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Synopsis
This engaging book reveals the vibrant man and the American era behind history's most infamous financial con.
Review
By all accounts a highly intelligent man, Charles Ponzi arrived in America from Parma, Italy in 1903 as something of a criminal academic. He learned to speak English in a mere matter of weeks, and in a few months more he'd learned fraudulent accounting and was cultivating number skills as a bankteller in Montreal.
After a stint in prison for check forging, Ponzi went straight, got married, moved to Boston, and promptly failed at about a dozen legitimate investment plans. After a few years, he hit it big with International Postal Reply coupons, which he reasoned could produce returns of over 400% — on paper anyway. The scheme's brilliance lay in its simplicity: Ponzi planned to send cash back home to Italy to buy Postal Reply Coupons, which in turn could be redeemed in any American post office for stamps. The meteoric rise of the dollar in the 1920s meant that the stamps' purchasing power in the US was quadruple the original amount — thus, not only was the plan a sound investment, it was a legal form of currency speculation.
Like any get-rich-quick scam, this one was far from foolproof. Ponzi's
guarantee of an irresistible 50% interest over 45 days was underwritten by
paying off old investments with new ones — what we know today, thanks
to Ponzi, as a classic pyramid scheme. At its zenith, Ponzi's company (named — ironically, in hindsight — the Securities Exchange Company, or SEC) was worth around $10 million. But the bottom fell out when a few shady acquaintances resurfaced and the Boston Post ran his Montreal mug shots. Investors flocked to withdraw their money, only to find that it had been spent — all of it — on Ponzi's lavish house, fine suits, and his new automobile.
Reissued as part of Luc Sante's new Library of Larceny series, Donald Dunn's fascinating 1975 biography paints a first-hand portrait of the master criminal whose scheme has been brazenly sunk to lower depths over the years, most recently and infamously by Enron. Dunn takes care to highlight the seamy side of white-collar crime — those blue-collar folks who were swindled out of a lifetime of honest wages by a smooth-talking salesman and the promise of the American Dream. (PJW)
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| PHOTOGRAPHY |
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The Innocents
by Taryn Simon (Photographer), Peter Neufeld, Barry Scheck
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| Published: |
June 2003 |
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136 |
| Publisher: |
Umbrage Editions |
Links:
The Innocents exhibition
Simon's commercial work
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Synopsis
A powerful written and photographic account of innocent men and women who were wrongfully convicted, imprisoned, and eventually exonerated of heinous crimes.
Review
A few years out of college in 2000, Taryn Simon landed a momentous magazine assignment to photograph men who had recently been released from death row because of DNA evidence. Recognizing the story's greater potential, she applied for and received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography to fund a cross-country investigation into similar legal cases of mistaken identity. In this compelling book, Simon shares the deplorable accounts of judicial injustice through reports of the crimes, arrests, trials, and exonerations; moving interviews with the accused and the accusers; and mug shots of the wrongfully convicted offset by straightforward poses in locations that were central to their indictments.
Ironically, it's Simon's chosen medium of photography that played a crucial role in the convictions. A significant part of the police identification process and criminal evidence was based on photographs of suspects shown to crime victims. In case after case, we learn how easily the process can be manipulated and coerced, especially when it involves cross-racial identification. Because DNA was used in the exoneration, most of the crimes were related to rape and murder. In society's eyes, these are dreadful acts: when someone is wrongfully accused and punished for these crimes, lives are often shattered.
For instance, a white woman was robbed and raped in her home in Alexandra, Virginia. The police photographed several black men in the neighborhood and showed the photos to the victim, who could not identify anyone. Upon returning home, she looked out the window and wrongfully fingered the man washing his father's car across the street as the assailant. Her identification was based on the photo the police had shown her and when they unjustly told her that he had confessed, she became certain it was him. It took another seven years to set the record straight. Variations of this injustice exist across America; thanks to Simon and the Innocence Project, due process may prevail. (PL)
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FEATURE
PEN's Freedom to Write Campaign
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Many people know the literary nonprofit PEN for the prestigious PEN/Faulkner prize or for their star-studded events and festivals. But these celebrations of literature mostly serve to generate attention (and
funds) for the organization's many programs, among them the Freedom to Write campaign. Serving as something of an Amnesty International for writers and journalists, Freedom to Write comes to the aid of scribes who are censored, imprisoned, or worse. The more than 140 PEN centers around the globe lobby for asylum, release, or clemency for writers worldwide, including Chinese journalists, Saudi poets, cyberdissidents in Iran, and imprisoned authors in the US itself. But not enough people know about these crucial campaigns, and that itself is a crime. (TW)
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