Read The Art of Making Money for Free Online

the enticing rattle of coins. This caused him to stop and study the meters more closely.
    They had a cylinder at the base containing two holes. He correctly assumed they accommodated some kind of twin-pronged key, and searched the sidewalk until he found a pliable piece of metal. He bent it, snakelike, so it could fit both holes at once.
    “I stuck it into the holes like a pin and, what do you know, the cylinder began turning,” he remembers. “The cylinder part popped out and inside there was a canister with change. Then we just went down the street, hit about two blocks’ worth. It was really pretty simple. We got about fifty dollars and then we went to the grocery store.”
    Art knew in the abstract that he had committed a crime, but when he and Jason walked back through their front door with two bags of groceries each, the relief—and pride—in his mother’s face obliterated any sense of shame. Malinda chastised him when he told her how he got the money, but she didn’t hide her pleasure at his resourcefulness. The family had been starving, he had rescued them, and power had shifted. He kept the homemade key, using its rough design to make an even better one. Over the next six months he used it to buy more food, clothes, toys, and candy. To avoid repetition, he alternated blocks and went to other thoroughfares, but eventually the city caught on and began replacing the meters with a more secure model. He kept the key long after it was obsolete.
     
     
     
    LESS THAN TWO WEEKS after the Williamses arrived at the Homes, Art, Wensdae, and Jason were walking down Lituanica Avenue, about a block from their apartment, when they crossed paths with a group of teenagers sitting on a stoop near the corner.
    “Project killer!” one of them shouted, then he slugged Art in the stomach and pushed him to the ground. While Wensdae and Jason screamed, the others had at him, shouting, “Project killer! Project killer!” over and over again.
    Beaten up and bewildered, Art returned home, and when his mother asked him why he’d been bullied he didn’t even know what to tell her. He got his answer a few days later from a group of boys who also lived in the Homes and hung out in the project’s playground. Noticing his shiner, they plied him for details about the fight, then explained the nuances. “Those kids who got you are Latin Kings,” they told him. “Our gang is the Satan’s Disciples. They figured you were one of us.”
    Art had never met anyone in a gang, much less been associated with one. He was surprised to learn that almost every boy in the projects older than fourteen was a member of the SDs, while younger boys like him were regarded as “peewees”—provisional members until they came of age. The gang had started on the South Side in 1964 and rapidly spread. There were more than fifty branches throughout Chicago and Wisconsin. Its supreme leader was said to be a guy named Aggie, its colors were black and canary yellow, and its symbol was the trident. The Latin Kings were their archenemies.
    Art found the whole thing utterly weird. Raised a churchgoer and subjected to an exorcism, he had a visceral mistrust of anything with the word Satan in it, but, other than the word and the fork sign, the gang was less preoccupied with devil worship than the average church. Race wasn’t a factor either; like the neighborhood, the SDs had originated as mostly white and Irish, then adapted to the changing demographics. Latinos stood alongside carrot-topped Irish kids and Italians, and the operative commonalities were that they were all stuck in the Bridgeport Homes, overwhelmingly lacked fathers, and they all hated the Latin Kings up the street, who differed in no way other than the fact that they were perhaps slightly less poor.
    The gang kids teased Art at first. With his gawky glasses, small size, and bookish suburban outlook, he was a natural target. Art avoided them by staying inside, but one day as he was peering out