The Art of Making Money (2 page)

He’d been born Arthur Julius Luciano, the son of an alcoholic trucker from Sicily, and a mentally ill Irish mother. In his early years, the family, which also included his younger brother Richard, had lived in Bridgeport—one of the toughest neighborhoods on Chicago’s South Side. When he was twelve, the Lucianos moved to the suburb of Lemont, a quarry town about fifteen miles southwest of Chicago. There they were among the poorest families in town. Their house lacked running water, and Luciano and his brother would lug their water from a nearby gas station, using it to drink and fill their toilet. On their beds were packing blankets from their dad’s truck.

Things only got tougher. Within a year of moving to Lemont, Luciano’s father died after driving his rig off an overpass on Chicago’s Damen Avenue. His mother was ill-equipped to raise the boys alone. She was prone to spells of verbal fixation in which she would repeat the phrase
Lotti-fa-dotti
to herself, sometimes for hours. Within a year she remarried another alcoholic trucker, who had a tendency to go after the boys with a belt after a few whiskeys. Whatever mitigating influence their mother might have had on their stepdad’s violence ended when she died of natural causes, when Luciano was only fourteen.

Poverty can always afford paradox, and the great one of Luciano’s childhood was that somehow the family always managed to feed a pack of five or six dogs. Completely undisciplined, they were of every breed and bark and occupied the house with the same prerogatives as the children. They’d sleep in the beds with the kids, and Luciano adored them. “I can’t say for sure that Art ever really loved anybody, but he definitely loved those dogs,” says Bruce Artis, one of Luciano’s childhood friends. “That was just the strangest thing about him, but maybe it wasn’t so strange—given his folks, I mean.”

By the time he was sixteen, Luciano had decided that home was not the place to be. He fixed up a broken-down ’65 Ford that his stepfather had abandoned in the front yard and began road-tripping as far from Lemont as he could afford. On one occasion he stole some checks from his stepdad to fuel a trip to Florida. After he used one to buy some fancy shoes in Pensacola, a suspicious clerk called the sheriff, who picked up Luciano and called his stepdad, who made him ride a bus back to Lemont barefoot. When Luciano was nineteen, an acquaintance recently released from prison taught him how to be a short-range con artist. He’d take a twenty-dollar bill and buy something for a dollar at a gas station. After getting his change, he would say, “Know what, buddy? I didn’t want to break that twenty. If I give you a five and five singles back can you give me a ten?” But Luciano would hand a five and four singles to the attendant, who would pass him the ten, then look at him and say, “You only gave me nine.” That’s when Luciano would respond, “Sorry about that. You know, I might as well just take back the twenty. You got nine, here’s another dollar which makes that ten and here’s another ten, so can I just get back my twenty?” By the time he was done confusing the attendant, Luciano would have an extra ten dollars.

Change raising was an ideal con for Luciano. It allowed him to make money on the road by using his natural charms. He was laid-back and funny, impossible not to like even though he was always on the make, whether it was fast money or women. With his high self-confidence, he began ranging farther afield, and to fuel his travels he graduated to paper hanging. He’d pull into a town, establish a residence and a checking account under a false name, and embark on a shopping spree. After a week or two, he’d return the goods for cash. By the time the checks bounced he’d be in the next state, on to the next scam.

It was during a ramble into Texas in the late sixties that he met Malinda Williams. She was a dark-haired beauty of seventeen who was waiting tables at a diner in Dallas. A country girl who’d grown up in the small town of Valley View, she’d moved to the city after her father got a job as a Dallas police officer. She’d been raised by conservative, evangelical parents, and was just beginning to taste her independence right at the time that half her generation needed little more excuse than rumors of a party six states away to leave home. Luciano regaled her with tales of the big city and his travels across the country, and within days she’d quit her job and joined him on the paper-hanging trail. Truth was, parts of Malinda were just as wild and unhinged as Luciano. Neither of them knew it then, but she suffered from bipolar disorder, and for the first few years there were a lot of highs. The couple latched on to the hippie movement, following the sun to places like southern California and Florida, then eventually gravitated back to Illinois and settled down in the Chicago suburb of Schaumburg, where Luciano worked various jobs in construction with his brother Richard. At some point, presumably either to avoid the draft or the law, Luciano changed his last name to his wife’s—Williams. Whatever his motivation for the name change, in March of 1972 his draft number indeed came up and Uncle Sam found him. He was briefly stationed in Texas at Fort Bliss, but according to his military records he struck his commanding officer shortly after discovering that the army planned to ship him off to Vietnam. He spent the rest of his service, 533 days, in Fort Leavenworth. He was there on Thanksgiving Day, 1972, when Art junior was born.

He rejoined his wife and son after his dishonorable discharge. They moved back to Schaumburg and picked up where they’d left off. Over the next two years, the couple had two more children, Wensdae and Jason, and for a little while it looked like Art senior would reform. Then, in December of ’77, he was arrested for robbing the truck in DuPage County and wound up in Stateville.

On the day he visited, Art junior was too young to think of his father as a “criminal”—a distinction that comes naturally only to those of us lucky enough never to have had a family member behind bars. In a vague way, little Art knew that his dad was “in a bad place full of bad men, but it was unfathomable that he was one of them.” All he remembers was sitting on his daddy’s lap in the visiting room, being perfectly happy that he indeed had a father, and ecstatically cognizant of the fact that in a few months his “pops” would be leaving Stateville to become, once and for all, a permanent presence in his life.

