Ponzi's Scheme (8 page)

As midnight approached, they stood on the platform waiting for the train. Looking around at the postconcert crowd, Ponzi noticed a lovely young woman. She 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. An oil portrait painted of her as a teenager portrayed her in Mona Lisa–like pose, with a faint smile and a billowing silk blouse pushed low on her shoulders. In the eyes of the painter, a Somerville neighbor, Rose bore a striking resemblance to Lillian Gish, the ethereal beauty of silent film.

Ponzi watched her intently, ignoring the young man who was her escort. Eventually Mrs. Lombard noticed that her normally talkative tenant had dropped his end of the conversation. She searched for the source of Ponzi's distraction.

“Why, there is Rose!” Mrs. Lombard said, spotting the young woman. “I want you to meet her, Mr. Ponzi. She is one of my pupils.”

Mrs. Lombard led a delighted Ponzi down the platform and made the introductions. Rose Gnecco was twenty-one, the youngest of six children of a fruit merchant and a homemaker who had emigrated from Genoa. Born in Boston, she had spent two years in high school but dropped out to take a job as a stenographer and bookkeeper for a Somerville contractor. Rose liked the work, but her fondest dream was to fill a small, happy home with a husband and children.

“How do you do?” she asked Ponzi in a voice he found as sweet as her looks.

An accomplished flirt, normally quick with a quip, Ponzi could do little more than repeat the phrase back to her. The streetcar arrived, and Rose and her escort took a seat a few rows ahead of Ponzi and his landlady. As the trolley clacked and rattled along the steel rails embedded in the street, Ponzi stared at the back of Rose's head. He spent the entire twenty-minute ride that way, his eyes locked on her curls. He would remember the moment his entire life: “Time, space, the world, and everything else around me, except that girl, had ceased to exist.”

When they got home, Mrs. Lombard asked Ponzi what he thought of Rose.

“I think she is wonderful,” he replied. “I am going to marry her.”

“Why, Mr. Ponzi!” Mrs. Lombard said. “You must be crazy!”

A few days later, Ponzi telephoned Rose to invite her to a moving-picture show. His failure to ask her father's permission was a breach of accepted courting etiquette, but she had a mind of her own, and she was attracted to the older, worldly suitor. Rose accepted. That night, they sat side by side in the darkened theater, and Ponzi knew he never wanted to be farther apart. He told her he wanted to marry her. She laughed.

But Ponzi was serious. After so many rootless years, he was ready to settle down. Rose fit his every dream of a loving, beautiful wife, and he pursued her as ardently as he had money and success. Nearly every day he sent sodas or flowers to her office, and whenever she accepted his invitations he would treat her to a night at the movies or the symphony. If she begged off by saying she was taking her nephews and nieces to the beach at Nantasket, Ponzi would show up unannounced on the ferry. He was relentless, and she relented. He told her about his boyhood in Italy and his adventures in the United States, though he left out his years in prison. Whenever he described his activities during that period, he said only that he had been involved in “investigations.” At times he would suggest mysteriously that he had been working on behalf of the Italian government.

Not long after, Ponzi's immediate supervisor died and he was promoted to a position that doubled his salary to fifty dollars a week. Flush with his new job, he felt ready to make good on the vow he'd made the night he'd met Rose. A glistening, full-carat stone in a Tiffany setting would have cost perhaps three hundred dollars, but that was out of his league. So he bought what amounted to a diamond chip. This time when he told Rose he wanted to marry her, she did not laugh. She accepted the ring.

During their engagement, Rose received a letter from Ponzi's mother, welcoming her to the family and sharing some difficult news. Imelde Ponzi suspected her son would not tell his bride-to-be all the stories of his past, and Imelde wanted to be sure Rose knew that her betrothed had spent time in prison. The letter explained the cases in the same innocent light that Ponzi had used when describing them to his mother—he took blame for the forgery to spare the Zarossi family, and he was duped into pleading guilty to the immigrant-smuggling charge. Rose accepted her mother-in-law's explanations and admired Ponzi even more for his chivalry toward Zarossi and the Italian immigrants. It fit perfectly in her mind with his donation of skin to Pearl Gossett, a story she had heard from Ponzi himself. At Imelde's suggestion, Rose did not tell Ponzi that she knew of his prison past. Both women believed it would damage his ego if he thought Rose viewed him as an ex-convict.

