The Art of Making Money (32 page)

“United States Secret Service!”

Art didn’t even bother turning off the water. “I figured they had me at that point, so I just tried to enjoy the rest of the shower. Good bet it was the last private shower I’d have in a long time! But those motherfuckers came right into the bathroom.”

“Art Williams?” one of them asked, poking his head in the door.

“Yeah, that’s me.”

“Get out, get dressed. We need to talk to you.”

Art toweled off, threw on some jeans, and stepped out of the bathroom to find himself facing two Secret Service agents and two deputies from the local sheriff’s office. The lead agent identified himself as Adrian Andrews—a name that Art thought was a little too obviously fake. He was black, in his early thirties, with a polite yet determined air. He had wanted to be a Secret Service agent since the age of thirteen and would later go on to head the Oklahoma City field office. Since the Service refuses to comment, what occurred next is based entirely on Art’s recollection.

“There are children in the house, so your mother-in-law has suggested we talk in the back bedroom,” Andrews said. Art’s heart dropped. Before jumping in the shower, he had set down the travel bag containing the laptop in precisely that room. When they entered it, Andrews handcuffed Art, read him his rights, then sat him down on the bed. Andrews took a chair in the corner. The bag, with the laptop actually sticking out of it, was literally inches from the agent’s feet.

“So we went through your father’s house,” Andrews explained. “Your stepmother, Anice, pretty much told us everything. We know about the House of Blues, we know you went up to Alaska, we have counterfeit that you made and statements from four individuals corroborating that you made it. You’re done, we know everything. But there are still things you can do to cooperate. We want the files, Art, your computer, the disks.”

Art wasn’t convinced he was in such a bad position. He and Natalie possessed no counterfeit currency. Secret Service agents have a long history of lying and exaggerating to extort confessions, and Art was thinking that the only thing that the agents knew was what one person—Anice—had told them. It seemed impossible to him that any other member of his family in Alaska, particularly his father, would be willing to testify against him.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he calmly told the agent. “Anice is lying. Take a close look at that woman and you’ll realize it’s all bullshit.”

“Okay Art,” Andrews said, “we’re going to bring you and Natalie in, then. We’ll sort this out behind bars.”

“Do whatever you need to,” Art said. All he wanted was to get the agents out of the room and away from the computer as quickly as possible. He was doing visual calisthenics to not keep staring at it himself, and the fact that nobody had seen it yet gave him hope. “It was right there at his fucking feet!” he says. “All he had to do was just look fucking down. Everything he needed to bury me, literally right next to his shiny shoes.”

As they got up to leave, one of the sheriff’s deputies suggested to Andrews that they search the house.

Art watched Andrews’s face as he turned to the deputy; the agent’s eyes turned inward, as if he were calculating the benefit of spending an hour obtaining a search warrant, then another digging through closets and drawers. The agent’s response had an almost biblical mercy to it.

“Nah, there’s probably nothing here,” he said.

 

 

 

LATER THAT EVENING, both Art and Natalie visited the interrogation room at the local sheriff’s office. Natalie entered first. She came out five minutes later in tears. “They told me I was never going to see my children again,” she says. “They said that my mother would go to prison, my life as I knew it was over. They didn’t mess around. It was, ‘Either you cooperate or everybody goes to prison.’ ” When she came out of the room, she had just enough time to tell Art, who was waiting outside, that everything would be all right. From that, Art knew that Natalie had told the agents nothing. Andrews confirmed it minutes later when it was Art’s turn on the hot seat.

“Your woman must really love you,” he said, “because I pretty much used everything I could in the short period of time she was here. She didn’t say anything. I suppose you’re not going to be any different, are you?”

“No, because I don’t know anything.”

“Okay,” the agent said obligingly.

Art was beginning to like Andrews. He knew that the agent had just been doing his job when he tried to turn Natalie, and now that he’d failed, he seemed relaxed and surprisingly respectful.

