The Art of Making Money (20 page)

During Art’s hiatus from counterfeiting, the FBI had raided the On Leong Building several times, and the once legendary gambling den in the basement had passed into history. This time around, he met the Horse in his car at Ping Tom Park, and afterward they went out to a downtown nightclub.

“You’ll have to be careful with these new bills,” the Horse warned him at one point. “Everybody will want.” Art was already seeing it. While superficially good for his ego, his social calendar exploded as clients, crooks, and even family members jockeyed for position next to the goose who was laying the golden eggs. “Everyone wanted money faster than I could make it,” he says. “They all had big plans, they all wanted me to become exclusive with them. I could see that it wasn’t really about me or my interests, but the money. It bothered me.”

Dmitri was still pushing Art hard to travel with him abroad, specifically to St. Petersburg. Sensing Art’s earlier reluctance, the Russian now talked about a short trip—three months—in which they would basically hang out and explore the architecture, but Art knew that once he was there he’d be seduced by Dmitri’s friends and relatives into printing, or at least selling some of his secrets. At the time, the city was one of the largest producers of U.S. counterfeit in Europe, and all Dmitri needed to return as a conqueror was an unlimited supply of Art’s bills.

One of the worst changes Art saw was in Tim Frandelo, an old friend he’d grown up with at the Bridgeport Homes. It had been Tim’s little brother, Darren, who was gunned down outside the Dunkin’ Donuts next to the projects. Back in the Dungeon days, Tim had helped Art out with a few deals, but once Frandelo saw the new bill, he pressed hard to become Art’s full-time partner. Since Art desperately needed someone besides Natalie to help him with the backlog of orders, he brought Frandelo in on a trial basis. But from the very first print run Tim was frustrated.

“I don’t understand why you’re doing fifty- and hundred-thousand-dollar deals when we can be printing millions,” he complained. “I know people who would buy a million.”

Art didn’t doubt it. Tim had solid Outfit connections, and that worried him. He explained da Vinci’s rule about occupying too much “space” and the certainty that the Secret Service would catch them if they printed too much, but Frandelo derided him as being too cautious. “When you have an ability like you got, you need to use it to its full extent,” Frandelo pressed. “These little batches will never make us rich, but with this product we could be.”

A few weeks after they started working together, Tim informed Art that he had been offered another job; an Outfit associate named Ron Jarrett was smuggling cocaine into the city from an Indian reservation upstate, and he needed foot soldiers to help him move it. Since it was much better money than the five thousand dollars per batch that Art was paying him, Tim was seriously considering taking it.

“If you can promise me we’ll print larger amounts, I’ll stick with you,” Frandelo told him. Art not only wouldn’t budge, but he was incensed.

“You go with Jarrett and we’re done,” Art replied. “I won’t be able to talk you. And if you tell him anything about me I’ll find you.”

Everybody in Bridgeport knew Ron Jarrett. A key member of the Twenty-sixth Street Crew, Jarrett had recently been released from prison for a 1980 jewelry heist, and since returning to the streets he’d been throwing his weight around the neighborhood, extorting money from locals and aggressively trying to tax any crook who smelled faintly of money. He was known for being a brute and a bulldog, and it was widely believed he was positioning himself to take over the Crew. That Frandelo was now associating with Jarrett spelled bad news to Art. “I figured it could be only a matter of time before I got on Jarrett’s radar,” he says. “If that happened I’d get taxed. The guy had a high profile. It was the kind of circle I didn’t want to be anywhere near. Those guys are always watched by the feds.”

As Art feared, Frandelo took the cocaine job, and he broke off all contact with his old friend. Worried that Jarrett or law enforcement would catch wind of his operation, Art grew intensely paranoid. He began spending thousands of dollars at the SpyShop USA, a “discreet electronics” store in downtown Chicago that specialized in high-tech countersurveillance equipment. Art bought a police scanner, bug and wire detectors, even night-vision goggles so he could look for stakeout cars in the dark. At the same time, he rarely answered his phone or allowed people to know where he was. When he and Natalie finally found their own apartment near Comiskey Park, he rented it under a false name and invited no one over but family. “I was like a ghost,” he says. “Nobody could ever find me. People hated it, but it kept me safe.”

“He was nuts,” says Tony Puntillo. “I remember one day Art shows up at my apartment. He was worried that he was being followed. He comes in and he has this little box with an antenna sticking out of it—a bug detector. He starts poking the antenna around the whole place, the walls, the furniture. I’m like, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ The jagoff’s walking around my house acting like he thinks he’s James fucking Bond.’ Then he goes to the window and shuts the blinds and keeps peeking through them. He’s convinced that one of the parked cars is following him.”

Even though nobody knew where he and Natalie lived, Art decided that Chicago wasn’t anonymous enough for him. The couple began searching downstate for a safe house, a country home where they could lay low and print if necessary. Eventually they found a farmhouse in Marshall, an agricultural community of about four thousand not far from the Indiana border. Located at the end of a dirt road, it literally sat in the middle of a cornfield. “No one was going to find this place,” Art says. “I paid cash for six months’ rent up front, used a false name. We didn’t go there all the time, but when we did we usually printed. We did all the digital stuff there. My plan was to operate out of there and do what Pete had always said: Keep my batches small, avoid too much attention, and live a comfortable life. Things didn’t work out that way, of course.”

9

THE ART OF PASSING

“Papa! What’s money?”

The abrupt question had such immediate reference to the subject of Mr. Dombey’s thoughts, that Mr. Dombey was quite disconcerted.

“What is money, Paul?” he answered. “Money?”

“Yes,” said the child, laying his hands upon the elbows of his little chair, and turning the old face up toward Mr. Dombey’s; “what is money?”

