It took Art Williams four beers to summon the will to reveal his formula. We had been sitting in his living room, a few blocks from Chicago’s Midway Airport, listening to jets boom by for the better part of two hours. I was there interviewing him for an article for Rolling Stone magazine, and he had promised to tell me the secrets that made him one of the most successful counterfeiters of the last quarter century. Understandably, he was reluctant. “I’ve never shown this to anybody before,” he finally said with a contempt indicating that I could not possibly appreciate or deserve what I was about to see. “You realize how many people have offered me money for this?”

Some men—he wouldn’t say who—once promised him three hundred thousand dollars for his moneymaking recipe. They pledged to set him up in a villa anywhere in the world with a personal guard. It was easy to picture Art sitting on a patio above the Caspian Sea surrounded by bucket-necked Russian gangsters. With his high, planed cheeks, blue eyes, and pumped-up physique, he’d fit right in with an Eastern European operation. It was also easy to think that he was full of shit, because Art Williams was a born hustler, as swaggering as any ever found on the streets of Chicago. Later I’d learn that the offer had been real, and that he’d declined because he wasn’t sure if his guards would treat him as prince or prisoner.

“My friends are going to hate me for telling you,” he sighed.

“They’ll probably hate you for knowing.” Then he shuffled off toward the kitchen. Hushed tones of an argument between him and his girlfriend, Natalie, echoed down the hall. It was clear enough that she didn’t want him to show me. When I heard a terse “Fine, whatever,” I was pretty sure that Natalie would hate me too. Then came the rumblings of doors and cabinets opening and the crackling of paper. A moment later, Williams returned with some scissors, three plastic spray bottles, and a sheet of what looked like the kind of cheap, gray-white construction paper a kindergarten teacher might hand out at craft time.

“Feel how thin it is,” he whispered, handing me a sheet. Rubbing the paper between my thumb and forefinger, I was amazed at how authentic it already felt. “That’s nothing,” he said. “Just wait.” He cut two dollar-sized rectangles from the sheet, apologizing that they were not precise cuts (they were almost exactly the right size). Then he sprayed both cuts with adhesive, his wrist sweeping fl uidly as he pressed the applicator. “You have to do it in one motion or you won’t get the right distribution,” he explained. After he deftly pressed the sheets together and used the spine of a book to push out air bubbles, we waited for it to dry. “I always waited at least half an hour,” he said. “If you push it, the sheets could come apart later on. Trust me, you don’t want that to happen.”

Another beer later, he sprayed both sides of the glued sheets with two shots of hardening solution, then a satin finish. “Now this,” he said before applying the final coat, “is the shit.” Five minutes later I held a twenty-dollar bill in one hand and Art Williams’s paper in the other, eyes closed. I couldn’t tell them apart. When I opened my eyes, I realized that Williams’s paper not only felt right, but it also bore the distinctive dull sheen.

“Now snap it,” he commanded. I jerked both ends of the rectangle and the sound was unmistakable; it was the lovely, husky crack made by the flying whip that drives the world economy—the sound of the Almighty Dollar.

“Now imagine this with the watermark, the security thread, the reflective ink—everything,” he said. “That’s what was great about my money. It passed every test.”

ART WILLIAMS WAS THIRTY-TWO YEARS OLD and already a dying breed. In an era when the vast majority of counterfeiters are teenagers who use ink-jet printers to run off twenty-dollar bills that can’t even fool a McDonald’s cashier, he was a craftsman schooled in a centuries old practice by a master who traced his criminal lineage back to the Old World. He was also an innovator who combined time-tested techniques with digital technology to re-create what was then the most secure U.S. banknote ever made.

“He put a lot of work into his bills,” Lorelei Pagano, a counterfeit specialist at the Secret Service’s main lab in Washington, D.C., would later tell me. “He’s no button pusher. I’d rate his bills as an eight or a nine.” A perfect 10 is a bill called the “Supernote” that many believe is made by the North Korean government on a tenmillion- dollar intaglio press similar to the ones used by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.

Art would eventually reveal to me his entire process of making money, and I’d be awed by the obsession, dedication, and exactitude it had taken him to achieve it. But as extraordinary as his formula was, it defined his story about as much as a mathematical equation can capture the mystery and terror of the universe. Far more interesting were the forces that created and compromised him, and those could not be easily explored in a magazine article. Art had too many secrets to share, many of which he had hidden even from himself.

