Ponzi's Scheme by Mitchell Zuckoff Page A

with a photo. Eventually, 431 canes were handed out, often with great pomp and ceremony followed by fawning stories in the
Post.
Holders of the canes variously attributed their longevity to abstinence from, or daily devotion to, alcohol and tobacco. The death of a
Post
cane holder was cause for another story, as was the token’s passage to the town’s next oldest man. To Grozier, the appeal was obvious: “In many small towns and villages the general store was a place where many men gathered to talk and swap stories. One of the most conspicuous figures in the group was the ‘oldest man.’ Age is a subject of universal interest, no matter whether it is among city folks or country folks. A man who has succeeded in cheating death longer than most of us manage to do it is always an interesting figure.”
    Edwin Grozier knew he needed more than fun and games to win readers. He loved a good murder case. Lizzie Borden’s father and stepmother turned up dead less than a year after he bought the
Post,
and the early years of the new century provided an endless stream of other celebrated killings. Circulation always rose when murders involved the rich, the pious, an attractive woman, or a spurned lover. A case involving a minister with two beautiful young fiancées, one of whom turned up dead from poison in what looked like suicide, kept Grozier in gravy for weeks. A
Post
reporter cracked the case when he tracked down the minister’s purchase of cyanide. A close second was when a diver hired by Grozier found the severed head of a beautiful showgirl at the bottom of Boston Harbor. “Missing Head Found by the
Post
’s Diver,” the headline blared.
    When not covering crime, the paper kept its promise to be a friend to the little guy. Grozier supported the labor movement and shorter work weeks, and fought for lower gas and telephone rates. The paper leaned to the Democratic Party, and Grozier worked to stay in touch with the needs of the common man. It was an approach he had pioneered in New York: “I used to go over among the swarming millions of the East and the West sides of the city; because it was there that we must build up our circulation if it was to be a large one; there, among the masses, not in the narrow strip of millionaires along Fifth Avenue.” In Boston, Grozier was a careful reader of the census, and he recognized that Boston’s surging Irish population would support the Irish nationalist movement. The
Post
was the first prominent American paper to show solidarity with Sinn Fein, and Grozier personally made large contributions to the nationalist cause.
    At a time when “No Irish Need Apply” remained the practice in certain Brahmin quarters, Grozier supported the candidacy of David I. Walsh in his successful effort to become Massachusetts’ first Irish Catholic governor. Grozier further ingratiated the
Post
with Irish Bostonians by treating interviews with the city’s Catholic cardinal as front-page news.
    Though Grozier calculated his positions carefully in terms of circulation, he also took unpopular positions based on his sense of fairness. Boston’s Irish and blacks were often at odds, competing for scarce resources, but the
Post
refused to favor one group over the other. William Monroe Trotter, editor of the
Boston Guardian,
a black newspaper, once said that Grozier ran his newspaper under a policy of “identical justice, freedom, and civil rights for all, regardless of race, creed, or color.”
    The combination of aggressive news coverage, community appeal, and dedication to fair play, along with a healthy dose of razzle-dazzle, worked beyond all expectations. In time, Edwin Grozier’s
Post
outsold the
Globe.
And in a much smaller city, its circulation exceeded that of Pulitzer’s New York
World.
But the
Post
’s status as Boston’s premier newspaper would soon be tested as never before.

Mug shots of young Carlo Ponzi