THINGS WENT ACCORDING TO PLAN at first. In March of 1978, Senior left Stateville to serve out the remaining six months of his sentence at a halfway house in Bensenville. During the day he worked at a wire-manufacturing plant, a job at which he excelled. Malinda visited him at night and on the weekends with the kids, and his reintegration into both his family and law-abiding society progressed smoothly. By the time he left the halfway house and rejoined his family, Magnum Wire was so impressed with Senior that the company made him a foreman, and he was able to begin anew his life as a father and husband in a three-bedroom home that was as respectable and as congruous as that of any workingman in town.

Art remembers that taste of normality with the possessiveness and incredulity of an old exile. “You wouldn’t believe it, but there was a time when I was a kid when I had pretty much a normal life,” he says. “I was a suburban kid. We had a nice home. We were a family. We did normal things like go to the movies. I remember my dad taking me to see
Superman,
you know, with Christopher Reeve, and holding his hand in line and thinking that was just the coolest thing.”

Despite Senior’s appearance of becoming a family man, what little Art and none of the other Williamses knew was that he had been seeing another woman even before leaving the halfway house. Her name was Anice Eaker and she was a lithe, blonde-haired, blue-eyed divorcée who lived on the other side of Bensenville with two kids from a previous marriage. From the moment she appeared she laid siege to Senior’s affections with pythonic determination.

Malinda did not give in easily. She learned of the affair and insisted that Senior break it off. He did, but a few days later Anice came by the house looking for him. She even had the temerity to let herself in the back door, but instead of finding Williams she found Malinda, seething and incredulous. Little Art was there, too, and watched wide-eyed as his mother proceeded to administer a beating as brutal as any he’d later see on the streets of Chicago. By the time it was over, she had broken Anice’s nose.

Anice later called the police, claiming that Malinda had tried to kill her. Confronted by Anice’s thoroughly battered face, they had little choice but to arrest Malinda. Senior bailed his wife out and convinced Anice not to press charges, but Malinda sensed that getting her husband away from the other woman would require more drastic measures. She told Senior that they either had to leave the state and head back to Texas, or she’d leave him.

Senior consented to the move, and within two weeks the family was packed up and headed south. They made a go of it in Houston at first, where Senior worked odd jobs, and when that failed to pan out they retreated to a mobile-home park in Pleasant Grove, a suburb of Dallas. Like many such marginal communities, it hosted a mix of blue-collar strivers, wanderers, the elderly, and religious zealots. The Williamses’ next door neighbors were an older couple that consisted of a World War II veteran and a Santería priestess from the Philippines. The priestess, whose name was Connie, had long black hair that nearly reached the ground, and a beautiful smile. She baby-sat the kids, sang to them, and spoiled them rotten with cookies and milk. She told Art stories about the moody pantheon of Santería demigods, conversed with invisible entities, and told him that a powerful spirit dwelled inside of him.

Little Art loved her.

While Art was learning about the dark arts with his mystical nanny, his dad was spending days on the other side of the park with an evangelical minister. With no work, an unhappy wife, and a guilty conscience, Senior was reaching for Jesus. Things came to head one day when he dropped by his neighbor’s place to pick up Art and found him kneeling in front of a Santería altar with candles ablaze. Harsh words, accusations of devil worship, and hexes ensued. The minister convinced Art senior to move his family to the other side of the park and organized a trailer-park exorcism, during which they held Art down on the floor of their makeshift church and commanded the devil to abandon the boy.

Needless to say, Art was terrified and hopelessly confused—a state that would only become more enhanced by what followed: Exhausted from all the moving, her husband’s bad decisions, and finally the commotion surrounding Junior, Malinda had a nervous breakdown. It manifested itself as a near-catatonic depression and rages at Senior over the fact that they’d descended from a relatively good life to the status of trailer trash.

The obvious solution, he told her, was to return to Illinois and quickly reestablish themselves. And so a little more than a year after they left, they moved back to the Land of Lincoln. They stayed with Senior’s half-brother Richard, who lived in Schaumburg—only eight miles from Bensenville and Anice Eaker. Senior’s proximity to his old mistress was probably enough to doom his marriage, but the catalyst for his final break with Malinda proved far more destructive and tragic.

Senior and Anice’s new plan was to enroll in bartending school, taking turns watching the kids while the other attended classes. One evening while Senior was watching the kids, Wensdae woke up and wandered into the kitchen, where she found her father at practice mixing drinks while the other kids slept. She was only five, but her memory of what happened next would stay with her like an immutable pathogen.

“What are you doing?” she asked her father.

“I’ll show you,” he said. He quickly left the house, returning minutes later with a bottle of red wine. He poured her a glass, encouraged her to drink it, and when she was happily dizzy, he led her into the back bedroom.

Malinda came home from class minutes later. She opened the bedroom door to find her husband lying naked on the bed with their daughter.

The fighting lasted most of the night. Senior tried to convince his wife that nothing had happened, but Malinda had seen. Her rage re-erupted the next morning even stronger. As they screamed and yelled at each other, Senior rounded up all three children and put them in the car. Malinda followed him to the driveway, demanding that he leave the children with her. When he refused and prepared to get in the driver’s seat, she tried to wrestle the keys away from him. He shoved her hard to the ground, then jumped into the car. As he drove off, Malinda was still on her back in the driveway, kicking and screaming for him to return the kids.

Days later, the police would pick her up from wandering the streets and take her to Elgin Mental Health Center, where she would be diagnosed with severe depression and spend the next month undergoing treatment.

Art never knew what caused the fight. Because of their individual shames, no one ever told him the truth about what his father had done. In Art’s childhood mind, everything congealed around the bizarre incident with Connie, and for years he’d harbor a vague shame that it had all been his fault—the work of the vengeful spirit inside him.