Column: Charles Ponzi's fascinating twist on the American Dream — as played by Sebastian Maniscalco
More than 100 years ago, the name Charles Ponzi was splashed on newspaper front pages across the land and poured from radio broadcasts, putting the phrase 'Ponzi Scheme' firmly into the arsenal of generations of would-be con artists.
Sebastian Maniscalco, an Arlington Heights native who worked at a McDonald's long before becoming a successful actor and comedian, had very little knowledge of Ponzi when he got a call from a man named Will Malnati.
'I had once almost, almost, been the victim of a Ponzi scheme in the early 2000s,' Maniscalco told me. 'So at least I knew the name.'
Malnati, a native of Northbrook and Northfield and a proud part of a family pizza empire, founded At Will Media in 2016, a Brooklyn-based, independently-owned podcast studio. It has produced many fine programs, including, in partnership with the Tribune, 'Unsealed: The Tylenol Murders' in 2022, and the haunting 'The Last Days of Cabrini-Green' last year.
These two men have created an enlightening and entertaining eight-episode podcast series. 'Easy Money: The Charles Ponzi Story' is an Apple Original Podcast, produced by At Will Media, with Maniscalco as Ponzi.
You can hear its first two episodes now, with future episodes arriving weekly through July 28. And here's how it came to be.
'A friend had sent me a YouTube link about Charles Ponzi, a pretty crude piece taped in a basement,' Malnati said. 'I didn't know much about Ponzi. I had heard the name, of course, but knew almost nothing about the man. So I started digging around and couldn't find a great deal. I wanted more, and so I started thinking of how this story could be told.'
He was further grabbed by what he found to be marked similarities between Ponzi and Maniscalco. 'I only knew Sebastian as a fan, but I found his resemblance to Ponzi so striking that I gave him a call to see if he was interested in a project.'
Maniscalco was a very busy man. Not only was he regularly on tour, often with Chicago's Pat McGann as his opening act, he has released six comedy specials, has had supporting roles in such films as 'The Green Mile' and 'The Irishman,' and wrote and starred, with Robert DeNiro, in 'About My Father.'
Not incidentally, was already part of the podcast world, with 'The Pete and Sebastian Show,' which he described to me as, 'Just me and my buddy Pete (Correale, a stand-up comic and writer) sitting around talking.'
Amid all of that, Maniscalco found time to listen to Malnati.
'I didn't know much about storytelling podcasts,' he said.
To enlighten him, Malnati sent him links to 'Wild Things: Siegfried & Roy,' the Apple Original podcast produced by At Will Media in 2021. Maniscalco listened, often during the 20 minutes he spends each morning in a steam room. His reaction was 'Wow, this is fantastic.'
And so did these two children of the Chicago suburbs team up, along with many others, to create Apple's first original scripted podcast.
Fascinating in its details, 'Easy Money: The Charles Ponzi Story,' is polished in its production, each episode in the neighborhood of 40 minutes.
There are many other characters, good ones and nasty ones. Yes, it focuses on a colorful, wide-reaching criminal but, thanks to some recently discovered letters, it's a love story too. The relationship between Ponzi and his wife Rose (performed by Candice Shedd-Thompson) is memorably touching.
So, when I say Ponzi, what pops into your mind?
Likely the face of Bernie Madoff, who orchestrated the largest Ponzi scheme in history which usually fails to credit, even mention, the creator of the scheme which is defined as 'a form of fraud that lures investors and pays profits to earlier investors with funds from more recent investors.'
Though there were variations of this boondoggle before Ponzi, he was its most colorful and talented practitioner (for a surprisingly short time), a 5-foot, 2-inch tall Italian immigrant of ambitions that eventually turned avaricious.
Hosted with considerable charm by Maya Lau, a former Los Angeles Times reporter and podcaster, deeply researched and stylishly written by Matt Hickey and Kevin Hynes, it is directed by Katie Finneran, also from Chicago.
This was all new to Maniscalco, who says, 'In my comedy, there's a lot of visualization in the way I tell stories. I can see things in my head. In movies, I'm on a set. I'm in the Copacabana in the 'Irishman,' there's Don Rickles over there on the stage. I don't have to visualize. Everything's right there in front of me. For this I'm alone in a sound booth. I have to use my imagination to create in my mind the Ponzi world, his office, the people around him. And I'm not moving and I like to move.'
He found it all 'great learning experience' but also 'the hardest thing I've done in my career. … It's what I think might just be a new category, a new kind of podcast.'
I told him I found his performance so energetic that I started feeling a grudging respect for Ponzi.
'I get that. This guy was sincere, misguided rather than evil,' Maniscalco told me. 'I think he felt a lot of pressure, especially from his mother, to grab the American Dream. He didn't come here to rip off the whole country and I know he had some regrets but it was amazing, the way he was able to seduce people. But still, a part of me feels sorry for the guy.'
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