Bridgeport counterfeiter turned painter still finds money much to his liking

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. Yet something about him made the gallery owner uneasy.

“Something just hit me, man, like this ain’t right,” Williams says.

Then, he looked closely at the $12,000 cashier’s check the man presented to pay for a painting. It was from a bank in San Francisco, which seemed odd for a guy who said he lived in Chicago. The check turned out to be a fake.

Had Williams been hoodwinked, it would have been a fitting irony for a man once dubbed the “King of Counterfeit,” who printed an estimated $10 million in fake bills during his career in crime — including what he estimates was about $500,000 printed on Chicago Sun-Times scrap newsprint.

For his crimes, Williams spent 12 years in prison. That’s where he turned to art.

Now out of prison for 10 years, he has become a successful artist.

But he’s still obsessed with money. It seeps into all of his work, like a watermark underlying a portrait of the Greek philosopher Socrates, whose writings Williams studied while incarcerated. Or, more extravagantly, you’ll find a giant, crumpled $100 bill with a velvety purple sheen in his work.

Pat Nabong / Sun-Times

Williams bristles that some might find his tale of redemption distasteful because, in a sense, he’s still profiting from 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?” Williams, 50, says in reference to his own background. “Were you forced to break into parking meters so you could feed your brother and sister?”

He tells his story in a lounge on the 21^st floor of the LondonHouse Chicago, the downtown hotel where some of his work is on display through Sept. 20. Outfitted in Prada eyeglasses, gleaming Air Jordans and a red Armani polo shirt, he’s a muscular figure with a few extra pounds, his salt-and-pepper hair short and slicked back.

Pat Nabong / Sun-Times

He describes his background this way.

His 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,” with mentors in Bridgeport who included Jerry Scalise, the mobster famous for stealing the 45-carat Marlborough Diamond from a London jewelry store.

A friend of his mother, who went by the nickname DaVinci, introduced a teenage Williams to counterfeiting — after scolding him for stealing a car.

In time, Williams made an art of counterfeiting. He mixed his own inks, blending new- and old-school printing technologies.

“I went all in,” Williams says. “It took years of figuring this stuff out.”

One stumbling block was finding just the right paper. Sun-Times newsprint, it turned out, worked exceptionally well, he says.

During a decades-long career, Williams says he printed probably about $10 million in fake bills, usually in $500,000 batches, much of it sold to other criminals for 30 cents on the dollar. Williams says he’d spend some of it, never making flashy purchases that might draw attention.

Pat Nabong / Sun-Times

He says advice that Scalise had given him years ago stuck with him: “If you let people know what you have, they want to take it from you.”

In a story in Rolling Stone magazine in 2005, Williams compared counterfeiting to “orgasm.”

Today, he says, “It is truly one of the hardest things to quit — worse than heroin.”

His illicit enterprise collapsed in the early 2000s. He was visiting his estranged father, Albert Williams Sr., in Alaska and had printed some money to show him his craft. But the paper was poor quality. So the fakes were, too. Williams Sr. handed out some of the cash to friends. They 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 Secret Service office in Anchorage. Sweazey, now head of security at a small liberal arts college, describes Williams’ work as “high quality.”

“But, to be honest with you, that’s because most counterfeit money is terrible,” says Sweazey, who was an expert on counterfeit cash. “It takes somebody with real skill to make real good counterfeit money.”

Williams ended up doing three stints in prison, the longest of them seven years.

“Coming from the South Side and being raised by the streets allowed me to go through prison a lot easier than most,” Williams says. “I don’t take no crap from no one.”

While in prison in 2009, he took an art class. His prison teacher told him: Your work shows promise. He gave Williams a rose to paint. But Williams says he told him he wanted to paint money. The teacher shook his head in disbelief but said OK.

Williams’ first piece took a year to paint. It was a painting of an 1896 $1 bill, the detail illustrating his counterfeiting prowess.

Provided

Williams got out in 2013. A high school dropout by then 40 years old, he came back to Chicago. He started out cleaning toilets downtown for a lawyer buddy, a job he says he loved. He rode a bike to work for six months.

Williams says what he really wanted to do even then 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 to allow him to try to get his art career going.

He says he worked hard and produced four paintings that another friend agreed to display at a hangar for private jets near Miami. Williams says he sold all four paintings for $16,000 to a man who makes medical equipment.

Pat Nabong / Sun-Times

Williams says an executive at a children’s charity saw the paintings and then invited Williams to a fundraiser at Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Los Angeles home, where he had to overcome some security issues, given that he was a felon trying to get access to the former California governor’s home. But he says he sold $500,000 worth of paintings and donated $160,000 to charity.

Homero Villarreal, LondonHouse’s food and beverage director, says he first saw some of Williams’ work at a friend’s home, was intrigued by Williams’ story and thought the $100 bill featured in much of his art would be a clever way to celebrate the 100-year anniversary of 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 says.

Williams says he doesn’t stay down for long despite facing some personal setbacks. On the day he was released from prison, his father died. He says the house where he lived in Bridgeport burned down about two years later due to an electrical problem. He now lives in Mount Prospect. And his mother was recently diagnosed with cancer.

Sweazey, the former Secret Service agent, looks at how Williams is making a living, using his old counterfeiting skills to now paint works of art featuring money, and says: “If he is doing well and he’s doing it legally, good for him. That’s kind of the goal of the legal justice system.”

But Williams says his art is evolving, that he wants to get away from it being all about money.

“That’s the one thing that connects me to my past,” he says. “Now, I’m starting to feel more confident in art rather than the money.”

Pat Nabong / Sun-Times

And what about that guy who tried to beat Williams at his own game in passing off a fake cashier’s check in the artist’s gallery in 2019? Williams says he reported him to the feds.

Was he tempted to give the guy a break, thinking that maybe, like him, he was just trying to feed his family?

The artist says his gut told him otherwise, that this guy didn’t have “morals,” like he always did.

“I don’t say there is a good criminal,” Williams says. “But, if there ever was a definition of a good criminal, I fit it well.”