Word: arts
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...uncrackable. From the distinctive feel of the greenback's cotton-and-linen-blended paper to its watermarks and color-shifting ink, the Treasury Department goes to excruciating lengths to ensure no one can counterfeit the world's most powerful currency. But the U.S. Treasury Department was no match for Art Williams, one of the most inventive and prolific counterfeiters of recent decades. After learning the craft at 16 from his mother's boyfriend, Williams, the product of a tough neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, went on to print an estimated $10 million in fake money by outmaneuvering the government...
Writer Jason Kersten first told Williams' story in Rolling Stone magazine in 2005. Now he's returned to the subject for a book, The Art of Making Money: The Story of a Master Counterfeiter. Williams took a stab at making an honest living, but eventually returned to counterfeiting and was arrested again in 2007. He's currently serving a federal prison term scheduled to end in 2013. Kersten spoke with TIME about Williams' remarkable criminal career and the odd allure of duplicating dollars...
...that, unlike other criminals, counterfeiters are craftsmen. Is there a part of you that admires the work that they do? Well, sure. I've seen one of Art's bills. It's just astonishing how similar it is to the genuine article. I tend to be fascinated by any master criminal, anyone who's such a diabolical genius that they take a crime beyond the financial gain...
...counterfeiters you write about seem to have a certain reverence for the crime's long history. Art's mentor, a man nicknamed "Da Vinci," insisted on listening to Italian opera while making fake bills because the music itself was old. Is that romantic aura part of what drew Art into the crime? Well, I think initially what drew him in was the desire to make money. But it does take a certain sensibility to be a producer of counterfeit money; you have to have an artistic sense. You have to have a respect for the craft and a creative personality...
...striking detail of the story is how Art and his wife would travel around the country and unload their fake bills by buying random supplies and souvenirs, getting real money in change. Then they donated those supplies to charity. They'd have all this extra stuff, and they'd drop it off at Salvation Armies and churches. That became as important to them as the money itself, that feeling of charity. He wasn't a greedy counterfeiter...