1920 (17 page)

In retaliation, the company fought back like a cell of terrorists. Unable to find the miners who had actually made the bombs, the man took his revenge on the miners who were now toiling for him again, who had had nothing to do with the destruction of the cars, who had in fact been intending to fill the cars for transport. The man's goons beat his employees into dizziness, unconsciousness, and in a few cases to death. Meanwhile, the families of all miners were imprisoned in tent cities at the foothills of nearby mountains, with armed guards making sure they did not leave. They begged for permission to depart briefly, to find out about loved ones who had gone to war against the man. They were told to stay where they were.

It was not until the first breaths of autumn that the strike finally ended, and for reasons that, at least in part, had nothing to do with labor–management relations. As Savage relates,

The demand for coal was falling dramatically. Non-union fields undercut those that were unionized. Wage cuts and unemployment eroded the miners' determination. [A.F.L. head John L.] Lewis stopped the organizing drive before it failed.

The coal operators now delivered the coup de grace: an injunction. It bore the names of 316 complainants, nearly every non-union coal company in West Virginia. The injunction restrained the miners in every conceivable way. They were even barred “from further maintaining the tent colonies of Mingo county or in the vicinity of the mines of the plaintiffs.”

The next year, 1921, most of the violence moved to coal mines in “Egypt,” the nickname for the stretch of land where southern Illinois meets Missouri and Kentucky. In Matewan, most of the miners were on the job again, although at a slightly lower wage than they had been making before the strike. It was all too typical.

What was different about Matewan, although it did the miners no good in the long run, was that the local government sided with labor. In virtually all other cases, government and management were virtually a team, with the former sometimes providing weapons and manpower to
the latter so they could defeat the miners. When defeat inevitably came for them, they were left to wonder how they would survive, much less prosper, against the wealthy establishments that both hired and vilified them.

To former president Roosevelt, who had died the previous year and who had been as perceptive a historian as he was a chief executive, it all would have seemed preordained. In one of his many books, he had stated his position with a heartlessly succinct eloquence. History, he wrote, is an ongoing struggle “between the men who possess more than they have earned and the men who have earned more than they possess.” He left no doubt about the victor's identity.

IN
1921,
ONLY ONE INCIDENT
of strike-related violence was reported near Matewan, but, inevitable though it probably was, it hit the town hard. While walking up the steps of the town hall in nearby Welch, West Virginia, where he was to stand trial on trumped-up conspiracy charges related to another strike, Sid Hatfield was accompanied by a second defendant and their wives. Suddenly gunshots shattered the early-morning quiet. One of them hit Sid in the arm and another three or four in the chest. He was dead before he hit the ground. Mrs. Hatfield almost fainted, then began crying, wailing her husband's name over and over, eventually lunging forward and hugging him one final time, kneeling on the steps beside him and holding him tightly, as if to squeeze life back into him. Those who sought to carry the body away had to fight off Sid's sudden widow, as gently as they could.

No one ever caught the killer or killers. It was not surprising, but what
was
surprising was that there were no attempts to avenge Sid's death. Someone knew who had pulled the trigger; someone knew who had ordered the hit. But Sid was dead; nothing would change that, and efforts to get even would only lead to further efforts to get even, and at some point it all had to end; life had to go on in the southwest corner of West Virginia without the innocent living in constant and pointless fear.

Besides, by this time Matewan was spent, emptied of the energy that revenge demanded. The town had gone back to work, and the old, familiar grimness through which they lived had long since draped itself over the people who lived on the land above the mines.

DRIVING INTO MATEWAN TODAY ON
State Route 49, one does not see a sign that says “Welcome” or boasts a slogan like “Home of the 1972 West Virginia Class AA Wrestling Champions.” Instead, one sees a historical marker with the words “Matewan Massacre” serving as the headline:

In 1920 area miners went on strike to gain recognition of UMWA. On May 19 of the same year, twelve Baldwin-Felts Agency guards came from Bluefield to evict the miners from company houses. As guards left town, they argued with town police chief Sid Hatfield and Mayor Testerman. Shooting of undetermined origins resulted in the deaths of two coal miners, seven agents, and the mayor. None of the 19 men indicted were convicted.

It takes almost as long to read the marker as it does to drive through the town. The population is less than five hundred today, and to many of them coal-mining doesn't seem so bad when there's nothing else to do. New equipment has made the job less physically demanding than it used to be: much of the heavy-duty digging is done by machines, and fleets of powerful fans keep the air circulating below the ground, reducing toxins and stagnation. Still, it is coal-mining, and coal does not grow on trees, ripe and easy for the picking. Those who dig for it remain men who have but a nodding acquaintance with sunshine.

T
HERE WERE, HOWEVER, MORE HUMANE
ways to mistreat the American working man than to damage his body and perhaps terminate his existence. There were ways to steal from him without affecting his employment at all, especially the man who had a good enough job to have put some money away for his family and the future he was hoping to provide them. An Italian named Carlo Pietro Giovanni Gugliemo Tebaldo Ponzi, sometimes known by the aliases Charles P. Bianchi and Charles Ponei, discovered one of those ways.

Ponzi, who became better known by the Americanized version of his first name, Charles, was born in 1882 in the northern Italian province of Ravenna, the small town of Lugo, in “a decidedly working-class neighborhood; down the street was the ghetto where Lugo's large Jewish population had been required to live since the 1700s. At the other end of the street was the Church of Pio Suffragio, a gloomy sanctuary filled with baroque stuccos of cherubs and frescoes depicting the deaths of saints.”

