The Art of Making Money (6 page)

Soon the Assembly of God church had a new member—a Satan’s Disciple no less—as Art made a point of attending Sunday services. He’d plop into the pew next to his sister and Karen, and during the sermons his eyes would lock on the flaxen cascade of Karen’s hair and the lustrous sweep of her thighs. “I wasn’t going in there for spiritual enlightenment,” he says.

Magers had sized up Art long before that, of course. She’d been impressed by his intelligence, but he, too, had a new body. At fifteen, his skinny arms and knobby shoulders now showed bowling-pin curves, while his jawline had come in square and firm. All of his prior delicacy was vanishing, as if the inner armor he’d adopted after moving to Bridgeport was expanding skinward and sounding out as a swarthy, hard handsomeness.

“He was really cute, and when you’re young you go for looks,” Magers says. “He always thrived on his looks; he was always a charmer. It also might have been an opposites-attract thing. I was always the good girl, and he was the bad boy. I didn’t like the fact that he was in a gang, but in those projects boys basically had to join the gang. It was either that or get the shit beat out of you on your way to school.”

When Art finally worked up the nerve to ask Karen out on a date, she accepted, and they quickly became a regular item. During the winter they’d go to movies, and in summer they’d laze around at a beach off Lakeshore Drive, then grab a meal at one of the tourist spots on Navy Pier. Parental loss was their unspoken bond, but like most teenagers, they rarely spoke about the past and even less so the future. On the occasions when they did talk about their dreams, Art would throw any number of pies into the sky; one day he’d want to be an inventor, the next a real estate developer. Karen, however, was magnificently consistent. She intended to follow a Bridgeport path almost as well-worn as the one that Art would take, and he was so smitten by her that he never considered that it made any future with her problematic at best. “I only ever had one dream. Maybe it’s because when my mom died, the man who broke the news and comforted me was a cop, but I knew since I was five that one day I would become a Chicago police officer.”

Karen’s dream would have to wait. Six months after they began dating, she learned she was pregnant. At fourteen, she was about to become a teenage mother, while Art—with no high school diploma, no job, and few connections outside of the street—had at best dim prospects of supporting a child. “I didn’t know what I was gonna do,” he says. “I was a kid myself. I knew I didn’t want to be like my father and just avoid responsibility—that wasn’t going to be a possibility. Somehow I had to find a way to make it out of there.”

3

THE APPRENTICE

We are all bastards;
And that most venerable man which I
Did call my father, was I know not where
When I was stamp’d; some coiner with his tools
Made me a counterfeit. . . .

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,
Cymbeline
,
Act II, Scene V

 

 

 

 

Ed’s Snack Shop had been around for twenty-one years when Malinda took a waitressing job to help prepare for the baby. Owned by a local named Ed Thompson, it was a Bridgeport fixture, an old twenties-style diner with a bar counter and a long line of windows overlooking Halsted Street. It was a familiar world to Malinda, easily navigable, and Ed was sympathetic to her condition. As long as she was on her meds, which was most of the time, he let her work the day shift. Since it was right across the street from the Bridgeport Homes, she was never far from her children. Art and Wendz dropped by on a daily basis, a ritual she always looked forward to. She’d sit them at the counter, feed them burgers and soda, and pry them for details about their lives while they pried her for tip money.

Years later, Ed’s son, Gary, would find himself writing a small memoir about Ed’s, then posting it on an Internet blog devoted to Bridgeport memories:

Pete “da Vinci” was an easygoing Italian who usually perched by himself in a booth up front, across from the counter. At about five seven, he was short, but striking thanks to his deeply tanned skin, and eyes so yellow they were almost gold. He was in his mid-forties but looked much younger, and unlike most of Ed’s characters, who tended toward the blue collar, da Vinci had a bohemian air about him. His defining accessory was a black leather beanie. Unless he was asleep, in the shower, or at church, it sat on his head with the permanency of a tattoo.

Like all the other characters at Ed’s, da Vinci was not his real name. It’s a street name that Art later gave him because of his fondness for drawing and painting. “I liked him from the beginning,” says Art. “He had class. He didn’t curse, he didn’t raise his voice. But most importantly he treated my mom really well, better than any man ever did.”

Art first noticed him as a regular presence about two months after his mom starting working at Ed’s. He’d show up and Pete would be nursing a coffee, cracking jokes with Malinda. He had a naturally sunny disposition, and he’d see Art come in and shout, “Hey kid, how ya doin’ today!” and he always had a huge grin that went ear to ear. Art never once saw him complain about his life, and when Pete was around, Art could see in his mother shades of the happy-go-lucky country girl who had been cowed by abandonment, poverty, and a crippling mental disease. And after a few months, Art and Wensdae were no longer asking Malinda for spending cash. “There was just this point where he’d insist,” remembers Art. “We all knew my mom didn’t make any real money there, and he was just going to give it to her in tips anyway. So he’d lay a little cash on us, nothing big, nothing more than she would have given us.”

Pete’s stated occupation was that he was “in construction,” Bridgeport’s oldest and most ubiquitous occupation. It meant that he was either really in construction or a criminal—probably both. Da Vinci certainly didn’t dress like a foreman or crewman, and if he was overseeing some nearby development, then its dust never powdered his shoulder or interfered with his quality time at Ed’s. He drove a white Cadillac, and Art simply assumed that he had some kind of a racket going, but he could never glean what it was, and in Bridgeport you do not ask questions.

Criminal or not, da Vinci was generous and warm, and that was what Malinda noticed. After about four months, Pete was dining with the family at the house, watching a bit of TV, then discreetly slipping out before bedtime. He also began taking the family out to the movies, or on weekend trips to Indiana Dunes, a magnificent stretch of rolling sand hills along the shores of Lake Michigan. The excursions, and the presence of a kindly, older male in the house, was a welcome change to Art, but he didn’t invest too heavily in Pete’s long-term presence.

