Ponzi's Scheme_ The True Story of a Financial Legend - Mitchell Zuckoff [125]
As the weeks passed, federal and state indictments rained down upon Ponzi. He became the subject of what quickly shaped up as the biggest and most complex bankruptcy proceeding in Massachusetts history. Meanwhile, Pride expanded his work to include a search for hidden assets, but it was a mission doomed to fail. Ponzi had believed that the good times would keep rolling; he had not squirreled away so much as a dime.
In November, Ponzi faced trial in federal court on two lengthy indictments of using the mails to defraud the public. Federal prosecutors had located scores of people who had received Ponzi letters telling them their notes had matured—any use of the postal system in a fraud scheme was potentially a criminal act—so the two indictments contained eighty-six separate counts.
Before the trial began, lawyers Dan Coakley and Daniel McIsaac met with Ponzi and Rose at the jail. For two hours they talked about the best course of action. Time and again, Coakley and McIsaac urged Ponzi to plead guilty. They had spoken with their good friend Dan Gallagher and cut a deal. Ponzi would enter a guilty plea to one of the eighty-six counts against him, and all the rest would be placed permanently on file. He would receive a prison term of no more than five years, but likely would serve only twenty months with the rest waived for good behavior. Once he had served his federal sentence, Coakley said, the state would almost certainly leave him alone. Coakley had never heard of anyone being prosecuted on essentially the same facts in both the federal and the state court, so Ponzi and Rose would be free to begin life anew. The alternative, Coakley warned, was a high likelihood of a guilty verdict and more time behind bars.
Rose wanted to know if Coakley was making the recommendation because they had no money to pay legal fees. She knew that Coakley and McIsaac had already returned to the bankruptcy trustees the fifty thousand dollars Ponzi had paid them; they would be working for nothing. Coakley and McIsaac pledged to defend Ponzi, fee or no fee, if he decided not to plead. That convinced Rose.
“I think Mr. Coakley is right,” she said. But Ponzi would not hear of it. He insisted that he was innocent and wanted to fight to the end. He told Rose and the lawyers that he did not care if he was sentenced to thirty years—he would not plead guilty.
After three months of holding her chin up, Rose could take no more. She gasped, then fainted. When she was revived, tears washed her rounded cheeks. The lawyers left them alone to talk.
“What difference does it make what the world thinks, as long as I know you’re innocent?” Rose pleaded. “When you come out we’ll start life over again.”
Still Ponzi resisted. He worried that she might think he truly had been guilty if he entered such a plea, and he abhorred the thought of being separated from her. “I might as well be dead as away from you for five years,” he told her.
But what if something went wrong, Rose wanted to know, and he was away for twenty years?
They went around and around, neither giving ground, until Ponzi finally said he would spend the night thinking and, uncharacteristically, praying about it.
The next morning, when Rose and the lawyers returned to the jail, Ponzi told them his decision: no plea. Rose shrieked and fell to the ground. Looking up at her husband, she begged him once more to take her feelings into consideration.
When they filed into the fourth-floor federal courtroom on November 30, 1920, reporters noticed that Ponzi appeared to be the same dapper gent they had spent the summer chasing all over town. He wore a brown, double-breasted suit with a dark blue silk handkerchief peeking from the pocket. But something seemed different