Ponzi's Scheme

The True Story of a Financial Legend

By: Mitchell Zuckoff

Narrated by: Grover Gardner

You’ve heard of the scheme. Now comes the man behind it. In Mitchell Zuckoff's exhilarating book, the first nonfiction account of Charles Ponzi, we meet the charismatic rogue who launched the most famous and extraordinary scam in the annals of American finance.

It was a time when anything seemed possible–instant wealth, glittering fame, fabulous luxury–and for a run of magical weeks in the spring and summer of 1920, Charles Ponzi made it all come true. Promising to double investors’ money in three months, the dapper, charming Ponzi raised the “rob Peter to pay Paul” scam to an art form and raked in millions at his office in downtown Boston. Ponzi’s Scheme is the amazing true story of the irresistible scoundrel who launched the most successful scheme of financial alchemy in modern history–and uttered the first roar of the Roaring Twenties.

Ponzi may have been a charlatan, but he was also a wonderfully likable man. His intentions were noble, his manners impeccable, his sales pitch enchanting. Born to a genteel Italian family, he immigrated to the United States with big dreams but no money. Only after he became hopelessly enamored of a stenographer named Rose Gnecco and persuaded her to marry him did Ponzi light on the means to make his dreams come true. His true motive was not greed but love.

With rich narrative skill, Mitchell Zuckoff conjures up the feverish atmosphere of Boston during the weeks when Ponzi’s bubble grew bigger and bigger. At the peak of his success, Ponzi was taking in more than $2 million a week. And then his house of cards came crashing down–thanks in large part to the relentless investigative reporting of Richard Grozier’s Boston Post.

In Zuckoff's hands, Ponzi is no mere swindler; instead he is appealing and magnetic, a colorful and poignant figure, someone who struggled his whole life to attain great wealth and who sincerely believed–to the very end–that he could have made good on his investment promises if only he’d had enough time. Ponzi is a classic American tale of immigrant life and the dream of success, and the unexpectedly moving story of a man who–for a fleeting, illusory moment–attained it all.©2005 Mitchell Zuckoff; (P)2005 Books on Tape, Inc.

Critic reviews

Advance praise for Ponzi

“For Charles Ponzi, a poor Italian immigrant with big dreams and grand schemes, the streets of America truly were paved with gold. In Mitchell Zuckoff’s hands, the get-rich-quick saga of Ponzi is a portrait of America in the Roaring Twenties–a time of innocence and greed, of rogues, rascals, and reformers. It’s hard not to root for Ponzi as he tiptoes along a financial high wire of his own creation, high above his immigrant investors cheering him on and the Boston Brahmins hoping for him to fall. Zuckoff spins a tale rich in intrigue, corruption, betrayal–and love. It is a story that resonates today, in an age of financial scandals ranging from Enron to Martha Stewart.”
–MIKE STANTON, author of The Prince of Providence

“Ponzi is an engaging, learned, and wonderfully entertaining story of American business misadventure. Mitchell Zuckoff's recounting of the story of Charles Ponzi, the curiously charming and likable huckster, reads as swiftly as any novel, but it is also a piece of important business history. Indeed, it stands almost as a parable for our own era of corporate misadventure, and it is not be missed.”
–DAVID LISS, author of A Spectacle of Corruption

An odd book

What does this book have going for it? It has a great narrator & a brisk style of writing. What does this book have going against it? Alot of extraneous material shoved in to make it thicker, a fairly despicable main character who is painted somewhat sympathetically by the author, a relatively simple-minded fraud (unlike two other books on tape I have recently listened to off of Audible -- on Enron & on LTCM) that does not have enough finance intricacy to be of significant interest. Oh, I should say that the book is probably worth reading just so you know where the term Ponzi scheme came from. I am sorry that I am not more enthusiastic about it.

Surprised by how much I enjoyed this

This biography and examination of the times really flows like a novel, which is a nice surprise. Also a nice surprise was the great narration - I found I listened to this book almost straight through and turned it on at every opportunity. It was very entertaining, and really highlighted the Roaring Twenties as a time of change, hope, surprise, and a feeling that anything was possible.

Charles Ponzi was only a part of that time, but the story behind the household name was interesting. Unlike some other reviewers, I didn't find that the depiction of this swindler was sympathetic at all, but I do agree that it portrayed him as human.....because that's what he was. It's good to understand that swindlers and greedy people without ethics also have families and dreams - they don't act like bastards, they don't have horns, they don't have a dark cloud about them. They are often charming, friendly people with nice smiles and good families. Proof that it doesn't take a lot to separate greedy people from their money. I wish we could say that the massive "robbing Peter to pay Paul" swindles ended with the stock crash in 1929, but there are still hundreds of millions of dollars being lost to Ponzi schemes today, so it looks like not many people have learned from the mistakes of those past victims of charmers like Ponzi.

An Amazing Tale

Before Madoff, there was Ponzi.

This book is well-researched, expertly read, and incredibly listenable. Over the last 15 years, I’ve listened to it at least five times, always coming back to this most audacious of scams. The dueling narratives of Ponzi and the newspaper publisher Richard Grozier makes what could be a relatively straightforward scam story more of a crime caper, a la Catch Me If You Can.

Ponzi was irrepressible and the quotes from his own words and the contemporaneous news reports of the time comes alive, especially with Gardner's narration.

If you like books on scams, true crime, and financial frauds, this is a must-listen.

Wonderful

I love this kind of historical books! Easy and pleasureable to listen to while learning.

Crazy rise & fall of ambitious, oddly unaware, man

Story of Ponzi's life is well told, if maybe too briefly, before and after the main days of his Scheme. In the midst of the craziness of the Scheme, when hundreds of thousands of dollars are flowing into Ponzi's company, the author does a very good job of reconstructing. He carries us along as each of the players involved converged on Ponzi's ultimate downfall. As for Ponzi, he was oddly unaware of the harm he was causing. From this author's telling, he could see moral problems in some areas of his and other's lives, but not as much with his Scheme.