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By Root 377 0

marshals as his escorts, Ponzi went south with a berth in a Pullman sleeping car. He enjoyed his meals in a dining car and lounged in the plush seats as farms and cities rolled past the windows. His small entourage stopped in Washington and enjoyed lunch at a restaurant that Ponzi considered pretentious, then took an afternoon constitutional on the grounds of the Capitol. By the time they reached Atlanta, the marshals had grown fond of the charming convict. They brought him to a bar for a last bracing drink before prison, but to Ponzi’s disappointment the only libation was flat, sour-tasting near beer.

Still, the trip was oddly appropriate considering their destination. The Atlanta Federal Penitentiary was considered the cushiest prison in the land, more like the Willard Hotel than a medieval dungeon. Built a decade before Ponzi’s arrival, it sat proudly on a hill, looking to the world like a fine southern college. Ponzi reasoned that the men who ran the country wanted a haven for themselves in case they ever ended up in prison. “Since it had to be a cage,” Ponzi figured, “it might as well be a gilded cage.”

Ponzi was given a job as a clerk in the prison laundry, but his linguistic skills soon won him a transfer to the mail clerk’s office. He impressed his boss, prison record keeper A. C. Aderhold, as smooth, smart, and congenial, a clever young man with a gift for figures who kept error-free books without complaint. The only peculiarity Aderhold noticed was what he called Ponzi’s “obsession for planning financial coups.” Aderhold thought his assistant took so much pleasure from plotting elaborate moneymaking schemes that he might someday put one into play simply to see if it would work.

Ponzi’s least favorite part of the job was translating for Warden F. G. Zerpt the incoming and outgoing letters of a dough-faced Sicilian mobster named Ignazio “the Wolf” Lupo. Lupo represented a new kind of criminal turning up in prisons like the Atlanta penitentiary. He had landed in New York twelve years earlier, in 1898, having fled Italy to avoid arrest for the murder of a customer of his dry goods store. He’d continued to mix fine food and major crime in the United States, opening an importing business while moonlighting in murder and extortion as a boss of the fearsome Mafia group known as the Black Hand. Lupo was suspected of ordering or taking part in numerous killings, most notoriously the 1909 murder of legendary New York police lieutenant Giuseppe Petrosino. Petrosino’s relentless pursuit of mafiosi had made him the scourge of the Italian underworld, whose leaders ordered him shot to death when he was in Italy pursuing leads against the Black Hand. Prosecutors had lacked the evidence to pin the murder on Lupo, so instead they’d nailed him with a thirty-year prison sentence on two counts of counterfeiting. Printing funny money was seldom punished so severely, so the sentence was understood as payback for the violent crimes authorities suspected him of but could not prove.

Adopting the code of prisoners everywhere, Ponzi took the health-conscious position that any unproven allegations against his fellow inmates were between them and their Maker. Yet, with time to kill, Ponzi found himself feeling a certain kinship with his countryman Lupo. Not only did they share a native tongue; Ponzi believed that they had both been treated unfairly by overzealous, duplicitous authorities, and were both serving excessive sentences for nonviolent offenses. Lupo the Wolf must have sensed Ponzi’s comradeship.

After being housed with a string of prisoners he suspected were informants, Lupo approached Ponzi one day after a ball game in the prison yard. He was sick of stool pigeons, Lupo said. Would Ponzi become his cellmate? Ponzi agreed—it was always wise to say yes to Lupo—and prison officials approved the transfer, apparently thinking the skinny young mail clerk would make an ideal stoolie. They were wrong.

Ponzi was wary of Lupo, but he liked his new cellmate. The optimist in Ponzi found Lupo to be good-hearted and straightforward. What