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Halfway through the day, Ponzi made arrangements to take over the old Bell-in-Hand pub, a bar on the first floor of the Niles Building that had been shuttered by Prohibition. Though located in the same building as Ponzi’s office, the entrance to the Bell-in-Hand was around the corner on Williams Court. The narrow street, hemmed in by brick buildings and barely wide enough for ten men standing shoulder to shoulder, was better known as Pi Alley. The name derived from the piles of jumbled type, called pi, dumped there by printers from Newspaper Row.

Soon Pi Alley filled with investors. Ponzi’s clerks ushered them inside the old bar in groups of five, then led them up a back stairway to the dingy second-floor offices of the Securities Exchange Company. There they traded their notes for checks drawn on Ponzi’s accounts at Hanover Trust. Ponzi preferred paying by check rather than by cash, suspecting that at least some of his customers would deposit their refunds at the bank he controlled. “It was a case of ‘heads I win,’ and ‘tails you lose,’ ” he chuckled to himself. After receiving their checks, the investors were shown the front way out of the building and disgorged onto School Street, a system that created an assembly line of sorts in which Ponzi notes entered one door and money exited another.

At the end of the day, Ponzi invited the assembled reporters to join him in Henry Chmielinski’s office at the bank. He sat with them for an hour, laughing, joking, and announcing plans to establish something he called the Ponzi Foundation as a vehicle for his intended philanthropy. As a first step, Ponzi said, he would donate $100,000 to a new orphanage, the Home for Italian Children, scheduled to open the coming weekend in the city’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood.

When the reporters asked him about the run of withdrawals, he said casually that he believed he had paid out more than a million dollars, though that was almost certainly an exaggeration. Some reporters automatically downgraded his estimate to several hundred thousand dollars. Ponzi adopted a more sober tone when using the reporters as a means of asking his customers to remain patient when awaiting their money.

“I wish the public would be orderly in presenting their demands for payment because all obligations will be honored. The lack of police protection, which has been withdrawn from me since I have discontinued receipt of investments, should not be taken advantage of by the public,” he said in what amounted to a formal statement to the press. He insisted he was unconcerned by damage to his property, but added, “I do not want any unnecessary crushing, any rioting, or any acts that may be apt to prejudice the welfare of my customers.”

Then, with an absolutely straight face, he criticized the predatory tactics of the men buying notes from his investors at a discount. “I feel I should call attention to the public of this attempt to speculate on their holdings and let them see the inconsistency of giving profit to money sharks who are willing to gamble on the nervous tension of the public.”

Although Ponzi displayed his devil-may-care self with the reporters, the size of the day’s run left him shaken. If it continued at this pace, he might run out of money before he could prove his solvency, end prosecutors’ inquiries, and regain the upper hand. When the reporters left, Ponzi quietly took a precaution against that happening. Under the terms of the certificate of deposit he had given Hanover Trust five days earlier, Ponzi was required to give thirty days’ notice before withdrawing the $1.5 million it covered. Before leaving the bank this day he did just that, hoping he could hold on until he could claim the money on August 27.

Unknown to Ponzi, the commissioner of banks, Joseph Allen, was thinking the same way. Though his investigation had turned up nothing illegal about Ponzi’s banking practices, Allen knew that sudden, massive withdrawals could imperil Hanover Trust or any other bank where