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By Root 494 0

Oreste Ponzi had enlisted one of young Carlo’s uncles to watch over him. Now, the uncle suggested that the twenty-one-year-old college washout find a job, perhaps as an entry-level clerk. Carlo flatly refused. He considered himself a gentleman, a member of the elite class of his Roman friends. Taking a mundane job would be beneath him. Humiliating, even. The thought of physical labor was not even discussed. Ponzi considered himself a mollycoddle, and no one disagreed. The uncle tried a different tack: “Poor, uneducated Italian boys go to America and make lots of money,” the uncle said. “You have a good education, you are refined and of a good family. You should be able to make a fortune in America easily.” Then Ponzi’s uncle spoke the magic words that were luring millions of Europeans across the ocean: “In the United States,” he said, “the streets are actually paved with gold. All you have to do is stoop and pick it up.”

Ponzi knew his mother was disappointed by his Roman holiday. He was ashamed that he had misled her and ignored her advice. Going to America and coming home a rich man would make her proud. Even better, it would satisfy his thirst for a life of leisure and hers for a prominent son. Confident that he would soon be the toast of the New World, after which he would return triumphant to Italy, Ponzi accepted his uncle’s suggestion and packed his best clothes. As a send-off, his family provided him with a steamship ticket and two hundred dollars to get established in America and begin collecting his gold. With a blessing from his mother still ringing in his ears, Ponzi went south to Naples. There, on November 3, 1903, he climbed the gangplank of the S.S. Vancouver, bound for Boston.

At 430 feet and five thousand tons, the Vancouver could carry nearly two thousand immigrants on each two-week transatlantic crossing. Most spent about twenty-five dollars for tickets that entitled them to the crowded misery of steerage—an area deep within the bowels of the Vancouver, perhaps seven feet high, as wide as the ship, and about one-third its length. Iron pipes formed small sleeping berths with narrow aisles between them. Most steerage passengers spent the entire journey lying on their berths—outside space for them was severely limited and inevitably located on the worst part of the deck, where the rolling of the ship was most pronounced and the dirt from the smokestack most likely to fall. The food was barely edible, the water often salty, and the only places to eat were shelves or benches alongside the sleeping areas. Toilets were nearby, overused, and poorly ventilated. Within a few days at sea the air in steerage reeked of vomit and waste. Passengers lolled in a seasick stupor on mattresses made from burlap bags filled with seaweed, using life preservers as pillows.

Most of the Vancouver’s passengers were from the south of Italy, which had withered economically since the country’s unification in 1861. They were young laborers like Giuseppe Venditto, who had twelve dollars in his pocket and the address of a cousin in Ohio, and domestic servants like the widow Lauretta Zarella, who boarded the ship with her two teenage daughters, nine dollars, and a plan to join her son in Providence. A few were from Greece, others from Austria and Russia. Several dozen Portuguese boarded when the ship stopped in the Azores. To pass the empty days at sea, they traded rumors of America, thought of their families back home, and wondered what awaited them.

Ponzi had almost nothing to do with them. Not only was he from the ostensibly more cultured north of Italy, he was among the more privileged travelers. He and sixty-four other passengers had paid an extra twenty dollars for more comfortable berths in the Vancouver’s second-class cabins, though he would forever claim he had traveled to America first-class. While the human sardines in steerage suffered, Ponzi spent the passage continuing his college ways, buying drinks and gallantly tipping waiters. Ponzi’s biggest expense was gambling. A cardsharp caught sight of the bushy-tailed young