Ponzi's Scheme_ The True Story of a Financial Legend - Mitchell Zuckoff [15]
Richard’s father was Edwin Atkins Grozier, editor, publisher, and owner of the Boston Post, the largest-circulation newspaper in Boston and one of the largest in the nation. Through relentless work and rare gifts, Edwin Grozier had engineered the Post’s rise from the brink of bankruptcy to the top of the pig pile of Boston newspapers. By the time he was Richard’s age, Edwin had already been one of the most respected newspapermen in the country. Without him, the Post would have been long dead, cannibalized by competitors on Newspaper Row.
Some thought the paper might still end up that way, once it passed to his son.
The first edition of Boston’s Daily Morning Post hit the streets November 9, 1831, under the ownership and editorial direction of Colonel Charles G. Greene, whose military title was honorary but whose journalism was sound. The Post appeared at a time when Boston newspapers seemed to be opening and closing every few months; fifteen printed their first and last editions between 1830 and 1840. But under Greene’s steady hand, the Post survived and grew steadily for four decades, establishing itself as a well-written, reliable Democratic voice in an age of partisan newspapers.
Then came November 9, 1872. A fast-moving fire consumed an empty hoopskirt factory on the edge of Boston’s financial district, then leapt from one building to the next. Many of the horses that were used to pull the city’s fire equipment had recently succumbed to an equine epidemic, so the Great Boston Fire burned for more than two days, consuming 776 buildings and leveling sixty-five acres downtown. The City upon a Hill was a smoldering ruin. Sullenly surveying the damage, Oliver Wendell Holmes was moved to verse: “On roof and wall, on dome and spire, flashed the false jewels of the fire.” The Post’s offices escaped the flames, but the oceans of water used to protect it ruined almost everything inside. Greene and his son, Nathaniel, reopened the paper in a new location, but it was never the same. When the nation fell into economic depression during the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant, the Greenes decided to sell.
The eager buyer was the Reverend Ezra D. Winslow, a Methodist minister, staunch prohibitionist, and member of the state Senate. He was also a forger and a swindler. In a scheme that would anticipate stock manipulators of a later day, Winslow sold twice as many shares of the Boston Post Company as allowed by the incorporating papers. He also forged the signatures of more than a dozen prominent men on banknotes for nearly a half million dollars, and pocketed thousands more loaned to him. He exchanged much of his stolen cash for gold, fled to Holland, and by some accounts ended up in Argentina, enjoying his ill-gotten gains in Buenos Aires and working as a reporter for a local newspaper.
The story of Winslow’s scam became part of Post lore, passed down year after year, deeply ingrained in the memories of its employees. Winslow had ruined the finances and shattered the credibility of the once-proud newspaper. For the next fifteen years the Post floundered under transient ownership. By 1891 it was hobbling along with fewer than three thousand subscribers. It had an antiquated printing plant, only a handful of advertisers, and a debt of $150,000. But where creditors saw a newspaper in its death throes, Edwin Grozier saw the opportunity of a lifetime.
Edwin Grozier was born September 12, 1859, aboard a clipper ship within sight of the Golden Gate in San Francisco harbor. It was a fitting arrival; Grozier men were storied mariners, and the ship’s master was Edwin’s father, Joshua, who routinely captained voyages from Boston around Cape Horn to California and back. When Edwin was six, his parents brought him and his two brothers to live on the far tip of Cape Cod, in Provincetown, the home of generations of sea captains and their families.
A sickly boy and an avid reader who dreamed of becoming a poet or a novelist, Edwin Grozier