Ponzi displays his fancy walking stick in a pose fit for a drum major.
Boston Public Library, Print Department
CHAPTER ONE
“I’M THE MAN.”
The huge blue car moved slowly through the crooked streets of the old city, its owner sitting on the wide rear seat, his bottom comforted by deep, horsehair-filled cushions that absorbed the bumps from the uneven cobblestones. Heat and sunlight bounced off the brick and granite buildings, baking the Locomobile limousine and broiling its passengers. The morning air bristled with the hint of a developing thunderstorm. When the skies broke loose it would be a welcome relief from the weeks of summer heat that had made downtown Boston ripe with the smells of horses, fish, fruit, fresh-cut leather, and tight-wound rope, all seasoned by salt from the nearby harbor.
At the wheel of the hand-polished Locomobile was a young Irish immigrant named John Collins, wearing the hat and brass-buttoned uniform of a newly created job: motorcar chauffeur. His boss, an Italian immigrant, had taken delivery of the dazzling vehicle only three weeks earlier, paying a thousand dollars in cash above the $12,600 list price to spirit it away from the New York financier for whom it had been custom-built. For the same price a man could own twenty Model T’s, with enough change to buy a modest house. But what was the point of that? In 1920, the Locomobile was the most expensive car in America, dripping with luxury, from its sterling-silver trim to its crystal bud vases. Purring, glistening Locomobiles filled the garages of Carnegies and Vanderbilts, and General John J. “Black Jack” Pershing, commander of American forces in the Great War, had shipped his to France for use as a staff car. The executives at the Locomobile Company of America understood that exclusivity appealed to the elites. They had positioned their automobile in direct opposition to Henry Ford’s backfiring rattletrap of the masses. The company’s ads, with the look of engraved invitations, stated that Locomobiles were built by hand “in strictly limited quantities because the making of any pre-eminently fine article is impossible on a large scale.”
In the short time he had been driving the car, Collins had learned well the daily twelve-mile route that began at his boss’s gracious home in the historic suburb of Lexington, less than a mile from the site of the first skirmish of the Revolutionary War. From there, they rolled east through working-class Arlington and Somerville, into tony Cambridge, across the Charles River, then down Tremont Street to a nondescript building on School Street, less than a block from Boston City Hall. Occasionally there would be detours, most often to a bank, and the boss would use the one-way intercom from the back seat to relay the new directions to Collins. But on this day—July 24, 1920—it was straight from home to office.
Collins slowed as he turned down School Street and saw what awaited them: a mob of several hundred men and women, crowded together hip to hip, chest to back. Viewed from above, it looked like an abstract mosaic of straw boaters and colorful felt cloche hats, punctuated by the dark crowns of a few bowlers. Some in the throng had brought bewildered children, who cried or whined as they struggled to avoid being trampled underfoot. The street was alive with electricity unrelated to the gathering thunderclouds. It came from the horde itself. Each member was a charged electron jittering in a magnetic field created by the man in the back seat of the Locomobile.
The street normally would have been all but deserted on a sultry Saturday in late July. But this was no ordinary day. When the crowd saw the limousine turn down the street they pressed toward it, half in reverence and half in mindless desire. They parted to allow Collins to steer toward the curb in front of the Niles Building, at 27 School Street, the modest home of his boss’s extravagantly immodest firm, the impressively named Securities Exchange Company.
From his perch in the back seat, Collins’s boss could see that some men in the street were holding copies of that morning’s Boston Post. The banner headline trumpeted a victory in one of the America’s Cup races by the American yacht Resolute over its British challenger, Shamrock IV. At a time when anything seemed possible except a legal drink of whiskey, elite sports like yachting and golf had captured the public imagination.
If one subject interested Bostonians more than rich men’s sports, it was the prospect of becoming rich themselves. Undeniable evidence could be found in that morning’s Post, just below the yacht race story. On the left side of the front page, in bold black letters, was the headline that had filled School Street to bursting:
DOUBLES THE MONEY WITHIN THREE MONTHS
A Post reporter had visited 27 School Street a day earlier and acquired a basic understanding of how the Securities Exchange Company claimed to create spectacular profits for its investors. The unbylined story even described the Locomobile limousine and the boss’s Lexington home, which was “furnished with the best” and “does not give the impression of nouveau riche either, for the fine Italian tastes of the owner fixed that.”
