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The Story of a Master Counterfeiter
Gotham
June 2009
On Sale: June 11, 2009
304 pages ISBN: 1592404464 EAN: 9781592404469 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
The true story of a brilliant counterfeiter who “made”
millions, outwitted the Secret Service, and was finally
undone when he went in search of the one thing his forged
money couldn’t buy him: family. Art Williams spent his boyhood in a comfortable middle-
class existence in 1970s Chicago, but his idyll was
shattered when, in short order, his father abandoned the
family, his bipolar mother lost her wits, and Williams
found himself living in one of Chicago’s worst housing
projects. He took to crime almost immediately, starting
with petty theft before graduating to robbing drug dealers.
Eventually a man nicknamed “DaVinci” taught him the
centuries-old art of counterfeiting. After a stint in jail,
Williams emerged to discover that the Treasury Department
had issued the most secure hundred-dollar bill ever
created: the 1996 New Note. Williams spent months trying to
defeat various security features before arriving at a bill
so perfect that even law enforcement had difficulty
distinguishing it from the real thing. Williams went on to
print millions in counterfeit bills, selling them to
criminal organizations and using them to fund cross-country
spending sprees. Still unsatisfied, he went off in search
of his long-lost father, setting in motion a chain of
betrayals that would be his undoing. In The Art of Making Money, journalist Jason Kersten
details how Williams painstakingly defeated the anti-
forging features of the New Note, how Williams and his
partner-in-crime wife converted fake bills into legitimate
tender at shopping malls all over America, and how they
stayed one step ahead of the Secret Service until trusting
the wrong person brought them all down. A compulsively
readable story of how having it all is never enough, The
Art of Making Money is a stirring portrait of the rise and
inevitable fall of a modern-day criminal mastermind.
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