On February 4, 1918, Rose Maria Gnecco and Charles Ponzi—he had dropped Carlo altogether—stood before the marble tabernacle inside the basement sanctuary of Saint Anthony's Church on Vine Street, in the heart of Somerville's Italian district. As rays of winter sunlight angled through ground-level stained-glass windows, the Reverend Nazareno Properzi pronounced them husband and wife. Rose's sister Theresa was her maid of honor, and Ponzi's friend Lawrence Avanzino, a grocer, stood as best man. The wooden church pews were filled with Gneccos, extended family members, and friends. Ponzi's joy was tinged only by his mother's absence: He could not afford to bring her over from Italy.

The newlyweds moved into a tidy five-room apartment a few miles from the church, near Tufts College, on tree-lined Powder House Boulevard. Their apartment was the upstairs half of a two-family house owned by Anders Larsen, a Danish immigrant factory worker and his wife, Karen, who lived on the first floor. Ponzi leapt happily into married life—the devil-may-care boy who'd gambled and drunk away his nights in Rome had matured into a devoted husband who hurried home after work at J. R. Poole. He made certain he and Rose were never apart for even a single night. Rose stopped working to care for their home, so there was little money for extras. They went to dinner and the theater once a week—it thrilled Rose to have a night out with no cooking—but most often they stayed home, ate a meal Rose prepared, and listened to music. Sometimes Ponzi would serenade his young wife by strumming a song on the mandolin. Afterward, Rose would gingerly put away her few prized belongings. One, a sterling silver ladle that was a wedding present from a coworker, was tucked into its chamois bag after every use.

Not for Rose the ways of the flapper girls who smoked cigarettes and haunted speakeasies. She believed in old-fashioned domesticity. All she wanted was a husband who loved her, children to love, and a home she could keep to her immaculate standards. She would be happy to stay in Somerville, near her parents, John and Maria Gnecco, and her large extended family of two sisters, three brothers, and assorted cousins, in-laws, nieces, and nephews. With Ponzi, she figured she was well on the way to fulfilling that modest dream.

The new Mr. and Mrs. Charles Ponzi rarely quarreled, but there was occasional tension over their different approaches to money and his endless puzzling over how to obtain it. Rose wanted them to be economical, living carefully within their means “in a cozy little place where we can pay our bills.” Ponzi, she despaired, “had the air and the tastes of the millionaire.”

Rose craved his attention, and grew peeved at times over her husband's dedication to a stamp collection he had kept throughout his years of travel. For some men it would be an idle hobby, but it seemed more for Ponzi. He would pore for hours over the colorful little pieces of paper he had lovingly pressed into several books, as though the different denominations printed on their faces held a secret he was desperate to unlock. It was a fitting hobby for the son of a postman who had died young.

Ponzi's uncommon interest in the foreign stamps might have had something to do with a recent conversation he had had with Roberto de Masellis, manager of the foreign banking department at the Fidelity Trust Company, where Ponzi kept an account. Ponzi had met de Masellis when he'd strolled into the bank one day to exchange some dollars for Italian lire. De Masellis, who had been deputy Italian consul to the United States in Naples before immigrating to Boston, was a loquacious authority on foreign exchange. Unprompted, he launched into a tutorial about fluctuations in the values of European currencies after the Great War. Looking at Ponzi through pince-nez glasses, his banker's paunch restrained by his suit coat, de Masellis explained that Italian lire, once worth five to the dollar, had been so devalued that lately it took eighteen or twenty to equal one dollar. The wild fluctuations created the possibility of hugely profitable speculation for anyone smart, daring, and lucky enough to figure out a way to buy one currency for a low price and sell it when its value increased.

Rose, meanwhile, considered his persistent focus on the stamp books unwanted competition. “Charlie, for heaven's sake drop it and talk to me,” Rose implored him. “What do you think I want to do after I've worked all day? Darn socks?”

Sometimes Ponzi would smile and put down the book, but more often he would gently tease her: “Well, why don't you get hold of something that's worth spending your own time with?”

