The Art of Making Money (21 page)

Most large malls, especially the older ones, are anchored by marquee department stores like Sears, Macy’s, or JCPenney’s. Art would usually park as close to them as possible, enter through their outer doors, then access the rest of the mall via their interior entrances. “We would never spend in that store, ever,” he notes, “that was our getaway plan. And usually it would be through the department store door, to the car, then an exit to the highway in one fucking sweet move.”

Once inside the mall, Natalie shopped while Art waited outside the stores and did his best to look like just another bored, dutiful husband beleaguered by an acquisitive wife. He’d keep an eye out for security guards and watch Natalie closely as she “did her thing.” Natalie was a pro. She wore wigs and often sunglasses to avoid being identified on security-camera tapes, her favorite of the former being a black bob, like Uma Thurman’s in
Pulp Fiction.
She’d pick an item under twenty dollars, browse for a few minutes more, then head for the cashier. If there was more than one register, she’d pick the attendant least likely to scrutinize the bill: “An old woman with thick glasses, or a young kid who looks like he doesn’t give a shit about anything—those are the best people to drop money on. The worst is a woman in her mid-thirties who looks conscientious about her job.”

Demographics also had a lot to do with how closely people inspected their bills. In populated, affluent states like California and New York, where counterfeits abounded, almost everyone would mark the bills with the pen or look for the watermark; in the Midwest and South, Art and Natalie might go all day without seeing the pen. Not that it mattered that much where they were. As Art and Natalie quickly learned, the new bills always passed. “We
knew
that we were gonna make money,” says Art. “There was no ‘might’ about it, or ‘I hope it’s good enough to pass here.’ It always worked.”

After visiting three or four stores, Natalie would hand the bags and the change to Art, who’d look increasingly like a beast of burden. When he could carry no more bags he’d head back to the car, dump the goods in the trunk, deposit the change in a satchel, and pick up more bills to give to Natalie.

“We could hit forty or fifty stores in two hours, come out with about thirty-five hundred or four thousand dollars,” Art says, “then we were gone.”

 

 

 

NEITHER ART NOR NATALIE remembers the first mall they hit, but five minutes afterward they realized they had a unique logistical problem: a trunkful of brand new, unwanted goods. Given Art’s experience with poverty and Natalie’s churchgoing background, throwing away perfectly good merchandise was unthinkable. So they grabbed a phone book, located the closest Salvation Army branch, and drove straight over. Placing the goods into the donation bin gave both of them an intense charity high. Art would later describe it “as powerful as the high I got when I was making the money,” and both he and Natalie would come to see it as a reason in itself for counterfeiting. From that moment on, the couple integrated charity into all their mall operations; if there wasn’t a Salvation Army store in the area, then they’d leave the “merch at a church” with a note requesting that it be donated to needy families.

Once they started donating, Art and Natalie felt a little weird leaving poor people useless items like scented candles and other tchotchkes, so they began tailoring parts of their passing operations to include things that families could actually use: Baby clothes and formula, toys, and school supplies became mainstays. “Pretty soon charity became an important part of what we were doing,” says Art. “We weren’t satisfied unless we gave stuff away. It became a rule, not just donating items but also that we had to give ten percent of whatever real money we made away. Sometimes it was as simple as dropping four hundred bucks in a bucket at church, which we did a lot. Another rule was that we never dropped money on mom-and-pop stores—only the big chains.”

They would later extend their charity to individuals as well. Natalie heard one Christmas about a friend of a friend living in Houston who was going through hard times. Her name was Brenda, and she had three daughters and two infant grandchildren. Brenda was on disability, suffering from severe carpal tunnel syndrome, and distraught because her children needed clothes, shoes, and hygiene products—Christmas presents were a luxury she didn’t even consider. Natalie had her friend make a list, then Art and Natalie showed up at Brenda’s doorstep two weeks later with everything on it and more: toys and clothes for the grandkids, music and shoes, jackets, shampoo, conditioner, bath soap, laundry detergent, toothpaste, toothbrushes, towels, washcloths, cleaning supplies. Every item was gift-wrapped, and even the dog got food and treats. Brenda herself was not forgotten. Art and Natalie bought her a paraffin-wax machine—a medical device used to relieve carpal tunnel syndrome. Brenda was reduced to tears by the couple’s generosity, which did not end there. When Natalie noticed that the family had no Christmas tree, she and Art ran out and bought one, along with a full-blown holiday feast.

