#681 - Ex-Counterfeiter Arthur Williams Jr.

Arthur “Art” Williams Jr. is a former counterfeiter known for mastering the 1996 $100 bill. After serving 12 years in prison, he is now an artist and speaker. Art joins Theo to talk about how he was able to counterfeit almost $10M in cash before getting caught, the paranoia that comes with a life of crime, and the best ways to spend fake money. Art Williams Jr.: https://www.instagram.com/arthurjwilliamsjr ------------------------------------------------- Tour Dates! https://theovon.com/tour New Merch: https://www.theovonstore.com ------------------------------------------------- Sponsored By: Celsius: Go to the Celsius Amazon store to check out all of their flavors. #CELSIUSBrandPartner #CELSIUSLiveFit https://amzn.to/3HbAtPJ Shopify: Take control of your income. Start your free trial at http://shopify.com/theo Morgan and Morgan: Visit https://forthepeople.com/THEO to see if you might have a case. Morgan and Morgan. America's Largest Injury Law Firm. Perplexity AI: Ask anything at https://pplx.ai/theo ------------------------------------------------- Music: “Shine” by Bishop Gunn Bishop Gunn - Shine ------------------------------------------------ Submit your funny videos, TikToks, questions and topics you'd like to hear on the podcast to: [email protected] Hit the Hotline: 985-664-9503 Video Hotline for Theo Upload here: https://www.theovon.com/fan-upload Mail stuff to: ATTN: TPW PO BOX 40137 Nashville TN 37204 ------------------------------------------------ Find Theo: Website: https://theovon.com Instagram: https://instagram.com/theovon Facebook: https://facebook.com/theovon Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/thispastweekend X: https://twitter.com/theovon YouTube: https://youtube.com/theovon Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheoVonClips Shorts Channel: https://bit.ly/3ClUj8z ------------------------------------------------ Producer: Zach https://www.instagram.com/zachdpowers Producer: Trevyn https://www.instagram.com/trevyn.s/ Producer: Nick https://www.instagram.com/realnickdavis/ Producer: Andrew https://www.instagram.com/bleachmediaofficial/ Producer: Halston https://www.instagram.com/halstonrays/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

  He was one of the most prolific counterfeiters in America, printing over ten million dollars in fake currency. He spent 12 years in prison for his crimes, but now he's out and he's telling his story. And what a story it is, man. Um, we're gonna hear about it all and we're gonna hear about where he's at today. We really got into it. Today's guest is Mr. Art Williams.

• 0:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, dude, my friends were texting me the full moon, about the full moon yesterday.

• 0:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a partial lunar today.

• 0:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, they're like, go look at the moon, you know?

• 0:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:53Speaker 00

  And I feel like it's, I, I wonder if like the moon feels embarrassed because like everybody's looking at it at the same time. That's what I start to think, you know? Like if everybody was looking at me at the same time, like I would just feel so embarrassed, I feel like.

• 1:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, sometimes it feels like that.

• 1:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05Speaker 01

  But I look at the moon like a mirror.

• 1:06Speaker 00

  Yeah?

• 1:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, reflection, right? Even last night in the room that you got me. Hey, that room is dope. I got the dopest city view.

• 1:12Speaker 00

  Oh, nice, dude.

• 1:13Speaker 01

  I woke up at like two in the morning and the moon was just looking at me.

• 1:16Speaker 00

  Hey, oh, that's a peeping tom, man.

• 1:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was peeping on me.

• 1:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:20Speaker 01

  The moon was a peeping tom last night. Because the curtains were open, right? And it was just sitting right there looking down. I'm like, whoa.

• 1:26Speaker 00

  I don't blame it, man. Um, Art Williams, dude.

• 1:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29Speaker 00

  We met, uh, in Chicago at the Gibson's Restaurant.

• 1:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, we met at, at the Viagra Triangle.

• 1:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, dude. But, uh, there we are.

• 1:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, there we are.

• 1:40Speaker 00

  But dude, yeah, thanks for, thanks so much for coming in. So for, just for our listeners who don't know, so in a past life, you, you, you were a counterfeiter.

• 1:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, printing money.

• 1:48Speaker 00

  Printed money.

• 1:49Speaker 01

  Not for the feds either.

• 1:50Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:51Speaker 01

  Nah, yeah.

• 1:51Speaker 00

  For yourself.

• 1:52Speaker 01

  For myself.

• 1:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's what I like, bro. Hey, we need more of that.

• 1:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure now, right?

• 1:57Speaker 00

  Oh, dude, I think especially, look, if the government's just gonna print it for themselves.

• 2:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, now they're going digital. They're gonna, they're gonna print it through the digital coin, which is gonna be even more trippy.

• 2:06Speaker 00

  Right, and I think, yeah, and, and, and we're gonna get into some of that, dude. I wanna, I wanna talk about some of those things.

• 2:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I printed money, man. I, I, I, I, when they, the nineteen ninety six hundred dollar bill came out, they said that it was impossible to replicate and I was about, I don't know, I was probably like twenty-four, twenty-five. And, uh, and so was a child, I said, man, I'm gonna replicate it. I think I could. And, and, and my story goes back a little further because I grew up in the South Side of Chicago.

• 2:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, take me there. Like, looking back, are you able to see any things that made you think, okay, I'm gonna head in this direction, kinda?

• 2:35Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:35Speaker 00

  Like, was you doing early crime or whatever?

• 2:37Speaker 01

  I was doing a lot of crimes, yeah, early, you know, when, when, so when my dad.

• 2:40Speaker 00

  Early bird gets the wallet.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  And that's true, though. Well, we'd get the coins because I'd hit the meters.

• 2:45Speaker 00

  Oh, you would?

• 2:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, the meters on the side of Hostess Street. So that, that was like my first crime. When we, when my dad left us, my mom was, she dealt with mental illness. She was diagnosed bipolar. Um, so she does, you know, she had to take lithium, you know, and if she didn't take it, you know, every, well, once a year, she would go into the hospital. Right? And he'd have to get the levels back up and they put us in foster home, right? So my youth grew, so when my dad took off and we ended up homeless and then ended up in the projects on the South Side, right by White Sox Park.

• 3:16Speaker 01

  You know, it was, uh, the, I remember, because we, you know, you're on welfare, my mom was on welfare, she wasn't working. For us, it was, I came home from school, it was cold, I come into the, the house and my mom's in the kitchen smoking and, um.

• 3:31Speaker 00

  Would she smoke them Doral's or whatever?

• 3:33Speaker 01

  I, my, she used to roll her own. Yeah, my mom used to buy, buy big bags of tobacco and she'd be there all day and it.

• 3:39Speaker 00

  Midwestern, she's a hard worker.

• 3:41Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, no, my mom just rolled, but, but she was there smoking and, and she was crying and she go, and I asked why she was crying. She said, we had no food in the house. So I opened up the fridge and it was empty, right? I was about twelve at that time. We had probably been living there almost maybe like nine months to a year. So I've already got a taste of the streets, you know? And, uh, so I grabbed my brother, my little brother, we ran outside and while, while I'm walking down Hostess Street, and I, I was right on Thirty First and Hostess, that's where the projects that I grew up in. So it's like South Side, they call it the low end.

• 4:10Speaker 00

  Okay, bet.

• 4:11Speaker 01

  Anything like under Fifty Fifth is like the low end. These are just all Chicago street terms, I'm telling you right now, right? Yeah, and, uh, maybe I'll take you over there one day. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 4:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:20Speaker 01

  No, it's cool. So anyway, yeah, so that was, so we're hitting, I'm hitting the meters, walking down Hostess, and I'm hitting the meters, but as, I'm an angry kid, not thinking about, you know, like, I don't know what to do. But as I'm hitting them, I can hear the change ringing. And, and so I, I figured there was money in there.

• 4:36Speaker 00

  So you're just walking down the street, hitting them with a stick or something?

• 4:38Speaker 01

  No, with my fist. You know how you just snatch, you know, hitting it every, because there's a meter like every twenty feet, right?

• 4:44Speaker 00

  Right, for sure.

• 4:44Speaker 01

  So I'm just cracking it, you know, just like as a little kid, man, you know?

• 4:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:47Speaker 01

  But then I started hearing the jingling, jingle, jing, jing, jingle, you know, like, it's money, right? You, you, bing, like the little thing goes off. And, uh, and so I start playing with it. So this is, this is what God gave me. The gift he gave me is figure things out.

• 5:00Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  Puzzles, money.

• 5:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:03Speaker 01

  Meters, you know?

• 5:05Speaker 00

  Right, whatever's going on, you're gonna figure it out.

• 5:07Speaker 01

  Art, whatever, whatever it is, my brain just like, it wants to dissect it, right? Just, but early on, it was just the meters. I wanted to get into the meter, right? So, so I went in the alley, I made, I made this little metal piece that allowed me to, to, to twist the little pins. There were two little pins on it. And if you could get them to go straight up, you could pop it out. And there was always maybe like ten, fifteen dollars of quarters in it. So you'd hit like five or six and also you got a hundred and a hundred back then was something.

• 5:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a lot of money.

• 5:34Speaker 01

  And I still love a hundred, right? Like the hundred's my number, man, you know, it's a hundred, yeah. But, so, so we hit it, I, we hit it for like, me and my bro hit for like eighty-seven. We went to Tony's supermarket. And, uh, me and my, me and my bro were just, just putting stuff and we're all excited, right?

• 5:48Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 5:49Speaker 01

  And we get up there and the, the big guy, and he looks down, he's like, you guys got money? We're kids, man, like, and we had a bag, it was in a bag, like a little jewels bag or something. We just, this, we got money? And he looked, changed, he goes, yeah, that's money, right? And so he started counting. It was eight, it was like eighty-six bucks. We get home, thi- this is what was awesome. When we walked in the door, my mom was still, you know, kinda in her depressed mode. She hadn't really moved yet. But when she seen the groceries, she lit up, ran and hugged us. She's like, where'd you get these? She probably thought some church gave it to us or something, you know?

• 6:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:20Speaker 01

  And I'm like, um, I'm like, we got them, ma, you know, she goes, well, how'd you get, why? I said, out the meters. She's like, well, how'd you get out the meters? I said, we broke into them. She was, and that, and she was, go up to your room right now. So she, she, her, her demeanor went from happy to pissed like that, you know? Like in heart, like, real quick. So me and my brother go upstairs, she comes up after that and she's like, um, she's like, look, I don't want you stealing for money. God will provide the way. I said, God did provide the way. He showed me how to open it, right? Because I'll, I believe there's divineness in what I do. Like, whatever my mind is able to do, there's, there's, there's, there's a creative, there's something outside of me that I could tap into that, that gives me a force, I call it. A force field, right?

• 7:01Speaker 00

  Well, at that time, did you feel like you were doing it for a good cause too?

• 7:03Speaker 01

  Well, for my mom, for my brother, for my sister.

• 7:05Speaker 00

  What are you gonna do?

• 7:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, man, they gotta eat, you know, like, and that started it, right? Then, once, once that happened, it didn't stop. Uh, I'd hit the meters whenever I needed it, you know, then, then I could start hanging out with the gangs. So like in Chicago, the gang violence was real strong at that point. Yeah, it's like mid-eighties, early nineties, guns are hitting the street, right? It went from, it went from, uh, like, at, at first it was like, uh, dance crews, like breakdancing.

• 7:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  And so the breakdancers turned into the gangs pretty much, right? So you had the breakdancing moments in Chicago and probably New York and LA, probably everywhere. And then when the breakdancing kind of faded out, all those cats turned into Latin Kings or Disciples or, I mean, GD's have always been there, right?

• 7:47Speaker 00

  What's GD's?

• 7:48Speaker 01

  Uh, Gangs Disciples.

• 7:49Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, they've always been before, you know, and all these gangs have been there forever, but the breakdancing, when it broke out, that's when a lot of numbers filled it, you know?

• 7:57Speaker 00

  What do you think caused that breakdancing to kind of dissipate over there?

• 8:00Speaker 01

  I don't, I don't, I think because they started fighting, right? So at first it was just like, ah, right? You know, grab my nuts and you put it in your face, right? And then they started beefing. And then when they started beefing, you know, physical just always enhances, even like wars.

• 8:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's an escalation.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  There's always escalation with them, man, right? So if it's a, you know, you step on my toe, then I smack you in the face and you punch me in mine and then boom, boom, boom, boom, right?

• 8:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's always a way to do it.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, so anyway, but that's what I think happened. I think.

• 8:27Speaker 00

  Okay, got it.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  You know, there's just the beefs and, and, and then the guns. That was the thing that really, for me, that sticks in my memory harsher than anything because I've been shot. And I've had friends killed. One right, right there, you know, got shot in the head.

• 8:42Speaker 00

  With you?

• 8:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, we, we were all out there and we heard one shot and poof, hit him in the head and he dropped, right? I got hit in the side.

• 8:48Speaker 00

  And were you out there like with the gang, like?

• 8:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:51Speaker 00

  Because you were just out in the streets?

• 8:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, we, we all, everyone had their corner.

• 8:54Speaker 00

  Got it.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  We had Thirty Second and Luthwanica, the Italians, they had Armour Park, Thirty Third and Shields, Latin Kings had, uh, Thirty Third and Morgan, the, the, the Spanish Chancellors had Twenty Ninth and Wallace, right?

• 9:05Speaker 00

  And who's your favorite gang, looking back?

• 9:07Speaker 01

  I mean, the one I was with, right?

• 9:08Speaker 00

  Type shit.

• 9:09Speaker 01

  I was a disciple, man, of course.

• 9:11Speaker 00

  That's a good answer, bro.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  I ran the streets real hard from breaking into cars to garages to stealing cars to just, it, it escalated.

• 9:20Speaker 00

  So you were into crime then? That was your thing?

• 9:22Speaker 01

  Well, it was to survive, right? Like, I, I didn't, I didn't ever look at like crime in the sense, and even, even when I got older, in a sense of like, I, I, I imagine that it would make me like a rich drug lord. Right? Like, I never had that in my mind that stealing a car is gonna get, you know, cause me to have something great, like.

• 9:40Speaker 00

  Right, one day I'm gonna have a dealership or something.

• 9:42Speaker 01

  I'm not gonna have a dealership, exactly, right? So, so I, I always fought against wanting to do it, right? Like, and then when the money came though, so I ended up getting in trouble stealing a car. Uh, one of my mom's friends came up to get me because they could sign you out at the police station. And, uh, on the, on the way back, he was just telling me like, you know, what are you doing, man? You're smart in this. You know, I see how you are and you love your mama and you, you know, what, what's going on? And he brought me into his world.

• 10:08Speaker 00

  Who was saying this?

• 10:08Speaker 01

  Uh, uh, an older gentleman. Well, I nicknamed him Pete, called him Pete DaVinci, cause you know, he'd tell me crazy stories about DaVinci, wear a little hat, tying guy.

• 10:17Speaker 00

  Okay, got it.

• 10:17Speaker 01

  So we're walking back, me and Peter walking back, and he's just, you know, telling me, he goes, hey, listen, I'm gonna take it, I'm gonna show you how to make some money, and, and be quiet about it, right? That was the thing. That was the difference about what I was doing, it was loud. The gangs was loud, the guns, the stealing, the breaking windows, right, to get in the cars, right? He, he wanted to show me how to be quiet and make money. And, and so for me, with my dad leaving, he was kinda like the first one, the first guy that like, I, I felt like a, a, a, not, like a fathership, you know, like, like a little bit of a fatherhood too, right?

• 10:48Speaker 00

  Oh yeah, dude, when you're young, if somebody comes in your life and pays you some attention, or hey, this is another thing, hey, let me show you how to do something, that's a huge thing.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  I just didn't think it was gonna be print money, right? Like, I didn't know.

• 10:59Speaker 00

  Oh dude, I mean, I hate to say, look, I hate to say, you got lucky, cause some guys are like, let me teach you how to play tennis, you know? Let me teach you how to touch yourself or whatever, but you got lucky, bro.

• 11:11Speaker 01

  I did, I did. I really did, and my whole life has been kinda like that too. I get in places that people just don't get into.

• 11:19Speaker 00

  A hundred percent.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  I really do, man. It's like DaVinci hanging with the kings. I don't know how it happens, man, just I just, whoop, okay, here, I like portaled in, you know?

• 11:28Speaker 00

  And like, here we are in the next chapter of this fairy tale.

• 11:30Speaker 01

  I love it, I love it. That's what makes life live though, right?

• 11:33Speaker 00

  Oh, I agree. I, I think it's so interesting that he's teaching you how to, how to do something quiet.

• 11:38Speaker 01

  Quiet, that's what it was all about, right? And, and, and as a counterfeiter, you learn to become a ghost. I mean, even now, I'm still a ghost, you know? I still live like that, just cause it's how I was trained, you know? And, um, but yeah, so he, he, he takes me to his shop, he had a shop over by Armour Park, and you know, I had one of them old elevators that went down into the basement and stuff, and he had his printer over here, he had his light burner over here, he had his, uh, plate maker over here, where he did his ink, where he held his paper. I mean, it was just, it was fascinating. As a kid, I'm like fifteen, sixteen, man, you know, like here and I am with an old gangster, you know? And as a kid in that neighborhood, because my, my neighborhood was, was where Mayor Daley was from, right? Bridgeport, they call it.

• 12:18Speaker 00

  Where Mayor Daley was from?

• 12:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, Mayor Daley, the old Daley, Richard Daley and all the Dailys, that's that neighborhood, you know?

• 12:23Speaker 00

  Got it.

• 12:23Speaker 01

  And so you have the Irish on Thirty-seventh, you have the Italians on Thirty-first, you got the Chinatown over on Twenty-second, you got Pilsen, which is over off Eighteenth, and then, and then where I lived was like the hoth posh of everyone but poor, right? We were all just poor, right? But there was a little Puerto Rican, a little Thai, and a little, little mutt, you know, like everything, right? So for a kid in the projects, to make it to the Italian side was huge. That was like, that was like a hand up, man.

• 12:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:50Speaker 01

  You know, like, that's what everybody wanted, you know? You didn't wanna be a car thief, you know, you didn't wanna, you, you wanted to be with them, cause you know what they did.

• 12:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, they at least were a little, they were organized.

• 13:00Speaker 01

  They were organized, man. And so for, for me to be in the projects and be pulled out of it, that was like winning the lottery, man, you know, it was like winning the lottery. So, you know, he took me in, he started showing me, you know, I, I would help carry, carry the, he was old, so he needed someone anyway, cause the paper's heavy, ink cans, the, you know, have to move the equipment around, you gotta keep everything clean, right? It's constant, and that ink is shit, man. I've had it on my hand and then went and took a piss, and man, I'm burning my piece, you know?

• 13:23Speaker 00

  Really?

• 13:24Speaker 01

  Oh, that was crazy. Yeah, my paint, man, it was like green for like a week, and it wasn't gonorrhea.

• 13:28Speaker 00

  But it's heavy.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  It was ink, yeah, it was nuts, man.

• 13:31Speaker 00

  But it's getting darker, you know what I'm saying? Win some, lose some, cuz.

• 13:34Speaker 01

  I did, man, it was, you know, well, yeah, so.

• 13:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, what, what was some of the machinery that Pete was using to make, uh, to counterfeit?

• 13:41Speaker 01

  So the, at that time, it was still the little, little faced hundred, right? Had, there was a time when the hundred had a tiny face on it, right?

• 13:47Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 13:48Speaker 01

  We're going way back, nineteen eighty-five. So those were the ones he made, and they, and they were a lot easier, because there was no wa-water mark, there was no shifting ink, there was, you just, just a visual.

• 13:58Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 13:59Speaker 01

  And so, he was making those, and he was using the old off-offset technology, so it was, he had an A B Dick, he had A B Dick, uh, two color, right?

• 14:07Speaker 00

  What is that, A B Dick two color to paint?

• 14:09Speaker 01

  No, it's, it's a press, it's a printing press. It's, uh, it's, yeah, I gotta send you a picture. They're, they're awesome, man, they're like.

• 14:15Speaker 00

  We'll, we'll, we'll bring one up right here, it's called A B Dick.

• 14:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, look at like a two color A B Dick, yeah, there you go, right? And so, so he, that's what he used.

• 14:23Speaker 00

  Wow, and that looks kinda advanced for the times, huh?

