Ponzi's Scheme_ The True Story of a Financial Legend - Mitchell Zuckoff [67]
Post employees from newsboys to pressmen had been lining up in recent weeks to buy Ponzi notes. There was little doubt that word would spread to a well-liked reporter like Santosuosso. But his visit to 27 School Street was personal, not professional. He was twenty-nine, unmarried, the sole supporter of his widowed mother and his unmarried younger sister, both of whom lived with him in East Boston. The three hundred dollars he was due on August 5 would be a welcome addition to their household finances. If he thought the stream of people hoping to strike it rich at 27 School Street might make a good story for the Post, he mentally filed it away and returned to work.
The soaring number of new investments made Ponzi rethink his plan to take Rose on a second honeymoon to meet his mother in Italy. Although he fancied himself Boston’s Count of Monte Cristo, Ponzi knew that his sudden success made some people wonder if he modeled himself after a more recent literary character, J. Rufus Wallingford, the creation of author George Randolph Chester.
Chester’s 1908 novel Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford: The Cheerful Account of the Rise and Fall of an American Business Buccaneer, had become embedded in popular culture with help from a long-running 1910 Broadway play written by George M. Cohan. Wallingford is a consummate con artist who fleeces investors with a scheme based on items even more mundane than postal coupons: carpet tacks. Wallingford is ultimately undone by a small oversight and sent to jail, but he is rescued at the last minute by his devoted wife and a businessman whom Wallingford had swindled. The businessman forgives Wallingford because “you’re only the logical development of the American tendency to ‘get there’ no matter how. It is the national weakness, the national menace, and you’re only an exaggerated molecule in it.” The businessman then hires Wallingford as an executive.
Ponzi had already decided that he would not take the money and run, but he wanted to be certain that no one had any reason to suspect him. Leaving the country was something Wallingford would do. So Ponzi canceled his and Rose’s trip to Italy and wired more than five thousand dollars to his mother with instructions that she sail to Boston, first class, as soon as possible. Her only child had struck it rich, and he wanted her to come live with him and his wife. Rose worried that Imelde Ponzi might not like America or, worse, her daughter-in-law. But having lost her parents, and knowing how badly Ponzi missed his mother, Rose accepted the change in plans and began preparing for the arrival of the elder Mrs. Ponzi.
With money rolling in, and the pace increasing from week to week, Ponzi knew that he and his staff of amateur money minders needed professional help. He looked no further than his old acquaintance Roberto de Masellis, manager of the foreign banking department at the Fidelity Trust Company, who two years earlier had planted the seed in Ponzi’s mind about fluctuating currency values. Ponzi took de Masellis to dinner at the Copley Plaza, where he described the business of buying postal reply coupons and redeeming them in countries with favorable exchange rates. De Masellis thought Ponzi seemed an honest man with a logical business plan. Practical, even. De Masellis knew nothing about reply coupons, but he had always believed profits could be found in rising and falling currency rates with the right medium of exchange and the money to pull it off in a big way. Based on how well Ponzi dressed, it seemed to de Masellis that his dinner companion had discovered the magic formula.
Ponzi told de Masellis that he should come to work at the Securities Exchange Company as a financial “efficiency expert” who would create a system more comprehensive, or at least less primitive, than the index-card file. To seal the deal, Ponzi agreed to pay de Masellis the princely salary of a thousand dollars a month.