Book summary “The art of making money”: summary

Introduction

You want to understand how extreme poverty and systemic failure forge a master criminal capable of outsmarting federal law enforcement. You face a world where survival demands ingenuity, yet the traditional paths to success remain completely closed off.

Jason Kersten answers this problem by tracing the fourteen-year criminal empire of Arthur Williams Jr. The central idea is that high-level counterfeiting requires not just technical skill, but a rare mix of childhood resilience, industrial machinery, and ruthless street survival tactics.

The book details how a neglected Chicago child builds an underground printing operation using offset presses and family networks. You will discover how outlaws evade federal agents through careful paper sourcing and chemical simulations before justice finally catches up.

• How do extreme poverty and neighborhood violence shape a criminal mind?
• What industrial equipment and processes are necessary to replicate U.S. currency?
• How do federal agents track down and dismantle a sophisticated counterfeiting ring?

1. Childhood and Origins in Chicago

Extreme childhood instability, parental abandonment, and neighborhood violence force children to seek survival through gangs and ingenious petty crimes.

Stateville Correctional Center featured a circular cell block built in the 1920s and inspired by Jeremy Bentham. The thirty-three-foot-high walls and ten guard towers projected a sentiment of invisible omniscience. Arthur Williams Sr., inmate number C-70147, served time at Stateville for robbing a truck in DuPage County.

Art junior experienced repeated kidnappings by his father, driving 2,200 miles from Illinois to Lobster Valley, Oregon. He was six years old when he had his earliest memory of his father in Stateville. Constantly moving across the country led children to seek sanctuary in books, school, and drawing.

Bridgeport Poverty and Gangs

The Bridgeport Homes were built in 1943 on a square block containing 18 units in total. About 250 total residents lived in the Bridgeport Homes. Young Art faced immediate physical violence from rival gangs like the Latin Kings.

To survive and avoid constant beatings on the way to school, he joined the Satan's Disciples gang. The group provided him with food, money for bills, and protection despite its criminal nature. Peewees learned South Side martial arts after being attacked and called project killers.

The Apprentice and Counterfeiting Basics

Desperate poverty drives children to invent ingenious criminal methods to feed their starving families when social systems fail. Malinda experienced violent psychotic episodes involving hallucinations, paranoia, and delusions about little people. Lithium suppressed the symptoms, but she frequently stopped taking her medication, turning Mother Hyde into a source of severe domestic instability.

When his mother suffered a breakdown and could not feed the children, twelve-year-old Art looked for money outside. He noticed single-headed Park-O-Meters on the street and used a bent piece of metal as a custom key to pop out the inner canister. Art hit parking meters on Halsted Street, stole about 50 dollars, and brought home two bags of groceries to feed his family.

Pete da Vinci took seventeen-year-old Art under his wing to teach him offset printing and counterfeiting. Pete paid Art $7000 in real money after each print run. They produced approximately $100000 during their first run together. Pete charged overseas clients 30 to 35 cents on the dollar for his fake bills.

Pete took Art down to an underground print shop near an old stone quarry to reveal a fully operational offset print shop with an AB Dick press. Pete trained Art on the precise steps of platemaking, photographing genuine hundred-dollar bills, and running a four-color offset press invented in 1843 by Richard March Hoe.

To protect the operation, you must follow strict operational guidelines:

• Apply superglue to fingertips before working in the shop to avoid leaving fingerprints.
• Rub down every surface at the end of the day and wash all cleaning rags.
• Burn all chemical-saturated paper towels and printing stock in a fifty-five-gallon drum.
• Always find out where the money is going to avoid flooding a single area and attracting attention.

Faced with financial pressure and criminal ambitions, Art and his crew turned to robbing drug dealers by impersonating police officers. Art outfitted a black or white Chevrolet Caprice with a police antenna and cherry strobe to pull over drug dealers. You could earn a maximum of $15000 from a successful drug-dealer robbery.

2. Setting Up the Dungeon

Establishing a professional counterfeiting operation requires specialized subterranean locations, industrial paper sourcing, and hybrid digital printing methods.

You need to select a location that can handle heavy vibrations and noise before you start printing. Offset presses produce vibrations akin to an off-balance washing machine full of shoes. Art rented a gloomy subterranean three-bedroom basement apartment on Halsted Street, dubbed the Dungeon.

Art paid cash to his friend Chris Bucklin, whose real estate baron father lived in Ireland and delegated property management to his son. Equipping the shop cost five thousand dollars, including an AB Dick press, process camera, plate burner, hydraulic cutter, inks, lights, tables, tools, and chemicals. State-of-the-art small-sized presses typically cost ten thousand dollars.

Industrial Paper and Press Pace

You must source specialized paper stock that closely mimics the composition of genuine United States currency. United States currency is printed on paper composed of 25 percent linen and 75 percent cotton. Art targeted a large printing house on Dearborn Street to acquire lightweight newsprint stub rolls by masquerading as a student working on a large school presentation.

Art visited a low-lying redbrick monster printing house, met a jocund white-haired manager, and received three free butt rolls from the recycling bins. Each butt roll weighed two hundred pounds.

Operating an offset press successfully requires meticulous patience and frequent interruptions to check and adjust ink colors rather than letting the machine run continuously. Art's first printing runs resulted in distorted purple and chartreuse bills because he lacked direct experience mixing inks and operating the press alone. He solved this by stopping the press every fifteen or twenty sheets to adjust his colors and alignment.

After a week of reflection, Art returned to the Dungeon, stopped the press dozens of times, and successfully produced twenty thousand dollars in counterfeit twenties, known as fugazi. You follow specific operational steps during this phase:

• Stop the press every fifteen or twenty sheets.
• Adjust colors and alignment incrementally.
• Proceed to print fronts once the color consistency is achieved.
• Print backs separately as they consist of only one color.

Art ran off two thousand fronts after achieving the correct color.

Combining traditional offset printing with modern digital desktop publishing tools resolves specific visual defects in counterfeit production. Art experimented with an Apple computer, a scanner, and Photoshop to clean up bill images. Finding that digital printers created pixilated seals and fibers while offset presses lacked agility for fine lines, he created a hybrid method using offset for backgrounds, seals, serial numbers, and fibers, and an ink-jet printer for the faces.

Art utilized an Apple computer, scanner, diazotype blueprint machine, and an ink-jet printer alongside his AB Dick offset press. In 1992, only one half of one percent of counterfeiters used desktop-publishing equipment. Hybrid counterfeit bills had an expected selling price of thirty cents on the dollar in daylight.

Dealing with Organized Crime

Organized crime syndicates with transnational operations provide stable, large-scale distribution channels for counterfeit currency. Art bypassed the local Italian Outfit to avoid steep street taxes and being treated as a personal ATM. Instead, he approached the On Leong organization through a contact known as the Horse, trading stolen Corvettes for contacts before establishing a regular wholesale counterfeiting client relationship inside the secure On Leong Building gambling den.

Art stole seven Corvettes for the Horse at five thousand dollars each, and later sold batches of counterfeit hundred-dollar bills at twenty-five cents on the dollar. Within six months, Art secured two additional organized crime clients through the On Leong tong connection.

Running a high-volume counterfeiting operation requires delegating specific operational tasks to trusted associates while keeping their individual activities compartmentalized. Art enlisted friends from Bridgeport and Taylor Street to handle security, acquisitions, wheelman duties, and dealmaking, ensuring that his associates remained largely ignorant of each other's specific tasks.

Art relied on Mikey Pepitone for dealmaking, Big Bill Barcus for armed security and errand running, Giorgi Munizzi for industrial acquisitions via Outfit lineage connections, and Tony Puntillo as a wheelman using a beeper code system. Giorgi Munizzi's home stood just four blocks from Art's childhood home. Chris Sophocleus mixed five thousand dollars of counterfeit into a cash box during a police raid.

3. Texas and Criminal Operations

Geographic relocation cannot extinguish criminal impulses, leading outlaws to execute drug-dealer robberies and deploy incapacitating substances.

A new address fails to cure the internal compulsion to commit crimes.

Art moves to Valley View, Texas, which sits sixty miles north of Dallas with a population of seven hundred, to break free from his counterfeiting past. He spends six months working construction and living a clean life before encounters with local women and the memory of Morty Bello pull him back. Approximately nine months pass before Art drives nine miles from Valley View to Chicago for revenge.

