Ponzi's Scheme_ The True Story of a Financial Legend - Mitchell Zuckoff [32]
Photograph of an oil portrait of a teenage Rose Gnecco.
Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
CHAPTER SIX
“AN AMERICAN BEAUTY”
In 1915, two years before Ponzi’s return to Boston, construction began on a mansion that came to symbolize the spoils within the reach of poor men who were bursting with ambition, gifted with charisma, and unburdened by scruples.
The Georgian Revival manor would be the home of Boston’s mayor, James Michael Curley, an up-from-the-slums force of nature who viewed politics as a sure path to wealth and power. Clad in brick and roofed in slate, the house sat on a two-acre lot facing a park that was part of Frederick Law Olmsted’s “emerald necklace” around Boston. Past the park was Jamaica Pond, where hand-holding couples and raucous families skated in winter and picnicked in summer. The location was within the borders of Boston yet seemed light-years from the inner city.
Even more magnificent than the site was the house itself: more than twenty-one rooms, including an oval dining room paneled in mahogany, fireplaces framed in white Italian marble, fixtures plated with gold, and a curving staircase lit by a two-story chandelier bought from the Austro-Hungarian embassy in Washington. The only signs of the owner’s humble beginnings were the festive shamrock cutouts in all thirty of the white shutters, placed there as much to annoy the Yankee neighbors as to display Hibernian pride.
Curley was born in 1874 in Boston’s poor Roxbury section. Fatherless by age ten, imbued with resentment of the Brahmins, and blessed with prodigious energy, Curley devoted himself to the punch-in-the-nose, pat-on-the-back world of Boston Irish politics. At twenty-six he won election to the Boston Common Council, a raucous body that was the stepping-stone for every young would-be Democratic politico in the city. He soon became boss of Roxbury’s Ward 17, which along with his council seat gave him the power to barter jobs and other goodies for loyalty and votes. He launched a political organization called the Tammany Club, defiantly named for the New York machine. Curley insisted it was a tribute not to the New Yorkers’ corruption but to their commitment to constituents in the absence of government aid programs. But the Boston Tammany Club soon emulated its New York cousin in graft and scandal, with Curley larding the public payroll and dipping his fingers in every slice of municipal pie. The club’s mascot was a crouching tiger. The public treasury was its prey.
To raise money for its activities, the Tammany Club sponsored all sorts of promotions at its summer festivals, known as “powwows.” Men would struggle to catch greased pigs for a prize, vie for the title of “ugliest man,” and pay ten cents to take an ax to a piano, with a five-dollar reward to the man with the mightiest swing. Only a few years had passed since Massachusetts was atwitter over the trial of Fall River’s Lizzie Borden, so the ax-swinging spectacle was certain to send shivers down spines. Speakers at the powwows included local celebrities, including Curley’s pal John L. Sullivan, the former heavyweight champion known as “the Boston Strong Boy.” In spirit, Curley borrowed Sullivan’s familiar cry, “I can lick any man!”
From the Common Council, Curley rose to a seat in the Massachusetts legislature. But in 1903 his rise was nearly derailed when he became the first member of that body arrested for a crime. He and a fellow leader of the Tammany Club had taken civil service exams for two Irish immigrants who wanted jobs as letter carriers. Curley and his cohort were charged with “combining, conspiring, confederating and agreeing together to defraud the United States.” The maximum penalty for each was two years in prison and a ten-thousand-dollar fine. Curley admitted to the scheme in the face of overwhelming evidence. He was convicted of the charges and sentenced to two months in jail.
Refusing to slink away quietly, he appealed the conviction and sought a seat on the Boston Board of Aldermen, a step up from the