Ponzi's Scheme_ The True Story of a Financial Legend - Mitchell Zuckoff [55]
Ponzi sent Cassullo on an endless number of fool’s errands and wild-goose chases. One was to the wharves of New York to buy a few bottles of Ponzi’s favorite after-dinner drink, Hennessy Three Stars cognac, from a French ship in port. Secretly he hoped that Prohibition agents would catch Cassullo with the contraband liquor and take him to jail, but Cassullo returned with the bottles as ordered. When that did not work, Ponzi kept him away from School Street by making Cassullo an advance man, scouting out locations for branches in cities around New England. Ponzi did not particularly want a string of offices, but he wanted Cassullo hanging around even less.
Soon Ponzi had Massachusetts branch offices not only in Lawrence but also in Brockton, Clinton, Fall River, Framingham, Lynn, Plymouth, Quincy, and Worcester. He opened a second Boston branch in the North End, at 196 Hanover Street, next door to the Daniels & Wilson Furniture Company. Then came Manchester and Portsmouth, New Hampshire; Barre and Burlington, Vermont; Hartford, Bridgeport, and New Haven, Connecticut; Bangor and Portland, Maine; Pawtucket, Providence, and Woonsocket, Rhode Island; and Bayonne and Clifton, New Jersey. Agents in Boston and the ever-expanding branches—some little more than a traveling salesman, others modeled after 27 School Street—began doing so much business that they hired subagents, splitting with them the 10 percent commissions that became Ponzi’s going rate. And the money kept coming.
The bigger Ponzi got, the more threats he faced. Inquiries by the postal inspectors had not slowed his ascent, but they had sent shock waves through the cobwebbed corridors of the Universal Postal Union. The possibility that a Boston man was growing rich by trafficking in International Reply Coupons was too much to bear. Questions needed to be asked. Regulations needed to be tightened. During his meeting with the Boston postal inspectors, Ponzi had mentioned trading in coupons imported from Italy. They could not prove he was doing it, but they could not be sure that he was not. Either way, action needed to be taken. In April, Italian postal officials abruptly suspended sales of reply coupons. Their counterparts in France and Romania quickly followed suit.
The moves were technically not a problem for Ponzi, who had at least temporarily abandoned efforts to purchase coupons, having failed to overcome the practical and logistical obstacles. But looked at from another perspective, it meant his operation was attracting unwelcome notice. A net was slowly being woven to ensnare him.
The Ponzi family’s new home on Slocum Road in Lexington.
The Boston Globe
CHAPTER NINE
“ALWAYS REACHING FOR THE MOON”
By early spring, Ponzi’s operation was becoming the talk of Boston, exceeding thirty thousand dollars a week in new investments and attracting increased attention from police and postal officials. Yet despite the location of the Securities Exchange Company on the edge of Newspaper Row, the city’s newspapers had been completely silent about it.
One reason might have been reporters’ and editors’ deeply ingrained aversion to providing free publicity—“Let ’em buy an ad” was a common newsroom refrain. For his part, Ponzi saw no reason to spend money on advertising; money was coming in as fast as he and Lucy Meli could count it. Another reason for the newspapers’ silence might have been the absence of any official action against Ponzi. Newspapers tended to be reactive rather than proactive, and until