One Summer: America, 1927

but an accurate one, to think of Sacco and Vanzetti going to their deaths dressed in the style of footballer Red Grange.
     
    For all the fuss and heartfelt lamentations among protesters and editorial writers about the unfair trial and unjust fate of Sacco and Vanzetti, the evidence suggests that the majority of Americans thought the two men were probably guilty, and most of the restdidn’t really care. According to the author Francis Russell, by 1926 most people couldn’t have said whether Sacco and Vanzetti were still alive or not. The newspaperman Heywood Broun was certain that the average man ‘cared nothing about the issue’. He despaired that his own newspaper, the World , carried more coverage of the Snyder–Gray case than it did of Sacco and Vanzetti. Even those who supported Sacco and Vanzetti weren’t always terribly sympathetic. Katherine Anne Porter was shocked when, in passing, she expressed hope to the communist Rosa Baron that a pardon would be granted, and Baron snapped back: ‘Pardoned – what for? They are no earthly use to us alive.’
    Somewhat surprisingly, Sacco and Vanzetti were not the most notorious inmates in Charlestown Prison in the summer of 1927. That distinction belonged to a fellow immigrant who had rather faded from the news but whose name has, ironically, lived on more powerfully than those of Sacco and Vanzetti in the decades since. He was Charles Ponzi, and eight years earlier he had attracted the world’s attention, and made himself an eponym, by devising a scheme designed to make people a lot of money very quickly.
    Ponzi was a dapper and diminutive fellow, barely five feet tall. Originally from Parma, he came to the United States in 1903 at the age of twenty-one and worked at various jobs, from busboy to office clerk to vegetable wholesaler. But in 1919, while living in Boston, he concocted a scheme – in itself perfectly legal – to make a profit by trading in international postal reply coupons. These coupons were invented as a way to help people or businesses send or receive letters or parcels from abroad. The system was meant to facilitate small-scale exchanges between countries. Ponzi realized that he could buy coupons in Europe with depressed European currencies, then redeem them in America for booming US greenbacks. For every dollar invested, he could get back up to $3.50.
    Promising investors a 50 per cent return on their investment every ninety days, Ponzi launched his scheme in autumn 1919, and by the following spring – at exactly the time that Parmenterand Berardelli were being gunned down in Braintree and Sacco and Vanzetti arrested in Brockton – Ponzi was being overwhelmed with eager clients. Thousands of people gathered daily outside his offices in Boston’s North End trying to thrust money into his care. Often it was their life’s savings. So much money flowed in that Ponzi literally couldn’t bank it fast enough. It was packed into shoeboxes and stuffed in desk drawers. In April he took in $120,000, in May $440,000, in June $2.5 million, in July over $6 million, mostly in bills in small denominations.
    The problem with Ponzi’s system was that individual coupons were worth only very small sums – 5 cents typically – so it would have been necessary to exchange truly monumental volumes of coupons to make a reasonable return. Ponzi didn’t even try. It was much simpler to pay off early investors with funds paid in by more recent ones. As long as money kept flowing in, the scheme worked fine, but you didn’t need to be a financial wizard to see that the arrangement couldn’t be indefinitely sustained. Ponzi, alas, genuinely believed it could. He opened branch offices all around New England to take in yet more money, and embarked on an ambitious programme of expansion and diversification. At the time of his downfall, he was negotiating to buy a steamship line, a bank and a chain of cinemas, all in the sweetly delusional belief that he was a legitimate business titan in the mould of John D. Rockefeller. Ponzi, it is worth noting, personally benefited little from his artful manipulations. He bought a nice house and a new car with his investors’ money, but otherwise his greatest financial indulgence was to donate $100,000 to an orphanage.
    Ponzi’s grand plans began to unravel when a newspaperman asked the Post Office’s coupon-redemption department how it was coping with such an influx of business, and learned that there was no influx of