Ponzi's Scheme Read Online Free PDF

and a plan to join her son in Providence. A few were from Greece, others from Austria and Russia. Several dozen Portuguese boarded when the ship stopped in the Azores. To pass the empty days at sea, they traded rumors of America, thought of their families back home, and wondered what awaited them.
    Ponzi had almost nothing to do with them. Not only was he from the ostensibly more cultured north of Italy, he was among the more privileged travelers. He and sixty-four other passengers had paid an extra twenty dollars for more comfortable berths in the
Vancouver
’s second-class cabins, though he would forever claim he had traveled to America first-class. While the human sardines in steerage suffered, Ponzi spent the passage continuing his college ways, buying drinks and gallantly tipping waiters. Ponzi’s biggest expense was gambling. A cardsharp caught sight of the bushy-tailed young fellow with the ready billfold and invited him for a friendly game. By the time they were through, Ponzi’s two-hundred-dollar stake had been reduced to two dollars and fifty cents, even less than most of the unfortunates in steerage.
    The ship entered Boston Harbor on November 17, greeted by a steady drizzle and an icy east wind that whipped the dirty waters into a liquid mountain of whitecaps. The
Vancouver
’s captain eased the ship to the Dominion Line’s dock in East Boston, where the nearby Splendor Macaroni Company and a fish-glue plant provided the immigrants with their first smells of the new land. Before disembarking, the first- and second-class passengers underwent immigration inspections—only the steerage passengers would be held in quarantine. Ponzi stretched the truth and identified himself to the inspector as a student, but he admitted that he was down to his last few dollars. To gain legal entry into America, he vowed that he was not a polygamist, a cripple, or otherwise infirm, and that he had never been held in prison or a poorhouse.
    Having satisfied the inspector, Ponzi strolled jelly-legged down the gangplank wearing his best suit, with spats fastened to his shoes. Despite his nearly empty pockets and his rain-soaked clothes, Ponzi thought he looked “like a million dollars just out of the mint.” He imagined that he cut the figure of a young gentleman from a fine family, perhaps the son of wealthy parents visiting Boston on a pleasure tour before taking his rightful place in Roman society. His excitement ebbed the moment he stepped onto U.S. soil. No gold awaited him. On the ground from the pier to Marginal Street in the distance was sticky, black mud, an inch deep wherever he stood, stretching as far as he could see. It was certain to ruin his spats.
    H aving anticipated the possibility that young Carlo would leave the ship broke—he had been stranded before, on much shorter trips—his mother and uncle had provided him with prepaid train fare to Pittsburgh. There he could spend a few days with a distant relative—“some fifth cousin of some third cousin of ours,” Ponzi called him. But even before he reached Pittsburgh two days after landing, Ponzi was feeling tricked. He was hungry to the point of starving, alone, and down to a few coins. He began wishing he had never heard of America. He spoke no English, had no marketable skills, and considered it a source of pride that he had never worked a day in his life.
    America did not seem terribly welcoming, either. The trip to Pittsburgh took him through New York, and when he bolted off the train in search of a meal during a stopover he ran smack into the arms of an Irish policeman. Ponzi lacked the language to explain that he was running because he was hungry, not because he had stolen something, and it was only through the intervention of an Italian bootblack that Ponzi avoided a night in jail. Once in Pittsburgh, Ponzi spent only a short time with his relative before finding a bed in an Italian rooming house and beginning a