The Art of Making Money (13 page)

Sandy liked the idea from the first moment Art showed him a bill, a reaction that Art thought was hilarious because it was well known that Sandy had vision problems. “Sandy was blind as a bat,” Art says. “He had glasses and contacts but he didn’t like to wear them if he wasn’t driving, so he’d go around squinting all the time. I could have given him Monopoly money and he would have said it looked great. With him, it was all about trust, and he trusted me implicitly.”

Just to test the water, Sandy started out slow, ordering twenty-five grand from Art to see how the money played once it left his hands. When no one made a stink, he quickly upped his orders to a hundred thousand dollars—the maximum amount that Art agreed to make per da Vinci’s rules. Art didn’t ask Sandy many questions about where the money was headed; he knew that Sandy’s uncle got his cocaine from out of state, and given the quantities of cocaine he’d seen at Sandy’s house, it was safe to assume that his uncle was moving much larger quantities. Although Sandy offered, Art had no interest in meeting his uncle. “I never want to see his face,” he told his friend.

Art’s other client, Dmitri Kovalev, was a Russian he met at a party thrown by one of his Italian friends from Taylor Street. Thick chested, with brown hair and a heavy accent, Dmitri was a party animal who Art liked from the moment he saw him sitting at a table surrounded by friends and slamming five shots of vodka in a row. “This guy was the biggest party animal I’d ever seen,” Art remembers. “There aren’t many people I know who can outdrink me, but he could every time. He was one of those guys who seems to get more sober the more they drink. He liked booze and girls, but he wasn’t obnoxious. He was extremely polite and polished, a classy guy. And he was very Russian. The one way you could tell he was getting drunk was because he’d never shut up about how great Russia was and how much he missed it.” Dmitri was from St. Petersburg, which is perhaps best known for two things: its magnificent architecture and its Mafia, the latter of which is the most resilient and powerful in all of Russia. He liked to praise the merits of both. “He’d tell me that the United States was a pain in the ass. He’d say that in Russia, no one had to worry about cops or crackdowns because everyone was paid off. They could do anything they wanted. He always told me that one day he’d take me there.”

Dmitri was evasive about why he was in the U.S., and Art suspected it had to do with mob trouble. He ran a social club on the North Side, and after a few all-night visits, Art gleaned that gambling and prostitution orbited there. Each time Art came, Dmitri treated him like an old friend, and on a hunch Art decided to lay a note on him to see if he was interested in buying.

“Falshivki!”
Dmitri declared with a smile as he fondled the bill. “Pretty good. But in St. Petersburg we make better.”

“So you don’t want any?”

“I didn’t say that. How much?”

“Thirty cents on the dollar.”

The Russian said he’d think about it. Once again, within a week they had negotiated a hundred-thousand-dollar order, this time for the requested thirty-cent rate. And when Art posed his question about the direction his money would take once it left his hands, the Russian’s response was music to his ears: “Don’t worry, Arty,” Dmitri told him. “It will leave the country fast.”

 

 

 

AS THE DUNGEON TOOK OFF, Art realized that his apprenticeship with da Vinci had probably been more than a generous criminal scholarship; satisfying multiple orders for counterfeit is heavy work for a lone operator. He soon enlisted some help of his own, drawing on friends from Taylor Street and Bridgeport who were willing to risk federal time for a quick profit. He intentionally kept them largely ignorant of each other’s activities, but each man played a role, and together they formed a colorful crew.

Along with Mikey, Art’s most trusted associate was Giorgi Mu nizzi, a Bridgeport native who’d grown up just four blocks from Art, but in terms of advantages, they may as well have been miles apart. Giorgi was Bridgeport royalty, the grandson of one of the Outfit’s most powerful and legendary bosses. “Out of respect for other family members, I won’t say my granddad’s name,” declares Giorgi, “but everyone knows who he was. I mean, he was
the boss
. People would tremble when they saw him, that’s how mean he was.” One hundred percent Sicilian, with dark skin, curly black hair, and a laid-back air, Giorgi had grown up surrounded by men who feared and served his family, but he never joined the organization and insists he was never pressured to—he didn’t have to, because he already enjoyed all the privileges of being associated by lineage. “It was crazy,” Giorgi says of his status. “My whole life, people have come up to me and given me money. For nothing. For being somebody’s grandson. It’s bizarre, but I’d have to be stupid not to appreciate that.”