No wonder he wanted to get out. Nor is it any wonder that others wanted to get rid of him. As a boy, virtually his sole interest was discovering how much trouble he could cause in the neighborhood, how many little crimes he could commit without getting caught, how many saints he could appall even though they had passed from the realm of the living. Biographer Donald H. Dunn tells us “that relatives weary of paying his fines for gambling, petty theft, and forgery, had put up the money to get the young man out of the country.” It was the United States to which they exiled him, not in hopes of his finding golden streets, but in hopes that American law-enforcement officials would keep him either in line or in prison.

Ponzi felt no guilt about his relatives' chipping in to get rid of him. In fact, he could not have been happier. Not so his mother. When Carlo was but a child, Mrs. Ponzi “dreamed aloud about the illustrious future she wanted for him, building what he called ‘castles in the air' in her stories of the glory she hoped he would achieve. A favorite notion was that her smart, pampered boy would follow the example of one of her grandfathers and become a lawyer and perhaps even a judge.” Instead, poor Mrs. Ponzi found her son
in need
of lawyers and
facing
judges. As for the “castles in the air” that floated through Ponzi's dreams, he would build them, all right, but then he tried to sell them—and that was when his problems began. Many years, however, awaited that sorry occasion—and its sorrier results.

In the meantime, Mrs. Ponzi was disconsolate. She had always hoped her son would succeed in Italy. She wanted the family to see him triumphant, to enjoy the neighbors' envy of her; she wanted to be a witness to his life, not someone who learned about it long-distance in letters. When he was shipped across the ocean, she chose to believe that
he
was the one who had decided on the voyage, not virtually the entire
villaggio
of Ravenna. Yes, that was it; he had simply made up his mind to achieve his success on a grander stage than Ravenna. His vision was ambitious; so, too, must be his
teatro
.

Mrs. Ponzi might have admired her son's ambition, but no sooner did his boat pull away from the dock than more tears began to flow down her cheeks than her flowered handkerchief could absorb. As for Ponzi, he too
felt the immediate sting of absence. Later in life, he would conclude that leaving his mother was the most sorrowful event of his younger days, and in some ways one from which he never fully recovered. Other than that, though, he was pleased with his expulsion—this despite the fact that he passed through Ellis Island in 1903 with but a few dollars, a few shirts and pairs of pants, and a train ticket from New York to Pittsburgh.

But even then, Ponzi's belief in his ability to fleece his fellow man never wavered. His ambitions far outran his years, and he could realize those ambitions only with the big score, the ultimate scam. In the meantime, like anyone else on the make in the land of liberty, he would work his way up the ladder, mastering a variety of small deceits. Pittsburgh would be his starting point. He had been told that a distant cousin awaited him there, a man who would be able to provide employment, something to get himself started.

But Pittsburgh was not the place for him, and his dissatisfaction was evident after a matter of days. He and his relative did not get along with each other—and, to make things worse, the relative did not, as advertised, have a job for Ponzi. He did not even have any suggestions, other than the steel mills, and these Ponzi would not even consider. Further, the cousin did not have a spare room for him; he told Charles he would have to find somewhere else to stay.

After a few weeks of searching for employment and being forced to live in a shabby Italian rooming house, he gave up on Pittsburgh and went back to New York, where he took any work he could find: as a grocery clerk, a road drummer, a factory hand, a dishwasher.

A bright young man, and a quick learner when he applied himself, Ponzi learned to read and write his new language, albeit with the occasional glitch, within a year. It was at about that time that he got a job with another distant relative, this one in Boston. The man, Joe DiCarlo, was cordial, welcoming, and absent an honest bone in his entire body. Now
this
was a man to whom Charles could look up. “I ship stuff on the railroad for the food companies,” he told the young man, a second cousin of a third cousin, “takin' it off at this end and splittin' it up among the stores or movin' it on east. It's paperwork mostly. 'Cept now and then I do a little sellin' of my own.” He winked, then went on to explain that “a
crate o' tomatoes here, a barrel o' flour there”—would sometimes get lost in transit. “There are ways to cover it up,” DiCarlo told his apprentice, “if you got the right papers. The letter I got says you had enough schoolin' to be good with numbers. You'll be helpin' me.”

Ponzi smiled. He liked the idea of cheating, just on general principles. And he seemed to have a natural gift. He got better and better at it as he improved his command of English, but he also grew more and more disenchanted, for “with his growing skills came growing profits—profits that seemed only to vanish in his employer's pockets. When he announced in late fall that he was leaving for New York [DiCarlo] nodded understanding.” And likely chuckled. Charles had started out his career as an American con man by being conned himself.

For the next sixteen years, Mrs. Ponzi's beloved only child grew to manhood, struggling at one small-time con after another. He once stole 5,387 pounds of cheese that he intended to chop into small pieces and sell for 45 cents a pound. But he was quickly arrested, and then just as quickly released when the clerk who had written out his warrant misspelled his last name, making him, according to the letter of the law, a different person from the one who had been charged. The prosecutor was enraged. Ponzi took it as a sign, skipping out of the courtroom.

On another occasion, Ponzi offered to save a failing bank by promising the president money that he did not have and could not possibly obtain. His hope was that he and his partner, through various machinations, could gain control of the bank, operate it for a few months, and then empty it of its contents. Ponzi was undeterred by the fact that he knew no more about how to run a financial institution than he did how to turn a double-play on a baseball field. But he would learn as he went along; his confidence, he was certain, would carry him to skill, and the eventual result of the skill would be a financial windfall.