The Art of Making Money (33 page)

“I never should have come up here,” he said.

“That’s bullshit,” Senior countered. They went back and forth blaming themselves again, then more silence.

“What about Anice?” Art asked.

“Not happy, but she has a shot at staying out.”

Based on the police reports his lawyer had shown him, Art had a pretty good idea why.

“She turned us in. Why did she do that?”

“She’s a woman, she was frightened,” Senior said.

“Yeah. She’s a woman. My woman was frightened, too, she didn’t tell them anything.”

Senior shrugged.

“Anice turned me in because she never liked me,” Art continued. “She never did, not even when I was a kid. She wanted us gone. I guess she’s gonna have her way now.”

“C’mon, that’s not true,” Senior said, but he didn’t offer a countering argument.

They small-talked a little more about family members, and as the hour wore down Senior promised he’d visit again. As his dad prepared to leave, Art couldn’t help apologizing again.

“Stop it,” Senior said as they hugged each other farewell. “I don’t want you worrying about me. Promise me that you’ll take care of yourself, I’ll take care of myself, and we’ll get through this, okay?”

“Okay.”

 

 

 

ART HAD NO INTENTION OF WAITING AROUND to see how the chips fell for his father. Following their visit, he decided to help not only his old man, but Anice and Natalie as well. Through his lawyer, he approached Joseph Bottini, the federal prosecutor assigned to all of their cases. Bottini was a rising star in the federal District of Alaska. In his late thirties, with a black brush mustache and square jaw, Bottini embodied the ruggedness of the state and could easily pass as a cop or a fisherman, while in the courtroom he exhibited the finesse and dynamism of a professional athlete. A native of Napa, California, he had a casual and conversational air wired up to a memory that was almost photographic and a presentation that was precise and deadly. Bottini would go on to participate in the takedown of the state’s infamously corrupt legislature and its petroleum-industry bedfellows, ultimately finding himself a key member of the team that prosecuted Senator Ted Stevens. But he would never forget Art Williams: “I have one of Mr. Williams’s bills sitting on my desk in an evidence bag,” says Bottini. “It’s been sitting there all these years as a memento. It is an unusually good counterfeit. I remember everything about the case. It was a sad case. Art junior hadn’t seen his father in many years, and I wound up being the guy to prosecute this family.”

Art was in a position of strength when he approached Bottini. Because the Secret Service had failed to recover the laptop with its image files, all the government had against him was hearsay—verbal and written statements from Jim and Vicki Shanigan and Anice. Without physical evidence, it was doubtful that even a prosecutor as skilled as Bottini could make the charges against him stick. In spite of that advantage, Art indicated to Bottini that he was willing to plead guilty to everything—provided that the prosecutor would go easy on his father, Anice, and Natalie. He relayed to the prosecutor that he was the mastermind and that he had been counterfeiting for years. None of the others would have gotten wrapped up in it, he explained, if he hadn’t shown up.

Bottini appreciated Art’s chivalry, but he was in a difficult position. Federal agents had worked long hours bringing down the rest of the defendants. They had successfully compromised a counterfeiting ring, run phone- and wiretaps, and executed a search warrant that had produced hard evidence against Senior and Anice. His case against them was rock solid. And when it came to the gun charges against Senior, his hands were completely tied since it was a parole violation. He demurred at Art’s offer, but presented him with a counteroffer: If Art was willing to plead guilty to conspiracy, he’d recommend less than the five-year maximum. As part of the deal, he also wanted Art to admit to making the bills passed in Oklahoma, where agents had claimed they’d finally pulled a partial print matching one of Art’s fingers from inside one of the bills. Because it was a weak case, Art wouldn’t face charges; the Service just wanted to close the file.

That alone made Bottini’s offer a great deal for Art, but the prosecutor also said that if Natalie and Anice pleaded guilty to at least one of their respective charges, he’d go easy on the women and recommend no prison time. But he could do nothing for Senior. Art’s old man had violated parole and guns had been found on the property—state charges that were out of Bottini’s control. Like Senior had said himself, he was going down. With Natalie’s future on the table as well, Art had little choice but to take the deal. Although he was still angry at Anice, he also recognized that if he could help her, too, then so be it.

