The Art of Making Money (10 page)

He wheeled around and started to run, dropping his chin down close to his chest. He got about twenty yards away, then felt a sharp push on his left hip and tumbled to the cement. He’d been hit by a .25 caliber round. The shooters screamed with glee and chased after him, but he got up again and kept running. As he did so, another bullet from a 9mm struck him on his right thigh. Flying on adrenaline and knowing that he had no choice but to keep running, he rounded the corner onto Thirty-first Street, where a
Chicago Tribune
deliveryman was unloading stacks of the early edition. He collapsed next to the van and asked him to call an ambulance.

 

 

 

LUCKILY ART’S GUNSHOT WOUNDS were superficial; paramedics took him to Mercy Hospital, where surgeons removed the bullets and released him in less than twenty-four hours. The shooters were never caught, and in a macabre way, getting shot was a good thing for Art; it crystallized the literal dead end he’d been heading down since arriving at the Bridgeport Homes. Lying incapacitated in his bedroom, he knew that the moment he recovered he would be right back where he had been. He had hated the Homes from day one, then the Homes had become home, and for the better part of a decade they had defined him and then nearly killed him.

“After I got shot, I thought a lot about the things da Vinci had told me about getting out of the projects,” Art says. “I knew that I’d die if I stayed there. I didn’t know how I’d get out, but I decided that I would.”

It turned out the decision would be made for him. About three weeks after he returned from the hospital, he awoke one morning to the sound of his mother in his doorway.

“Arty! Get up! There’s a fire downstairs. We gotta get out of the house. Hurry up!” she shouted until she saw Art’s head pop up from his pillow, then whisked back downstairs.

He groaned plaintively, naturally thinking that his mom was experiencing another delusional episode. But a few seconds later, he smelled smoke. He lifted his head off the pillow, saw a black cloud pouring through the heater vent, and ran to the doorway. When he looked downstairs he saw the living room half engulfed in flames. Malinda and Wensdae were nowhere to be seen.

Art snatched up some jeans and a T-shirt and ran out to the parking lot, where his mother and sister were waiting. The three of them watched as the Chicago Fire Department moved in and tried to save the home they loathed. The firefighters were able to contain the flames to just their apartment, but it was a total loss. Fire investigators later attributed the blaze to a cigarette butt that Malinda had left burning on the living-room sofa. Interviews with the neighbors and records checks confirmed that Malinda was certifiably crazy and a heavy smoker. Case closed.

Art wasn’t so sure. “I asked her about it later and she was cagey,” he says. “I agree with the fire department in that she started the fire, but I don’t think it was an accident. I think she did it because it would be the only thing that would force us to find a way out of the projects. It was right after I got shot. I don’t think she wanted to live there anymore. I think something snapped in her mind, and I think she fucking lit the house up. I mean, my mom was a
smoker
. She may have been crazy, but she knew how to smoke.”

And that was how they finally got out of the Bridgeport Homes. Accident or not, Malinda had initiated one the most desperate jail-break gambits in the book: She’d lit her own cell on fire.

TWO DAYS AFTER THE FIRE, one off the local churches found the Williamses a new apartment ten blocks away at Thirty-first and Wells. Although just a short hop from the projects, it was another planet. There were brick town houses with little iron gates in front, well-lit streets, trees—and none of the gunshots and gangbangers that had made the simple act of coming and going from home akin to navigating a siege zone. Rent was a few hundred dollars more than it had been at the Homes, but Art had saved enough to tide them over for the first few months. Once the family moved in, the collective mood soared as they realized that they had spent the last seven years stuck inside a trap from which they were now free. Art wished his mother had set the fire the day they moved in.

The Williamses spent a year in the Wells Street apartment, which became a base that each of them would use to embark on their next stages of life. Wendz was the first to move on; she took a job at Ed’s Snack Shop, and there she met and fell in love with Dr. Samos—a dentist from Greek Town who was fifteen years her senior. He not only treated her well and fixed her teeth for free, but he also paid for her to attend both junior college and modeling school. Wendz eventually moved in with him, and a year later Art would attend her first fashion show at a club on State Street. He had always thought of his little sister as a rag doll, but the young woman he saw striding down the catwalk was stunningly beautiful. “She was wearing a white outfit. Slacks with a white shirt, and a white coat. And I didn’t even realize it was her at first. I thought, ‘Wow, that’s my sister. ’ A whole crowd of cameras went off,
click click click
. I remember her looking at me when she came to the end of the runway. She turned and the jacket dropped to her arm; it was beautiful. I remember how proud I was of her, because she just
had it
.”

Once Wensdae moved out, Malinda quickly followed suit. Sick of the city altogether, she headed back to Texas, leaving Art enough room to bring in Karen and the baby. For the first time since becoming a father, he finally had his own family under one roof, but he soon learned that escaping the Bridgeport Homes would require more than geographical separation.

The Thirty-second Street Satan’s Disciples were not enthusiastic about Art’s move. Now twenty years old, he had risen to become one of the top lieutenants and moneymakers. At first he continued to visit his old friends at the Homes and show up for the Friday meetings, but after Karen and the baby moved in he decided it was time to end his involvement in the gang. Knowing that the gang’s leader, Marty Arbide, wouldn’t be too happy about one of his top lieutenants jumping ship, Art chose a passive exit strategy: He simply stopped attending meetings in the hopes that everyone would understand his new situation. But a few days after he failed to show up, he ran into two SDs on the street and realized it wasn’t going to be so easy. They immediately asked him where he’d been.

“You know I love you guys, but I’m not about this anymore,” he told them. “I have to look after my family now.”

