S7E1 - The Original Con: How Charles Ponzi Invented Modern Fraud - Part 1: The Postage Trick

Charles Ponzi arrived in Boston with almost nothing, but he carried one thing that mattered more than money. He carried appetite. Appetite for status. Appetite for speed. Appetite for reinvention.And in nineteen nineteen, in a city primed to believe a polished stranger, that appetite would become a business model. Ponzi was born in Lugo, Italy, in eighteen eighty-two. The public record traces a hard path before Boston. He worked as a waiter, a laborer, a clerk, and a bank errand boy. Those were not glamorous jobs, but they taught him something valuable. He learned how institutions look from the...