The Art of Making Money (24 page)

 

 

 

ART WAS ARRAIGNED A DAY AFTER HIS ARREST and charged with one count of counterfeiting United States currency, a crime that carried a maximum sentence of twenty years. But even as he stood haggard before the judge and heard the charge, agents and lab technicians were poring through bill databases and pulling up potential matches for other bills that might be linked to him. They turned up more almost immediately.

Six weeks earlier, Art, Natalie, and a couple of friends had taken a spending trip into Oklahoma, knowing that the post-Christmas bargain crowds would make a great slamming environment. Along Interstate 44, they had absolutely papered the Central Mall, near the town of Lawton. When the Secret Service later sent a couple agents from the Oklahoma City field office to investigate, they found that a whopping 80 percent of the merchants—or about sixty stores—had received counterfeit bills. In the report, they noted that the bills “differed in serial number, but possessed many of the same characteristics [as the Chicago notes] to include: mismatch Federal Reserve Bank number and letter, unique two-part note defeating the CFT detection pen, watermark and security fiber representations, unusual paper.”

Proving that Art had made the Lawton bills would be difficult without his equipment, but if they could establish that just one of those bills was his, then there was a good chance he could also face at least one count of “uttering” counterfeit—an Old World term for passing. Uttering carried a fifteen-year maximum, but that wasn’t the end of the bad news for Art. If they could trace any of the bills to another criminal he’d sold them to, then he’d also be facing a “dealing” charge, which also carried a twenty-year max.

The federal government enjoys a ninety-five percent conviction rate when it comes to criminal cases. Its law-enforcement officers enjoy the best training, equipment, and funding in the world, and their investigations produce evidence for not just a single prosecutor, but typically a team of a highly talented attorneys who often find themselves facing a lone defense lawyer or, in the case of multiple defendants, a loose and conflicted confederacy. The Department of Justice is also infamously selective; it likes to choose opponents it knows it can beat. In cases involving the Secret Service, the conviction rate is 98.8 percent, the highest rate of any law enforcement agency in the land.

Needless to say, Art needed a very good lawyer, which came down to money. Yet despite the millions in fake cash he had made and sold over the years, he had very little real money to spare. His lifestyle, and the confidence that he could always print more, had left him pathetically unprepared for financial emergencies. He had never established a way to launder his counterfeit earnings into savings; he had convinced himself that he could create a note that would fool anticoun terfeiting devices used in offshore banks, deposit millions of dollars, then withdraw real cash. Such a plan, if feasible, would take years of research, and he had run out of time. Other than about fifty thousand dollars in assets, he had nothing, which meant that he was looking at a court-appointed lawyer who would invariably press for a guilty plea.

Natalie’s mother, Sharon, decided that she wasn’t going to let that happen. The morning after the arrest, she was hitting the phone, hunting for criminal-defense attorneys in Chicago. Conveniently, the town was practically built on them, and after several calls she was referred to a federal criminal-defense attorney named John Beal. The next day, she drove up to Chicago, visited his office downtown, and enlisted his services.

A few days later, Beal visited Art at the Metropolitan Correction Center, Chicago’s federal jail, an ominous, eleven-story-high triangle. Art liked Beal immediately for his no-bullshit style. Beal asked Art to give him a step-by-step account of the arrest. When Art reached the part where the officers came into the room and found the marijuana, the lawyer became visibly excited. In the police report, CPD stated that their cause for entering room had been because they had seen—apparently through the crack in the door that Amy was holding open—marijuana on a coffee table.

“That’s impossible,” Art told him. “There was a hallway, and the coffee table was around the corner. It would have been physically impossible to see the weed, you’d have to have X-ray vision.”

The next day, Beal visited the House of Blues. A police officer and the hotel manager escorted him to the room, which was blocked off with police tape. After the manager signed an affidavit stating the room had not been disturbed, Beal entered and took photographs. Just as Art had said, the coffee table was entirely out of view from the door. The manager also confirmed that the coffee table was in the appropriate position according to hotel policy, further indicating that it had never been moved. Beal developed the film and made a visit to the prosecutor, affidavit in hand.

“You’ve got a straight-up illegal search and seizure here,” he told his adversary, and showed him the photos. “Not only that, but I have CPD lying about it on paper.”

Three weeks later, the preliminary hearing had barely got under way when the prosecutor approached the bench and told the judge that the state wished to dismiss all charges.

Moments later, the gavel fell. After less than a month, Art was free.

11

THE LETTER

The world meets nobody halfway. When you want something, you gotta take it.

—LINCOLN HAWK, IN THE FILM
Over the Top
, 1987

 

 

 

 

Art’s elation upon beating the House of Blues rap was un abashedly visible. He bear-hugged Beal in the courtroom, then literally jumped for joy once he hit the sidewalk in front of the courthouse. Thanks to a technicality, he had escaped spending the rest of his youth in federal prison.

His rapture lasted about five minutes. His life as an underground counterfeiter was over. The Secret Service knew his identity, his capabilities, and the names of at least some of his associates. In the courtroom, he had seen two suited, short-haired men in the gallery. They glared at him as he exited, leaving him little doubt as to their affiliation and message. “They were so pissed,” Art remembers. “By law, they had to burn all the evidence, sixty grand. I knew it wasn’t over. There was no way they were going to let me get away.”

