Ponzi's Scheme_ The True Story of a Financial Legend - Mitchell Zuckoff [135]
He spoke of sending for Rose once he got settled, but her home and family were in Boston. Even if she had wanted to join him in Italy, Ponzi could not support her. He barely scraped by doing odd jobs and working occasionally as a guide in Rome. For the next two years they corresponded regularly. Ponzi enlisted Rose in his vigorous, lengthy, unsuccessful attempts to find an American publisher for the autobiography he called The Rise of Mr. Ponzi.
The inevitable blow came in 1936, when after eighteen years of marriage, more worse than better, more apart than together, Rose decided she could no longer remain Mrs. Ponzi. Her feelings for him had not changed, but their separation seemed likely to be endless. It was time to move on. “When he was down, when he was in trouble, when he was in prison, I stuck to him,” she told a Post reporter. “When he had millions, when he had a mansion, when he had cars, I stuck with him. And now I feel that I have proved my loyalty through thick and thin, and I intend to secure a quiet divorce.”
Reached in Rome, Ponzi tried to bluff Rose into jealousy by telling a reporter that he had become engaged to an eighteen-year-old girl. Rose would not bite. She said simply that she hoped he was happy. Rose resolved for religious reasons that she would not remarry, and so she would never fulfill her dreams of motherhood. Ponzi sought to return to Boston to oppose the divorce but ultimately fought it in absentia and lost. The marriage ended in December 1936.
In 1939, Ponzi moved to Brazil to take a job with the Italian airline LATI. The job had been arranged by his cousin Attilio Biseo, an Italian air force colonel who commanded the Green Mice Squadron and was friendly with Mussolini’s son Bruno. Ponzi did well for a while, but eventually it fell apart. He became enmeshed in what he claimed were efforts to expose a smuggling ring operated within the airline. By 1942 he was out of a job. He made ends meet by running a small rooming house in Rio de Janeiro and teaching English in a private school. Soon the momentary millionaire was living on seventy-five dollars a month, though he optimistically called it “quite a tidy sum here.” His eyesight and his health began to fail, and he remained weakened from a heart attack that had struck him seven years to the day after his deportation.
In the meantime, Rose supported herself working as the bookkeeper and de facto manager of the Cocoanut Grove, a Boston nightclub partially owned by her divorce lawyer, Barnett Welansky. Rose found herself thrust unwillingly back into the headlines in November 1942, when a fast-moving fire claimed the lives of 492 people at the nightclub. Tired after a long day of work, Rose had resisted the urgings of friends to remain at the club that night for a party. Instead she’d gone home early, a decision that probably saved her life. Later, she became a key witness in the hearings to assess blame.
Even after the divorce, Ponzi and Rose corresponded with some regularity and with obvious affection. Ponzi sent her notes at Christmas and on her birthday, usually addressed to “My dear Rose” and signed “Your Charlie.” Sometimes he sent kisses, and sometimes she sent photos in return. In one 1941 letter, Rose coyly inquired if Ponzi was married. “Of course I am, in a way,” he answered. “I am married to you, even if it is a one-sided and long-distance affair.” When a Brazilian friend urged him to marry a forty-five-year-old woman who could nurse him through