Ponzi's Scheme_ The True Story of a Financial Legend - Mitchell Zuckoff [40]
Beyond the mountainous logistical challenges of selling so much advertising and producing fifty pages of editorial content of interest to exporters and importers, Ponzi was fast exhausting his limited money supply. He tried to interest investors in purchasing a half interest in the guide for five thousand dollars—a steal if it were possible to yield even a fraction of his anticipated profits—but found no takers. By summer 1919 he was running low on cash and options. Certain he was on the verge of greatness, Ponzi walked around the corner from his office to the Washington Street branch of the Hanover Trust Company, where for several months he had kept a small checking account that frequently approached a zero balance.
Adopting the nonchalant air of a man certain to be approved for any loan he sought, Ponzi walked smartly through the bank’s heavy front door and asked to borrow two thousand dollars. He tried to say the sum “with the same inflection with which I would have asked change for a nickel.” But his faux confidence could not overcome his real lack of collateral. The application never made it to the loan committee. It was dealt with immediately by the bank’s president, Henry Chmielinski.
“Sorry,” he told Ponzi, “but I cannot approve the loan. While it is our policy to accommodate our depositors whenever we can, your account is more of a bother than a benefit to us. Good day, sir.”
Ponzi seethed as he watched Chmielinski turn on his heel and return to his private office. Bile rose in his throat—“I could have spat poison,” he said afterward—as he made the short walk back to the Niles Building. Anger turned to despair as he opened the door to his office. With a heavy heart, he laid off his small staff and pronounced the Trader’s Guide dead before its first edition.
He swallowed his pride and placed a small newspaper ad offering office space to sublet. His new tenants would help cover the rent, but the added names painted on the door below his own were blows to his dignity. “Another house of cards had collapsed,” he said afterward. But he remained undaunted: “I was getting accustomed to chasing rainbows. As one would fade away, I would pursue another.”
Sitting alone in the office one day in August 1919, Ponzi began idly leafing through his mail. He opened a letter from Spain inquiring about the Trader’s Guide. Unaware that the guide had been permanently mothballed, the letter writer asked to be sent a copy. To pay the postage, the Spaniard had pinned to the corner of his letter a strange piece of paper. It was roughly the size of a dollar bill but nearly square, with intricate watermarks and a fanciful drawing of a woman dressed in flowing robes delivering a piece of mail from one part of the globe to another.
Ponzi held the note in his soft hands. In a spark of inspiration he saw a glittering future spread out before him. Everything up to this point in his life, from major events to chance encounters, from his never-quit persistence to his unquenched thirst for wealth, had led to this moment. It had its roots in his upbringing and his spendthrift youth, his dashed expectations of gold in American streets, and his jobs in banking and exporting. It could be traced to his stretches in prison and the men he’d met there, his acts of generosity, his return to Boston, his passion for stamp collecting, his memories of his father the postman, his chance meeting with foreign exchange expert Roberto de Masellis. All of this made it possible for him to see what no one else could, to dream what no one else dared.
PART TWO
A Ponzi note, issued to Boston Post reporter Principio Santosuosso.
Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
CHAPTER SEVEN
“THE ALMIGHTY DOLLAR”
The paper in Ponzi’s hand was an International Reply Coupon. A more mundane