Good as Could

...Rick Hertzberg of The New Yorker described Giuliani as "exactly the leader the city needed...

...Meanwhile, Jay Gould, while not perfect by any means, was frugal and focused from an early age, invested wisely, kept honest hours, built a rail-road empire that stretched across 15,854 miles of track (or one-ninth of the railway mileage in the country at the time), gave millions to charity (mostly anonymously since even altruism brought him negative publicity), and was a dedicated family man...

...In one particularly comic episode, Gould's Erie railroad engages Vanderbilt's New York Central in a price war, which Vanderbilt wins by eventually drop-ping his rate per carload down to one dollar and a penny a head for pigs and sheep...

...J N THE MIDST OF NEW YORK'S perpetual political theater, Giuliani held daily afternoon press conferences, trying to convey his message to the public over the heads of a hostile press...

...Well, Giuliani, for one...

...He had read the biographies and long admired Britain's savior...

...They are not calculated to make me particularly popular on Wall Street, and I cannot help that...

...The author clearly finds the response to this North Korean threat irresponsible, ineffective, and appeasing...

...It's true...

...Quoting journalist Andrew Kirtzman, Siegel portrays the scene: "Thousands of pro-testers, union members, politicians were fighting one man, who stood alone each day at the podium inside City Hall's Blue Room, a solitary figure facing a sea of skeptical reporters...

...It is the history of how this monstrous regime got to where it is and why...

...Bravely he ended his memoirs with the lines: "Life, hope and courage are a combination which knows no defeat...

...He was every socialist's worst nightmare: A real life Randian hero who as a teenager with barely a dollar to his name announced to a co-worker, "I've seen enough to realize what can be accomplished by means of rich-es, and I tell you I'm going to be rich," and then by sheer individualistic determination made it so...

...That same night, Ponzi gave up 72 inches of his skin and another 50 inches shortly thereafter, landing him in the hospital for three months, in pain and permanently scarred across large swaths of his body...

...Renehan does a wonderful job of bringing to life Gould and other major players from the Robber Baron era—Cornelius Vanderbilt, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., Daniel Drew, and Jim Fisk, among others...

...And that is its great value...

...After reading Ponzi's Scheme it's hard not to believe the petite man from Italy with the big smile didn't generally have good intentions for mankind (though to Hell they surely did lead many...

...Why don't you send it in...

...But Ponzi was also a swindler and fit easily into the box the trendy socialists of the time were attempting to put all capitalists in...

...From the beginning, Ponzi loved to gamble...

...Behind the scenes, Giuliani was even more impressive: By noon, the mayor, assuming the role of a wartime leader, had gathered not only the police and fire commissioners, but also representatives of all of the city's emergency agencies, at the Police Academy on 20th Street, which served as makeshift command center...

...Who knew that Rudy was Churchill...

...He was the "Mephistopheles of Wall Street" to the New York Times...

...and, perhaps most colorfully, to Gustavus Myers in his History of Shawn Macomber is a reporter and staff writer for The American Spectator...

...If he truly did not believe that, he would have, as he said many times, fled with millions of dollars rather than sitting in Boston trying to think up a new scheme to give investors the promised return as he watched investigators close in on him...

...He gambled away the money for his education and, later, on ship en route from Italy, he gambled the $200 meant to float him in America down to $2.50 in a single card game...

...He remains wildly popular throughout the country, an electrifying speaker, and—in the words of Oprah Winfrey—"America's Mayor...

...But the book does not simply catalogue the current distortions and repressions the regime engages in...

...If we didn't, no get-rich-quick scheme could be successful...

...Ponzi's Scheme: The True Story of a Financial Legend by Mitchell Zuckoff (RANDOM HOUSE, 416 PAGES, $25.95) Dark Genius of Wall Street: The Misunderstood Life of Jay Gould, King of the Robber Barons by Edward J. Renehan, Jr...

...Nor did his refusal to bow in the face of labor unions earn him any friends among the anti-capitalist agitators of the day on the other side, but it does shed some light on how he turned his early years in poverty into strength rather than weakness...

...Every man has natural inclinations of his own," Gould once said...

...said Giuliani, brushing her aside...

...an incarnate fiend of a Machiavelli in his calculations, his schemes and ambushes, his plots and counterplots...

...Rogue Regime: Kim Jong-II and the Looming Threat of North Korea by Jasper Becker (OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 300 PAGES, $28) Reviewed by James R. Lilley...

...Army recently credited his policing techniques as helping in the capture of Saddam Hussein...

...When he casually inquired about her condition, a doctor explained that gangrene had set in and her only hope was a skin graft but that he could not find anyone willing to "give up as little as an inch of his skin for her...

...Whether his liberal views on abortion and gay marriage can clear the hurdle of conservative primary voters remains to be seen...

...Every man has natural inclinations of his own," Gould once said...

...BASIC BOOKS, 352 PAGES, $30) Reviewed by Shawn Macomber B O O K S I N R E V I E W "In subsequent years, the story of Black Friday itself would be remade to include outraged, bankrupted mobs moving through the financial district hunting for Gould, all the while summoning his earlier crime with the chant, `Who killed Leupp...