• 14:26Speaker 01

  Well, no, well, I mean, it was an offset press. Ben Franklin invented the press. Like, look at Ben Franklin's press, his first one. Yeah, Ben Franklin's first press, he's the one who invented it. Ben Franklin invented all kinds of things. So there was different machines, you asked about the machines. So you had a machine to take a photo, right? You would take, put the bill up there, you take a photo of it, right, and then take it down. Then there was another machine, it was, uh, it made the, the negatives, right? So you would go and you'd make the negatives with, with the bill. And we would always do three bills, right? Cause these offsets, um, they, they would, they were best with like eight and a half by eleven paper.

• 15:02Speaker 00

  And you would take the photos of the bill?

• 15:04Speaker 01

  Of the bill.

• 15:04Speaker 00

  Of a real bill?

• 15:05Speaker 01

  Of a real bill, yeah.

• 15:06Speaker 00

  Okay, got it.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then we would take it and we put it into a negative form, and you know, put through the machine that makes the negative. And then we, that's when you do your serial numbers. We take this red tape and we, we'd knock out the serial numbers, and, cause that was one of the hardest things to change, right? Cause the, the numbers is what get people caught back in the old days, right? So you'd, you'd, you'd, you'd mark out the numbers, and then you'd make the plate, you'd burn, you'd put the negative in the machine, it'd burn the plate, then you put the plate onto the press, and then you make the ink, and then you run your paper, right? Like, it's fascinating. I love it. I, I really do. I, I love it.

• 15:37Speaker 00

  Well, it's a piece of art.

• 15:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I still got a press, you know, and I sit there and I lay next to it and reminisce.

• 15:42Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  But nevertheless, yeah, I'll show it to you one day, but, so yeah, so, so that, that's that process, but with me, what happened.

• 15:49Speaker 00

  And just to interrupt you real quick, how long did that process take?

• 15:52Speaker 01

  Well, for him, he could do it quick, so I had to learn, because he never let me do some of the things. Like, he never let me, like, uh, take the photos. He didn't let me, you know, burn the plates. I would be there, I would move stuff for him or be cleaning, but there was a lot of things I didn't get to do. But because I got to see what he used, I, I replicated that part first. So when, when the bill came out, I went back and started thinking about all the things that he was doing.

• 16:17Speaker 00

  You mean when the nineteen ninety-six one, one hundred dollar bill came out?

• 16:20Speaker 01

  When that came out.

• 16:21Speaker 00

  Because that bill came out and they said that it was unable to be duplicated, is that right?

• 16:25Speaker 01

  Duplicate, yeah, they said that all the security features, there was a watermark, a strip, uh, fluorescence on it, there were, uh, shifting ink, there was microprinting, you got the Moray, the, so there's a Moray, which if you try to scan it in a present scanner, the lines around his head will get real wavy, right? There's all kinds of neat things in there.

• 16:46Speaker 00

  Oh, really? So if you try to scan that in like a, just a scanner, to like scan it over to just even send a picture to somebody, the lines will get wavy in his head?

• 16:52Speaker 01

  Get wavy in his head. It's called a Moray, right?

• 16:55Speaker 00

  Interesting.

• 16:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, there's a lot of cool things on it.

• 16:58Speaker 00

  It says here, six features, uh, yeah, watermark, a second faint image of Benjamin Franklin to the right of the portrait, visible when held to light.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:06Speaker 00

  Uh, embedded security thread, a vertical strip embedded in the paper, visible when held to light, it reads USA one hundred. I remember when that came out, bro. UV reactive thread under ultraviolet light, the security thread glows red.

• 17:20Speaker 01

  So that's where you take the money to the strip club, and you throw it at the girl, and it, the, the line will glow yellow, red, or green, right?

• 17:26Speaker 00

  Got it.

• 17:26Speaker 01

  Whatever denomination it is. You want it to grow, I would want it to glow red, right? Red was the hundred color.

• 17:31Speaker 00

  It was? Oh, I wanted to glow. What was green, ones?

• 17:34Speaker 01

  Uh, well, no, I think that's twenties, I think.

• 17:37Speaker 00

  Okay, I'll do twenties.

• 17:38Speaker 01

  You could do twenties?

• 17:39Speaker 00

  Help the ladies out.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:40Speaker 00

  Ultraviolet light, they, the security thread glows red, uh, color shifting ink, the one hundred in the lower right front corner shifts from green to black as you tilt it.

• 17:50Speaker 01

  And now, then now it's purple to gold.

• 17:52Speaker 00

  Got it.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  The new one, microprinting.

• 17:54Speaker 00

  Microprinting, tiny USA one hundred printing included on Franklin's lapel and in the lower left numeral area. And then fine line, concentric line printing, intricate lines around the portrait and on the reverse, that ordinary copiers struggle to reproduce accurately.

• 18:08Speaker 01

  Exactly, the ordinary copiers, it, it makes it the, like, wavy.

• 18:11Speaker 00

  Got it.

• 18:12Speaker 01

  But listen to this one, read that next line.

• 18:14Speaker 00

  The nineteen ninety-six note does not have the blue three D security ribbon or the color changing bell in the inkwell. Those arrived on the redesigned one hundred dollar note introduced later.

• 18:23Speaker 01

  In two thousand fifteen. You know why that bill was made?

• 18:26Speaker 00

  Cause of me. I'm sitting next to him.

• 18:29Speaker 01

  It's called visual physics, right? You know, it's so funny, they let the bill out right when I got out of prison. Oh, I thought they were trying to rub it in my face a little bit.

• 18:37Speaker 00

  You doing it on purpose?

• 18:37Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, they had to, cause it, it was supposed to come out in thirteen, or no, it was supposed to come out like eleven or ten, somewhere around there. I got out in thirteen, two thousand thirteen. But I'm watching in the paper there, I'm reading in the paper, and man, you know, this new bill coming out, right? And, and, uh, then when I got out and I seen that purple line, I just went nuts. I'm like, well, so what happened is they wrote a book about me called Darn to Make a Money. Like, way back, it was like two thousand five, and so, and then they put me in Rolling Stone magazine, called me the best counterfeiter ever.

• 19:07Speaker 00

  Really?

• 19:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was awesome, right? I mean, I, I mean, I went to prison for seven years, so it wasn't too awesome, but it was still cool that I, it got recorded, you know? And, uh, but then everyone wanted to be like me. So you started having guys in California reading the book. Now, granted, I only, there was twelve steps to the whole thing, I only gave them like five, right? And so, I, I, for one, I would never give my recipe to anybody.

• 19:29Speaker 00

  To how to counterfeit, you mean?

• 19:30Speaker 01

  But when I was doing the book, I was like, you know, if I give these five, even if they tried to do it, it wouldn't come out like mine, right? Cause I don't want a bunch of people making money like me, and then I'm getting in trouble, right? So I just left a lot of parts out, but a lot of people tried and started creating their own money.

• 19:45Speaker 00

  Did anybody ever reach out to you and say, hey, do you wanna get back in the game?

• 19:49Speaker 01

  Oh, they do now on my Facebook and Instagram, man, you know, like, I get a little weirded out, you know, cause I get, that happens all the time, all the time.

• 19:56Speaker 00

  Have you ever just even met up with somebody just to see what it was like? Like, what's this person even talking about?

• 20:00Speaker 01

  Nah, nah, nah. If, if somebody comes at me like that now, like, I'm an artist, I got a great life, man, you know what I'm saying, like? And even back then, man, I'd probably trunk them, right? Just for coming to me without knowing me, right? Yeah, so like, yeah, anyway. Yeah, my no, my neighborhood, we trunk, they would trunk people, not me.

• 20:15Speaker 00

  Did put them in a trunk?

• 20:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, put them in a trunk.

• 20:17Speaker 00

  Um, but anyway, okay, so take me back to, all right, you're working with Pete?

• 20:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:22Speaker 00

  Are you able to learn Pete's method, or, or, or what happens there?

• 20:25Speaker 01

  So, so when, the time I was with him, like I said, mostly I was just moving things for him, learning how to mix inks. He didn't, he didn't ever let me do any of the real heavy stuff, like the, the brain work, right?

• 20:35Speaker 00

  Okay, got it.

• 20:35Speaker 01

  So I got to watch his, what he did, you know, that's how I learned what he, you know, I'd watch him do the plates, I'd watch him do the, the, uh, the photography, I'd watch him, you know, mix his inks, right? How he'd weigh it, right? He'd put the ink on the little scale like drugs, right?

• 20:48Speaker 00

  Oh, so you had to have a certain amount of ink on the bill?

• 20:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, you had, yeah, everything. Even the bill had to weigh a gram, right? Cause a drug dealer's like to weigh money, but nevertheless, so, but then Pete.

• 20:57Speaker 00

  God, I want a gram, go on.

• 20:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, so anyway, for like, you know, we did, I, I stayed around for, for about nine months to a year, and then he ended up disappearing. He was gone, never came into the diner no more. Wasn't at the shop, you know, and in my neighborhood that happened to people.

• 21:11Speaker 00

  Do you know what happened to him?

• 21:12Speaker 01

  No, no, I don't. I don't. I just, he just never came back, you know?

• 21:17Speaker 00

  If you had to guess what happened to him, what do you think happened?

• 21:19Speaker 01

  Well, I hope he got away. Like, that's what I think.

• 21:21Speaker 00

  Oh, you think somebody might have been on him a bit?

• 21:23Speaker 01

  Oh, well, that's in that, in that world back then especially, man, like people in my neighborhood disappeared. That, that really happened.

• 21:29Speaker 00

  But did you see Pete being paranoid about stuff? Like, did he also have some like things that he had done? Like, were there things he set up at his place or his house to like?

• 21:36Speaker 01

  So, the one thing about counterfeiters that, that, that, that he did, not, so not only did he, did I get to see what he did, but we talked a lot, right? I mean, that was the coolest thing I, I think about the whole experience is just getting, getting to hear his thoughts on different things, which expanded mine, right? Which made me grow, right? You know, so it was more than just learning how to print money, but it was actually learning how to use my mind. Cause up until that point I had it, you know? And, and so when, when he, when he did disappear, like it, it was hard on me, man, you know? I'd go over there, I'd be looking in the windows, seeing if he's around, you know, and

• 22:10Speaker 00

  You never heard from him again?

• 22:11Speaker 01

  No, no. And so the thing about a counterfeiter is the biggest thing is they teach you how to be quiet. They teach you how to disappear. They teach you how to not exist. They teach you how to, you know, that's the thing that was so awesome when I later down the road became a master at it, is I could, I could go anywhere. I could go to Florida. I could go to New York. I could go to LA. I could go to any country and quietly go somewhere and not know anybody and talk to anybody and produce money. It was the most, it was the most liberating feeling you can have to have that ability. To walk in with, with blank paper and then turn it into, to suitcase cash. But, but you learned how to do it quietly. And so for him, when he disappeared,

• 22:56Speaker 01

  in my mind, I'm thinking, you know, he had to go, right? The, the heat's on him, right? And, and, and boom, he's gone, right? I, I didn't want to think he was dead, even though like that's a high, that's a possibility too, because, you know, here's the thing, like whenever you're dealing with large amounts of money, every, it's not like the movies, man. You get over 50,000, you get over 100,000, your life's in danger.

• 23:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:18Speaker 01

  Okay? It, it don't need to be 500,000. It don't need to be a million. I've seen people get killed for 5,000. So, so in that world, you're literally printing like, I, so you asked if people have tried to get me to do money while I'm free? No, because I don't even entertain it.

• 23:34Speaker 00

  Right.

• 23:34Speaker 01

  Right? But on the streets, yeah, there were times where, where there were different, you know, crews that would hear about me. And then they literally look at you like a printing press.

• 23:45Speaker 00

  Right. You, this guy's ATM.

• 23:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, this is an ATM, man. So, so that was the, the thing that I had to watch for when, back on the day, you know?

• 23:52Speaker 00

  That's scary.

• 23:52Speaker 01

  And that's why you have to be a ghost. That's, that's why you have to be a ghost because you can't be predictable. You can't, I never, even now, nobody knows where I live, man. Like, I don't let, wherever I lay my head, man, it's top secret. Top secret. Even my gallery, you know, by appointment only. Doors ain't open. Can't come in there.

• 24:09Speaker 00

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• 24:54Speaker 00

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• 25:38Speaker 00

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• 26:17Speaker 00

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• 26:39Speaker 00

  So, so just to do a timeline recap, so you, you grow up in this neighborhood in Chicago. It's a hectic environment. You get into stuff on the streets. You guys are out there kind of banging, stealing this, stealing that. Kind of petty crime stuff, maybe a little bit aggressive. You meet Pete, you kind of go under his wing as this sort of like, not exactly an apprentice, but you're there with him all the time.

• 26:59Speaker 01

  His helper.

• 27:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, his, his helper. You're watching, you're seeing what he's doing. And also he's kind of having conversations with you that are helping you kind of elevate and expand. Just how you even think about the world.

• 27:08Speaker 01

  Mentally.

• 27:08Speaker 00

  Okay. And now Pete disappears and you're back, uh, out on the streets and you guys start getting into some heavier stuff.

• 27:14Speaker 01

  Pete, yeah, like, you know, when he, when he left, I went back, actually when, when that whole situation, he took off, I went back to the streets. I started getting into the gangs and I started getting into, you know, just some real heavy shit, you know? And we started robbing drug dealers. We dress up like cops. We had the cop cars, you know?

• 27:32Speaker 00

  Really?

• 27:32Speaker 01

  Like I said, the drug dealing was a real big thing. So I, I didn't like to sell drugs. Like, I had a lot of friends that did, but I didn't like to see what it did to people. You know, that's why I liked the, the counterfeiting, right? Cause it was like, I didn't feel like I was really hurting anyone, you know? I'm not stealing. I don't like to steal. And, and the drug part, like I, I seen what it did, but, but we would, so we would start robbing them, right? And, and one of my dudes, he, um, like he, my son, so my, my first son, his mom's a cop, right? So like, and, and yeah, right. That's a whole nother lane. Well, we won't go down that one, but it, it, it, it allowed, you know, a lot of my guys, we had friends that were cops, so we could get uniforms, we could get badges, you know? I always loved a cop car. And I had a nice one, right? I always had a real nice one, like,

• 28:17Speaker 01

  and I loved it because I could move through, see, I, I'd wear glasses and, you know, make my hair to the side and I look like a cop, you know? But, but we started, we, you know, we'd start robbing the drug dealers. The ones like out in the suburbs, and what, basically what would happen, these guys from the suburbs would, would come in and they like to hang out at the clubs downtown. They want to flash their money to the girls. We'd have girls that were working for us. So we'd have girls in those clubs and they'd be like, hey, this guy, that, he's doing this, this and that. I'm like, okay, cool. And, and she wouldn't sleep with them, but she'd go home with them, become friends, hang out with them, finesse them. And then we'd come and, right? And we'd, we'd be like, we'd have fess on guns, like, like legit, like dressed like cops.

• 28:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, dude.

• 28:58Speaker 01

  But yeah, no, and we did that. And then it got dangerous. It did start getting dangerous because we started getting stupid. Like, you know, at first it was, and that's how

• 29:05Speaker 00

  What, y'all throw like a police ball or whatever? Like, I mean, how stupid do you guys get?

• 29:09Speaker 01

  Well, that's, that's stupid like that.

• 29:10Speaker 00

  Were you playing softball against the fire department or something? Like, what were you guys doing?

• 29:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, no, no. But we were like robbing more dangerous elements.

• 29:20Speaker 00

  Okay, got it. So it escalated?

• 29:21Speaker 01

  It escalated. Like all crime, right? Like all crime escalates. You go from, oh, we're gonna hit these white suburban kids from out there that think they're cool. And now we get, our ball's so big, we're like, oh, we're gonna hit that cat on 18th street that got 10 guns around him.

• 29:35Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 29:35Speaker 01

  Right? So you go from, like, you know, it just escalated.

• 29:39Speaker 00

  It's escalation ladder.

• 29:40Speaker 01

  And then I got shot. I got shot in my side. And, and then, and, and there was a lot of things that happened that caused me to go to my next phase.

• 29:48Speaker 00

  Okay, got it.

• 29:49Speaker 01

  But we did for, for that little brief, you know, there was, I guess, For about three years, maybe, I was just running hard on the street, you know?

• 29:57Speaker 02

  And who shot you?

• 29:59Speaker 01

  Uh, Latin King. Latin King shot me, tried to kill me. Yeah, yeah.

• 30:03Speaker 02

  Did he spare your life?

• 30:04Speaker 01

  No, hell no. Yeah, he tried to kill me. Yeah. No, they, I was walking home from a, a, a party like two in the morning. I'm walking through a basketball court and I hear two guys behind me. I looked, they got, they got handkerchiefs on and, um, and I thought it was my dudes from the party. And so I'm like, hey, man, take the handkerchiefs off, man, you know, you're getting me nervous. And they're like, getting you nervous? And boom, they pulled out the pistols and just started just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. I turned around, I took off running, put my head between my legs. I could feel the bullets just, right? And, uh, and then I got hit and I fell to the ground right as I was almost around the corner from the projects, you know? I got hit and I stayed on, I, when I hit the ground, I was just gonna stay on the ground and figure they thought they killed me and they take off.

• 30:47Speaker 01

  And, but when I hit the ground, I looked back, they were running up on me. They were gonna try to dome shot me.

• 30:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:52Speaker 01

  You know, and some, something real spiritual happened at that moment. Like I felt something grab me from underneath my, my armpits, you know? And just kinda like lift me off the ground and, and I ran like five blocks to 31st and Halston. I was on 32nd.

• 31:10Speaker 02

  And was you leaking too?

• 31:11Speaker 01

  I was leaking. Yeah, yeah.

• 31:13Speaker 02

  You plug it up? Did you plug up the wound with like a?

• 31:15Speaker 01

  There was a Chicago Tribune guy that was helping me.

• 31:19Speaker 02

  He might have put some newspaper in it or something?

• 31:20Speaker 01

  I had to put a newspaper on me. Well, I didn't even know, I, I, I didn't even like feel it. It was weird because when I got to 31st and I sat down on the bus stop and I'm like feeling myself, you know, you're all like shaking and stuff. And then, uh, and then I stood back up and I could feel like something on my, and when I grabbed it, it was just all red and just blood. And I, then I told the, the Chicago Sun-Times guy, say, hey, man, I've been hit, man, call the ambulance.

• 31:43Speaker 02

  Damn.

• 31:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, so then.

• 31:45Speaker 02

  He was delivering papers?

• 31:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, delivering papers, yeah. Yeah, it was like three in the morning. But after that, that's when I went to Texas, you know, I was like, my mom was like, man, you gotta go. You know, I've already had at that point, like six of my friends murdered, you know, I'm only like 18, 19 years old, you know?

• 32:01Speaker 02

  So shit was getting hot down there, huh?

• 32:02Speaker 01

  Well, well, the South Side was dangerous back then, man. Like I said, guns hit the street, man. It seemed like everyone had one. They were called Larson's, L L A R S. I mean, it's just.

• 32:10Speaker 02

  What, the type of gun?

• 32:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, like right around 90, I'd say like 92, 93. Man, everyone had these things. It was a 22, a 25 and a 380. They were, yeah, they, they were like that, little, the little guns. They were real tiny, like that 22. Yeah, that's what we had.

• 32:27Speaker 02

  Oh, that little?

• 32:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's it. Those things flooded, flooded the, the streets, man.

• 32:32Speaker 02

  That little grocery getter, you think?

• 32:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, they were a little tiny, man, but 22, 25, 380, and you get them for 50 bucks. It's almost like they dumped them on the street. And then that's, and it just, so it went from, you know, fighting and bats and, you know, like the old school type to just.

• 32:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, real shit, double dragon shit.

• 32:48Speaker 01

  Double dragon shit, yeah, to like everyone having these little peace shooters that killed.

• 32:52Speaker 02

  That's crazy. I wouldn't be surprised.

• 32:54Speaker 01

  But I lost six of my friends during that time and, uh, and so I went to Texas. My mom said, let's get, get out of here. So I ended up going down to Texas.

• 33:02Speaker 02

  And, and when you get down to Texas, is that where, uh, your kind of fitting journey kinda continues?

• 33:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So when I went down there, of course, I'm trying to get away from the gang violence and, uh, but I'm still me. You know, I'm still a criminal, right? And so I go down there, I start getting with the, in, in, with, with the wrong crowd. I get into a little trouble. Um, I go to, I go to prison for like two years and, uh, in a Texas prison, those Texas prisons were rough too, man. Wow, was it crazy. I thought I was in hell. But, uh, when I got out, my girl Natalie, she picked me up and she took me to a hotel. We did the whole, you know, the whole prison release freedom party, right?

