Sorry, Mr. Madoff. Despite your prodigious alleged accomplishments — $50 billion of investors' money, vaporized! — you're no Charles Ponzi.

The feds, in their complaint, allege that you, Bernard L. Madoff, admitted to colleagues that you've "been conducting a Ponzi-scheme" through your investment advice business. Some Wall Street experts, struggling to convey the scope, say it's perhaps "the biggest Ponzi scheme in history."

But for all your Palm Beach Country Club connections and sterling Wall Street resume, you're still just walking in the shadow of the great Charles Ponzi, along with all the other get-rich-quick guys, the pyramid schemers, the land-deal scammers.

Now, if you, Mr. Madoff — sounds like "made off" — were made of a little of Ponzi's stuff, first of all, you wouldn't have allegedly admitted anything to anyone. Show some moxie, man! You'd have kept up appearances for the sake of the game — as if you really believed in it.

Second, since you're free on $10 million bail, if you were anything up to Ponzi's standard, you'd go out in public more in your winter of discontent.

As Ponzi's world was collapsing in Boston that wild summer of 1920, his notorious deeds splashed all over the front pages, he would put on a sharp suit and a big smile, grab his fine walking stick and go mingle with the public. Some would jeer — but others would cheer! Reporters followed him everywhere. He'd give long, good-humored quotes. He'd lunch at the Kiwanis Club, and at night he and his wife would sit in their box at the movies. When newsreels about him came on, the audience would cheer some more.

But Mr. Madoff, we see little more of you, sir, than that photo with your cap pulled low after your trip to the courthouse. You had a seasick sort of smile, and no comment.

Someday, someone may memorialize you with a concept called "a Madoff scheme." But we think not.

HUMBLE BEGINNINGS

From the Oxford English Dictionary:

"Ponzi scheme: A form of fraud in which belief in the success of a fictive enterprise is fostered by payment of quick returns to first investors from money invested by others."

Like so many great self-made-American stories, Ponzi's began with him landing on these shores with little money — in 1903, at 21, with just $2.50. (He lost a couple of hundred bucks gambling on the voyage from Italy.)

He traveled the country, taking odd jobs, dreaming up schemes. He did some prison time in Montreal, for passing a bad check.

But he wasn't a bad guy. In Blocton, Ala., an acquaintance had been badly burned and needed a skin graft. Ponzi donated 120 square inches of skin off his back and thighs. He married Rose Gnecco, the love of his life, who stood by him through everything.

"He was enormously charismatic, he was charming, he was this sort of dapper figure. I call him a banty rooster of a man," says Mitchell Zuckoff, who wrote the 2005 biography "Ponzi's Scheme: The True Story of a Financial Legend."

Ponzi stood 5 foot 2 and weighed 130 after a big meal. "A diminutive guy, he had this huge smile," says Zuckoff, a journalism professor at Boston University. "He was kind of like the guy you would automatically put in the front of a parade, and people would follow.

"I am certain he did not set out to be a swindler. He sincerely believed he had found a way to turn lead into gold."

THE SCHEME UNFOLDS

In 1919, as Ponzi's latest fanciful plan was imploding, a letter from Spain arrived with a curious document that resembled currency but wasn't. Ponzi's monumental insight was to realize it could be as good as money.

It was an international reply coupon. In those days, many nations had agreed on a system for prepaying international postage. Sending a reply coupon was like sending a self-addressed stamped envelope. You could buy a coupon in Rome, and it could be redeemed for stamps in Boston.

But the coupons' fixed price did not reflect the dramatic post-World War I devaluation of some currencies. Thus, $1 worth of lira in Rome could buy enough coupons to redeem $3.30 worth of stamps in Boston, according to Zuckoff's reconstruction of Ponzi's calculations. Ponzi figured he could make a profit of $2.30 for every $1 invested.

He was still puzzled about how to convert the coupons back into cash. He decided to worry about that later.

With zero advertising, the astounding offer spread by word of mouth: Ponzi promised to return a 50 percent profit to investors within 45 days.

The pool of investors grew exponentially. "The woman cleaning houses on Beacon Hill would mention it to her employers, and soon you had Brahmin matrons and white-shoe bankers lining up next to newsboys and cleaning women," Zuckoff says.

By spring 1920, Ponzi was pulling in $30,000 a week (about $319,000 today).

At this point, Ponzi's scheme was not a "Ponzi scheme." But he apparently never did figure out how to convert mass quantities of coupons into cash. Soon he was forced to begin paying off early investors, and for that he used money collected from later investors — a Ponzi scheme, though they didn't call it that back then.

Meanwhile, Ponzi invested in banks and other businesses. "I kept up the bluff, hoping that I might eventually hit upon some workable plan to pay all of my creditors," Ponzi wrote in his autobiography, cited by Zuckoff.

In May 1920, he raked in $440,000 (about $4.7 million today) from 1,525 investors. In June, the take was $2.5 million (about $26.6 million) from 7,800 customers.

A GRAND PRODUCTION

But skeptical reporters began digging, and Ponzi made headlines far beyond Boston. He was arrested that August, less than nine months after the scheme began. He had paid out millions to investors but was about $7 million ($74 million) short. He still owed money to some 20,000 people. They got back less than 40 cents on the dollar.

Ponzi served nearly 11 years in state and federal prisons, then was deported to Italy.

Beyond a nice house, car and clothes, he never kept much for himself. He didn't try to flee with his millions. Until the day he turned himself in, he acted as if he'd work it all out somehow.

Many who lost money were bitter. But many had also made money on Ponzi's venture. And many others agreed with Ponzi's self-serving populist rhetoric that he was being taken down on behalf of the Brahmin bankers who saw him as a threat.

Ponzi died in 1949, at 66, in a charity hospital in Rio de Janeiro. Months earlier, he gave an interview to The Associated Press from his hospital bed: "Those were confused, money-mad days. Everybody wanted to make a killing. ... My business was simple. It was the old game of robbing Peter to pay Paul."

He died not knowing that his name, on so many lips these days, would go down in history.

Exactly when the phrase "Ponzi scheme" was coined is a mystery, but by the 1930s, it was being used in newspapers. By 1957, it had gained entry to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Now the term yields 807,000 hits on Google.

In his autobiography, Ponzi thought about his legacy, and wrote of his investors: "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! I had given them the most brazen exhibition of sheer nerve that had ever been witnessed in the world of finance! ... It was easily worth fifteen million bucks to watch me put the thing over!"