The Art of Making Money (15 page)

He called some of his old robbery crew members and, on Friday, June 4, drove the marathon 940 miles from Valley View to Chicago. Sure enough, on the following morning Art watched from a car up the street as Morty and his retinue filed out of the house, boarded cars, and left for the wedding. He waited a few minutes to make sure nobody was left in the house, then broke in through the back door. Inside Morty’s bedroom closet, Art found a steel lockbox, which he opened with a pry bar. “We got the box and pulled about sixty thousand in cash out of there,” Art remembers, “but that wasn’t everything. We also pulled diamonds and emeralds! They were folded real nice in rice-paper envelopes, and there was also a little box inside the big box. Inside that there were earrings and jewelry and watches and gold necklaces.”

After dividing the take with his crew and fencing it, Art returned to Texas with about forty grand. “I figure it was about as much as Morty had shorted me over the years,” he says. As usual, he began burning through the cash with a vengeance. “I was taking all four girls out, partying a lot,” he explains. “I was still working, but construction pay in Texas was low because there you’re competing with Mexicans. But the thing about the Morty job was that, when I did it, all the thrill came back.”

That thrill was fresh in his mind a few months later when his first Texas criminal temptation presented itself. By then, Art and Janet had broken up and he’d started to pursue Susan—the artsy brunette. Art sensed that Susan was more infatuated by his bad-boy image than any of the other girls, and he put it to the test one day after she came home from a shopping spree loaded up with new clothes and jewelry.

“Where’d you get all this stuff?” Art asked her.

“A friend of mine took me shopping,” Susan said. “Her boyfriend’s a huge drug dealer in Denton, and she was telling me he’s got like stacks of money underneath his bed. She just goes in there and snatches some whenever she wants to shop.”

Art’s clean future in Texas disintegrated as she spoke. Up until that point, he hadn’t really given the girls many specifics about his criminal activities. He’d mentioned that he’d been in a gang and even the counterfeiting operation, but he had billed it all as a dark past that he was trying to put behind him, which had been true enough when he’d said it.

“Back in Chicago I used to rob drug dealers like him,” he told Susan. “I made good money at it.”

“Really?” Susan said, fascinated. “How’d you do it?” He told her a few stories from his drug-pirate days, watching her eyes get bigger as she realized that he wasn’t kidding. Once she was immersed in the criminal contact high, he engaged her in playful interrogation. Within ten minutes he knew where the dealer lived, what he drove, and what he sold. Susan had no criminal background, but by the time he was done with her she was helping him plan the job.

The dealer’s name was Clayton. He lived in an apartment complex on the other side of town. He drove a black Mustang and peddled pot and Ecstasy. Susan didn’t know which apartment was his, so Art hid in some woods across from the complex and waited until he saw him leave. Once he had the residence pinned down, he began forming a plan.

Deeming it too dangerous to enter the dealer’s house alone, Art enlisted Jason, who after eight years had recently been released from the boys’ home in Des Plaines. Art had visited Jason many times over the years with his mother and sister, and had never held any illusion that the home was helping him. By the time he finally left, Jason could barely read or write, and at the time, he was living with Wensdae and looking for work. When Art asked him if he was interested in making a fast buck, Jason jumped at the opportunity and flew down to Dallas the very next day. If there was any doubt among the girls that Art was serious, one look at his brother eliminated it. “When we picked him up at the airport, he had this big Chicago Bulls jacket on,” Art remembers. “He looked like a straight-up thug from the South Side.”

 

 

 

ART’S PLAN WAS STRAIGHTFORWARD: While he and Jason waited in the woods near Clayton’s, Susan would call the dealer and ask him to deliver some marijuana. Once Art and Jason saw him leave, they’d emerge from the woods, break in, and rifle the apartment for cash and drugs. Their getaway driver would be Natalie, who’d be waiting up the street.

“Things went perfect at first,” remembers Art. “Susan called, Clayton came out and left, and me and my brother jimmied his sliding-glass doors and went right up in there.” In Clayton’s bedroom, the brothers found about seventeen thousand dollars in cash, a vacuum cleaner bag stuffed with hydroponic weed, and five prescription bottles filled with Ecstasy. Art was feeling so comfortable inside Clayton’s that he even dallied to liberate some of Clayton’s high-end cologne off his bureau. “That’s how much of a jagoff I was,” he muses. But they ended up paying for every extra second: When they opened the front door to leave, the first thing they saw was Clayton, holding his key in his hand, about to insert it into the lock.

