Free Ponzi's Scheme by Mitchell Zuckoff Page A

meager thirty dollars a month.
    Ponzi took his meals at the home of the college caretaker and spent nights in a room on the first floor of the medical school. His on-campus lodgings made him easy prey for the pranks of medical students. One night when a storm knocked out the lights, they carried an embalmed corpse from a classroom to Ponzi’s room and tucked it in his bed. “I laid him on the floor of my room,” Ponzi recalled. “We both slept peacefully, but I woke up first.”
    He moved to a rooming house owned by Mrs. T. C. White, who grew fond of him as she listened to his endless fantasies about becoming rich. He spent nights locked in his room, Mrs. White said, “and when we asked him what he was doing he would say that he was figuring and not to worry him.” One time he made an arrangement with a local automobile dealer to raffle off a new car. But Mrs. White drew the line when he began inviting young women to the house—not for dates, but for a jewelry sales business. When she told him he could not make the house an office, he abandoned his plan but told her that he would someday have a fine office downtown.
    He found new rooms at the home of the college’s caretaker, Gus Carlson, and once he boasted to Carlson’s daughter-in-law that his picture would be in all the newspapers. She joked that it would be when he was hanged.
    â€œEither that or I will be a millionaire!” Ponzi answered.
    He grew friendly with Carlson’s son, Gus Junior, who watched as Ponzi routinely spent whatever money he made on girls or friends. Ponzi especially delighted in buying ice cream for the children who gathered during the afternoon to play on the college lawn. “He would never let you spend your money,” Carlson said after Ponzi left town, “no matter if he was spending his last cent on you.”
    Through his work in the library, Ponzi learned that doctors in Birmingham were lobbying to uproot the medical school from Mobile. Doctors in Mobile were fighting to keep the school, and Ponzi sided with his new friends in Mobile. He became upset when he discovered that a member of the school’s faculty was secretly scheming in favor of the Birmingham move while publicly opposing it. Motivated by loyalty to his adopted home and new friends, Ponzi intercepted a letter the two-faced faculty member was sending to a leader of the Birmingham contingent. He steamed it open, “and there before me was the evidence that he had been double-crossing the college right along. He was working hand-in-hand with the Birmingham bunch.”
    Ponzi brought the letter to the acting dean, who demanded the resignation of the duplicitous faculty member. But it did not end there. The college president, who sided with the Birmingham forces, did not appreciate a Mobile librarian tampering with mail. The president crossed out the budget line for Ponzi’s job. Ponzi was disappointed—he liked the school and its students, he enjoyed the steamy weather in Mobile, and he cherished the friends he had made. “I should have known it wouldn’t last,” Ponzi said afterward. “If it had, it would have interrupted a long circle of bad breaks.”
    He left Mobile in ragged clothes, with empty pockets. He headed for New Orleans just in time for the hurricane of September 1915. The storm made plenty of business for a sign painter, and he kept busy through Mardi Gras the following spring. From there he moved farther west, to Wichita Falls, Texas, a straitlaced cotton and cattle town halfway between Dallas and Oklahoma City. The town was pretty much owned by two brothers-in-law, Joseph Kemp and Frank Kell, who controlled the banks, the dry goods business, the grain elevators, much of the land, and the railroad lines. Soon they would grow richer with the discovery of oil.
    As a sideline, in 1910 Kemp and Kell had formed the Wichita Falls Motor Company, whose rugged flatbed trucks were soon