The man who owned the fine home, the flashy car, the Securities Exchange Company, the adoration of the people on School Street, and anything else he cared to buy was named Charles Ponzi.
Reading the Post story that morning, Ponzi could chuckle with appreciation of his good judgment in granting the reporter access to his office and home. He had handled the interview himself, but from now on he would rely on advice from a publicity man he had just hired, an ex-reporter named William McMasters. At first, Ponzi had been skeptical about publicity—he had not needed much to achieve success that approached his wildest dreams—but his gentle treatment by the Post made it seem as though every card he turned would be an ace.
The front-page Post story eclipsed two previous stories Boston papers had printed about him and his business. The first, six weeks earlier in the Boston Traveler, had described his company in flattering terms but never mentioned it or him by name. Still, word had spread as to the identity and location of Ponzi’s operation, and hundreds of thousands of dollars had poured in during the weeks that followed. The second story, three weeks earlier in the Post, had been a brief item about a million-dollar lawsuit filed against Ponzi by a furniture dealer. That, too, had helped. The fact that he was rich enough to be sued for a million dollars had attracted swarms of new investors.
The brief account of the enormous lawsuit had piqued the interest of the Post’s young acting editor and publisher, who had ordered the follow-up feature story that appeared this day. In it, the Post reporter printed Ponzi’s comments at length and without challenge, as though Ponzi had delivered them with his hand on a Bible. During the course of several hours of discourse, the thirty-eight-year-old entrepreneur had offered a condensed, sanitized version of the seventeen years since he had emigrated from Italy. Then Ponzi had explained his business in broad, confident terms, telling how it was built on a modest and unlikely medium: International Reply Coupons, slips of paper that could be redeemed for postage stamps. He’d described his company’s growth—from pennies to millions of dollars in seven months—and had boasted of the opening of branch offices from Maine to New Jersey. The reporter had filled a notebook with Ponzi’s comments and played the notes back to Post readers as clear and sweet as a song from a Victrola.
Ponzi had capped the interview with a priceless assertion, and again the reporter had obliged him by printing it: “I get no pleasure out of spending money on myself, but a great deal in doing some good with it. Always I have said to myself, if I can get one million dollars, I can live with all the comfort I want for the rest of my life. If I get more than one million dollars, I will spend all over and above the one million trying to do good in the world. Now I have the million. That I have put aside. If my business closed tomorrow I am sure that I will have that amount on which to make myself and family comfortable for the rest of our days.” If anyone doubted how secure Ponzi felt, the story continued: “Ponzi estimates his wealth in excess of $8.5 million.”
With a maestro’s touch, Ponzi had struck a perfect balance among the forces competing to control the new American identity: altruism and avarice. Now that he was all set, he insisted, he had no need for more investors. But he would continue accepting their money out of the goodness of his heart, so they could join him and his family in savoring the finer things in life.
If there was any reason for the people of Boston to be suspicious of Ponzi, they would not find it in the morning Post. The story read with all the confidence of the advertisements the paper ran that promised disappearing dandruff to wise buyers of Petrole hair tonic, or “sunshiny” stomachs courtesy of Goldenglo tablets, or relief from chronic constipation in a tin of Fruit-a-Tives.
The closest the story came to skepticism was to mention that federal and state authorities had looked into Ponzi’s extraordinary investment plan. But the reporter defused that land mine in a single sentence, writing, “The authorities have not been able to discover a single illegal thing about it.” Ponzi could not have hoped for a more sterling endorsement.
Adding to Ponzi’s delight, below the front-page story was an ad for a prominent local bank, the Cosmopolitan Trust Company. The bank was trying to drum up new deposits by guaranteeing a generous interest rate: 5 percent a year, compounded monthly. To Ponzi, the ad was a divine gift. For months he had been comparing his promised rate of return—50 percent in forty-five days—to the paltry sum paid by banks. Here was the same comparison on the front page of the Post, the self-proclaimed “Great Breakfast Table Paper of New England.”
A working man with one hundred dollars to invest, reading that day’s Post over a bowl of Grape-Nuts, faced two choices of seemingly equal reliability but vastly different outcomes. Even in the margins of his newspaper, he could calculate that depositing his hundred dollars in the Cosmopolitan Trust Company would yield him an annual profit of five dollars and change. That was assuming the bank did not fail in these days when federal insurance for deposits was barely a whisper of an idea. Or he could entrust his hundred dollars to this Charles Ponzi fellow and watch it multiply over and again during the same year.