Years later, a therapist would suggest to Art that perhaps all the charity was simply an attempt to cleanse the tremendous guilt he felt for his crimes. “I don’t think that was it,” Art would tell him. “For that to be true I’d have to feel guilty about counterfeiting in the first place, and I never did. Not for one day. I only felt guilty about some of the problems counterfeiting led to.” Guilt is rarely a byproduct of counterfeiting. The money looks real, and the moment it passes, it effectively becomes real. And for Art it was even better than the real thing. “I liked
my
money more than real money. It was mine. I made it with my own hands and every batch was a little different, with its own personality.” No one ever got hurt, and the fakes they left behind were trace molecules in the billion-dollar collection ponds of the national chains. Especially for Art, passing felt rebel liously empowering, each dropped bill a nip at the dispassionate system that he increasingly came to believe was as much a cause of his impoverished childhood as his father’s abandonment.

 

 

 

HITTING AT LEAST A MALL A WEEK, Art and Natalie ran out of counterfeit fast. At night in the motel rooms, they’d assemble the bills. Art had a five-gallon pail in which he kept his glues, sprays, and finishing tools, along with a portable hydraulic press that could clamp onto tables and counters. Their only requirement was a fan in the bathroom to vent the chemicals. They’d dry the bills on a portable clothesline, hanging the fresh notes festively above the beds like the streamers of a capitalist cult. On one occasion, Art even assembled five thousand dollars in a tent they’d pitched in a northern California campground. “I had the little zip windows open and I’m in there with my kit and my radio going. I’m out in the wilderness putting money together. Natalie was pissed because I fucked the whole tent up. My glue got everywhere.”

It was easy enough to buy a new tent the next day with the finished bills. Except for camping hardware and CDs, possessions became entirely disposable to them. They never did laundry or wore the same clothes more than twice. Once their clothes got dirty, they went into the donation pile with all the other goods.

With all the driving, traffic tickets were an omnipresent danger, especially since Art was a hopeless speeder. A single ticket could attach Art to a locale where counterfeit had popped. But like any conscientious criminal he carried fake IDs, or more precisely real IDs belonging to other people. He obtained them by getting trial passes from gyms in Chicago’s more prosperous neighborhoods and visiting them on a regular basis. Not only did he get free workouts, but if he saw a fellow fitness enthusiast who looked like him, he’d note the time of his arrival. Gym rats often follow a precise schedule, and the next time Art’s doppelgänger showed up he might return from a workout to find his locker ajar and his wallet gone. Art never used the credit cards; he was only interested in the driver’s license and photo IDs. On two occasions that summer, patrolmen pulled Art over for speeding, but there would never be a trace of Art’s presence anywhere near a papered mall. For years to come, guys in neighborhoods like Lincoln Park, Lakeview, and Old Town would receive receipts for tickets from places they had never been. The strangest thing was that all of them had been paid, in cash.

If the crime of creating counterfeit had brought Art and Natalie closer together, then the act of spending it on the road bonded them as surely as the twin sheets of their bills. They went river rafting in Wyoming, took a rock-climbing course in Utah. Hiking was their favorite pastime. One day in the Olympic Range, they stood on a cliff above a glacier lake.

“I want to jump in,” Art told Natalie.

“It’s at least three hundred feet, don’t even think about it. You’ll be dead.”

“I can do it.”

They joshed and argued over the jump for fifteen minutes until she won, then they clambered down to a beach for a safer entry. But Art liked the earlier view, so afterward they hiked back up and made love up above the tree line, cooled by nearby snowmelts with a granite boulder for a bed.

In western Nebraska, they had to stop the car when a herd of wild horses crossed the road in front of them. They left the car and marveled at the dappled crowd, making contact with eyes that held fear and ferocity. Then, it was the Art of romance.

