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By Root 467 0

School Street and Ponzi stepped out, the swarm of people began to cheer. He wore a freshly laundered, perfectly pressed copy of his outfit of the day before—blue coat and white pants—but this day he spiced it up with a blue-and-white striped silk shirt and a complementing cravat. Many in the crowd still wanted their money, but something about the elegant little financier had captured their hearts. They had doubts, but they were rooting for him. Certainly they preferred him to the bankers and Barrons of the world. Ponzi acknowledged his fans and, feeling flush, granted reporters a moment of his time. He retold his rags-to-riches story, then offered reporters a populist counterattack against his detractors.

“Bankers and businessmen can easily understand how I could make 100 percent for myself,” he scoffed. “But simply because no one ever made an added 50 percent for the general public they reason that it can’t be. You remember the old rube who saw the giraffe for the first time? He stared at it and remarked, ‘There ain’t no such animal.’ The truth is, bankers and businessmen have been doing plenty for themselves under the present banking system, but they have done little for anybody else.” He outlined yet again his plan for a profit-sharing bank, adding with a touch of sarcasm, “Yes, I know that it is a shock to some of these folks who have been hogging it all, but it is fair and right, and the depositor should get a fair return for his money.”

Gaining momentum, Ponzi made a bid for sympathy by complaining that the deferral of deposits had already cost him dearly: “I would have cleaned up three-and-a-half million dollars this week if the authorities had not asked me to suspend operations pending the result of their investigations,” he said, ignoring the fact that it was he who had volunteered the stoppage. But never fear, he cried—he would not be kept down by the powers that be. “Despite the temporary interference with my business, I intend to continue it on a larger scale than ever. I have opened offices in New York and mean to start branches all over the country. I am in this business to make money. Ethics does not interest me any more than it interests the bankers. They are in the game to make it pay, and I am going to show them up.”

Before he was finished, Ponzi upped his estimate of his personal wealth to $24 million and took a shot at the man who was challenging the Post for the title of chief nemesis: “Now please don’t think that I’m boasting, but I have forgotten more about foreign exchange than C. W. Barron ever knew.”

But Ponzi was not the only one making statements to reporters. “As I told Ponzi the other day,” said Daniel Gallagher, the federal prosecutor, “he is either a benefactor deserving of the blessings of the public officials and all alike—or he should be in jail. Investigation may show that Ponzi is solvent theoretically, yet an offender against the federal law. We are going to find out.” Still, Gallagher would not confirm whether federal authorities would work with local and state prosecutors or on their own.

The withdrawals continued apace, though with Ponzi’s takeover of the Bell-in-Hand the process became more orderly even with the continued absence of the police. On the other hand, the narrow Pi Alley remained uncomfortably crowded and provided fish-in-a-barrel pickings for speculators buying notes below face value. When lunchtime came, Ponzi relieved the tedium, hunger, and thirst by providing free frankfurters, sandwiches, doughnuts, coffee, and cold soda to everyone in line, begging forgiveness for his failure to do so the day before.

“I want to use my customers right,” he told a reporter as the meals were served. “I hope they leave their money with me. There is nothing for them to fear. No one can stop my business, and by leaving their money in my hands those people out there will get the profit they were promised.”

Ponzi added to the circus atmosphere by hiring a sometime vaudevillian with a mop of black hair that looked suspiciously like an animal pelt. For a salary of fifty dollars a