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Ponzi: Origin of an Italian Surname

Charles Ponzi, after whom the fraudulent scheme that dupes investors was named, was an Italian immigrant who arrived in Boston in 1903 at the age of 21. Ponzi once did prison time in Canada for forging cheques. In today’s trip down emery lane (ouchies!), we look at the origin of the Italian surname Ponzi and then offer stern words of reproof to the covetous chumps who got taken to the cleaners by the oily slicker, Bernard Madoff.

The Ponzi fraud has been in the news lately because this high-class New York City grifter named Bernard Madoff has allegedly pulled off the most obscenely profitable Ponzi swindle in history — his possible theft? 65 Billion Dollars! — no mean feat in the midst of greed’s most rampant pillage of our planet. If Bernie Boy is convicted, he faces 150 years in the slammer.

 

The Surname Ponzi

Like many ancient surnames, there are several cogent origins of Ponzi. Ponzi is an Italian patronymic surname. That means the founding ancestor of the family bore the name Ponzio or Ponzo. Ponzi is a plural form so that, as Italian surnames were created in the late middle ages, one might have seen Pietro Ponzi, meaning ‘Peter, son of Ponzo’ or ‘Peter of the Ponzo family.’

Ponzio is an earlier personal name derived from an ancient Roman family name, Pontius. It was not common early in Italian naming because of its negative association, in a Roman Catholic country, with one of the great villains in the Christian myths, Pontius Pilate. Pontius Pilatus was the official judge at the trial of Christ and Pilate it was who ordered Jesus to be crucified. Pontius is known to historical record as the Prefect of the Roman province of Judaea from 26 to 36 CE.

When Pilate presented the scourged Christ to the hostile mob of louts in front of the praetorium, his residence in Jerusalem, during that long-ago Passover, the Bible claims that Pontius’ most famous words were uttered, the Latin sentence “Ecce homo!” There are several translations. The gist of the Latin is “Here is the guy you want.” A literal translation might be “Behold the man!”

Of course, Pilate’s sentence (Ecce homo!) is a translation into Latin in Saint Jerome’s Vulgate version of the bible. In the Koine Greek of the original New Testament, Pilate’s words to the screaming crowd are reported as Ἰδοὺ ὁ ἄνθρωπος (idou ho anthrōpos). The gist of the Greek is “See. Here is this person. He is merely a human being.”

The moment inspired many canvases throughout the history of European painting. Several are reproduced below.

 

“Ecce homo!” (Behold the man!) is Antonio Ciseri’s (1821-1891) depiction of Pontius Pilate presenting a scourged Christ to the people from the porch of the governor’s mansion, the praetorium in Jerusalem, as told in the Gospel of St. John, chapter 9, verse 5. This nineteenth-century oil on canvas is now in the Galleria d'Arte Moderna, Florence, Italy.

 

Etymology of Pontius Pilate’s Names

By the way, Pontius’ famous cognomen Pilatus meant in Latin ‘adept at throwing the javelin’ from pilum Latin ‘javelin.’ The Roman army pilum had a five-foot shaft of wood and a two-foot iron blade.

The Roman gens or clan name, Pontius, has several possible origins. The simplest one suggests that the founder of the Pontius family had control of some important toll bridge at some time during the Roman empire or, less likely, the ancestor merely dwelt near a famous bridge. The Latin word for bridge is pons, pontis. In ancient Roman religion one of the highest priestly positions was “bridge-maker” or in Latin pontifex. In any good Catholic dictionary, look up the relationship of this word to modern derivative words like pontiff and pontificate and pontifical. Then check the same words in a good Classical Dictionary.

 

“Ecce Homo,” Quentin Massys, oil on wood panel, 1520 CE, Doge’s Palace, Venice, Italy

 

Four Alternate Origins of the Italian Surname Ponzi

1. The Roman family name Pontius appears later in Italian history as Pontii, a patronymic plural. One northern Italian pronunciation of Pontii is ‘pontzi’ or ‘ponzi.’

