Ponzi's Scheme_ The True Story of a Financial Legend - Mitchell Zuckoff [130]
Eddie Dunn remained city editor of the Post for thirty-five years. When he left in 1953 to open a public relations firm, the Boston Herald hailed him as “one of the ablest editors in his craft.” Twice during his Post tenure he refused appointment as Boston police commissioner, preferring the city room to the squad room. Though he had helped to engineer Ponzi’s downfall, Dunn had a soft spot for his old foe. They exchanged letters now and then, and more than once Ponzi urged Rose to seek out Eddie Dunn if she ran into any problems. When he died in 1961, Dunn was remembered as a friend to three presidents, Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, and John F. Kennedy, and as the city editor who’d overseen the Post’s Ponzi coverage.
P. A. Santosuosso left the Post a year after the Ponzi story to launch a weekly newspaper called the Italian News. He chose a sly location for his new business, one he knew would be available—196 Hanover Street, the empty office of Ponzi’s North End branch. On the tenth anniversary of the Italian News, Santosuosso was presented with a purse of gold coins by Boston’s Italian-American community. He gave the money to the Home for Italian Children, the orphanage that had never received the $100,000 donation promised by Ponzi.
Richard Grozier remained in daily control of the Post while his father continued his convalescence. Clear proof that Edwin Grozier had placed his newspaper in steady hands came in May 1921, when the Post’s investigation of Ponzi was awarded the Pulitzer Prize gold medal for public service, the highest honor in American journalism. The occasion marked the first time the Pulitzer—endowed by Edwin Grozier’s mentor at the New York World—had gone to a Boston newspaper.
The Post made news of the prize its lead page 1 story on May 30, 1921, under a headline as big and bold as the ones it had used nine months earlier to assail Ponzi. The story, rich in self-congratulation, recounted the long odds and lonely road the Post had faced at the start of its campaign, including the support Ponzi enjoyed from public officials, police, other newspapers, and, most of all, readers. The story told how the paper had been swamped with letters of protest in the early days of its Ponzi coverage, and how many staffers in the Post newsroom feared that taking on Ponzi would mean the paper’s death. Finally, the story detailed Richard Grozier’s unwavering “courage and fine sense of newspaper honor” and hailed him for having “stuck to his guns when the outlook was dark indeed.”
The young acting editor tried to deflect the attention. He ordered his reporter to write that, as far as Richard Grozier was concerned, he “had merely been carrying out the general instructions which had been given to him by his chief, the editor and publisher, Mr. Edwin A. Grozier, his father.” Richard then heaped praise on Post editors and reporters for “securing evidence of Ponzi’s past career in Montreal and elsewhere which pricked the bubble and exposed the fraud.”
In a signed editorial two days later, Edwin Grozier set the record straight. He bestowed upon his son the approval Richard had long craved, doing so in the way they both knew best: in black ink on a newspaper page. Edwin Grozier disclosed that he had been away from Boston and incommunicado during the entire episode, and that his managing editor had also been absent the previous summer from Newspaper Row.
“The entire office, editorial, business, and mechanical, was in the sole charge and responsibility of my son, Mr. Richard Grozier,” Edwin Grozier wrote with evident pride. “It is to him personally, assisted by an exceptionally loyal staff, that the entire credit . . . was due.” In closing, Edwin Grozier offered a rare, awkward window into his emotions: “We encounter in this life many difficulties and many compensating pleasures, and not the least of the latter in my case