• 33:39Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, sex or whatever.

• 33:40Speaker 01

  Sex, yeah, anyway. And, um, and then we, we went to, the, the first place I wanted to go was to the bookstore. Cause I read a lot. I read thousands of books, right? And so I wanted a Bruce Lee book and so she wanted to get me the Bruce Lee book. So we go to the bookstore and she buy, we were buying the book and she pays with a hundred, the new hundred. I hadn't seen it yet. Alright, cause I was in prison and, and, and I'm watching, she pays and the, and the lady just pulls out a pen and marks it and then puts it in drawer.

• 34:09Speaker 01

  And I'm looking, I'm like, man, already I'm thinking like she didn't even look at the hundred.

• 34:14Speaker 02

  But she just used the marker?

• 34:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I had, yeah, I just used the marker and that was entrusted fully. I was, and I'm thinking in my mind, I'm like, man, if somebody figured this part out, man, you could have a run, right? And that's where it started, right?

• 34:27Speaker 02

  I just gotta beat the marker.

• 34:28Speaker 01

  Just gotta beat the marker, right? That's the only thing on my mind. I just gotta beat that because nobody's looking at it. And, and that's where the, the quest began, you know? And I'm not even out of prison like a couple of days and here I am already thinking about the next crime. That's, that's what's so, like, the criminal mind could be so like obsessive and addictive, you know? Like it really can be.

• 34:52Speaker 02

  That'd be kind of an addiction.

• 34:53Speaker 01

  Oh, for sure, right? Especially printing money. Like the smell of ink even now gets me aroused, you know, like anyway. I mean, I might be, use a different word, but it, it makes me like get goosebumps, you know?

• 35:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, the, the smell of like old canned ink when you open it. So anyway, so, so we start, we, we start the journey, I'm, and, and just, and I, again, here's one of those moments where I just in the, you know, I got, got a little bit blessed or lucky or star fell on my head or whatever, is, is Natalie was, was one of the first that was into tech, right? When the computers were coming out, the internet was only in like the, the, the libraries and, uh, the universities, right? So, w- w- I would use the, the internet at that time. I'd go into the library to, to look up, uh, how they made money. I could go onto the treasury site and they had like educational videos on how they put the money through each step.

• 35:42Speaker 02

  Nah-uh.

• 35:43Speaker 01

  It was fascinating. Yeah.

• 35:44Speaker 02

  You're lying.

• 35:45Speaker 01

  No, it was, yeah, you could still go. I bet you could still probably look up how, how they, how the treasury makes money and they'll have videos. But we're, this is early, the videos were slow, but you could see it, right?

• 35:54Speaker 02

  Right.

• 35:55Speaker 01

  And that's when I thought about my, about Pete, right? About the offset press, right? And then, like I said, I, I got a little lucky because Natalie was a computer genius at the time, right? She was working for, for a tech company to, that, you know, they were calling, this is before, you know, uh, other countries took all the, you know, the call in jobs, right? And, um, and so I, what I did is I combined the old technology and then the new technology together. So I created a hybrid, right?

• 36:23Speaker 02

  Did you have to have a conversation with her? Like, hey babe, this is what I'm gonna do or?

• 36:26Speaker 01

  Uh, it, it slowly led there, right? Like first I'm just trying to just figure it out in my head how this could be done.

• 36:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, like how do you like ease her into it? Like, just like you're sitting on the couch being like, wish, wish we, wish we had a couple of hundreds.

• 36:38Speaker 01

  Well, no, I, I didn't ease her into, I mean, a little bit of an easement, but she was ready to go too. Like she was fascinated how I was thinking, right? Cause I'm telling her about when I was young and when I got to learn how to use the old printing presses. And then she's telling me about how she's like a technician for all the new stuff and, and.

• 36:55Speaker 02

  That's a good point. She's already smashing criminals. So it's like, what are we even talking about?

• 36:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, she's, she's, yeah. So anyway, she, me and her having, we, we start to come and form this thing. The first thing we had to do was figure out the paper, right? You can't, you know, I know how I could get the press. I'm looking up, you know, where to get presses, we're calling places. So we, we could almost get everything we need from the ink to the printers. The printers were new, so they didn't have none of the, the secret service, uh, uh, software in them, right? The Photoshop was new, all the stuff was new. So that's why credit card scams shot through the roof. That's why checks shot through the roof. People were doing corporate checks because all this equipment that was coming out, there was no safeguards on it.

• 37:35Speaker 02

  Oh, okay.

• 37:36Speaker 01

  Oh, it was awesome.

• 37:36Speaker 02

  It wasn't tested. They hadn't really thought that people are gonna use this for this yet.

• 37:39Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, we were using the magnet, they had magnetic printers. You could print the magnetic checks. Like that was like 96, 97, probably look that up. I bet you fraud went through the roof, right? Because you were able to use these machines, you know, and we used them well. We, you know, she, she started looking in how to, uh, one of the first things we did was change the, uh, the Photoshop program where it wouldn't like, if you scanned the hundred, it had something in there where it would, um.

• 38:06Speaker 02

  In 1996, financial institutions faced a dramatic surge in check and credit card fraud.

• 38:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. Yeah, that, that's what happened, man.

• 38:12Speaker 02

  Driven primarily by the.

• 38:13Speaker 01

  I was a part of it. I raised my hand. Yeah, I was a part of that shit, but.

• 38:17Speaker 02

  Driven primarily by the transition into the early digital era and the rapid adoption of desktop publishing technology.

• 38:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, there you go. So.

• 38:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, I just wanted to get that out there. Uh, but you were talking about the paper?

• 38:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. So the paper was the first thing we had to figure out. We could figure out all the other things. The printing, the technology, this, but if, if you don't get the paper right, it, it, it's worthless, right? Because you had to beat the pen, right? That was the first test that led us there, right? Was the pen.

• 38:41Speaker 02

  And the paper is what beats the pen?

• 38:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was the pH in the paper, right? The, the, the paper is like a, it's a neutral, right? It's, there's no acid. So, so paper goes from like acidic levels. And so the money paper is like, almost like at zero, right? It's really hard to get it at that, I suppose. I don't make paper, but as I learned how to do this, I learned that paper has these different levels on it.

• 39:05Speaker 02

  And so the pen reacts with that?

• 39:07Speaker 01

  With the acidic level.

• 39:08Speaker 02

  If it's not neutral, then what happens?

• 39:09Speaker 01

  It turns black, like a dark brown.

• 39:11Speaker 02

  Okay, got it. So that's like you see at the bank or there's some like, some like.

• 39:14Speaker 01

  When you go to the store, you give a hundred.

• 39:15Speaker 02

  And stuff, they do that sometimes.

• 39:16Speaker 01

  They do the, do the pen. And if it's real, it'll turn like a light yellow, right? It's like a light yellow. It's a beautiful color. Love that color. But, so here it is, we're trying to figure out this paper and we're ordering paper from everywhere, but like back in the day in the Yellow Pages. Again, the internet's only in the libraries and the universities. So you still had Yellow Pages back then. So here we are going to this paper company, this paper company, we're ordering, getting samples. She's marketing, marketing, marketing. We're going on and on with this. Finally, I'm losing. I'm thinking we're not gonna be able to pull it off. And so I'm getting a little upset with her. I'm arguing with her that we're not doing something right. So she starts screaming back at me. She's waving the yellow pages at me. You fucker, you're fucking running me and ragging. Like, I was really running the girl hard, too, right?

• 40:00Speaker 01

  And she slammed it down and she goes, nothing works. And she marked the yellow pages. And she just, she stopped. She goes, she goes, I can't believe this can't be. And I'm like, huh, what's going on? Cause I still don't know. And she hits it again and again. She goes, she looks up, she goes, this whole time, we've been looking for the paper and this is it. Our, come here. And I go over there. And what the fuck? It marked. I got nervous. When I seen it go yellow, I got so nervous because I didn't have to do nothing to it. Bro, up until this point, I even started trying to put acid on the paper. I almost burned the house down. Like a real asshole. I put acid in aluminum. Don't ever do that, right?

• 40:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:41Speaker 01

  Don't do it. But I was trying to do all kinds of dumb things, right?

• 40:45Speaker 02

  So you were trying all different papers?

• 40:46Speaker 01

  All different papers. And I'll hear the whole time, it's the freaking yellow pages. That is like one of the most widely used paper in the whole world.

• 40:54Speaker 02

  Like what types of different?

• 40:55Speaker 01

  Cottons, linens, um, different poundage, twenty, cause it's the paper's weight, right? Like you got twenty pound, they're like, like school paper would probably be like a twenty-six pound, thirty-two pound, right? Your printing papers, like thirty-two.

• 41:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:10Speaker 01

  Uh, what I needed was eighteen, right? So it was real thin, right? And, and, and this is what happened. This is what made this so amazing. So here I was looking to, for the paper that I could mark, you know, mark right. But now this gave me, it, it solved a bunch of things because I needed to solve the watermark. And I needed to solve the strip, right? And then the strip is fluorescent. So now I gotta figure out how to make the strip fluorescent, but I gotta put all these things in the paper. With the yellow pages, cause it was so thin, it allowed me to press two of them together. It was awesome, right? I'd print three on each side, three fronts, three backs.

• 41:50Speaker 01

  I'd have my strips and my watermarks. I'd have a light table and I would have all the stuff, just every piece laid out. And I would just lay, it was all hand done. That's the one thing about my money, right? So like, people ask how much I've done and I've, I've printed and made a lot, but every single piece was hand done.

• 42:06Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 42:07Speaker 01

  Every piece. Every, every one I put that watermark in. Every one I laid that strip. Every one of them, she'd be standing right next to me, you know?

• 42:15Speaker 02

  It's a little newborn.

• 42:16Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, a little baby.

• 42:18Speaker 02

  It's a piece of art.

• 42:18Speaker 01

  It really was. And then, then you press them, but, but when we found, you know, when she did that, now we're looking for the paper. She, she would go to, uh, RR Donnelly out there in the suburbs of Chicago. Say that she was a teacher and she was doing a school project with the kid. Could I get, get some paper? And they'd give us a whole roll of it for free.

• 42:36Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 42:37Speaker 01

  The whole roll. Like enough to do like a million dollars, right? It was, it was, and, and.

• 42:42Speaker 02

  For the, of the phone book?

• 42:43Speaker 01

  Of the phone book paper. We'd get it on a butt roll, they call it, right? So after they're done printing the, the phone books, they would have these butt rolls that would have like that much left on it or something, man. They would just, and so she'd come out here, man, with free paper, like, look at me, man. We'd load that shit up. And, um, and then we would cut it and then we'd, we'd prep it. We had to do a lot to it because, so when we started to, to try to run it through the, the, the ink jets, it couldn't match the, the colors, right? So at first I wanted to just run it off the inkjet, right?

• 43:13Speaker 02

  The printer.

• 43:14Speaker 01

  The printers, you know, the neural printers. But you, you could get like the serial numbers really good. You could get the seals really good. You could get certain, maybe the backs sometimes, the right ones, in the early days, you could get good. But the actual color of money, you can never match. Ever. I don't, I don't give a shit how good you were. I mean, again, again, here we go. Now we got the paper. Now it's time to do the files.

• 43:36Speaker 02

  But you think you'd be able to figure out the color, right? I mean, the colors.

• 43:39Speaker 01

  With a computer, you don't control it. It's the computer that uses the pantone. So it's a pantone color.

• 43:45Speaker 02

  I see.

• 43:45Speaker 01

  Right?

• 43:46Speaker 02

  So it wasn't really exactly up to you. I mean, if you're printing, if you're using, if you're using an inkjet, it's gonna, it's only gonna have so many variations.

• 43:53Speaker 01

  You can adjust it, you know? And so like, with, with money, right? You're trying to create something that is the most powerful tool in the world.

• 44:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:01Speaker 01

  Right? And, and, and, and money has a feel. It has a look. It has like a greenish, uh, cream color to it, right? Like, and, and, and this, and even though it looks very simple, it's still very powerful, right? That, that bill is. And so if you're printing, like what, what the way that I did it, is I did every layer like they did. When I went to the, to, to, to their website and I watched how they did it, what the first thing I learned was they did every single image by itself, right? That's what made my money so good. That's what separated me from all the other counterfeiters before me and most definitely all of them behind me. I like to do one thing at a time. If you try to do everything at one time, which a lot of the counterfeiters did,

• 44:45Speaker 01

  you're always gonna get one or two or three of, of the, the, the assets off, right? Cause, cause the, the, the face and the, and the weave around it, which is micro printing or the seals or the numbers. There's so many different things that you gotta print. And if you try to print them all at once, it's gonna be impossible to, to match all of them. And if you only get one or two off, you could tell. You could tell right away, right? Every one of them has to be perfect if you want to really fool the world with the money, right?

• 45:13Speaker 02

  So how would you go about doing one and then doing the next one? Like with a printer? Were you still using the printer or you put that kibosh on that?

• 45:20Speaker 01

  Well, no, that's when it advanced to, to bringing back Pete's technology with the offset because it allowed me to mix my own ink.

• 45:26Speaker 02

  Got it.

• 45:27Speaker 01

  Right? So I needed, what I needed to figure out was how to color this paper, right? And that was one of the hardest things. It's so, so, so like trippy when I think back on it. Because on the scale, the amount of paint that I used for a run was like an eye drop. Right? To get that light, light, light, green, creamy look was one of the hardest colors to match.

• 45:50Speaker 02

  So a run means one bill or how many bills?

• 45:52Speaker 01

  It was just one run through, right? Like, so, so.

• 45:54Speaker 02

  I see what you're saying. And how many times you have to run through to get a bill correct?

• 45:57Speaker 01

  So for the registrat-, so, so I'm gonna give you some printing, uh, knowledge, right? So, so what made my bills, what, what allowed me to be able to run, keep running it through is the registration. Like on a printer, you got that little thing that moves to the side, right? For the paper, like if you change the paper size, right? If you have eight and a half by eleven.

• 46:15Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. That little gauge. It's like, okay, you pull, you move that to the side of it to kinda keep it right there.

• 46:20Speaker 01

  That's called registration, right? Keeps the paper straight where it goes into the computer perfect. Same thing on an offset press. You have a registration. Little bit harder to work with on that though, right? You gotta be really lined up, cause that paper's flying through that thing, right? Whereas a printer's like, uh, uh, uh, uh, right?

• 46:39Speaker 02

  Right.

• 46:39Speaker 01

  Offset presses, right? It's just shooting it out really fast. So that registration, but I, I was able to get the registration pretty much perfect every time. But, you know, just being patient with it, right? Not, not trying to force it. And so the first thing I would do is run the paper through the offset press. So this is when I combined the two. I seen that the ink jets couldn't print the background. It was impossible. And so I said, okay, let me, let me get a printing press and let me go do the old way, you know?

• 47:08Speaker 02

  One of Pete's?

• 47:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, one of Pete's. And then we'll use Natalie's way with the serial numbers and the seals, right? It worked really good for the serial numbers, cause I could change every single one of them, right? And the seals, it matched really close, right? But with the, with the printing press, I wanted the color and the, and the weave and the face. I wanted that face to be perfect.

• 47:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:28Speaker 01

  Because, you know, if you try to scan the bill, it would create this little wavy thing around the head and it just looked nasty, right? That was one of the security features. It's called a maray and they didn't even list it up there, but that's one of them. But with the printing press, I get to shoot my own. I get to take a picture of it, right? And so when I went back to that, that's when the bills went like from here to here, right? Cause now I'm really making it like the feds are making it, just at a very small, you know, small scale, right? And the first thing I would do is I would, we would cut the paper and we'd have to put it on a carrier paper, which was a thicker paper, cause that eighteen pound was so skinny that it would jam the, the big press.

• 48:06Speaker 02

  Oh, that makes sense. Yeah. If you're putting like, yeah, if you're putting phone book paper through a printer, it's not gonna make it.

• 48:10Speaker 01

  It would just, just tear it up. So we'd have to put that on a piece of paper thicker and then tape the sides. Funny story. I had a whole, a senior citizen, uh, living place putting paper on paper for me, like fifty boxes, man.

• 48:24Speaker 02

  Really?

• 48:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, we were doing, yeah. Well, I, we were about to do a big run. And so I asked my boy to Greek, I said, man, I gotta, I gotta get all this paper put on, man. He's like, how many? I was like fifty boxes. He's like, dude, that's crazy. I said, what? And he was remodeling a senior citizen home. And he's like, well, guess what, dog? He goes, the senior citizen home that I'm doing some work on, they play in the game room all the time. Maybe I'll ask them. He goes, there ain't no money on it. I'm like, no, no, there ain't no money on it. I just need one piece of paper placed on another and tape the two sides. So we asked the, the head of the, the, you know, the, the senior citizen. And I had, before you know it, I had like twenty old people doing it. We were doing contests. I was paying them fifty bucks a day.

• 49:03Speaker 02

  And you're, and they don't even know?

• 49:05Speaker 01

  They don't know it's going to get printed into money. Yeah, they were helping. I had all these. It was awesome, man. But they, they had fun. They were laughing.

• 49:10Speaker 02

  They had fun for sure.

• 49:12Speaker 01

  They did contests.

• 49:13Speaker 02

  For sure they were laughing.

• 49:14Speaker 01

  Do the most. I would give a bonus. Well, who could do the most? Or they would all come out.

• 49:18Speaker 02

  But they had no idea they were helping you counterfeit.

• 49:20Speaker 01

  Not at all. Not at all. Not one bit. Yeah. And, and we, and we got it done like that. It was so awesome. Yeah, that was fun. But anyway, so yeah, we, the, the paper, we'd run it through, we'd do the background. Then we would do the, the weave in the face and then we would run it through the new technology and we would do the serial numbers and the seals and then that little hundred, right?

• 49:38Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 49:39Speaker 01

  And then even that with the, with the shifting ink. This is what was the coolest thing I, I, I think with, with me creating this bill. Was how I was able to take just your common things, right? Like take car paint and use it for the shifting ink. It was car paint, but I, but I was able to alter it. Well, not all. It was the same company that made it for the feds, right? I mean, wasn't too smart of them, right? You know?

• 50:04Speaker 00

  How'd you find out that they made it for the feds?

• 50:05Speaker 01

  Through their, uh, patent number. So, so I would also look up patent numbers. That's how I figured out the counter machine in the banks.

• 50:11Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 50:12Speaker 01

  So I was, I'm like a scientist with stuff, man. I'm always trying to figure things out and what's really nuts is the federal government, man. They give you like the patent office, if you have a patent number, you could go to the patent office and put patent number and it'll tell you. You could make a nuclear bomb if you wanted, I think, actually.

• 50:26Speaker 00

  It'll tell you everything about it?

• 50:27Speaker 01

  Tell you everything about it. Well, has to.

• 50:28Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 50:28Speaker 01

  Right? So if you're trying to file a patent, you gotta do a patent search. Right? So I got the, my boy's mom worked at the bank and I had her get the patent number off the counter machine.

• 50:37Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 50:37Speaker 01

  And then I just went and put it in, in, in the, you know, patent trademark office. And it gave me the whole schematic, man, how it used the magnetic ink for the thread, how it did this, how it counted. I mean, I literally defeated the bill by using their own knowledge. Yeah, it was pretty cool, you know, but, um.

• 50:52Speaker 00

  Wow, dude. Dude, I, I, and, and I remember whenever we, whenever we met up in Chicago, you told me that, um, yeah, like whenever you made that first bill, it was crazy. The feeling was like really overwhelming because, um.

• 51:05Speaker 01

  It was scary. It was, I mean, I don't get scared much. But it, it, it put a, it put a, a level of fear in me. Like what did I just do? You know, like I, you know, cause I'm from the streets and, and I, and I, and I've seen people get hurt. I've seen people do really well, but money can cause a lot of things, you know?

• 51:25Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 51:25Speaker 01

  And, and so for me, I'm sitting here like the, the, the first thing that came to mind is be as secretive as possible. Don't let anybody know. Like I didn't wanna tell nobody, right? So it wasn't, you know, sometimes you do something that, that you're so proud of that you, you wanna go show your mama.

