The man who strolled into Arthur J. Williams’ art gallery in Bridgeport a few years ago was well-spoken, dressed nicely and knew what he wanted — but something about the visitor made Williams uneasy.
“Something just hit me, man, like this ain’t right,” Williams remembers.
Then Williams looked closely at the $12,000 cashier’s check the man presented for one of the gallery’s paintings. It was from a bank in San Francisco; that was odd for a guy who’d said he lived in Chicago. The check turned out to be a fake.
If Williams had been hoodwinked, it would have been a fitting irony for a man who was once dubbed the “King of Counterfeit” and printed an estimated $10 million in fake bills during the course of his career — including about $500,000, he said, on Chicago Sun-Times scrap newsprint.
Williams also spent 12 years in the penitentiary for his crimes. He’s been out for 10 years and is now a successful artist. But he’s still obsessed with money: It seeps into all of his work — sometimes like a watermark underlying a portrait of the Greek philosopher Socrates, whose writings Williams studied while incarcerated. Other times, extravagantly, as in a giant crumpled $100 bill with a velvety purple sheen.
Williams bristles at the suggestion that his is a distasteful redemption story because, in a sense, he’s still profiting form his misdeeds.
“Anyone who questions my reasoning now, I ask, have you grown up with a bipolar mother in the projects with no food, with no hot water for two years? Were you forced to break into parking meters so you could feed your brother and sister?,” Williams asked rhetorically.
We met recently in a lounge on the 21st floor of downtown’s LondonHouse Chicago, where some of his work is on display through Sept 20. He wore Prada eyeglasses, gleaming Air Jordan sneakers and a red Armani polo shirt. He’s muscular with a slight paunch, his salt-and-pepper hair short and slicked back, on his way to Nonna Soluri’s Italian Deli in Bridgeport for an Italian beef (“easy dip, easy hot”) after our chat.
Williams’ mother, when she could hold down a job, was a waitress. His father ditched the family when the boy was 12. Williams says he was “raised by the streets.” His mentors in Bridgeport included Jerry Scalise, the mobster famous for stealing the 45-carat Marlborough Diamond from a London jewelry store.
A friend of his mother’s, nicknamed DaVinci, introduced a teenage Williams to counterfeiting — after scolding him for stealing a car. Williams elevated counterfeiting to a fine art, mixing his own inks, blending new- and old-school printing technologies.
“I went all in,” Williams said. “It took years of figuring this stuff out.”
A stumbling block: finding just the right paper. Sun-Times newsprint, it turned out, worked exceptionally well, he said.
During a decades-long career, Williams estimates he printed about $10 million, usually in $500,000 batches. Much of it he sold to other criminals for 30 cents on the dollar. Williams spent some, but avoided flashy purchases, he said.
Advice that Scalise had given him years before stuck: “If you let people know what you have, they want to take it from you.”
In a 2005 Rolling Stone piece, Williams compared counterfeiting to an “orgasm.” These days, the 50-year-old Williams says: “It is truly one of the hardest things to quit — worse than heroin.”
Williams’ enterprise collapsed in the early 2000s, while he was visiting his estranged father in Alaska. Williams had printed some money to show his father the craft, but the paper was of a poor quality and so were the fakes. Williams Sr. handed out some of the cash to friends, who spent it. Several cashiers became suspicious and called the cops. The trail led back to the son.
At the time, Michael Sweazey was in charge of the U.S. Secret Service office in Anchorage. Sweazey, now the head of security at a small liberal arts college, described Williams’ work as “high quality.”
“But to be honest with you, that’s because most counterfeit money is terrible,” said Sweazey, who was at the time a counterfeit expert. “It takes somebody with real skill to make real good counterfeit money.”
Williams did three stints in prison, the longest of which was seven years.
“Coming from the South Side and being raised by the streets allowed me to go through prison a lot easier than most,” said Williams. “I don’t take no crap from no one.”
In 2009, he took an art class in prison. His teacher told him he had promise. He gave Williams a rose to paint. Williams said he wanted to paint money. The teacher shook his head in weary disbelief, but said OK.
Williams’ first piece took him a year to paint — an 1896 $1 bill, his attention to detail illustrating his counterfeiting prowess.
Williams got out in 2013. He was 40 years old and a high school dropout. He came back to Chicago. Fortunately, he had connections. He’s the kind of guy who always seems to have a guy, who knows a guy …
He started out cleaning toilets downtown for a lawyer buddy, a job he said he loved. He rode a bike to work for six months.
What Williams really wanted to do, though, was paint full-time. But he had a wife and a child to support (he has seven children). Another buddy offered to pay all of Williams’ bills for six months so that he could get his art career off the ground.
He worked hard, produced four paintings that another friend agreed to display at an airport hangar for private jets near Miami. Williams said he sold all four paintings for $16,000 to a man who makes medical equipment.
An executive at a kids charity connected to the actor Arnold Schwarzenegger happened to see the paintings, and then invited Williams to a fund-raiser at Schwarzenegger’s Los Angeles home. After overcoming some security hurdles — Williams was a felon trying to get access to the former California governor’s residence — the counterfeiter-turned-artist sold $500,000 worth of paintings, donating $160,000 to charity, he said.
Homero Villarreal, LondonHouse’s director of food and beverage, said he first saw some of Williams’ work in a friend’s basement. He liked Williams’ backstory and thought the $100 bill featured in so much of his art would be a clever way to celebrate the 100-year anniversary of the the LondonHouse building.
“I loved how he was able to stay consistent with the motif of the $100 bill, whether it was in-your-face or it was subtle and you had to look for it,” Villarreal said.
Williams has had setbacks. His father died the day Williams was released from prison. His Bridgeport home (he now lives in Mount Prospect) burned down about two years later due to an electrical problem. And his mother was recently diagnosed with cancer.
But Williams’ kind doesn’t stay down long. He says his art is changing, evolving. He wants to get away from the money.
“That’s the one thing that connects me to my past,” he said. “Now I’m starting to feel more confident in art, rather than the money.”
Sweazey, the former secret service agent, said he has no problem with how Williams is making a living.
“If he is doing well and he’s doing it legally, good for him,” Sweazey said. “That’s kind of the goal of the legal justice system.”
But what about that guy — the one who tried to beat Williams at his own game in passing off a fake cashier’s check in the artist’s gallery back in 2019? Williams reported him to the feds.
Investigators told him: “Don’t worry — this has been happening a lot.”
Was Williams tempted to give the guy a break? Maybe, like Williams, he was just trying to feed his family?
The artist’s gut told him otherwise — that he didn’t have “morals.”
“I don’t say there is a good criminal, but if there ever was a definition of a good criminal, I fit it well,” he said.
