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Doubts eventually led to a run on the Ladies Deposit, and when the money was gone Howe missed her chance to flee and was arrested. She went to prison as a thief and an insolvent debtor. As the Herald later explained, Howe “simply took the money that one set of patrons paid in to meet her obligations to another set. She never invested a penny of income. She took Miss Mary Jane Smith’s money to pay off Miss Abigail Brown’s claim, and so on to the end of the chapter.”

Howe was a small-timer compared to William Franklin Miller, for years the reigning king of the Peter-Paul scam. In 1899 he was thirty-six, with nothing to show for himself except a five-dollar-a-week job as a brokerage-house clerk. Eager to satisfy his expensive tastes, he devised a Peter-Paul scheme so simple and yet so audacious that it succeeded fabulously, though briefly.

Miller opened for business as the Franklin Syndicate in Brooklyn, New York, with an eye-popping promise: 10 percent a week interest paid on any investment. He soon acquired the nickname “520 Percent Miller,” based on expectations of what investors would receive over the course of a year. Asked how he could possibly pay such unheard-of interest, Miller talked of tapping into the methods of Wall Street barons who hoarded their wealth. He spoke loosely of “inside tips” about mining companies, stocks, and other businesses that supposedly churned out large profits.

A trickle of investors turned into a flood when word spread that Miller was paying the interest every week as promised. Unbeknownst to his customers, Miller was using his new investors’ money to pay the interest on the old. Soon a majority of customers were leaving their principal untouched and “reinvesting” their interest, reducing Miller’s expenses and increasing his personal bankroll. He used his low-rent office as a selling ploy: “Your money buys neither mahogany desks nor oil paintings. It is put to work for you at 10 percent a week. Our running expenses are small, our profits enormous and sure.”

The New York office proved so successful that Miller opened a Boston branch, operating out of the Hotel Harvard on Main Street of the city’s Charlestown neighborhood. Mail from around the country poured into the hotel office with sums for Miller to “invest.” The Franklin Syndicate took in more than a million dollars before Miller was exposed as a fraud by the New York Herald. He fled to Montreal but was captured there, returned to New York for trial, and sentenced to ten years in Sing Sing. His creditors ultimately received about twenty-eight cents on the dollar. Miller won a pardon halfway through his term and opened a grocery store on Long Island, eventually earning the moniker “Honest Bill.”

Despite Miller’s fall, there was no shortage of other scammers eager to pick up where he left off. Around the same time as Miller’s release from prison, an imitator named C. D. Sheldon, alias Wilson, alias Hoyt, alias O. D. Washburn, went to work using the same Peter-to-Paul scheme in Canada. Sheldon’s run was brought to a halt shortly before Ponzi arrived in Montreal, though it was still the talk of the town when Ponzi went to work at the Zarossi Bank.

But for every story of a Jernegan or a Borges, every account of a Howe, a Miller, or a Sheldon, there were a hundred tales of up-from-nothing men who had given birth to innovative ideas that legitimately made them rich. Some were inventors, others monopolists, still others financiers. Some worked tirelessly; others got lucky. Those stories, as much a staple of early-twentieth-century newspapers as photos of oddly shaped vegetables, kept alive two dreams in the hearts of millions of working Americans: Let such an idea come my way or, failing that, let such a man cross my path on a day he feels generous.

With the small loan from Daniels, Ponzi began getting organized. Three days later, on December 13, 1919, he pulled on his threadbare coat to ward off the winter chill, left his cubbyhole office, and strolled around the corner to Boston