• 51:43Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 51:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I didn't wanna show my mama this one, right? Like I didn't wanna show nobody, man. I, and, and I got nervous. I'm like, man, they'll kill us. They'll kill us. I told, I actually told now, they'll kill us for this, man. Like this is their power. And we're, and we're learning how to create it out of freaking yellow pages.

• 52:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:01Speaker 01

  You know, like.

• 52:02Speaker 00

  I can't even imagine.

• 52:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was ridiculous, you know? And so.

• 52:05Speaker 00

  And so now you can make money.

• 52:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:08Speaker 00

  Right? How long does it take to you to make like a decent amount of money? And then what do you decide you're gonna start doing and what do you start spending it on?

• 52:15Speaker 01

  Well, again, crime escalates, right? So, you know, at first it was like, we wanted to just, because I wanted to be secretive about it, we would just drive around the country and just spend it, right? We'd shoot, shoot to the other side of the country.

• 52:28Speaker 00

  Where'd y'all go? Like Vegas?

• 52:29Speaker 01

  To the malls, you know, I mean, no, we'd hit, I'd probably hit every town in the country. Like I, I'm like back road arty, man. I have been on every back road in this country.

• 52:36Speaker 00

  You were just cruising, just having a good time?

• 52:38Speaker 01

  I got like two million miles under me for sure. Absolutely.

• 52:41Speaker 00

  On the road driving?

• 52:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, back then we had the Atlas, you know, so we'd look at a town. And every town always had like this little mall in it, you know? And Natalie got good, boy. She could hit a mall, man, be on the other side of it, spend, you know, almost fifteen thousand in like an hour and a half.

• 52:55Speaker 00

  Damn.

• 52:55Speaker 01

  And we'd be on the road, shoot, gone, you know? And we, sometimes, well, we don't, the most we ever did with three in one day. She was on a roll. I don't know if she did a lot of cocaine or what, man, but she wouldn't stop.

• 53:06Speaker 00

  You know if she did a lot of cocaine, but let's keep it a going.

• 53:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, she was going.

• 53:13Speaker 01

  Anyway, so like, yeah, we would hit the road, man, and, but what happened is first we started buying things for us.

• 53:18Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 53:19Speaker 01

  And then before long, you got so much, man, shit don't mean nothing. Like you're almost like, God, I feel like an asshole, right? I got a hundred and fifty shirts.

• 53:27Speaker 00

  Right, yeah, yeah. What are you gonna do? You have, yeah, a lot of pairs of shoes. What are you even gonna do?

• 53:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, so then we started getting things for like our family and friends and stuff like that.

• 53:36Speaker 00

  And were people noticing that you had money for sure?

• 53:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, but people, you know, here, the thing is, is I was always looked at as a hustler.

• 53:43Speaker 00

  Got it.

• 53:44Speaker 01

  Right? So whether it was robbing drug dealers or like, I mean, we even hit, hit trucks a little bit, you know? My boy was a Teamster. We'd get shit off the, the docks, you know, all the time. One time I had like two hundred and fifty thousand condoms. Like everyone in Chicago was wearing one of the condoms. I was, yeah.

• 54:01Speaker 00

  Oh, you, you robbed the truck?

• 54:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:02Speaker 00

  Got it.

• 54:03Speaker 01

  The trucks, yeah, trucks in Chicago. That was another little hustle we had, you know? I had Bic razors. I had, I had, I've had everything, you know? But anyway, back to, to, to the, the, the money.

• 54:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, how were you spending it?

• 54:14Speaker 01

  So we, so we started buying stuff for like our families and friends, you know? But then that, that even kinda got to the point to where like people started expecting things.

• 54:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:23Speaker 01

  Like, you know, like you'd come into town and like, they'd be like always looking, what's, what's he got me now, right? You know? And if you didn't, there, there'd be like an attitude or something, you know? So like, that's when I stepped away from that and then, then we just started buying things for kids, right? I grew up poor, grew up in the projects. You know, we were at the Salvation Army Shelter Home, you know, and so there's a Salvation Army box in every town, right? So I would just tell, tell Natalie, listen, just get diapers, baby clothes, baby shoes, baby toys.

• 54:52Speaker 00

  Let's go drop them off.

• 54:53Speaker 01

  And we would just drop them off. And that was like, that was like one of the coolest times of my life.

• 54:57Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 54:58Speaker 01

  That's the most fulfilling. They say I, they, they say I did the, my therapist said when I was in prison, I did it to like cover up my crime. But, but for me, it really, I, I loved helping people, man. It was awesome.

• 55:08Speaker 00

  What made it one of the best times of your life?

• 55:11Speaker 01

  Well, cause I just do, cause it wasn't even just the Salvation Army, but even families, like, you know? Uh, one of Natalie's friends down in Houston was struggling, man, and we just showed up at Christmas and just bam, blessed her kids with, with, with, with rent and toys. They weren't gonna have a Christmas.

• 55:24Speaker 00

  Right.

• 55:24Speaker 01

  Right? And see that, or, you know, or even like, I'd go to church, man. Like I was, I was so sick with it. I would take ten percent out and I'd go to church on Sunday. We'd hit, we hit the malls Friday and Saturday and I'd go to church and, and give them ten percent and walk out, you know, like I, I just love doing things like that, you know?

• 55:42Speaker 00

  So you were using some of the counterfeit money to go tithe?

• 55:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 55:45Speaker 00

  You'd give ten percent counterfeit money?

• 55:46Speaker 01

  You gotta give God the money. He's the biggest gangster ever, man, you know?

• 55:49Speaker 00

  Oh, for sure.

• 55:50Speaker 01

  Gotta give him his, man. Well, you know what? That's the thing about life, right? Like the, there's, there's, I call it the flow, right? Like when you, when you, when you give, man, it, it, you, what you're doing is you're opening yourself up, man, for a lot of good.

• 56:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:04Speaker 01

  A lot of good, you know, and I learned how to do that even in the toughest times. Like, man, we wouldn't, there were times when I was growing up, man, where we didn't have, uh, hot water. For two years, we didn't have no hot water. You know how cold it gets in Chicago?

• 56:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:16Speaker 01

  And here you're, you're taking a cold shower, you know, while it's thirty degrees out?

• 56:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:21Speaker 01

  Like that shit was rough.

• 56:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:22Speaker 01

  You know, but even in that, you, you found some happiness, man.

• 56:26Speaker 00

  Right.

• 56:26Speaker 01

  Right? And it's all about the mind, the thought, man, where you're, where you're, where you're gonna be, you know? And so for me, helping these kids, giving back, doing that was like, and, and I say it's one of the coolest times because even though there was, my mom was mentally ill, you know, my dad was gone. My brother was, you know, I lost my brother to mental illness. He was no longer with us, you know, I lost him two years ago. Yeah, yeah, you know, out in L.A., man, he just, you know, he's gone, but, but he was, he was special. He had a great mind, right? But, you know, so for me, the money, at that time, that's what brought me happiness.

• 57:03Speaker 00

  Right.

• 57:03Speaker 01

  Was giving.

• 57:04Speaker 00

  Right, so it led you to a place where it's like, yeah, at least I get to do something for others, right? That's a good, I mean, it makes sense, especially if you come from a place where you didn't have much. Then you would want to be able to give to others, you know? Um, did you try to put any money in the bank?

• 57:19Speaker 01

  No, no, no. I mean, my bank was a forest preserve.

• 57:23Speaker 00

  Just burying it?

• 57:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'd bury it, man. I'd say I'd stuff it in PVC pipes. Well, first I'd put it in plastic, seal it. And put, cause PVC doesn't disintegrate, you know? And stuff it in there and then go bury it. I, I probably still got stuff buried out there. I just don't know where it's at. We can go look sometime if you ever come up there.

• 57:39Speaker 00

  Hypothetically.

• 57:41Speaker 01

  I got at least three there still buried somewhere over there. I just lost the map.

• 57:44Speaker 00

  Three mill, you think?

• 57:45Speaker 01

  Oh, no, I don't know about that. I'd always do like hundred thousand dollar tubes.

• 57:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:49Speaker 01

  You know, like just little ones, you know, put maybe two or three or four tubes in a hole, five tubes, you know? But yeah, I did lose some out there, but I really don't know where it's at. And I don't wanna find it. Just, that's just, I just need to say that.

• 58:04Speaker 00

  Did you ever give counterfeit money to people that you knew?

• 58:07Speaker 01

  Ah, not like purposely, right? You know, like, I, I like to play with it. One of my favorite things back then, you know, the bums on the street that would have the little signs, we'll work for food, right? I always give them a hundred.

• 58:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. Cause you know, they'll go spend it and they were good. I knew that they wouldn't get caught with it, right? And they'd go spend it in a place that I probably would never have gone.

• 58:27Speaker 00

  Right.

• 58:28Speaker 01

  You know, so like if it did pop up, hey, is he, you know, what's going on?

• 58:31Speaker 00

  What happens to places that end up with counterfeit money? Like what happens to say, like you go to like a bodega or a gas station someplace? You pass a hundred dollar bill on them. What happens to those places?

• 58:40Speaker 01

  So, so here's the thing. So like corporate stuff back then, they could just write it off, right? The bank could snatch it. They'd have to write it off as a loss, right? We, we'd always try to stay away from like boat, you know, we, I, I don't want to go hit a momma pop with, with a bogus hundred, you know? Cause I don't want it to pop up on them in their bank and then they get it. So it was always like, I always tried to stay towards the corporations stuff, you know, like the Walgreens, the Walmarts, the game. You know, I, I wouldn't go to the corner store and spend it on, on, on old lady, you know?

• 59:11Speaker 00

  Got it.

• 59:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I, but, but, but the corporations out, you know? Now, I mean, I think they changed it to where now they do make them responsible, but back then, because it wasn't so like aggressive, the, the laws were a little bit lighter.

• 59:26Speaker 00

  What do you mean it wasn't so aggressive?

• 59:27Speaker 01

  Well, there wasn't, the counterfeiting wasn't like a really big crime. Like there's drug dealers in every city, thousands of them, right? There might be one or two counterfeiters in a city, right? Like the crime was, especially when the new bill did come out, it did defeat a lot of things, you know, a lot of-

• 59:45Speaker 00

  The nineteen ninety-six one hundred dollar bill?

• 59:46Speaker 01

  It put a lot of people out of business, you know, like it did.

• 59:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:50Speaker 01

  And, um, you know, and, and, and, and still does there. I mean, I don't think really there's been a, a huge, you know, impact of counterfeiters since then, especially with the new bill. New bill's almost impossible to do.

• 1:00:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:02Speaker 01

  It would cost too much money to try to even replicate it.

• 1:00:05Speaker 00

  Is that true?

• 1:00:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, yeah.

• 1:00:06Speaker 00

  What new features have been added?

• 1:00:07Speaker 01

  Well, the visual physics, it's that purple strip. So like I said, yeah, you can look it up, but that, that on the two thousand and fifteen, I think it came out in fifteen or thirteen. I think it was thirteen, cause that's when I got out. I felt like they let it out right when I got out. And, uh, it's a purple strip that goes down the middle.

• 1:00:23Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:00:23Speaker 01

  And it's actually like, uh, there it is. It's actually like ti- thousand, like nano, nano shards of glass that they embed in, in it, in it. It's called visual physics. It's actually really fascinating. Do they even tell you it's called visual physics in that thing? No, no, they don't.

• 1:00:41Speaker 00

  Let me see this right here. This says it has a three D security ribbon for one, where if you tilt the note back and forth while focusing on the blue ribbon or blue strip, some people call them, you will see the bells change to one hundreds as they move. When you tilt the note back and forth, the bells and one hundreds move side to side. If you tilt it side to side, they move up and down. The ribbon is woven into the paper, not printed on it. Wow.

• 1:01:04Speaker 01

  It's called visual physics. That's the name of it. And some scientists created, and the reason they didn't release the bill at the time was because the, the bills were defected. So that, that printing technology wasn't perfected. And they were trying to use it too soon. So if you take a hundred, if we had one and you folded it right on that, it would rip from there real easy, real easy, right? And, and so they didn't release it for a while.

• 1:01:27Speaker 00

  The ribbon would rip, you mean?

• 1:01:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. Right on the edge of the ribbon, the bill would just come right apart. Whereas money's made to be, to, to last, right?

• 1:01:33Speaker 00

  Got it.

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  And so these ones were a little bit, that, that, that, that technology wasn't perfected when they decided to use it.

• 1:01:41Speaker 00

  Got it. Let me read the rest of these. Yeah. Bell in the inkwell, color shifting one hundred, um, erased in Taglio printing. Uh, genuine bills feel slightly rough, particularly across Franklin's portrait and certain printed areas. Uh, UV-

• 1:01:56Speaker 01

  On his lapel, you could feel his lapel.

• 1:01:59Speaker 00

  Oh, you can?

• 1:01:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. When you rub your thumb across his lapel, you'll feel it.

• 1:02:02Speaker 00

  They had a famous director, um, who used to, uh, that famous director who used to pass money. I think it was from that movie, Live and Die in Los Angeles. You looked at it, it might've been William-

• 1:02:15Speaker 01

  Oh, Live and Die in L.A.

• 1:02:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:02:16Speaker 01

  It's one of the greatest movies ever.

• 1:02:17Speaker 00

  Live and Die in L.A.

• 1:02:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I love it. It's only counterfeit money.

• 1:02:20Speaker 00

  Oh yeah. This is the guy right here. William Friedkin. Let's, let's hear this real fast.

• 1:02:24Speaker 03

  He introduced me to a counterfeiter that he had arrested and put in prison. And he got this guy out to come and make counterfeit money for us, which was as good as the government's money. I know because I used to pass it. I used to spend these fake twenties. The, this guy was an artist. If I was the government, I'd hire that guy to make the money cheaper.

• 1:02:50Speaker 00

  So yeah, that's pretty wild. I remember hearing about that, that he used to pass this money. He used to go around and spend it. And they had it on this, the money they got, I believe it was from the set of, uh, Live and Die in L.A.

• 1:03:03Speaker 01

  I'd like to get some of that.

• 1:03:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:03:05Speaker 01

  I collect money. I'd love to get my hands on some of that. I was actually doing a painting of Live and Die in L.A. in my gallery and, and on Mel, so I'm an artist now, right? I told you. I had, I had a space on Melrose and La Sianga and I was doing, uh, a Live and Die in L.A. picture, right? I was doing the, the, like the poster that it came out, but I, I made it with money. And I mean, I made it really badass and it was really big. And on Halloween night, I, I didn't go in cause I went to take the kids trick or treating. And there was a drive-by and all my windows got shot out and somebody got shot. Yeah. I would have been there if I didn't go trick or treating, but I was doing to Live and Die in L.A. and I got bullet, I got bullet holes in my window. Like what the hell is this, man?

• 1:03:48Speaker 00

  Dude, then predict the future. Predict like a really good one, like Theo goes to heaven. Paint that one.

• 1:03:55Speaker 01

  But yeah, so we-

• 1:03:56Speaker 00

  Let's go back into it. So how much money do you think you printed over time?

• 1:03:59Speaker 01

  Oh gosh. I mean, millions, millions, you know, but I burned millions too. Like, so, so my way, I, I would burn money if it was, if it wouldn't come out, right? You know, I'd get rid of it immediately.

• 1:04:10Speaker 00

  Cause it was too risky to pass, try and pass it.

• 1:04:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. And just didn't want it floating around, you know, and-

• 1:04:16Speaker 00

  Like what's the escalation ladder like once that, once you start to make money, you're buying things, you're tithing, you don't even know what to do? Like what's happening with you personally? And then what's happening with you as far as making the money?

• 1:04:27Speaker 01

  Personally, you know, me and Natalie are having the greatest time of our life, right? But, uh, I was getting tired of hitting the road all the time. It gets exhausting.

• 1:04:35Speaker 00

  Cause you don't want to spend it at home?

• 1:04:36Speaker 01

  No, no, you, you, you don't. Yeah, absolutely not. Right? But I hadn't been in Chicago in like nine years. So when I went to Texas, I had stayed down there. And so I wanted to go back home, you know, and, and show my friends, you know, like now it's time when I, I know that, you know, I know I'm from an organized crime neighborhood, you know? So I'm thinking, man, this might be good, you know? I won't have to be driving around all the time. Cause you're taking chances when you're hitting the road with that stuff, right? You get pulled over and you got stacks of twenties, fives and ones, you know, the cops are gonna be thinking something.

• 1:05:07Speaker 00

  How much would you have in the car sometimes?

• 1:05:09Speaker 01

  Oh God, thirty thousand, forty thousand. Like it's scary. You have so much, you know, like, yeah, you're like, yeah. Even recent, you know, anyway, yeah. So yeah, the, the money, you have a lot of it, gets you nervous. And, and so I wanted a little bit easier life with it, right? So that's what happens with crime though. It escalates. Like I told you in the first, and so when I went back home, my, my, so when I was growing up in Chicago, the other thing is I like to play basketball, love basketball. So I was on different teams and we would go to different neighborhoods. And whereas the, uh, Chicago could, could be a little racy at times, you know, uh, sports always healed that, you know? So I could go, I could go to forty-seventh and Indiana, man, and go hoop and them boys love me over there, right?

• 1:05:50Speaker 01

  Or I'd go to Pilsen, man. I'd, I'd hoop with the, with the amigos over there. I mean, I, I was able to go in, all over the city because of basketball.

• 1:05:57Speaker 00

  Got it.

• 1:05:58Speaker 01

  And, and I would, you know, I, I created friendships in all the different areas, man, you know, you're carrying in village. And even now, like I'd go anywhere, man. I'm probably the only white dude that go one hundred third and Wallace, you know, and hang out and just chill there, right? All them cats over there love me, you know?

• 1:06:13Speaker 00

  Really?

• 1:06:13Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Yeah.

• 1:06:14Speaker 00

  I'd go over there. I'd leave quick.

• 1:06:15Speaker 01

  I'd take you over there with me. I mean, it would do nothing.

• 1:06:17Speaker 00

  I would leave quick, but I would go.

• 1:06:18Speaker 01

  But, but I'm saying like I, I could move through the city. Cause I just, and so when I went back, you know, I went back to my boys, you know?

• 1:06:24Speaker 00

  Got it. So were you trying to big shot at that time a little bit? Like, did you get a, a little bit of ego?

• 1:06:27Speaker 01

  Not at that time. Not at that time. At that time, I just wanted to sell large chunks of it, right? I wanted to sell a hundred thousand at a time for thirty, right? Or two hundred thousand. I never really wanted to go too high with the number.

• 1:06:38Speaker 00

  That's high.

• 1:06:39Speaker 01

  Uh, a hundred thousand was a good number, right? A hundred for thirty, you, you could walk away from that one, right? You start getting into the bigger numbers, you know, I've had people say, I want a million. I had one guy, Jordanian dude wanted five million, right?

• 1:06:53Speaker 00

  Did you consider it?

• 1:06:54Speaker 01

  Uh, I, I did, but I, I didn't, right? Like I didn't do it, you know? I, I considered it, you know? He actually showed up. I, I told him he was full of shit. I'm like, you ain't got that type of cash. And he showed up, he showed up, popped his trunk, man. And, uh,

• 1:07:08Speaker 00

  He had three hundred grand?

• 1:07:10Speaker 01

  Well, that was five million. So he had like one point five. It was, yeah, it was a lot of money. He had a suitcase of money.

• 1:07:15Speaker 00

  What kind of car?

• 1:07:15Speaker 01

  First time I, Rolls Royce too.

• 1:07:17Speaker 00

  Ooh, in a Rolls Royce.

• 1:07:17Speaker 01

  Well, he actually owned, uh, he owned, uh-

• 1:07:19Speaker 00

  You can't pull up in a Dami Lantra with that shit.

• 1:07:22Speaker 01

  Nah, he, he owned the exotic car rental company in Chicago years ago.

• 1:07:26Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:07:26Speaker 01

  His cousin who I was going through actually killed himself on the road in Vegas. There's actually a video of it.

• 1:07:31Speaker 00

  Oh shit.

• 1:07:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. It got real weird because they were taking the money to Vegas. His, his, his, uh, his, um, his stepmom or something owned a casino in Vegas and they were running the money through there.

• 1:07:44Speaker 00

  So when people would win, they would win that money?

• 1:07:46Speaker 01

  They would win my money. Yeah. It was nuts, man. Right? Yeah. It was crazy. Yeah. And then I guess Mohammed, yeah, that's, that was a real wild.

• 1:07:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, that sounds like a bad idea.

