You’re a 16-year-old slum kid on Chicago’s South Side and your girl has a newborn baby to shelter and feed. One day, your mom’s boyfriend offers to help.
So you hop into his Cadillac and head to a 19th-century brick building in the packinghouse district. There he shows you his underground print shop, complete with an A.B. Dick offset press and canisters of ink. Forest-green ink.
That’s how Art Williams began his apprenticeship as a counterfeiter, writes Jason Kersten in his wild ride into a crook’s mind, The Art of Making Money.
Williams, says this nonfiction account of true crime, was one of the top counterfeiters of the last quarter of a century, a rogue who later melded Old World printing techniques with digital technology to create a replica of what was then the most secure US banknote ever made, the 1996 New Note.
“The bill felt like a dare to him,” says Kersten, who lays out, step by step, how Williams copied the note’s features — its acid-free paper, security strip, watermark and Optically Variable Ink, which causes a color to shift at different angles.
If that sounds glamorous, forget it. From start to finish, this is a seedy story from the criminal underbelly of America. Counterfeiters may sound like elite artisans, but the best ones, it turns out, are just cogs in the wheels of organized crime — suppliers of a product used by gambling rackets, drug runners and smugglers, whose patrons aren’t likely to run to the cops if they wind up with funny money.
Kersten, who first wrote about Williams in Rolling Stone, casts him as a misunderstood outlaw, a Jesse James with an Apple Macintosh and a Ryobi press. There is a whiff of Bonnie and Clyde about this tale, which seems destined to become a Hollywood movie.
At the height of his spree, Williams and his girlfriend fled Chicago in a silver convertible and crisscrossed the nation, dropping fake US$100 bills at malls. From each purchase of US$20 or less, they pocketed at least US$80 in genuine currency and donated the unwanted goods to charity. The book strains to put this shameless crook in a kind light.
By his own estimate, Williams counterfeited some US$10 million of US bills over 10 years, selling shrink-wrapped batches to crime bosses for up to US$0.30 on the dollar. He never felt guilty about counterfeiting and spending fakes “felt rebelliously empowering, each dropped bill a nip at the dispassionate system” that he partly blamed for his destitute childhood, Kersten writes.
Williams had reasons for lashing out. Abandoned by their father — an ex-con who took up with another woman — Williams and his siblings landed in one of Chicago’s few “white projects.” A bookish suburban boy, he joined a gang and graduated to car theft. His life was warped by his need for his missing father and money. That story presents Kersten with several challenges. One is to make us empathize with a protagonist who delivers beatings, robs houses and rationalizes his wrongdoing.
“I know every criminal says this, but it’s almost like the system wants you to commit another crime,” Williams says.
A deeper problem is that this isn’t what you expect from a story about a “master counterfeiter.” The best passages in the book show how Williams learned the trade and succeeded in copying the New Note with elements as different as phone directory paper, ChromaFlair paint pigment and a rubber stamp made at Kinko’s copy center. I was left hungry for more of this and less of Williams’s sad quest to find his creepy father.
There’s also the question of sources. Kersten reconstructed Williams’s story from interviews and legal documents. The Secret Service, which is charged with chasing down counterfeiters, clammed up after granting him one interview, he says.
Though Kersten has stitched together a rattling narrative, the story in places hinges on Williams’s version of events. Can he be trusted? This is, after all, a convict. As the book closes, he has pleaded guilty to manufacturing more than US$89,000 and been sentenced to 87 months. In telling his story, was this master counterfeiter tempted to adjust a color here, fake a watermark there?
This year will go down in the history books. Taiwan faces enormous turmoil and uncertainty in the coming months. Which political parties are in a good position to handle big changes? All of the main parties are beset with challenges. Taking stock, this column examined the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) (“Huang Kuo-chang’s choking the life out of the TPP,” May 28, page 12), the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) (“Challenges amid choppy waters for the DPP,” June 14, page 12) and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) (“KMT struggles to seize opportunities as ‘interesting times’ loom,” June 20, page 11). Times like these can
June 23 to June 29 After capturing the walled city of Hsinchu on June 22, 1895, the Japanese hoped to quickly push south and seize control of Taiwan’s entire west coast — but their advance was stalled for more than a month. Not only did local Hakka fighters continue to cause them headaches, resistance forces even attempted to retake the city three times. “We had planned to occupy Anping (Tainan) and Takao (Kaohsiung) as soon as possible, but ever since we took Hsinchu, nearby bandits proclaiming to be ‘righteous people’ (義民) have been destroying train tracks and electrical cables, and gathering in villages
Dr. Y. Tony Yang, Associate Dean of Health Policy and Population Science at George Washington University, argued last week in a piece for the Taipei Times about former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) leading a student delegation to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) that, “The real question is not whether Ma’s visit helps or hurts Taiwan — it is why Taiwan lacks a sophisticated, multi-track approach to one of the most complex geopolitical relationships in the world” (“Ma’s Visit, DPP’s Blind Spot,” June 18, page 8). Yang contends that the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) has a blind spot: “By treating any
Swooping low over the banks of a Nile River tributary, an aid flight run by retired American military officers released a stream of food-stuffed sacks over a town emptied by fighting in South Sudan, a country wracked by conflict. Last week’s air drop was the latest in a controversial development — private contracting firms led by former US intelligence officers and military veterans delivering aid to some of the world’s deadliest conflict zones, in operations organized with governments that are combatants in the conflicts. The moves are roiling the global aid community, which warns of a more militarized, politicized and profit-seeking trend
RSS