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Not for Rose the ways of the flapper girls who smoked cigarettes and haunted speakeasies. She believed in old-fashioned domesticity. All she wanted was a husband who loved her, children to love, and a home she could keep to her immaculate standards. She would be happy to stay in Somerville, near her parents, John and Maria Gnecco, and her large extended family of two sisters, three brothers, and assorted cousins, in-laws, nieces, and nephews. With Ponzi, she figured she was well on the way to fulfilling that modest dream.

The new Mr. and Mrs. Charles Ponzi rarely quarreled, but there was occasional tension over their different approaches to money and his endless puzzling over how to obtain it. Rose wanted them to be economical, living carefully within their means “in a cozy little place where we can pay our bills.” Ponzi, she despaired, “had the air and the tastes of the millionaire.”

Rose craved his attention, and grew peeved at times over her husband’s dedication to a stamp collection he had kept throughout his years of travel. For some men it would be an idle hobby, but it seemed more for Ponzi. He would pore for hours over the colorful little pieces of paper he had lovingly pressed into several books, as though the different denominations printed on their faces held a secret he was desperate to unlock. It was a fitting hobby for the son of a postman who had died young.

Ponzi’s uncommon interest in the foreign stamps might have had something to do with a recent conversation he had had with Roberto de Masellis, manager of the foreign banking department at the Fidelity Trust Company, where Ponzi kept an account. Ponzi had met de Masellis when he’d strolled into the bank one day to exchange some dollars for Italian lire. De Masellis, who had been deputy Italian consul to the United States in Naples before immigrating to Boston, was a loquacious authority on foreign exchange. Unprompted, he launched into a tutorial about fluctuations in the values of European currencies after the Great War. Looking at Ponzi through pince-nez glasses, his banker’s paunch restrained by his suit coat, de Masellis explained that Italian lire, once worth five to the dollar, had been so devalued that lately it took eighteen or twenty to equal one dollar. The wild fluctuations created the possibility of hugely profitable speculation for anyone smart, daring, and lucky enough to figure out a way to buy one currency for a low price and sell it when its value increased.

Rose, meanwhile, considered his persistent focus on the stamp books unwanted competition. “Charlie, for heaven’s sake drop it and talk to me,” Rose implored him. “What do you think I want to do after I’ve worked all day? Darn socks?”

Sometimes Ponzi would smile and put down the book, but more often he would gently tease her: “Well, why don’t you get hold of something that’s worth spending your own time with?”

“Oh well,” she would answer coyly, “if you don’t think my husband is important enough to spend some time with . . .” And they would laugh.

To anyone who would listen, Rose would boast about her good fortune in finding him. “When a man is always a gentleman to his wife,” she would say, “behind closed doors as well as in front of them, he’s absolutely certain to be, at heart, a good man.” Ponzi, she was sure, was just such a man.

Ponzi was equally delighted by his wife—“An American beauty. My Rose!” he called her. But the rest of his life left him unsatisfied. Ponzi wanted to drape Rose in finery, lavish her with servants, own a home big enough to get lost in. How could they start a family without financial security? “I want you to be able to throw away a hundred dollars,” he told Rose, though he must have known she could never be so extravagant. As they sat together at the small table in their kitchen, Ponzi outlined one intricate moneymaking scheme after another. Once she took a photograph of him sitting there, his feet up on the stove as though he already owned the world. He turned the camera on her and captured