The Art of Making Money (7 page)

Based on the look in Pete’s eye, Art knew that they were not headed off to a construction site.

 

 

 

THEY DROVE SOUTH, which in that part of Chicago is back in time. They passed the eastern railroad approaches to the Union Stockyards, where generations of Irish, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish, and Slavic immigrants once labored in the largest concentration of slaughter-houses in the world—an industry immortalized in Upton Sinclair’s
The Jungle
. Later on the area became a haven for bootleggers, who could mingle in with the packing and storage facilities without drawing much attention. How many criminal operations had set up shop in Packingtown since then was anyone’s guess, but its industrial anonymity was daunting. As da Vinci wheeled the Cadillac deeper into blocks of buildings bracketed by vacant lots and truck parks, neither of them spoke.

Pete finally parked next to an old stone quarry. For the briefest of moments Art wondered if maybe he was legitimate after all. “I try not to park right in front of my business,” the older man explained. “A block away is fine.”

They continued on foot to a three-story, nineteenth-century brick building with a loading dock in front. Once inside, they made their way down a long hallway to the back of the building. There, Pete plugged a key into an elevator call box. A few moments later, a pair of double doors reeled back to reveal an old-style, top-gated lift. After they entered, Pete pushed the down button, taking them below ground level, where he unlocked another door, revealing a space that was almost pitch-black except for a few block windows. Pete flicked on a nearby switch, blasting the space with fluorescent light that emanated from long, buzzing bulbs. And as Art’s eyes adjusted, he was surprised to encounter a familiar scene.

Spread out before them in a large room was a full-service offset print shop, a smaller version of the sort of setup he’d seen next to the
Bridgeport News
. Immediately to the left was a photography alcove, which was followed by a light table, a platemaking station, and then the offset press itself—a beautiful, six-foot-long AB Dick. After that came an industrial paper cutter.

“It was a perfectly kept setup,” remembers Art. “Everything was in order, each machine placed right where it should be in the overall process. You could work clockwise through the room, and by the time you came to the end you would have a finished, printed product.”

Da Vinci remained silent as Art walked around and inspected the shop, giving him some time to figure out the situation for himself. At first glance, it struck Art as a completely normal, “camera ready” print shop, the kind neighborhood printers used to make flyers, posters, and pamphlets for local businesses. But if that was the case, then why all the secrecy? The first odd detail that caught Art’s eye was a steel cabinet filled with ink canisters. Aside from a few yellows and reds, the vast majority of the cans were forest green, charcoal black, and white. Even sitting on the shelves, the colors brought to mind only one image. When he saw a shrink-wrapping machine sitting at the very end of the print line, he moved from suspicion to conviction. He could picture the small rectangles coming off the cutter, then being wrapped into neat little bricks of plastic, ready for sale
.

“Is this what I think it is?” Art gasped.

Pete answered with a simple, “Yeah.”

“You’re a
counterfeiter
.”

Art had barely ever used the word. He immediately recalled an encounter he’d had about a year earlier, when he’d been taken to the precinct house for questioning after a street battle with some Latin Kings. Waiting with him in the holding cell was a kid in his late teens who told him he’d been picked up for “copying.” He was dressed in a suit, and he was wired up and smiling like he’d just won the lottery. He explained to Art that while working as a janitor at the Sears Tower, he had seen a cutting-edge color copier in one of the offices and snuck in after hours to run off dozens of twenty-dollar bills. He’d spent the next two days on a wild spending binge, buying clothes, expensive meals, and drugs, until a suspicious cashier at a shoe store ran an eraser across one of his bills and the ink blurred. She called the police, who picked him up running down the street with a pocketful of bills. The kid had had so much fun that he was planning to print more bills as soon as he got out of jail, and Art had always wondered what became of him. The idea that people could print their own money astonished him, and it struck him as the ultimate crime.

Da Vinci was obviously way beyond amateurish larking with color copiers. Based on his equipment alone, Art could tell that Pete was a professional, a far higher grade of criminal than anyone he had ever met. All this time, his mother had been dating a man who held the keys to his own bank.