Andrews indeed released Natalie that evening, but the following morning Special Agent Clark e-mailed him two photographs from Anchorage. One was a photo Vicki Shanigan had taken of Natalie during a family outing; the other was a photo taken by an employee from a camera store in Anchorage’s Fifth Avenue Mall who suspected the bill Natalie had handed him was counterfeit. Pretending to test a digital camera, he had snapped a shot of her before she left the store. Once Andrews compared the photos, he immediately worked up an arrest warrant for Natalie. Keeping with the original plan, she’d fled to the ranch in Longview after leaving the sheriff’s office, but with two children to take care of she was in no position to stay on the lam for long. Within six weeks, she’d turn herself in.

By July 17, the Secret Service had effectively shut down Art Williams’s counterfeiting operation—a criminal spree that had spanned fourteen years, minus the four he’d spent in Texas. How much money he had made, sold, and passed during that time is impossible to say. “I figure it was somewhere around ten million,” he says, but Art was never one to keep records. If he made only half of that, then it was an extraordinary run, given that the vast majority of counterfeiters are arrested long before their first million ever hits the streets. He had taken one of the oldest criminal arts, evolved it, and—for a sweet time—defeated the most secure bill the United States government had ever created. And for an even briefer time he had made one thing that can never be counterfeited—his father—proud.

Now it was time to pay.

14

DEBTS

Punishment is a fruit that unsuspected ripens within the flower of the pleasure which concealed it. Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit, cannot be severed; for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end preexists in the means, the fruit in the seed.

—RALPH WALDO EMERSON, “COMPENSATION,”
Essays, First Series
, 1841

 

 

 

 

In the final, heartwarming sequence to
Over the Top,
Lincoln Hawk’s estranged son shows up in Las Vegas to root for his father at the National Arm Wrestling Championship. Hawk has bet everything he owns on the outcome, and in true hang-lipped fashion, Stallone’s character defeats his nemesis in the last round, securing a financial windfall and, most importantly, symbolically defeating the troubled past that separates him from his son. They drive away into the Vegas sunset, joshing about plans to form their own company.

For the Williams family, the contest would be
United States vs. Arthur J. Williams Sr., et al
. It would take place in an Anchorage courtroom, and this time no technicalities offered easy salvation. Agents Clark and Sweazey had been cautious and calculating. They had produced more than a hundred pages of phone and wire transcripts detailing the counterfeiting activities of what was now referred to by the
Anchorage Daily News
as the “Mat-Su” counterfeiting family, after the Matanuska-Sustina Valley where Senior lived. They had written confessions from Anice, Vicki, and Jim Shanigan. Senior’s home had supplied them with physical evidence, including receipts of converted cash, and they had counterfeit currency from several stores in the Anchorage area. In Natalie’s case, one of those stores had provided a photograph of her, taken moments after she passed a bogus note.

Every one of the six conspirators faced at least one count of utterance, while Art, Natalie, Senior, and Anice were also looking at one count of manufacturing each. But counterfeiting wasn’t their only crime. Under federal law, all six were also charged with “conspiracy,” which holds that anytime two or more people plan to commit an offense against the U.S. government, that, too, constitutes a crime punishable by up to five years. Of all the defendants, Senior had it the worst. The weapons the ATF had confiscated in his home severely violated his parole conditions, meaning that regardless of the federal charges he was most likely facing prison time.

Vicki and Jim Shanigan were in the best position of all. They had turned against their best friends and performed masterfully for the Secret Service, and in addition they had agreed to testify against the Williamses come trial. As a reward, the Service recommended that they do no prison time. But in the more ambiguous system of justice among thieves, they were rats, the lowest form of criminal. Their best defense against
that
was that Senior and Anice had been using them to do their dirty work, stringing them along with promises of riches that they were pathetically incapable of delivering.