“Oh well,” she would answer coyly, “if you don't think my husband is important enough to spend some time with . . .” And they would laugh.

To anyone who would listen, Rose would boast about her good fortune in finding him. “When a man is always a gentleman to his wife,” she would say, “behind closed doors as well as in front of them, he's absolutely certain to be, at heart, a good man.” Ponzi, she was sure, was just such a man.

Ponzi was equally delighted by his wife—“An American beauty. My Rose!” he called her. But the rest of his life left him unsatisfied. Ponzi wanted to drape Rose in finery, lavish her with servants, own a home big enough to get lost in. How could they start a family without financial security? “I want you to be able to throw away a hundred dollars,” he told Rose, though he must have known she could never be so extravagant. As they sat together at the small table in their kitchen, Ponzi outlined one intricate moneymaking scheme after another. Once she took a photograph of him sitting there, his feet up on the stove as though he already owned the world. He turned the camera on her and captured a more modest image, of Rose sitting demurely in her nightgown.

When he spun his web of dollar dreams, Rose listened politely. Then she would remind him again that she did not need money to be happy. He went on dreaming. But it was not only about the money, Rose knew. Her husband wanted the world to take notice of him, to celebrate his ingenuity and be dazzled by his charm.

Six months after they married, Ponzi got a chance to prove his financial acumen at Gnecco Brothers, the wholesale fruit business Rose's father and uncle ran near Faneuil Hall. The company was failing, and John Gnecco turned to his bright new son-in-law for help. In September 1918, Ponzi quit J. R. Poole to work full-time on an effort to save Gnecco Brothers. He took the titles of president and treasurer and threw himself into the work, but his efforts proved fruitless. An end-of-the-year accounting showed that the company's assets were worth about six thousand dollars and its liabilities were about eleven thousand. No one faulted Ponzi—the company had been in a hole before he'd gotten involved. But at the very end, Ponzi thought he could wrangle a dramatic way out. He appealed to the company's lawyers to allow him to borrow the six thousand dollars in assets, promising he would use his knowledge of exporting to repay the money plus all the debt within a year. The lawyers said no, and on January 4, 1919, Gnecco Brothers went into bankruptcy.

The same month Ponzi quit J. R. Poole to join Gnecco Brothers, his home life came under stress when Rose's mother died. As much as she loved her husband, Rose's one question when they'd married had been whether she could love him as much as she did her mother. Rose went deep into mourning. Ponzi was pure patience. He lavished her with kindness. He gave her gifts and offered to buy whatever she wanted, though she asked for nothing. She already had what she wanted. Her love for him deepened.

After the collapse of Gnecco Brothers, Ponzi found himself without a job. He had no interest in going back to J. R. Poole or seeking similar work. He was “tired of working for expectations that didn't pay either my rent or my grocery bills, tired of making money for my employers in general and none for myself.” He and Rose had saved enough to carry them for a while, and she had inherited some money from her mother, so Ponzi figured this was his chance to put his dreams into action.

He rented a windowless, one-room office over the Puritan Trust Company on Court Street at the edge of Scollay Square, the heart of Boston's commercial district and home to risqué entertainment at the Old Howard Theater. Ponzi was hungry for the former and ignored the latter. Since his marriage, Ponzi had become immune to all temptations except those with dollar signs. He sat in the office's lone armchair for hours on end, hunched over the rolltop desk scribbling figures on pads of paper. As hard as he tried, his endless reams of calculations did not add up to profits. So Ponzi tried to become something of a commodities broker. His chief mistake was trying to do so with someone else's commodities.

On May 10, 1919, Ponzi was served with a warrant charging him with stealing 5,387 pounds of cheese valued at forty-five cents a pound. Two days later, he pleaded innocent in Boston Municipal Court. Then he received a rare stroke of good luck. The clerk who wrote out the warrant misspelled his surname, substituting a
u
for the
n,
listing the defendant as “Charles Pouzi.” The mistake frustrated efforts by authorities to follow up on the purloined cheese, and the case was continued several times before finally being dismissed for lack of prosecution. Ponzi never told his side of the story—he surely would have claimed it was an innocent misunderstanding.