Ponzi's Scheme_ The True Story of a Financial Legend - Mitchell Zuckoff [14]
The detective and a partner searched Ponzi and found the receipt from the forged check. They also counted out what was left of the money: $218.12. McCall placed Ponzi under arrest and brought him to the city’s vermin-infested jail.
Ponzi’s years as a sojourner had taught him a few things, and he quickly began calculating a way to improve his accommodations. Pretending to be catatonic, he curled up in a corner, stared at the wall, and chewed a towel to shreds. A guard brought him to the jail infirmary, where Ponzi emerged from his trance and began whooping and climbing a wall to get to a barred window. After a few hours in a straitjacket, he acted as though he were recovering from a bout of epilepsy. It was a crude ruse, but it worked. His jailers kept him in the relative comforts of the infirmary until his November trial.
Ponzi pleaded innocent before the court, but it was a hopeless cause. The testimony of Detective McCall and the bank teller, not to mention Ponzi’s sudden shopping spree, made quick work of the trial. Ponzi was found guilty of forgery and sentenced to three years in prison under the name Charles Ponsi, alias Bianchi.
Ponzi served his sentence three miles from Montreal, inside the looming gray stone walls of Saint Vincent de Paul Penitentiary, a prison with all the charm of the Bastille. Like a passenger in steerage, he slept on a mattress made from a sack of corncobs and husks. His cellmate was a fellow Italian immigrant, a swindler named Louis Cassullo who was serving a three-year stretch. Ponzi sized up Cassullo as a man who would steal the poor box in a church or pick a drunkard’s pocket—“one of those prowling, petty, sneaky thieves whose counterparts in the animal kingdom are the hyenas and the jackals.” Their days were spent in an unheated shed where they pounded rock into gravel. In time, Ponzi joked that he had crushed enough stone to pave Yellowstone National Park. Within a few months, Ponzi put his banking experience to work by winning a job as a clerk in the jail blacksmith’s shop, after which he won a promotion to the chief engineer’s office, and finally to the warden’s office.
Despite the softer working conditions, Ponzi stewed endlessly over his situation. He wrote several pleading letters to Cordasco, but the padrone turned a deaf ear. Cordasco suspected that Ponzi was the mastermind of the Zarossi scheme, and he was not about to help. Over time, Ponzi earned the warden’s trust as a model prisoner, and his sentence was shortened to twenty months for good behavior.
On July 13, 1910, Ponzi was doing his clerk duties when the warden came to him with a paper to type: his own parole form. Elated, Ponzi was released with five dollars in his pocket and an ill-fitting suit from the prison tailor shop. Longing for the fine Italian garments of his youth, Ponzi considered the suit grotesque. Not that it mattered where he was headed.
Edwin Atkins Grozier, editor and publisher of The Boston Post.
Mary Grozier
CHAPTER THREE
“NEWSPAPER GENIUS”
Like Ponzi, Richard Grozier was a bright, handsome young man with a taste for fine clothes. Also like Ponzi, he was approaching the midpoint of his life with little to show for himself. Unlike Ponzi, however, Grozier had every possible advantage—he was descended from Mayflower Pilgrims and had spent his life bathed in wealth and privilege.
Yet in 1917 Grozier was thirty years old, single, and living in his parents’ house. He worked, without distinction, for his father’s company after nearly flunking out of college and washing out of law school. As the only male heir, Grozier was destined to inherit his family’s business and the money and power that