James Singleton, the federal judge assigned to the case, recognized the fact that all of the Alaskans in the conspiracy were small-fry compared with Art. Senior, Anice, and Vicki and Jim Shanigan all made bail. With long histories of residence in the state, and their relatively advanced ages, none of them were considered flight risks. All of them had cooperated, and they basically told the same story: They’d been seduced by the authenticity of Art’s bills, tempted by the prospect of money that appeared so real that it was easy to pretend that it actually was. They were scavengers. The real prize for the feds had always been Art, and they had wanted him long before he ever set foot in Alaska.

 

 

 

ART HARBORED NO ILLUSIONS about making bail himself; his history and ability to produce counterfeit on the run made him a tremendous flight risk. But only three weeks after he was arrested, Art would learn just how small an enemy of the federal government he was. He was in the federal transfer facility in Oklahoma City, in transit back to Anchorage to face arraignment, when the planes hit on September 11. He watched the footage on the rec room TV, part of that forgotten archipelago of two million incarcerated Americans who were as astonished, frightened, angry, and saddened by the attacks as the rest of America and most of the world. He was supposed to board an “air con” plane the next morning for Alaska, and like every other flight, his, too, was canceled. They told Art he might have to wait a couple weeks before getting on with his trial.

That same morning, by pure coincidence, Natalie turned herself in. She put on her nicest skirt and blouse, took extra time with her makeup, and drove to the federal building in Texarkana. She heard about the attacks over her car radio on the way, and didn’t consider that it might be a bad day to turn herself in. Her world was already in collapse, and the fact that the rest of the country felt that way, too, didn’t seem like a reason to prolong the inevitable. When she showed up for her reckoning with the Department of Justice, she found an office full of awestricken agents standing in front of TVs.

“We need to do this fast,” a processing officer told her. “We’ve kind of got our hands full right now.”

They booked and released her on bail in less than an hour.

By early October, Art was back in Alaska, awaiting formal charges in the Anchorage Jail. Of all the detention facilities he’d become familiar with, he found it the absolute worst. “It’s already bad enough that most Alaskans are fucking crazy because they don’t have any sunlight in the winter,” he says, “so imagine what they were like in a cold, nasty jail with the worst possible food. I’ve been in a lot of jails and jails can get crazy, but in most places there’s some sort of respectability in the inmates. They try to keep themselves clean, even though they can be mean. These people were nasty. They didn’t clean themselves, it smelled, drugs were rampant in there. People were fucked up on all kinds of shit, mostly OxyContin. I hated it. I didn’t talk to anyone and stayed completely to myself.”

The first phone call Art made from the jail was to his father. He obtained permission for a one-hour contact visit, and later that week Senior drove down for what would be their only visit together. It took place in a small room, in the presence of cameras and guards. Senior came alone. He entered the room and smiled wanly at his son

“This was my fault, Arty,” he said as he hugged his son. “I should have listened to you.”

Art immediately felt relieved. But he wasn’t convinced that was the truth.

“Pops,
I
was the one who fucked up,” he said. “I brought it into your life. I shouldn’t have. We wouldn’t be here if I had just left it behind.”

“Look, it ain’t your fault,” his old man insisted. “I knew better. I should have ended it.”

“I’m sorry anyway.”

Senior tried to change the subject by asking Art about how he was holding up, the jail conditions, whether he was eating enough. Art told him that everything was great. Silence crept in. Eventually they got around to the subject of the cases. Art finally heard from his father’s mouth about how the Service had raided the house. Since they were being monitored, they avoided getting too specific about what had been found.

“So what does your lawyer say about your outlook?” Art asked.

Senior hesitated a moment—Art thought he was trying to summon up an encouraging response to the question—but he couldn’t.

“I’m going down,” he said. “I don’t mind doing the time, I’m still young enough to have a life when I get out. But what really bothers me are the dogs. I don’t know what will happen to them if we both go away. We won’t be able take care of them. There’s too many to find homes for all of them.”

Art felt sick to his stomach. He had never had anything against the dogs themselves, just his father’s devotion to them at the expense of his own kids. He began to cry.