Ponzi's Scheme_ The True Story of a Financial Legend - Mitchell Zuckoff [79]
Out of view of the camera, Ponzi and Leveroni strategized on how best to respond to the threat posed by Ponzi’s imitator, the Old Colony Foreign Exchange Company. Stealing Ponzi’s customers by opening an office down the hall at 27 School Street was bad enough, but Ponzi’s real fear was that his rival would bring additional heat down upon him just as he was racing to go legitimate. And if government officials took a hard look at the men behind Old Colony, “none of them had either the courage or the ability to hold their own in a match of wits. They would have been exposed in no time.” Ponzi could not tell Leveroni or anyone else how he knew, but he was certain the outfit was a rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul scam. That meant Old Colony “constituted for me a greater menace than all of the government agencies put together.”
To himself, Ponzi rationalized the difference between his Securities Exchange Company and copycat upstarts: “Perhaps my activities were not entirely within the law,” he allowed. “But my intent was honest. I was in a critical position and I had fallen into it without any intention to do wrong. Now that I was in it, I was trying my hardest to pull myself out of it, without hurting my investors. The means I was resorting to, in order to swim out of the hole, might not have been sound and might not have been entirely legitimate. But I felt that the end justified the means, and the end, my purpose, was not dishonest.”
He had been paying agents of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency to provide security for himself and his business. Now he had a new job for the agency’s Boston manager: Find out all you can about every man and woman associated with Old Colony. “Follow them everywhere—to China, if necessary,” he ordered. “Spare no expense. I want you to land those people in jail.” He instructed the agents to send one copy of their findings to him and another to the county prosecutor, District Attorney Joseph Pelletier. Ponzi was angling for a two-bank shot to eliminate the threat: quickly knocking Old Colony out of business while positioning himself as a friend of justice.
Ponzi also spent part of the day making plans to open a new Boston office. The hordes on Saturday convinced him that he had outgrown 27 School Street, so he made arrangements to move to a second-floor office next door to Hanover Trust on Washington Street, even closer to the Post building.
When he crawled into bed alongside Rose that night, Ponzi was exhausted. Afterward, he remarked: “That Sunday was the busiest day in all my life I ever put in doing nothing!”
While one Post reporter spent part of Sunday in Lexington watching Ponzi soak up the limelight, other Post reporters were working overtime trying to nail him. Boston’s other newspapers were still ignoring the story, so Richard Grozier and city editor Eddie Dunn sought to press their paper’s advantage—but carefully. One step was to shore up the Ponzi reporting staff. Joining P. A. Santosuosso was Herbert L. Baldwin, a bookish Harvard graduate selected for his knack with financial stories and features. The previous Saturday, Baldwin had written a lively profile of one Lucius Dodge, a man who had meticulously recorded nearly every penny he had spent during the previous thirty years.
The next step was to advance the story. But it was Sunday, and nothing much was happening beyond the commotion at Ponzi’s house. The Securities Exchange office was closed, as were the government offices managing the investigations. Not wanting to lose momentum, the Post staff engaged in the time-honored journalism practice of consulting an outside expert. They did not have to look far.
Clarence Walker Barron was a Bostonian who, as the Post put