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Saturday morning, August 29, 1908, he went to the offices of a shipping firm called the Canadian Warehousing Company, a client of Banco Zarossi. Ponzi had been there many times before to collect receipts and to handle other business matters. He raised no suspicions when he walked into the empty office of the manager, Damien Fournier. While no one was looking, Ponzi went to Fournier’s desk and found a checkbook from another bank where the company had an account, the French-owned Bank of Hochelaga. Ponzi tore a blank check from the back of the checkbook and left as quickly as he had come.
    That afternoon, Ponzi filled out the check in the legitimate-seeming amount of $423.58. He signed it “D. Fournier” and presented it at a branch of the Bank of Hochelaga. He asked the teller for four one-hundred-dollar bills in American currency, but the teller told him that would not be possible. Agitated, Ponzi accepted forty-two ten-dollar bills, three singles, and the rest in coins. Cash in hand, Ponzi left the bank and began outfitting himself for his return to the United States. He went from store to store, buying two suits, an overcoat, a pair of boots, and a watch and chain. He completed the spree with thirty-two dollars’ worth of shirts, collars, cuffs, ties, and suspenders from a men’s clothing store called R. J. Tooke.
    Before Ponzi could leave town, officials at the Bank of Hochelaga began having serious doubts about the signature on the check. At noon the following Monday, Montreal Detective John McCall headed over to Ponzi’s boardinghouse, across town from the bank on Rue Saint Denis. When McCall first confronted Ponzi, the detective asked if his name was Bianchi. Ponzi said no, his name was Clement. McCall then identified himself as a detective. Before McCall could say anything more, Ponzi sighed, “I’m guilty.”
    The detective and a partner searched Ponzi and found the receipt from the forged check. They also counted out what was left of the money: $218.12. McCall placed Ponzi under arrest and brought him to the city’s vermin-infested jail.
    Ponzi’s years as a sojourner had taught him a few things, and he quickly began calculating a way to improve his accommodations. Pretending to be catatonic, he curled up in a corner, stared at the wall, and chewed a towel to shreds. A guard brought him to the jail infirmary, where Ponzi emerged from his trance and began whooping and climbing a wall to get to a barred window. After a few hours in a straitjacket, he acted as though he were recovering from a bout of epilepsy. It was a crude ruse, but it worked. His jailers kept him in the relative comforts of the infirmary until his November trial.
    Ponzi pleaded innocent before the court, but it was a hopeless cause. The testimony of Detective McCall and the bank teller, not to mention Ponzi’s sudden shopping spree, made quick work of the trial. Ponzi was found guilty of forgery and sentenced to three years in prison under the name Charles Ponsi, alias Bianchi.
    Ponzi served his sentence three miles from Montreal, inside the looming gray stone walls of Saint Vincent de Paul Penitentiary, a prison with all the charm of the Bastille. Like a passenger in steerage, he slept on a mattress made from a sack of corncobs and husks. His cellmate was a fellow Italian immigrant, a swindler named Louis Cassullo who was serving a three-year stretch. Ponzi sized up Cassullo as a man who would steal the poor box in a church or pick a drunkard’s pocket—“one of those prowling, petty, sneaky thieves whose counterparts in the animal kingdom are the hyenas and the jackals.” Their days were spent in an unheated shed where they pounded rock into gravel. In time, Ponzi joked that he had crushed enough stone to pave Yellowstone National Park. Within a few months, Ponzi put his banking experience to work by winning a job as a clerk in the jail blacksmith’s shop, after which he won a