Ponzi's Scheme_ The True Story of a Financial Legend - Mitchell Zuckoff [68]
De Masellis was hardly the only business expert Ponzi convinced. On June 30, Ponzi invited into his office a representative from the respected credit reporting firm the Bradstreet Company. A stamp of approval from Bradstreet would be a huge boon to Ponzi, and he got it. After hearing Ponzi’s account of his enormous success, the company issued a report that outlined the business and concluded authoritatively, “Mr. Ponzi bears a favorable personal reputation.”
Despite talking a good game with de Masellis and the Bradstreet Company, Ponzi was searching more desperately than ever for a way to turn a profit. And he still had not completely given up on International Reply Coupons. As a last-ditch effort, he tried to enlist Henry Chmielinski, president of Hanover Trust, in an effort to obtain coupons from Poland, where Chmielinski maintained ties with government officials. Ponzi promised that they would both reap profits from the deal.
“Henry,” Ponzi told him, “this is your chance of a lifetime to clean up some real dough.”
Chmielinski tried to do as Ponzi instructed, but the deal—implausible to begin with—fell through. With it went Ponzi’s last hope of turning postal coupons into cash. “I was left high and dry,” he reflected, “with no coupons and no profits in sight, and no way of meeting my notes, except by the time-honored custom of robbing Peter to pay Paul. It was a case of either sink or swim, and . . . I didn’t want to sink. Not just yet, in any event.”
In the meantime, Ponzi’s popularity kept soaring. When Ponzi and Lucy Meli tallied the investments from June, they could scarcely believe their eyes. Ponzi knew that deposits had been coming in so fast that his clerks had filled wastebaskets with greenbacks when the cash drawers had overflowed. But no one could have predicted the astonishing total: In June alone, the Securities Exchange Company had taken in more than $2.5 million from seventy-eight hundred customers.
Just as Ponzi was giving up on reply coupons, postal authorities in Washington were finally awakening from their torpor. They prepared an order, to be issued July 2, prohibiting post offices from redeeming more than fifty cents’ worth of International Reply Coupons per person at one time. The order made no mention of Ponzi, but it was a clear sign that postal officials still believed he was somehow trafficking in postal coupons. In that sense, postal officials were on a par with Ponzi’s investors, who fervently believed that Ponzi had a secret method of turning coupons into cash.
In the meantime, Ponzi continued playing the role of wealthy benefactor. On June 30, he gave a ten-thousand-dollar loan to his brother-in-law George Bertoldi, who was married to Rose’s sister Theresa, to buy a note that would be worth fifteen thousand dollars by mid-August. Ponzi also decided to square old debts. The failure of his late father-in-law’s wholesale fruit business eighteen months earlier had resulted in losses of about eight thousand dollars to creditors. At the time, that had been a world of money to Ponzi. But now, he collected more in an hour. He paid all Gnecco Brothers’ creditors, in full, with a smile.
But Ponzi’s grin was about to be sorely tested by another old creditor, one who had already been repaid but who wanted to collect far more.
Richard Grozier, after taking over for his father as the Post’s acting editor and publisher.
Mary Grozier
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“LIKE STEALING CANDY FROM A BABY”
Day after day throughout June, furniture dealer Joseph Daniels had watched streams of people troop down Hanover Street, walk past his store, and climb the stairs next door to the North End branch of the Securities Exchange Company. Several months had passed since Daniels had last spoken with Ponzi, who had repaid Daniels’s two-hundred-dollar