• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

An investigation by the city Finance Commission led to a recommendation that Curley face prosecution for an array of criminal charges. But action depended on the local district attorney, Joseph C. Pelletier, a political ally of Curley’s who, years earlier, had rejected calls to prosecute him for the New England Telephone and Telegraph bribe allegations. Beyond their political ties, Curley shared with Pelletier a link to Dan Coakley: Coakley had served as Pelletier’s campaign manager, and Pelletier and Coakley were in league on a sexual blackmail game. At Coakley’s urging, Pelletier rejected the call for prosecution. That was how it worked. Once again Curley had caught a break.

Still, Curley had to answer to voters if he wanted to win a second term in 1917. When graft was doled out in small doses or tucked in secret bank accounts, it could be hidden, denied, or downplayed. It surprised no one in Boston when a man with a hand on the tiller of government had his other hand in the government till. But the mansion was too much, a ten-thousand-square-foot gorilla climbing to the roof of Curley’s City Hall with his future in its grasp.

The newspapers had a field day. Edwin Grozier’s Post was especially disgusted with Curley, despite the paper’s Democratic leanings and the fact that Grozier actually agreed with the mayor on a number of key issues. In his race for reelection, Curley ran not only against his opponents but against the Post, at one point holding a rally on Washington Street across from the offices of “that foul sheet.” Pretending to be a David among Goliaths, he shouted, “With every corrupt boss and rotten newspaper against me, with all of these powers of rottenness and corruption against me, they can’t beat Jim Curley.”

Awash in scandal and distrust, and with old enemies like Honey Fitz working behind the scenes against him, Curley persevered in his bid for a second mayoral term. The Post endorsed Congressman James A. Gallivan of South Boston for mayor, enabling Gallivan to take a big enough chunk of Curley’s core constituency to deny him reelection. With Gallivan and Curley splitting the Irish vote, the winner was Andrew J. Peters, a thoroughly forgettable Yankee. Peters’s only lasting mark on the city would be a dark one: his debauchery with an eleven-year-old girl who had been placed in his care.

From the moment Curley lost the 1917 election, no one doubted he would engineer a return to the political stage. But the lesson was clear, and it applied to every ambitious man in the city: Boston would tolerate, even celebrate, a rogue who made his own rules and lined his own pockets, as long as he knew the limits. If he grew too bold or too flashy, or if his spoils became too big to ignore, he would be made to pay.

Ponzi arrived in Boston just in time to watch the Curley house scandal play itself out in the newspapers and the streets. Ponzi found himself rooting for Curley, whom he admired for his moxie and sense of style, and whom he considered a “likeable chap.”

While the mayor was fighting for his political life, Ponzi went dutifully to work as a clerk and stenographer at the J. R. Poole Company, named for its owner, John R. Poole. Ponzi’s workplace was on South Market Street, in the shadow of the new Custom House Tower, a thirty-story, peaked-roof wonder of Italian renaissance architecture that was Boston’s first skyscraper. All around the area were bright colors and the wafting smells from the stalls of produce vendors, dairy merchants, and fishmongers. On his way to work Ponzi could hear the screams of gulls and see the masts of ships along Central and Long Wharfs. If he listened hard enough, he might hear his mother tongue carried on the wind from T Wharf, where the Italian fishermen congregated. A few steps away was Faneuil Hall, the Revolutionary War meeting place where Sam Adams had inflamed his compatriots upstairs and merchants sold their wares in a marketplace downstairs.

For months Ponzi toiled to keep track of Poole’s extensive