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At the moment, though, Ponzi was in no position to put that knowledge into practice. He was too broke to buy his way out of anything. The summer after Morse was freed, Ponzi completed his two-year term, plus an extra month tacked on for his inability to pay his five-hundred-dollar fine.

Ponzi had had enough of Atlanta, so he headed west to Birmingham, Alabama, for no other reason than it was a city where he had yet to try his luck. Not long after arriving in Birmingham, Ponzi met up with a fellow he had known years earlier during his travels. The man was making a killing by filing false medical claims against coal-mining companies. He had agents in mining camps throughout the region, and whenever a miner got hurt an agent would coax and coach him to exaggerate the injury. A small lump of coal falling on a miner’s shoulder could be turned into a near-death cave-in. If the miner was game, he would eventually end up at a Birmingham infirmary run by Ponzi’s acquaintance. There, the miner would remain laid up for weeks or months, however long it took to document all kinds of imaginary ailments. Eventually the miner would win a large settlement from the mining company, which would of course include medical costs and a generous share for Ponzi’s pal. The infirmary was doing land-office business.

Ponzi considered joining his old acquaintance but hesitated. He was as eager to get rich as he had ever been, but he believed he could do it legitimately with one of the many plans he had cooked up in prison. Another reason he turned down his old friend’s offer was a suspicion that taking part in such a crude operation would land him on an Alabama chain gang. Ponzi was thirty. He had just lost four years to prison and he was determined never to go back.

Ponzi hit the rails again, heading fifty miles southwest to Blocton, Alabama, an Appalachian mining town founded after the Civil War by a New Yorker named Truman H. Aldrich. By the 1880s, Aldrich had made a fortune by establishing the Cahaba Coal Mining Company, which owned eight mines and blasted thousands of tons of high-grade coal from the earth to help power the newly industrialized country. By the time Ponzi arrived, coal was better than gold in Alabama, and boomtowns like Blocton, Scratch Ankle, Coalena, and Marvel were peopled with coal-dusted miners and their families, a growing number of them Italian immigrants.

For several months Ponzi scraped together a living as a translator, a part-time bookkeeper, and, occasionally, a nurse to injured miners. The Italian camp in Blocton reminded him of small-town life back home, always celebrating a christening, a marriage, or a holiday, and he felt embraced by “a brotherhood of common interests and endeavors and neighborly love.” But conditions were only a step above primitive. The camp’s ramshackle wooden houses had no electricity or running water. Still dreaming of riches, Ponzi began laying plans to make himself the local czar of light and water. Imagining himself a Charles W. Morse in miniature, Ponzi outlined for his neighbors a vision of a corporation in which community members would purchase stock to finance a small power plant that would supply electricity and pump water from a nearby creek. Ponzi, of course, would retain a controlling share to compensate him for his work and leadership. Water and power rates would be set based on Ponzi’s cost estimates, and he promised he would take no more than “a reasonable margin of profit.” He would effectively be owner, supplier, and rate setter of two essential utilities. If it worked, Ponzi would no doubt attempt to duplicate those monopolies in other isolated mining camps.

Early support from his neighbors was strong, and Ponzi was certain he had come upon his first chance to make real money legitimately. But it was not to be. “Something always happens!” he lamented. “Something so entirely unexpected that it always catches me unaware. Like a flower-pot that lands on a man’s head from a three-story window.”

The flowerpot in this case was a