Art calculates that Morty Bello short-changed him over two years. On June 4, 1994, the date of Risa Bello's wedding, Art breaks into Morty's empty Chicago home and steals approximately sixty thousand dollars in cash along with diamonds and emeralds from a steel lockbox. He returns to Texas with forty grand after dividing the take with his crew and fencing the items.

Robbery Methods and Accomplices

Targeting drug dealers offers high rewards because they rarely report thefts to the police. The involvement of untrained accomplices increases operational risk, however.

Art plans a robbery where his brother Jason breaks into a dealer's apartment while Susan calls the dealer to lure him away, and Natalie acts as the getaway driver. Jason spent eight years in the boys' home in Des Plaines before his release. They rob a Denton dealer named Clayton of seventeen thousand dollars, hydroponic weed, and five prescription bottles of Ecstasy, but encounter the dealer returning mid-robbery and escape through a swamp.

Systematic robbery operations scale by using incapacitating substances to neutralize targets without violent confrontation. Art obtains Rohypnol from Mexico and uses female crew members to charm cowboy drug dealers from honky-tonks back to their residences.

• Obtain a fast-acting incapacitating substance such as Rohypnol.
• Scout honky-tonks or bars for targets displaying wealth markers like fat billfolds and beepers.
• Send female crew members to initiate conversation, flirt, and secure an invitation back to the target's place.
• Administer the substance into the target's drink to induce unconsciousness within roughly fifteen minutes.
• Enter the residence once the target is incapacitated to systematically rifle for cash and drugs.

Arrest and Consequences

Partnering with inexperienced or unreliable individuals introduces fatal flaws into a criminal operation. Deception and panic ruin even carefully planned scores.

Dave Pettis convinces Art to burglarize his girlfriend's jeweler father for an insurance scam, promising twenty-five thousand dollars in gems and precious metals. The actual items found in the jeweler's workshop are worth only five thousand dollars. Their arrest on January 12, 1996, leads Pettis to pin the entire plot on Art to save himself.

Art spends over three years in various Texas prisons, including the harsh Lopez State Jail near the Mexican border, enduring extreme heat and violence. He serves three years, two months, and nine days for his robbery arrest before his release from the Holiday Unit in Huntsville on April 30, 1999, where loyal girlfriend Natalie Silva meets him outside the gates.

4. The Battle of the Bill

Counterfeiters overcome advanced U.S. currency security features through twin-sheet watermarks, directory paper, and automotive paint simulations.

The U.S. Treasury overhauled the hundred-dollar bill in 1996 to combat advanced reprographic technologies, introducing major visual and security modifications known as the New Note. The Series 1996 note incorporated a supersized, fifty percent larger portrait of Benjamin Franklin, microprinting, a security strip, an embedded watermark, and optically variable ink that shifted colors depending on the viewing angle.

When Art and Natalie visited a local Barnes & Noble shortly after his release, Natalie handed him a new hundred-dollar bill to pay for a book by Bruce Lee, shocking Art with how much the currency had changed.

Counterfeiting Techniques

Counterfeiters could bypass the ubiquitous Dri Mark counterfeit-detector pen by identifying acid-free paper sources or by applying chemical treatments that prevented the iodine-based ink from turning dark brown. The Dri Mark pen used an iodine-based ink that reacted to acidic starch in paper, turning dark brown on standard paper while remaining yellow on starch-free currency. Art and Natalie discovered that directory paper from phone books naturally yielded a bright yellow reaction with the pen, solving their paper crisis.

After weeks of frustrated paper samples marking black, Natalie angrily marked a phone book in her kitchen, discovering to their amazement that directory paper caused the pen to mark bright yellow.

• Test paper samples using a Dri Mark pen to check for an acid-free reaction.
• Locate directory paper used by large print houses to mimic starch-free properties.

The challenge of duplicating a traditional paper watermark and security strip can be overcome by a twin-sheet sandwich method combining thin directory paper, hand-drawn portraits on tracing paper, and adhesive sprays. Because genuine watermarks are formed in wet paper pulp using a dandy roll, Art solved the problem in a dream by realizing that two thin sheets of paper pasted together with a thin tracing paper portrait and printed security strip in between perfectly matched the thickness, feel, and visual properties of real currency.

