The Art of Making Money (22 page)

 

 

 

SAILING ALONG ON THEIR CURRENTS OF COUNTERFEIT, Art and Natalie had been entirely oblivious to events transpiring back in Chicago. Just as Art had feared, during his absence Ron Jarrett’s murder had led to a massive FBI investigation in Bridgeport, code-named Operation Vendetta II. By wiretapping a known Outfit member and Jarrett associate, the Bureau learned of Jarrett’s cocaine smuggling operation—and the name Tim Frandelo. It had also uncovered that Frandelo was supplying many of Art’s former friends in the Satan’s Disciples with the drug, and that the SDs were dealing large amounts of cocaine out of the projects. In late October, Frandelo and fourteen other suspects would be swept up in a sting for trafficking in cocaine. Art’s name never came up as a Frandelo associate, and in that regard his plan to flee the city worked. But it came at a cost.

He had ceased communication with his family during his absence, just at the time that Wensdae had needed him most. Right before Art left the city, her five-year relationship with the Greek dentist had come to a bitter end. She had moved into a new apartment on Sawyer Avenue, and for the first time in her life she was completely alone. Stoked by the recent loss, the depression, pain, and panic that had haunted her for as long as she could remember reignited with unprecedented ferocity. On the evening of May 15, 2000, she was alone in the apartment, dousing the flames with a fifth of Bacardi, when she decided to end her pain permanently.

Her new apartment was on the fourth floor, with a window overlooking an alley. That evening she opened window, then lay on the ledge on her stomach, testing the waters of her own death. She had flirted with suicide-by-fall many times before and had always pulled back, but this time she went deeper. She grabbed the ledge tightly, then slid off until she was hanging by her fingers. Then she let go.

She remembers very little about the fall, but two police officers on their dinner break at a White Castle fifty yards away saw her just as she dropped. According to the report they later filed, Wensdae plummeted down the wall, grazing it on the way down, then crashed feet-first into the cement below. As the officers radioed for a paramedic, they were stunned to see Wensdae stand up in the alley as if the impact hadn’t even fazed her, then walk around the corner toward the building’s main entrance. They ran after her, but her location wasn’t clear to them until a few minutes later, when they spotted her at the same window, climbing out a second time.

They couldn’t believe their eyes. She had somehow hobbled back to her apartment. Once again Wensdae crawled out on the ledge and dangled by her fingers, but now she decided she wanted to live. She screamed for help. One of the officers ran into the building, but just before he reached her, she lost her grip. Miraculously, a series of power lines running parallel to the building broke her second fall; she hit the wires, then spun forward, again landing on her feet, but this time she lost consciousness. The last thing she remembered was hearing one of the police officers yell to the other, “She jumped again.”

Wensdae awoke two weeks later in a bed at Mercy Hospital. Both her ankles were completely shattered and her spine was broken. She spent the next three months in the hospital, and when she came out of it her right leg from below the knee was completely useless, a dangling, dead appendage whose only sign of life came from an immense, stultifying pain that never ceased. Doctors advised her that she would be much better off having it surgically amputated, but Wendz wanted to keep her leg. To fight the pain, she opted for a drug regimen that often left her completely debilitated and committed to an indeterminate series of reconstructive surgeries—a fight that would last nine years—longer and more harrowing than any prison sentence her brother would ever serve.

“Where were you? I tried calling around but no one knew where you were,” she asked Art after he came back.

He didn’t have the heart to tell her that he had been on a spending spree across America, having the greatest time of his life.

 

 

 

ART FOUND THE ROAD TRIP with Natalie so liberating that he decided to make passing his bills a permanent feature of his operation. From then on, almost every time he executed a deal in Chicago, he’d print up an extra twenty or thirty thousand, then invite a select group of friends or family on a prolonged shopping spree. He called it “slamming,” and if you were one of the chosen few picked to participate in the adventure, it was akin to winning a game-show prize without ever having to compete. Not only would Art pay all your expenses, but you were allowed to keep twenty percent of the change and whatever goods you could fit into your allotted trunk space.

