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By Root 461 0

bracelet for a refund. Another time, Ponzi brought home a string of lustrous pearls. Again she demurred, but Ponzi thought he could outwit his thrifty wife. He agreed to tell her the price, but then tossed out a number that was only a fraction of the necklace’s true cost. Rose accepted the necklace, and Ponzi thought he’d carried the day. But Rose had the last laugh. Not long after, she quietly returned them for a full refund. Ponzi had better luck with a much different gift: To keep Rose company during his long days at work, Ponzi surprised her with a Boston terrier puppy they named Beauty.

Ponzi’s regular trips to a North End jewelry store led to a friendship with jeweler Alphonso Ciullo. It came in handy one morning when Ponzi was dealing with yet another visit from a pair of postal inspectors. Postal authorities had remained frustrated in their attempts to prove that Ponzi was doing something illegal, but they continued to examine his claims, including the recent statements printed in the Traveler about building his business by trading in reply coupons.

“Where do you buy them?” one inspector inquired.

“I am not telling that,” Ponzi answered. “I will merely say that they can be profitably bought in any country having a depreciated paper currency.”

“For instance?” the inspector wanted to know, setting a trap.

“For instance,” Ponzi answered, “Italy, France, Rumania, Greece, and so forth.”

“Exactly,” the inspector said, thinking he had caught Ponzi in a lie. “Now we have information that Italy, France, and Rumania have withdrawn from the postal agreement and stopped the sale of coupons . . .”

Ponzi parried as best he could, but the inspectors seemed to be gaining the upper hand. Just then Ciullo walked up the stairs at 27 School Street with a fat envelope.

“Charlie,” Ciullo said, “I have just received this package of coupons from Italy.” Ciullo wanted to know if Ponzi could transform them into cash. Scarcely believing his luck, Ponzi took the envelope and dumped out three hundred International Reply Coupons. He smiled. The inspectors pounced.

“Where did you get them?” one demanded of Ciullo.

“I got them from my uncle in Italy,” the jeweler answered, not knowing what was going on.

“Who is he?” the inspector asked.

“He is a postmaster in a small town,” Ciullo said.

“When did you receive them?”

“This morning.”

“How?”

“By mail,” Ciullo said.

The inspector examined the envelope and saw that it had been mailed from Italy in May and had only just arrived.

“Well,” Ponzi said, his voice tinged with sarcasm. “I hope you are satisfied now that somebody else beside myself can buy coupons in Italy.”

The inspectors turned tail and left.

And all the while, larger waves of investors kept crashing on Ponzi’s shores.

John Elbye of Everett bought a certificate for fifty dollars on June 10, and then his wife put up the same amount the next day. That gave John confidence, so he came back five days later with one hundred dollars. Five days after that he got up his real nerve and plunged in for a thousand dollars. Ernesto Giovino of Boston topped that with eleven hundred dollars on June 11. Giuseppe Albano of Boston deposited two hundred dollars on June 14 and came back two days later to add two hundred more. Catherine Callahan of Cambridge brought in a hundred dollars on June 18, and Samuel Goldstein of Charlestown put in double that the same day. Fred Drener of New Bedford could spare only fifty dollars on June 19. Harry Ash of Roxbury invested four hundred dollars on June 21, while Michael Kennedy of Somerville came in to collect his 50 percent interest on the $175 he had invested forty-five days earlier. He then took the whole $262.50 and bought another Ponzi note.

That same day, the first day of the hot summer of 1920, an unassuming man with a prominent nose and marquee-sized forehead came to 27 School Street from his office around the corner. With two hundred dollars in cash, he bought the 9,641st certificate issued by the Securities Exchange Company. A clerk wrote the man’s name on the certificate in graceful script: