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By Root 518 0

foreign businesses, only to be disappointed by his pay of sixteen dollars a week. At first, Ponzi considered the job a gamble in the futures market—the company was doing well and lavished its employees with promises of eventual rewards. He won a raise to twenty-five dollars a week, but still he struggled. “By starving one day and eating a little less the next one,” he complained, “we employees always managed, more or less, to keep handsomely in debt.”

His only consolation was his certainty that he had established a firm foothold on the ladder up from manual labor. He had painted his last sign, washed his last dish, begged his last bowl of macaroni. Never again would he seek a menial job. But he was far from satisfied. It remained a long, unsteady climb to the top rung, and at thirty-five Ponzi was impatient about getting there. His impatience grew exponentially at the end of May 1917.

On Memorial Day weekend, Ponzi accompanied his landlady, Myrtle Lombard, to a Boston Pops concert. Ponzi played mandolin and considered himself an aficionado of fine music, and Mrs. Lombard taught piano to neighborhood children. Afterward, music still in their ears, they made their way to the Boylston Street station to catch an electric streetcar to Mrs. Lombard’s house on Highland Avenue in nearby Somerville, home to a growing colony of Italian immigrants.

As midnight approached, they stood on the platform waiting for the train. Looking around at the postconcert crowd, Ponzi noticed a lovely young woman. She was tiny, at four foot eleven just the right size for him, with rounded curves that defied the stick-figure fashions of the day. She had luxurious brown hair, lively dark eyes, and skin as smooth as Gianduja cream. An oil portrait painted of her as a teenager portrayed her in Mona Lisa–like pose, with a faint smile and a billowing silk blouse pushed low on her shoulders. In the eyes of the painter, a Somerville neighbor, Rose bore a striking resemblance to Lillian Gish, the ethereal beauty of silent film.

Ponzi watched her intently, ignoring the young man who was her escort. Eventually Mrs. Lombard noticed that her normally talkative tenant had dropped his end of the conversation. She searched for the source of Ponzi’s distraction.

“Why, there is Rose!” Mrs. Lombard said, spotting the young woman. “I want you to meet her, Mr. Ponzi. She is one of my pupils.”

Mrs. Lombard led a delighted Ponzi down the platform and made the introductions. Rose Gnecco was twenty-one, the youngest of six children of a fruit merchant and a homemaker who had emigrated from Genoa. Born in Boston, she had spent two years in high school but dropped out to take a job as a stenographer and bookkeeper for a Somerville contractor. Rose liked the work, but her fondest dream was to fill a small, happy home with a husband and children.

“How do you do?” she asked Ponzi in a voice he found as sweet as her looks.

An accomplished flirt, normally quick with a quip, Ponzi could do little more than repeat the phrase back to her. The streetcar arrived, and Rose and her escort took a seat a few rows ahead of Ponzi and his landlady. As the trolley clacked and rattled along the steel rails embedded in the street, Ponzi stared at the back of Rose’s head. He spent the entire twenty-minute ride that way, his eyes locked on her curls. He would remember the moment his entire life: “Time, space, the world, and everything else around me, except that girl, had ceased to exist.”

When they got home, Mrs. Lombard asked Ponzi what he thought of Rose.

“I think she is wonderful,” he replied. “I am going to marry her.”

“Why, Mr. Ponzi!” Mrs. Lombard said. “You must be crazy!”

A few days later, Ponzi telephoned Rose to invite her to a moving-picture show. His failure to ask her father’s permission was a breach of accepted courting etiquette, but she had a mind of her own, and she was attracted to the older, worldly suitor. Rose accepted. That night, they sat side by side in the darkened theater, and Ponzi knew he never wanted to be farther apart. He told her he wanted to marry her.