CHARLES PONZI WOULD CELEBRATE THE Fourth of July in 1920 in a grander fashion that he had ever, in the most avariciously luxurious of his dreams, imagined.
His wife, however, was not as enthusiastic. Rose Ponzi, her husband’s one and only and ever, “was tiny, at four foot eleven just the right size for him, with rounded curves that defied the stick-figure fashions of the day. She had luxurious brown hair, lively dark eyes, and skin as smooth as Gianduja cream [chocolate with thirty percent hazelnut].” Several weeks earlier, perhaps feeling that the end was approaching and he wanted to leave something tangible behind, Ponzi announced he would build a castle for his Rose, and not one of his castles in the air. She declined; like him, she came from a poor village in Italy, and it was the simple things of life that made her comfortable. He insisted; it was the expensive things of life that made him salivate, the luxuries of the American promise so long deferred. Again she said no. He begged her to let him show his love in his way, and finally they agreed to compromise; the result, however, favored the husband much more than the wife.
The Ponzis bought a house already erected in Lexington, Massachusetts—less than a castle, certainly, but Charles immediately began to add on and rebuild. Employing dozens of workmen seven days a week, Ponzi supervised construction of a living room so large that it took several seconds to notice the grand piano in a corner. Neither of them played. Behind it was the entrance to a sunroom and, directly opposite, a fireplace with a bearskin rug in front. Persian and Oriental rugs covered the rest of the hardwood floors; chairs and sofas upholstered in damask and velour bordered the rugs; and a $5,000 kitchen, which was more than the cost of many entire dwellings at the time, was powered by gas, a rarity for the era. Tending to the Ponzis’ needs were a gardener, a butler, and a cook, although Rose, unhappy about the latter, gave her a lot of nights off. She would peel her own vegetables, thank you. She would prepare her own pastas and stews, clean up her own messes, supervise her own shopping.
In truth, Rose was unhappy about much in her new home. It was like a museum, one that few people visited, and she was one of the items on display, one that few people ever saw. She did not complain; she knew that her husband was bathing her in materialism because he loved her, but she could not understand what had happened. So unexpected was Charles’s sudden wealth, so excessive—where had it come from? Surely two people didn’t need so much. Unlike most of her countrymen, she had just found the American dream come true, but to an extreme that left her shaken and confused. Shouldn’t the dreams of more Americans come true instead of those of just one couple, a couple now so drowning in excess that they had bought a piano simply as decoration?
What had happened to her sweet Charles? She was puzzled by his behavior; he seemed so unlike the man who had courted her and won her heart.
Then again, maybe they would one day have a couple of children who could play the piano. They certainly tried enough times. They did not need the services of Margaret Sanger and associates; they needed the opposite.
As Michael E. Parrish relates, “By July 4, 1920, according to some estimates, Ponzi’s company was raking in a cool $1 million each week. … Ponzi was mentioned in the same breath with Columbus, Michelangelo, and Marconi.”
ACCORDING TO THE AMERICAN CHRONICLE: Six Decades in American Life, 1920–1980, twelve new words or phrases were added to the English language in 1920. One of them was “profiteer.” It is perhaps fair to say that Ponzi was as responsible for its inclusion as anyone else.
He did not, however, remain a profiteer for nearly as long as he had anticipated. He was sued twice in 1920 for dubious business practices; and although he won both cases, one of them a libel judgment that provided him with a whopping award that started out, before appeals, at $500,000, the more cautious among his investors were becoming more cautious still. They began to pull their money out of the Securities Exchange Company, or at least some of it, fearing that Ponzi was not as legitimate as he seemed. Yes, they reasoned, he had been legally vindicated in the two cases, but where there’s smoke. … Sometimes it just takes a little longer to see the fire, and during that time, as the flames ignite beneath the surface, a great deal of damage can be done.
Fortunately, Ponzi had more than enough revenue on hand to cover the small number of defecting clients, and his ability to pay them, promptly and profitably, reassured his remaining investors. All seemed well. Actually, all seemed better than well, as the July 24, 1920 issue of the Boston Post printed a favorable article on Ponzi’s firm, and the result was even more clients than there had been before the two lawsuits, the most ever.