He’d spent half his life pursuing verisimilitude in an idealistic attempt to recapture something very real that he believed had been lost, or stolen, or unfairly denied. What enthralled and terrified me the most was that his pursuit had very little to do with money, and the roots of his downfall lay in something impossible to replicate or put a value on. As he would say himself, “I never got caught because of money. I got caught because of love.”

What compelled you to write this book?

Curiosity about the crime of counterfeiting was the interest that initially drew me in. Master counterfeiters—criminals who produce superior quality notes and sell them—are extremely rare. Unlike other kinds of career criminals, they are also craftsmen, and they typically learn from another master through apprenticeship. When Art Williams learned to counterfeit from a master at just 16, he was the last link in chain of counterfeiters that went back generations. I found this so fascinating, this idea of legacy. I wanted to know how he learned, the dynamics of that student-teacher relationship and how it changed him. Then of course there was his pursuit of a counterfeit of the 1996 New Note, the most secure US bill ever created. It was a quest, and quests always make for great stories.

While it was the world of counterfeiting that originally attracted me to Art’s story, what ultimately made a book-length project worthwhile wasn’t the crime, but the man. Art’s quest to reconnect with his father was far more compelling than his criminal escapades, and it is the conflict that arises between these two goals that gives his story so much dramatic weight.

How did you find this story?

Art Williams actually found me. Back in 2004, the Hollywood producer Paul Pompian spent a week in Chicago scouting locations for one of his films. Paul didn’t have a car, so one of his friends loaned him a car and driver. That driver turned out to be Art Williams. As the week went by, Art kept hinting to Paul that if he really wanted to make an interesting movie, he should listen to his story. Of course, being a veteran Hollywood man, Paul hears such claims on a daily basis, so he pretty much blew Art off the entire week.

On his last day in Chicago, Paul had a few hours to kill before heading to the airport. By then he had taken a liking to Art. They were both native Chicagoans, both from the streets, and in a few of the details Art revealed about his past Paul saw shades of his own memories growing up in the city. Paul offered to buy Art lunch and, grudgingly, finally listen to his story. Upon hearing that Art had learned to counterfeit at 16, Paul was shocked, and of course there was much more to the story. He thought that Art’s life might indeed not only make a good film, but an interesting book. Eventually he contacted my literary agent in the hopes of finding someone to write it.

I really didn’t know what to think when my agent told me about Art. I was fascinated, but there was no way I could commit to anything without meeting Art myself. After spending an hour with him on the phone and doing a little research, I though it would at least make an interesting magazine article. The resulting article ran in Rolling Stone in July of 2005, and by then I had learned enough about Art’s story to want to write the book.

How much money did Art Williams counterfeit?

By Art’s own estimate, he counterfeited about ten million dollars worth of US currency over a ten-year period. While that is quite a sum for a lone counterfeiter, the dynamics of the crime make getting rich from it a bit more complicated. Since he sold much of it for 30-cents on the dollar, he only got about third or less of the face value. Overhead, his splurging lifestyle, and the countless bills he burned because he wasn’t quite satisfied reduced his net profit even further.

Have you ever seen one of Art Williams’s counterfeit bills?

I have, though interestingly this didn’t happen until the book was almost finished. The bill, a C-note, was stuffed inside a journal sent to me by someone close to Art. This individual had tucked it in there as a memento years earlier and completely forgotten about it. Seeing it was a strange sensation. If I hadn’t spent so much time learning about both real and counterfeit currency, I wouldn’t have been able to distinguish it from a genuine bill. Holding it in my hand, I realized how easy it would be to just go spend it. Art always told me that spending his bills never felt like a crime to him, and I could see why: it was too easy to believe the bill was real.

While writing this book, did you have fantasies about becoming a counterfeiter yourself?

There came a point when I realized that few people—perhaps nobody other than Art and Natalie—knew as much as I did about how Williams made his bills. At the same time, I also had intimate knowledge of the personal tragedies and sufferings that his life as a counterfeiter had caused him. That kind of knowledge tends to strip away the glamour of the crime.

Even so, there have certainly been times when I’ve daydreamed about making my own bills. Those fantasies are very short-lived. The likelihood that I would wind up in prison aside, counterfeiting at Art’s level requires tremendous skill and patience, and it helps if you enjoy the work, which comes down to printing. Art always said he did it more for the challenge than the money, and I believe him. Sadly, if Art applied the same discipline to his counterfeiting to a legitimate endeavor, he would not only be successful, but free. Ultimately, counterfeiting just isn’t worth the risk. You might have a great ride for awhile—as he did—but the odds are overwhelming that your criminal career will end very badly. When that happens, it’s not just you who pays, but your friends and family as well.