Mr. Dombey was in a difficulty. He would have liked to give him some explanation involving the terms circulating-medium, currency, depreciation of currency, paper, bullion, rates of exchange, value of precious metals in the market, and so forth; but looking down at the little chair, and seeing what a long way down it was, he answered: “Gold, and silver, and copper. Guineas, shillings, half-pence. You know what they are?”

“Oh yes, I know what they are,” said Paul. “I don’t mean that, Papa. I mean what’s money after all.”

—CHARLES DICKENS,
Dombey and Son

On the morning of December 23, 1999, fifty-five-year-old Ron Jarrett stepped outside his bungalow on Lowe Street, a quiet, middle-class section of Bridgeport that had long been a bastion of the Mafia. Like many reputed mobsters who lived in the area, Jarrett felt safe in the neighborhood. That morning, which was clear and cold, he was on his way to the funeral of a family member.

A few blocks away, two men started up a yellow Ryder moving truck and began driving toward Jarrett’s house. The truck slowed as it drew up alongside Jarrett, then a man jumped from the passenger seat. He walked directly up to Jarrett, who turned to face him just in time to see a pistol aimed directly at his head. The gunman squeezed off at least five rounds, shooting Jarrett in the face, chest, right shoulder, and both arms. Jarrett would die in the hospital a month later.

The hit had all the earmarks of a classic Outfit operation. Police would later find the Ryder truck torched in an alley up the street, but they would have no good witnesses. In earlier eras, a single shooting might have drawn little law enforcement attention, but this was the first mob killing in Chicago in four years—one of the quietest periods in Outfit history. During that time the FBI had basked in the credit for tamping the organization’s profile, a development that had more to do with the Outfit’s self-policing than any law enforcement effort. For the Bureau, it was both an affront and a golden opportunity, a chance to take on its favorite Chicago nemesis.

Art heard about the hit from Jarrett’s own son, Ron junior, who he frequently played basketball with at McGuane Park. He immediately knew that it was bad news. Since Tim Frandelo was a Jarrett associate, it meant that the FBI would probably haul him in for questioning or at the very least put him under surveillance. Frandelo’s associates, which included Art, would be looked at as well. Art had no intention of being around when that happened. “Within two days after the Jarrett hit, the FBI was all over Bridgeport,” he remembers. “You could actually see it. There were undercover vehicles everywhere and people were getting hauled in. Jarrett had so many enemies. It was a shitstorm. There was no way I was staying in that city.”

It was time to print and run.

 

 

 

FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS in bill components, a box of equipment, a silver Mustang convertible, each other, and the clothes on their backs—that’s all Art and Natalie had when they left Chicago (at the time Natalie’s son was staying with his grandmother in Texas). No bags, no toothbrushes or maps, no reservations. They didn’t bother packing anything. Their plan now was to buy everything they needed as they went—and make money doing it.

Their first stop was a sporting goods store, where they dropped about eight hundred dollars in fakes for camping supplies that included a high-end tent large enough to fit a portable table, a double sleeping bag, mats, toiletries, backpacks, cooking supplies, beach towels, hiking boots, canteens, flashlights, a first-aid kit, disposable cameras, suntan lotion, plastic containers, mosquito repellant. Within four hours of leaving, they had enough equipment to survive comfortably off the map for weeks.

Their plan was to keep moving west and see as much country as possible while changing up the counterfeit for real money. For the first time in his life as a counterfeiter, Art intended to go on a balls-out, hedonistic spending spree with his own product. He was going to ignore da Vinci’s advice about not spending his own money and “really see what it could do” out in the world. Pete’s advice was no longer applicable, he reasoned, because Pete had never possessed a bill like his.

Neither Art nor Natalie knew precisely how they were going to convert fifty thousand dollars counterfeit into genuine, but math led the way. Buy an item worth twenty dollars or less with a fake hundred-dollar bill and you get at least eighty dollars back in genuine currency. The faster you can drop the Benjamins, the more money you make. To spend money quickly, you need an environment abounding in shops, designed to make visiting all of them as convenient as possible. The solution was right there along the road.

According to the most recent statistics from the International Council of Shopping Centers, there are 48,695 malls in the United States. They range from quaint, open-air strips to megatherial indoor chambers replete with roller coasters, aquariums, and petting zoos. Collectively, they bring in about $2.12 trillion a year, accounting for 75 percent of all “nonautomotive” retail sales in America. During any given month, two-thirds of all Americans will visit a center, where they’ll spend an average of $86.30 per visit. Malls even outnumber towns in America. The true cathedrals of capitalism, many of them rank among the largest indoor structures in the world. They employ more than twelve million people, and are so woven into the social fabric of suburbia that they are destinations in themselves and monuments of collective memory. As kids we wander their climate-controlled chambers looking for action and each other. As teenagers they become proto-mating grounds where girls test their first lipsticks while boys lurk hoping to test them too. We return to them as adults, working our first jobs in them and sneering at the kids we once were. We meet and sometimes even get married in them. We may detest their superficiality, but we never leave them.

Art and Natalie decided to rob them. America’s malls were about to become gigantic, cash-spitting ATMs that would fuel a lifestyle that most of us only dream about.

PASSING MONEY INVOLVES ALMOST AS MUCH ART as making it. When Art and Natalie intended to hit a mall, he’d spend an hour leisurely driving through the closest town, noting the location of the police station, highway on-ramps, and general layout. If someone at the mall reported a bad bill, he wanted to know how long units might take to respond.

After surveying the town he’d move on to the mall itself, first prowling the entire parking lot for police cars. If he saw any, he would either wait for them to leave or abandon the operation altogether because “there was always another mall up the highway.” Mall security guards were unavoidable, so in their case he at least made sure to register their vehicles and faces, get a feel for how they liked to conduct their rounds.