The trips were like abbreviated versions of Art and Natalie’s first summer with the New Note. Part serious criminal enterprise and part play, they lasted anywhere from a weekend to a week, depending on how much counterfeit Art had printed and his sense of security, which could shift dramatically if he felt the slightest whiff of discovery.

As the orchestrator of the operations, Art never spent money himself; it was enough work managing three or four people high on unlimited cash from succumbing to stupidity.

Avarice would set in long before he parceled out the money. Prior to hitting a mall, he would hand out maps to everyone in order to review the layout and assign stores. At first he tried letting them choose the stores themselves, but that invariably led to conflict.

Friends would argue about who got to shop where until Art stepped in to say, “Listen, you assholes. You’re going to go where I tell you to go.” Even when spenders swore to follow a program, they’d invariably be tempted to sneak a visit to each other’s targets, an act that Art strictly forbade because stores that discover a counterfeit immediately go on the lookout for more. To avoid this, Art warned everyone that whoever ignored his orders would be summarily dumped off at the nearest Greyhound station for a lonely bus ride back to Chicago. On two occasions, he delivered on the threat.

Like any good businessman (or parent) he found that positive incentives worked best. “A good spender knew they had a good chance of being invited on another trip, so I always encouraged them to compete with each other,” he says. “Whoever cleaned the most money might get to keep a few hundred extra, or maybe I’d reward everybody with an expensive dinner.” With three spenders competing, Art could suck five thousand dollars from a large-sized mall in less than two hours.

Spending trips were as much about living it up as they were about making money. During a trip through Missouri, one of Art’s friends found that his assigned section of a mall included a costume store. He bought two clerical collars and declared that he intended to spend the rest of the trip passing counterfeit money dressed as a priest. After a philosophical debate in the car as to whether or not this constituted a mortal sin, Art declared that it was the best idea he’d ever seen. “So another friend of mine on the trip buys two black shirts, and these two guys spend the next three days passing money as priests, competing with each other the whole time. We destroyed Missouri on the that trip; absolutely slammed it.”

By the time they reached St. Louis, Art had about four hundred dollars in singles alone, so he took the whole crew out to a strip club. He waved the brick-thick wad in front of a host, then gestured to his friends. “I want the best-looking girls in this place to be entertaining these guys at our table until this pile runs out,” he said, then handed the host a fifty. The host happily complied.

 

 

 

ART ESTIMATES he printed four to five million dollars of his New Note within the first two years of its creation, and his money only got better over time. Small changes he made in printers, inks, and processes constantly added verisimilitude and allowed him to speed up production, so much so that he came to view his earliest versions of the Note with almost as much disdain as he did the pre-’96 money.

Yet despite how good the bills looked, they had an Achilles’ heel. Art first noticed it at a mall in New Orleans while on a spending trip with Natalie. He was waiting outside a store, watching her do her thing at the counter, when suddenly the cashier—a young woman—exited the store and entered the shop next door. Art didn’t think much of it, since cashiers commonly trot over to the neighbors for change. He had seen it a dozen times, but this time things played out differently.

When the cashier entered the adjacent store and approached the register, the male clerk didn’t reach for the till. Instead he held up the bill and began picking at it. Art watched, horrified, as the clerk completely peeled away both sides of the bill as if it were a piece of single-wrapped American cheese. “Their eyes just popped, and the woman’s mouth literally dropped open. And as soon as I saw that I ran into the first store and got Natalie. I told her it was time to get the fuck out of there and we did, fast.”

It was the humidity. Art had assembled the bills in one of the nation’s most tropical climates, and the glue had never quite dried. When he went back and inspected the rest of the stash, he found loose corners on many of them. He tried blow-drying them and taping them up to air conditioners and in front of fans. Nothing worked—the southern air was just too moist. He had to stop spending in Louisiana, and from then on he made a rule to never assemble his bills in a humid climate.

