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Attorney General J. Weston Allen never achieved his dream of higher office. He ran for governor as a Republican in 1922 but was defeated by Channing Cox, lieutenant governor under Calvin Coolidge. Allen later served as a special adviser in the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti and in several appointed positions for the U.S. Justice Department. He spent the last days of his life as a psychiatric patient at McLean Hospital, where he died in 1941. His top assistant on the Ponzi case, Albert Hurwitz, was named acting district attorney in Suffolk County after Pelletier’s removal. Later, Hurwitz became a leader in Jewish philanthropic circles, and his one hundredth birthday was declared Albert Hurwitz Day in Massachusetts.

In the aftermath of Ponzi’s arrest, Boston newspapers told a handful of stories of people who had lost money in the mania, though reporters’ interest in individual victims was scant and short-lived. The stories were written without including investors’ names, almost certainly to spare them further embarrassment. A veteran who had twice been gassed in the Great War told how he had hoped to parlay his seven hundred dollars of savings into enough to move to Arizona, where the government had opened a health clinic. Instead he was stuck in Boston with a persistent cough. A Revere woman described how she had mortgaged her home for eight thousand dollars and lost it all. A young couple lamented having trusted Ponzi with twenty-six hundred dollars that they had intended to send to relatives in Italy.

After the collapse, hundreds of Ponzi investors swamped the Massachusetts State House, some weeping and others crying out for blood, to register their names with authorities in hopes of getting at least some of their money back. Yet some among them were philosophical. A tailor told a reporter how his hunger for what he called “unearned increment” caused him to give Ponzi eight hundred dollars against his wife’s wishes: “ ‘Jake,’ she said, ‘you know yourself you never had any luck. Why, if you were to bet on the sun coming up in the morning, it would be just your luck to have Gabriel blow his horn before daylight. You keep your money in the bank.’ ” He ignored his wife. “I gave it to Ponzi. Of course he failed. It’s just my luck.”

On the other side of the ledger, a handful of Ponzi winners—those who’d collected their 50 percent interest before the collapse—turned over the money voluntarily. First among them was Joseph Pearlstein, who had learned about the Securities Exchange Company from Rose Ponzi when he’d sold her luggage. “This is dirty money,” Pearlstein said. “I don’t want it.”

For the most part, Ponzi’s investors suffered their losses, licked their wounds, and moved on with their lives. For the next ten years they received small reminders of their gullibility and greed each December. Trustees appointed by the bankruptcy court sent small holiday-season payments to Ponzi’s creditors until the money ran out and the case closed at the end of 1930. All told, twenty thousand people who had held Ponzi notes at the time of the collapse received refunds equal to 37.5 percent of their investments.

The aftermath of Ponzi’s story kept the Post and its reporters busy for years, not that there was any shortage of other news. Just a month after Ponzi’s fall, the nation learned that players on the Chicago White Sox had taken bribes to lose the 1919 World Series in a scheme hatched by a Boston gambler, Joseph “Sport” Sullivan. The Post covered it as closely as any Boston newspaper, though Herb Baldwin was distracted by a series of immensely popular stories he was writing about the fictitious exploits of the newsroom cat, known as Von Hindenburg, “Hindy” for short.

Before moving on to the cat beat, Baldwin had a brief encounter with Ponzi. During an arraignment in federal court, Ponzi caught sight of the reporter who had gone to Montreal in search of his past. “You did a fine job on me,” Ponzi admitted to Baldwin. “If it hadn’t been for that story in the Post, maybe