Ponzi's Scheme_ The True Story of a Financial Legend - Mitchell Zuckoff [102]
Ponzi was heartened by scores of telegrams offering support and money. Gary Johnson of Houston wrote: “Recent news dispatches state you will reopen and extend business to other cities. You will remember me as a fellow worker and friend in Wichita Falls. If you are opening in Texas would like to represent you. Are channels now open for further investments? If so, will invest my savings with you. Reply [at] my expense.”
Just after four o’clock, Ponzi wandered outside to buy the afternoon papers, generously tipping the first newsboy he came across. As he did, someone in the crowd yelled, “You’re the greatest Italian in history!”
“No,” Ponzi answered with a laugh. “I am the third greatest. Christopher Columbus discovered America and Marconi discovered the wireless.”
The fan cried out, “You discovered the money!”
Before Ponzi could respond, a clerk directed his attention to an elderly woman who was crying. Rose Perchek had two notes worth $450, but the lines were too long for her to get inside before the doors closed. Ponzi wrapped an arm around her shoulders and led her through the mob. As they walked into the building a man with a freshly fat lip grabbed Ponzi by the arm.
“Mr. Ponzi,” he said, “one of your men is assaulting people outside. He shoved me in the face. Look. You hadn’t ought to allow such business. Are you going to let them maul people?”
“I am very, very sorry,” Ponzi said. “He hasn’t any business to be rough.” He calmed the man and continued into his office with Mrs. Perchek.
“Now, madam,” he asked, “what will you have, cash or check?”
She asked meekly for cash, so Ponzi pulled a thick roll of bills from his pocket and paid her.
“Now,” he told her, winking to the crowd of investors waiting for their money, “you have the money and I’m broke.”
Meanwhile, Edwin Pride continued his audit, as he had been doing almost nonstop for three days. Pride caused a small stir when he told reporters that he had so far found nothing to suggest that Ponzi had violated any laws, but his work on the mass of index-card files was far from finished. With no real movement on the probe, Pelletier and Attorney General Allen traded barbs over Allen’s takeover of the case, with each suggesting the other had not been cooperative. Another ripple resulted when Boston’s chief postal inspector, Hal Mosby, said Ponzi had written a letter telling one of his investors to come get his money. Mosby suggested that the government could immediately suspend Ponzi’s operations based on its belief that Ponzi had used the mails in a scheme to defraud. But with Pride’s report still pending and Ponzi paying all claims, no investigator wanted to step out on that limb. As a Globe reporter wrote that night, it remained an open question whether Ponzi was “wiping Peter’s nose with Paul’s handkerchief.”
While the Boston papers followed Ponzi’s every move, one enterprising New York World reporter tracked down William “520 Percent” Miller, the Peter-to-Paul champion of two decades past. When the reporter found him, Miller was holding court on a cracker barrel in the country store he owned in Rockville Centre, New York. Shaking his head over what he had read in the papers about Ponzi, Miller said, “I may be rather dense, but I can’t understand how Ponzi made so much money in so short a time in foreign exchange.” Though he admired Ponzi’s fearlessness, he said he would not change places with Ponzi for $10 million. “I would much rather own this grocery store, where I have few worries and breathe God’s free, pure country air.”
Before night fell, Ponzi accepted an invitation to meet with the attorney general. They met for two hours