Art had witnessed the power of Giorgi’s family firsthand at the age of thirteen, when he unwittingly stole a Cadillac belonging to Giorgi’s dad and was quickly arrested. Giorgi accompanied his dad down to the station, where he saw Art, who was three years younger than him, sitting in handcuffs and locking eyes with him. Giorgi knew Art from the neighborhood as a tough little kid from the projects who had it rough. He told his dad that Art was okay, and the cops released Art right then. After that, Giorgi was the only kid who wasn’t an SD who was allowed to walk through the projects by himself. He was also one of the few people close to Art who had known da Vinci, thanks to a bookmaking operation he later ran out of Ed’s Snack Shop. “He was a genius,” Giorgi says of Pete. “I didn’t realize it until Art showed me what he learned, but I always sensed that about him. And it didn’t surprise me that Art was the one he picked to teach.”

All these connections made Giorgi a natural confidant for Art, who was quickly amazed by the Mafia prince’s gift as an acquisition specialist. With his connections to the Outfit, his hands were on the pulse of what was coming in off the trucks and trains, and if he heard about something he thought Art could use—computers, ink, paper stock—he’d set it aside and deliver it to Art factory-fresh.

Once a batch was ready for delivery, Art usually called Tony Puntillo, a garrulous cabdriver he’d known since his teenage years. A wiry Italian who loved nothing more than trash-talking, Tony was Art’s wheelman. Whenever Art needed to move money and material, or avoid tails, he’d call Tony on his beeper and leave him a number between 1 and 15. Each number represented a different location in the city, and unless he was stuck in traffic Tony would pull up within half an hour, ready to turn his cab into a race car or bury it in a sea of other yellow taxis if needed. “Art used to make five-dollar bills just for me,” Tony remembers. “It’s no secret that I like to talk, I like people. But if you’ve just come in from out of town or from a bar and you’re in my cab, you won’t know what hit you. I’ll be talking your ear off so much that you won’t notice that I’ve given you two of Art’s fives back as change. If you’re an asshole, I’ll give you four.”

Along with providing security at drop-offs, Big Bill helped with production, running errands for ink and other supplies that constantly seemed to be tapping out. And of course Mikey remained Art’s primary dealmaker and counselor. Even if Art arranged a deal himself, he’d usually consult Mikey for a second opinion. “Half the time I was teaching him things,” Mikey recalls. “Where was the deal? Is it in a public place? If it is, you show up an hour early, park in a dark spot, and watch so if somebody is planning to fuck you, there’s a good chance you’ll see it coming.”

Like da Vinci, Art was willing to teach his friends the secrets of how he made counterfeit, but few had the inclination. They were happy to help him with piecework, but when it came to the details and artistry, they quickly lost interest. “Oh, we all said we wanted to know how he did it,” laughs Mikey. “Lots of people bugged him. I probably knew more than anybody. I could tell you the steps, but I still don’t know how he did it so
well
. He was gifted. I know I could never have done what he did.”

Despite such praise, Art is dismissive about the counterfeit he made during his Dungeon days. “It was caveman stuff,” he says. “Compared to what came later, I don’t even like to think about it.” But his cohorts have a different opinion.

Chris Sophocleus, a Greek social-club owner who was a close friend of Art’s, had so much faith in the “Dungeon dollars” that he put them to the ultimate test one night when Chicago PD and the FBI raided his club. Art was in the club at the time, and carrying about five thousand dollars in counterfeit—bills that would surely be scrutinized once the officers and agents began searching patrons.

“Give me whatever you’re holding,” Chris whispered to him. “I can mix it into the cash box.”

Art quickly passed Chris the bill roll, and a few minutes later both he and Chris watched as an FBI agent proceeded to count out the contents of the box, including Art’s five grand, on the hood of a CPD cruiser.

The agent gave every single bill back to Chris.