Beginning in mid-March 2002, the plea deals lined up fast and furious. Art’s went down first, on the ides. True to his word, Bottini dropped all but the conspiracy charge and Art was sentenced the same day. Judge Singleton gave him thirty-six months’ imprisonment, along with three years’ probation and a fine of $13,200.

Four days later, Natalie pleaded guilty to one count of utterance, receiving five years’ probation and restitution of $7,350—a sweetheart deal for a woman who had not only played a crucial role in Art’s mastery of the New Note, but also made and passed enough bad C-notes at America’s malls to pad the secretary of the treasury’s bed.

Senior and Anice had scheduled their pleas for the same day, March 25. He went first. The arrangement he’d worked out with Bottini was to plead guilty to a single “dealing” charge, the most damning counterfeiting charge short of manufacturing. Combined with his parole violations, tacked on by the state’s attorney, his sentence was a whopping seventy months, plus $7,350 restitution. In federal prisons, inmates must serve a minimum of eighty-five percent of their time, meaning that he was looking at a little more than five years—twice as much as his son.

Anice watched from the gallery as her husband received his sentence. From the moment Senior had abandoned his children, she’d had him all to herself. She had done nothing to encourage him to reestablish contact with his own children or provide them with financial support. When Art had popped back into their lives he was precisely the product of time and neglect. That smart little kid had grown into a master criminal artist, and she eagerly took his money without ever having taken him into her heart. Hers was a self-fulfilling prophesy, and what happened next would illustrate the depths of her capacity for denial.

 

 

 

PLEA HEARINGS are affairs of formality. Since the accused, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judge have all consulted beforehand, everyone knows what’s coming. In most cases, the prosecutor presents evidence supporting his case, then the accused faces the judge and acknowledges his or her culpability, verbally and in writing.

Largely thanks to Art, Anice had won herself a beautiful deal: five years’ probation plus the by now standard $7,350 restitution. She would not spend a day behind bars, and with special permission she’d also be able to visit her husband.

Like clockwork, when the clerk called up Anice’s case, Bottini presented his evidence, then her lawyer, Eugene Cyrus, informed Judge Singleton of her intent to plead guilty. As required by law, the judge then asked her if she understood that she was pleading guilty to the charges, thus surrendering her right to a trial.

“I’m doing this because my lawyer advised me, but I’m innocent,” she said.

“You’re innocent?”

“Oh, yes.”

“It was my understanding that you were going to plead guilty. Do you wish to change your plea to not guilty?”

“I didn’t do anything, Your Honor. I’m innocent. This all happened because of my stepson, Art. You see—”

“Mrs. Williams, this proceeding requires that you plead either guilty or not guilty. Your stepson is irrelevant here. Do you wish to change your intended plea?”

“I’m an innocent woman, Your Honor. Nothing should be done to me.”

“You must reply either guilty or not guilty, Mrs. Williams.”

“I’m not guilty.”

Eugene Cyrus, Anice’s lawyer, was standing right next to her at the time. Like everyone else he had assumed her guilty plea was a done deal; he now found himself in the unfortunate position of having won for his client a very good arrangement—only to watch her double down on a terrible hand. And Bottini wasn’t just unhappy, but incensed. By any legal assessment he had been merciful toward Anice. He had her on tape arranging counterfeit deals, a ledger listing the proceeds, and the Shanigans to testify to it. In spite of that, he’d offered her no time.

“Do you understand what you are saying?” Judge Singleton pressed Anice. “That you wish to enter a plea of not guilty and proceed to trial?”

“Yes.”

“Very well,” said Judge Singleton, but he was far from convinced of her competency to stand trial. He ordered that Anice undergo a psychiatric evaluation prior to proceeding. The assigned psychiatrist, Dr. Irvin Rothrock, found that Anice was not only aware of her actions, but that she was “feigning an impaired memory hoping to avoid the legal consequences of her actions.” Judge Singleton ordered her case to proceed.