If he reinvested his hundred dollars plus interest after each forty-five-day period, he would walk away with more than twenty-five hundred dollars after a year. If he let it ride for a second year, he would pocket more than sixty-five thousand dollars. It was an unimaginable sum at a time when the average U.S. income was about two thousand dollars, the president of Harvard University was paid six thousand dollars, a Men’s Ventilated Raincoat could be ordered from the Sears catalog for less than twelve dollars, a can of codfish cakes for a family of three cost twenty-five cents, and the newspaper he held in his hands cost two cents. Only a fool would choose the bank’s interest over Ponzi’s.
Having read the Post and done the math, would-be investors had begun assembling on School Street long before the Locomobile had even started the trip from Lexington. They came from all corners of Boston and beyond, a miniature League of Nations, with immigrants brushing shoulders with Brahmins, Italians mingling with Spaniards, Irish alongside English, Greeks chatting with Poles. Among them were Swedes, Frenchmen, Jews, blacks, and Portuguese, new and old Americans. Kitchen maids stood alongside businessmen, office boys squeezed against society matrons. It was the one place in the tribal city where the only denomination that mattered was engraved on the bills clutched in investors’ hands.
Bookbinder Arthur Case of the city’s Dorchester neighborhood was ready to invest a whopping three thousand dollars, just a week after his wife, Clara, had put in one thousand. Their neighbor, candy-factory worker William Hoff, emptied his wallet and came up with seventy-eight dollars. Boston florist Philip Feinstein was ready to place eleven hundred dollars in Ponzi’s hands, while Patrick Horan had stuffed sixteen hundred dollars into his billfold. Benjamin Brown intended to add six hundred dollars to the six hundred he had deposited just four days earlier. Stable worker Timothy Donovan of suburban Somerville and Alfred Authoir of nearby Cambridge each expected their fifty-dollar investments to grow into seventy-five dollars by the first week of September. Print shop foreman Percy Stott of Methuen had made the thirty-mile trip to Boston for the third straight day, this time to add one hundred dollars to the two hundred he had already invested.
Luggage shop owner Joseph Pearlstein came bearing not cash but a note signed by Ponzi that would allow him to collect fifteen hundred dollars. He had heard about the Securities Exchange Company from none other than the lovely Rose Gnecco Ponzi, who had stopped at his Dorchester store the first week in June. She had come by to purchase new bags for a trip she and her husband, Charles, were planning to Italy, to visit his mother. Rose Ponzi had proudly described her husband’s remarkable financial skills to the luggage vendor, and Pearlstein had been so impressed he had invested one thousand dollars. Now his note was due, so Pearlstein was in line to collect his original stake plus his five-hundred-dollar profit. But he would not invest again. Reluctant to press his luck, Pearlstein was satisfied with one spin of the wheel.
The crowd also included a fourteen-year-old boy in short pants named Frank Thomas. He earned $7.20 a week running errands, and he was eager to invest ten dollars with Ponzi. Charlie Gnecco of Medford, six miles away across the Mystic River, was there for his fourth and largest investment of the month, one thousand dollars. And why not? His baby sister, Rose, was happily married to the man in charge of the whole operation. If she had faith in Ponzi, well then, Charlie Gnecco did, too. Carmela Ottavi of nearby Chelsea brought two thousand dollars to add to the six hundred she had invested twelve days earlier. Ponzi’s chauffeur, John Collins, had already thrown in five hundred. Watching the crowd from the front seat of the Locomobile, he resolved to add seven hundred more.
While some had come because of the Post story, others had heard from friends and relatives of the profits to be found on School Street. Although the Post seemed to have only just discovered the Securities Exchange Company, the streets of Boston had been buzzing about it and Ponzi for months. Some people had heard testimonials from men like Fiori Bevilacqua of Roslindale, whose friends knew him by his anglicized name, Frank Drinkwater. In a lifetime of hard work as a laborer and a real estate investor, Bevilacqua had painstakingly amassed the small fortune of ten thousand dollars. In June he had entrusted the entire amount to Ponzi, then spent the next few weeks sharing the news of his impending good fortune. His friends listened, and they came, too. When the Post story hit the streets, the Securities Exchange Company was already averaging more than a million dollars a week in new investments. If the pace held, it would soon be a million dollars a day.
