The Man Behind the Name

Charles Ponzi was five-foot-two and lied about being five-foot-three. He arrived in Boston as an Italian immigrant in 1903, and over the next fifteen years he worked as a bank clerk, translator, mining camp nurse, road roller, sign painter, grocery clerk, factory hand, dishwasher, waiter, and librarian. He was, as journalist Mitch Zuckoff puts it, "an itinerant immigrant rolling up and down the east coast looking for work." But Ponzi wanted more than a paycheck. He wanted the kind of wealth that would make him unforgettable. He got his wish—just not the way he expected.

Zuckoff stumbled onto Ponzi's story while covering banking for the Boston Globe. A state treasurer mentioned that banks hadn't failed like that "since Ponzi's day," and Zuckoff realized he knew nothing about the man whose name had become shorthand for a certain kind of financial fraud. He spent years digging through court records, private letters, and birth records in Italy. What he found was a story far stranger than the simple con most people imagine.

The Skin Graft and the Snowball