“That’s us, baby,” he told Natalie.

All over America they saw twentysomethings like themselves laboring in restaurants and strip malls, burning away their youth in pursuit of paper. Cataleptic cashiers worked to their advantage, but also reminded them of what they had escaped. While everybody else chased the dollar and daydreamed of what they’d rather be doing, they were doing it. They became firm believers in the adage that retirement is wasted on the old. “We talked about how we should rent a motor home and just keep rollin’ on forever,” says Natalie. “We joked that we were doing life backwards, but was that any worse than what everybody else was doing? Waiting to get old to appreciate their freedom? I think we came closer to achieving pure freedom on that trip than anyone I’ve ever met. It sounds strange, but it was almost spiritual.”

“I think we were what humans were meant to be,” Art says, “completely free, almost like it was in the Garden of Eden. God wants us to play. I do not believe that people were meant to live the way they do. Slavery still exists; now we’re just slaves to the dollar.”

Time to philosophize about their lifestyle was just another one of its benefits. Whether or not freedom can be obtained through counterfeit means has been pondered for eons. Diogenes of Sinope believed that true freedom could be achieved only by rejecting both material goods and societal constructs. The path he ultimately took—hermitage—was one that Art and Natalie had no interest in. The goods and time they bought with counterfeit were real, and their perceived freedom didn’t feel any less so. Great moments and memories, however purchased, always feel stolen.

Freedom from the past was a more complicated matter. Art wasn’t even conscious of it at first, but the route they were taking—more or less due west from Chicago—shadowed the exact course his father had driven twenty years earlier when he had kidnapped Art and his siblings. Like a migrating animal, he had been navigating along the magnetic lines of his childhood. He didn’t become aware of it until they were in southern Oregon, where he saw to the south the allusive and shimmering peak of Mount Shasta.

“That’s where we’re going,” he told Natalie. “I used to live there.”

Memories of the last days he had spent with his father flowed from the landscape. He told her about how he had never wanted to leave Mount Shasta, about riding horses with his first girlfriend, his first kiss, and the horrible trip back to Chicago in the well of the Bronco. He wanted to go back to the last good place of his childhood and plant a flag there.

They rented a cabin in the pines outside the town of Mount Shasta. During the days they hiked the Cascades and swam in the nearby rivers, and at night they ate out and drank microbrews on the cabin’s porch. After a week, Art declared that they should live there, so they began driving around and looking at property. He talked about putting a few big deals together in Chicago, then building a house. “I liked the idea,” says Natalie. “It was a beautiful little town and what he was talking about sounded
normal
. That was something I always tried to encourage in him, not that I was ever very successful.” But normal wasn’t free. Because they were now all but living in Mount Shasta, they couldn’t drop counterfeit there without popping up on the Secret Service’s radar. They had to spend real money, and as the weeks in the town drew out into a month, Art grew restless. Plans and dreams meant commitment, surrendering the unpredictability that now defined the way he operated. For a counterfeiter who spends his own product, staying free means movement. One morning, just as quickly as he’d decided to stay, he told Natalie they were leaving.

“We’ll come back later,” he said, and she wasn’t exactly surprised. She wanted to see southern California anyway, and that’s where they headed next. They broke for the coast, cruised down Highway 1, and wound up in Huntington Beach. There, it was long days on the beach and L.A. nightclubs in the evenings. They were also in the mall capital of America, but after hitting a couple of the larger centers they ceased spending; Art noticed that southern Cali fornians paid attention to cash. The pen was omnipresent and every other cashier seemed to look for the watermark. Though the bills passed, Art felt like it was only a matter of time before a vigilant attendant sensed something amiss.

And so after three months on the road, they began backtracking. As promised, after Los Angeles Art drove them back to Mount Shasta, where they stayed for another week as he picked at the bones of his old happiness, but the past held less meat for him than the future. He still wanted to pursue his dream of land and a quiet life, but he was convinced that to achieve it he needed to return to the crucible that had always nurtured his life as a counterfeiter. Rather than staying in Mount Shasta and spawning, he steered them back to Chicago, the city in which, for him, pitfalls and possibilities are always indistinguishable.