Ponzi's Scheme_ The True Story of a Financial Legend - Mitchell Zuckoff [108]
“Are you a Bolshevist?” one asked.
“No, certainly not,” said an amused Ponzi. “Do I look like it?”
“Are you an agent of the Soviets?” the reporter persisted.
“No, I am not. I am an agent for no man or men. I am for Ponzi and the people.”
“Are you a Socialist?”
“I am not a Socialist,” Ponzi insisted. “I am a firm believer in law and order and [a] hearty endorser of the established government.”
“Washington reports you are representing Lenin and Trotsky.”
Ponzi had had enough. “Washington is crazy if what you say is true.”
Nevertheless, Attorney General Allen was so concerned about the possibility of foreign influence that he sent an assistant, Edwin Abbott, to New York to consult with former secretary of state Robert Lansing. Fanciful as it might seem, the Post acknowledged, some authorities feared that Ponzi’s operations were part of “a gigantic plan for the financing of Soviet Russia, and a plan which also embraced within its scope a determined effort to disrupt banks and financial institutions of the United States.”
Had Ponzi been a Red agent, he’d have been the most beloved Communist in the country. Even Rose drew hundreds of curious women in her wake when she spent the afternoon on a downtown shopping trip. When she presented a check, the department store salesman acted as though he were in the presence of royalty.
“Are you . . . ? Are you . . . ?” he stammered.
“Yes,” Rose said, blushing. “I am his wife.”
The staid New York Times sensed the pendulum of public opinion shifting in Ponzi’s favor. “Charles Ponzi retains his cheerfulness as well as his liberty,” the paper said in its first editorial on the phenomenon. “In Boston . . . public distrust seems to be shifting from Ponzi to his critics and assailants, and the once long and excited line of those who wanted his notes paid, with or without 50 percent interest for forty-five days, has fallen away to nobody at all.” The Times’s only caution involved Ponzi’s refusal to reveal his methods, warning that “continued concealment on his part must continue to have the unkindest of interpretations.”
Most of the Boston papers all but conceded the success of Ponzi’s operations without endorsing his methods. The Globe, for instance, donned a puritanical and decidedly racist cloak to warn readers about the moral costs of collecting money without working for it. “There may be regions of the tropics where this is possible, but it will be observed that the people who thrive in those latitudes are not very prolific in anything except offspring,” wrote the Globe’s editorial figurehead, known as Uncle Dudley. “In those parts of the planet which nourish high-grade human stock there is no such thing as living without working. If anyone does so, it simply means that he is living on the labor of someone else.”
The Post, meanwhile, conceded nothing. Richard Grozier was as certain as ever that Ponzi was a fraud, and he was determined to prove it.
A crowd of Ponzi investors awaiting their money in Pi Alley.
Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“IFEEL THE STRAIN—INSIDE.”
Ponzi left Slocum Road early on the muggy morning of Saturday, August 7, eager to visit his nemesis Simon Swig at the Tremont Trust Company. With Daniels’s suit settled, Ponzi could withdraw the $185,000 that had remained locked in Swig’s safe even as the banker had publicly called Ponzi an unbalanced crook. Ponzi wanted to wish Swig a sarcastic “good morning” as he demanded his money.
But Swig was nowhere in sight, so Ponzi had to settle for his son Benjamin, the bank’s treasurer. Benjamin Swig counted out eighteen ten-thousand-dollar bills and various smaller ones and dumped them into a bag, which Ponzi jammed into his pocket just as he had done a day earlier at Cosmopolitan Trust. He hurried to Hanover Trust and deposited the cash, which would more than cover the day’s payments to the 265 people crammed in Pi Alley. Collectively they held Ponzi