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 AB 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 Kersten was one of the top counterfeiters of the last quarter century, a rogue who later melded Old World printing techniques with digital technology to create a replica of then the most secure United States 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 colour 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. The best ones are just cogs in the wheels of organised crime – suppliers of a product used by gambling rackets 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 Mustang and crisscrossed the nation, dropping fake $100 bills at malls. From each purchase of $20 or less, they pocketed at least $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 $10 million of US bills over 10 years, selling shrink-wrapped batches to crime bosses for up to 30 cents 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.
Williams had reasons for lashing out. Abandoned by their father – an ex-con who took up with another woman – Art 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 empathise with a protagonist who delivers beatings, robs houses and rationalises his wrongdoing.
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, Kersten says. So in places, the story hinges on Williams's version of events. Can he be trusted?
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