2. Some European surnames began as nicknames of ancestors who acted so frequently in various religious dramas, often taking the same part, that they became identified with it. It is possible that the founding ancestor of the Ponzi family may, especially if the surname arose late in Italian history, have been an amateur actor who played Pontius Pilate in crucifixion dramas. Eventually his nickname became his new surname. That transition of nickname to surname is exceedingly common in the rise of European last names.

3. Pontius may have arisen as a Roman version of a foreign name, perhaps the name of an immigrant to Rome. The family founder may have come to Italy from Pontus in Asia Minor, named Pontos in Greek after their word pontos ‘sea.’ In antiquity the Greek Πόντος comprised the southern shore of the Black Sea, today part of Turkey. Pontos was dubbed by ancient Greek colonists who took the name from their term for the Black Sea, Pontos Euxeinos, ‘hospitable sea.’ The territory on the south coast is first mentioned as Pontos in The Anabasis by the Greek historian Xenophon. The compound adjective euxeinos consists of eu- Greek ‘good, well’ + xeinos Ionian Greek ‘stranger, foreigner’ so that one who was hospitable was ‘good to strangers.’

From a similar Attic Greek adjective and noun xenos comes our modern English word xenophobia ‘fear of strangers.’ When in 1898 British scientist Sir William Ramsay isolated gaseous elements new to the periodic table he named one of them ‘the strange one’ or xenon.

4. The least likely origin, from a strict linguistic standpoint, is Ponzi as an alternate pronunciation of Bonzi, a northern Italian surname, itself a plural and patronymic of a Piedmontese medieval personal name, Bónizo, of Germanic origin.

Unlikely, but remember, in the history of human naming, almost anything is possible.

 

The dapper swindler himself, photographed in Boston in 1920

 

Let us skulk back now into the gummy alleyways of fraud and deception. In one common version of the Ponzi scheme, the conman offers unusually high and consistent returns on money invested with him. His rates look better than current market returns, but not so much better that his rates rouse suspicion among amateur or ignorant investors. If the market is offering four percent, the Ponzi schemer will guarantee, say, 11 percent. Just enough to stoke the first flickering gut-flame of licking greed.

After the Ponzi scammer has collected perhaps fifty thousand dollars, he might skim off ten grand for himself and start paying back his very first investors. Then, he hopes, word-of-mouth will spread among the greedy and more suckers will invest. The fraudster keeps paying back earlier investors with monies received from the newest investors.

Even the mathematically challenged can see that, if the scammer hooks a sufficient number of suckers, he can skim off more and more money for himself. Very often the Ponzi schemer makes no investments in the market at all, or only takes token and moderate positions in stocks known to the suckers. Eventually every Ponzi scheme will collapse. Sometimes the grifter absconds with all the moolah and is never caught.

The recently unrich must often seek altered accommodation. Underwear drooping from withered thighs, the duped dopes hunker in their Florida trailer kitchenette, slobber plinking lightly on the arborite table, blankly staring at their emptied accounts, scratching like insects at lottery tickets and gazing heavenward, not at God but at the large hole in the Airstream’s roof as they await the next hurricane.

Sometimes a Ponzi scheme can be detected, but not often, especially not if there are permissive governments like those operated for the last 30 years by American Republicans, in which no real federal or state regulation or policing of financial institutions is permitted. After all, it might be a drag on American business! Looking around our tattered world, the reader can see just where that philosophy landed us, especially with the help of a moronic chieftain like George W. Bush.

My humble addendum is this: greed is not a philosophical stance. Greed is a disease. Gordon Gecko in the movie “Wall Street” has been proven wrong. Greed does not work, Gordo — except for a cringing crew of creepoid elitists, now huddled behind their brocade drapes in their high condos, their terrified ears filled with the clank and squeak of empty tumbrels rolling, rolling, rolling toward their buildings, tumbrels waiting to be filled with softly weeping wives still clad in Vera Wang originals and Grecian-formula-gray former golf champions surgically-dewrinkled, all ready for transport to the guillotine of poverty or revolution. But which shall arrive first?

