “They miss you.”
“I miss you too,” Senior said. Then he told Art exactly what he wanted to hear. “Why don’t you come on up here? Why don’t you just come as soon as possible?”
“Right now?”
“Right now.”
Art didn’t even stop to think before responding.
“You know what? I am,” he said. “I’m coming as soon as I can.” He explained that there were a few things he had to take care of first, but that a visit within the next few months was a given. They made plans to talk to each other again in a few days. Art hung up and raced back to Natalie to tell her the news that they would soon be heading north.
“He didn’t even ask me if I wanted to go to Alaska,” she says. “He just told me that that was what we were doing. He was excited; he needed to see his dad. I thought it was a good thing for him.”
ART HAD NEGLECTED TO MENTION to Senior that he happened to be on the run from the United States Secret Service for perfecting a counterfeit of the 1996 New Note. Not the kind of detail you give your long-lost father if you want to rekindle a relationship, or even just get an opportunity to confront him face to face. Art wanted to do both, so when he touched base with his dad over the next few days he kept the calls short, light, and slim on specifics. Had Senior known his own son better, he might have interpreted that forced brevity as a sign that Junior was making serious criminal moves.
The day after Art contacted his dad, he and Natalie drove back to Chicago and started ramping up for the big print run. Sandy gave Art the five thousand dollars, and he bought a scanner, an Apple laptop, and a printer. He already had many of the smaller items—the glues, carrier sheets, hardening sprays, and hand tools—stashed away with the Ryobi at the warehouse. The run, Art decided, would take place in two locations; rather than breaking down the Ryobi and moving it from Giorgi’s warehouse, Art would use it in situ to color his paper and print security strips and seals. He’d also take care of the faces and the color shifts. He would then take everything to Natalie, who’d have her own little shop set up in Sandy’s back bedroom. She’d ink-jet the serial numbers and the “100” over the treasury seal, then they’d assemble the bills with the help of Big Bill, who Art hired on as a much-needed extra hand.
As the deal grew closer, in typical fashion, Art latched on to an even more grandiose scheme—one that could potentially turn the five hundred thousand he was making for Beto into millions. When Sandy had told him that his bills were destined to be stuffed into the walls of an RV full of cocaine money, the old drug pirate in Art began salivating. “Oh, God, I wanted to hit that thing,” he laughs. “Can you imagine? You’re talking five dealers depositing six or seven hundred thousand each. That’s at least three million dollars inside that thing. Pose as a cop, pull it over on the road at night . . . that would set me up for life!”
Art had no way of locating the RV without tipping Sandy off to his plan, a risk that would not only ruin their relationship but probably also get him killed, so he visited his friend Mark Palazo, an electronics expert up in Des Plaines. He wanted to know if there was a GPS device small enough to fit inside a bill. “He told me there was no way he could do it,” says Art, “and said that I was the craziest person he’d ever met.”
Early retirement plans dashed, Art raced back to Chicago to begin work on the largest batch of counterfeit currency he’d ever attempted. By now, he had a commanding knowledge of a once tortur ous process, and production ran smoothly. Every morning, he and Big Bill ferried cardboard boxes of prepped faces and strips