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To lighten the mood, one of the reporters asked Ponzi if he had enough money to buy his supper. Ponzi gave a half smile and produced a roll of cash, with a ten-thousand-dollar bill on the outside.

“I am broke,” he said sarcastically. “They say I am broke and am a criminal. You boys all know me. If I did not have the money to pay all my notes with I would have stopped paying on the twenty-sixth [of July]. I would have flown the coop.”

“Did you have passports?” a reporter asked.

“I don’t need passports,” Ponzi answered. “I have not got my second papers [for citizenship] out yet.”

“If you went away you would have go to in the steerage and you could not come back again,” the reporter said.

“Do you think I would care to come back after I had stolen seven or eight million dollars—if I had stolen the money? I could have gone away any time I wished. I did not wish to. I did intend to go to Italy on July Fourth and I bought my tickets three months ahead of that time. But my business was becoming bigger and bigger and I could not afford to leave or get away, so I sent for my dear mother to come over here and she came. I am not going to run away. That is what the officials would like to have me do. I am a fighter and I am going to fight them to the end. And I am going to win my fight.”

As the reporters went off to file their stories for the morning, Ponzi returned home to Lexington. After the day he had endured, it was not hard to persuade Rose to break her vow about never again accompanying him to the theater. He needed to be out in public, to show no doubt, no fear. They both dressed in white as if to prove the point.

They sat together in the back of the Locomobile for the return to Boston, where a box was waiting for them at the Park Square Theatre. On stage was a play called My Lady Friends. They were the guests of the show’s producer, Harry Frazee, a theatrical manager who owned the Boston Red Sox. Frazee apparently hoped to capitalize on Ponzi’s popularity, having forfeited his own eight months earlier by selling Babe Ruth to the Yankees. By coincidence, that very day a devoted Red Sox fan had sent Ponzi a letter. “Dear Charlie,” it began. “For God’s sake, buy the Red Sox.” The theater crowd was equally enthusiastic, greeting Mr. and Mrs. Ponzi with sustained cheers.

Between acts, Ponzi ducked outside for a snack in a little fruit store on Eliot Street, where P. A. Santosuosso caught up with him. The smile and the confidence had returned. Asked about the attempt to force him to declare bankruptcy, Ponzi laughed.

“That is foolish. I am solvent absolutely,” he said, adding that he would probably keep his offices closed until Friday. “I am very sure I that I will open for business again, and I predict a rush of business that will make financial history in Boston.”

With his owlish glasses, receding hairline, and soft jowls, Herb Baldwin looked like a refugee from Edwin Pride’s staff of accountants. But “Baldy,” as his friends in the newsroom called him, was used to being underestimated. Confident of his abilities, Baldwin had become interested in newspapers while growing up in Everett, a blue-collar city four miles north of Boston. After spending his high school years covering schoolboy sports for the weekly Everett Herald, he’d earned admittance to Harvard’s class of 1911. He’d worked for two years in the Boston bureau of the Associated Press, then had joined the Post and made a name for himself as a no-nonsense reporter with a writer’s flair.

On Tuesday, August 10, Baldwin arrived in Montreal armed with a few recent photographs of Ponzi and a determination to get the story. It soon turned into a dream day for Baldy.

Although more than a decade had passed since Ponzi’s brief stay in Montreal, he had left an indelible image. As Baldwin moved through the Italian quarter of the city, one person after another looked at the recent pictures of financier Charles Ponzi and exclaimed, “That’s Ponsi” or “Why, that’s Bianchi.” The only question they asked was