• 1:07:55Speaker 01

  It was a bad idea. Yeah.

• 1:07:56Speaker 00

  But that sounds exciting though.

• 1:07:58Speaker 01

  Well, for, for, for me, you know?

• 1:08:00Speaker 00

  And so how much were you keeping at the house then?

• 1:08:03Speaker 01

  At my, I, I, I didn't, so one of my dudes, um, Irish cat from the south side, his, his dad was a big real, real, real estate guy. He had like, man, he probably had, gosh, he probably had like sixty buildings on the south side. Big apartment buildings that had like, you know, twenty, thirty apartments in them. Like cat was well off. He had a lot of apartment buildings, man. And when he died, my friend got them all.

• 1:08:26Speaker 00

  Oh shit.

• 1:08:27Speaker 01

  So my buddy inherited like forty apartment buildings, you know?

• 1:08:31Speaker 00

  Fuck, I'd sleep everywhere.

• 1:08:32Speaker 01

  Well, I had eight apartments at one time, man.

• 1:08:34Speaker 00

  You did?

• 1:08:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. I had something over here.

• 1:08:36Speaker 00

  You had how many?

• 1:08:37Speaker 01

  About eight at one time.

• 1:08:38Speaker 00

  Eight apartments?

• 1:08:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, about eight.

• 1:08:40Speaker 00

  And so you would keep money in them?

• 1:08:41Speaker 01

  Well, I'd, I'd keep, I'd keep equipment. So, so I never did everything at, all at the same place. Right? Like I would print the money on the offset in one area and then I'd move it, right? I wanted to get, get it away from the offset as quick as possible.

• 1:08:54Speaker 00

  Got it.

• 1:08:55Speaker 01

  Right? Cause if I just got caught with this, I'm cool. I get caught with that, uh-uh, I'm gone. I wouldn't even been sitting here if I got caught with that.

• 1:09:01Speaker 00

  I see.

• 1:09:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, yeah, I was always able to get away without getting caught with the equipment. They didn't, they, they never caught any equipment with me, you know? But, but so, yeah, I would have stuff over here. I'd have paper over here. I have money stashed over here.

• 1:09:15Speaker 00

  And, and how did things start to get hot?

• 1:09:17Speaker 01

  Uh, just-

• 1:09:20Speaker 01

  Ego, you know, living life, you know, not the money's coming.

• 1:09:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, buying extra sandwiches.

• 1:09:26Speaker 01

  You're going to the clubs.

• 1:09:28Speaker 00

  Cars, hats.

• 1:09:29Speaker 01

  Cocaine's blowing in the air, you know, I mean, just the whole night.

• 1:09:32Speaker 00

  Oh, you started popping, huh?

• 1:09:33Speaker 01

  Oh, man, I was an animal. I was a savage.

• 1:09:35Speaker 00

  I didn't know all that shit, dude.

• 1:09:37Speaker 01

  Savage, man.

• 1:09:38Speaker 00

  You fucking made it sound like you're fucking.

• 1:09:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I am now. I'm a grown old man dad.

• 1:09:43Speaker 00

  No, but you made it sound like you in there tithing, you guys are just popping into different malls, just freaking blessing Cinnabon's and shit. And now you're over here telling me all out, getting it going.

• 1:09:52Speaker 01

  Well, I was a dirty Christian. That's how I call it, right?

• 1:09:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:09:56Speaker 01

  I would pray in, you know, anyway, man. Yeah, that, I think, who, who termed that? Oh, Shia LaBeouf from Transformers, the dirty Christian.

• 1:10:04Speaker 00

  The dirty Christian?

• 1:10:05Speaker 01

  The dirty Christian, believing God, but still, still saying, no, we, well, that's what happened, man, just what? When you, well, one of my boys, he, so I got a really badass crew of cats in Chicago.

• 1:10:17Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:10:17Speaker 01

  Still do. My dude owned a drink. He was one of the owners of the drink, which was a real famous club in Chicago. Then he had one of the dopest private clubs in the city called Stiletto's, like, super private, you know.

• 1:10:30Speaker 00

  I can imagine it.

• 1:10:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, so, so I had, my, my crew of guys, we, we were like, we were serious, we were badasses, man, you know what I'm saying?

• 1:10:38Speaker 00

  You guys were out doing it?

• 1:10:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:39Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, dude, I will say this, some of the dudes that I know that get after it the most are from Chicago.

• 1:10:45Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, no, we, we know how to have a good time, right?

• 1:10:49Speaker 00

  I mean, it's like, it's unprecedented, bro. And then they're always like, at some point in the evening or weekend, they're always like, "Oh, have you tried this, like, sausage from?" And it's always like, some dude's grilling up some, uh, some Polish franks or whatever, it's fucking the best.

• 1:11:04Speaker 01

  Oh, well, in summer, my dude Tommy, he, he don't even use a stove, yeah, and, yeah.

• 1:11:09Speaker 00

  It's grill only.

• 1:11:09Speaker 01

  We got one of our guys, one of our guys, Krista, he a Russian cat, man, he likes to cook indoors, man, and Tommy tries to throw him out the window, he's like, "Only outside in the summer, man, no cooking inside," you know? Literally, that grill is going nonstop. But, yeah, no, I, I just had a good group of guys, but we were animals, we were savages, man.

• 1:11:27Speaker 00

  See, I was out getting after it, you're doing the cocaine.

• 1:11:30Speaker 01

  We were doing limos, we were doing just dumb shit, man.

• 1:11:32Speaker 00

  Oh, limos are for [BLEEP].

• 1:11:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, back then, it was kind of cool.

• 1:11:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, I agree. The problem was, you get in, and the, you gotta go all the way in, you gotta come all the way in.

• 1:11:41Speaker 01

  Now, now we do the Suburbans, those are the best way, right?

• 1:11:44Speaker 00

  But dude, when I, like, sometimes limos, I'd get in, if you're the first person in, you gotta go all the way to the, like, "Bro, I'd be so drunk sometimes, I couldn't even get out, I'm like, fuck it, I'll just stay."

• 1:11:53Speaker 01

  Just crawl out the fucking sunroof.

• 1:11:54Speaker 00

  No, I'd just stay in there.

• 1:11:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, just stay in there, go to sleep.

• 1:11:56Speaker 00

  Cause it's too long, it's like a hall, it's like fucking too.

• 1:11:58Speaker 01

  It's like a hallway.

• 1:11:59Speaker 00

  It was too far to get to the door, dude.

• 1:12:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, but things started getting out of hand, man, you're doing, you know, you're drinking, you're going out, you're doing drugs.

• 1:12:06Speaker 00

  You're partying, you're flexing, you're showing y'all.

• 1:12:08Speaker 01

  You're flexing and, and you're just making mistakes, you know? With me, you know, my, and, and then, and then, for, when I got caught, it was just kind of just freak, right? Cause I'm always moving, right? But in, in the early time, it was more of the quiet, being the quiet ghost, right, you know? And now you're going to the clubs, and you're meeting people, and you're doing more, and you're doing more, and you're doing more, and you put yourself in, in more danger, the more you do, right? And so I, I actually ended up at the House of Blues, how I got, you know, how this, the whole thing went down, is I, I was at the House of Blues, I was meeting somebody.

• 1:12:43Speaker 00

  Dude, I've been to that House of Blues, it's right over there, it's across the river from the, uh, Chicago Theater.

• 1:12:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, it, it, it was, it was awesome back in the day.

• 1:12:51Speaker 00

  Was there a band playing?

• 1:12:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, it was a great night, I mean, we had, so we went, we were actually staying at the hotel, because I had like a little, I had like where I lived was in Marshall, Illinois. Was like, three hours or two, I forgot how, how south it was, it was on Highway One, but, so like I told you, I'm real weird about where I laid my head at night.

• 1:13:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:13:10Speaker 01

  And so I, I rarely ever was in the city, right? Where I laid my head was usually outside of the city, you know?

• 1:13:16Speaker 00

  Were you staying at that tall hotel right there by the river?

• 1:13:18Speaker 01

  Uh, well, you had the round things, you know where the round is?

• 1:13:20Speaker 00

  The corn husk looking one?

• 1:13:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's at the corn husk. Yeah, it's the corn husk.

• 1:13:23Speaker 00

  That's the one you're staying at? Let's go, dude, I've stayed there.

• 1:13:26Speaker 01

  Well, let's go, yeah. Anyway, I got the cops, the cops kicked my door, and did they ever kick yours in?

• 1:13:31Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:13:32Speaker 01

  Oh, okay, well, they kicked mine in, and, uh, with guns out.

• 1:13:35Speaker 00

  You should have left the sign out there.

• 1:13:36Speaker 01

  Ha, no, they tricked me.

• 1:13:38Speaker 00

  Did they really?

• 1:13:40Speaker 01

  Well, what, what happened is, we were, we were down at the, uh, so I'm coming in, I'm selling a hundred grand to one of my dudes. He had me meet, you know, we, we were gonna stay at the House of Blues, so I had him meet us at the bar. So I get in, and, uh, and, and he's just, he, he shows up, he's like, "Dude, I can't really stay, cause I got family from," he was a Russian, one of my Russian friends, and he had family come in, they were doing a wedding or something. And he's like, uh, he goes, "Why don't you come back, uh, to my house and we'll party with all my family, and then we'll do the deal tomorrow." I was like, "All right, cool, let's do it, do it." So I went with him, we had a fucking great time. But the bartender heard us say "party," and I guess he was a, a snitch for, you know, some, some dicks downtown, you know?

• 1:14:21Speaker 01

  And, and so he called his, his little, you know, contact, and so when me and, and my, my, my wife's sister, cause I had my wife's sister, she wanted to see the city, and I brought her up, and, you know, it was all that, and, um, and she was having a great time, and so when we went up to the room, I went into the room and she stayed on the couch, you know, near the front door, but I was all the way in the back, in the, in the, in the, it was like, you know, the suites, you got the,

• 1:14:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:14:46Speaker 01

  So the phone rings, uh, like, so we get, we get into the room like two in the morning, the phone rings, I pick it up, and there's, there's no one there. You know, and when that happens, you know, you got problems.

• 1:14:57Speaker 00

  You got about thirty seconds.

• 1:14:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's not good, right? I put the phone down, and not like, literally thirty, I mean, quick, I hear the door knock, right?

• 1:15:07Speaker 00

  And you have cash in there with you?

• 1:15:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I had like a hundred, a hundred thousand, I had it, I had it in the closet, uh, in between the towels. As I put the phone down, I hear the, the, the, uh, the, the, you know, the door hitting, and I, and I, and I scream out, "Don't open the door," right? But she got up, cause I was, cause the suites were big, she didn't even hear me, she opened the door, boom, they come in, they got their guns out. I'm like this, man, no, no, I'm on, on the bed, they, yeah, it was just a crazy movie scene, man, you know?

• 1:15:41Speaker 00

  What'd they think it was?

• 1:15:43Speaker 01

  They thought I was selling drugs, so, so the bartender.

• 1:15:45Speaker 00

  Oh, cause the guy said "party."

• 1:15:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, "party," so he thought it was cocaine. Again, cocaine gets you in trouble, man.

• 1:15:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:15:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. So anyway, they, they, they, they came in there, "Where's the cocaine? Where's the cocaine?" I'm like, "What are you talking about? Like, I have no fucking clue what's happening right now." They handcuffed me, they handcuffed my, my, my wife's sister, she's crying, she's only like sixteen years old.

• 1:16:06Speaker 00

  So she's scared?

• 1:16:07Speaker 01

  She's scared, right? She's, cause we were supposed, I was gonna take her to the museums, and it's gonna be a great little, like, really nice day, now she's in cuffs, right? And I'm thinking, "Oh, my God, what is going on?"

• 1:16:19Speaker 00

  And does she know you have this money in the room?

• 1:16:20Speaker 01

  No, she don't know nothing. Yeah, she don't have a clue. I was just going, drop it off, and, and, and Natalie's like, "Man, why don't you take my sister with you, she wants to see the museums and all that." And I'm like, "Whatever," I bring her, and what happens, so, so now here I am, we're both handcuffed, and she's looking at me like, "Now, one thing I will say about her," she didn't say nothing, man, she was sorry, yeah, she just stayed there, she was crying a little bit, then she kind of said, "Just calm down, it's gonna be all right," and she listened to me. Anyway, they're searching the room, looking for the cocaine. They find the money in the closet. They got the money, it's a brick money, you know? They said, "Listen, you're gonna go through with the deal, you're gonna, you're gonna call your contact, and you're gonna go through with this deal, and you're gonna, you're gonna have him come here and bring the cocaine here."

• 1:17:02Speaker 01

  I said, "What are you talking about, man? Well, that's why you have this money?" I'm like, "Man, you guys are, I, I ain't doing nothing," you know, and then they're getting all threaded and all that shit. Well, my luck, the, the one cop, he starts counting it, right? They get me in there, they're just talking shit to me, and you know, they're, they're counting me, he's like, "Man," you know? And, and then, like, probably like about maybe, I don't know, maybe five minutes into it, he starts looking, and he's looking for something. And he calls his partner, and he said, and, and, and he tells his partner, he didn't, so the guy was a fucking banker before he was a cop.

• 1:17:38Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:17:38Speaker 01

  He worked at a bank, like a teller, before he became a cop, so he wasn't seeing no red and blue fibers in there. So I didn't have the red and blue fibers in this, and I later ended up putting them in after this, because this happened.

• 1:17:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, that cool ranch, yeah.

• 1:17:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, he didn't have no, he didn't see the red and blue fiber, he had everything else, had the watermark, had the strip. He's like, "Man, I don't know what to think about this stuff." He goes, "It got all this stuff on it, but I'm not seeing no fibers in it, it's just not making sense." So they said, "Well, we're taking them in anyway," so they took me in, they took her in, and, uh, and then the Secret Service came.

• 1:18:14Speaker 01

  A woman's Secret Service and she said, oh. While you're in jail? Yeah, they took us downtown, right? And what about the kid? They let her go? No, hell no. They had her, they put her in a cell too. But they, you know, the Secret Service showed up, right? And, you know, she's threatening me, telling me, we know this, we know that, we've been looking. She goes, first she goes, we've been looking for you. We've been looking for you. I'm like, okay, you know, whatever. She goes, where, where, where, you know? Then find me, cuz. Yeah, she's trying, yeah, she's trying to, she wants to know where my stuff is, where my papers at, where this is at. She's probably trying to meet someone too, where she's, who knows? Yeah, well, who knows with them, right? Cause they're so, they're, you know? You don't know. Yeah, you never know. But one, one thing she was doing was threatening me with my wife's sister. Oh. Alright, she's like, you're gonna tell me what I want? Or she's gonna face some charges? She's gonna face some charges.

• 1:19:00Speaker 01

  And I'm like, man, what am I gonna do? I didn't, cause I had to get my wife's sister out. On a good note, back then you had like those burn phones, everyone, you know, you could get them at Walmart, right? Little twenty dollars with the card, remember sketch, scratch the card off, put the number in it. So we had, I was like, I was like a James Bond criminal too, never went into that, but I had uh surveillance, anti-surveillance shit, I had bug detectors, I had like all kinds of whacked out stuff, man, like, you know, just really had, I could find hidden cameras and shit, had this little thing, anyway. I was real big into stuff like that. And again, safety, right? Cause here, you know, we, I didn't, I, I try, I always wanted it to keep it to where if anything ever happened, it was just on me. Got it. You know, that way I had Natalie in the world still where she could help me while I'm away.

• 1:19:46Speaker 01

  Alright, you don't, I don't want her to go down too, you know, because then, then it takes my, my access away, right? So y'all ended up getting married, you and her? Yeah, we ended up getting married, so. Okay, got it. So here it is. I, I said, okay, I'll call her, right? They said, you, you, we know you got your stuff here, you know? Uh, Pharaoh said that your mom, or her mom is with her sister right now at your house, but she don't know where the house is. And there's no way she could have known, cause it was in Marshall, Illinois, man, we had, they flew into Indianapolis, I was in the cornfields, man, like for real, right? And uh, and they said, so we want you to call her, right? So I called Natalie and um, I said, hey, listen, I'm, I'm here in Chicago, I'm not in a good position, you know? They got your sister.

• 1:20:31Speaker 01

  And uh, and she said, yeah, my mom's trying to figure this thing out right now. I said, okay, well, you know, there, this, this is a serious situation, it looks like I'm gonna be going away for a while. Well, what was awesome, she, she went right into, she went right into uh, her movement and she got rid of everything. Everything, like, I mean, I don't even know how she did it, her mama had to help her, right? But like, by the time they got there, Natalie strung them along, right? She kept stringing them along. And by the time they got there, it was completely empty. I had nothing in the house, man, the girl really saved my ass. I get arrested, they, they locked me up for the money that was in there. They let her go, right? I said, it's my money, my thing, right?

• 1:21:17Speaker 01

  And my lawyer comes and he's telling, he's reading me the police report, right? And, and, and he reads it off, he says, hey, he goes, you know, they see weed on the, they said they saw weed on the table, right? And that's why they came in, right? That, that, they seen it and boom, that was their probable cause. I said, well, that's impossible, man, because the, the hallway, they'd have to be Superman, they'd have to have X-ray vision to see the weed, right? And, cause there was a table around the corner, so he had someone go take pictures and then brought in the um, brought in the uh, security person that actually like came with the cops? And threatened to put him in jail if he lied, so he told the truth, said that there was no, they didn't see no weed, and then he had the pictures, and so

• 1:21:56Speaker 01

  when I went back to court three weeks later, my attorney read off, put the cop on the stand and read off the police, police report. Uh, yeah, we seen weed on the table and that gave us probable cause, then it. So it was illegal? It was all legal. He said, he goes, you know, officer, he goes, you're saying that you were able to see it? He goes, well, I have photos here with an affidavit from the manager of the hotel that says no furniture was moved. And there's no way you could have seen the table. Right away, the prosecutor, ah, judge, ah, you know, right? They stopped the hearing, fucking judge dismissed it and I walked right out. Nuh uh. Walked right out. You were free? I was free, yeah. Couldn't believe it. I remember I called, I called, she was way back to Texas, cause she was from Texas with her mom.

• 1:22:37Speaker 01

  I remember calling her, I'm like, and she goes, where you at? How'd you call me with, you know, cause usually it's like, you got a call from a correctional facility, right? Yeah. There's none of that shit, it's just me calling her. And I said, man, they let me out today, I just beat my case. She's like, what? And so then I ended up going there and then, you know? Then you kept doing it? Well, no, I stopped, then I, I, I went through, I went into like a real bad depression and shit, man, and just, I, I couldn't. Cause now I got Secret Service knowing who I am. You know, and like, and, and then I felt like I was locked, I, I, if I did. They knew it was counterfeit, so. Oh, yeah, but they, they had to destroy it. They had thrown the money away, you know? And did you have any money hidden anywhere at that time? I mean, I had money stashed here and I had, but I was scared to go it, I was, I was like, I felt like the trees were watching, man, you know?

• 1:23:22Speaker 01

  Like, it was like, you know, in the Secret Service, you don't really know, know what they know. Right. Right? Like, you, they, they got secret weapons and shit, man, they can see underneath. Yeah, their name starts with secret. Secret, yeah, that's enough right there, like, you know, so, so for me, it was in my head. And so I ended up, I ended up watching this movie, man, uh, it was, uh, it was an arm wrestling movie with Sylvester Stallone, Over the Top. Over the Top, yeah. And, and it was about a dad and a kid, man, and, and I just was missing my pops. Over the Top's a gay movie now, I think. Ah, is it? Yeah. Yeah, I think it's like Over the Top or whatever, or I don't know. I don't remember what it is, but it's something like that. Well, back then it was an arm wrestling movie. Yeah. With Sylvester Stallone. Oh, it's Over the Bottom, I think. Over the Bottom? Nah, we don't wanna do no bottoms.

• 1:24:07Speaker 01

  That's the one I'm thinking of. We don't wanna do no bottoms, the top. Yeah, this movie I remember, for sure. Yeah, Over the Top, man, Sylvester Stallone, it was awesome. My bad. So anyway, I ended up trying to find my pops, I went, I went on, started looking for Art J. Williams Jr., one pops up in uh, uh, Alaska. So your past started catching up with you then, probably? Well, now everything's caving in, right? You know, like, my whole world is, is like, I can't, I don't wanna go near my presses, I don't wanna go to the apartments, I don't wanna go here, I don't wanna drive that car, I don't, you know, like, I'm in a bad depression, man, like, I don't, I just don't wanna move. So you find where, where your dad lives? Yeah, so I ended up watching this movie, now I got this thing, but so I find out, uh, there's a P O box in uh, what was it, um?

