Customer Reviews

Ponzi's Scheme: The True Story of a Financial Legend

5 star:		(27)
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We've all heard of the Ponzi Scheme, what they referred to in that era as "robbing Peter to pay Paul". But this well researched book traces the tragic story of how Charles Ponzi came to America, what he did before the Ponzi scheme and what happened to him afterwards. It would make a great movie! Situated in Boston, he ran ads for great returns and when many middle class people invested, publicity soon followed with various members of the media warning that it was a scam. No common criminal, he took the press on and argued the opposite winning much public support.

It is a fascinating tale! The side story of the faithful wife who only wanted her husband at home without the money and the final outcome of their marriage is also heartwarming and tragic.

I like business biographies and this certainly qualifies although I wouldn't consider him the classic success story. This book offers so much more with detailed history of that time period and the roles regulators, politicians and media played in society at that time. And the story itself is charming in many ways. Charles Ponzi was a common man that on the surface became wealthy and everyone rooted for him. But it only lasted so long. If you have interest in finance you will like this book. If you have interest in the history of the early 1900s in this growing country you will be interested. If you like novels and good character growth I think this will also be of interest as it reads like a novel as he develops his scheme.

I love books that tell the story behind a well-known phrase with a little-known background, so Ponzi's Scheme was a natural selection for me. Turns out it was a great choice. The story of Charles Ponzi, an Italian immigrant to America, is a fast-moving rollercoaster of a tale told with skill by Zuckoff.

The result is a very readable book with a combination of good lessons for its reader about too-good-to-be-true propositions, great characters, good history, financial lessons, and a tradgedy of Shakesperean proportions.

Highly recommended for history buffs, fans of character-driven stories, people in financial markets, and anyone who's curious to know the story behind the phrase "Ponzi Scheme."

Zuckoff has written a first-class biography of Charles Ponzi. His writing style keeps the reader deeply engrossed in the story and wanting to know what happens next. Zuckoff recounts various communications between the main characters, all of which he says comes from letters, newspaper accounts, etc. He also does a very nice job paralleling the lives of the scam artist, and the newspaper publisher who finally exposes the scam.

Although he was hardly the first to come up with the con game, Ponzi will forever be associated with pyramid schemes and "robbing Peter to pay Paul" schemes. The way he did it was brilliantly simple: Come up with a way of making money that seems completely legal and is relatively easy to explain. Market that scheme to folks that are in the same boat as you (e.g., same industry, ethnicity, religion, neighborhood, etc.) Pay the astronomical returns to the initial investors. Then let their word of mouth recommendations bring in additional investors. Repeat the process and watch the money pour in.

It is difficult to read this book and not empathize with Ponzi. Even though the reader knows that many of Ponzi's "investors" will become victims of the fraud, Ponzi's amazingly seductive personality is able to win over most people. The question that lingers throughout most of the book is whether Ponzi ever actually intended to pay off the investors with a legal - and feasible - money-making idea, or whether he simply wanted to scam the victims out of their life savings. The answer is finally provided by Ponzi himself towards the end of his life.

This book - and Ponzi's story - serves as a great reminder of the old adage that if something sounds too good to be true, then it probably is. But what is truly amazing is that these same Ponzi-type schemes continue even today, whether it is stock "pump and dump" scams, late-night infomercials on how to get rich quick, or large-scale Enron-like frauds. By appealing to people's instinctive desire to make money, the end result of these schemes is usually the same: the investor becomes a victim. This book makes for a great read, as well as a great life lesson.

Zuckoff paints Ponzi as someone who desperately wanted his international reply coupon scheme to work legitimately, and then merely didn't know exactly how to get out of it and "go straight." He almost makes you feel sorry for the guy.

To his credit, Zuckoff does explain his sources very well in the back of the book. However, even using the substantiated facts that he himself presented, one wonders if Ponzi really was trying to legitimate his career, pressures from his wife and mother aside.

Even according to Zuckoff's own account, trouble followed Ponzi like mice to cheese. How many times have you been arrested? Me neither. Given the series of events and the fact that Ponzi kept lying to everyone (even behind his facade of charming confidence), I don't think he deserves an iota of sympathy (although Zuckoff and the New York Times did bring up interesting questions about Ponzi's investors and their characters--the desire to get something for nothing).

Most telling are Ponzi's quotes and actions after turning himself in for the fraud committed under the auspices of the Securities Exchange Company and serving his prison term for that. Here we see the desperate thief running from the authorities and making a pretty stark "confession" (as Zuckoff states) later in life which shows little remorse.

I wonder if Ponzi's character was more consistent than Zuckoff describes through this book. He started off as a person of questionable character and ended the same way. I just don't think he was as desperate to legitimize his scheme as Zuckoff makes him out to be (he seemed to do a lot of thinking about how to manipulate the coupons, rather than doing; and what he really got close to doing (stealing from his own bank), wasn't very legitimate).

His charming character and devotion to mother and wife aside, the guy seemed to be a crook through and through.

Still, it's a fun read; it does make you think about who Ponzi really was.

I needn't write a lengthy review as some of my fellow armchair critics included here have done. I will only second what the majority of them have said. Even J. Edgar Hoover would have had a difficult time disliking this guy!. I'm sure if one had actually been there and suffered personal losses as too many did, he would see it much differently, but from the perspective of this author, Ponzi was a most likeable person and you can't help rooting for him, and poor loyal Rose) until the bitter end! Buy this book! You'll be glad you did.