Lest I wax rabid or caw like the Raven of Doom or launch a jeremiad (fie on it, say I!) let me note that Bernie may have scammed 65 billion bucks off a slew of slavering schnooks who deserved exactly what they got. Bernie weaseled billions out of these quick-buck fools by calibrating their greed to within a nanometer. Madoff played them as Paganini once romanced violin strings.

Clustered in a vulturine circle around the con-man were these seekers after unbelievable returns — their eyes, slits of avarice; their fingers, reflexed talons of rapacity; their ancient throats still dry-rasping a whispered gimme-gimme-gimme. Ought we now to melt in sympathy for every wizened wrinkly now bereft of his or her life savings? Will you donate some of your tax money to assist them?

If an interest rate or return looks too good to be true, it is. Is that rocket science? I think not.

The Ponzi scheme is named after Charles Ponzi. Who was he and what did he do to have his surname immortally smeared as the name of a fraud? One good summary is in a New York Times book review written by David Margolick. It’s a review of Ponzi’s Scheme: The True Story of a Financial Legend by Mitchell Zuckoff.

“Born in northern Italy , Ponzi had come to Boston in 1903 at the age of 21. He splurged on a second-class ticket rather than take steerage; in style, breeding and aspirations, he was less one of those huddled masses yearning to breathe free than he was a hustler yearning to be rich. Early on he was sent to prison for forgery and smuggling, where he impressed one supervisor with his head for figures and his ''obsession for planning financial coups.'' But his were not small-bore get-rich-quick ideas, but complicated market manipulations that would make him millions.

Avarice fondles her obscene treasures.

His time served, Ponzi returned to Boston in 1917, married and took a job as a clerk and stenographer. And he schemed. His tool of choice turned out to be an innocuous enclosure he received in a letter from Spain : an International Reply Coupon, designed to purchase postage stamps in foreign currencies at fixed, outdated rates of exchange. Buy them in bulk in European countries whose currencies had been ravaged by World War I, redeem them in the United States for sturdy American dollars, and presto! You had a tidy little profit. ''A little dollar could start on a journey across the ocean and return home in six weeks, married and with a couple of kids,'' is how he put it.

It was simple, apparently legal and offered people of even modest means the chance to invest. There was, of course, the small matter of how to convert postage stamps into cash. But as Ponzi quickly discovered, that would not be necessary. Nor, for that matter, was buying coupons, or doing anything at all in Europe . With successive waves of people entrusting him with their cash, Ponzi needed only enough money to pay off those people redeeming their coupons. Of course, with the prospect of increasing their savings exponentially every couple of months, few ever redeemed anything.

Ponzi opened for business in December 1919, and soon the first few customers began trickling in. There was no need for advertising; word of mouth sufficed. In February 1920, he took in $5,290; in April, more than $140,000; in May, more than $440,000; in June, more than $2.5 million; and in July, nearly $6.5 million -- this at a time when the president of Harvard earned $6,000 a year. In seven months, 30,000 people had entrusted Ponzi with almost $10 million of their money. He was a wealthy man -- that is, if you didn't count the $15 million he owed them.”

Ponzi promised his marks a return of 50 percent within 45 days! They caught him in 1920. He was convicted, served time in American prisons and in 1934 was deported to Italy, dead broke. Ponzi died in the charity ward of a hospital in Brazil in 1949. He was 66 and was still flat broke. You can investigate the precise details of his original Ponzi scheme by looking up on the internet any lengthy review of Mitchell Zuckoff’s book, Ponzi’s Scheme: The True Story of a Financial Legend.

 

© 2009 William Gordon Casselman

 

 

 

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