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“We are only trying to get at the truth,” Dunn answered. “Let us investigate your affairs in the interest of the public. If you are honest, there is nothing to fear.”

“I’ve been on the level all my life,” Ponzi said, his emotions rising.

Settling down, Ponzi gave the Post a statement about the conclusions he had reached regarding his new company.

“I have decided that it would not be fair to the public to open my new company to receive money on Monday until after these investigations have finally given me a clean bill of health,” he said. “The investigation won’t last long, and it will end very happily.” To demonstrate his confidence, Ponzi said, he would instruct his network of agents to take applications from investors, to give him a sense of how much money he would raise. He predicted he would have ten to twenty million dollars in a matter of weeks.

After he left the Post, Ponzi told other reporters that one of the first actions of his new business would be to bid on the entire fleet of the United States Shipping Board, for reasons of profit as well as patriotism. “I mean to twist the British lion’s tail,” Ponzi said, “by keeping these steamships from falling into their hands.” Investors could expect 1 to 2 percent a month, a far cry from his current deal, and would get only a plain receipt for their money. “This will be all the security the depositors will have,” he said. “They must have faith in me.”

For all his bravado, the pressure was beginning to wear on Ponzi. That night, he let down his guard with a reporter from one of the papers he considered most friendly toward him, the Boston Advertiser. He spoke of the relentless phone calls and requests for donations, advice, and time, and he complained of Attorney General Allen’s repeated requests for lengthy interviews.

“They call me the ‘Millionaire Kid’ and ‘The man with the million-dollar smile,’ ” Ponzi said. “I do smile. I smile at home and I smile downtown. But no one knows what I have been through in this fight. It keeps me at a tense strain all the time, and people make such demands on my time I cannot get time to sleep. I smile, but I feel the strain—inside.”

Like a boxer gathering himself between rounds, Ponzi spent Sunday, August 8, inside his house, dressed in a bathrobe, never once venturing outside to feel the ninety-three-degree heat or witness the gawkers’ cars on their daily parade along Slocum Road.

That, of course, did not stop him from speaking with reporters, and once again he held court, downplaying his liabilities and waving a telegram from Herman and the other New Yorkers claiming they were ready to pony up $10 million. Ponzi said a deal would occur only if they came to Boston with cash in hand and allowed him to continue to run the company—to protect the public. Neither condition was likely to be met.

While he relaxed, Ponzi spent several hours telling Post reporter P. A. Santosuosso the story of his life. He spun a picaresque tale of his boyhood in Italy, his arrival in America, and his travels before finding his fortune. Notably, though, he left several blanks in his chronology and cloaked the empty spaces in mystery. Ponzi told Santosuosso he had been engaged in “confidential investigations” in Canada. Then, “after three years traveling throughout that country, I was sent South.” Ponzi had conveniently excised his prison years. As the young Post reporter pointed out in the paper, Ponzi’s supposed vow of secrecy regarding those years “necessarily leaves out a great deal of Ponzi’s activities in the story of his life between 1906 and 1916.”

It was no accident that Santosuosso enticed Ponzi to wax poetic about his past. Santosuosso had previously heard portions of Ponzi’s life story, and he had noticed the holes in the timeline on those occasions as well. He had begun to suspect that Ponzi was hiding something, and those suspicions had grown more urgent in recent days when a woman Santosuosso knew in the North End had passed along a rumor that Ponzi had spent