• 1:24:49Speaker 01

  It was east of Anchorage, Chickaloon, Chickaloon, Alaska, right? Way the hell up there, man, right? He got far away from you guys, that's crazy. Well, it was the lady he took off with, right? She, she, she didn't want him to be around his kids. So she made sure she took him as far away from us as she could, you know? That's crazy. Yeah, it was terrible. But so I find him and I, I write a letter, you know? I say, hey, man, if this is Art Williams, boom, from Chicago, this is your son, man, here's my phone number, and I had a burnout phone. And it took about three weeks, he called me. And then when he called me, I, I was like, you know, I said, hey, you know? I didn't tell him what was going on, I, I just say, man, I'd like to see him, you know? He said, well, you can come up here.

• 1:25:31Speaker 01

  So be, that, this was before the nine one one, so you know, you could still get into the airports, you know, pretty easily, you know? And so I had fake IDs too, you know, so I, I ended up sneaking off to Seattle. And then I flew out of Seattle to Anchorage and I, and I brought Natalie with me. And uh, I don't know, man, my dad picked us up with that chick he took off and I could just see the, the, the darkness on her face that I was showing up, you know? Yeah. And uh, and he, we, I remember driving out to his house and just kinda tripping that I was in Alaska. Like, I'm a straight Southside City boy, man, and now I'm in a fucking wilderness, you know? And that shit's wilderness out there, you know? Yeah, that's what I heard. Oh, yeah, it's beautiful though, man, nothing like it.

• 1:26:13Speaker 01

  But like, we, when we, we, we got to his house, he had another separate like little guest house, and then he had like a little trailer over here, you know? And so we went into this guest house and Natalie went out to the trailer, actually, and then uh, and his wife went into their house and me and my pops just stayed up for like two days, man, smoking that Alaska perp, you know, cause he, he had the, you know, that purple bud before people knew it was purple, you know? Oh, y'all was bent off that iceberg shit, huh? We were just, and we were talking shit and catching up. Was he like a crime guy? I mean, yeah, well, he was a paper hanger at one time, you know, like when I was young, he was running checks. So it's kind of, kinda odd that I ended up running money, right? Paper, you know? And at that time, so when, when me and him were hanging, when I went to Alaska,

• 1:26:56Speaker 01

  you know, and we're smoking and we're talking, we literally stayed up for like two days, just catching up and I was telling him about everything. I, I opened up about what I did, I had some of it on me, I showed him some of it. You break him off a little? Well, that's where all things went bad, right? That's when I ended up going to prison, cause you know, after I showed him, so I call gold fever, right? Like when people, when people, when I would show, that's the reason I didn't show too many people, because when you showed somebody the bills and they, and even, and like, even my canvas ones now, people see, can we print it on paper? Right? If, cause I print on canvas and I paint over it. Right. But even those bills, I've had people say, man, that looks good, and it's on canvas, it's not even on paper, so when you would show someone the real bill.

• 1:27:40Speaker 01

  They get wet, their mouth gets wet. Their brain gets wet, everything gets wet, you know, like, they, they just, it's, I, I call it a gold fever because they would go into this, just their eyes would change, you know? Especially if he's up in Alaska, he's already half, he's into that shit. Yeah, well, he, well, it got, it got nuts, I mean, he um. So you showed him the money? I showed him the money and then after we started moving around, he, he had his own thing going on, he was growing bud in uh, like track, truck, tractor trailers, they bury them underground? And then they, he would tap into the, the, the power line on the side of the highway. Like, he had some crazy shit going on too. Damn, y'all are wild. Yeah, no, he was on one, like, I was like, man, ain't you scared to get electrocuted? He's like, ah, man, you know? He was actually tapping into, to the, the power line, you know?

• 1:28:23Speaker 01

  And they were, and then they had this uh, special material that the, the heats, the airplanes couldn't look through. Couldn't get through? Like, they were awesome, this is early in the game, you know? And um, and so we, we were bonding by showing each other what we were doing. Yeah, I'll show you my, I'll show you. Yeah, I'm doing the money, you're doing the weed, you know? I'll show you my crime, you show me your. Yeah, that's how we reunited, man, like the crime things, you know? And uh, and it was awesome, man, my dad was cool, man, he was funny, man, he was, he was, he was um, it sucked he had left, you know, I think for him, you know, he, he seen how I was, right? Like, we, we, we were cool, man, and, and, and, and, and he felt, I could feel the, the like, damn, I wish I would have known this cat, you know? Like, I wish I would have been around him more, you know? Yeah, he probably, you guys probably would have had a good time together.

• 1:29:08Speaker 01

  Good time, yeah, you know, but, so then anyway, he started um,

• 1:29:13Speaker 01

  He started asking me if I if he could make if I could make more, right? And and and I was like, man, yeah, of course. And then and then it's my dad, so I want to make him proud, you know? And so but I came clean with him. I said, look, man, the reason I actually came to find you is because I got jammed up in Chicago, and so I had I had to disappear. And he's and he said, well, can you still make the money? I said, well, of course I can make it, but we have to change it. I can't make it exactly the same because they don't know it's me. So some sort of element has to be changed in it. And so then he goes, well, can you do it? And I'm like, yeah. Were you planning on doing it? Uh, there was a thought because I knew I couldn't use the same recipe, you know? But were you planning on making more?

• 1:29:56Speaker 01

  No, hell, no. I wanted to go up there and I didn't want to do nothing, man. I just I just wanted my pops. Yeah. Yeah, I just wanted my pops. I didn't want to make no money, you know? Damn, that's kind of crazy then that he asked you. Yeah, well, he's a crime. He's a crime crime guy, man, you know? And then and then we're bragging about it. Hey, look this, you know? Right. So then maybe he thinks my son thinks it's cool, too. Yeah, you know, and then and even when I told him about what happened, man, he's like, you got away. So there was even the element that I pulled the fast one. Right. Right? Like, even that was impressive to him. Right, you got out. I got out, right? And now you're here. They don't know where you're at. All right, fuck them. Let's go.

• 1:30:31Speaker 01

  Let's go, right? So so I told him, I said, listen, I'm probably gonna do this. I gotta go back to Chicago and I gotta get some supplies and we'll ship them up here. And so I had I had brought with me. I had brought with me about 20,000 of the fake money. I used to I used to have a belt that I could put 10 grand in and I could wear it around, you know? And that's what I was showing him. And so I said, I said, here, listen, I'm gonna leave this. Let's leave most of it here. And let's fly into Seattle and then we'll drive across the country to Chicago. We can spend a little money, check out, get close, because, you know, we haven't seen each other for 22 years. Yeah. Right? And, um.

• 1:31:15Speaker 01

  Spend a little counterfeit cash, enjoy, yeah. Enjoy, yeah. Go to Chicago, get the material, ship it back. And we did. We we, you know, he so he left the stuff with his his his wife, though, and she hated me. And so she started spending it in Alaska, giving it to her friends, telling her friends who made it, telling it was fake, you know? Buying moose meat and shit? Just, yeah, moose meat, probably, yeah, yeah. Fur hats, fur. Fish. Holicash, yeah. Fish made out of fur? But they were spending it. And and I had specifically told him, you cannot spend this here in this in Alaska. You can't, you know? Yeah. Because it's it's fucking way up here, man. Oh, you're done. You're done. At least in the lower 48, you know, you you can move the money around. So anyway,

• 1:31:58Speaker 01

  she did, though. And not only did she, but then she she made sure she let the Secret Service know who was making it when it all came down, right? Because when we were in Chicago, so here I am in Chicago and I'm sending, we're sending stuff back. And, um, and then we see my sister, my sister, my dad, they get into it. My sister is forgiving as I am. She's kind of like, man. Fuck this guy. Yeah, you know, and she's even at me like, what what's the deal, man? What do you care? What do you care about this cat? He left us, you know? Yeah. And, uh, and so I didn't go back with him. I shipped every all the stuff and I said, I told him I had to go to Texas to get one thing.

• 1:32:37Speaker 01

  Uh, and while he fly back and then I'll come. And I I ended up leaving Natalie and the baby up there and she was pregnant, right? With with. In Alaska? In Alaska. Okay. And so when I finally called her, I went back to Texas. She goes, why why aren't you on the plane with your dad? I'm like, oh, man, I had to go here. She goes, fuck that. You better. I'm pregnant, dude. What are you doing, you know? Yeah. And so I ended up getting the things I needed and I fly I I flew back to to Anchorage. But I stayed with a niece's daughter in Anchorage when he when he was out there. And, um, and it's so so so weird how things happen and how fast, but I was I was getting a bad feeling. I don't know. It was weird. Like, I just wanted to get out of there. So I'm telling Natalie, I'm like, hey, we're leaving. We're out here.

• 1:33:21Speaker 01

  And and oh, that's what it was. When when when I went to visit him, he took me, uh, he took me to this biker party. It was Hells Angels, right? He he was real cool friends with one of the the big dogs up there. And, uh, and we went to this crazy ass like gathering. And and he introduced me to the dude and then he then he told the dude that I was the one that made the money. And I looked at him like, what are you telling this cat that I don't know that I'm making money, man? I got pissed with them, man, real real bad. That's pretty shitty. Yeah, it was terrible, man. He started showing me colors of reason why he left. You know, there was a reason he left because he wasn't that that that cool, laughety dude. There was something wrong, you know? Yeah. And now I'm seeing it, right?

• 1:34:03Speaker 01

  And so after that happened, when I got back to to to the house, I told, hey, pack up, we're leaving. We're getting out of here. And, uh, and so then I ended up flying to Houston. And one of my dudes picked up, but the Secret Service was waiting for me in Dallas. So unbeknownst to me, as I'm wanting to get out of Anchorage because of how he is, and niece is working with the the Secret Service the whole time. His wife? His wife. Oh. Yeah, so they're getting ready to. Why? Why would she do that? She just didn't want me around. She didn't want his kids around. It was the whole reason he took off for 22 years, you know? And so this was her way of just like get get him out of here, you know? So once you hit Houston. Yeah, once I hit Houston, my boy drives me up to Dallas to where Natalie's mom is and Secret Service were waiting for me. They busted. They

• 1:34:48Speaker 01

  they grabbed us. They said, we got you. And they did, you know, they had me. I ended up going to prison. My dad ended up going to prison because he had guns in the house and he was a felon in possession. And, uh, and then she she was the the confidential informant. But when she went to court, she she pleaded insanity and they, oh, this woman was crazy, right? She pleads insanity. I get three years. My dad gets six years. Or no, he got four and a half years. And then she pleads insanity and the judge takes her to trial and gives her six. Wow. She gets six years. Because she was lying about it. Because she was lying about it. I got less than everyone. It was wild. On the day I get out. At least you finally knew where your dad was for four and a half years, you know?

• 1:35:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was shared in federal correctional, but yeah, yeah. But anyway, well, sad part, though, is the day I got out of prison, he died. No. Yeah, had a heart attack that morning. In prison? In prison. Oh, man, I'm sorry. I. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Should have just said that. Oh, no, man, it's cool, man. My dad's laughing his ass off right now. He ain't tripping, man, you know? I I ain't. So the thing is, is that's irony in life, man, right? Like, when my when I got, so here you are, I'm getting ready to get out of prison. You're packing your stuff. You're happy. You're going home. You know, there's no better feeling than getting your freedom back, right? And you walk out the door and then you get handed, you know, a phone and and they tell you your dad's dead. And so you go from one high to the next quick, right?

• 1:36:11Speaker 01

  And and I had to deal with that. And then I ended up getting my son, right? So I had now I got a 13 year old whose mom's a cop. And she's calling me pissed off because he's printing $20 bills at her house off her little printer. Probably just trying to relate to his dad. Exactly, right? Because I just got out of prison. So now I got this kid, you know, that I'm taking care of because she don't want him at the house. And, you know, me and him ended up going to prison together. For what? Money. I ended up going back. With your own son? Yeah. No, sorry, dude. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:36:45Speaker 04

  You weren't arrested at the same time?

• 1:36:47Speaker 01

  No, we weren't arrested at the same time. So so he's 13. Bro, I am. Yeah, no, it's crazy, dog. This shit's wild. You can't. I'm telling you, this shit's so nuts, man. Like, I I sit back and trip out on it. Yeah, I sent a picture to your dude with my son rapping in prison. There it is, right there. Oh, he raps? Yeah, he raps. He's a badass rapper. Yeah, no, this is a crazy situation because in prison it's real racy, you know? Yeah. And. I would imagine that. American Greed did a show on me. American Greed, you know? Yeah, they did? Yeah, episode 46, right? Early in the American Greed days. And so me and my son are in prison together watching American Greed. And they they played one of his songs on TV, right?

• 1:37:30Speaker 01

  So all the brothers heard him rapping. And they do shows in prison, like on on the holidays. Yeah. You know, that's how Johnny Cash came in there and jammed. So Johnny Cash didn't come here, but they, uh, on July 4th, the brothers were doing a concert, you know? Well, like on Fridays, you know, uh, the brothers would do stuff on. Yeah, there's like, I think it's like a red, white and black thing or something they do. Just like that, right? Yeah. And so they came in and they said, hey, man, we heard you on TV, man, like rapping, because we were like prison celebrities in there, right? Yeah. Because we were on TV and then I was. And y'all were printing money? Yeah, we were. Yeah, we were like the coolest cats. So you guys were in prison together? Yeah, we were cellies together. No, what are you talking about? So you and your son were then. That little boy, 18 years old, it was nuts. Tight shit. Yeah, well, I'll tell you, it was.

• 1:38:14Speaker 01

  You and him were cellmates for going to jail for counterfeiting together? Yeah. So when I so after my dad died and I get out, man, long story short. My, my son and me, we're not really getting along, right? He's being a tough kid. His, his mom can't take care of him because she's a cop. She can't have that shit in her house. And, uh, and we connect through music, you know? Like, he, he was a real good musician, you know? He, and he was only like, at that time, like thirteen. And so I knew Johnny K, who, who, uh, he had groove sounds and he did like Disturbed, Fallout Boys. Those guys came out of Chicago. It was his studio and that was my dude.

• 1:38:47Speaker 02

  Okay, he's a producer?

• 1:38:48Speaker 01

  Big producer, big time, you know? He did Disturbed, Fallout Boys.

• 1:38:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't know a lot of, uh, producers in that area, but understood.

• 1:38:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we, we would hang out at his studio.

• 1:38:57Speaker 02

  Okay, got it.

• 1:38:57Speaker 01

  And then my boy's at this badass studio, you know? And he's, and he's, and he's, they're letting him rap in there and make beats in there and just do some really cool shit. And, and, and he had talent. Johnny was like, hey, man, this kid, you know? This is before there were any other white rappers besides Eminem.

• 1:39:12Speaker 02

  Got it.

• 1:39:13Speaker 01

  Right? And, uh, and so he made some songs, he made four songs and then it started getting expensive. My boy was like, hey, look, let's keep it going, but you, you gotta throw me a little something, right? Cause it's not like now where you could have a home studio, you know? Big boards and so that's what brought me back into printing. Cause I was like, okay, you know what? I'm gonna make as much money as I, I'm gonna do one big blast and I'm gonna help my son make it, you know? And, uh.

• 1:39:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's artists now that I think their, their parents are helping them make it, I think.

• 1:39:43Speaker 01

  Oh, no, yeah. Well, I knew a lot of people, plus I was, you know, so it just needed this, needed the money, you know? So the only way I knew how to do it was, you know, at that point I was working out at the, at a shipyard and, you know, the river rap, running up and down the river, pushing barges and shit. So I was, I was done with the work and myself anyway, you know?

• 1:39:59Speaker 02

  So you were ready to try one more, go at it?

• 1:40:01Speaker 01

  I was ready. I was like, let's do it, you know? And then I got my boy.

• 1:40:03Speaker 02

  Did you convince him or he convinced you?

• 1:40:05Speaker 01

  At first I didn't even let him know. It was on me, you know? Like this was my thing, you know?

• 1:40:09Speaker 02

  Oh, so you were gonna make a mon, you were gonna make some money anyway?

• 1:40:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I was already at that point, but this was a perfect reason to do it too.

• 1:40:16Speaker 02

  Because he needed money for his career?

• 1:40:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, for his career and so, yeah, so anyway. Now, but at this point, man, all the technology's changed. They had scrapped all the freaking presses, you know, they had.

• 1:40:26Speaker 02

  What year is this?

• 1:40:27Speaker 01

  Uh, that was like two thousand three, two thousand, yeah, about two thousand four.

• 1:40:32Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:40:32Speaker 01

  Cause I went to prison in two thousand, end of two thousand five, two thousand six.

• 1:40:36Speaker 02

  Got it.

• 1:40:37Speaker 01

  Um, so, so, but it was hard to get the equipment and that now at this time, you gotta hook up the internet to use Photoshop. You can't just pop in the CD anymore, you know? So I pretty much spent time hustling all the equipment up and getting it ready to go. And, uh, me and my brother broke into the paper place, you know? We actually cut all, we're probably the only idiots to, to break into a paper company, you know? Like we cut a hole in the thing, we're like in a rope and it was fucking, oh, it was nuts, man. And what's really nuts about it, the paper company only closed one day a year, one day a year. Guess what day that was? Christmas, fucking Christmas. We watched it.

• 1:41:12Speaker 02

  So on Christmas, you and your brother broke into the paper company?

• 1:41:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was the best. We got onto it. We cut a hole in the ceiling, in the, in the, in the tin metal. It was on Christmas. We lowered ourselves down. We actually got into a fight in there because they had these big, uh, potato sacks, right? And these, these rolls were massive, right? Like I had always got little butt rolls, right, you know? But the real roll was massive and weighed thousands of pounds and they were stacked up real high. So me and my brother had, we had to scale all the way up to the thing. And then we're sitting here with our legs up in the air and we're pushing the roll off the thing. And when it hit, it cracked the concrete. And then me like a, a madman, when we get down, when you cut the roll, it makes a snap, boom, real loud, right? Cause that, it's tight, you know?

• 1:41:57Speaker 01

  And, and, and I was stuffing the potato sacks and I had about ten, ten big potato sacks stuffed, but I couldn't stop. I kept stuffing and kept stuffing. My brother grabbed me, he's like, bro, we gotta go. We got enough, we got enough to make ten million. And I'm like, there's never enough, like, and then we're getting into it. And finally he's like, well, I'm leaving you here, man. I'm out of here. Anyway, he waited for me, but we, we got all the paper. We had everything ready.

• 1:42:23Speaker 02

  Damn.

• 1:42:24Speaker 01

  And then, uh, and then one day I had just spoke, this is what was crazy. Now they're doing, they just did a Rolling Stone thing on me. I was in Rolling Stone magazine, right?

• 1:42:35Speaker 02

  So you were doing public speaking?

• 1:42:36Speaker 01

  I was doing public speaking.

• 1:42:37Speaker 02

  About being a counterfeiter?

• 1:42:38Speaker 01

  As I'm counterfeiting. This is what was so bizarre about it.

• 1:42:41Speaker 02

  It's addiction, really?

• 1:42:42Speaker 01

  Addiction, yeah. Couldn't stop. Well, they flew me out to Rochester, right? Document Security Systems. It was a, a, a, a check company. Um, and so they wanted me to speak at some conference and I thought it was a corporate check conference, right? I fly out there to Rochester and, and I got the same assistant that Frank Abigail had, right? Frank Abigail was the check guy from Catch Me If You Can. Well, he had retired and so they wanted me to step in his place, right?

• 1:43:09Speaker 02

  So the security company was trying to get you to come and work for them?

• 1:43:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it was, it was a check security. They wanted me, you know, they, they would send me product.

• 1:43:16Speaker 02

  ADP, what, no, it was?

• 1:43:17Speaker 01

  It was a document security system, DSS.

• 1:43:20Speaker 02

  And so, but you're still doing crime at this point?

• 1:43:22Speaker 01

  I am, yeah, they don't know, right?

• 1:43:23Speaker 02

  They don't know, so you get there and what hap?

