Ponzi's Scheme_ The True Story of a Financial Legend - Mitchell Zuckoff [118]
Wheeler made his way past the guards who surrounded the Slocum Road house and handed Ponzi the paper. Ponzi read Baldy’s story slowly, deliberately, with a poker face. Wheeler studied him as he read, but could see no reaction—not a muscle in his face moved, nor did his eyes betray the gravity of the situation. When he had finished, Ponzi shrugged his shoulders.
“I’m not the man,” he said. “It does not concern me.”
“We think this is the truth,” Wheeler answered, “and we’re going to print it.”
“Then you are going to get the presses ripped out of your building,” Ponzi threatened.
If Ponzi imagined that the Post would retract its story, by dawn he knew that any such hope was false. He met reporters again on his front porch at eight in the morning, dressed in a silk bathrobe with his Colt .25-caliber in the pocket. Seeming on the verge of coming unglued, he pulled it out and explained to the startled reporters that he intended to use it for self-protection against two men he had noticed loitering near his house.
Asked about the Post story, Ponzi seemed uncertain about the best approach. He began with a rambling, awkward statement referring to himself in the third person that sounded like the start of a confession about his Montreal past. “If the statements printed in certain morning papers are true,” he said, “I feel that either he is one of many who have made some mistake and paid for it, or that he paid for some mistake of another, and a perusal of the records there might hide a deeper motive than it would be expedient to establish at the present time.” Ponzi then took a shot at the Post: “It is evident that some of the local papers are endeavoring to hurt him for purposes which are as clear to him as they are to the public.” Suddenly he interrupted himself and began a new statement. After starting and stopping two more times, Ponzi got into the Locomobile and went to Boston to meet with his lawyers.
By noon, Ponzi was ready to meet the press once again. The reporters were admitted into Daniel McIsaac’s imposing law offices on the tenth floor of the Pemberton Square building known as Barristers’ Hall. They found Ponzi seated behind a large desk, hunched down in a chair, looking smaller than they had ever seen him. His gold cigarette holder dangled from his hand. The reporters looked for his smile, but it was gone.
“The statement that I am about to make I should probably have made before, in view of the notoriety given me by the press,” he began, a stenographer recording his every word. “However, I felt that my past had no bearing on the present situation. If several years ago I sinned—if I made a mistake and paid for it—I had every reason to believe that society owed me another chance.
“I am not the first one to commit a sin. I am not the only one, even in the city of Boston. And when I see others who have been under the same circumstances years ago and are today occupying prominent positions I do not see why I should be made an exception to the general rule and become an object of persecution on the part of either the authorities, the press or the public.”
He paused and turned to McIsaac. They spoke for several minutes about one of Ponzi’s former prison mates, not in Montreal but in Atlanta, a man who had enjoyed the support not only of President Taft but also the very same Clarence Barron who had helped lead the charge against Ponzi. To speak of “Ice King” Charles Morse, Ponzi would also have to disclose his own prison term in Atlanta, but at the moment that seemed the least of his concerns. McIsaac gave him the go-ahead.
“Charles W. Morse, at one time a prominent banker, was also convicted in the United States court,” Ponzi said, “and sentenced to fifteen years in Atlanta, Georgia. I know it because I was