Ponzi's Scheme Page 7

  As if to purposely break his father’s promise, Richard did even worse. His professors took notice. “My dear Mr. Wells,” literature Professor W. G. Howard wrote the dean. “So far as I know R. Grozier I am inclined to think that temporary separation from College would be the most wholesome medicine that could be administered to him.” After receiving that letter, Wells wrote Richard’s father another warning. Edwin Grozier answered with a father’s lament.

  “I . . . very much regret that my son, Richard, did so poorly in his midyear examinations,” he wrote. “I am much puzzled by the young man’s failure to do well in his college studies. He is naturally bright; his fund of general information is unusually good; he has no bad habits that I know of. We see a great deal of him at our home, and he devotes a good deal of time to study. Why he fails to do, at least, fairly well is an enigma to me.”

  The letter traffic continued through spring 1906, the end of Richard’s freshman year. For the year, he received a B in physics, D’s in French, philosophy, and math, and a failing grade in English composition. Already on probation, Richard was, in Harvard parlance, “separated” from his class. He was entitled to petition for reinstatement, but Dean Wells suggested that it was not worth the bother. Some men just were not cut out for Harvard. Edwin Grozier was not ready to hear that.

  At his father’s insistence, Richard attended a Harvard summer school program and did well enough to seek readmission. With more assurances to the dean from Edwin and warnings from Wells about staying on track, Richard was readmitted as a sophomore. But soon the pattern repeated itself, and by the following spring Richard was back on probation. No longer a freshman, Richard now came under the purview of the dean of Harvard College, a well-fed man named Byron Satterlee Hurlbut. He invited Richard to his office.

  “I beg to thank you very much indeed for your kind and inspiring talk with my son, Richard,” Edwin Grozier wrote Hurlbut afterward. “Needless to say I am very fond of Richard. He is my only son, and I believe he has fine natural capacities. But he has sadly neglected opportunities, despite many urgent talks on my part. He seems much impressed by the timely advice which you gave him.”

  “I think we can get the boy on his feet all right,” Hurlbut answered. “There is no reason why he should not win relief from probation at the final examinations. What he needs most is to realize that it is time to look at things as a man does.”

  More letters followed between Hurlbut and Edwin Grozier, but Richard’s schoolwork continued to lag. His father’s letters to the dean became increasingly apologetic: “I am extremely sorry that despite the utmost efforts of his parents the young man has made no better showing.”

  At the end of his sophomore year, Richard’s probation led again to separation—he had earned D’s in four of the eight classes he had taken since entering Harvard, and he had failed English again. That failure, Hurlbut told Edwin Grozier, was due to simple neglect. It was back to summer school, after which, in September 1907, Richard petitioned to be readmitted, this time not as a member of his own class but as a second-time sophomore. The request was granted, and he returned to Harvard.

  Two months later, in November 1907, the Boston Globe ran a brief news item that went a long way toward explaining why Richard Grozier was not focused on his studies. The headline read: ROMANCE DISCLOSED; NEWTON HIGH SCHOOL GIRL TO WED HARVARD MAN. Below it was a photograph of an attractive, serious-looking woman with a fashionable choker necklace and her hair swept high on her head. Her name was Vera Rumery and, despite the headline, she was no high school girl. She was twenty-three, the daughter of a former alderman, a young woman two years older than Richard. The story began: “The pretty romance of one of Newton High School’s most popular young women athletes and a Harvard junior was revealed today by the engagement announcement of Miss Vera E. Rumery of Newtonville and Richard Grozier of Cambridge.” Richard was not technically a junior, but an engagement announcement was no place to air his academic failings. The next three paragraphs described the bride-to-be’s prowess at field hockey and her devotion to snowshoeing. It mentioned her family and Richard’s father, though it neglected to note that Edwin Grozier was editor and publisher of the rival Post. The last line of the story struck the only odd note: “Because of the illness of Mr. Grozier’s mother the date for the wedding has not been fixed.”

