Ultimately, Ponzi was sentenced to five years in federal prison for using the mails to defraud.  After three and one-half years in prison, Ponzi was sentenced to additional seven to nine years by Massachusetts’s authorities.  He was released on $14,000 bond pending an appeal and disappeared about one-month later. 

 

He turned up a short time later in the state of Florida.  Under the assumed name of Charles Borelli, Ponzi was involved in a pyramid land scheme. He was purchasing land at $16 an acre, subdividing it into twenty-three lots, and selling each lot off at $10 a piece.  He promised all investors that their initial $10 investment would translate into $5,300,000 in just two years.  Too bad much of that much of the land was underwater and absolutely worthless.

 

Ponzi was indicted for fraud and sentenced to one year in a Florida prison.  Once again, he jumped bail on June 3, 1926 and ran off to Texas.  He hopped a freighter headed for Italy, but was captured on June 28th in a New Orleans port.  On June 30th he sent a telegram to President Calvin Coolidge asking to be deported.  Ponzi’s request was denied and he was sent back to Boston to complete his jail term.  After seven years, Ponzi was released on good behavior and deported to Italy on October 7, 1934.  Back in Rome, Ponzi became an English translator.  Mussolini then offered him a position with Italy’s new airline and he served as the Rio de Janeiro branch manager from 1939-1942.  Ponzi discovered that several airline officials were using the carrier to smuggle currency and Ponzi wanted a cut.  When they refused to include him, he tipped off the Brazilian government.  The Second World War brought about the airline’s failure and Ponzi soon found himself unemployed. 

 

Once again, he wandered from job to job.  He tried running a Rio lodge, but that failed.  He then alternated between earning a pittance providing English lessons and drawing from the Brazilian unemployment fund. Ponzi died in January of 1949 in the charity ward of a Rio de Janeiro hospital.  Somehow, the man who had gone from poverty to multi-millionaire and right back to poverty in a matter of six months had managed to save up $75 to cover the costs of his burial.  He left behind an unfinished manuscript appropriately titled “The Fall of Mister Ponzi”.

 

-          www.swindlers.eu

-          www.wot-if.eu – how would people behave in extreme situations

-          www.super-discount.eu – the whole truth…

-          www.sexychicks.eu – the prettiest women

-          www.alpajda.eu & www.brefa.eu – the most famous paradoxes

-          www.residencecare.eu & www.residence-care.eu – everything about residential care

-          www.one-x.eu – a web about UFO

-          www.impostor.eu – impossible torque