Ponzi's Scheme by Mitchell Zuckoff Read Free Book Online

Winslow, a Methodist minister, staunch prohibitionist, and member of the state Senate. He was also a forger and a swindler. In a scheme that would anticipate stock manipulators of a later day, Winslow sold twice as many shares of the Boston Post Company as allowed by the incorporating papers. He also forged the signatures of more than a dozen prominent men on banknotes for nearly a half million dollars, and pocketed thousands more loaned to him. He exchanged much of his stolen cash for gold, fled to Holland, and by some accounts ended up in Argentina, enjoying his ill-gotten gains in Buenos Aires and working as a reporter for a local newspaper.
    The story of Winslow’s scam became part of
Post
lore, passed down year after year, deeply ingrained in the memories of its employees. Winslow had ruined the finances and shattered the credibility of the once-proud newspaper. For the next fifteen years the
Post
floundered under transient ownership. By 1891 it was hobbling along with fewer than three thousand subscribers. It had an antiquated printing plant, only a handful of advertisers, and a debt of $150,000. But where creditors saw a newspaper in its death throes, Edwin Grozier saw the opportunity of a lifetime.
    E dwin Grozier was born September 12, 1859, aboard a clipper ship within sight of the Golden Gate in San Francisco harbor. It was a fitting arrival; Grozier men were storied mariners, and the ship’s master was Edwin’s father, Joshua, who routinely captained voyages from Boston around Cape Horn to California and back. When Edwin was six, his parents brought him and his two brothers to live on the far tip of Cape Cod, in Provincetown, the home of generations of sea captains and their families.
    A sickly boy and an avid reader who dreamed of becoming a poet or a novelist, Edwin Grozier attended public schools and graduated from high school at age fifteen. In keeping with family tradition, and to improve his health, he spent the next two years sailing around the world. The teenage wanderer wrote detailed descriptions of the exotic ports he visited and sent them to Greene’s
Boston Post,
which was impressed enough to publish them as a series. In 1877, he returned home, spent some time at prep school, then entered Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. After a year he transferred to Boston University, drawn to Boston by the lure of Newspaper Row.
    After graduating he landed a job at the
Boston Globe,
where he worked under the tutelage of the editor and publisher, General Charles H. Taylor, a gregarious Civil War veteran. Grozier was paid ten dollars a week, which he at first considered an enormous sum. Then his ambition took hold. “It was soon raised to twelve, to fifteen, to eighteen dollars,” he recalled. “I wanted more money—because I needed it!” Despite his fondness for Taylor, an offer of twenty-five dollars a week sent Grozier across Newspaper Row to the
Boston Herald
to cover politics. He distinguished himself quickly, in part because he was able to accurately record the long-winded speeches of the day with his uncommon skill at shorthand. During the 1883 campaign for Massachusetts governor, Grozier so impressed the Republican candidate, George D. Robinson, that as soon as Robinson was elected he hired the young reporter as his personal secretary.
    But the pull of newspapering was strong. Eighteen months later, Grozier moved to New York and became personal secretary to Joseph Pulitzer, the Hungarian-born editor of the New York
World
and a journalism legend in the making. Pulitzer pioneered a formula of compelling human-interest stories, social justice crusades, and sensational battles with William Randolph Hearst and the New York
Journal.
Under Pulitzer, the
World
became the most profitable and most copied newspaper in the nation. Edwin Grozier had a front-row seat, and he was in thrall to Pulitzer: “I never saw anyone to equal him. His mind was like a flash of