 

 

 

AS HIS OPERATION FELL INTO PLACE, for the first time in his life Art had more money than he knew what to do with. Having been raised with a scarcity of dollars, he might have taken a conservative approach to spending, but the knowledge that he could always make more overrode any parsimonious instincts. His outlook, certainly not uncommon to criminals, was purely feast or famine, almost as if the money would expire if he didn’t spend it first. “We’d do a deal and Art’d have five thousand dollars in his pocket,” remembers Pepitone. “We’d hit a bar and he’d go in there and the first thing he’d do was buy everyone a round, the whole bar. Then he’d just spend and spend. By Monday morning he’d be asking
me
if he could borrow twenty bucks.”

“No one could spend money like me,” Art proudly admits. “If I had it, I spent it. I was stupid, because if I had invested the money I made I’d never have to work again. But that’s the criminal attitude: You live from one crime to another.” Art wielded his cash the Bridgeport way: He carried a fat roll in his right front pocket, small notes shelling the large so no one could see how much he had. Wallets were for squares, people who didn’t understand that the best way to get anything done was to whip out that wad at a moment’s notice, crack out a C-note, then get the roll back in your pocket and next to your cock as fast as possible. All day long the roll came out; for groceries, smokes, cocaine, alcohol, oversized tips, strippers, new clothes, bets, valet parking.

Art’s favorite exuberance was to rent limousines for a night out with friends. For this, he’d call a driver in his sixties who went by the name “Mr. U.” Despite or perhaps because of his age, Mr. U. loved nothing more than taking the kids for a night out. He’d drive with the partition window down so he could be one of the boys, breaking balls and telling stories about his own days as an outlaw. “He was Irish mob straight to the core: red in the face with only two fingers on his left hand. People said he got the other two shot off doing something back in his younger days.” A typical night would start out with Mr. U. meeting Art, Mikey, and Giorgi on Taylor Street, then they’d pick up a few more friends and head for a steak dinner at Gibson’s or the Chop House. After that, they’d hit the bars and clubs. If Art was feeling particularly elated over a deal, or if he was just plain drunk and happy, he’d pony up the bar round. “People would freak out because that’s something you only see in movies. You drop a grand in one shot. But the best thing about it is that the women see shit like that and they just swarm in.”

The vast majority of money Art spent in Chicago was real. Da Vinci had warned him of the dangers of spending locally, but he also found it distasteful to lay counterfeit on doormen, bartenders, and waiters from his hometown who were sweating out legitimate jobs. “My ma worked in a restaurant; service jobs are brutal. So I didn’t like to hand out counterfeit when I was partying. To me, that would have ruined the whole experience. It made me feel good to give them real money. And I’ll tell ya, pretty soon I didn’t wait in lines. I got in for free.”

Beyond the disposable spending, there were the goods and toys, like a high-end Kenwood stereo system for his car, new computer equipment, and Armani shirts, which he had tailored because he was big in the shoulders. An unwritten rule of criminal masterminds is that they must also have a collection, the more bizarre the better; Escobar had a zoo, Capone had jewelry, and though Art wasn’t exactly an underworld emperor he wasn’t about to be kept out of the club. He took to collecting antique money, especially notes from the “Golden Age” when each bank printed its own currency. He bought hundreds of bills from dealers and fences that he knew; old Wells Fargo notes from the California gold rush, silver notes with portraits of Indian chiefs, and bills with tall ships, locomotives, and intricately engraved scenes from Americana. He cared less for their market value than for their aesthetic impression. His prize pieces were a set of three immaculate “fractional notes”—five-, fifteen-, and twenty-five-cent bills that the Union printed during the Civil War because of metal shortages. “I told Karen they were quite valuable, so what does she do? She takes them and has them laminated, thinking she’s doing a good thing. They were completely ruined.”

 

 

 

HIDING HIS CRIMINAL ACTIVITIES from Karen became an increasingly high-stakes game for Williams. Each weekday he would eat breakfast with his wife and son, put on a Windbreaker bearing a “Bello Construction” logo, then Karen would drop him off at one of Morty’s construction sites. He’d kiss her good-bye, throw in a workingman’s sigh at the prospect of another day of manual labor, and wait until she turned the corner. Afterward he’d make his way to the Dungeon or over to Taylor Street. If he wasn’t printing, he’d meet up with his pals for cappuccinos, then head to the basketball courts at Sheridan Park, the horse track at Arlington, or maybe a White Sox game. Or they’d just spend the day partying at a bar or a friend’s house.