Ponzi's Scheme_ The True Story of a Financial Legend - Mitchell Zuckoff [78]
Beyond the report of what had happened a day earlier, from the crowds to Ponzi’s summoning of police against the rival Old Colony Foreign Exchange Company, the Sunday story dripped with skepticism. Ominously for Ponzi, it began with the report that a federal investigation “is being pushed with vigor.” The story added no specifics but breathlessly told readers that Boston’s federal prosecutor, United States District Attorney Daniel J. Gallagher, “has set in motion all the government machinery to learn whether Ponzi is telling the truth when he asserts that he is able to pay such enormous profits by juggling of International Reply Coupons in Europe.”
But if the Post wanted its readers to doubt claims that seemed to be too good to be true, the paper was sending a very mixed message. A few pages past the report on Ponzi’s business appeared the headline TO MAKE OLD WOMEN YOUNG. The story described the amazing work of Dr. Serge Veronoff and his wife and assistant, Madame Evelyn Veronoff, who had recently arrived in America from Paris to promote the good doctor’s success in implanting young chimpanzee glands in aged humans “to make them vigorous and hale again.” The reporter, Marguerite Mooers Marshall, guilelessly asked, “Will women be made young in the sense of recovering the beauty and charm of youth, of banishing their wrinkles and gray hair?” Madame Veronoff answered: “It is not inconceivable that fresh, lovely facial tissues should take the place of those that are worn and lined—that even the color of the hair should be changed.” Marshall was sold. “It will be a wonderful thing for women!” she wrote.
Meanwhile, the other Boston papers were silent about Ponzi on Sunday. The closest any of them came was an item buried in the Boston Sunday Herald about the finances of Lawrence millworkers that blandly mentioned how some put their money “in various other forms of ‘get-rich-quick’ speculation that promises a maximum of return in a minimum of days.” The Herald, the Globe, and Boston’s other papers were paying more attention to an attempt to raise bail for Bartolomeo Vanzetti and the sensational murder trial of dashing undertaker Byron M. Pettibone, accused of poisoning his wife with strychnine so that he could marry a beautiful nurse.
Even though Ponzi remained overlooked by the other papers, the combined effect of back-to-back page 1 stories in the Post was to instantly make him the most talked-about, sought-after man in New England. People began calling Ponzi “a wizard of finance.” Like most overnight sensations, he had spent decades laying the groundwork for his triumph, and now he wanted to milk it for all it was worth. He would get no rest this Sunday, and that was fine with him.
The telephone began ringing at daybreak. Western Union delivery boys—“Telegram for Mr. Ponzi!”—soon followed. Ponzi basked in the attention: “Every one of them anxious to get on the right side of me. Because I was a multimillionaire. I received more congratulations than a president-elect!” The Post photo of Ponzi’s house was accompanied by a caption placing it on Slocum Road, so the quiet lane became a destination for a steady stream of motorists taking Sunday drives in the country.
A Post reporter dropped by the house and ran into Ponzi’s lawyer, Judge Frank Leveroni.
“As a judge of the Juvenile Court,” the reporter asked, “do you think it a proper thing for a concern of that kind to accept loans from fourteen-year-old boys?” It was a clear reference to Frank Thomas, the errand boy in short pants who had praised Ponzi to a Post reporter a day earlier on his way to invest ten dollars.
“Mr. Ponzi,” Leveroni replied, “has given me assurance that his promises to pay are good. I believe him, and on that score I consider it perfectly proper for him to accept loans tendered by anyone.”
Two men came to the house