Overview

In the summer of 1920, the line outside a small Boston office stretched around the block before dawn. Tens of thousands of people - factory workers, domestic servants, barbers, widows, immigrants who had spent years accumulating modest savings in a country that had not always been kind to them - handed their money to a dapper, charming Italian immigrant named Charles Ponzi, who promised them fifty percent back in forty-five days. Most of them never saw it again. Ponzi's scheme lasted eight months, cost its investors the equivalent of three hundred million dollars, and collapsed with a speed that shocked a city that had spent the preceding months celebrating him as a financial genius. But the damage it left behind was not only financial. It was structural. In those eight months, Ponzi had assembled, refined, and deployed a template for financial fraud so complete and so durable that it remains, more than a century later, the operating manual for every major investment scam in the world. Charles Ponzi and the Original Scam is the gripping, deeply researched story of the man, the scheme, and the culture that made both possible. It traces Ponzi's journey from provincial Italy to the prisons of Montreal and Atlanta to the most famous financial office in America, and it follows the fraud through its triumphant ascent, its devastating collapse, and its extraordinary afterlife - from Bernie Madoff's sixty-five-billion-dollar masterwork to the cryptocurrency schemes that are running the same playbook today. This is not merely a story about a con man. It is a story about what we want to believe, who we choose to trust, and why the line on School Street has never truly ended.

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