One of Art’s friends from Chicago, Eric Reid, would learn that even bills made in dry conditions could also be susceptible to climatic influence. Reid was one of Art’s square friends, a regular guy with no criminal history who worked as a personal trainer. He knew that Art counterfeited, but had never once asked for bills or requested to go on a spending trip. Under the right circumstances, however, there were very few people Art knew who were never tempted to spend a note or two, either for the spontaneous thrill of it or because they felt certain they wouldn’t be caught. So he wasn’t surprised when Reid nervously approached him one day and asked if he could buy a few thousand dollars. He and some buddies had long been planning a trip to Jamaica. Given that it was a foreign country, he figured that no one would be wise. “Eric was such a nice guy, I told him I wouldn’t sell them to him, but that I’d throw him enough to have fun with. This was when it was fall. It wasn’t hot or humid. I was able to do my thing and they came out beautiful. So I gave him four thousand dollars. I figured that would be plenty for him to go down there and have fun with, right? He comes back ten days later, and he looks all fucked up. He has a beard, eyes all blood-shot, he’s looking stressed.”

Reid explained that everything had gone well at first. Reid had no problem passing the money and was having such a good time with it in Jamaica that he gave some to his pals. Out of what he thought was discretion, he didn’t tell them it was fake. Toward the end of their trip, the group went wild at a strip club in Montego Bay, ordering an expensive dinner followed by off-the-books backroom liaisons with some of the girls. When it came time to pay the check, however, the cashier split a bill apart right in front of him. Then he called the Jamaica Constabulary Force.

The JCF arrested the entire bachelor crew. During a night of interrogation, Reid—aided by the otherwise high quality of Art’s money—was able to convince the cops that they’d had no idea that the money was fake. The JCF released them the next morning, but the saga wasn’t over. Waiting outside the police station was the strippers’ pimp, along with two muscular guys. They shadowed Reid back to his hotel room, knocked on the door, then bum-rushed their way in when he opened it. They wanted real money. In tears and lying to save his hide for the second time in twenty-four hours, Reid begged them to believe that he had had no idea, then ended up giving them whatever real cash he had left. “It ruined my vacation,” he told Art. “I’ll never spend that shit again.”

The friends had a good laugh over the Jamaican episode, and Art learned that using his bills in the tropics could be just as dangerous as assembling them there. In the end, that seemed like a small limitation given that he could take steps to prevent it. Unfortunately, the next time someone found a flaw in his bills the results would prove far more costly.

10

HOUSE OF BLUES

The counterfeiter, the educated in his calling, and prince among the rascals of his clique, still finds his trade full of danger and difficulty.

—
The Merchants’ Magazine and Commercial Review,
1858

 

 

 

 

There’s a sequence toward the end of Martin Scorsese’s 1990 mob masterpiece,
Goodfellas,
in which the coked-up protagonist, Henry Hill, spends a long, exasperating day dashing around town performing errands for the mob while simultaneously arranging a feast for his family. In a wonderful rendering of the banalities of criminal life, Hill fights to stay in control as meat-balls and marinara mix with cocaine and gun running. Meanwhile a police helicopter shadows ominously above the whole time. Just when Hill reaches the point of heroic exhaustion the trap is sprung; his street erupts in floodlights, cops come charging up his driveway, and out come the handcuffs. His babysitter/drug courier has made the mistake of using his home phone to arrange a deal. No matter how hard a criminal tries, there’s always a wild card he cannot control, and that is usually what brings him down.

On February 19, 2001, Art woke up in Marshall with a similarly hectic day in front of him. He and Natalie had been up most of the previous night finishing a $160,000 print run, most of which he had to deliver to Dmitri in Chicago that night. At the same time, Natalie’s mother and little sister were flying in from Texas that afternoon to visit for a few days and pick up Alex, who’d been selected to appear in a Sears children’s catalog that was being shot in Dallas. So Art had to remove all traces of counterfeit supplies and chemicals from the house, drive 100 miles to Indianapolis to meet the family at the airport, rent them a car, then race another 180 miles back to Chicago and rendezvous with the Russians.