But despite the Post’s history of favorable coverage, there were doubters on the paper’s staff, and they occupied prominent positions. Both assistant editor/publisher Richard Grozier and city editor Eddie Dunn believed that, what seemed too good to be true was in fact too good to be true, and this was never more accurate than in the world of finance. It was time, they decided, to look more deeply into the Securities Exchange Company than the paper had ever done before. On July 26, just two days after the latest encomium, the Post published an article by Clarence Walker Barron, “recognized internationally as among the foremost financial authorities of the world.” Under a headline that ran …
QUESTIONS THE MOTIVE BEHIND PONZI SCHEME
Barron Says Reply Coupon Plan Can Be Worked Only in Small Way
… Barron wrote, “If Mr. Rockefeller, the richest man in the world, should offer even 50 percent for money and be found to be putting his own money into 5 percent bonds, there would not be much money offered to him by financial people.” In other words, if Rockefeller couldn’t deliver a fifty-percent return, no one could. Barron, after whom the highly respected financial newspaper would be named by family members the following year, continued his article by declaring that even if it were possible to continue to pay the kinds of returns Ponzi was providing, it would be “‘immoral’ because it would be profiting at the expense of a government. ‘When a man gets money from the government without performing a service, it is just the same as when a man takes money from an individual without performing a service for that money.’”
Something was wrong somewhere with Ponzi’s offering; it was just a matter of discovering where. And, as unlikely as it seemed, it was the Post that would soon take on the mission.
In part because of Barron’s reputation, and in part because of the carefully reasoned critique he had offered—he had been poring over records of Ponzi’s dealings for weeks—the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had also begun to look into the dapper financier’s affairs; and as if he hadn’t a care in the world, which might truly have been his attitude, Ponzi volunteered to help. Without being forced, or even asked, he announced that he would stop accepting investments during the period of the commonwealth’s inquiry. He had more than enough money on which to live for an indefinite time, and by showing his cooperation with the investigators, both public and private, he would, ipso facto, be showing his confidence in SEC. In the long run, he thought he just might attract more investors because of his amenability. In the long run, it would be good business.
So, at his own expense and with a broad smile for reporters who asked him about the matter, Ponzi took out an ad in the Post:
PUBLIC NOTICE
I have made a personal agreement with District Attorney Pelletier to cease receiving funds from the public for investment with the
SECURITIES EXCHANGE CO.
27 School St., Boston,
and all branches, until after an official audit is made to determine my solvency and satisfy him that my methods of financial operation are thoroughly legitimate. Meantime, I shall pay all maturing obligations as fast as presented. Further, during the auditing of the books any persons holding unmatured notes can receive back their original investment, without interest, if they desire.
Signed, Charles Ponzi.
Ponzi was convinced that the self-imposed suspension would be a brief one, and that the investigation would reveal his methods to be without flaw. How he could have been certain of either is a mystery whose only solution seems to be self-delusion. A later examination of Ponzi’s books revealed some of the shoddiest record-keeping the auditors had ever encountered, shoddy enough to raise questions not just about paperwork, but about the ethical basis of the entire company.
The reasons for the criticism of the original Ponzi scheme are complicated, to the point of being beyond the scope of this book. Or, at least, this author. Suffice it to say, in the simplest possible terms, that, as has been the case with later Ponzi schemes of a simpler nature, Charles did not have enough money available to him to pay for a run by investors. This was not illegal at the time, only dubious; after all, runs by investors are most uncommon occurrences in normal-to-better economic times. And had newspapers, starting with the Boston Post, not created doubt in the public mind, and, more important, had the Universal Postal Union not changed its regulations concerning International Reply Coupons, Ponzi would have made a lot more money for a lot more people for a lot longer period. Himself notably included.
But the Union was finally catching on to what Ponzi and Old Colony and others were doing; and although it might have been slow to do so, its actions were quick and decisive once they came. There was no way, the Union decided, that it was going to allow its coupons to be used for a free-money swindle in the United States. It tightened its definition of terms so there was not as great a difference in the cash value between one country’s stamps and another’s. Then, shortly afterward, determining that any difference at all could lead to some kind of fraud, it took the wiser course of eliminating the International Reply Coupons altogether. The result was far more complexity than before in mailing items from one country to another, but far less opportunity for fraud.