In a very engaging account of the arguably the "best" financial scam (before Enron days atleast), Zuckoff narrates the fascinating story an Italian immigrant to the US and his seemingly unending tale of woe, charm, financial trickery - all combined! As the plot (even though this is an actual account of real events, it reads as if it were one of the best written thriller!) develops, one cannot but imagine if any other person could have survived the events Ponzi had to suffer through. Using a brilliant narrative technique, the author develops the main actors' roles in a systematic manner, most notably those of Charles Ponzi, his wife, and Gozier (publisher).

Each chapter also includes a reproduction of a relevant photograph obtained from the famed Post, Boston Library and other sources. Those pictures are so well chosen that they capture the essence of the ensuing chapter very well.

As can be expected from a professor of journalism, the book is well documented with plenty of detailed notes and bibliography for any serious reader.

It should be pointed out that the Epilogue should not be forgotten at all. The unravelling of the "plot" happens mostly in the epilogue and contains numerous twists and turns associated with the fascinating life of Charles Ponzi.

An excellent read, but make sure you have cleared out an entire day or weekend for it, because once you start reading it, you wont stop until you are at the last page!

As a trader living in New York, I feel a morbid fascination with the Madoff story. $50 billion up in smoke, two suicides so far, and the legal juggernaut is just beginning to rumble. To read up on the background I bought Ponzi's Scheme by Zukoff - and am glad I did!

The scheme itself was simple enough: Ponzi became aware that the coupons for purchasing stamps abroad were priced differently in different currencies. One could spend a dollar in Austria or Italy - and get several dollars' worth of stamps in the USA. A profit opportunity was definitely there, but it was a very small opportunity. The volume of coupons sold in the US was under $100,000. Meanwhile, Ponzi took in millions from people to whom he promised profits from speculating in postal coupons. The real opportunity drew people in - but in reality there was no way for masses to profit from it.

This is also what Madoff did. He claimed to be trading spreads between stocks and options: essentially riskless, low-profit, reliable trades. The profit opportunity was there, but the volume of the instruments he claimed to trade was very low - the spread story simply attracted people whose money was used to pay departing investors and line the pockets of crooks.

With the collapse of Ponzi's scheme, the total investment losses came to a then-staggering three million dollars. Those who did not exit in time got 37 cents on the dollar back from the liquidators. No such luck seems to be in the cards for Madoff's victims.

While the technical aspects of the scheme are simple, Zukoff weaves a wonderful yarn. I could not put his book down. He is a wonderful stylist, with an eagle eye for details. I loved his digressions, for example, the story of The Boston Post, the newspaper that helped blow Ponzi out of the water.

Reading Zukoff's book opened my eyes to a surprising aspect of the personalities of three `ponzi schemers' I know about - Ponzi himself, Madoff, and a European acquaintance who was running a scheme among his family members and friends last time I saw him. All had a likely script for profits - but no ability to extract those profits. They all seemed like very nice and attractive people: Ponzi donated a skin graft to a stranger, Madoff was highly regarded in New York philanthropic circles, and my old acquaintance - well, that's a story in itself.

I highly recommend Ponzi's Scheme to all who love a good story. Incidentally, I downloaded my unabridged copy from audible.com (now a division of amazon), and the voice of its reader was superb.

I always like to read books which tell the story of a person in history who we hear about all the time but never get the details. I found Ponzi's Scheme to be well-written, informative and entertaining. I also feel that the hallmark of a good biography is that it tells the stories of the people around the subject of the biography as well as the subject. Ponzi's Scheme fits this hallmark with its stories of Richard Grozier of the Boston Post and Ponzi's wife Rose, among others. As for Ponzi himself, I was left with the feeling that although he did come across a basically a nice person, I felt that his passion for greed was his fatal flaw and that he should have realized that it would have been better to have the love of his wife and settle for an ordinary life rather than scheme for quick riches which hurt those who believed in his scheme, his wife and himself at the end. I do feel, however, that he would have made a great host of a "reality" TV show over someone like Donald Trump. Ponzi's Scheme is a good book, especially for those who are interested in Boston history.

Nowadays, the phrase "Ponzi scheme" is applied to everything from putrid boiler-room operations to the housing boom. That makes it instructive to take a look at the phrase's actual namesake. Charles Ponzi was a con man, to be sure, but he also was a gifted promoter and cheerful dreamer who captured the shadiest side of the American spirit. In this fascinating, novelistic account of Ponzi's meteoric rise and inevitable fall, journalist Mitchell Zuckoff painstakingly recreates the 1920 zeitgeist that allowed Ponzi to delude and scam so many investors. Times have changed, but the underlying human nature that allowed Ponzi to raise so much cash remains the same. We recommend this page-turning history to investors who want to be equipped to spot hype and scams designed to lure the gullible.

While I consider this a remarkable story filled with rich details, I detected a significant journalistic gap and bias on the part of the author that I find mysterious. I sure don't buy, for example, that Ponzi was as benign or well-intentioned a character as the author made him out to be. Charismatic, strategic and highly skilled, absolutely. But Ponze was also very deviant and that didn't arise accidentally. He'd been a criminal and served hard time and about that experience we learned next to nothing or IMO it was glossed over. Hard time is not and never has been a church picnic, not in a penitentiary during the early part of last century for certain. Some details from what he was likely exposed to inside would have helped fill in these gaps for me. Some additional comments from creditors who got stung would have been interesting to include, too, but it all wraps up very quickly in the end. A little too quick for my interests.