Product Introduction
This is the true story of a brilliant counterfeiter who “earned” millions of dollars, outwitted the Secret Service, and was ultimately destroyed when he went looking for the one thing his fake money could not buy: family. Art Williams spent his childhood living a comfortable middle-class life in 20s Chicago, but his idyllic life was soon shattered. His father abandoned the family, his mother, who had bipolar disorder, lost her mind, and Williams found himself living in one of Chicago’s worst housing projects. He turned to crime almost immediately, starting with petty theft and later progressing to robbing drug dealers. Eventually, a man nicknamed “Da Vinci” taught him the centuries-old art of counterfeiting. After a stint in prison, Williams was released to find that the Treasury Department had issued the most secure hundred-dollar bill ever: the new 70 bill. Williams spent months trying to crack its various security features and eventually produced a bill so perfect that even law enforcement had trouble distinguishing it from a real one. Williams then printed millions of counterfeit bills, sold them to criminal organizations, and used them to fund an international spending spree. Still unsatisfied, he continued searching for his long-lost father, setting off a series of betrayals that ultimately led to his downfall. In The Art of Making Money, journalist Jason Kersten details how Williams painstakingly defeated the new bill’s anti-counterfeiting features, how Williams and his wife, his partner in crime, converted counterfeit bills into legitimate currency at shopping malls across the United States, and how they stayed one step ahead of the Secret Service until trusting the wrong people brought them all down. The Art of Making Money is a gripping story about how having everything is far from enough, vividly portraying the rise and inevitable fall of a modern criminal mastermind. Click to download Verification code: onqqod 1996