• 1:43:25Speaker 01

  So I get there, man, and I'm sitting in the hotel, uh, bar with the assistant and I'm looking around. I'm like, man, everyone in here looks like a cop, right? Like, and, and I ask her, I'm like, hey, isn't this, uh, like a corporate check security thing? She goes, no, this is a Homeland Security Conference for, for fraud. I'm like, well, what do you mean? Like everyone in here is an agent? She's like, yeah, these are all federal agents. I'm like, what? I wanted to run out the door, man. I couldn't believe it. I was like, oh, this can't be happening. This cannot be real.

• 1:43:53Speaker 02

  Did you speak at the conference?

• 1:43:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, but it was not easy though. I'll tell you what happened, so.

• 1:43:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:43:59Speaker 01

  So here it is. I don't even really drink much, man, right? But I'm pounding whiskeys, right?

• 1:44:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, it sounds like it.

• 1:44:05Speaker 01

  I'm pounding, I get to the room. She was worried about me. She's like, she's like, you're gonna be all right? I'm like, yeah, man, I'm all right, you know?

• 1:44:11Speaker 02

  I'm just glad it, finally at some point in this story, that somebody was worried about you.

• 1:44:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:44:16Speaker 02

  You know what I'm saying? Like, we gotta have somebody be worried about us.

• 1:44:18Speaker 01

  You know, I got, I got people now that love me, man. It's all good. It all worked out.

• 1:44:22Speaker 02

  Sure, but this is the first time I'd heard you say that in all of this.

• 1:44:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, nah, well, my momma always did.

• 1:44:27Speaker 02

  Oh, she did?

• 1:44:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, momma was always there. And but, so anyway, so here I'm at the conference and, and I go up to the room. She wakes me up at like six in the morning, telling me what to not eat, what to eat, what I can eat, you know? And, um, we go.

• 1:44:39Speaker 02

  What's she worried about you die for or did you gotta speak that day?

• 1:44:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, that morning. I was the first speaker.

• 1:44:43Speaker 02

  Don't want you being nervous.

• 1:44:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, she don't want me being nervous.

• 1:44:45Speaker 02

  Got it.

• 1:44:45Speaker 01

  I was the first speaker. It was eight o'clock in the morning, right? So I, I, I go into the, the hall where, where it's all set up and I walk into the front and, uh, I'm looking at who's speaking. It was the guy that caught the son of Sam was speaking that day too, right? The serial killer. It was pretty cool, man, actually. But I'm like nervous. My stomach is just ripped, man, right? And I'm looking like, who's coming in? And I'm thinking to myself, oh, man, it's eight in the morning. They're not gonna be here. Maybe ten, twenty, fifteen. Not too many people are gonna show up, so I'll be all right.

• 1:45:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:45:18Speaker 01

  It was, it fit a thousand people, right? Literally, man, I'm not kidding, like, that hall stayed empty till like two minutes before eight.

• 1:45:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:45:29Speaker 01

  I thought I won. It was only like, just a few people and I'm like, oh yeah, they're still sleeping. This is their vacation. They're not gonna be getting up at eight in the morning to watch some counterfeiter, right? Man, bro, like in a matter of like two minutes, man, it started filling up and the whole place was packed. All agents with their badges and, and I start sweating. Like I'm, I'm sick. I don't know if they, I don't know if they know what I've done back, back in Chicago, right? I don't know. I'm, I'm thinking, man, am I being set up? Do they know? Are they playing games with me? Are they, like, my brain was rattling, right? And, uh, and so she gives me some water. She sees me sweating. I said, man, I gotta go to the bathroom. So they hooked me up. They put the thing, the mic on me, getting ready to go.

• 1:46:13Speaker 01

  And I'm, I'm looking around, it's loud, you know, and everyone's sitting down. And, um, and the, and the, and the present, the, the guy that was presenting everybody, he came up. He goes, hey, you all right? He goes, you know, let's test the mic and, you know, we're about, I'm, this is how I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna say this and this and then I'm gonna call you up.

• 1:46:29Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:46:29Speaker 01

  I'm like, all right, cool, you know? And I said, can I, can I use the bathroom real quick? And, uh, she's like, yeah, it's right out the door. So I, I go out to the bathroom and I, and I just start throwing up. I'm in the bathroom just throwing up. There was a door that went outside. I kinda stumbled out the bathroom, went outside and I'm talking to myself. I'm like, what the fuck is wrong with you? What are you doing? You fucking, man, like, I'm really like insane, talking to myself.

• 1:46:54Speaker 02

  And they can hear you.

• 1:46:55Speaker 01

  And they fucking heard me. She comes out, she comes running out. She goes, dude, dude. She grabs the thing. She goes, we're, we're canceling this. You're not gonna, you're not speaking. And, and I'm like, what do you mean? She's like, they, they've listened to everything you just said right now.

• 1:47:09Speaker 02

  Killed them all. Remember that guy? He's like, I killed, I killed them all. Who was that guy?

• 1:47:14Speaker 01

  They heard everything. I was talking about, what the fuck am I doing? So I said, I said, no, man, we're not gonna cancel this, man. We're not gonna cancel it. So I walked back in, in there.

• 1:47:24Speaker 02

  We're not gonna cancel?

• 1:47:25Speaker 01

  Well, that's the problem with me. I'm stubborn, dog, right? Like, that's the reason I ended up making the money I did.

• 1:47:30Speaker 02

  Robert Durst muttered, killed them all, of course.

• 1:47:33Speaker 01

  Like, so, so I go back in there and it's silence now and they're all staring at me. You asked, the first question you asked me, how's it feel when people are staring at you and all that stuff you were talking about?

• 1:47:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, like the moon?

• 1:47:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, like the, like the moon, yeah. That's what I was going through, right? That's what it felt like. And, and I, they walked me up to the front. The presenter, he starts, then he calls me up.

• 1:47:56Speaker 02

  There's no way you got through it.

• 1:47:57Speaker 01

  Oh, listen to this. It was awesome, actually. I get up there and I look and I freeze. Like I'm frozen.

• 1:48:04Speaker 02

  For sure.

• 1:48:04Speaker 01

  Like I can't move, dog, right? And there was a, there was an older woman that had this silver hair. I'll never forget her. She was about fifteen rows in and she just lip, lifted, uh, you're gonna be all right. I could, I could read her lips. It was weird. She goes, you're gonna be all right. That's what she kept saying, like. And, and then I, then I just came out of it. I said, you know, I'm, I'm a little froze right now. It's the first time I've ever been in a room with this many agents. Usually I'm getting hauled off to jail and they all laughed, right? And once they laughed, then I just started like going in with everything and it was amazing. I ended up speaking for like forty-five minutes. I took questions for like thirty minutes.

• 1:48:46Speaker 01

  They ended up sitting me next, they sit me at the head table next to the Homeland Security Secretary, right? And we were joking about how he was making credit or, uh, fake IDs when he was in high school. And so like it, what turned, what looked to be terrible, right? Turned out to be amazing, you know? But I had to go back to Chicago and I was still printing money. I, I was going to anyway. But now I'm having second thoughts. Like there was all kinds of things going on when I was flying back to the city.

• 1:49:14Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:49:14Speaker 01

  You know, like I, I was like, man, am I really gonna do this? You know, when I actually got this opportunity right here that maybe could actually take care of me, you know? And when I get home. You know, my son's being whatever and I do a few things and when I come back to the house, he's printing money twenties. We get to he's one of his friends. We get into it. He runs out. I run out after him. You know, I'm trying to tell him he don't have to do this and he throws the money at me while while a cop is passing by.

• 1:49:42Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:49:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. And the cop gets out. I'm trying to pick the money up off the ground. And the cop, I tell the cop my name and right away boom and it was over, right? They called the secret arrested me, called the secret service. Secret service was toying with me actually because they they were like, you know, we know this is your son's money and all this like we're not, we're not looking at you. But I had some, I had some of that old money that I got busted with, you know, from that was buried and I played with it a little bit and and and it popped, right? And they knew. And so they they pulled me in and they said, we we know, we know what you're doing. We know you got a whole new off, you know, a whole new place and you got paper and you got the ink and,

• 1:50:26Speaker 01

  you know, we got, we're about to get you, man. You're going down for the rest of your life like, because because if you get busted with the presses and the files and the plates and stuff, you're done.

• 1:50:35Speaker 00

  Got it for sure.

• 1:50:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're done, right?

• 1:50:36Speaker 00

  So what is so?

• 1:50:37Speaker 01

  Well, what happened is they ended up, they ended up, um, they said they knew where it was at. They they took me in and and my boys let me know what happened. I wasn't there, but they literally had helicopters and SWAT teams and they fucking busted in my space. But what happened though is three weeks before that, the old man that owned the building, Rick and Benny, he owns Rick and Benny's, it's a bread shop. He's dead now, but he had sold it. It was an old warehouse, old dingy warehouse. And he had sold it before before this happened and told me that I had to get all my shit out of there. So the secret service, yeah, they knew that I was there, but they didn't hit me. I don't know why they waited. And so I ended up moving everything out because he told me to move everything.

• 1:51:21Speaker 01

  And then he had a cleaner come in and clean everything. So when they kicked in the door, there was nothing in there. It was insane. Nothing. I wouldn't be sitting here right now if if if there was. Yeah, they and they were messing me. They're like, we got you now. We got you. We're going in. And there was nothing. The press was gone. The paper was gone. Ink was gone. Everything was gone. It it was, it was so like.

• 1:51:43Speaker 00

  Blessed and cursed, bro. It's kind of like this perfect mix, bro.

• 1:51:47Speaker 01

  Perfect mix, man, but.

• 1:51:48Speaker 00

  But did you have to testify against your son or anything like that?

• 1:51:53Speaker 01

  No, no, he didn't even go to jail.

• 1:51:54Speaker 00

  So how do you and your son end up in jail together?

• 1:51:57Speaker 01

  So after this happens, they kicking the doors, whatever, I go ahead and take the beef, right? I got probably the shortest paragraph federal indictment in history, literally one paragraph, right? They give me seven years, hundred and five months. I go down. My son's left. He's 15. Well, he kept doing it, right? He he he got, he's a smart kid, right? He's seen some of the stuff. He gets the paper. He's like, he's getting everything. My brother's still out there playing with him. So him and my brother, whatever, right? And I'm in prison and I'm gone for like three years now.

• 1:52:27Speaker 00

  Were you able to help give him advice and suggestions about it from prison?

• 1:52:30Speaker 01

  No, no, we didn't really talk much, you know, that was it, you know, I didn't see him at all. I saw him three years later. So what happens is I get a call, I I call home and my sister says, hey, you need to call Karen. The day my son turned 18, the secret service went and arrested him as soon as he became an adult. They pretty much let him play money man.

• 1:52:52Speaker 00

  Right, because they're like, these charges aren't that good if you're a kid.

• 1:52:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're a kid. Nothing's gonna happen. As soon as he hit 18, they kicked, he he his stories, he he got a crazy story how they grabbed him. But he was on the run a little bit and they grabbed him finally. And so I called my sister, tells me what's going on. And uh, and he gets sentenced to, I forgot, I think it was like 36 months. So now I'm already been gone for three years. Now he's 18 and they ship him to Forest City, Arkansas. I'm in Big Spring, Texas at a real shithole. I've been trying to get out of there. And they end up transferring me from there to to Forest City.

• 1:53:28Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 1:53:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it was crazy because when I got there, I knew he was there, I knew he was there, right? So as soon as I went through processing, you know, go through all that shit all day, as soon as I hit the hit the dorm, some of the white guys came up to me, hey, you know what's your name? I told him, he's like, oh, your son's here. And I'm like, yeah, I know. And I need to see him as soon as I hit the yard tomorrow, right? They were like, shit, you don't have to wait to the yard. Your son's in the dorm. I'm like, what? He's like, yeah, he's he's here in this dorm. Man, he's in TV room right now.

• 1:53:57Speaker 00

  Damn.

• 1:53:58Speaker 01

  I'm like, what? So I haven't seen my son for three years, right? And I I I be lying to the to the to the uh, the TV room. And when I opened up the the the TV door and he he was sitting right there on the the front thing, looking up at the TV with his little headphones on. And when he seen me, man, he just, he just, he got up and just ran straight to me, man. I'm tearing up because my boy's in prison. So as happy as I am to see him, I'm devastated inside that he's here.

• 1:54:30Speaker 00

  That both y'all are there.

• 1:54:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, just devastated. Well, I can handle me.

• 1:54:33Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:54:33Speaker 01

  My life's been hell. I don't want him going through it, you know? And what this what was cool though, man, here it is, some of the hardest cats, man, in this TV room. And it's just pure silence. And you see this guy crying over there and this guy crying over there and that guy crying over there. Like people were thinking that they're kids and they're seeing me and my son just embracing. I just held him, man.

• 1:54:55Speaker 00

  Damn.

• 1:54:56Speaker 01

  And that's where I learned to become a dad, man. The next two and a half years, man. I started, I've been painting. I paint, you know, and so in prison, that's what I did. And then my son was music, so he he was writing lyrics. And so our plan was, yeah, that's me in prison with one of my first pieces, you know? And so, so the the plan, the grand master plan was, you know, that that he was gonna do music and I was gonna do art, you know, and um, and so, you know, when I I got out in 2013, I got out a month before him. They let, they wouldn't let us out together. The therapist, the counselor said, we're gonna let you out first. So you could get yourself situated. Then we're gonna let your son out.

• 1:55:36Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:55:37Speaker 01

  And so when I got out, you know, I just, I I had an unbelievable, I had an unbelievable uh, community around me, you know? Like when I got out, my attorneys were there, my friends were there. They got me a job. They got me a place. They got me a car. I had to go through my struggles. It wasn't easy, you know? And then my son got out. He ended up getting his CDL and then he started driving a trash truck. Now he's doing amazing. He's been out 13 years. We've both been out 13 years now. He just bought his first house. Yeah, it's amazing. He just had a baby. You know, he's doing amazing. He's writing new music now. His music is freaking awesome. Like he's really getting down on his music. And then me, you know, I I I went through the art thing, you know, I,

• 1:56:19Speaker 01

  first two years out, I I almost actually went back to printing. He busted me. He busted me with some with some chemicals and.

• 1:56:26Speaker 00

  Your son did?

• 1:56:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So like two years after this.

• 1:56:29Speaker 00

  He said, this ain't it.

• 1:56:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I well, it just like, it was a bunch of things like I I, you know, I I I just met someone, was about to have a baby, you know, and it just felt like deja vu all again, right? And so I ended up walking away from it and um, and I ended up one of a big time cat in Chicago. His name's Joe Ketchtor. He owns, he owns Lakeside Bank. He took me under his wing. And he said, look at man, I don't want you to go back to prison, man. I want to show you how to make it, you know? And uh, and damn, here it is 13 years later, you know, and I've had five galleries. I've had unbelievable shows from Rolls Royce to Satie. I've got to meet some of the most amazing people and, you know, just life has been so fucking awesome, man.

• 1:57:10Speaker 00

  A better community too. It just shows you what a community can do for us, bro.

• 1:57:14Speaker 01

  Really like.

• 1:57:15Speaker 00

  What about, um, tell me about like, when you look at like crime and the effect that it's had like on your family overall? Like, what do you think about that?

• 1:57:23Speaker 01

  I mean, for for me, like, what would I, what I, what I, because I've met with guys getting out of prison. I speak at schools. I spoke at schools, you know, to talk about how to overcome stuff, whether it's mental illness, whether it's drugs, whether it's crime, right? Because crime is can be addictive too. And and.

• 1:57:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'd never thought of it as an addiction until I spoke with you about it.

• 1:57:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:57:45Speaker 00

  And it almost seems like a familial addiction too.

• 1:57:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, they say it's worse than heroin, counterfeitment. If you looked it up, I think it says that counterfeitment is more addictive than heroin, you know?

• 1:57:55Speaker 00

  Wow, bring that up?

• 1:57:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's there's something saying on it. You know, for me, it's like, it's.

• 1:58:02Speaker 01

  So, so I, I, I have a few cats that I've kept in touch with that I was in prison with.

• 1:58:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:58:07Speaker 01

  But sadly, almost, you know, seventy-eight percent of people go back. Small percentage of us that make it out. There's even a smaller percentage that make it into something really big. You know, so what I've done with my art, with my life and with, you know, is, is, is, is very unusual.

• 1:58:25Speaker 00

  Right. Well, that part I get.

• 1:58:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:58:27Speaker 00

  But do you think, what effect do you think that crime had like on just like your like, you know what I'm saying? Cause you had it, it's, it's very wild that you had this happen in your own father-son relationship and then had it in the second generation of it.

• 1:58:39Speaker 01

  Well, here's the thing, the, the crime, crime actually, it, the streets, it is even deeper than the crime. It's the whole aspect of the streets and the, and the mental illness with my mom. Those things I think make, make, allow me, they, they've taught me how to deal with shit now. Right? Like, like before what would happen? The reason I would always go back to the crime is because the stress, right? Of, of being able to survive, right? I need to eat, I need shoes, I need to take care of my kid. Like people have these stresses, everyone does, right? Some people deal with it differently, right? Me, I was trained since crime, from the, the first time breaking into the meters. I, I was, I, the training was to just like an animal to hunt.

• 1:59:20Speaker 00

  Right, you'd learn that.

• 1:59:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I learnt that. That's what, that's where.

• 1:59:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't blame you.

• 1:59:24Speaker 01

  And, and so there, there wasn't like, there wasn't the guilt, there wasn't the shame, there wasn't that part of it. But the crime and the streets and everything I went through, it, it's made me now like aware. Like I see through a lot of things that other people don't see.

• 1:59:42Speaker 00

  But looking back, do you think, um, yeah, do you have like, was there any situations that you caused like by passing all that fake money? Like did it, like, did it ruin some people's business or anything like that? Did you have to make any like amends with that sort of situation?

• 1:59:57Speaker 01

  No, the, the, the, the more of the amends that I needed to make was with my, my, my son, you know? And, and my kids and, and, and the people that, that relied on me that, that, that I, you know? I wasn't there for, right? Like even, even when I went back for seven years, you know, Natalie was still had the three babies down in Austin, you know? And I didn't even know, I didn't even get to, to meet the, the young one till like four years later.

• 2:00:23Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 2:00:24Speaker 01

  And so the things that I regret are, are more family, you know? I, I wa, I, I didn't, I didn't sell drugs and I wasn't into all that other stuff, you know? So for me, the money was almost like, well, they're doing it, shit, you know? Like why can't I, you know? And, and then I was always doing good with it. So whether that was to justify me doing it or not, I just, I, I didn't ever feel that guilt for it, you know? And, um.

• 2:00:46Speaker 00

  Well, did anyone ever come to you and say, hey, you passed this much fake money with me and this is a problem?

• 2:00:51Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no. I've had people come to say, hey, man, I got one of your bills and I loved it, right? Like people, even, even now, there's a couple of people in the city that had, had some of them that actually framed them.

• 2:01:02Speaker 00

  Are they still in circulation?

• 2:01:04Speaker 01

  No, I, I don't know, maybe, you know, the money was good.

• 2:01:07Speaker 00

  Do you, if you even have one, will you send it to me so I can have one?

• 2:01:09Speaker 01

  I will.

• 2:01:09Speaker 00

  You will?

• 2:01:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I will, yeah. I actually brought you one.

• 2:01:12Speaker 00

  No, you didn't.

• 2:01:12Speaker 01

  No, I brought you a hundred, but not one of them. I brought you something though. No, I mean, it was, it was, it was a wild time, man, you know, and then like.

• 2:01:19Speaker 00

  Oh yeah, here we go. Yes, counterfeiting money can become a psychological or behavioral addiction. While it's not classified as a substance addiction, criminologists and psychologists recognize that the process of committing high stakes financial fraud can trigger the exact same neurological reward pathways as gambling, stealing, or substance abuse. The high of counterfeiting comes from the combination of chemical rush of the crime, the artistic obsession, and the illusion of ultimate control. Dang, bro, that sounds like some shit I would love to do, but I just wasn't brave enough, you know? I did that fucking nose crime, baby.

• 2:01:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, cocaine, that, yeah. No, the money, man, like even now, so when I, I, I, I print sheets of money right now, like.

• 2:02:00Speaker 00

  But it's for work, credit for your art.

• 2:02:02Speaker 01

  It's canvas and I paint over it, but I still get that same, when, when I see that sheet coming out and I could do it legal? Like it just warms my, I just get like all giddy, man.