But potential investors were not the only ones focused on Ponzi. The Post story aroused the interest and concern of some of the most powerful men in Massachusetts. Several of them had already begun asking questions. The newspaper’s inexperienced acting publisher, Richard Grozier, who had ordered the feature story after reading about the million-dollar lawsuit, directed his staff to dig deeper into Ponzi’s rise from poverty to prosperity. Similar orders issued from Boston’s federal prosecutor, Daniel J. Gallagher, and Massachusetts Attorney General J. Weston Allen, whom the Post reporter had tracked down vacationing on Cape Cod. The attorney general, as priggish as he was ambitious, answered vaguely that one of his assistants, a young prosecutor named Albert Hurwitz, was dutifully investigating Ponzi. Two other public officials also took note of the Post story: Boston’s corrupt district attorney, Joseph Pelletier, and the state’s incorruptible new bank commissioner, Joseph C. Allen, who had only recently been named to the job by Governor Calvin Coolidge.
Collins eased the Locomobile to a stop, hopped out, and hustled to the back door. It swung open and the man himself alighted from the car, stepping onto the wide running board, then planting his feet on the sidewalk. If the crowd had expected a large man, it would have been sorely disappointed. Ponzi was five foot two, shorter than some of the arm-weary newsboys selling their papers in the crowd. He weighed just 130 pounds fully clothed after a heavy meal.
But what he lacked in size he made up for in style.
Ponzi was a human dynamo, handsome in his own way, with a regal nose, a dimpled chin, and full lips that curved upward in a barely suppressed grin. Usually he did not suppress it, and the resulting smile seemed almost too big for his face, as though painted on by a child. On his head was a jaunty golfing cap—a smart weekend fashion statement, more casual than his usual straw boater. Under the hat was a crown of brown hair flecked with gray, slicked down and razor-parted on the left side, with a low pompadour in front. The only signs of age were starbursts of wrinkles around his lively brown-black eyes, seemingly etched not by worries but by a lifetime of laughter. He wore a new Palm Beach suit, impossibly crisp given the sultry weather, with a silk handkerchief peeking from the coat pocket like a fresh-cut daffodil. His polished shoes clicked and clacked on the stone sidewalk. A starched white collar was held in place by the knot of his dark moiré silk tie, which sported a dazzling diamond-topped pin. His right hand gripped a gold-handled malacca walking stick, similar to one favored by a showman of an earlier age, P. T. Barnum. His left fist held the handle of a leather satchel that would prove too small for the bushels of cash awaiting him this day.
Looking around, Ponzi could not help but beam. Much later, when writing his memoirs, he would remember the street looking as though “the two million inhabitants of Greater Boston were all there!” All to see him. In fact, Ponzi overstated the region’s population by a half million people, but inflation of numbers was something of a habit with him. Emerging with Ponzi from the car was a stern-faced, heavily armed bodyguard from the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, which rented out its agents when they were not busting “Red menace” unionists or chasing bank robbers.
Security had lately become a concern for Ponzi, whose business was generating so much cash it made him fear that he was a ripe target for thieves. To reinforce the Pinkertons, Ponzi had obtained a gun permit three months earlier from the police department in Somerville, where he’d lived before moving to Lexington. A small, blue steel pistol, a .25-caliber Colt automatic, rested snugly inside a vest pocket. Another pocket held contents he was much more eager to wave in public: a bank statement, in his name, for $1.5 million.
“There’s Ponzi!” someone shouted when he stepped from the car. On that cue the masses moved as one. They surrounded him and his guard, some pleading for a moment of his time, others content to pat him on the back, and some thrilled simply to lay eyes on the Merlin of money. A few skeptics mingled among the believers. One was loudly labeling the Securities Exchange Company a bogus get-rich-quick scheme when Ponzi arrived.
“I’d like to see the man who could do it—” the doubter shouted.
Faced with the challenge, Ponzi called out, “Well, I’m doing it! I’m the man!”
The words emerged in a mellifluous tone, accented only slightly by his native Italian. Ponzi sometimes spoke in staccato bursts, but more often he had a pleasing, charismatic voice—women heard a mildly insistent suitor; men, a trusted friend. It was a voice that would have fit rising movie star Rudolph Valentino, if only his films had sound.