It was at this point that any company doing business like SEC or Old Colony went from being dubious to being illegal, from being unethical to being fraudulent—and in fact most such firms went quickly out of business. But foolishly, even though he was accepting no more money for the time being, Ponzi stayed in business and, because of the new rules, quickly found his cash on hand shrinking in comparison to cash owed investors. The new rules were about to cause that dreaded run on SEC; after a brief hiatus, Ponzi was about to become a full-fledged crook yet again.
On July 30, with his firm still under voluntary suspension, the Post ran a headline that he might long have been fearing, even with his kindergarten-ish bookkeeping methods:
EXTRA
COUPON PLAN
IS EXPLODED
New York Postmaster Says Not Enough in Whole World to
Make Fortune Ponzi Claims
Ironically, the next story about Ponzi in the Post, and the final nail in the coffin of the Securities Exchange Company, was written not by Barron or by Richard Grozier or Eddie Dunn, but by a man Ponzi had himself hired to do publicity for him, a shill who, in effect, turned state’s evidence.
William McMasters was one of the few upstanding practitioners in a field full of carnival barkers and con men with the newly proliferating typewriting machines. Having signed onto the SEC payroll several weeks before the previous headline spread across the Post’s front page, McMasters was eager to rescue the company’s reputation, just as his employer wanted. But he quickly became suspicious, as he heard his boss say one thing in one meeting with potential investors, then contradict himself in the next session with those he was hustling. So sincere in manner and enthusiastic in presentation was Ponzi that McMasters thought he might simply have gotten carried away, becoming so excited about the prospect of new business that he didn’t know what he was saying. Either that, or he had forgotten McMasters’s presence and didn’t realize he was being overheard; or perhaps he had just gotten to the point at which he didn’t care anymore one way or the other. In which case he would have looked at McMasters as less a name on the payroll than an accomplice. It was not to be.
McMasters began after-hours searches of Ponzi’s office to verify his doubts, and was amazed at what he found. Incriminating information did not just exist, but lay right out in the open—on top of the desk, in unlocked drawers, even in stacks of papers in the corners of the sofa. How the Commonwealth of Massachusetts could have missed this evidence—or, more likely, not understood its significance—is baffling. But just as baffling is the fact that, since the commonwealth’s investigation had begun, Ponzi had apparently gotten even sloppier in his methods. Actually, he did not even have methods; he simply had clutter.
McMasters, however, proved himself expert at sorting through it. He collected the most damning evidence, organized it, wrote an introductory summary to it, and then went to Grozier. The summary was all Grozier needed to hear. He told McMasters to stop talking and begin writing. The headline was the worst news yet for the ambitious Italian.
DECLARES PONZI IS NOW HOPELESSLY INSOLVENT
In the following article, McMasters claimed that Ponzi was at least two million dollars in debt; had never earned so much as a penny from outside the United States, as he had claimed; had once bribed a policeman for a gun permit; and had paid thugs to intimidate, either verbally or physically, reporters primed to publish exposés. McMasters quoted banker Simon Swig, a leader of Boston’s Jewish community, as questioning Ponzi’s sanity, and further denounced Wall Street officials for not having looked more carefully, if at all, into Ponzi’s procedures and his impossibly unheard-of returns.
It is not certain that all of McMasters’s charges are true; some seem exaggerated, even for a man of Ponzi’s moral shortcomings. It also speaks ill of McMasters, and the Boston Post, that the publicist, despite being on SEC’s payroll, received the “fabulous sum” of $5,000 from the newspaper. It is one thing to sit on both sides of the fence, quite another to be paid by both.
A disclaimer, which would have explained McMasters’s supposed dual allegiances, is a staple of today’s journalism. Or, at least, is supposed to be. It would have protected McMasters from later charges of manipulating the truth for financial gain.
One thing, though, was certain from his article: Ponzi had for quite a while now been paying off old investors with money he had taken in from newcomers. Soon both he and his later investors would be broke, and even a giddy self-deceiver like Ponzi must have felt the pressure of living on borrowed time. The famous—although not yet named—“Ponzi scheme” had been in operation now for several months, and its life span was inherently a short one—eight months, in fact, from the first sale to Ponzi’s arrest.