• 2:02:12Speaker 00

  Do you think that people should be allowed to counterfeit money?

• 2:02:14Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

• 2:02:17Speaker 00

  Well, cause money's just like a, so, it's like a, kind of a social construct that we have. It's like this, you know?

• 2:02:22Speaker 01

  Well, see, the thing about money, you know, like my, my, my, my things were, I think we should be allowed to keep more of it. So, so I think that we're taxed too much, right?

• 2:02:30Speaker 00

  I agree with that.

• 2:02:31Speaker 01

  You're taxed on what you do, you're taxed on what you buy, you're taxed on your car, you're taxed on this. Like before the nineteen hundreds, there was no tax, right? And, and so like, there was, I, like even me, I love to barter. I barter a lot, man. I trade paintings for cars, for this, for that. I love to barter, right? So, so like, should people be allowed to print? No, neither should have I, man, it was wrong, you know?

• 2:02:52Speaker 00

  These days, it's like our government is just printing money. They're just siphoning money out, like they give, they're giving money away to these different like, um.

• 2:03:01Speaker 01

  Well, I think they gave up. I think they gave up. I think, I think that they gave, they, they knew that this thing's gonna collapse.

• 2:03:07Speaker 00

  The society, you mean?

• 2:03:08Speaker 01

  Well, the, the, the financial system that they set up, it's forty trillion in the hole, man. Like you can't, there's no way to get out of it, impossible, right? And they know that. And so like for me, I look at it, I analyze it, like, I think they gave up already. There's gonna have to be a reset, there's gonna have to be some sort of, and that's what the, the, the digital dollar's gonna be, right? It's gonna be a reset. I just hate that it's gonna be programmable, right? That's what they need to get rid of.

• 2:03:30Speaker 00

  Like what do you mean when you say that?

• 2:03:31Speaker 01

  Well, if you look it up, digital currency, have them look it up and pro, it's all programmable, which means they could say, hey, you can't buy gas on Tuesdays. And guess what? Your card will not work on Tuesdays. So it's programmable. They could give it direction.

• 2:03:44Speaker 00

  If they have certain coins, they are, but Bitcoin isn't necessarily programmable, right?

• 2:03:48Speaker 01

  Bitcoin ain't, but the US, the, the US, uh, the digital dollar will be.

• 2:03:53Speaker 00

  Okay, got it. A US digital dollar is a proposed central bank digital currency that would be issued and backed directly by the Federal Reserve as a digital form of physical cash. Government-backed, unlike decentralized cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or private stable coins. A CBDC, the central bank digital currency, uh, would be official legal tender backed by the US government. It would represent a direct digital liability of the Federal Reserve available to the general public. Wow.

• 2:04:23Speaker 01

  Ask if it's programmable, they don't wanna tell you that part. Just put in there, is it programmable? Cause this for sure is. And that's the thing that people need to be asking questions about.

• 2:04:33Speaker 00

  Is it programmable? Whether a US digital dollar would be programmable is one of the most heavily debated aspects of its potential design. And the Federal Reserve has explicitly stated it would oppose making it programmable.

• 2:04:43Speaker 01

  For retail users.

• 2:04:44Speaker 00

  For retail users. So what are you saying that means?

• 2:04:47Speaker 01

  So what happens is that, that, that, just like they got these cars coming out where they could turn them off, right? They'll be able to turn your money off really easy, like easier than we, it's ever been in human history. So throughout human history, it started with bartering and then coins and then paper, right? The, the human has always had the ability to trade something for something.

• 2:05:08Speaker 00

  Right.

• 2:05:09Speaker 01

  Right? And you can do it in a private setting or a public setting, right? With this, there will be no more private ever. That's gone. And some people say, well, if you're not doing anything wrong, but what happens is, is you can see through time that laws change. Where you thought it wasn't wrong this day is now wrong this day, right? And that's where this gets dangerous because.

• 2:05:30Speaker 00

  Like explain that to me a little bit better, where you think.

• 2:05:32Speaker 01

  It's kinda like the, uh, the truckers that were in Canada that were protesting and then the Canadian government turned their accounts off.

• 2:05:39Speaker 00

  Got it.

• 2:05:39Speaker 01

  Right? I, I'm sure you remember that, right?

• 2:05:41Speaker 00

  Well, it's just like Kanye West, when he was like speaking out against, um, I don't know exactly what it was, but I don't know if it was like Jewish people or it's just some things he said or things about the record industry. At some point, they cut off some of his.

• 2:05:52Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, de-bank you and all this shit.

• 2:05:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, they de-banked him.

• 2:05:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, this, they won't have to de-bank you, they'll just turn it off. It's just programmable. AI, AI, AI's not being too honest right now about this because it's saying it possibly. Because these cats here, they, they don't tell you the truth all the time. And, and, but there's, the, the engineers, believe me, they're putting the programmables in the, in the, in the, in the, the digital dollar.

• 2:06:15Speaker 00

  Would the digital dollar then, uh, be counterfeitable or no?

• 2:06:18Speaker 01

  It's a good question. We could try. We could try, man. I would love to try.

• 2:06:22Speaker 00

  We can't use pain on this though.

• 2:06:23Speaker 01

  No, we just have to figure out how to break into the system. But no, I mean, this, it, it, here's the thing, I, I hope that you'll have the states that, uh, that pass, like Florida's passed laws, where you can't refuse cash, you know? But the, I, you know, there, in other countries, there are, you see all these kids are raised on their phone, paying with their phone.

• 2:06:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:06:44Speaker 01

  Right? That's crazy to me. Like I see that and I'm like, man, I, I don't even like to have my phone on me, right? And you're letting it like do everything for you? From your money to your life, to your social media, to your dating, to.

• 2:06:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, we've just gotten, well, we've just gotten so addicted, we've gotten so used to it. I think it's hard to separate that. And I think a lot of people don't realize, um, the depth of the surveillance, you know?

• 2:07:10Speaker 01

  Well, now they got fly cameras going up, they got, you know, they, I mean, it's, it's getting really interesting, you know? And, and, you know, for me, because I was a ghost, I, I pay attention to that stuff real carefully, you know? Not cause I'm doing anything wrong, it's because I wanna be free.

• 2:07:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:07:26Speaker 01

  At the end of the day, you know, this, this is what I look at this country, you know, like, I, I love this country. I've been on every road that there is probably, right? Every, I've been in so many towns in this country, man. And I've watched the middle, middle, the middle part of the country just disappear, right? Where, where, where there was a time where I would drive through a town and, and it looked a little bit alive. And then five years later drove through it and it had boarded up windows and everything, right?

• 2:07:49Speaker 00

  We've seen the same.

• 2:07:50Speaker 01

  And that's sad.

• 2:07:51Speaker 00

  Yeah. Oh, it's heartbreaking. Well, like just like, yeah, it feels like our government has just sold everything out that was good from here. It's like they've let it, like just let it be siphoned out.

• 2:07:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think they gave up. I think they gave up, I think.

• 2:08:01Speaker 00

  I did, I don't, did they give up or were they, I mean, it seems a lot more like they were, um.

• 2:08:07Speaker 01

  Well, they were siphoning, now they gave up, right? Now they're looking like, oh, just let's get what we can. It's gonna, it's gonna get reset.

• 2:08:13Speaker 00

  The digital dollar divide, right here it says, um, the anti-CBDC Act would bar the Federal Reserve from issuing, piloting, or implementing any digital currency designed for general public use. The bill's supporters led by Representatives Tom Emmer, French Hill.

• 2:08:31Speaker 00

  Uh.

• 2:08:32Speaker 01

  Well, this is awesome that they're filing a bill for this. This is the first time I've seen this.

• 2:08:36Speaker 00

  Sight risks of government surveillance and programmable money pointing to China's digital yuan as a cautionary example of state control over individual financial behavior. Banking industry groups argue that retail CBDCs would enable consumers to bypass commercial banks entirely, potentially destabilizing credit intermediation. I-

• 2:08:56Speaker 01

  So China already does it. They do the programmable, right?

• 2:08:59Speaker 00

  Right, but if that becomes here, then it's like, yeah, if you didn't spend your money appropriately, it would just be cut off. Or also-

• 2:09:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, no more buying cocaine.

• 2:09:08Speaker 00

  That right, which is good for me, which is good for me. But, but also, if you, if you spend a money where they don't, they don't like it, or you're paying for a service that they don't like, they could cut your money off. If it's something that they deem that isn't right, or if you're, um, even paying to see, say you're paying to see a speaker that says things that the government doesn't like,

• 2:09:28Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, they could-

• 2:09:29Speaker 00

  They could cut your money off.

• 2:09:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's terrible, man. It's terrible.

• 2:09:31Speaker 00

  I mean, that's super scary.

• 2:09:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, there, it's, you know, like, but, you know, my hope is, is like, you know, well, the good thing is I'm learning how to create currency with my art, right? Like, so, so now that I'm an artist, you know, like I, it, it's been 13 years, 10 years professional artist, you know, the first time it, you know, that I got into the industry was when I met Arnold Schwarzenegger. I got to go out to his house and have a show, sold a bunch of art.

• 2:09:57Speaker 00

  Fuck, wow.

• 2:09:58Speaker 01

  Oh, it was badass, man. I mean, here I am, two years out of prison, shit ain't working, can't get nothing going. You know, the catch there, me is Arnold right there, and, um, here it is. I feel like I'm about to go back to printing. Catch Tori, kind of, you know, scoops me in. I worked for him a little while, and then I end up going to Florida.

• 2:10:18Speaker 00

  I remember you telling me about some of this and being in a show.

• 2:10:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was in a show.

• 2:10:21Speaker 00

  Before we get into something else, let me just, I, I want to go a little bit further about like, because like Bitcoin is, like, because say something is a money, right? It's just because we all agree that money has value, right? Like, if tomorrow, everybody just agreed it didn't have value, then it wouldn't.

• 2:10:40Speaker 01

  It wouldn't, and, and that goes for a lot of things, like, and, and I, I, I reference art because like, really, what does, how do I sell a painting for 10 grand that I sold for a thousand five years ago?

• 2:10:53Speaker 00

  Right.

• 2:10:53Speaker 01

  Right? How do I do that? How do I make it valuable, right? And it's the same thing with paper. And actually, in, on the old money, the 1800s money, it looks like little pieces of art. And the reason they did that is because them old timers didn't want to give up their gold, right? So they had to make the, the paper look valuable, right? So if you look at, look at this money, man, some of this stuff is beautiful, right? Look at, look at the educational series, the 1896 educational series. I mean, that thing is, is, is just unbelievable. And, and so they had, they had to make this stuff look valuable, and then they made gold illegal, right? To get the old timers to give up the gold. Like, look at this stuff. That's a five dollar bill. You see that? That's, nobody's seen no five dollar bill like that. Look how beautiful that is. It looks like a piece of art.

• 2:11:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:11:37Speaker 01

  Right? So they, they, it's, it's all about, really kind of trickery, a little bit, a little psyop, right? You, you, you, you, you give, and then the way they created the system, right? The system for us really kicked in after World War II, right? That's when they really created the financial structure, right? Uh, how, how America would loan money to different countries, and then they would buy goods, and then it would create this system, right?

• 2:11:59Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:12:00Speaker 01

  But what happened is they just dug too deep into it, right? I mean, it could have been an unbelievable system.

• 2:12:05Speaker 00

  Right, but then people started manipulating things that happen in certain countries. There's sort of this, I mean, we just had a guy on who was talking about, uh, secret societies that like manipulate things at a higher level.

• 2:12:15Speaker 01

  Oh, way higher.

• 2:12:16Speaker 00

  So now this country has to, like, we have immigrants that are going from here because we caused starvation here, or we stopped, we, we put a, like a fuel, uh, embargo here, and so now this country's going to behave like this. And so it's like, and they're all betting on that at a higher level. I want to, I want to get this point out there. Franklin, uh, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 6102 on April 5th, 1933, which largely outlawed the private ownership of gold, coin, bullion, and certificates in the United States. The Great Depression widespread bank failures caused citizens to hoard gold, shrinking the circulating money supply. So, but then when they bought it back, sorry, in order to, but when they bought it back from them,

• 2:12:59Speaker 00

  I know that they bought it, they made everybody kind of give their gold, and then they sold it back to them at a cheaper, uh, at a cheaper rate.

• 2:13:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:13:07Speaker 00

  Let me see that. Americans had to turn in their gold to a Federal Reserve Bank by May 1st, 1933. The government paid citizens 20.67 dollars per troy ounce of gold, um.

• 2:13:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, 10 years in prison if you didn't do it.

• 2:13:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, is that what it says? Violations, violations carry penalties of up to a $10,000 fine or 10 years in prison. And then in January 1934, FDR raised the official price of gold to $35 per ounce, increasing the Treasury's value and deval-

• 2:13:36Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 2:13:37Speaker 00

  And devaluing the dollar.

• 2:13:39Speaker 01

  So they gave 20, and then raised it 35. I mean-

• 2:13:42Speaker 00

  That's crazy.

• 2:13:43Speaker 01

  Money, like even, like, I look at how they changed, like, when they changed the bill to the new purple thing.

• 2:13:48Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:13:49Speaker 01

  Like, that, that really was fascinating to me, that I, I was able to create something that caused them to change the whole system, you know?

• 2:13:57Speaker 00

  Are you sure that that was the cause of it?

• 2:13:58Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I mean, it, it, yeah, they need the paper, you know, the paper, they, there was too many people doing it, you know? They had, they had to fix it. They had to fix it, you know? But, you know, and, and, and soon, you know, like, like you, I, I, I look at my art kind of like historic art, because soon there won't be currency. Soon there won't be paper currency, you know?

• 2:14:17Speaker 00

  Right.

• 2:14:17Speaker 01

  And so for me, it's almost like I'm, I'm preserving history through my pieces. That every piece I make, that it's, it's going to be historical.

• 2:14:25Speaker 00

  Because a lot of it's printed on actual money.

• 2:14:28Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, I print. Yeah, I love to print. Yeah, maybe one time you're in town, I'll, I'll print with you. There you go. There's a sheet of money.

• 2:14:34Speaker 00

  Bro.

• 2:14:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'll give you one next time. I'll give, I'll give you a little one, dog, yeah. But I paint right over it, man. I love it, you know, and look at that. Now, now this sheet almost-

• 2:14:43Speaker 00

  Dang, that shit's popping, though.

• 2:14:45Speaker 01

  It's awesome, man. I love it, yeah. So, so I still get to print, you know, like, it's just, it's just awesome that I get to do it. But, you know, soon, soon currency will be gone, you know, and it'll be digital, and it's going to be an interesting time in humanity, like, big time. Like, it's going to get, it's going to get, like, I get more nervous about that than AI. I think AI is kind of a little bit hoaxy, because this shit don't really work well, you know?

• 2:15:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, I agree. This shit's capped, dude.

• 2:15:10Speaker 01

  And the data centers are good for the robots. I'm telling you, they're making that shit for the robots.

• 2:15:14Speaker 00

  Oh, the data centers just, I think it's to store a lot of information from all the surveillance information. When you think about-

• 2:15:19Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, that too. Oh, yeah.

• 2:15:20Speaker 00

  Activating surveillance, and how they're, what they're going to need, I think there's a lot of, I think there's a lot of future stuff that's going to be super scary, and I don't know if we're ready for it, but we don't have a choice but to go into it. It doesn't look like, because it doesn't look like anything is going to save us. Or you could move to a country that doesn't have it, you know?

• 2:15:36Speaker 01

  Like you, bringing it to people so they understand it, so we could go into it the right way, right? Like, it really is about just information, like, to, to, teaching the people the things where they can make a choice to make this world better, right? Like, and that's what's awesome about podcasts now, because you guys get to actually inform people about things that are happening, so that maybe it could change, like, to have hope. I want to have hope that even if they change the money, even if they have surveillance, that somehow humans will find a way to thrive, right?

• 2:16:05Speaker 00

  We need a he, we need like a new Mel Gibson, we need a new patriot, you know?

• 2:16:09Speaker 01

  New patriot, yeah.

• 2:16:09Speaker 00

  Oh, we need, we need a new patriot.

• 2:16:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:16:11Speaker 00

  But, um, Art Williams, you have your studio now. People can find it online.

• 2:16:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I got a juliestavinci.com. I got, uh-

• 2:16:20Speaker 00

  juliestavinci.com?

• 2:16:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then I got a arttojwilliamsjr.com, my name. And then I got a gallery in Chicago on Clark and Diversey, and, uh, just started showing other artists, which is kind of cool, because-

• 2:16:31Speaker 00

  Oh, that's cool stuff. Yeah, I like to go see art.

• 2:16:34Speaker 01

  Man, you gotta come to the gallery, man, you know, you'll, you'll dig it, man.

• 2:16:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, I would love to.

• 2:16:37Speaker 01

  I got a printing press there.

• 2:16:38Speaker 00

  Do you?

• 2:16:39Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, I got a printing press there.

• 2:16:41Speaker 00

  Um, oh, one thing I wanted to go to real quick. What are the top, can you look, uh, Trevon, what are the top things that can be counterfeited?

• 2:16:48Speaker 01

  Clothes, bags.

• 2:16:50Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 2:16:51Speaker 01

  Um, uh, medications are a big thing.

• 2:16:54Speaker 00

  The 10 most counterfeited products in the world. Let's see them. Uh, food products.

• 2:16:58Speaker 01

  Food. Oh, that's 10.

• 2:17:00Speaker 00

  I think that food products and well-known brands of food could be counterfeited, but that is increasingly the case, especially as food prices around the world continue to rise, and companies charge-

• 2:17:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's an interesting one, huh?

• 2:17:10Speaker 00

  And companies charge a premium for their brands, whether it be coffee, chocolate, or fruit. For example, in Canada, the most popular and profitable coffee store chain is named Tim Hortons, after a hockey player. However, in South Korea, people are sold Tim Morton's coffee, which is a blatant knockoff of the popular Canadian caffeine product, huh? Designer labels, tags, that's pretty obvious.

• 2:17:29Speaker 01

  Computers.

• 2:17:30Speaker 00

  Computers. I wouldn't have thought that, but I guess it makes sense, because you do hear people like on Facebook Marketplace and stuff, like, I went to buy this computer and it was cat.

• 2:17:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:17:38Speaker 00

  Uh, pharmaceutical drugs.

• 2:17:40Speaker 01

  Movies still.

• 2:17:41Speaker 00

  Fake pills. Oh, movies, yeah, like in third world countries. Uh, sneakers and shoes, that makes sense. Smartphones.

• 2:17:49Speaker 01

  Jewelry.

• 2:17:50Speaker 00

  Jewelry and accessories.

• 2:17:52Speaker 01

  Money's not even on there.

• 2:17:54Speaker 00

  Watches for sure. Handbags, purses, wallets.

• 2:17:57Speaker 01

  No money.

• 2:17:57Speaker 00

  No money.

• 2:17:58Speaker 01

  Man, I gotta, I gotta get money on there.

• 2:18:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, hey.

• 2:18:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, figure out the digital.

• 2:18:03Speaker 00

  You'll figure it out, bro.

• 2:18:04Speaker 01

  Nah, nah, I'm done. I'm retired, man.

• 2:18:07Speaker 00

  Look, um, Art Williams, man, thanks so much, dude, for hanging out. Thanks so much for just telling us about your story. Congrats on, I mean, in the end, you were kind of just an artist, man.

• 2:18:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, really.

• 2:18:16Speaker 00

  You know, and not just an artist, but yeah, it's like-

• 2:18:19Speaker 01

  An artist that went through some shit that just, you know?

• 2:18:21Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, if you're an artist and you're locked and you're stuck in like criminal type shit, then of course you're going to start your art in criminal type shit. And these days, dude, everybody should be able to make their own fucking money. You know what I'm saying? If the government's just printing that shit and just handing it out.

• 2:18:34Speaker 01

  We could give classes.

• 2:18:35Speaker 00

  Yeah. Dude, it might not be a bad idea.

• 2:18:38Speaker 01

  Crayson Theo Von, making money classes, man.

• 2:18:40Speaker 00

  Hey, TBD, man.

• 2:18:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I love it.

• 2:18:43Speaker 00

  And you have a book. I don't want to forget The Last Counterfeiter. Um, Art, man, thank you so much, dude.

• 2:18:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I appreciate this, and it's been awesome, brother.

• 2:18:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, I appreciate it. Tell Penelope I said what's up.

• 2:18:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I will. Yeah, yeah.