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The words emerged in a mellifluous tone, accented only slightly by his native Italian. Ponzi sometimes spoke in staccato bursts, but more often he had a pleasing, charismatic voice—women heard a mildly insistent suitor; men, a trusted friend. It was a voice that would have fit rising movie star Rudolph Valentino, if only his films had sound.

Ponzi kept moving—past two uniformed policemen at the doors of the Niles Building and up the narrow flight of stairs to his cramped second-floor offices. Along the way he had to push into the stairwell past people who formed what one observer called “a swirling, seething, gesticulating, jabbering throng.” Some kind of commotion was happening down the hall from his office, but Ponzi paid it no mind. He stepped through a glass-paneled door into a small anteroom his company used as a waiting area. There, each investor was met by one of the sixteen clerks and assistants, many of them added to the payroll in recent weeks to handle the torrents of cash.

Moving deeper into the office, prospective investors would be turned over to a team of agents led by one John A. Dondero, a distant relative of Ponzi’s by marriage. After making sure the investors had cash on hand or endorsed money orders, Dondero would lead them to a second, larger room, divided roughly in half by a four-foot wooden barrier topped by iron bars. Between the bars and the counter were slim openings for three tellers.

Investors slid their cash to one of the young tellers. Often they were three particular girls: Angela Locarno, her sister Marie Locarno, and their friend Bessie Langone. In return for cash, the investors received promissory notes, receipts really, that guaranteed the original investment plus 50 percent interest in forty-five days. The receipts bore Ponzi’s ink-stamped signature, which led many to call them simply “Ponzi notes.” Lately the waves of cash had come crashing over the counter so quickly that the bills were dumped into wire baskets, to be sorted when the tide rolled out. At slower times the cash was funneled from the clerks directly to a man named Louis Cassullo, an unpleasant acquaintance from Ponzi’s past whom Ponzi neither liked nor trusted. Where Cassullo was concerned, Ponzi applied the old adage about keeping friends close and enemies closer. From Cassullo, the cash was counted, bundled, and deposited into one of Ponzi’s fast-growing bank accounts. That is, minus any stray bills Cassullo siphoned off.

The other half of the room, a space perhaps eight by fourteen feet, was partitioned off for an office shared by Ponzi and a pretty, dark-haired girl named Lucy Meli, his eighteen-year-old chief bookkeeper, secretary, and gal Friday. The walls of the office were bare, and the furniture consisted of three chairs and a single flattop desk, at which Ponzi and his young assistant sat on opposite sides, facing each other. Visitors were surprised to see no adding machines or file cabinets. Despite the enormous sums of money pouring in, the offices of the Securities Exchange Company were dark and dingy, with a few scuffed, mismatched pieces of furniture and the lingering smell of the Turkish cigarettes Ponzi smoked in a five-inch, ivory-and-gold holder.

As soon as Ponzi arrived, his overwhelmed workers rushed to greet him with word of trouble. The fuss that he had passed in the hallway was the opening of a competing, copycat investment plan that called itself the Old Colony Foreign Exchange Company. Its owners had had the temerity to rent an office on the same floor of the Niles Building as Ponzi’s Securities Exchange Company. Old Colony was promising the same 50 percent in forty-five days, and its organizers were more than happy to steal away the overflow of would-be Ponzi investors who grew tired of waiting in line. The Old Colony promoters had even printed up promissory notes that strongly resembled Ponzi’s.

Ponzi understood instantly that some investors might be confused into thinking that the two companies were one and the same.