  In the immediate afterglow of the engagement, Richard pulled up his grades enough to rejoin his class as a junior in February 1908. But by spring Richard was back to his old habits and in danger of again failing freshman English composition. Once more, he became a topic of discussion for Harvard’s academic masters.

  “I am sick in bed,” Richard wrote Hurlbut in April while he was suffering from an ear infection. “Can you put off action on my case until I am able to see you?” The dean granted his request, and also agreed to hold off writing another letter to Richard’s father. Two weeks later, though, the board stopped waiting and placed Richard on probation for his third time in three years at Harvard. He was failing three of his five classes, and Hurlbut wrote again to Edwin Grozier. This time the dean injected a touch of melancholy not found in their earlier exchanges.

  “It is unnecessary for me to write you about the meaning of probation, for Richard has been on probation before,” Hurlbut wrote. “I hope that his final record will justify his relief from probation, so that it will be unnecessary to close his connection with the College. I wish that you would let me know of anything I can do to help the boy. Personally, he is a very attractive fellow, but I judge him to be as restless as the sea, or anything else that is a comparison for great restlessness.”

  Hurlbut’s sympathy was answered by Edwin Grozier’s rising frustration.

  “I do not see what you could do to help the young man, as you kindly offer,” the elder Grozier wrote. “It is up to him to help himself. That is what I am earnestly urging him to do, and hope to succeed. I am confident that he has his full share of natural ability, but to keep him down to the actual work in hand is the difficulty.”

  A month later, in June 1908, at the end of Richard’s junior year, his third probation turned into his third separation. Hurlbut suggested that it was the last time.

  “You are, I am sorry to say, dropped for two reasons; first, because of your unsatisfactory work for the year, and secondly, because of your failure to secure the necessary total of grades requisite for promotion to the Senior Class,” Hurlbut wrote to Richard. A special vote of the Administrative Board would be required for readmission, but Hurlbut thought that unlikely. “Personally I feel that experience out in the world would be better for you than a further attempt to succeed here at Cambridge.”

  To Edwin Grozier, Hurlbut wrote: “I believe that it would be best to put the boy at work.” After some pleasantries and sympathies, he reinforced his point: “Were he my son I should put him at work.”

  The wrought-iron gates to Harvard were closing. But Edwin Grozier, for whom a relentless work ethic was a defining trait, was determined to keep them open. And, as editor and publisher of the Post, he undoubtedly knew that his voice would carry weight, even among the dons of Harvard. “I am much disappointed and grieved that my son Richard should continue to do so poorly in his college studies,” he wrote Hurlbut. “Without doubt your advice to put him to work is sound, but, while there is any chance remaining of his completing his college course, I hesitate to abandon the effort.” He sent Richard to Harvard’s summer engineering camp, exiling the cosmopolitan young man to a world of trees and blackflies at Squam Lake, in New Hampshire. His orders were to return home with passing grades.

  “Good work at camp will certainly be an important consideration with the Board,” Hurlbut wrote Edwin Grozier when he heard of the plan. Reluctant to shrug off the editor and publisher of the Post, he offered a glimmer of hope and a cautionary note. “I should like to have Richard get a degree; at the same time I question whether his being allowed so many chances would not in the long run be bad for him.”

 
“While the young man has not shown it in his studies,” Edwin Grozier answered, “I still cling to a father’s fond confidence that he possesses rather unusual natural abilities, and I trust that he may have a final chance to demonstrate that in connection with his college work. . . . I will urge him to put his best foot forward this summer, and trust he may yet make a creditable record.”

  Halfway through the summer, when Richard had earned a B in his first course, Edwin Grozier grew cautiously optimistic. He began seeking Richard’s readmission from Hurlbut: “The young man has put in a lot of hard, earnest work this summer, evincing some of his natural capacity, and I trust that he may yet graduate and in after years prove to be a credit to his University.”

  Hurlbut answered in kind, though with a hint of sarcasm: “I hope that he will keep up his good work in college. He certainly has allowed things to slide right along so far.”

