Ponzi's Scheme_ The True Story of a Financial Legend - Mitchell Zuckoff [116]
“Positively, that’s the same man,” Laflamme declared, holding his mug shots of Bianchi/Ponsi beside Baldwin’s Ponzi photographs. He showed Baldwin the matches of the earlobes, the pout of the lower lip, and the creases on the forehead. Laflamme went so far as to pull Bianchi/Ponsi’s criminal file, which contained details of the forgery that had landed him in prison.
From the police offices Baldwin went searching for victims of Zarossi’s bank failure. He soon found several willing to express their anger toward Zarossi’s erstwhile manager Bianchi/Ponsi. Baldwin also scored with the notorious Montreal padrone Antonio Cordasco. At first, Cordasco said he did not recognize the photographs, but then he looked closer. “Ah, my fine friend,” Cordasco purred. “So I see you again. You are, you are—he’s Bianchi, the snake!”
Bank clerk Dominico Defrancesco remembered his fellow clerk Bianchi/Ponsi as “a sporty feller” who always talked of making millions and dressed in fine clothes with white-collared shirts. Further confirmation came from a warden at the Saint Vincent de Paul Penitentiary. The only points for Ponzi were the warden’s description of him as a model prisoner, though he weakened that portrait by saying that Ponzi had shifty eyes.
Baldwin had more than he could have hoped for: solid confirmation that the man who had gained the trust of tens of thousands of investors was a convicted forger and the former manager of a bank that had collapsed under a cloud of swindles. Elated, he wired what he had found to Richard Grozier.
“Are you sure?” Grozier wired back, knowing that a mistake of that magnitude could cost his family its newspaper and its fortune.
Annoyed but trying to toe the line of respect for his boss, Baldwin fired back: “Do you think I am making it up?”
That was all Grozier needed to hear. Baldy’s got a big one. They’d better make room on page 1.
After being released on bond on August 13, 1920, Ponzi marches through downtown Boston, certain that he has suffered only a temporary setback.
Boston Public Library, Print Department
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“I’M NOT THE MAN.”
While Baldwin spent the day linking past to present, Ponzi plotted ways to soften the previous day’s blows: the freeze on his accounts, the bankruptcy filing, the attorney general’s accusations, and the call for his investors to report to the State House. He ordered the offices of the Securities Exchange Company closed until further notice and spent the morning in Lexington, where he assessed the damage, girded for battle, and listened to a summer thunderstorm. He was determined to make some thunder of his own rather than surrender without a fight.
In the meantime, the officers of Hanover Trust tried desperately to balance their books. They calculated that Ponzi had overdrawn his account by $441,778, a potentially devastating dip into the red that could send the bank to its death. Treasurer McNary decided on the only course of action he thought possible to save the bank: He would use part of Ponzi’s $1.5 million certificate of deposit to cover the overdraft. Ponzi would not have gained access to that money until August 27—thirty days after he gave notice that he wanted to withdraw the money—but this was an emergency and McNary made up the rules as he went along. After returning Ponzi’s checking account to zero, McNary made out a new certificate of deposit to Ponzi with a balance of $1,058,222, having deducted the amount of the overdraft from the certificate.
Before the latest uproar, Ponzi had agreed to return this day to the weekly luncheon of the Kiwanis Club. This time, though, the club’s president had arranged a “battle royal” between Ponzi and a celebrated psychic named Joseph Dunninger, a friend of Harry Houdini’s and Thomas Edison’s. The club advertised that the mind reader would “throw the X-ray of clairvoyancy on the subtle brain of the little Italian and reveal what he found to