The predictable happened as soon as the McMasters edition of the Post rolled off the presses. The scheme’s lifespan was over. Virtually all of the investors in SEC demanded their money back, and at the promised 50-percent yield. The first few to get to Ponzi made a profit, although less than they had expected. For the rest of the SEC investors, the vast majority of them, it was already too late when the Post was delivered to homes and newsstands. The most that an individual in this group of Ponzie’s patsies could retrieve from his life savings was twelve cents on the dollar. Not enough to send the butcher Ettore Giberti’s children to college. Not even enough to clothe them, or his wife, in such a way that he could be proud.
No longer was Charles Ponzi being mentioned in the same breath as Michelangelo and Columbus.
PONZI SPENT MUCH OF THE Roaring Twenties, ostensibly America’s golden decade, in jail. His Lexington home was gone. His dazzling wardrobe was gone. Most crushingly, his dreams were gone. So vivid had they been, so deeply had he immersed himself in them, that he was barely able to speak when addressed in the courtroom for his first of several sentencings. Writes biographer Mitchell Zuckoff, “The clerk persisted, asking Ponzi if he wanted to plead guilty or not guilty. Again [Ponzi’s attorney Daniel] Coakley prompted him, ‘Guilty.’
“Ponzi seemed startled. But in a timorous voice, he said the word: ‘Guilty.’” When a sentence of five years was announced, Rose fainted briefly, then regained consciousness and began to sob. She had to be helped out of the courtroom by friends who were equally morose.
It was F. Scott Fitzgerald who said, foolishly and yet somehow enduringly, “There are no second acts in American lives,” a statement proven false far more often than true. Yet if the five-year sentence was the end of Ponzi’s first act in America, there would indeed be no second act in his case. He was too notorious, too well known, and too widely distrusted ever again to regain a position of prominence.
Zuckoff deserves to be quoted in detail about the aftermath of Charles Ponzi’s appearance in court:
A few days after Ponzi’s guilty plea, a New York Times editorial offered a remarkably balanced epitaph on the affair. First, it poured on the condemnation, decrying him as “an egregious falsifier and a wholesale betrayer of simple confidences.” But the Times recognized that there was more to Ponzi. “There was something picturesque, something suggestive of the gallant about him, and it is almost possible, though not quite, to believe he was as credulous as his victims and deceived himself as much as he did them,” the Times mused. “Perhaps the disinclination for being harsh in characterizing Ponzi is due to lack of any sympathy for those whom he robbed. … They showed only greed—the eagerness to get much for nothing—and they had not one of Ponzi’s redeeming graces.”
When New Yorkers went to the polls a few weeks later, election officials came across the names of two unexpected write-in candidates for state treasurer: John D. Rockefeller and Charles Ponzi. It was the company he had always hoped to keep.
BY THE TIME HE HAD managed to repay the last of his creditors, it was December 1930, and he still had more than three years to spend in jail on one of the numerous charges that had been filed against him. Released in February 1934, Ponzi, who had never become a U.S. citizen, which had been one of his dreams, was deported back to Italy. According to biographer Donald H. Dunn,
The deportation scene, despite its tragic overtones, in many ways resembled a farewell party for a successful industrialist. Accompanied by seven uniformed immigration inspectors, several of whom carried his luggage, Ponzi was ferried by government motor launch to the cruise liner in Boston Harbor. Dressed immaculately and waving his cap in salute, he came aboard while newsreel cameras whirred and flash bulbs exploded all about him. In a press conference held in one of the ship’s larger suites, he settled his rotund figure into a velvet-covered armchair and explained that friends had provided ninety-five dollars in addition to the $105 paid by the government for a third-class ticket, so that he might travel to Italy first class.
But there would be no more first class for Charles Ponzi after that. He would never know the good life again. In fact, he was about to sink into a gloom more profound than any he had ever known—and, despite his “redeeming graces,” as the Times called them, would never rise out of it.
The “tragic overtones” of the deportation scene to which Dunn refers are in part a reference to the fact that Ponzi could not afford either to take Rose with him or, as things worked out, to send for her later or even to support her in their native land if she had been able to come. That, at least, was the story most often told. But it might be that Rose, although still loving her failed financier in her way, had had enough of the corrupt life, and was simply unwilling to return to Italy as the handmaiden of a criminal. It may be that, although he was broken-hearted and began missing her terribly the moment she departed, she was less affected, having grown weary of her husband’s jolly deviousness.
