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As long as Rose remained by his side, Ponzi kept smiling, even after his business closed and his legal troubles began.

The Boston Globe

EPILOGUE

Ponzi settled quickly into his new home: Cell 126 at the Plymouth County Jail, a concrete monolith with a million-dollar view of the Pilgrim landing site at Plymouth Harbor and, beyond that, Cape Cod Bay. He returned to the jailhouse routine familiar to him from Montreal and Atlanta: wake at dawn, dress in prison grays, work in the prison library, lights out at 8:30 P.M. Still, he retained his refined tastes, ordering engraved stationery—“Charles Ponzi, Plymouth, Mass.”—as if the jail were his summer home by the sea.

A few days after Ponzi’s guilty plea, a New York Times editorial offered a remarkably balanced epitaph on the affair. First, it poured on the condemnation, decrying him as “an egregious falsifier and a wholesale betrayer of simple confidences.” But the Times recognized that there was more to Ponzi. “There was something picturesque, something suggestive of the gallant about him, and it is almost possible, though not quite, to believe that he was as credulous as his victims and deceived himself as much as he did them,” the Times mused. “Perhaps the disinclination for being harsh in characterizing Ponzi is due to lack of any sympathy for those whom he robbed. . . . They showed only greed—the eagerness to get much for nothing—and they had not one of Ponzi’s redeeming graces.”

When New Yorkers went to the polls a few weeks later, election officials came across the names of two unexpected write-in candidates for state treasurer: John D. Rockefeller and Charles Ponzi. It was the company he had always hoped to keep.

Rose became a regular visitor to the prison, though she needed to get lifts and ride the trolley because authorities confiscated the Locomobile. She filled her lonely days caring for Ponzi’s mother and their Lexington home. “The house was never as clean and tidy when we had servants around as it is now,” she preened. Soon the job would get easier; bankruptcy trustees moved to seize and sell the elegant house to help defray the losses of thousands of clamoring creditors. The sale included an auction of all furnishings except a bedroom set the Ponzis had brought from their Somerville apartment. Ponzi’s erstwhile chauffeur, John Collins, stood among the auction crowd that trampled the lawn on Slocum Road. He won the bidding for the music rolls from the Ponzis’ player piano, as a memento of the glory days.

Some of Ponzi’s other friends and associates had problems of their own to keep them busy. Several Ponzi agents not only had to worry about customers to whom they had sold notes, they also had to hire defense lawyers. Although Ponzi’s guilty plea ended the federal investigation, that did not satisfy Attorney General J. Weston Allen. He insisted that the state seek punishment, too. Allen filed charges against Ponzi and several of his top agents, including his brother-in-law Rinaldo Boselli; cousins John A. and John S. Dondero; Henry Neilson; Harry Mahoney; and Ponzi’s old Montreal cellmate, extortionist Louis Cassullo. All but Cassullo turned themselves in.

The last time anyone saw Cassullo, in August 1920, he was cleaning out one of Ponzi’s safe-deposit boxes in the midst of the furor. Some said he fled to Italy. Wherever he went, Cassullo was never heard from again. Another of Ponzi’s old Montreal pals was not so successful in avoiding prosecution. The attention surrounding Ponzi prompted authorities to renew their search for Antonio Salviati, who had skipped out on larceny charges relating to the Zarossi bank failure. Salviati was arrested in late August 1920 in New York, living in a cheap hotel under the alias Dongello Buccini.

In the aftermath of Ponzi’s plunge, furniture dealer Joseph Daniels learned that turnabout is fair play. When the profits were rolling in, Daniels had demanded that he be treated as Ponzi’s partner, filing the million-dollar lawsuit that had