Ponzi's Scheme_ The True Story of a Financial Legend - Mitchell Zuckoff [136]
The nightclub fire seemed to draw the two closer. When he learned that Rose had survived, Ponzi poured out his heart. “I have missed you terribly,” he wrote. “I have thought you lost forever, and under circumstances more horrible than death itself. I don’t know how the shock did not kill me right then and there. I believe it was because somehow there still remained a dim ray of hope at the bottom of my heart: hope that the gods would not be so unmerciful to you.”
“Perhaps I made a mess of your life but it was not for lack of the necessary sentiment,” Ponzi continued. “Here I am, past sixty-one, thousands of miles away from you, physically separated from you these past nine years, legally a stranger to you, and yet feeling toward you the same as I did that night in June when I took you home from the first movies we saw together in Somerville Avenue.”
Their letters continued, and several times each tiptoed around the possibility of getting back together, either for a visit by Rose to Brazil or an attempt by Ponzi to return to the United States. “Dear Sweet Thing,” Ponzi wrote in 1947. “Decidedly you have lost all sense of morals and social behavior! What do you mean by suggesting that I come up there and make myself at home in your apartment? What would the people say of you . . . living with a strange man? I am just joking, dear, so as to forget the tragic side of the thing: the impossibility of going with it. As to your coming down here, it is entirely out of the question not only for the reasons you mention but also because life here would be unbearable for you.” They continued writing to each other, long letters that described daily life and the comings and goings of old friends Ponzi had not seen in decades. Once Ponzi tried to enlist Rose in a moneymaking idea involving the importation of trucks, pens, watches, radios, clocks, and other goods from the United States. But the deals evaporated with Ponzi’s diminishing finances and failing health, and their letters became less frequent.
By 1948, Ponzi was almost blind. A brain hemorrhage robbed him of control of his left leg and left arm. He lived in a small apartment with a young family and subsisted on a small pension from the Brazilian government. As his body weakened, he spent increasing amounts of time on the charity ward of a Rio hospital. A photograph of him there shows a man who looks much older than his years, his bald head propped on a pillow, his frail body swimming in an ill-fitting hospital gown. A reporter for the Associated Press found him there. Though the reporter showed no signs of realizing it, Ponzi took the opportunity of a final interview to unburden himself as never before. During his trials he had claimed innocence, and even in his memoirs Ponzi had danced around the true nature of his investment business. But with the reporter at his hospital bedside, Ponzi came clean.
Ponzi in bed in the charity ward of a Rio de Janeiro hospital in 1948.
The Boston Globe
“Well,” he began, smiling his old smile, “how much do you know about me? I was number one in those days before Al Capone. . . . Once I had fifteen million dollars. I used to carry a couple of million in my pockets in certified checks and cash. Look at me now. I guess a lot of people would say I got what I deserved. Well, that was twenty-eight years ago. A lot of water has gone under the bridge since. But I hit the American people where it hurts—in the pocketbook. Those were confused, money-mad days. Everybody wanted to make a killing. I was in it plenty deep, rolling in other people’s money.”
Then came the confession: “My business was simple. It was the old game of robbing Peter to pay Paul. You would give me one hundred dollars and I would give you a note to pay you one-hundred-and-fifty dollars in three months. Usually I would redeem my note in forty-five days. My notes became more valuable than American money. . . . Then came trouble. The whole thing was broken.