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promotion to the chief engineer’s office, and finally to the warden’s office.
    Despite the softer working conditions, Ponzi stewed endlessly over his situation. He wrote several pleading letters to Cordasco, but the padrone turned a deaf ear. Cordasco suspected that Ponzi was the mastermind of the Zarossi scheme, and he was not about to help. Over time, Ponzi earned the warden’s trust as a model prisoner, and his sentence was shortened to twenty months for good behavior.
    On July 13, 1910, Ponzi was doing his clerk duties when the warden came to him with a paper to type: his own parole form. Elated, Ponzi was released with five dollars in his pocket and an ill-fitting suit from the prison tailor shop. Longing for the fine Italian garments of his youth, Ponzi considered the suit grotesque. Not that it mattered where he was headed.

Edwin Atkins Grozier, editor and publisher of
The Boston Post.
    Mary Grozier
    C HAPTER T HREE
    â€œN EWSPAPER GENIUS ”
    L ike Ponzi, Richard Grozier was a bright, handsome young man with a taste for fine clothes. Also like Ponzi, he was approaching the midpoint of his life with little to show for himself. Unlike Ponzi, however, Grozier had every possible advantage—he was descended from
Mayflower
Pilgrims and had spent his life bathed in wealth and privilege.
    Yet in 1917 Grozier was thirty years old, single, and living in his parents’ house. He worked, without distinction, for his father’s company after nearly flunking out of college and washing out of law school. As the only male heir, Grozier was destined to inherit his family’s business and the money and power that went with it. But it looked as though his inheritance would drop in value the moment he took possession.
    Richard’s father was Edwin Atkins Grozier, editor, publisher, and owner of the
Boston Post,
the largest-circulation newspaper in Boston and one of the largest in the nation. Through relentless work and rare gifts, Edwin Grozier had engineered the
Post
’s rise from the brink of bankruptcy to the top of the pig pile of Boston newspapers. By the time he was Richard’s age, Edwin had already been one of the most respected newspapermen in the country. Without him, the
Post
would have been long dead, cannibalized by competitors on Newspaper Row.
    Some thought the paper might still end up that way, once it passed to his son.
    T he first edition of Boston’s
Daily Morning Post
hit the streets November 9, 1831, under the ownership and editorial direction of Colonel Charles G. Greene, whose military title was honorary but whose journalism was sound. The
Post
appeared at a time when Boston newspapers seemed to be opening and closing every few months; fifteen printed their first and last editions between 1830 and 1840. But under Greene’s steady hand, the
Post
survived and grew steadily for four decades, establishing itself as a well-written, reliable Democratic voice in an age of partisan newspapers.
    Then came November 9, 1872. A fast-moving fire consumed an empty hoopskirt factory on the edge of Boston’s financial district, then leapt from one building to the next. Many of the horses that were used to pull the city’s fire equipment had recently succumbed to an equine epidemic, so the Great Boston Fire burned for more than two days, consuming 776 buildings and leveling sixty-five acres downtown. The City upon a Hill was a smoldering ruin. Sullenly surveying the damage, Oliver Wendell Holmes was moved to verse: “On roof and wall, on dome and spire, flashed the false jewels of the fire.” The
Post
’s offices escaped the flames, but the oceans of water used to protect it ruined almost everything inside. Greene and his son, Nathaniel, reopened the paper in a new location, but it was never the same. When the nation fell into economic depression during the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant, the Greenes decided to sell.
    The eager buyer was the Reverend Ezra D.