The Art of Making Money

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

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First printing, June 2009

Copyright © 2009 by Jason Kersten

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Kersten, Jason.
The art of making money: the story of a master counterfeiter / Jason Kersten.
p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-06016-2

 

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FOR KRIS AND WILLIE

To tell this story, I relied on interviews with primary sources whenever possible, reconstructing events and dialogue according to their memories. In instances where their recollections conflicted, I generally favored my protagonist’s version of events unless other source material was convincing enough to override him. I also drew on numerous legal documents such as court transcripts, law enforcement reports and warrants, prison records, and wiretap transcripts. Historical and contextual material was obtained from books, newspaper articles, and interviews.

Some of the people quoted in this book consented to interviews on the provision that their names be changed. In other cases, I changed the names of minor characters myself or used established nicknames because contacting them was either impossible or impractical.

Other than a single interview provided to me at an early date, the United States Secret Service chose to remain secret, declining numerous requests for interviews. Quotes and scenes involving Secret Service agents appearing in this book are therefore reconstructed from official reports and interviews with criminal suspects.

“Modern man, living in a mutually dependent, collective society, cannot become a counterfeiter. A counterfeiter should be possessed of the qualities found only in a Nietzschean hero.”

—LYNN GLASER, FROM
Counterfeiting in America: The History of
an American Way to Wealth

It took Art Williams four beers to summon the will to reveal his formula. We had been sitting in his living room, a few blocks from Chicago’s Midway Airport, listening to jets boom by for the better part of two hours. I was there interviewing him for an article for
Rolling Stone
magazine, and he had promised to tell me the secrets that made him one of the most successful counterfeiters of the last quarter century. Understandably, he was reluctant.

“I’ve never shown this to anybody before,” he finally said with a contempt indicating that I could not possibly appreciate or deserve what I was about to see. “You realize how many people have offered me money for this?”

Some men—he wouldn’t say who—once promised him three hundred thousand dollars for his moneymaking recipe. They pledged to set him up in a villa anywhere in the world with a personal guard. It was easy to picture Art sitting on a patio above the Caspian Sea surrounded by bucket-necked Russian gangsters. With his high, planed cheeks, blue eyes, and pumped-up physique, he’d fit right in with an Eastern European operation. It was also easy to think that he was full of shit, because Art Williams was a born hustler, as swaggering as any ever found on the streets of Chicago. Later I’d learn that the offer had been real, and that he’d declined because he wasn’t sure if his guards would treat him as prince or prisoner.

“My friends are going to hate me for telling you,” he sighed. “They’ll probably hate you for knowing.” Then he shuffled off toward the kitchen. Hushed tones of an argument between him and his girlfriend, Natalie, echoed down the hall. It was clear enough that she didn’t want him to show me. When I heard a terse “Fine, whatever,” I was pretty sure that Natalie would hate me too. Then came the rumblings of doors and cabinets opening and the crackling of paper.

A moment later, Williams returned with some scissors, three plastic spray bottles, and a sheet of what looked like the kind of cheap, gray-white construction paper a kindergarten teacher might hand out at craft time.

“Feel how thin it is,” he whispered, handing me a sheet. Rubbing the paper between my thumb and forefinger, I was amazed at how authentic it already felt. “That’s nothing,” he said. “Just wait.”

He cut two dollar-sized rectangles from the sheet, apologizing that they were not precise cuts (they were almost exactly the right size). Then he sprayed both cuts with adhesive, his wrist sweeping fluidly as he pressed the applicator. “You have to do it in one motion or you won’t get the right distribution,” he explained. After he deftly pressed the sheets together and used the spine of a book to push out air bubbles, we waited for it to dry. “I always waited at least half an hour,” he said. “If you push it, the sheets could come apart later on. Trust me, you don’t want that to happen.”

Another beer later, he sprayed both sides of the glued sheets with two shots of hardening solution, then a satin finish. “Now this,” he said before applying the final coat, “is the
shit
.”

Five minutes later I held a twenty-dollar bill in one hand and Art Williams’s paper in the other, eyes closed. I couldn’t tell them apart. When I opened my eyes, I realized that Williams’s paper not only felt right, but it also bore the distinctive dull sheen.

