Charles Ponzi

8 Pages 2106 Words

The Life and Times of Charles Ponzi

Charles Ponzi was one of the greatest con artist to ever come to the United States. He arrived on a boat that came from Italy. The majority of people don’t exactly know who Charles Ponzi was but they surely have heard of the “Ponzi Plan”, and even those who haven’t heard of that know about its modern version, the “make money fast” schemes that were popular at one time on the internet before they were replaced by better scams (Goebel).
He was a notorious liar, so nobody knows for sure how is life really went. He was born in Parma, Italy, in 1882, and immigrated to the United States in 1903. He would later claim that he had been a student at a university in Italy and decided to immigrate when he ran out of money. Other people say that he was constantly in trouble and his family kicked him out by shipping him across the Atlantic (Goebel).
When he arrived in the U.S he had big ambitions. He stood only 5 feet and 2 inches, but had an incredible amount of self -confidence, and from what I’ve read; he had the line of talk that could sell bubble gum at a lockjaw ward. The only problem was that he was too cocky. His ambitions were larger than his actual talent. He had some money on the voyage over here, but due to his excessive greed, he lost it all in a few card games on the boat (Goebel).
He was still undiscouraged. He learned how to speak English, and got a job as a dishwasher in a restaurant. He was going to do whatever it took to get some cash. Eventually he worked his way up to waiter. But once again, his greed got him in trouble and he was fired from the restaurant. This didn’t really faze Ponzi much. In 1907, he moved to Montreal, Canada, and became an assistant teller in a bank. Among his talents, was his talent with numbers and he found out that the bank was in some financial troubles because of bad real-estate loans. He schemed to take over the bank, but was caught forging ...