Late in the morning of May 6, 1884, Ulysses S. Grant, former commanding general of the Union armies, twice president of the United States, and famous throughout the world, walked into New York City’s brokerage firm of Grant & Ward confident that he was now a millionaire and without financial cares. Two hours later, he left the building as a pauper worth only $80.
His young partner, Ferdinand Ward, was a con artist and possible psychopath who had lured first Grant’s son Buck and then Grant himself into what was a giant Ponzi scheme, with Ward paying off investors in the brokerage with money he made from newcomers. His association with Grant gilded Ward’s reputation as “the Young Napoleon of Finance,” but that Napoleon had now met his Waterloo. As one banker noted, “The transactions of Grant & Ward constituted the most colossal swindle of the age.”