“Come over here and sit down, Arty,” da Vinci beckoned. Art joined him at some chairs he had set up near the light table. He could not believe what was happening. Were they going to print money right
now
?

“This has been in my family for a long time,” da Vinci began. His tone was serious, but not threatening. “I learned it from my father when I was young, right about your age. He learned from his uncle. The man who taught my great-uncle was not a relative, and I don’t know much about him. I know that he was from Italy, and somebody certainly taught him. It probably goes back hundreds of years. If you’re interested, I’m willing to teach you. It’s safer than stealing cars and there’s more money in it, but it’s also harder. It’s also a federal crime, and if you’re stupid enough to get caught, odds are you’ll be convicted. You won’t get out in a month like you did yesterday. You’ll do years, up to twelve for just your first offense. Are you interested?”

“Yes.”

“All right, but there are some rules,” da Vinci continued, and began a list that would grow longer than Art ever imagined.

The first rule was that Art could tell no one, not even relatives. “Once people realize what you do they will ask you for money,” Pete explained. “If you refuse to give it to them, they will hate you. If you give it to them, they will get caught and probably turn you in.”

The second rule was to never spend counterfeit money in the area where he lived. For reasons that Art would learn later, every counterfeit bill inevitably triggers an alarm, whether it’s in the hands of a grocery store clerk or a sophisticated bank counting machine. And once counterfeit bills are identified, they can be fingerprinted, forensically analyzed, and plotted and traced on a map that the authorities—namely the United States Secret Service—will use to close the geographical noose until it tightens around the counterfeiter’s neck.

The third rule was the most general and the most important. “Never be greedy,” da Vinci said. “If you’re cautious, you can have a good life. But if you print too much, you will be caught.”

Art swore to follow all the rules.

“Do you have any questions?” da Vinci asked him.

“How much do I get to keep?”

“You don’t get to keep any,” Pete said. “That’s not how this works. Passing counterfeit is a whole different ball game from making it, and if you got caught your mother would murder me. Every time we print, I’ll pay you seven thousand dollars in real money. Does that sound good?”

“Yeah.” It was more money that Art had ever made in his life.

“Any other questions?”

“What happens to the money after we make it?”

“It will go to clients.”

“Who?”

“That’s none of your business, and you’ll never know. That’s for your own good, Arty. Another rule is that you never reveal who your clients are.”

Da Vinci gave Art no more instruction that first day. After spending less than twenty minutes in the shop, he stood up and said that it was time to go. Just before they left, he spoke two final words.

“He told me to ‘get ready’ with that little devil smile he had,” remembers Art. “I was so fucking anxious, I couldn’t sleep. I stayed up all night long thinking that I was gonna make some money.”

 

 

 

COUNTERFEITING HAS SOMETIMES BEEN CALLED the world’s second oldest profession. Its conceptual birth, predicated on the simple notion that people will accept what you give them if it looks and feels “real,” is as ancient as rocks in a rice sack, but when it comes to money, most numismatic historians agree that counterfeiting probably dates back to very shortly after the invention of money itself, sometime around the year 700 B.C. in the ancient kingdom of Lydia. Enterprising craftsmen quickly learned that few people bothered to weigh lead and copper coins coated with a thin veneer of gold or silver as long as they bore the king’s stamp. The archeological record tells us that from that moment on, in virtually every society making coins there were also people faking them.

From the beginning it was a crime of legacy. Doing it successfully required an intimate knowledge of not only how real money was made and defended, but how to replicate it—specialized knowledge that could be passed on only by a mentor. One of the oldest accounts of counterfeiting comes from the third century B.C., when a Greek named Diogenes was banished from the city of Sinope, on what is now the Turkish coast, for “adulterating in coinage.” As the city gate closed behind Diogenes, he trudged off toward the horizon with an accomplice, the old man who had taught him how to counterfeit. His name was Tresius, and he not only happened to be head of the local bank, but was also his father.

