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As I've been visiting various cities and promoting the book, people have been asking how I managed to get Art Williams to open up and tell his story. This is a natural question, given that he not only shared some very valuable criminal secrets, but also bared many of the emotional wounds that helped mold his criminality in the first place.

What can I say? I'm a journalistic ninja with the ability to get sources to instantly pour out their stories. Seriously, at the risk of sounding reductive, there are only two ways a journalist can get a source to talk honestly: because the source wants to, or because he is forced to. And Art definitely wanted to talk.

Why? The answer he first told me was that he was sick of his life. He wanted to put crime behind him, and telling our stories-whether we're criminals or congressmen-is a well-worn path towards exercising our demons. Confession must be as old as language. But as I got to know Art better, I saw other motives as well. He was proud of his counterfeiting accomplishments-not because he had "beat the system" or anything so vainglorious-but because buried within him was that 12-year-old kid who had skipped two grades before winding up in the projects. Even though poverty and crime had been determining factors with him, in his heart he wanted inclusion into a bigger world where he'd still be considered part of the smart set.

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Jason Kersten is our guest blogger during the week of June 29th. If you have any questions for Jason Kersten, add a comment to any of his posts.

Here is more information on The Art of Making Money: The Story of a Master Counterfeiter:

 The true story of a brilliant counterfeiter who “made” millions, outwitted the Secret Service, and was finally undone when he went in search of the one thing his forged money couldn’t buy him: family.

Art Williams spent his boyhood in a comfortable middle-class existence in 1970s Chicago, but his idyll was shattered when, in short order, his father abandoned the family, his bipolar mother lost her wits, and Williams found himself living in one of Chicago’s worst housing projects. He took to crime almost immediately, starting with petty theft before graduating to robbing drug dealers. Eventually a man nicknamed “DaVinci” taught him the centuries-old art of counterfeiting. After a stint in jail, Williams emerged to discover that the Treasury Department had issued the most secure hundred-dollar bill ever created: the 1996 New Note. Williams spent months trying to defeat various security features before arriving at a bill so perfect that even law enforcement had difficulty distinguishing it from the real thing. Williams went on to print millions in counterfeit bills, selling them to criminal organizations and using them to fund cross-country spending sprees. Still unsatisfied, he went off in search of his long-lost father, setting in motion a chain of betrayals that would be his undoing.