Both her lawyer and her daughter attempted to change her mind. “Arthur had tried to take the fall for everything,” Chrissy remembers. “He had tried to keep my mom and dad out of it, and she had gotten a good deal. I begged her to sign it. ‘Mom, you could lose,’ I told her. ‘I’ve seen the police reports.’ She blamed everything on Art junior. But she didn’t want to admit that she had anything to do with it. To say she was stubborn would be putting it lightly. Her freedom wasn’t enough for her; she wanted to clear her name.”

But Anice refused to turn back, and so on August 12, 2002, the case went to trial.

Bottini had expended his mercy. His prosecution of Anice, as her own lawyer described it, “was flawless.” Utilizing what was then the latest technology, he projected transcripts of the phone- and wiretaps, the ledger and the bill receipts, and her own signed confession onto a screen from a laptop computer. It was the federal flip-side of some of the same imaging technology Art had used to counterfeit. He put both Jim and Vicki Shanigan on the stand, as well as the Secret Service agents, and they confirmed every allegation against her. He also played back the audio of Anice’s own voice, arranging the meet with Vicki Shanigan.

Once Bottini closed his case, Anice’s attorney had little choice but to put her on the stand. Other than her word, he had nothing to contradict the evidence. But on the morning she was scheduled to testify, the box stood empty as the court waited in vain for her to show up. That morning, she suddenly started complaining about a sharp pain in her side. Paramedics rushed her to the emergency room, where doctors gave her a battery of tests and discharged her. They were unable to find anything wrong with her.

Back in court in following morning, she finally took the stand and answered the government’s charges.

“I knew absolutely nothing about any counterfeiting,” she told the court. On cross-examination, when Bottini asked her to explain where the money and the receipts the Secret Service had confiscated from her bedroom came from, she said that “it was from Jim Shanigan’s drug dealing. Vicki gave it to me because Jim was a drug addict and she was afraid he would squander it.” When it came to explaining her signed confession, Anice was flabbergasted. Despite her acute memory of holding the money for Vicki because her husband was an addict, she had “no memory of making any statements to the Secret Service agents.” At the same time, she quite clearly remembered signing the confession, claiming that she “had been told by the agents she had to sign it or go to jail.” It was the sort of contradictory testimony that prosecutors dream of and rarely see. On at least two occasions, several jurors were so incredulous at the boldness of Anice’s lies that they actually laughed out loud at her.

The jury returned with a verdict in two hours. Anice was sentenced to forty-one months in prison, followed by thirty-six months of probation plus the restitution. Next to her husband’s sentence, it was the longest of the six defendants’.

 

 

 

THE FEDERAL CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTION IN WASECA, MINNESOTA, is a low-security facility about seventy-five miles south of Minneapolis. Housing about a thousand inmates, it has no bars or cells, and inmates sleep in dormitory-style bunks, held in by little more than a chain link fence and razor wire. Compared with the prisons Art had seen in Texas and even the Anchorage Jail, it was a cakewalk, filled with mostly nonviolent offenders, many of them white-collar criminals.

His first cell mate, Kenneth Getty, was the former mayor of the Illinois town of Lyons. He’d been convicted of bid-rigging town contracts. His second cellie, a big-time credit-card scammer from L.A. who faced $1.8 million in restitution, had been neighbors with Marvin Gaye. Prison had always been a likelihood in the world where Art grew up and in the life that he had chosen. Most of the boys from the Bridgeport Homes had done hard time in much worse places. A cynical reality of Art’s life is that, compared with many he grew up with, Waseca could almost be interpreted as a sign of success.

Word travels fast in prison. A few weeks after his arrival, Art was jogging around the outdoor track when a fellow Chicagoan named Louis Bombacino approached him. Bombacino was an Outfit man, convicted for loan-sharking fifteen years earlier.

“You’re from Chicago, right?” he said. “Taylor Street and Bridgeport?”

“Yeah.”

“We don’t get a lot of young guys from the neighborhood here. There are a few of us, but we don’t get much news. We’d like to talk to you.”

“Okay,” Art said, waiting for a question.

“The only thing is, we can’t really talk to you until we look into your past and who you are and what you did, you know? So don’t take offense, but until then we probably won’t even speak.”