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up in prison. “Since it had to be a cage,” Ponzi figured, “it might as well be a gilded cage.”
    Ponzi was given a job as a clerk in the prison laundry, but his linguistic skills soon won him a transfer to the mail clerk’s office. He impressed his boss, prison record keeper A. C. Aderhold, as smooth, smart, and congenial, a clever young man with a gift for figures who kept error-free books without complaint. The only peculiarity Aderhold noticed was what he called Ponzi’s “obsession for planning financial coups.” Aderhold thought his assistant took so much pleasure from plotting elaborate moneymaking schemes that he might someday put one into play simply to see if it would work.
    Ponzi’s least favorite part of the job was translating for Warden F. G. Zerpt the incoming and outgoing letters of a dough-faced Sicilian mobster named Ignazio “the Wolf” Lupo. Lupo represented a new kind of criminal turning up in prisons like the Atlanta penitentiary. He had landed in New York twelve years earlier, in 1898, having fled Italy to avoid arrest for the murder of a customer of his dry goods store. He’d continued to mix fine food and major crime in the United States, opening an importing business while moonlighting in murder and extortion as a boss of the fearsome Mafia group known as the Black Hand. Lupo was suspected of ordering or taking part in numerous killings, most notoriously the 1909 murder of legendary New York police lieutenant Giuseppe Petrosino. Petrosino’s relentless pursuit of mafiosi had made him the scourge of the Italian underworld, whose leaders ordered him shot to death when he was in Italy pursuing leads against the Black Hand. Prosecutors had lacked the evidence to pin the murder on Lupo, so instead they’d nailed him with a thirty-year prison sentence on two counts of counterfeiting. Printing funny money was seldom punished so severely, so the sentence was understood as payback for the violent crimes authorities suspected him of but could not prove.
    Adopting the code of prisoners everywhere, Ponzi took the health-conscious position that any unproven allegations against his fellow inmates were between them and their Maker. Yet, with time to kill, Ponzi found himself feeling a certain kinship with his countryman Lupo. Not only did they share a native tongue; Ponzi believed that they had both been treated unfairly by overzealous, duplicitous authorities, and were both serving excessive sentences for nonviolent offenses. Lupo the Wolf must have sensed Ponzi’s comradeship.
    After being housed with a string of prisoners he suspected were informants, Lupo approached Ponzi one day after a ball game in the prison yard. He was sick of stool pigeons, Lupo said. Would Ponzi become his cellmate? Ponzi agreed—it was always wise to say yes to Lupo—and prison officials approved the transfer, apparently thinking the skinny young mail clerk would make an ideal stoolie. They were wrong.
    Ponzi was wary of Lupo, but he liked his new cellmate. The optimist in Ponzi found Lupo to be good-hearted and straightforward. What Ponzi liked most was Lupo’s stoicism. Even after Ponzi had survived almost a decade of tough living and prison time far from home and family, deep down he was still the soft college boy of his youth. Lupo was tough and fearless, and Ponzi admired him for it. Yet there was little practical that Ponzi could learn from Lupo—the schemes Ponzi conjured in his mind had nothing to do with threats of violence. But another prisoner was an endless source of fascination for Ponzi.
    Charles W. Morse was a dark model of American prosperity at the turn of the century: physically ugly, amoral, rich beyond reason. Born in Maine to an affluent family, Morse established a shipping company with his father after graduating from Bowdoin College in 1877. The business boomed, and so did Morse’s rapacity and his capacity for shady deals. In 1897 he