Two years passed. Two endless years for Charles without his Rose. They wrote to each other often during that time, Ponzi assuring her as he closed each missive that he would see her before long. Then, suddenly, the theory about Rose’s disenchantment turned into fact. It was a blow that Ponzi should have expected but didn’t; and one from which he would never recover. “When he was down, when he was in trouble, when he was in prison, I stuck to him,” Rose told a reporter from the Boston Post. “When he had millions, when he had a mansion, when he had cars, I stuck with him. And now I feel that I have provided my loyalty through thick and thin, and I intend to secure a quiet divorce.”
Divorce. His soul mate Rose, the only woman he had ever loved, wanted to end her union with him. It is not certain how Ponzi found out about the Post article; but that his love for Rose was genuine, surely the most honest feeling he had ever known, cannot be denied. Although the two of them did not realize it at the time, they would never see each other again. They “corresponded with some regularity and with obvious affection”; unfortunately, they also corresponded at great distance, one that would never become closer. Rose kept their correspondence secret from her new husband.
The two of them stayed in the Boston area, with Rose supporting herself as a bookkeeper at a nightclub owned, in part, by the lawyer who had secured her divorce. The nightclub was the famed Cocoanut Grove, most famous because one night in 1942 a fire suddenly erupted inside, a blaze that, with frightening speed, engulfed the club, killing 492 patrons, all of them screaming and wrestling with each other to get out of the inferno.
The terrible irony is that most of them could have made it; there were nine doors on the first floor of the Cocoanut Grove, but virtually none of the night-lifers knew about eight of them, which remained unused during the untamed exodus. They knew only the one through which they had entered, and it was at this door that they piled themselves up into a ghastly mound of charred human rubble.
Ponzi was frantic when he heard about the tragedy. News that Rose had survived was slow in reaching him, but when Charles finally heard it, he was so relieved that it seemed as if he expected to see her prancing down the gangplank of the next ship from America, right back into his arms. He did not, of course, go to meet the vessel; she, of course, was not on board.
By this time, after having worked for several years as an interpreter at hotels in Rome and Venice, Charles had moved to Brazil, where he was employed by an Italian airline. He expected to make more money than he had in Italy. He hoped to see his Rose again. Something in him, though, feared it wouldn’t happen, that good fortune, once having deserted him, would never return. Nor did it. Money in Brazil did not go as far as it did in Italy in those days, and Ponzi, as had been the case ever since his prison terms, was unable to put anything away, unable to earn anything more than it took to keep him alive from week to week. No second act.
In one of his letters after the fire, Ponzi wrote to his ex-wife, “Perhaps I made a mess of your life, but it was not for lack of the necessary sentiment. Here I am, past sixty-one, thousands of miles away from you, physically separated from you these past nine years, legally a stranger to you, and yet feeling toward you the same as I did that night in June when I took you home from the first movies we saw together in Somerville Avenue.”
If Ponzi’s love for Rose never waned, neither did his love for the quick buck. On one occasion, even though still in Brazil, he tried to get Rose to be his accomplice. She couldn’t believe it. She read the letter in which he outlined his scam, and, stunned, a dozen different thoughts running through her head, she reminded him that she was married. He told her there were ways around any obstacle. She reminded him that his schemes always failed. To this charge there was no defense, and in fact, the plan that Ponzi had in mind had fallen apart before Rose’s letter about his failed schemes even reached him. It seems that Charles, to his unaccountable surprise, was unable to raise the necessary “down payment.” Rose feared that, had he had time, he might likely have asked her and her husband for some of the money. What was she to make of this man, her first lover, and in some ways still her one and only, her reprised wedding vows notwithstanding?
His emotional state at this time was as perilous as his finances were, and he could not hold on to his airline job, which had been arranged by a cousin, of whom he seemed to have plenty all over the world. By 1942, after a short period of unemployment, Ponzi was again supporting himself, Zuckoff relates, though just barely, “by running a small rooming house in Rio de Janeiro and teaching English in a private school. Soon the momentary millionaire, with the rise and fall of his scheme, the entire life span of Ponzi’s public story taking place in but a few months in 1920, was living on seventy-five dollars a month, though he optimistically called it ‘quite a tidy sum here.’ His eyesight and his health began to fail, and he remained weakened from a heart attack that had struck him seven years to the day after his deportation.” Not wanting Rose to worry, he had never told her about it.
