Comments & Curiosities:

I’m proud of you. We’ve behaved very well lately, with a few exceptions, which brings us back to the people-behaving-badly-in-Newport-Mesa folder. Last week, it’s was the pooch-napping at Russo’s pet store in Fashion Island. This week, it’s Saks Fifth Avenue at South Coast Plaza, where three young men were arrested Thursday night for admiring some upscale merchandise, which is exactly what one would expect at Saks, but then reportedly trying to leave without exactly, well, paying for it, which is rude.

Do you know where Saks’ name comes from? It comes from Andrew Saks, who opened his first New York store in 1867. Do you care? I didn’t think so. But here’s the point: If the shoplifters are making their way back to Fashion Island and South Coast Plaza, it could mean the economy is making a comeback! We’re not talking about going to Home Depot and pocketing some WD-40 or hitting an Albertson’s for a couple of Nabisco 100-calorie cookie packs (try the Chips Ahoy: way more chocolaty than the Oreos). We’re talking about designer shoes, Zegna shirts and Prada fragrances here, people. If the next story I see is about some woman trying to slip out of Neiman’s with three blouses and two bras on, I say the downturn is over. If it’s H&M;, not so much.

The other interesting item in the scam file this week is the 67-year old Orange man who is being charged with 62 felony counts that he bilked investors, many of them in Newport Beach and Costa Mesa, out of $2.5 million, which will get you a whole bunch of Chips Ahoy 100-calorie packs.

Joseph Anthony Veltre Jr. allegedly ran at least two shell businesses that posed as “hard money” lenders. Hard money lending can be a risky game for both the lender and the borrower, but prosecutors claim that Veltre’s operation was a fairly run-of-the-mill Ponzi scheme — lure new investors with the promise of obscenely large profits then use that money to pay off earlier investors, after breaking off a really big chunk for yourself of course.

Eventually, there are no more investors, meaning the investors who arrive on the last flight find themselves in an empty airport, with no one, and definitely no money, on the other end. By that time, the Ponzi operator has changed his name and moved to a nice spot in Provence, no forwarding address, where he introduces himself as an art collector looking for investors interested in obscenely large profits.

But it seldom works that way. These things almost always blow up before the con man, or woman, achieves Nirvana (see file under “Bernie Madoff.”) By the way, do you know where the name “Ponzi scheme” comes from? This is better than Andrew Saks, promise.

It comes from an Italian immigrant (awkward, I know) named Charles Ponzi who emigrated from Italy to Boston in 1903. Ponzi didn’t invent the con game that bears his name: It had been around for years.

But Ponzi ran the most successful and notorious version of it by far and made an astronomical amount of money from it for the time — not the billions vaporized by Bernie Madoff, but the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars today. In fact, in the span of just over six months in 1920, Ponzi went from being an anonymous immigrant with a funny name to a multimillionaire who was a favorite celeb of the Boston media.

How did he do it? Volume. No, seriously. He did it by charming the pants, and money, off some 40,000 people who in a matter of months handed Ponzi $15 million, and keep in mind, this was 1920. He formed a phony company that supposedly invested in something called international postal reply coupons, which were very popular at the time.

Remember, this was the height of the great European immigration, most of whom were somewhere between poor and really poor. Whether you were sending a letter from here to there or there to here, if you enclosed one of these reply coupons, your peeps over there could trade it for local stamps and use it to send a letter back to you.

Ponzi realized that by having partners in Italy buy international reply coupons, the total collapse of the Italian economy after World War I meant the same air mail coupon that could be redeemed on this end for 10 U.S. cents here could be bought for a tiny fraction of that over there. Reselling them here would make Ponzi and his investors fat, dumb and happy, sort of. It did make Ponzi fat and happy, briefly, but left his investors feeling really, well, not smart.

The house of coupons came crashing down when a reporter figured out that to make the profits Ponzi was claiming, he would need to trade something over 150,000,000 coupons, which is really hard since there were less than 100,000 of these things in existence in 1920. I’ll say one thing for Ponzi, he didn’t blow his money on foolishness. He bought a mansion outside Boston, with air conditioning, unheard of at the time, and a one-way ticket for a first-class stateroom on a luxury liner to bring his mother over from the old country. Wait, was that a segue? Yes, mama, I think it was.

Today is Mother’s Day. You didn’t forget, did you? Tell me you didn’t forget. This is the day that we honor all the mothers out there, who are of course the most important people of all. We also want to give two thumbs up, no four thumbs up, to all the moms out there named Tarra, especially those who just delivered the cutest baby in the history of babies, not to mention any those babies who happen to be named Vincent Michael. And that is no scam. I gotta go.

PETER BUFFA is a former Costa Mesa mayor. His column runs Sundays. He may be reached at ptrb4@aol.com .