“Now snap it,” he commanded. I jerked both ends of the rectangle and the sound was unmistakable; it was the lovely, husky crack made by the flying whip that drives the world economy—the sound of the Almighty Dollar.

“Now imagine this with the watermark, the security thread, the reflective ink—everything,” he said. “That’s what was great about my money. It passed every test.”

 

 

 

ART WILLIAMS WAS THIRTY-TWO YEARS OLD and already a dying breed. In an era when the vast majority of counterfeiters are teenagers who use ink-jet printers to run off twenty-dollar bills that can’t even fool a McDonald’s cashier, he was a craftsman schooled in a centuries-old practice by a master who traced his criminal lineage back to the Old World. He was also an innovator who combined time-tested techniques with digital technology to re-create what was then the most secure U.S. banknote ever made.

“He put a lot of work into his bills,” Lorelei Pagano, a counterfeit specialist at the Secret Service’s main lab in Washington, D.C., would later tell me. “He’s no button pusher. I’d rate his bills as an eight or a nine.” A perfect 10 is a bill called the “Supernote” that many believe is made by the North Korean government on a ten-million-dollar intaglio press similar to the ones used by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.

Art would eventually reveal to me his entire process of making money, and I’d be awed by the obsession, dedication, and exactitude it had taken him to achieve it. But as extraordinary as his formula was, it defined his story about as much as a mathematical equation can capture the mystery and terror of the universe. Far more interesting were the forces that created and compromised
him
, and those could not be easily explored in a magazine article. Art had too many secrets to share, many of which he had hidden even from himself. He’d spent half his life pursuing verisimilitude in an idealistic attempt to recapture something very real that he believed had been lost, or stolen, or unfairly denied. What enthralled and terrified me the most was that his pursuit had very little to do with money, and the roots of his downfall lay in something impossible to replicate or put a value on. As he would say himself, “I never got caught because of money. I got caught because of love.”

BOOK ONE

1

SENIOR

“Yo’ ole father doan’ know yit what he’s a-gwyne to do. Sometimes he spec he’ll go ’way, en den ag’in he spec he’ll stay. De bes’ ways is to res’ easy and let de ole man take his own way. Dey’s two angels hoverin’ roun’ ’bout him. One uv ’em is white en shiny, en t’other one one is black. De white one gits him to go right a little while, den de black one sail in en bust it all up. A body can’t tell yit which one gwyne to fetch him at de las’. But you is all right. You gwyne to have considable trouble in yo’ life, en considable joy.”

—WHAT THE HAIRBALL TOLD JIM ABOUT
HUCK’S FUTURE, AFTER THEY PAID IT WITH A
COUNTERFEIT QUARTER.
The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn
, MARK TWAIN

 

 

 

 

Stateville Correctional Center in Joliet, Illinois, sits back from the Des Plaines River on a low rise, its thirty-three-foot-high walls and ten guard towers a vision of medieval austerity amid cornfields and plains. Built in the 1920s and inspired by designs from the English social philosopher Jeremy Bentham, the prison’s centerpiece is a “panopticon”—a four-story circular cell block with a guard tower in the dead center. Bentham theorized that the layout would project a “sentiment of invisible omniscience” to the inmates, who would never know when the guards in the tower were watching. For guards and inmates alike it’s a world out of Dante: a giant, clamorous cylinder hiving some of Illinois’s most violent and deranged criminals.

It was in Stateville’s visiting room, in the winter of 1978, that Art Williams Jr. had his earliest memory of his father. He was six years old, sitting on his daddy’s lap, happy in the knowledge that he would soon be getting out.

By Joliet standards, Arthur Williams Sr.—inmate number C-70147—was a small fish. He’d been convicted two years earlier for robbing a truck in DuPage County. While the crime was nonviolent, it was part of a long line of similar offenses that stretched back to his teens, and so Judge William V. Hopf had rewarded Williams’s felonious consistency with a stay in what one former warden called “the world’s toughest prison.”

That winter, there were some signs that Williams was finally getting the message. He’d been on good behavior throughout his term, and he was looking forward to resuming a normal life with his wife and three kids. Not that Williams had many positive reference points when it came to family life.