Ponzi's Scheme_ The True Story of a Financial Legend - Mitchell Zuckoff [9]
Imelde Ponzi doted on her only child, staking her family’s future on the little boy who resembled her so strongly, hoping he would restore the family to its former social and financial rank. Throughout Carlo’s childhood she dreamed aloud about the illustrious future she wanted for him, building what he called “castles in the air” in her stories of the glory she hoped he would achieve. A favorite notion was that her smart, pampered boy would follow the example of one of her grandfathers and become a lawyer and perhaps even a judge.
When Carlo was a few months old, the family moved south to Rome, but then returned to the north and settled in Parma, a prosperous city halfway between Milan and Bologna, where both Oreste and Imelde were born. Carlo entered Parma’s public schools at age five, but when he was ten his parents decided it was time to begin preparing him for the professional life they had mapped out. Oreste and Imelde sent young Carlo to a prestigious private boarding school founded under the auspices of Napoleon’s second wife, Princess Marie-Louise, who had ruled the province for thirty years in the early nineteenth century. Ponzi impressed the nuns who taught him, learning to speak fluent French and generally winning good grades. His chief regret was that although the school was not far from his home, he could visit his parents only on occasional weekends and holidays. His loneliness increased when his father died while he was away.
A modest inheritance from his father, supplemented by some money left to him by an aunt, allowed Ponzi to chase his mother’s dreams and attend college. If he invested carefully and budgeted wisely, his inheritance would be just enough to cover tuition and living expenses. To his mother’s delight, he earned acceptance to the University of Rome, the city’s oldest university, founded six centuries earlier in the name of “La Sapienza,” or wisdom. But five hundred miles from home, free from the control of boarding school nuns, Ponzi had other pursuits in mind. He identified with the stories his mother had told of their aristocratic blood, and he gravitated toward a group of wealthy students who lived la dolce vita. Ponzi did everything he could to emulate them, adopting their manners and especially their spending habits. Their funds seemed limitless, so he dug ever deeper into his fast-dwindling inheritance to dress in the latest European fashions and pick up restaurant tabs for his friends and the pretty girls they met.
His rich friends considered the university a four-year vacation, and so Ponzi acted as though he could, too. He skipped classes, preferring to sleep away his days. At dusk he roused himself from his boardinghouse bed and roamed the city’s fashionable neighborhoods, carousing in cafés, attending the theater, and refining his taste for opera. At midnight he joined the gamblers and thieves in the casinos of Rome’s underground. Young, naive, half-drunk, and reckless with money, Ponzi made an appealing mark. At dawn he would trudge to his rooms to sleep, and then the cycle would begin again. Throughout, he assured his mother he was hard at work, making her proud. But the good times could not last. The combination of an exhausted bank account and a thorough disregard for classes killed any chance he had for a degree. Ponzi looked himself over and made a brutally honest self-assessment: He had become a fop. Worse, an impoverished fop. The easy accessibility of money had spoiled him. He had no choice but to leave Rome.
Before he died,