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By Root 525 0

trying to speed his demise in order to claim his scalp. Ponzi was agitated. He did not know that Richard Grozier, the acting publisher, was directing the coverage from his father’s office, so Ponzi focused on Dunn. The city editor, Ponzi fumed, was “never letting me out of his sight and nothing less than a shower of buckshot would have discouraged him.” Ponzi told Dunn that the newspaper should watch its step or else he would “own its presses.”

At the moment, though, Ponzi had more urgent concerns. A lawyer for one of his investors had filed a motion in Suffolk County Superior Court seeking the appointment of a temporary receiver to take over Ponzi’s business as well as an injunction shutting Ponzi down immediately. The investor, a twenty-one-year-old Boston news dealer, Alton Parker, had deposited $500 on June 14—he was due $750 in just two days. If Parker’s motion succeeded, Ponzi would be finished, done in by a $250 debt.

Fearing the worst, Ponzi sent men scouring the city for Parker to pay him early and render the suit moot. But Parker was nowhere to be found. In the meantime, Parker’s lawyer, David Stoneman, was granted an appearance before Judge William Cushing Wait. Frantic, Ponzi sent attorney Samuel Bailen, a law partner of Judge Leveroni’s, to argue that there was no need for a receiver or an injunction because Ponzi was paying all claims and had more than enough assets to weather any run. To Ponzi’s relief, Judge Wait lived up to his name and delayed issuing a ruling. But the motion remained active, so it represented a grave threat.

Later that day, just when Ponzi had given up hope of quietly locating Parker and settling the case, Parker surprised him by dropping by Hanover Trust. The young man had grown upset when he’d seen his name and news of the suit on the bulletin board outside the Post building. He told Ponzi that the lawyer, Stoneman, had tricked him into signing the complaint. Delighted, Ponzi dragged Parker to Bailen’s office, paid him the full $750, and got Parker to sign an affidavit absolving Ponzi of all claims. Stoneman, whom Ponzi suspected of acting as a straw man for Boston bankers who wanted to crush him, quickly withdrew the lawsuit.

Ponzi had dodged a bullet, but he decided he wanted more protection than Leveroni and Bailen could provide. He thought about strolling over to State Street, the heart of Boston’s business elite, and picking out “one of those lawyers with a Mayflower pedigree. One of those blue-ribbon Pomeranians.” But he remembered how “Ice King” Charles Morse had manipulated the system and gained his release not by complex legal machinations but by well-connected supporters, Clarence Barron among them. Obviously, Ponzi could not hope for help from Barron, so he would get the next best thing. He decided that he needed a lawyer with deep, even intimate knowledge of the men who ran the state. If that lawyer had dirt on the power brokers, even better. Ponzi chose the most connected lawyer in Boston, a friend to the federal and Suffolk County district attorneys, a man who had spent two decades warming the ears of politicians and prosecutors with his whispers: Dan Coakley.

Coakley’s boyish face belied a thoroughly grown-up talent for enriching himself at the expense of others. His work helping Curley push Fitzgerald out of the mayor’s race and his badger-game exploits with Pelletier and another district attorney, Nathan Tufts, were only part of his repertoire. Born in South Boston in 1865, Coakley had dropped out of Boston College because of illness and become a streetcar conductor on a line that ran from ribald Scollay Square to redoubtable Harvard Square. Fired for inciting a strike for higher wages, he’d found work as a boxing referee and a sports reporter for the New York Sun and the Boston Herald. He’d later graduated from Boston University Law School and become a personal injury lawyer, specializing in claims against his former trolley-line bosses. Savoring his revenge, Coakley had framed his canceled conductor’s license and hung it on his library wall.

As corrupt as he