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By Root 522 0

He envisioned a complicated series of stock sales, bond offerings, equity swaps, and lease deals that would take a team of accountants years to untangle. The immediate result would be the paying off of all debts of the Securities Exchange Company, at which point Ponzi would abandon the postal coupon business forever. He would then spend a decade as an unimaginably rich shipping magnate with a decidedly patriotic bent. The passenger ships, he declared, would double as “floating sample rooms for American products.” They would travel from port to port, their holds brimming with huge cargoes of made-in-America goods. Each time the ships dropped anchor, teams of salesmen would burst forth onto foreign soil and drag local merchants aboard. The salesmen would expertly display their wares and offer immediate delivery of goods from the below-decks warehouse.

As unlikely as it might have seemed, Ponzi was certain he could pull it off, as long as he had enough time.

Rerouting his financial path could wait, though, as Ponzi spent the morning of July 9 anxiously anticipating the arrival of his mother. After canceling his trip with Rose to Italy, Ponzi had wired Imelde Ponzi money to buy two first-class tickets aboard the S.S. Cretic, an immense White Star liner previously known as the Mayflower. One ticket was for his sixty-nine-year-old mother and the other was for Elena Omati, her twenty-nine-year-old maid. The ship had left Naples for Boston on June 25, and the elder Mrs. Ponzi and her helper were in good company for the two-week trip; merchants, a painter, and an Italian diplomat to Venezuela were among their fellow first-class passengers.

When he arrived at the Boston pier, Ponzi was as giddy as a child on his birthday. He bubbled with unrestrained joy when he caught sight of the black-hulled ship, as long as two football fields end to end, with four soaring masts and a single funnel jutting into the blue summer sky. During his rootless years in America and Canada he had often wondered whether he would see his mother again, whether he would overcome the shame of his dissolute college days and live up to her dreams of “castles in the air.” Now he had done it. He was rich and she was steaming into Boston. Ponzi could not wait a minute more than necessary to see her.

Spreading cash and charm, Ponzi enlisted the help of an immigration official named Joseph Merenda, a fellow Italian immigrant who happened to be a small investor in the Securities Exchange Company. Together they boarded a tugboat that Ponzi hired on the spot to motor him across Boston Harbor to the quarantine building where Cretic passengers were undergoing immigration inspections. While waiting to see his mother, Ponzi learned that the ship’s steerage passengers were suffering terribly from the summer fortnight at sea. Adding to their troubles, some had arrived penniless. Remembering his own landing with little more than two dollars and a gnawing hunger, Ponzi opened his wallet, handed out cash to help as many as he could, and sent for sandwiches and drinks.

Then he caught sight of Imelde Ponzi, a tiny, regal woman with a halo of white hair and an Italian widow’s black wardrobe. Ponzi rushed to embrace her. Tears streamed down his face. He held his mother tight in his arms. Merenda’s heart swelled as he witnessed the reunion.

“It is seventeen years since I have seen you,” the old woman told her son.

“Yes,” Ponzi answered through his tears, “but we shall never part again.” He rushed his mother and her maid home to Lexington, to meet Rose and to coddle the elder Mrs. Ponzi with comforts in their new house.

At that moment, Merenda set aside lingering doubts about the promise of 50 percent profits in forty-five days. He had invested only two hundred dollars to date, but now he resolved to deposit as much as he could with Ponzi. As he later told the financier: “I made up my mind that a man doing a criminal business could not bring his mother over from Italy after seventeen years with the possibility of his going to jail. And when I saw you with tears in your eyes