Diogenes would have been forgotten had he not gone on to become one of the greatest philosophers in Greek history. He gave us such pearls as “We have two ears and only one tongue in order that we may hear more and speak less,” “Man is the most intelligent of animals—and the most silly,” and “He has the most who is most content with the least.” Diogenes is considered the king of the Cynics—no surprise considering that prior to his reformation he spent a lot of time passing fake for real.

Diogenes and his father got off easy. Throughout most of human history, the typical punishment for counterfeiting has been death. Rome fed its counterfeiters to the lions of the Colosseum, while in various medieval European nations they were drawn and quartered, burned at the stake, or—in the Netherlands—boiled alive. In the early days of the United States, counterfeiters were hanged, and the crime was considered so heinous that the first American currency, the continental, even bore the ominous warning “ ’ Tis death to counterfeit.” Up until 1994, it was still a capital crime in Russia, and it remains so in Vietnam, China, and most of the Middle East.

Although the crime is nonviolent, it undermines the very basis of every economy—and therefore threatens governmental authority. One of the founding fathers of modern economics, the English-man Sir Thomas Gresham, best summarized the threat in what is known as Gresham’s Law: “When there is a legal tender currency, bad money drives good money out of circulation.” We’ve all heard that old philosophical query, “If all the money in the world were fake, what differentiates it from the real?” Without an agreed-upon and vigorously protected standard of “real” currency, modern trade would not exist. The heart of the world’s economy, which over the last hundred years has revolved around the American dollar, would suffer a terminal attack.

Such a fiduciary meltdown has come close to happening before. In the decades just after America won its independence, national mints did not exist. Each bank hired engravers to scratch bill designs onto copper plates, then printed however many notes they needed. Thousands of different kinds of bills were in circulation, and for counterfeiters it was a golden age. The only way people could tell a real note from a fake was by reading broadsheets, which printed pages of warnings describing false bills on a daily basis. Bills deemed credible one day could be banned the next, and the situation became so bad that by the end of the Civil War as many as half of all bills in America were counterfeit.

Up to its ears in war debt, and with only worthless paper to pay it off, the federal government decided to act. On the day of his assassination, Abraham Lincoln directed the secretary of the treasury to form an organization to hunt down counterfeiters and bring them to justice: the United States Secret Service. Initially staffed by Civil War vets and private detectives, the Service employed what were then revolutionary methods—undercover infiltration, heavy use of informants, and the playing of counterfeiters against each other to bring down large networks. At the same time, the Service harassed anyone who came too close to trampling on the sacred turf of U.S. currency design. In one instance, they confiscated the molds and cookies of a Philadelphia baker because he was selling cookies designed to look like an Indian-head penny, then threatened him with a fine and jail time if he baked them again. In another famous case, agents ripped a rug out of a department store window because it had been stitched to resemble a dollar bill.

The Service’s zealotry, along with the unification of all currency production under the Bureau of Engraving and Printing in 1877, produced dramatic results. By 1903 the amount of counterfeit currency circulating had fallen to one dollar out of every hundred thousand—a phenomenal reduction. The Service was so effective that in 1901, following the assassination of President William McKin ley, Congress informally requested that they protect his successor, Theodore Roosevelt, and within a year presidential-protection duty became the other of half of what remains the Service’s joint mission. Throughout the twentieth century, improved law enforcement techniques and the Service’s expansion would cut into counterfeiting even more. Today, an infinitesimal three one-hundredths of one percent of the roughly seven billion bills circulating is counterfeit. At the same time, seventy-five percent of all counterfeit currency is confiscated before it hits the streets.

By the time Art entered da Vinci’s shop, in other words, counterfeiting had long been a dying art. Skilled practitioners like da Vinci who made a steady living at it were virtually extinct. He was the last of his line, a lone wolf offering to hand off what he knew to Art, who at seventeen could barely appreciate the gesture or understand the danger of the knowledge he was about to receive.