...One also gets a glimpse of why the mischievous financial acumen of Gould might have rubbed some of New York City's power-brokers the wrong way...

...But according to contemporary reporting no such vigilantism occurred on the day in question...

...The U.S...

...Seem a bit melodramatic...

...Or, perhaps more appropriately, "Capitalism: Damned If You Do, Giuliani returns from a weary day of battling interest groups all over the city, only to find the inimitable Bella Abzug standing on the steps of City Hall waiting to tender her resignation...

...ambassador to the People's Republic of China from 1989-1991 and to the Republic of Korea from 1986-1989...

...SEPTEMBER 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 73 BOOKS IN REVIEW Damned If You Don't...

...Crimes that couldn't actually be pinned on Gould were simply invented to fit the ruthless capitalist caricature...

...For instance, then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright returns from North Korea in 2000 and gushes that Kim Jong-Il is "a good listener, very decisive and practical" who admires the Swedish economic model...

...Years later in Boston, Ponzi, in love with possibility, but nevertheless denying the basic facts, Gould's eschewing of the elite scene probably didn't earn him any defenders on Wall Street...

...It never actually worked, except on the smallest of scales...

...And so it does...

...Although, conveniently, this same activist class never runs out of sympathy for the self-made failures...

...Despite its fatal flaws, he sold it to himself and others with the dreamy notion that somehow "a little dollar could start on a journey across the ocean and return home in six weeks, married with a couple of kids...

...Gould...

...At first Vanderbilt delighted in reports that while his cars were packed the Erie trains ran empty," Renehan writes...

...meetings...

...Ponzi had a far-fetched dream he would turn his losses around and not only make back investors' money he had blown but also become a populist hero in the process...

...a gambler destitute of the usual gambler's code of fairness in abiding by the rules...

...I am past forty-nine years of age...

...SEPTEMBER 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 75 B O O K S I N R E V I E W promised to double investors' money within three months...

...But my intent was honest...

...Never...

...He was U.S...

...Renehan writes...

...For the Goulds, for the Ponzis, for all of us—no matter what the New York Times editorializes...

...Ponzi here is as he was: A likable, vivacious dreamer who sought single-handedly to create a tide to raise all boats, but instead opened a sinkhole...

...The North Korean regime can be bribed to put a lid on its most obvious nuclear capabilities, but it is determined to have weapons of mass destruction, both to extort concessions and to assure its survival...

...Temporary setbacks, perhaps, but 76 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 2005 utter defeat...

...In one memorable vignette drawn by Siegel, Giuliani returns from a weary day of battling interest groups all over the city, only to find the inimitable Bella Abzug standing on the steps of City Hall waiting to tender her resignation from the Women's Commission of something-or-other...

...His beautifully funny encapsulation of Gould's wife Helen—"Like her parents, she loved Jesus Christ, Murray Hill and the Daughters of the American Revolution, in that order"—is typical of the wit and verve Renehan displays throughout the book...

...If it sounds complicated, it should...

...Once while living the life of a transient immigrant in Alabama, Ponzi heard a nurse he hardly knew was severely burned in a gas stove explosion...

...We all crave easy money...

...Congressman Jerrold Nadler, usually a critic, "was amazed at the efficiency of the meeting...

...THE LIFE STORY OF CHARLES PONZI that Mitchell Zuckoff weaves is every bit as enthralling and enlightening as Renehan's exploration of Gould...

...In short, Zuckoff approaches the topic with the depth necessary for us to understand how ordinary people fell for the scam...

...For the first three days after that historic attack, Siegel notes, Giuliani was essentially "the de facto spokesman for a grateful nation...

...All for a woman he did not know in a state he could not wait to leave...

...Good as Gould J F SOME ENTERPRISING PROFESSOR were to teach a business class with two recent biographies as the core curriculum—Mitchell Zuckoff's Ponzi's Scheme and Edward J. Renehan's Dark Genius of Wall Street—the course catalogue could contain the following simple yet snazzy title: "Why Bother Doing the Right Thing...

...This and other stories from the remarkably odd life of Charles Ponzi make it seem all the more plausible that he was telling the truth when he said of his robbing Peter to pay Paul scheme, "Perhaps my activities were not entirely within the law...

...And plenty of it...

...In many ways, Gould was treated even more harshly than Ponzi, perhaps because he dealt in much larger numbers...

...I beg to say that I am yet a free American citizen," Gould wrote Terence Powderly, the leader of the Knights of Labor, in regard to an 1886 strike on the Texas & Pacific...

...Ponzi sold the scheme anyway...

...small and slight in person, dark sallow, reticent and stealthy...

...In fact, Leupp committed suicide in 1859 after years of mental illness...

...This translated early on into anti-Semitic stereotypes, with one foe casting the Presbyterian Gould as a "complex Jew...