“You gotta show up, Arty,” one of them replied. “Even if you’re not out there anymore, you gotta pay your respects.”

“Hey, I respect you, but I don’t know what else to tell you, man. I’m steppin’, I gotta move on,” he said, and told them he had somewhere he needed to be.

After Art failed to attend the next meeting, he started missing the camaraderie of the Disciples, and decided to drop by the playground the following Friday for a visit. Marty was there, along with his three biggest attack dogs: Danny, Porky, and Redhead Jerry. When Art greeted them with his normal enthusiasm, he realized right away that he had made a mistake. “They kind of rolled up on me, gave me the silent treatment,” Art says, “and I knew something was going down.”

“You have a violation coming for not attending the last two meetings,” Marty flatly told Art. In Disciple-speak, that meant that he was now expected to submit to three gang members as they beat him for thirty-two seconds—because they were from Thirty-second Street. If he resisted, more seconds would be added according to Marty’s whim.

“I’m not taking it,” Art told him. “If you start swinging, we’re fighting.”

“That’s the way it is, then,” Marty said, and before Art knew it Marty and his lieutenants were charging him.

Art was standing with his back to a brick wall, and the first to reach him was Danny, who opened up with a wide, wild right. Seeing it coming, Art sidestepped left and ducked. An instant later, he heard a crack followed by a scream, and was amazed to see one of Danny’s wrist bones sticking out from the skin of his right hand; he had struck the brick wall instead of Art. That turned out to be the only heroic moment for Art, because after that the other three boys moved in and beat him senseless. As he lay on the ground, knotted up and bleeding, they reminded him to be at the next week’s meeting.

The indignation of the beating only solidified Art’s determination to get out of the gang, and sure enough, he refused to turn up the following Friday. He didn’t hear anything from the Disciples for three weeks, and then one evening he heard a knock on his front door. Thinking it was probably one of Karen’s friends, he opened it, and the next thing he knew Marty and two Disciples bum-rushed their way into his apartment and began beating him in his own hallway.

Art covered his face and scrambled to get a footing, but in moments they had him on the floor. He heard his wife and son yelling hysterically in the next room, then suddenly all three Disciples were running for the front door. When he looked up, he saw Karen pointing his 9mm at the gangsters, screaming at them to get the fuck out, and looking very much on the edge of justifiable homicide.

“I never really talked to any of them after that for a long time,” says Art. “They left me alone. I think they were more afraid of Karen than they were of me.”

That was the final straw for Art. With scenes of pissed-off drug dealers and gangbangers invading his home and killing his family boiling through his dreams, he resolved to get out of the robbery business as well. In the relativity of his world, he had matured, and with it came an epiphany.

“I remembered what Pete had told me about having a nice life,” he says. “He had showed me that stuff for a reason, because he wanted me to have another avenue out. I had no idea how I would do it because frankly I had forgotten just about everything, but I knew that I was going to become a counterfeiter, like him. And, well, you know me. Once I set my mind to something, I’m obsessed. I took what he taught me and amplified it a hundred times over.”

5

THE DUNGEON

So I fixed up the basement with
What I was a-workin’ with
Stocked it full of jelly jars
And heavy equipment
We’re in the basement,
Learning to print
All of it’s hot
All counterfeit

—B-52’S, “LEGAL TENDER”

 

 

 

 

Starting a counterfeiting operation from scratch is a formidable task for a crew of men; for a single man, it’s a protracted logistical battle in which a hundred items must be acquired, prepared, and studied—all before ink wets paper. Four years after learning the basics from da Vinci, Art possessed the maturity and patience to pursue the endeavor, but as he set about his mission it was no less daunting. Pete had taught him only everything that took place in the shop, and production is only part of counterfeiting. Art didn’t know where the old man had gotten supplies, how he found clients, or how to conduct deals.

By necessity, Art’s first acquisition had to be a safe house, or what the Secret Service calls a “printing hole.” Like the song says, counterfeiters like to operate in basements, and for good reason: Chugging along at full speed, even a small electric offset press generates vibrations rivaling an off-balance washing machine full of shoes. Ideally, the press should have solid ground beneath it and thick walls around it, or be located far from any other building. With limited resources, Art didn’t have the option of renting an isolated space somewhere in the sticks or even an industrial spot like da Vinci’s. He needed to stay as local as possible.

Luckily, it turned out that one of his friends, Chris Bucklin, was the son of a local real estate baron. Chris’s dad lived in Ireland and delegated the management of his properties to his son. After a few vague descriptions, Art was able to pay Chris cash for a three-bedroom basement apartment on Halsted Street, the kind of gloomy subterranean den that few people passing on the sidewalk above ever notice.

He called the apartment “the Dungeon,” and immediately went shopping for equipment. Offset printing supplies are easy to find in most large cities, but Chicago in particular offers a bountiful hunting ground. Just like the meatpackers, printers were drawn to the city by its central location, and by the early twentieth century it hosted the greatest concentration of printers in the world. Companies like RR Donnelley & Sons grouped along Chicago’s South Loop in an area that became known as Printer’s Row, eventually spreading their industry outward. To this day, the graphic-arts industry remains the city’s largest single employer, and the heart of America’s printing industry still lies within a two-hundred-mile radius.

State-of-the-art small-sized presses can cost upwards of ten thousand dollars, so Art focused his search on used presses. He checked the For Sale sections of local newspapers and called local print shops, asking if anyone had a press they wanted to unload. At a going-out-of-business sale, he picked up an old AB Dick for five hundred dollars. “It was the lowest end of the line,” he says with a tinge of embarrassment. “It was literally something out of the nineteen seventies, sitting abandoned in the corner of the print shop.”