Ponzi's Scheme_ The True Story of a Financial Legend - Mitchell Zuckoff [137]
Ponzi recounted the story honestly and without rancor. When he was finished, he told the reporter he was regaining his strength and hoped to have an operation soon to restore his sight.
Ponzi said as much in his final letter to Rose, dictated to a hospital employee: “I am doing fairly well, and in fact I am getting better every day and I expect to go back home for Christmas.” It was false hope, but that had always been his strength. Deep within the impoverished old man in the hospital bed remained the optimistic young dandy of 1920.
He was still Ponzi, and he still believed the triumphant words he had used to end his memoirs: “Life, hope, and courage are a combination which knows no defeat. Temporary setbacks, perhaps, but utter and permanent defeat? Never!”
Ponzi never left the hospital’s charity ward. He spent his last days flanked on one side by a patient with a hacking cough and on the other by an old man who stared at the ceiling. Ponzi died of a blood clot on the brain on January 17, 1949. He was sixty-six. He had seventy-five dollars to his name, just enough for his burial. Rose would have liked to have had his body returned to Boston for a proper funeral, but she had lacked the money to do so.
Ponzi’s death was reported by newspapers and magazines across the country, including a full page in Life magazine, giving reporters an opportunity to colorfully revisit the phenomenon he had created. They ran photos of Ponzi at the height of his popularity, and waxed poetic about his charm and moxie. Of course, the Peter-to-Paul scheme did not die with him. In the years that followed, reporters and fraud investigators began using Ponzi’s name as shorthand when describing similar investment scams. In 1957, the Encyclopaedia Britannica formally acknowledged that his name had become synonymous with swindle. Soon the language sentinels at the Oxford English Dictionary followed suit, entering it into the great book as “Ponzi scheme.” Its definition: “A form of fraud in which belief in the success of a fictive enterprise is fostered by payment of quick returns to first investors from money invested by others.” It was not how Ponzi had hoped to be remembered, but it would have to suffice.
In 1956, Rose was working as a bookkeeper at the Bay State Raceway in Foxboro, Massachusetts, when she married the track’s manager, Joseph Ebner. They had a good life together, regularly traveling back and forth between racetracks in Massachusetts and Florida. She died in 1993 at age ninety-seven, happily anonymous and beloved by her many nieces and nephews. After Rose died, her family went through her belongings and found Ponzi’s letters. Reading his words, his playful responses to the notes she had sent him over the years, their suspicions were confirmed.
Despite the divorce and the heartaches, despite their dashed dreams and decades apart, the one thing Ponzi had never lost was Rose’s love.
A NOTE ON SOURCES
This is a work of nonfiction. Though I have tried to bring Ponzi’s story to life by writing this book in narrative form, I have invented none of the dialogue, altered none of the chronologies, and imagined none of the scenes described herein. All thoughts and feelings ascribed to persons came from the persons themselves, based on spoken or written comments. Descriptions of what a person experienced through his or her senses came either from the person or from photographs, newsreel footage, detailed street and fire insurance maps, or accounts in newspapers of the day. When I wrote that Rose Ponzi blushed, for instance, it was because a reporter had witnessed and recorded it. Put simply, I employed no fictional devices under the umbrella of literary license.
This approach was important for several reasons. First, given the nature of the subject himself, it seemed essential to draw a bright line between real and fake. Second, the truth was better than anything I could have invented. Third, Ponzi’s true story was already at risk of being permanently obscured in misinformation as a result of a “fictionalized biography” and other