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When the Eiffel Tower was built in 1889 it was intended to function as the entrance arches
to the World’s Fair in Paris.
It was never meant to be permanent.
In fact, it only had a permit to stay standing for 20 years, until 1909.
This was a good thing according to many Parisians who thought of the structure as an eye-sore.
This included famed author Guy de Maupassant who said of it, “What will be thought of
our generation if we do not smash this lanky pyramid.”
In fact, a group of artists and architects from France actually submitted a group letter
to the Minister of Works and the Commissioner for the Exposition against it being built
in the first place, writing:
“We, writers, painters, sculptors, architects and passionate devotees of the hitherto untouched
beauty of Paris, protest with all our strength, with all our indignation in the name of slighted
French taste, against the erection … of this useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower … To
bring our arguments home, imagine for a moment a giddy, ridiculous tower dominating Paris
like a gigantic black smokestack, crushing under its barbaric bulk Notre Dame, the Tour
Saint-Jacques, the Louvre, the Dome of les Invalides, the Arc de Triomphe, all of our
humiliated monuments will disappear in this ghastly dream.
And for twenty years … we shall see stretching like a blot of ink the hateful shadow of the
hateful column of bolted sheet metal…”
Nevertheless, it was built anyway and due to the value provided for radio transmissions
and tourism, the city of Paris kept it erect.
This all brings us to May of 1925, when one Victor Lustig first conceived the scheme that
would make him a legend.
With documents and letterheads proclaiming him the Deputy Director of the Ministere de
Postes et Telegraphes (the Ministry of Postal Services and Telecommunications), Lustig sent
out notes to prominent Paris scrap metal businesses urgently asking them to meet him at the Hotel
de Crillon.
Six dealers came, curious what the French government wanted with them.
After an expensive meal and plenty of wine, Lustig declared, in his typical charismatic
fashion, that the city of Paris was going to knock down the Eiffel Tower and sell it
for scrap metal.
This was a huge secret and the public could not know at this point, of course, but he
wanted the scrap metal businesses to bid against one another to see who would get this extremely
valuable government contract.
Negotiations began in earnest with Andre Poisson winning the bid for seventy thousand dollars
(about a million dollars today).
It was a lot of money, but to Poisson, who was new in town and wanted to establish a
reputation, it was worth the huge contract.
Of course, there was one very big problem.
Victor Lustig did not work for the Ministere de Postes et Telegraphes.
In fact, Lustig did not work for the French government at all.
Victor Lustig was a con man.
Born in Arnau, Austria-Hungary (today Hostinne, Czech) in 1890, not much is known of Lustig’s
childhood besides that he was born as Robert V. Miller to an upper middle class family.
At an early age, he decided to travel the world.
In order to finance his adventures, he took to conning rich people.
Fluent in several languages due to the varied cultures of his homeland, he rode ocean liners
between Europe and America playing the part of a rich, free-spending young man - and gave
himself a new moniker, the “Count."
The Count would wine, dine, and charm potential marks, until eventually conversation turned
to his line of work and source of obvious wealth.
Reluctantly and asking for utmost secrecy, he would reveal his “money box” (also
known as a Rumanian Box).
A well-known con, the “money box” was essentially a fake money printer - spitting
out bills that were hidden in the machine.
The contraption was made out of beautiful mahogany and was the size of a steamer trunk.
He would ask his mark for a hundred dollar bill, insert it into the machine, wait a few
hours for “chemical processing,” and when they came back, two of the bills would emerge.
As Lustig would put it, “the box literally paid for itself... and then some.”
The enterprising new friends of Lustig would beg him to sell it, despite Lustig’s “reluctance.”
After much cajoling and rising bids, Lustig would agree to sell it for, sometimes, up
to thirty grand.
After a few more test runs - and a few more hundred dollar bills - Lustig would depart
the ship and leave the money box with its new owners.
It would be only a matter of time before they realized it was scam, but it didn’t matter.
Lustig was already gone, onto his next con.
His coup-de-grace of cons came to him when he was reading a newspaper article about the
Eiffel Tower.
The article remarked on the high cost of maintenance and repairs for the Tower, making mention
that it was rusting.
As previously noted, many Parisians thought of it as a huge eye sore at this time, with
all of this giving Lustig the idea.
Despite the interest of the six Parisian scrap metal business, Lustig had already identified
his mark - Andre Poisson.