  After passing his second summer course, Richard was rewarded with a trip to Denver with his father. But with reinstatement still pending, Edwin Grozier was not ready to rest. Fearing they would miss an important deadline, he sent a Western Union telegram to Hurlbut: “Please wire me collect [at] Hotel Metropole just what date it is necessary for him to be in Cambridge.”

  Two days later, September 29, 1908, Hurlbut told Richard he had been readmitted as a junior on probation, a condition that would remain in force at least through the middle of the term. “This is to insure that you do not again, as you have done in the past, work hard at first, and then slump.”

  Despite the warnings, the cajoling, and the outrage caused by the three separations and reinstatements, Richard soon returned to form. He ignored his studies and seemed to be daring Harvard to ignore his father’s campaign and finally be rid of him. Then fate and friendship intervened.

  Richard’s roommate, Joseph W. Ross, a baby-faced engineering student from Ipswich, Massachusetts, saw his friend heading for a fall. Privately, Ross approached Dean Hurlbut at a college event on November 10, 1908, and then followed up with a letter: “I am writing to the effect that I should like to have the case of Richard Grozier handed over to me in case that his hour exam marks do not warrant a continuance of his probation,” Ross wrote. “I want to make plain that I am doing this absolutely without his knowledge. . . . I am very sure that I can bring around the required attention to his duties.” He asked the Administrative Board to formally approve his standing as Richard’s anonymous taskmaster.

  With Ross’s guarantee, the board voted a week later to give Richard yet another chance. Dean Hurlbut wrote to Ross explaining that this was done only after “accepting your offer that if he were put in your charge you promised to have him keep up his work.” Hurlbut added one more condition: The deal could not be kept secret; both Richard and his father would be informed of Ross’s new role.

  Ross answered with a “promise that my part of the agreement, meaning Richard’s part, will be faithfully lived up to.” He tacitly accepted that Richard would be informed, but begged Hurlbut not to tell Richard’s father. Ross must have known from Richard how angry Edwin Grozier had become about the situation. Learning that another student had been made caretaker for his son would only have enraged him further, making life harder on his friend Richard. Hurlbut briefly protested, but there was no indication that Edwin Grozier ever learned of the guardian angel on his son’s shoulder.

  Hurlbut kept tabs on Richard the rest of the year. With Ross’s help, Richard fulfilled all his requirements and passed all his classes, including English comp, in which he got a C.

  At the Class Day exercises near the end of June, one of Richard’s classmates may have unwittingly explained why the heir to a newspaper fortune had so much trouble with that particular class. That is, aside from his own halfhearted effort. Delivering an address entitled “The College and the Press,” Richard’s classmate told the crowd, “One of our teachers of English composition here at Harvard concludes his classroom work each year with a little advice to his young friends with regard to journalism. The gist of it is that newspaper work, like some medicines, is beneficial only when the dose is small.”

  Official word that Richard would graduate with his class came at the very last minute on June 29, 1909, a day before commencement. It was too late for his photograph to appear in the treasured Class Album. Richard had made it through Harvard, but he would not make it down the aisle. He and Vera Rumery broke off their engagement and went their separate ways.

  After graduation, Richard’s friend and savior Joseph Ross found an engineering job and moved home to Ipswich for what he later called “a very routine life, interrupted by a few Caribbean cruises.” In 1912, three years after graduating from Harvard, Ross received his reward for rescuing his roommate: He married Vera Rumery.

  After college, Richard packed his belongings and moved from his private dormitory to his parents’ new house, less than a mile from Harvard Square, in the most prestigious part of Cambridge. Flush with profits from the Post’s success, in October 1907 Edwin and Alice Grozier bought the enormous Queen Anne–style home at 168 Brattle Street. Alice had found the house by scouring the classified ads in the Post before the paper was printed; she furnished it much the same way, finding ads for estate sales and offering to buy items before the rest of the city knew they were available. Built two decades earlier, the house befit a powerful publisher, with gleaming woodwork, a teak-paneled ballroom designed to hold two hundred people, and a grand staircase. Christened “Riverview” by its original owner, the house allowed the son and grandson of sailing captains to look out over a sweeping lawn to the green-gray waters of the Charles River.

