Ponzi's Scheme_ The True Story of a Financial Legend - Mitchell Zuckoff [5]
Collins eased the Locomobile to a stop, hopped out, and hustled to the back door. It swung open and the man himself alighted from the car, stepping onto the wide running board, then planting his feet on the sidewalk. If the crowd had expected a large man, it would have been sorely disappointed. Ponzi was five foot two, shorter than some of the arm-weary newsboys selling their papers in the crowd. He weighed just 130 pounds fully clothed after a heavy meal.
But what he lacked in size he made up for in style.
Ponzi was a human dynamo, handsome in his own way, with a regal nose, a dimpled chin, and full lips that curved upward in a barely suppressed grin. Usually he did not suppress it, and the resulting smile seemed almost too big for his face, as though painted on by a child. On his head was a jaunty golfing cap—a smart weekend fashion statement, more casual than his usual straw boater. Under the hat was a crown of brown hair flecked with gray, slicked down and razor-parted on the left side, with a low pompadour in front. The only signs of age were starbursts of wrinkles around his lively brown-black eyes, seemingly etched not by worries but by a lifetime of laughter. He wore a new Palm Beach suit, impossibly crisp given the sultry weather, with a silk handkerchief peeking from the coat pocket like a fresh-cut daffodil. His polished shoes clicked and clacked on the stone sidewalk. A starched white collar was held in place by the knot of his dark moiré silk tie, which sported a dazzling diamond-topped pin. His right hand gripped a gold-handled malacca walking stick, similar to one favored by a showman of an earlier age, P. T. Barnum. His left fist held the handle of a leather satchel that would prove too small for the bushels of cash awaiting him this day.
Looking around, Ponzi could not help but beam. Much later, when writing his memoirs, he would remember the street looking as though “the two million inhabitants of Greater Boston were all there!” All to see him. In fact, Ponzi overstated the region’s population by a half million people, but inflation of numbers was something of a habit with him. Emerging with Ponzi from the car was a stern-faced, heavily armed bodyguard from the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, which rented out its agents when they were not busting “Red menace” unionists or chasing bank robbers.
Security had lately become a concern for Ponzi, whose business was generating so much cash it made him fear that he was a ripe target for thieves. To reinforce the Pinkertons, Ponzi had obtained a gun permit three months earlier from the police department in Somerville, where he’d lived before moving to Lexington. A small, blue steel pistol, a .25-caliber Colt automatic, rested snugly inside a vest pocket. Another pocket held contents he was much more eager to wave in public: a bank statement, in his name, for $1.5 million.
“There’s Ponzi!” someone shouted when he stepped from the car. On that cue the masses moved as one. They surrounded him and his guard, some pleading for a moment of his time, others content to pat him on the back, and some thrilled simply to lay eyes on the Merlin of money. A few skeptics mingled among the believers. One was loudly labeling the Securities Exchange Company a bogus get-rich-quick scheme when Ponzi arrived.
“I’d like to see the man who could do it—” the doubter shouted.
Faced