The Art of Making Money by Kersten Book Review

The Art of Making Coin
By Jason Kersten
Hardcover, 304 pages
Gotham
List Price: $26.00

It took Art Williams four beers to summon the will to reveal his formula. We had been sitting in his living room, a few blocks from Chicago'due south Midway Drome, listening to jets boom by for the better office of two hours. I was there interviewing him for an commodity for Rolling Rock magazine, and he had promised to tell me the secrets that made him one of the nearly successful counterfeiters of the final quarter century. Understandably, he was reluctant.

"I've never shown this to anybody before," he finally said with a contempt indicating that I could non maybe appreciate or deserve what I was about to encounter.

"You realize how many people have offered me money for this?"

Some men — he wouldn't say who — once promised him three hundred g dollars for his moneymaking recipe. They pledged to fix him upward in a villa anywhere in the world with a personal guard. Information technology was easy to picture Art sitting on a patio to a higher place the Caspian Sea surrounded by saucepan-necked Russian gangsters. With his high, planed cheeks, blue eyes, and pumped-upward physique, he'd fit right in with an Eastern European operation. It was also easy to retrieve that he was total of shit, because Fine art Williams was a built-in hustler, as swaggering equally any ever found on the streets of Chicago. Later I'd learn that the offer had been real, and that he'd declined considering he wasn't sure if his guards would treat him as prince or prisoner.

"My friends are going to hate me for telling you," he sighed.

"They'll probably hate you for knowing." Then he shuffled off toward the kitchen. Hushful tones of an argument between him and his girlfriend, Natalie, echoed down the hall. It was clear enough that she didn't want him to show me. When I heard a terse "Fine, whatsoever,"

I was pretty sure that Natalie would detest me also. Then came the rumblings of doors and cabinets opening and the crackling of paper.

A moment later, Williams returned with some scissors, iii plastic spray bottles, and a sail of what looked like the kind of cheap, gray-white structure paper a kindergarten teacher might hand out at craft time.

"Feel how thin it is," he whispered, handing me a sheet. Rubbing the newspaper betwixt my thumb and forefinger, I was amazed at how accurate it already felt. "That's nix," he said. "Only await."

He cutting two dollar-sized rectangles from the sheet, apologizing that they were non precise cuts (they were virtually exactly the right size). And then he sprayed both cuts with adhesive, his wrist sweeping fluidly every bit he pressed the applicator. "Yous accept to do it in one motion or you won't get the right distribution," he explained. Afterward he deftly pressed the sheets together and used the spine of a book to push button out air bubbles, we waited for it to dry. "I always waited at least half an hour," he said. "If you push button it, the sheets could come autonomously afterward. Trust me, yous don't want that to happen."

Another beer after, he sprayed both sides of the glued sheets with 2 shots of hardening solution, then a satin stop.

"At present this," he said before applying the last coat, "is the shit." V minutes afterwards I held a 20-dollar bill in one hand and Fine art Williams's paper in the other, eyes closed. I couldn't tell them apart.

When I opened my eyes, I realized that Williams'due south newspaper non only felt right, but information technology also bore the distinctive dull sheen.

"Now snap it," he commanded. I jerked both ends of the rect-angle and the sound was unmistakable; it was the lovely, croaking crack made by the flying whip that drives the world economy — the sound of the Almighty Dollar.

"Now imagine this with the watermark, the security thread, the cogitating ink — everything," he said. "That's what was groovy about my coin. It passed every exam."

Fine art Williams was thirty-two years quondam and already a dying breed. In an era when the vast majority of counterfeiters are teenagers who use ink-jet printers to run off 20-dollar bills that tin't even fool a McDonald's cashier, he was a craftsman schooled in a centuries old practice by a chief who traced his criminal lineage dorsum to the One-time World. He was also an innovator who combined fourth dimension-tested techniques with digital technology to copy what was then the virtually secure U.Southward. banknote ever made.

"He put a lot of work into his bills," Lorelei Pagano, a counterfeit specialist at the Secret Service's main lab in Washington, D.C., would later on tell me. "He'south no push button pusher. I'd rate his bills equally an eight or a ix." A perfect 10 is a bill chosen the "Supernote" that many believe is made by the North Korean government on a ten one thousand thousand-dollar intaglio press like to the ones used past the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.

Art would eventually reveal to me his unabridged process of making money, and I'd be awed by the obsession, dedication, and exactitude information technology had taken him to achieve it. But as extraordinary as his formula was, it defined his story about as much as a mathematical equation tin can capture the mystery and terror of the universe. Far more than interesting were the forces that created and compromised him, and those could not be easily explored in a mag article. Art had too many secrets to share, many of which he had hidden fifty-fifty from himself.

He'd spent one-half his life pursuing verisimilitude in an idealistic attempt to recapture something very real that he believed had been lost, or stolen, or unfairly denied. What enthralled and terrified me the most was that his pursuit had very little to do with money, and the roots of his downfall lay in something impossible to replicate or put a value on. As he would say himself, "I never got caught because of money. I got caught because of honey."

Excerpted from The Fine art of Making Money by Jason Kersten. Reprinting by arrangement with Gotham Books, a fellow member of Penguin Grouping, U.s.. Copyright © 2009 by Jason Kersten.

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Source: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=105226799

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