Stay informed with free updates
Simply sign up to the Arts myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.
In early 1920, an Italian American from Boston named Charles Ponzi was on his uppers. Newly married and without a job, he was so deep in debt he had pawned the jewellery given to his wife by her parents. But then he spied an opportunity. He realised that international postal coupons could be bought in one country and redeemed in another, often with different rates of exchange. Using start-up investment from individuals to whom he promised 50 per cent profit, he could buy the coupons in bulk and use new investors to pay off the old. He had created what became known as a Ponzi scheme.
Over a period of nine months, Ponzi went on to steal the modern equivalent of $250mn from thousands of investors, leading to his name becoming a byword for dodgy financial schemes. The most famous Ponzi schemer of modern times was the American financier Bernard Madoff, whose investors lost $65bn and who was sentenced to 150 years in prison in 2009 (he died in 2021).
The new Apple Original podcast, Easy Money: The Charles Ponzi Story tells the tale of Ponzi and his legacy. It is hosted by Maya Lau, a journalist and financial investigator who calls this “a cautionary tale we still haven’t fully learned today . . . Being conned isn’t a matter of intelligence, it’s a matter of desire. It’s about being given what we already want. Which is why Ponzi schemes remain so prevalent, because we’re all potential victims.”
But do we really need another story of a scammer? It’s true that we are overloaded with tawdry tales of con artists taking advantage of innocents in ever more creative ways. But there’s no sense that this series takes any pleasure in the gullibility of Ponzi’s victims. Nor is it a straightforward pod about the dangers of fraudsters. Although it is underpinned by Lau’s financial expertise, it is, above all, a character study in which we learn how a hopeful immigrant who travelled from Italy to the US to make his fortune in the early 1900s became a historic fraudster.
All this is done through immersive, dramatised segments where, extrapolating from Ponzi’s memoir and the testimony of historians, a cast of actors led by Sebastian Maniscalco imagine pivotal scenes in Ponzi’s life, such as creditors knocking on his door demanding what is owed and an investor arriving at his office accompanied by police, demanding her money back.
Blending drama and documentary this way often falls flat, as the serious documentary tone can make the drama feel hammy. Though it does feel overcooked in parts, the series is nonetheless effective in getting under the skin of its protagonist. Easy Money paints Ponzi less as an out-and-out villain than a proud and charismatic man who, to avoid the ignominy of destitution, made one bad decision after another and quickly got out of his depth.
podcasts.apple.com
Read the full article here