Actually, Ponzi would soon be in even worse straits, as his rooming house was closed by Brazilian authorities after complaints that most of the rooms were occupied by prostitutes, thumping mattresses and fleecing customers throughout the night. Ponzi claimed not to have known—and given his ever-worsening eyesight and fragile health, he might well have been telling the truth. Or he might have thought that what a paying customer did was his or her or their own business. They had, after all, put down the money for the room.
In 1948, so frail as to be unrecognizable as the sport he had once been, and almost completely blind, he could no longer work at any job. His home now was the charity ward of a Rio hospital, which he would never leave. When an Associated Press reporter found him there, a shell of himself in a shell of a building, Ponzi’s spirits again brightened, delighting in the attention. He told the reporter that “I hit the American people where it hurts—in the pocketbook. Those were confused money-mad days. Everybody wanted to make a killing. I was in it plenty deep, rolling in other people’s money.”
Later in the same year, 1948, Ponzi dictated his last letter to Rose, his hand so unsteady that a hospital employee had to transcribe his sentiments for him. “I am doing fairly well,” he told his great love, “and in fact am getting better every day and I expect to go back home for Christmas.” But where was his home? He had none. He had no one waiting for him.
It didn’t matter anyhow. As Zuckoff clarifies, “It was false hope, but that had always been his strength. Deep within the impoverished old man in the hospital bed remained the optimistic young dandy of 1920.” But in his even younger days, as a troublemaker about to be exiled from his native Italy, he had had his mother beside him, and his thoughts went back to her now: stroking his cheeks, bragging to the neighbors. He had not been in touch with her for several years; his shame was too great. She, of course, could not write to him as his address kept changing, and he would see to it that she never knew his final addresses—the different jails, the cheap apartments from which he had to keep moving because he could not pay his rent, the flophouse for hookers, the charity ward. No, his mother would never learn of these dwellings, not if he could help it. And as he moved ever closer to death, he was haunted by thoughts that his mother had preceded him, never having heard from her boy about his great American success. Apparently he could no longer force himself to raise her spirits with another batch of lies. And for Ponzi, no more lies meant nothing to say to the second great love of his life.
The year after his last letter to Rose, the story ended. Or seemed to. On January 17, 1949, Ponzi died of a blood clot on the brain. Rose had hoped to have his body returned to Boston for a service and burial but, even with her husband willing to contribute, she didn’t have enough money to bring him back to the United States.
PONZI’S OBITUARIES APPEARED WITHIN A day or two in all the Boston papers, and many papers elsewhere, nationally and internationally. The most appropriate mention, though, was longer in coming. It was the inclusion of Ponzi’s name in dictionaries, a claim to immortality that few people can make. In the volume that I have used for more than two decades, The Random House Dictionary of the English Language, Second Edition, the name “Ponzi” appears between “pony truss” and “poobah,” and the definition reads as follows: “a swindle in which a quick return, made up of money from new investors, on an initial investment lures the victim into much bigger risks. Also called Pon-zi game. Ponzi-scheme. (after Charles Ponzi (died 1949), the organizer of such a scheme in the U.S., 1919–1920).”
FORGOTTEN FOR MANY DECADES, PONZI burst back into public notice early in the twenty-first century, when a man named Bernie Madoff, whose methods, if not his charisma, could have led one to think he was Charles’s grandson, committed the biggest fraud in American financial history, a textbook example of the Ponzi scheme that bilked Americans out of the almost inconceivable sum of $65 billion, so great an amount that it threw the nation’s entire economy into a tailspin. In fact, the phrase “Ponzi scheme” has probably been written and spoken more in the current century than the previous one.
On a day in 2008, when Madoff and Ponzi were sharing the headlines, the New York Times once again decided to analyze the latter, contrasting him with the former, and doing so succinctly. “Ponzi was a great equalizer,” the Times wrote, “tapped into the desires of the masses, while for Madoff, the brilliance there, if the allegations are true, is that he tapped into the desires of the elite. They weren’t looking for the big score—they were looking for great returns and brilliant access.”
Since 1920, scores of people have invented new and ever more ingenious forms of swindling the innocent through alleged investment opportunities. But as Madoff so venally proved, it was Carlo Pietro Giovanni Gugliemo Tebaldo Ponzi, an Italian immigrant who came to the United States more than a hundred years ago, who stood as a beacon for them all. Which made him, in his own way, as much a robber baron as those more commonly associated with the term.