The New York Times has a story about a lost manuscript, now found, shedding light on the original Ponzi (photographed above in Boston, circa 1915).
From the story...
In the summer of 1920, William H. McMasters, one of Boston’s top publicists, was in a pickle. A new client, a dapper and charming Italian immigrant named Charles Ponzi, was raking in millions on promises to pay investors 50 percent interest in 45 days.
“If he was everything he claimed, I would have a client such as no man ever had in the publicity field,” Mr. McMasters wrote in a newly found and never published memoir. But, he reflected, “if he was crooked or deluded, I must make up my mind to have him stop taking the money from the public.”
As fate would have it, Mr. McMasters decided that Ponzi was indeed a fraud and wrote a newspaper exposé in The Boston Post. The front-page article declaring that Ponzi was insolvent and had used incoming deposits to pay off earlier investors proved instrumental in unmasking him as history’s most infamous swindler — at least until Bernard L. Madoff came along.
Mr. McMasters remained convinced of his service to humanity — “I do not anticipate that another Charles Ponzi will ever appear in the financial world,” he wrote.
Now that bittersweet narrative, so far known only in fragments, has emerged, offering insights into Ponzi’s downfall, the machinations of the press, and one momentous week that rocked the financial world nearly 90 years ago.
The memoir — “The Ponzi Story,” typed on 206 double-spaced pages and completed around 1962, six years before Mr. McMasters died at 94 — is part of a trove of 2,200 books, manuscripts and pamphlets on swindlers and their frauds, hoaxes and confidence games acquired a year ago and recently catalogued by John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
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