Arthur "Artorius" Williams is an American-born counterfeiter and subject of the book The Art of Making Money by Jason Kersten. He is most known for having counterfeited the 1996-issued $100 Bill, the quality of which is on par with the supernote. He currently resides in Chicago. His story was featured on NPR's The Diane Rehm Show on June 15, 2009. He was also featured in Season 5 Episode 10 of American Greed.
Personal life
Williams was born on Thanksgiving, 1972. Raised on the south side of Chicago in the projects on 31st and Halsted, Williams grew up to be a diehard Chicago White Sox fan. At the age of 15, he was taught how to counterfeit by another criminal who went by the name "Da Vinci". Afterwards, Williams was soon recruited by Chicago's street underworld. As a teenager, he met a young woman from the Southside of Chicago. They had one child, Art Williams III, after his father. He would go on to abandon the child and his mother, moving to Texas where he met a woman by the name of Natalie. In 1996, the U.S. Treasury had made a focused effort to stop counterfeiting by releasing new bills. The first to be released was the $100 note. While on a shopping trip with his new wife, Natalie, Williams held the new note in his hand and became obsessed. It was his first time seeing the new bill, which had been released while he was locked up. The complex note reignited his passion for counterfeiting. He studied the new features closely, focusing in on the watermark, security thread, color-shifting ink and micro-printed details. He immediately began working on ways to defeat these new security hurdles. In February 2001, Williams was caught with $60,000 drugs and his wife’s naked sister in a hotel room and was subsequently arrested. Whilst this should have caused him jail time he was released due to an illegal search and seizure. His past caught up with him, and Williams received an extended sentence of seven years for conspiracy to make counterfeit money. Before Williams was released from jail in January 2014, he began building his company, Julius Davinci Clothing.
Movie about his life
Paramount Pictures is in negotiations with director D.J. Caruso and actor Chris Pine to make The Art of Making Money. Brian Robbins is producing with Sharla Sumpter and Brad Weston. Frank Baldwin wrote the script. Pine would play Art Williams, the alias for a Chicago man who rose from petty theft to become a master counterfeiter. Paramount acquired the project based on a 2005 Rolling Stone article by Jason Kersten, who turned his reporting into the book The Art of Making Money: The Story of a Master Counterfeiter. Source: Variety October 12, 2009.
