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By Root 478 0

into a moneymaking machine. Knowing that his friends the Blasses had money in the bank, and hoping to separate them from some of it, Ponzi dropped by their home in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood in March. Louis Blass was forty-five, a traveling salesman of cotton waste products who had formerly run a mill in New York. He and his forty-two-year-old wife had emigrated from France seventeen years earlier, and now they were raising two sons and two daughters. The eldest planned to start classes at the Massachusetts Agricultural College in the fall. Ponzi showed them a few reply coupons and described his business, watching as always for the moment their eyes lit up at the sound of 50 percent interest in forty-five days. The Blasses spent weeks thinking about Ponzi’s proposal before plunging in with both feet.

On May 10, the couple showed up at Ponzi’s office with eleven thousand dollars in certified checks, from two emptied bank accounts, plus ten thousand dollars in Liberty bonds. Ponzi accepted the bonds as the equivalent of nine thousand dollars in cash and wrote out the biggest single certificate to date from the Securities Exchange Company: twenty thousand dollars, with thirty thousand dollars due in forty-five days. Louis Blass was so certain of the windfall he began urging his bosses and his customers to follow his lead and invest all they could. His boss, textile merchant Sam Finkel, was intrigued enough to inquire about speculation in postal reply coupons during a trip to Washington. He was told it was implausible. He declined to invest and shared that information with Blass, who nevertheless remained confident in his pal Ponzi.

With more investors came more salesmen. Ponzi brought in his brother-in-law Rinaldo Boselli, who was married to Rose’s sister Mary; and his friends Harry Mahoney and Henry Neilson, among others, and by the end of the month the Securities Exchange Company had more than three dozen employees. Neilson’s route to a job with Ponzi was typical. A Danish immigrant who worked as a forty-five-dollar-a-week meat cutter in Somerville, he had met the finance wizard socially the previous year at the home of a friend of his, Ponzi’s landlord, Anders Larsen. They stayed in touch, and when Larsen and his wife, Karen, invested five thousand dollars with Ponzi, Neilson and his wife, Hilda, took a chance with two thousand. The Neilsons made their first investment on May 18, then got so excited by the expected profits that they returned twice more within the next week, adding another thirty-four hundred dollars. Ponzi appreciated Henry Neilson’s confidence, not to mention the thirty-six-year-old Dane’s dashing looks and smooth manner. Ponzi knew a natural salesman when he saw one. So Ponzi hired Neilson to work in the office, explaining the system to would-be investors. Ponzi knew that customers were comforted when they heard salesmen honestly utter the words “Why, I have several thousand dollars of my family’s own money invested here.”

Another new salesman was Charles Ritucci, who ran the Plymouth office for Ponzi. He learned quickly from his boss’s enterprising nature, printing flyers in English, Italian, and Portuguese, then pasting them on store windows. They read:

Securities Exchange Company, No. 27, School Street, Boston, Mass.

NOTICE

Do you want to get rich quick? See our agent, Charles Ritucci, 3011/2 Court Street, Upstairs in Plymouth Theatre Building, who will explain how you can get fifty percent profit on your investment, payable forty-five days from date of investment. Our bank office in Plymouth opens every night from 6 to 8. Yours truly, Securities Exchange Company.

Investors could not help but throw money at such a sure thing. Ponzi began opening new bank accounts, including one at the North End branch of the Hanover Trust Company, where he deposited sixty thousand dollars on May 24 at the urging of the bank’s manager, an ambitious young man named Charles Pizzi. Pizzi was tired of seeing his depositors withdraw their money to invest with Ponzi.

Meanwhile, Lucy Meli had begun an index-card