“He looks up, and the look on his face!” Art recalls. “Can you imagine? I covered my face and started walking real fast. My brother’s behind me and he says, ‘Who the fuck is that? What’s going on?’ I’m like, ‘That’s
him,
walk!’ And the dude freaks out and starts following us.” As soon as Jason realized Clayton was following, he wheeled around to confront him, but rather than take on two men, the dealer backed off. Art and Jason took a side street, circled around, and met Natalie. But a minute after they pulled away Art spied the black Mustang behind them. Clayton was on his cell phone, undoubtedly rounding up friends to come help him take back his drugs and money by force. Art had no intention of being around when that happened.

“When we get to the next stop sign, Jason and I are jumping out,” he told Natalie. “Then you turn around and get the fuck out of here, go home. He’s gonna follow us because we’re carrying all the bags.”

Natalie, who was terrified of being left alone, didn’t like the idea at all, but by then she had already reached the next stop sign. Before she could protest, the brothers were already out the door. The ruse worked. After the brothers bailed out of the car, Clayton backed up and tried to follow them, but they quickly lost him by jumping fences. The problem was that they weren’t familiar with Denton, and soon found themselves slogging through a swamp on the outskirts of town. As the day wore on, the dejected brothers started arguing, then wound up getting into a small fistfight right there in the muck. By the time they finally found their way back to Susan’s apartment, hours later, they were both covered in mud, shrub-cut, and exhausted.

Natalie, Susan, and Lucy were crying when they arrived, terrified that Art and Jason had been killed because Clayton had called and threatened as much. Art calmed the girls down and assured them that the dealer was simply talking tough. But Clayton did do something: He found the phone number and address of Art’s aunt Donna, then called her house and threatened to burn it down unless he got his money and drugs back. That was as far as Art was willing to let it go. He and Jason hid in the woods again, waited for Clayton to leave his home, and gave him a South Side beating. By the time they were done, he not only promised to leave them alone, but left town altogether.

 

 

 

CRIME SO OFTEN POISONS RELATIONSHIPS that it’s easy to forget its power to feed them. Although the Clayton robbery was a fiasco, for Art the episode’s most surprising aspect wasn’t getting caught: It was the women. “They were frightened, but they stood strong,” he says. “And in spite of everything, they had a taste for it. I blame myself for that. I think in order to be a criminal, to a certain extent one has to have it in them, but I was the catalyst that brought it out. I straight-out corrupted them.”

Art wasted little time devising a way he could use two of the women, Susan and Lucy, to hit drug dealers. On a trip across the Mexican border to Nuevo Laredo, he obtained a bottle of Rohypnol— better known as the “date rape drug”—and starting taking the girls to honky-tonks. The group would perch themselves at a table where they could watch the bar, and Art would scout for cowboy drug dealers. Except for the boots and hats, they were as conspicuous as Chicago dealers. They carried the fat billfolds and beepers, and came and left the bar every ten minutes. After Art zeroed in on a mark, one of the girls would sidle up to the bar, take a nearby stool, and chat him up. Over the course of a few hours, the girls would let the dealers buy them drinks, growing increasingly flirtatious until coyly suggesting that the dealer take them back to his place. And when they’d pull out of the parking lot, Art and the other girls would be sharking right behind them.

Once a girl got inside a dealer’s house, she’d fix him a drink and drop in the Rohypnol. The drug was infallible and magnificently fast, usually about fifteen minutes before a dealer passed out. The girl would open the front door and Art and the others would breeze right in. With the dealer out cold, they’d leisurely rifle the house until they found the drugs and cash, then drive away. “It was so easy it almost wasn’t fair,” Art muses.

Now fully back in the criminal life—and with a harem for a crew no less—Art wasn’t so sure that staying straight was his best move. “There was too much opportunity in Texas. These rednecks were just clueless, the girls were down, and it wasn’t like we were robbing nice people. These guys were dirtbags and we were kinda their reckoning.” After getting into an argument with a coworker at a construction site, he quit his day job, rationalizing that the wages were too low anyway thanks to an overabundance of migrant workers from Mexico.

