A NOTE ON SOURCES

This is a work of nonfiction. Though I have tried to bring Ponzi’s story to life by writing this book in narrative form, I have invented none of the dialogue, altered none of the chronologies, and imagined none of the scenes described herein. All thoughts and feelings ascribed to persons came from the persons themselves, based on spoken or written comments. Descriptions of what a person experienced through his or her senses came either from the person or from photographs, newsreel footage, detailed street and fire insurance maps, or accounts in newspapers of the day. When I wrote that Rose Ponzi blushed, for instance, it was because a reporter had witnessed and recorded it. Put simply, I employed no fictional devices under the umbrella of literary license.

This approach was important for several reasons. First, given the nature of the subject himself, it seemed essential to draw a bright line between real and fake. Second, the truth was better than anything I could have invented. Third, Ponzi’s true story was already at risk of being permanently obscured in misinformation as a result of a “fictionalized biography” and other imaginary tales. One writer referred authoritatively, and erroneously, to Ponzi’s brothers and sisters, and then let his fantasies run amok when describing Ponzi’s Lexington home: “Interior decorators charged him half-a-million dollars to make the home livable. One hundred thousand dollars went to stock his wine cellar with clarets and brandies from the 1870s. He had a house staff of fifteen employees including armed guards with orders to shoot any prowler on sight. The twenty-acre estate was surrounded by a brick wall topped with barbed wire.” And so on.

Important insight into Ponzi, as well as dialogue and certain scenes, came from his little-noticed autobiography, The Rise of Mr. Ponzi. Portions of his memoirs are, like the man himself, flawed by self-aggrandizement and unreliability. However, much of Ponzi’s account squares with verifiable facts. I have used Ponzi’s version primarily to illuminate his unique impressions of people and events, and I have been careful to avoid repeating his errors. Moreover, I have used expanded source notes in several places to sort through the more tangled or incredible aspects of his account. Finally, newspaper stories without page numbers came, almost without exception, from the archives of the Boston Globe, where clips were cataloged by date without notations of the pages on which they appeared.