Ponzi's Scheme_ The True Story of a Financial Legend - Mitchell Zuckoff [4]
Bookbinder Arthur Case of the city’s Dorchester neighborhood was ready to invest a whopping three thousand dollars, just a week after his wife, Clara, had put in one thousand. Their neighbor, candy-factory worker William Hoff, emptied his wallet and came up with seventy-eight dollars. Boston florist Philip Feinstein was ready to place eleven hundred dollars in Ponzi’s hands, while Patrick Horan had stuffed sixteen hundred dollars into his billfold. Benjamin Brown intended to add six hundred dollars to the six hundred he had deposited just four days earlier. Stable worker Timothy Donovan of suburban Somerville and Alfred Authoir of nearby Cambridge each expected their fifty-dollar investments to grow into seventy-five dollars by the first week of September. Print shop foreman Percy Stott of Methuen had made the thirty-mile trip to Boston for the third straight day, this time to add one hundred dollars to the two hundred he had already invested.
Luggage shop owner Joseph Pearlstein came bearing not cash but a note signed by Ponzi that would allow him to collect fifteen hundred dollars. He had heard about the Securities Exchange Company from none other than the lovely Rose Gnecco Ponzi, who had stopped at his Dorchester store the first week in June. She had come by to purchase new bags for a trip she and her husband, Charles, were planning to Italy, to visit his mother. Rose Ponzi had proudly described her husband’s remarkable financial skills to the luggage vendor, and Pearlstein had been so impressed he had invested one thousand dollars. Now his note was due, so Pearlstein was in line to collect his original stake plus his five-hundred-dollar profit. But he would not invest again. Reluctant to press his luck, Pearlstein was satisfied with one spin of the wheel.
The crowd also included a fourteen-year-old boy in short pants named Frank Thomas. He earned $7.20 a week running errands, and he was eager to invest ten dollars with Ponzi. Charlie Gnecco of Medford, six miles away across the Mystic River, was there for his fourth and largest investment of the month, one thousand dollars. And why not? His baby sister, Rose, was happily married to the man in charge of the whole operation. If she had faith in Ponzi, well then, Charlie Gnecco did, too. Carmela Ottavi of nearby Chelsea brought two thousand dollars to add to the six hundred she had invested twelve days earlier. Ponzi’s chauffeur, John Collins, had already thrown in five hundred. Watching the crowd from the front seat of the Locomobile, he resolved to add seven hundred more.
While some had come because of the Post story, others had heard from friends and relatives of the profits to be found on School Street. Although the Post seemed to have only just discovered the Securities Exchange Company, the streets of Boston had been buzzing about it and Ponzi for months. Some people had heard testimonials from men like Fiori Bevilacqua of Roslindale, whose friends knew him by his anglicized name, Frank Drinkwater. In a lifetime of hard work as a laborer and a real estate investor, Bevilacqua had painstakingly amassed the small fortune of ten thousand dollars. In June he had entrusted the entire amount to Ponzi, then spent the next few weeks sharing the news of his impending good fortune. His friends listened, and they came, too. When the Post story hit the streets, the Securities Exchange Company was already averaging more than a million dollars a week in new investments. If the pace held, it would soon be a million dollars a day.
But potential investors were not the only ones focused on Ponzi. The Post story aroused the interest and concern of some of the most powerful men in Massachusetts. Several of them had already begun asking questions. The newspaper’s inexperienced acting publisher, Richard Grozier, who had ordered the feature story after reading about the million-dollar lawsuit,