Ponzi's Scheme_ The True Story of a Financial Legend - Mitchell Zuckoff [54]
Just for show, Ponzi himself took out a few notes, and his own Rose came by the office for a visit on April 17 and proudly deposited her pin money, seventy dollars. A twenty-seven-year-old English immigrant named Abe Rhodes outdid her, investing fifteen hundred dollars the same day. But even he fell short of the North End’s Antonio D’Avanzo, who bet two thousand. All three would be back to collect their winnings on June 1.
More than ten thousand dollars a week was surging into 27 School Street. By mid-April Ponzi needed help handling it all. He had been keeping the accounts himself, and sloppily, at that. He had barely any idea how much money he had taken in. When he wanted to check his cash assets, he simply added his bank deposit slips. He had less interest in counting his liabilities. He knew they would exceed his assets.
John A. Dondero was proving a more able salesman than he was an office manager, so Ponzi called an employment agency seeking a young woman with experience—but not too much experience—as a bookkeeper and stenographer. The agency sent him a doe-eyed eighteen-year-old. Lucy Meli was a native of Sicily who had immigrated with her family a decade earlier and still spoke Italian. After high school in Revere, she’d graduated from business school less than a year before coming to work for Ponzi, giving her the ideal combination of youthful enthusiasm and unquestioning trust in Ponzi’s word. He promptly put her in charge of the office. With her thick brown hair pulled back in a bun, Lucy Meli set about trying to get the company organized by the principles she had learned in school.
She and Ponzi occupied opposite sides of the same desk, and she looked across at him with respect bordering on adoration. He enjoyed the attention but offered only avuncular friendship in return. Rose was at home in Somerville, expecting him home for dinner, and Ponzi would do nothing to upset that. Meli expressed her confidence by investing her paychecks and her parents’ money with her boss, and the Meli family eventually owned nearly two thousand dollars in Securities Exchange Company notes.
Other new faces began turning up regularly at 27 School Street, as Ponzi hired more salesmen. April receipts would exceed $140,000, an average of three hundred dollars each from 471 customers. One of the new salesmen was Percy Lamb.
Lamb, a thirty-three-year-old English immigrant, had been laid off from his job as a foreman in a textile factory in the mill city of Lawrence, near the New Hampshire border. He’d moved to Boston and found a job earning fifty-five dollars a week as a sorter in a wool house on Summer Street, a mile from Ponzi’s office. One day an Italian coworker began talking about the money to be made with the Securities Exchange Company. Lamb and his wife went to see for themselves and were so convinced by Ponzi’s patter that they placed their life savings—six hundred dollars—in his hands. On April 17, Ponzi offered Lamb a job, matching his sorter’s salary and adding the promise of 15 percent commissions. Lamb grabbed it, agreeing to open the Securities Exchange Company’s first branch office, to serve the millworkers of Lawrence. Ponzi was expanding beyond his Italian base, using Lamb to reach other immigrant groups and native-born Americans who might be tempted by easy money.
Ponzi was glad to have salesmen like Lamb aboard, but not all his employees were so welcome. Months earlier, Ponzi had run into his old Montreal cellmate, the chronic thief and con man Louis Cassullo. Like Ponzi, Cassullo had bounced around after his release from prison, landed in Boston, and gotten married. Since learning Ponzi was in town, Cassullo had kept tabs on his comings and