Ponzi kept moving—past two uniformed policemen at the doors of the Niles Building and up the narrow flight of stairs to his cramped second-floor offices. Along the way he had to push into the stairwell past people who formed what one observer called “a swirling, seething, gesticulating, jabbering throng.” Some kind of commotion was happening down the hall from his office, but Ponzi paid it no mind. He stepped through a glass-paneled door into a small anteroom his company used as a waiting area. There, each investor was met by one of the sixteen clerks and assistants, many of them added to the payroll in recent weeks to handle the torrents of cash.
Moving deeper into the office, prospective investors would be turned over to a team of agents led by one John A. Dondero, a distant relative of Ponzi’s by marriage. After making sure the investors had cash on hand or endorsed money orders, Dondero would lead them to a second, larger room, divided roughly in half by a four-foot wooden barrier topped by iron bars. Between the bars and the counter were slim openings for three tellers.
Investors slid their cash to one of the young tellers. Often they were three particular girls: Angela Locarno, her sister Marie Locarno, and their friend Bessie Langone. In return for cash, the investors received promissory notes, receipts really, that guaranteed the original investment plus 50 percent interest in forty-five days. The receipts bore Ponzi’s ink-stamped signature, which led many to call them simply “Ponzi notes.” Lately the waves of cash had come crashing over the counter so quickly that the bills were dumped into wire baskets, to be sorted when the tide rolled out. At slower times the cash was funneled from the clerks directly to a man named Louis Cassullo, an unpleasant acquaintance from Ponzi’s past whom Ponzi neither liked nor trusted. Where Cassullo was concerned, Ponzi applied the old adage about keeping friends close and enemies closer. From Cassullo, the cash was counted, bundled, and deposited into one of Ponzi’s fast-growing bank accounts. That is, minus any stray bills Cassullo siphoned off.
The other half of the room, a space perhaps eight by fourteen feet, was partitioned off for an office shared by Ponzi and a pretty, dark-haired girl named Lucy Meli, his eighteen-year-old chief bookkeeper, secretary, and gal Friday. The walls of the office were bare, and the furniture consisted of three chairs and a single flattop desk, at which Ponzi and his young assistant sat on opposite sides, facing each other. Visitors were surprised to see no adding machines or file cabinets. Despite the enormous sums of money pouring in, the offices of the Securities Exchange Company were dark and dingy, with a few scuffed, mismatched pieces of furniture and the lingering smell of the Turkish cigarettes Ponzi smoked in a five-inch, ivory-and-gold holder.
As soon as Ponzi arrived, his overwhelmed workers rushed to greet him with word of trouble. The fuss that he had passed in the hallway was the opening of a competing, copycat investment plan that called itself the Old Colony Foreign Exchange Company. Its owners had had the temerity to rent an office on the same floor of the Niles Building as Ponzi’s Securities Exchange Company. Old Colony was promising the same 50 percent in forty-five days, and its organizers were more than happy to steal away the overflow of would-be Ponzi investors who grew tired of waiting in line. The Old Colony promoters had even printed up promissory notes that strongly resembled Ponzi’s.
Ponzi understood instantly that some investors might be confused into thinking that the two companies were one and the same. He also quickly surmised that his rivals had rented the rooms down the hall from a man named Frederick J. McCuen, who ran a struggling business selling and repairing electrical appliances. Weeks earlier, when the mobs had begun to overrun the Niles Building, McCuen had briefly worked for Ponzi in a minor capacity. With Old Colony, McCuen had seen an opportunity to get in on the ground floor.
Outside the offices of this upstart Ponzi imitator, a large man in a Stetson hat was beckoning investors who had come to see Ponzi.
“Right this way!” cried the ballyhoo man. “A new million-dollar company!”
As Ponzi’s employees described the scene down the hall to him, Ponzi emptied his pockets, searching for a key to a strongbox that held receipts from the previous day. Large sums of ready cash might be needed to handle this Old Colony threat. Out of Ponzi’s pocket came loose cigarettes, several bunches of keys, and a roll of bills so fat it “would have made anyone but a bank teller gasp,” as one witness described it. After finding the strongbox key, Ponzi took a moment to consider the news of his competition.
As a mother bear knows its young by scent, Ponzi knew that the Old Colony operators were frauds and scam artists—though he could never say how he knew. Privately, Ponzi assessed the situation and reached a troubling conclusion: “They had me by the small of the neck, and the best that I could do was squirm.” Though he could not denounce them directly, he would sic his Pinkerton agents on them to dig up whatever dirt they could find. But that would take time.
