Ponzi's Scheme by Mitchell Zuckoff

Academy. For tuition and expenses of about $325 a year, a young man at Exeter could be reasonably certain of winning entry into an Ivy League college. But Richard lasted barely three months, earning D’s in math and English, and a failing grade in history. He returned home after one term, in time for Christmas.
    A year later, his parents insisted he try again. He returned to Exeter, this time maintaining a C-minus average over the next four years, with an occasional A in math or physics, and a few failing grades in Latin and history. He seemed comfortable, though, winning election as president of his dorm and as captain of the chess team, and warming his father’s heart by becoming secretary of the school newspaper, the
Exonian.
    As planned, Richard was accepted at Harvard in the class of 1909, a collection of 434 pedigreed young men who had every reasonable expectation that they would rule the world. Half were from Massachusetts, and more than half, including Richard, were Protestants, with twenty-six Catholics, sixteen Jews, five Christian Scientists, three Free Thinkers, and two atheists thrown in for diversity. Fifty-four were the sons of men who had attended Harvard, and three-quarters declared themselves Republicans. One of those was Theodore Roosevelt Jr., whose father was president of the United States at the time. Classmates also included T. S. Eliot, Walter Lippmann, and scores of other young men destined for fortune and various levels of renown.
    Whether he was intimidated or just uninterested, it was not long before Richard began following a path almost identical to Ponzi’s at the University of Rome. He developed a taste for fine wine and champagne, ate sumptuous meals at fashionable restaurants, smoked cigarettes in a rakish holder, and put his gentle voice and handsome face to use wooing older women. He had chestnut-brown hair and sensitive dark eyes, and his finely tailored clothes hung perfectly on his trim five-foot-ten frame. With the world at his feet, he found little time for classes. Richard Grozier seemed especially determined to fail freshman English composition, a galling prospect for his newspaper editor father.
    In November 1905, not three months after his arrival at Harvard, Richard received a letter from the freshman dean, Edgar H. Wells: “I am very sorry to tell you that the Administrative Board at its meeting last night voted to put you on probation for your unsatisfactory record. Probation means that you are in serious danger of separation from College, and unless from now on your record both in attendance and grades is thoroughly satisfactory you may be sent away without further warning.” Wells wrote a similar, though somewhat more polite, letter to Edwin Grozier.
    There was a cachet to laxity among certain Harvard students. This was especially true among the “club men,” who thought a grade above a C was a waste of effort. They dressed in expensive but casual disarray, disdained rah-rah school spirit, and refused to date the brainy women at Radcliffe. Outwardly, Richard fit the profile. His only nonacademic activity was his membership in the Exeter Club. He played no sports, joined no groups, and despite his newspaper heritage spent no time at the school paper, the
Crimson.
He lived like a prince in Dana Chambers on Dunster Street, a private dormitory in an area near the college known as the “Gold Coast,” where students of means escaped the drafty, dingy housing provided by the college. A flattering description of the club men of that era would be “cool”; a less-generous one would be “feckless.” Richard resembled them in many ways, but in one important respect he differed: arrogance. Richard had none. He was charming and gracious, with a gentle voice and an aversion to limelight. Women adored him. He might have been a loafer and a lothario, but he was not a lout.
    Upon receiving the dean’s letter, Edwin Grozier began a campaign