After waking up from a dream about a sandwich structure, Art had Natalie buy thin tracing paper to draw Benjamin Franklin's portrait, placed it between thin directory paper sheets, and held it up to the light to confirm the watermark effect.

• Draw or print Franklin's portrait onto thin tracing paper.
• Print a security strip onto tracing paper using ultraviolet reactive red ink.
• Sandwich the tracing paper elements between two thin sheets of directory paper.
• Glue and solidify the layers using over-the-counter spray glosses.

Optically variable ink can be successfully simulated by utilizing patented automotive paint containing color-shifting pigments and applying it via a custom rubber stamp. True OVI used on U.S. currency was proprietary, but Art discovered that custom cars used a patented paint called ChromaFlair produced by Flex Products, which shifted colors when viewed from different angles. He scanned a denomination mark, created a rubber stamp at Kinko's, and applied the automotive paint to mimic the color shift.

Art spotted a limited edition 1996 Mustang Cobra in a Dallas parking lot whose paint shifted from purple-black to deep blue, inspiring him to track down the ChromaFlair paint technology.

• Scan currency denomination marks and adjust them using editing software.
• Order a custom rubber stamp of the scan from a local print shop.
• Dip the rubber stamp into color-shifting automotive paint and apply it to the note.

Slamming and Mall Spending

Malls serve as ideal, high-density environments for quickly passing counterfeit bills in exchange for real merchandise and genuine change. By purchasing items under twenty dollars with a hundred-dollar fake, passers collect eighty dollars or more in genuine currency while moving rapidly through large volumes of retail stores.

Art and Natalie targeted shopping centers across America, visiting forty to fifty stores in two hours to net thousands in genuine change.

• Survey the target town for police stations and highway on-ramps.
• Prowl the parking lot to check for police cars before operating.
• Park near anchor department stores to use them as an immediate getaway route.
• Select cashiers least likely to scrutinize bills, such as elderly women or young clerks.
• Dump purchased goods in the car trunk and pass more bills to the shopper.

Conclusion

Art Williams builds a fourteen-year criminal empire through offset presses, family networks, and street survival tactics before federal agents bring him down.

You see how an unstable childhood, early gang involvement, and relentless resourcefulness can forge an exceptional criminal mind. The underground economy demands absolute secrecy, yet it relies on fragile human partnerships that inevitably fracture under pressure. Family loyalty, drug addiction, and paranoia combine to destroy criminal operations from the inside long before law enforcement agencies finalize their cases.

1. Recognize that exceptional technical skill in any illicit trade cannot permanently outrun federal investigation.
2. Understand that involving family members in criminal enterprises guarantees mutual destruction when pressure mounts.
3. Accept that the extreme lifestyle of a fugitive creates a constant state of psychological exhaustion and isolation.
4. Conclude that the immense energy required to sustain a criminal empire yields only temporary survival rather than lasting security.

10 Key Ideas

1. Extreme childhood instability, parental abandonment, and neighborhood violence force children to seek survival through gangs and ingenious petty crimes.
2. Desperate poverty drives children to invent ingenious criminal methods to feed their starving families when social systems fail.
3. Establishing a professional counterfeiting operation requires specialized subterranean locations, industrial paper sourcing, and hybrid digital printing methods.
4. You must source specialized paper stock that closely mimics the composition of genuine United States currency.
5. Organized crime syndicates with transnational operations provide stable, large-scale distribution channels for counterfeit currency.
6. A new address fails to cure the internal compulsion to commit crimes.
7. Partnering with inexperienced or unreliable individuals introduces fatal flaws into a criminal operation.
8. Counterfeiters overcome advanced U.S. currency security features through twin-sheet watermarks, directory paper, and automotive paint simulations.
9. Malls serve as ideal, high-density environments for quickly passing counterfeit bills in exchange for real merchandise and genuine change.
10. Art Williams builds a fourteen-year criminal empire through offset presses, family networks, and street survival tactics before federal agents bring him down.