In the meantime, he could at least scare them. Ponzi grabbed the black, candlestick-style telephone on his desk and asked the operator to connect him with the headquarters of the Boston Police Department. In recent months, Ponzi had made many friends on the force; by some estimates, nearly three-quarters of the department had invested with him. Low pay had long been a nettlesome issue among Boston police officers, and Ponzi’s investment offer was a welcome supplement to their paltry incomes. Indeed, the department was filled with newly hired officers, replacements for eleven hundred veteran policemen—more than two-thirds of the force—who were fired nine months earlier by Governor Coolidge for striking over wages and working conditions. Several patrolmen even moonlighted as agents for Ponzi, collecting investments from others for a cut of the take.
Ponzi could have called Captain Jeremiah Sullivan at Police Station No. 2, located around the corner from the Niles Building on City Hall Avenue. But instead he called headquarters to seek help from a fellow immigrant, Inspector Joseph Cavagnaro. The inspector had no trouble finding 27 School Street. He had invested nine hundred dollars on June 16, and then over the next four weeks had added $1,750 more. Providing for his wife and four daughters, aged eleven to eighteen, would be much easier when his notes began coming due in eight days.
Ponzi explained the situation, strongly suggesting that Old Colony was deceiving the public by making investors think they were trusting their money to a firm associated with Ponzi. That could be bad for business, and anything bad for business would be bad for investors like Cavagnaro. The inspector got the message. Ponzi hung up, turned on his heel, and headed out of his office and into the hallway. His anger rising, Ponzi steeled his resolve for a nose-to-chest confrontation with the oversized ballyhoo man.
Halfway down the hall, he caught sight of a tired-looking woman with a baby in her arms. Ponzi’s rage vanished. He brought his quick march to a halt. “Here, let me help you,” he said in Italian, their shared native tongue.
She explained that she had grown exhausted while waiting to collect $150 on a Ponzi note that had just come due. Ponzi took the note and gently asked her to wait a moment. He returned to the offices of the Securities Exchange Company and emerged a few minutes later, money in hand.
“Buona fortuna!” he told her as she walked away. “Good luck.”
She was swallowed up in the crowd just as the ballyhoo man resumed his chants. When he saw Ponzi, the big man turned his come-on into a taunt.
“Ah, Mr. Ponzi!” the man called. “Want to put in two thousand?”
“Mister,” Ponzi shot back, “if you’ve got two thousand you’d better hang on to it for bail. There’ll be a couple of police inspectors down to see you in a few moments.”
Not waiting for a reply, Ponzi whirled around and returned to his office. Soon, Inspector Cavagnaro strode through the door. He wanted to help, but he explained to Ponzi that he had no evidence of wrongdoing by the Old Colony gang. He had no cause for arrest. Still, Ponzi could be pleased that Cavagnaro’s presence had put the Old Colony crowd on notice that they were being watched and that Ponzi had friends in high places. That would have to do until the Pinkertons could get busy with their investigation. All Ponzi needed was a little time. He had figured out how to turn this soon-to-be-exhausted gold mine into a permanent mint, one that would make him as rich and respected as the Brahmins who ran this town. At least that was the plan. In the meantime, he could not let anything derail him.
Investors kept pouring into the office the rest of the day, and by the time Ponzi locked the doors after six that night he had taken in more than $200,000. That did not include the receipts from his two dozen similarly overwhelmed branches. It was his best day since he had birthed his brainstorm the previous summer.
As Ponzi sat back in the Locomobile for the ride home to Lexington, the basement-level presses of the Post began rumbling to life once more. By coincidence, the newspaper’s offices were only a hundred yards away from the Securities Exchange Company, around the corner on Washington Street, a Colonial-era cow path known as Newspaper Row. If he had stayed in the city a few more hours, Ponzi could have picked up a copy of the Boston Sunday Post still warm and inky. This time the story about him would be at the very top of the front page, with a headline set in bold type. It would have photos, too, not only of him but also of his wife, his mother, the scene outside 27 School Street, and his fabulous Lexington home.
But the glorious tide that had carried him so far, so fast, was threatening to overwhelm him. The Post’s Sunday story would not be as flattering as the one that had appeared this morning. It would signal the Post’s rising doubts about his honesty and rally authorities to intensify their sluggish investigations. Ponzi was about to get a run for his money.