 

 

 

ART HAD OTHER THINGS TO WORRY ABOUT than his mother’s love life. Karen gave birth to a son on August 28, 1990. Few things are more telling about Art than the name he insisted on calling him. Of the all the shoes in the world a boy can be asked to fill, he picked the ones made biggest by their emptiness: Arthur J. Williams III.

To raise money for the new arrival, Art, like his mother, took a job. It came to him one morning shortly after Karen became pregnant, when a young man driving by in a pickup truck spotted him and a friend throwing a football around in the project’s parking lot.

“You guys want some work?” he asked. All he told Art was that he’d be working at a construction site. The pay was low—$3.25 an hour in cash—but Art needed the money, so he jumped in the back. He was taken to the North Side, where a crew was reroofing an old woman’s house. There, he met his new boss, Morty Bello.

Morty was infamous in Bridgeport, though Art was too young to have heard of him. He was short, fat, and charming, with dark circles under his eyes and a deep Romanian accent—a bona fide gypsy. Morty made his living by looking up the addresses of elderly people—usually women—then sending crews to their houses to knock on their doors. They’d point out problems with their roofs or siding and offer to fix everything for a bargain rate. By the time Morty’s crew was done, half of the old women’s savings—along with various heirlooms—would be in his pocket. He paid poor kids like Art chicken feed to create the pretense of labor, doling out plati tudes and encouragement to hide the fact that he was exploiting them. He was the first in a long line of paternal misfires that Art would glom on to.

“I really liked Morty,” says Art. “He definitely liked me, or at least acted like he did. Sometimes he’d take me to his home and feed me dinner. He had a nice house on Parnell Avenue, a big family, and he treated me like a member of the family. He did all that to make it easier to use me.”

Sometimes Morty wouldn’t even pay Art; he’d cry poor and promise to reimburse him come the next job. But whether Morty paid or not, Art wasn’t making anywhere near enough to support his girlfriend and their child. After consulting with a few Disciples, he opted for a side job that was almost as conventional in Bridgeport: auto theft.

Halsted Street was Chicago’s chop-shop capital, and since the age of thirteen Art had been hotwiring vehicles for fun. It wasn’t a big step to simply drop the cars off at a garage, and depending on the make and model he could earn up to two thousand dollars per vehicle. Cars were usually insured, he rationalized, and in the event of discovery the stolen item itself offered a mode of escape. Best of all, at seventeen he was also too young to go to prison; if caught, he faced no more than a few months in juvie. And every bit as enticing as the fast money was the excitement and a chance to prove his manhood.

About four months after Karen gave birth, Art hotwired a Buick Regency on Poplar Avenue, a long block from the projects. As he was pulling away, his jittery teen reflexes got the better of him and he clipped a nearby parked car, smashing the Buick’s front. He quickly abandoned the Buick, then sprinted back toward the projects. But an elderly woman, drawn by the noise of the crash, had seen him. By now Art was well known to the Ninth District, and the woman’s description of him was good. Twenty minutes later, two Chicago PD officers knocked on the door of the Williamses’ apartment.

Pete da Vinci answered.

Art’s delinquency had been a story to Pete until that moment, told by an aggravated mother to a sympathetic ear. While Art hid in his room upstairs, he listened to Pete talk with the cops. The tone he took was something Art had never heard in Pete before—that of a concerned and irate father. “It was embarrassing,” Art remembers, “I knew that he knew I was up to stuff, but now he was actually seeing what a shit I was.” Malinda was right there at his shoulder, and she was convinced that it was high time that Art was taught a lesson.

“Arty! Come down here!” she shouted.

Art sheepishly made his way downstairs, knowing full well what was coming. The officers arrested him and drove him to the district house, where the elderly woman identified him. A juvenile court judge later sentenced him to three months in a youth detention facility. But a little over a month later, just as he had calculated, he was free.

Pete and Malinda were waiting for him at the release center. It was a happy occasion, but Pete was somber and preoccupied. They took Art out to a celebratory lunch at Ed’s, and when Malinda excused herself to go to the bathroom, Pete looked him directly in the eye.

“I’m not here to lecture you,” he said evenly, “but if you keep up with the stealing, your baby’s going to have a crummy life.”

It certainly sounded like the beginning of a lecture to Art.

“I understand that you’re under a lot of pressure,” Pete continued. “You’re still a kid, but you’re also a father. Did you know that kids whose fathers abandoned them are much more likely to abandon their own children?”

“Really?” Art said snidely. He was thinking that Pete didn’t know anything about him.

“I know you’re a smart kid. I know all about your achievements in school, and I know that the last few years haven’t been easy on you. I know you don’t want your own son growing up in these projects, and if you give me a chance, I’d like to help you get out.”

Art was now intrigued, but Malinda returned from the restroom before Pete could continue. “We’ll talk more later,” he said before she sat down.

Later that night as Art lay in bed, he heard the muffled tones of an argument taking place across the hall. He couldn’t make out the words, but he had the distinct feeling that they were arguing about him, and that Pete was trying to convince his mother to allow him to do something. Later on, he realized that Pete had probably been asking her for permission. The argument cooled down and Art drifted off to sleep, assuming that it was a typical spat between a mom and a boyfriend giving her unsolicited advice on how to raise her son. But when Art awoke the next morning, Malinda was nowhere to be seen. Pete was downstairs sipping a cup of coffee.

“Remember what we talked about yesterday?” he said. “If you’re up to it, there’s something I’d like to show you. So get dressed. We’re going for a ride.”