Death
Ponzi spent the last years of his life in poverty, working occasionally as a translator. His health suffered. A heart attack in 1941 left him considerably weakened. His eyesight began failing, and by 1948, he was almost completely blind. A brain hemorrhage paralyzed his right leg and arm. He died in a charity hospital in Rio de Janeiro, the Hospital São Francisco de Assis of Federal University of Rio de Janeiro on January 18, 1949.
Supported by his last and only friend who spoke English and had notions of Italian, the barber Francisco Nonato Nunes, Ponzi granted one last interview to an American reporter, telling him, "Even if they never got anything for it, it was cheap at that price. Without malice aforethought I had given them the best show that was ever staged in their territory since the landing of the Pilgrims! It was easily worth fifteen million bucks to watch me put the thing over."
Read more about this topic: Charles Ponzi
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“O Lord, methought what pain it was to drown,
What dreadful noise of waters in my ears!
What sights of ugly death within my eyes!”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West,
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“In the attempt to defeat death man has been inevitably obliged to defeat life, for the two are inextricably related. Life moves on to death, and to deny one is to deny the other.”
—Henry Miller (1891–1980)