...The main difference, of course, is that instead of a story of derring-do and determination, it is a cautionary tale about determination without scruples...

...Although not happy about the money he'd lost, he was hardly penniless after his dealings with Gould...

...B O O K S I N R E V I E W ranged protester setting a fire that killed eight people, Harlem Congressman Charles Rangel blamed the whole thing on Giuliani because he had criticized Sharpton...

...There would be further humiliation for Ponzimore charges, deportation, loss of his wife, other failed businesses—but he never lost hope, even if he knew in his heart of hearts there would be no coming back from the mistakes he made...

...Then, as now, journalists and class-war aficionados could not deal with the reality of a self-made man who is actually successful...

...He would take advantage of currency fluctuations and devaluations in Europe by buying postal reply coupons in one country and selling them in another...

...Mine are domestic...

...They are not calculated to make me particularly popular on Wall Street, and I cannot help that...

...Even in an era of popular anti-Semitism, not everything could be blamed on Shylock...

...He includes in his rebuke the U.S., South Korea, and China, the three external players who matter the most...

...While some of his less brilliant plans—cornering the gold market, thereby precipitating the Black Friday crash, chief among them—hurt people, Gould also enriched many small investors and never specifically set out maliciously to destroy any-one aside from other super-investors...

...His tolerance for risk was almost as high as his tolerance for loss...

...As one wag put it, that is not the Swedish model Kim Jong-Il is interested in...

...And this all happened before September 11th...

...In every toe-to-toe battle with mob-controlled unions, in every spit-fight with rapacious public employees, in every harrowing confrontation with racial arsonists, Fred Siegel has recounted the story's grim and gory details...

...Still, it does not seem inappropriate to say that, whatever the future may hold for Giuliani and the country, he will probably never face a more daunting task than he did in 1994 when he took over a morally and financially bankrupt New York City...

...I began life in a lowly way, and by industry, tem-perance, and attention to my own business have been successful, perhaps beyond the measure of my deserts...

...Less a man than a machine for churning wealth," to the London News...

...In order to implicate Gould in a former associate's suicide, for example, the writer Edwin Hoyt moved big time investor Charles Leupp's death two years for-ward to make it jibe with a heart-rending story proving Gould's perfidy...

...Even though most will know at least part of the Ponzi story, Zuckoff still manages to get the full measure of the man, and not just settle for a simple recital of his crimes...

...Giuliani now runs Giuliani Partners, a highly successful consulting firm, amassing money and experience for an obvious run at the presidency in 2008...

...It was magnificent really...

...No one except Ponzi, that is...

...Still, when Ponzi pleaded guilty to those first scam charges in Boston, he passed along a piece of paper to reporters that read, "Sic transit gloria mundi...

...Then he added a few steps later, "I have the feeling when I get it I'll accept it...

...Only later did he learn that Gould had bought every bit of marketable live-stock coming into Buffalo from points west, which they then shipped to New York via the Central, realizing enormous profits...

...I talked to a garrulous British diplomat, who waxed eloquent on the pastoral scenes of the border James R. Lilley, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, researches China, Taiwan, and Korea...

...In response, the New York Times labeled him an "egregious falsifier and a wholesale betrayer of simple confidences," while the Boston Post seethed, "He painted halos over his head, but the facts have only shown sordid swindles...

...Gould's eschewing of the elite scene probably didn't earn him any defenders on Wall Street...

...There, Giuliani replicated the crisp tenor of his [daily] 8 A.M...

...74 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 2005 the Great American Fortunes, "a human carnivore, glutting on the blood of his numberless victims...

...His demeanor—calm, frank, patient, tender, egoless, competent—was, as carried to the city and the world through the intimacy of television, profoundly reassuring...

...Consider: Charles Ponzi swindled thou-sands in an investment hoax, promised hundreds of thousands of dollars in charity he never delivered, lived exorbitantly on other people's money, and openly lied with a smile to investors, the authorities, and the press...

...It documents acts of terror and aggression to make the case that all of us must work to change this regime or face the prospect of a nuclear-armed state with a very bad track record seeking to harm us and our allies in Asia...

...Thus passes worldly glory...

...asked New York magazine...

...Not by a long shot...

...These starry-eyed kids dreaming of turning a profit might as well know what awaits them if they succeed...

...Meet the Monster THIS BOOK CONVINCINGLY DESCRIBES the "roots of madness" in North Korea...

...In one era and out the other," quipped a bystander...

...Some European diplomats holed up in isolated Pyongyang dismiss the stories of massacres of would-be North Korean escapees as enemy propaganda...

...We are all gamblers," Ponzi would later say...

...If, as you say, I am now to be destroyed by the Knights of Labor unless I sink my manhood, so be it...

...Mine are domestic...

...And Gould...

...a "wrecker of industries and an impoverisher of men" to the London Standard...

...So, then, did Gould escape the animus Ponzi rightfully endured...

...In Hoyt's account, Leupp, distraught and penniless after the 1857 Black Friday scandal, shoots himself hours after a meeting with Gould...

...He was an army of one...