1920 (27 page)

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.

I
T WAS PONZI WHO MADE
headlines late in the summer of 1920, but there was a much more important story in Washington, D.C. at the time, a story of which few people were aware, a crisis that affected not only the manner in which government was conducted but perhaps the decisions that it made—there is no way to know. It was a kind of crisis that had never existed before and will never exist again.

Thomas Woodrow Wilson, who as a boy had been called Tommie by his family and friends, was the son, grandson, and nephew of Presbyterian ministers. As a result, Tommie could not help but inherit a certain stiff-necked, churchified rectitude, an image that he carried into adulthood, when he was known by his middle name.

But the Wilsons were not nearly as strict in their religion as their fellow followers of Calvin. Tommie's father, for example, known to all as Dr. Wilson, smoked, had an occasional drink, played billiards, and enjoyed vacationing at fancy resorts, even when his leisure activities prohibited him from a strict observance of the Sabbath. He also enjoyed tutoring
his son; “they talked like master and scholar of classical times,” writes Wilson's biographer Arthur Walworth, “the father giving the boy in digestible doses what he had learned of the world, of literature, the sciences and theology—imparting it all with humor and fancy.”

However it was imparted, though, theology was probably the most important part not just of Tommie's lineage, but of his life. Dr. Wilson might not have been a strict Presbyterian, but of the fact that he was a true believer there is no doubt. He displayed it to his son most often when the two of them were alone together on Sunday afternoons.

There were readings … in the big leather-bound Bible. The doctor penciled notes in the margins that interpreted the text in the language of the day. His religion had no cant and was suffused with a love of mankind that often overflowed sectarian bounds.