Not long after he and the girls began pulling the Rohypnol gambits, Art met Dave Pettis, a local from Denton who rode a motorcycle and seemed to share Art’s appetite for excitement. Like Art, Pettis talked big when he had a few drinks in him and came off as fearless, though in his case it was mostly a front. He had very little criminal experience, but Art took him under his wing, thinking that it might be useful to have a male crew member around. And within a week of meeting him, Pettis approached Art with a potential score. Pettis had a girlfriend whose father was a struggling jeweler. Times being tough, he was looking to liquidate his business, and figured the fastest way was to cash in on theft insurance. All he needed was someone to break into his house and steal his inventory; he’d report the theft and file his claim, and the hired thief would get to keep about twenty-five thousand dollars’ worth of gems and precious metals. “I’d do it myself,” he told Art, “but you have more experience with this than me, and we’ll still have to break in and be smooth about it. He works from his home and he has neighbors and everything.”

Art was not only flattered, but it sounded like a dream opportunity. Even if they somehow got arrested the jeweler wasn’t going to press charges, and there’d also be no need for surveillance since they’d know exactly when he’d be out and for how long. The jeweler was leaving town the upcoming weekend, and he had told Pettis that he wouldn’t report the theft until Sunday night.

On the designated Saturday, Dave and Art bought some gloves and a pry bar, then cased the house, a one-story home on the outskirts of Denton. Once it was dark, Art dropped Pettis off on the closest corner, then joined him after he’d pried his way in through the back door. Just as Dave had said, the house was dark and deserted, and he led Art straight to the jeweler’s workshop. It was then that Art started to have misgivings. Even for a home business, the shop seemed little more than a tinkerer’s den—a few power tools, a work lamp, some plastic bins of beads, and a file cabinet. When they pawed through the cabinet’s drawers they found about thirty gold and silver chains and semiprecious stones, but nothing close to as valuable as what Dave had described. “It was like we were robbing somebody’s artsy-and-craftsy grandma,” Art says. “There was maybe five thousand dollars’ worth of shit.”

Dave seemed confused and dejected. He wanted to search the house more but Art insisted that they leave immediately. Whoever the jeweler was, he had either lied about his inventory or Dave had misled him. After Art threatened to leave him there alone, Dave reluctantly followed him back to the car. On the way back to Valley View, Dave drove fast and nervously, weaving in and out of traffic as Art chastised Pettis for lying to him about the merch. And it was smack in the middle of that harangue that the red and blue strobe lights of a cruiser from the Denton County Sheriff’s Office graced the rearview mirror.

Art suspected that the deputies were pulling them over for a simple traffic violation, and he urged Dave to pull over and play it cool. But Pettis’s nerves were overloading, and when one of the deputies approached the driver’s side and asked him for his license and registration, he fumbled and failed to find them, then stammered as the deputy quizzed him as to where he was headed. Suspicious, the deputy requested to search the car—and Dave refused so adamantly that the cops went ahead and searched it anyway on the grounds that they had reason to believe there were drugs in the car.

They had placed the jeweler’s goods into an old bowling-ball bag they’d found in the house, and when the police opened it and saw the chains and stones their suspicions were immediately aroused. The bag was monogrammed with the jeweler’s name, which they used to look up his address. While Dave and Art waited, a unit was dispatched to the house, where officers quickly discovered signs of a break-in. The pair were arrested and taken to the Denton County Jail. A day later, they were both charged with burglary of a habitation—a first-degree felony that, under Texas’s infamously harsh penal code, can carry a maximum sentence of twenty years.

Dave had lied about the whole enterprise—a nervous novice, he’d invented the story about the insurance scam as a way to enlist someone with more experience to commit a genuine robbery (though Art’s familiarity with crime hadn’t helped much when it came to assaying the trustworthiness of a fellow criminal). The only truth was that the jeweler had indeed been the father of Dave’s girlfriend, but it turned out the two men hated each other, meaning the jeweler had every intention of pressing charges.