Ponzi's Scheme_ The True Story of a Financial Legend - Mitchell Zuckoff [124]
Later that night on Washington Street, the lights were blazing inside the Post newsroom as the staff raced to make the deadline for the next morning’s paper. For nearly three weeks, Richard Grozier and his staff had pursued Ponzi. Now they were ready to beat their chests and yell to the heavens.
Cartoonist William Norman Ritchie began work on a new sketch showing “Ponzi’s Pot of Gold” smashed atop caricatured bank officials and Ponzi note holders, with a smiling Ponzi looking on from behind bars. That would be followed by a half-biblical, half-puritanical editorial from Richard Grozier urging readers to reflect on the satisfaction of earning one’s keep. The editorial proclaimed that “poverty is not the curse which many think it is, but the blessing which makes men strive to attain a higher standard of living.”
The most urgent work was the writing and editing of the lead news story for the next morning’s paper, printed under a triumphant banner headline:
PONZI ARRESTED; ADMITS NOW HE CANNOT PAY—$3,000,000 SHORT
By the time it went to press, the story was polished as brightly as Ponzi’s shoes. Eschewing the usual dividing line between news and opinion, the story heaped scorn on Ponzi and unleashed pent-up fury that previously would have been potentially libelous. “He was ignorant of business, knew little or nothing of banking, his knowledge of foreign exchange was ludicrous, his statements to newspapers and business men’s clubs were grotesque in their absurdity,” it sneered. “He painted halos around his head, but the facts have shown only sordid swindles.”
Yet even as it condemned Ponzi, fairness demanded that the Post concede he was something special. Grudgingly, the story acknowledged “his bubbling vivacity, his boundless imagination, his smooth and ready tongue, coupled with a remarkable and winning charm.” Finding a balance between the images of the debonair and the debased, the Post gave Ponzi a backhanded compliment for the ages: “Of all the get-rich-quick magnates that have operated, Ponzi is the king.”
The day the story appeared, bail bondsman Morris Rudnick got cold feet and withdrew the twenty-five thousand dollars he had put up to secure Ponzi’s freedom. At about four o’clock that afternoon, Ponzi returned to the federal building, a dour look on his face. At first, he hoped to quickly find a new bail bondsman, but soon he realized he would have to spend the night in jail. He called Rose in Lexington and told her he needed to stay overnight in Boston “on business.”
Ponzi exited the federal building flanked by federal marshals. With his captors at his side, Ponzi rushed past reporters and photographers and hopped into a taxicab waiting to take them to the East Cambridge Jail. When the cab pulled up to the jail, Ponzi leapt out and ran to the door to escape the photographers he had once courted.
“You didn’t get me, did you?” he called back to them as he rushed inside. “You didn’t get me.”
Soon his spirits flagged, and as he shuffled toward the jail’s receiving desk, a frightened look settled on his face. He looked up at a calendar on the wall and shuddered at the date: Friday the thirteenth. Like a deposed monarch stripped of his scepter, Ponzi surrendered his walking stick. In short order he was booked, bathed, and taken to a cell for a dinner brought from a nearby restaurant: breaded veal chops, fried potatoes, a pot of coffee, a bottle of ginger ale, and a cantaloupe. A jailer brought him a briar pipe and a pouch of tobacco, and he smoked as he read week-old newspapers in his cell before falling asleep.
Ponzi thought he would soon regain his freedom, at least on bail, but it was not to be. Attorney General Allen made it known that if Ponzi were freed again from federal custody, the state would immediately file more charges and ask a judge to set bail so high that no bondsman would bet that heavily on Ponzi.
So Ponzi spent the next three months holed