Charles Ponzi, circa 1920 (Wikipedia)

THE PONZI SCHEME
A Slide Show and Talk
Long before Bernie Madoff made off with about $64.8 billion in other people’s money, there was a guy named Ponzi. Charles Ponzi. Carlo Pietro Giovanni Guglielmo Tebaldo Ponzi (1882-1949) was born and raised in Italy. He arrived in Boston aboard the S.S. Vancouver in 1903 with a few dollars and change in his pocket. Years later, he told the New York Times, “I landed in this country with $2.50 in cash and $1 million in hopes, and those hopes never left me.” Well, Ponzi traded in those hopes for millions more.  In 1920, he engineered one of the greatest pyramid schemes of all time, a scheme so great they named it after him.  And he did it right here in Boston, right under the noses of suspicious Yankees and normally inquisitive newspapermen. It cost his investors $20 million; it cost him years in federal prison. But that didn’t stop him. “I went looking for trouble and found it,” he said right before America gave him the boot in 1934. Relive the days of Boston’s most outrageous rogue through this fascinating slide show/talk with David Kruh who has written about Boston’s erstwhile entertainment district, Scollay Square, and other local historical subjects.

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