As mentioned, Poisson was new to the business community and was wanting to make a splash.
As the Count had suspected, when he took all the potential contractors to the tower in
a limo for a tour, it was Poisson who very clearly was the most serious about winning
the contract.
However, Poisson's wife wasn't so sure.
She thought the whole thing seemed fishy, with all the secrecy and quick moving nature
of the deal.
To calm her fears, the Count arranged a meeting where he confessed...
Lustig explained to Poisson and his wife that he was but a lowly bureaucrat, expected to
impress, but hardly making enough to pay his bills.
Thus, beyond any orders for normal discretion when facilitating contracts like this one,
he tended to like to keep things extremely quiet on closing the deal to avoid unwanted
attention.
Poisson knew exactly what this meant - Lustig was open to bribes.
Poisson and his wife, actually rather relieved, obliged, giving the Count fifty grand to make
sure Poisson would win the bid.
Adding in the twenty grand for the actual contract, Lustig had seventy grand, or about
a million dollars today, in his hands.
Within an hour of receiving the money, the Count left Paris.
Shockingly, despite the huge sum that had changed hands, upon realizing he had been
had, Poisson decided to keep his mouth shut.
The money was probably gone either way, but at least by keeping quiet, he could keep himself
from becoming the laughingstock of the Parisian business world.
So in the end, the price of being embarrassed and potentially being arrested for bribery
made it not worth it.
As it had worked out so well the first time, Lustig decided to try it again.
Only six months later, he returned to Paris with the same letterheads and summoned five
new scrap metal businesses.
He wined and dined them, just like before, but as a deal was being consummated with one
of the iron dealers, another one became suspicious.
He contacted the police.
When Lustig caught wind of it, he abandoned the deal and fled in a hurry to the United
States, presumably on one of the ocean liners where he got his start.
If one thought the Count had learned his lesson, they would be sorely mistaken.
He once again turned to the money box for his scams.
Taking on dozens of alias and enduring several arrests - including one that landed him in
the same Indiana jail as former professional baseball player turned famed gangster in the
off-season, John Dillinger.
The Count swindled innocent folks in Indiana, Nebraska, Texas, and Chicago, including one
Texas sheriff who followed him across the country, only to finally catch him and be
tricked again when Lustig convinced him it was the sheriff who failed to work the machine
properly.
Sometime prior to 1930, he even reportedly scammed the most famous gangster of our time,
Al Capone.
The story goes that he convinced Capone to give him fifty grand with a promise to double
his money in sixty days with his newest venture.
Knowing full well Capone’s dangerous reputation, he let the money sit in a bank for 59 days.
He then came back to Capone to tell him the deal fell through and that he'd lost the funds,
but was willing to repay the invested amount out of his own pocket.
Capone, evidently, was so impressed with Lustig’s integrity that he only made him pay back about
$45,000-$49,000 of the money (reports vary on the exact amount Capone let him keep).
A tidy little profit for the con man's minimal effort.
As Lustig grew more confident and arrogant in his abilities, so did his risks - which
led to him eventually being caught and given a substantial prison sentence.
In 1930, he teamed up with a Nebraska chemist named Tom Shaw and began a real counterfeit
operation; plates, paper, ink, the whole nine yards.
The bills looked so real that they were able to release up to one hundred thousand dollars
a month into the US economy (about $1.4 million today).
This much money was never going to escape the eyes of the Secret Service.
“Lustig money” kept showing up from New Orleans to Chicago.
Even so, the Secret Service got a little help in catching the man behind it all.
You see, when Lustig’s girlfriend suspecting him of cheating on her, she turned him in.
With her help, the Secret Service was able to catch him strolling down Broadway on New
York’s Upper West Side.
With a briefcase full of expensive clothes and no hint of nervousness, a Secret Service
agent remarked to the Count that, “You’re the smoothest con man that ever lived.”
Lustig wasn’t done yet.
He somehow escaped jail via a bed sheet rope, but was caught in Pittsburgh a month later.
He was then sentenced to twenty years in the most famous prison of them all - Alcatraz.
There, he lived the rest of his days.
Despite his success as a con-artist, his death attracted no real public attention in the
beginning, first reported to the public in a New York Times article from August 31, 1949,
in which Lustig's brother told a judge that the famed Count had passed away two years
earlier in prison.
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