Chicago was now way too hot for him. He believes the Service began tailing him the moment he left the courthouse. He stayed in the city just two days, then drove back roads all the way to Texas, where Natalie was waiting for him at her mother’s house in Lewis ville. Within a day of his arrival, black SUVs began appearing in his rearview mirror, or parked up the street at odd hours, the frozen silhouettes of their drivers in the front seats, waiting.

He stopped venturing outside, turned down the shades, and spent what was left of March beached on the sofa reading and watching TV. His plan was to bore the Service into moving on, but he became caught in his own trap. With too much time to think, he lapsed into a severe depression. “I didn’t know what I was going to do,” he says. “I figured that was it, game over. We lost the house in Marshall, and it was only a matter of time before the Service caught me for something else. I thought about the past, all the shittiness, my dad leaving, my mom going crazy, my fucking sister almost dying.”

One day he found himself engrossed in a TV showing of
Over the Top,
a Stallone film from 1987 about an estranged father and son traveling across the county in a semi truck. Stallone’s character, Lincoln Hawk, is an arm-wrestling trucker who hasn’t seen his ten-year-old kid since he was a baby. His son resents him for leaving at first, but the pair gradually bond on the road. True to its title,
Over the Top
is one of the most shamelessly sentimental, manipulative, and ridiculously optimistic father-and-son movies ever made. By the end of the movie, Art was bawling.

Natalie found him breaking down on the front porch, trying to hide his tears. “I hadn’t seen my dad in so many years. I didn’t even know what happened to him, why he left. Then that fucking movie came on and got me thinking about everything. And I said to myself, ‘Screw it. I’m gonna find him.’ ”

Natalie went back into the house, got on the computer, and enrolled in an Internet people-finder service for twenty dollars. Fifteen minutes later, she rejoined Art on the front porch.

“Your dad’s living in Alaska,” she told him. “I have his address.”

ART HAD SPENT ENTIRE DAYS on the Internet researching paper companies and bill components; using it to answer his oldest question had never occurred to him. He had to run to the computer to see the address for himself to believe it.

 

Williams, Arthur J.

P.O. Box 1258

Chickaloon, AK 99674-1258

 

 

Art felt certain it was his father because, in a margin, the site listed the subject’s age as fifty-two, precisely the age his dad should be. They entered the city into a map site. There it was, Chickaloon, a mote in the wilderness about sixty miles northeast of Anchorage. Art stared at the map point, transfixed. Farther away than he had ever imagined, but not so far that he couldn’t picture it. His dad was right there, right now, probably holed up by the fire as the dark days ruled over the biggest, wildest state. No phone number was given with the address, but they called information just to be sure. The number was unlisted. Art decided that was better anyway; a phone call out of the blue after all these years would be too sudden.

That same night, Art sat down and wrote a letter. He wanted to pen an account of everything that had happened since his father had left, along with the only question that really mattered: Why? Realizing such an epistle would take a butt roll of paper and probably freak his father out, he kept it simple. He told his dad that he was living in Texas and doing well. He was married and had a kid, with another on the way. He wanted them to know their grandfather, and he had never stopped thinking about him. He understood if his dad was hesitant after so many years, but he still loved him. He left the phone number for Sharon’s office line, telling his dad to leave his own number with her if he was interested in catching up. Art would call him back.

The next morning, Sharon took the letter to her office and deposited it in the outgoing mail.

 

 

 

ART KEPT A TIGHT REIGN on his hope that his father would respond, but the very act of reaching out made him feel like the future was opening up. Three weeks had gone by since he’d left Chicago, and sure enough, the Secret Service tails soon thinned out. That didn’t mean that he was no longer under investigation; it only meant that they’d been occupied elsewhere. He knew that as soon as they had time they’d start checking back, like fishermen revisiting the magic spot where they’d nearly hooked a big one.

He started thinking about establishing a new printing hole, someplace even farther off the map than Marshall, where they’d never find him. Although Natalie had been forced to destroy the computers and printers, the Ryobi press and process camera were still safe in Chicago, and he had plenty of paper stock in Dallas. If he could find a spot, then pull off a large, swift sale, he’d be able to disappear—this time for good. “I still wanted to find a place and finally do it like da Vinci had taught me. Keep it small and contained, not occupy too much space, and just live well. I had wanted to do that in Marshall. Now I felt like I had learned my lesson and this was it. I wanted to get out, get a place where I could breathe some.” It was classic criminal logic: He wanted to do a big sale so he could get back to doing small ones.

Finding a new house in rural Illinois was out of the question; not only was it too hot as far as law enforcement was concerned, but the House of Blues bust had given Natalie her fill of the state. “I told Art that I was never going back there,” she says. “If he wanted to be with me, then we’d have to live somewhere closer to Texas.” Using the Internet and want ads, they started shopping for real estate within a few hours of Dallas. Since the humidity was worse to the south, they concentrated their search north so as to avoid the sticky problem of having bills peel apart. Eventually they found a listing for about a hundred acres of land in northwest Arkansas east of Fay etteville. Early one morning when the street looked clear of surveillance, they slipped out of town to take a look.

Both of them immediately fell in love with the plot. It included a small, one-story house, along with a twelve-acre lake, several streams, and it was thick with forest. The seller was an elderly woman who’d grown up on the land, and she was asking for $500 per acre. When Art asked her if she was willing to drop her price to $350 per acre in exchange for fifty percent cash up front, no questions asked, her generational preference for hard currency perked right up. “That would be wonderful,” she told him.