  After scraping through college, Richard was uninterested in the routine of a job. He enrolled in Harvard Law School, but he wilted under the rigors of legal scholarship. Within a year he was finished with school and working at the Post. For the next decade, Richard followed the well-worn path of the newspaper heir, working his way through the various departments—reporter, editorial writer, print-shop apprentice—to learn the business he would someday own. For some months he even served as a pressman, laboring amid the clatter of the largest printing plant in New England, which Edwin Grozier had built with much fanfare on five floors directly beneath the Post offices on Washington Street. It was an ideal fit: Richard was a man of mechanical bent, unimpressed by the fancy scrollwork on the face of a watch but awed by its metal intestines, the screws and gears and springs that made the thing tick.

  By 1920, Richard was the Post’s general manager, assistant publisher, and assistant editor. But the paper was still firmly in his father’s control, and the titles carried little power. Richard devoted himself to his work, but his performance at Harvard lingered in Edwin Grozier’s mind. Richard was given few chances to prove himself, and nothing he had done during the past decade seemed to win his father’s confidence or approval.

  Yet during those years, Richard Grozier had quietly studied his father’s stunts—the elephants, the headless photos, the primitive man, the free cars, the canes. He understood them for what they were: flashes of fireworks that caught the eye and relieved the reader of his two cents before he knew what hit him. Richard also recognized that the gimmicks were a means to an end, a way to foot the bills for solid journalism. Now if only he had some way to prove how much he had learned.

  Photograph of an oil portrait of a teenage Rose Gnecco.

  Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

  CHAPTER SIX

  “AN AMERICAN BEAUTY”

  In 1915, two years before Ponzi’s return to Boston, construction began on a mansion that came to symbolize the spoils within the reach of poor men who were bursting with ambition, gifted with charisma, and unburdened by scruples.

  The Georgian Revival manor would be the home of Boston’s mayor, James Michael Curley, an up-from-the-slums force of nature who viewed politics as a sure path to wealth and power. Clad in brick and roofed in slate, the house sat on a two-acre lot facing a park
that was part of Frederick Law Olmsted’s “emerald necklace” around Boston. Past the park was Jamaica Pond, where hand-holding couples and raucous families skated in winter and picnicked in summer. The location was within the borders of Boston yet seemed light-years from the inner city.

  Even more magnificent than the site was the house itself: more than twenty-one rooms, including an oval dining room paneled in mahogany, fireplaces framed in white Italian marble, fixtures plated with gold, and a curving staircase lit by a two-story chandelier bought from the Austro-Hungarian embassy in Washington. The only signs of the owner’s humble beginnings were the festive shamrock cutouts in all thirty of the white shutters, placed there as much to annoy the Yankee neighbors as to display Hibernian pride.

  Curley was born in 1874 in Boston’s poor Roxbury section. Fatherless by age ten, imbued with resentment of the Brahmins, and blessed with prodigious energy, Curley devoted himself to the punch-in-the-nose, pat-on-the-back world of Boston Irish politics. At twenty-six he won election to the Boston Common Council, a raucous body that was the stepping-stone for every young would-be Democratic politico in the city. He soon became boss of Roxbury’s Ward 17, which along with his council seat gave him the power to barter jobs and other goodies for loyalty and votes. He launched a political organization called the Tammany Club, defiantly named for the New York machine. Curley insisted it was a tribute not to the New Yorkers’ corruption but to their commitment to constituents in the absence of government aid programs. But the Boston Tammany Club soon emulated its New York cousin in graft and scandal, with Curley larding the public payroll and dipping his fingers in every slice of municipal pie. The club’s mascot was a crouching tiger. The public treasury was its prey.