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When he spun his web of dollar dreams, Rose listened politely. Then she would remind him again that she did not need money to be happy. He went on dreaming. But it was not only about the money, Rose knew. Her husband wanted the world to take notice of him, to celebrate his ingenuity and be dazzled by his charm.

Six months after they married, Ponzi got a chance to prove his financial acumen at Gnecco Brothers, the wholesale fruit business Rose’s father and uncle ran near Faneuil Hall. The company was failing, and John Gnecco turned to his bright new son-in-law for help. In September 1918, Ponzi quit J. R. Poole to work full-time on an effort to save Gnecco Brothers. He took the titles of president and treasurer and threw himself into the work, but his efforts proved fruitless. An end-of-the-year accounting showed that the company’s assets were worth about six thousand dollars and its liabilities were about eleven thousand. No one faulted Ponzi—the company had been in a hole before he’d gotten involved. But at the very end, Ponzi thought he could wrangle a dramatic way out. He appealed to the company’s lawyers to allow him to borrow the six thousand dollars in assets, promising he would use his knowledge of exporting to repay the money plus all the debt within a year. The lawyers said no, and on January 4, 1919, Gnecco Brothers went into bankruptcy.

The same month Ponzi quit J. R. Poole to join Gnecco Brothers, his home life came under stress when Rose’s mother died. As much as she loved her husband, Rose’s one question when they’d married had been whether she could love him as much as she did her mother. Rose went deep into mourning. Ponzi was pure patience. He lavished her with kindness. He gave her gifts and offered to buy whatever she wanted, though she asked for nothing. She already had what she wanted. Her love for him deepened.

After the collapse of Gnecco Brothers, Ponzi found himself without a job. He had no interest in going back to J. R. Poole or seeking similar work. He was “tired of working for expectations that didn’t pay either my rent or my grocery bills, tired of making money for my employers in general and none for myself.” He and Rose had saved enough to carry them for a while, and she had inherited some money from her mother, so Ponzi figured this was his chance to put his dreams into action.

He rented a windowless, one-room office over the Puritan Trust Company on Court Street at the edge of Scollay Square, the heart of Boston’s commercial district and home to risqué entertainment at the Old Howard Theater. Ponzi was hungry for the former and ignored the latter. Since his marriage, Ponzi had become immune to all temptations except those with dollar signs. He sat in the office’s lone armchair for hours on end, hunched over the rolltop desk scribbling figures on pads of paper. As hard as he tried, his endless reams of calculations did not add up to profits. So Ponzi tried to become something of a commodities broker. His chief mistake was trying to do so with someone else’s commodities.

On May 10, 1919, Ponzi was served with a warrant charging him with stealing 5,387 pounds of cheese valued at forty-five cents a pound. Two days later, he pleaded innocent in Boston Municipal Court. Then he received a rare stroke of good luck. The clerk who wrote out the warrant misspelled his surname, substituting a u for the n, listing the defendant as “Charles Pouzi.” The mistake frustrated efforts by authorities to follow up on the purloined cheese, and the case was continued several times before finally being dismissed for lack of prosecution. Ponzi never told his side of the story—he surely would have claimed it was an innocent misunderstanding.

Best of all, the collapse of the case meant it would not be revealed that he had already served two prison terms, a circumstance that might have triggered deportation proceedings. He had never moved to become an American citizen, knowing that his felony convictions might make him an undesirable alien. Also