Austria-Hungary born and raised / in the schoolyard where he spent most of his days
Straight-A’s, trilingual, breezin through school / flirtin with the ladies, relaxin all cool
when one of their boyfriends who was up to no good / started making trouble in the neighborhood
Lustig lost a little fight and I guess he got scared / cuz he decided to run
away from home forever, take to the seas, start a life of crime under a fake name,
sell the g*sh d*rn Eiffel Tower and outsmart the biggest criminal syndicate in America.
[intro]
And so began the illustrious journey of Victor Lustig as he took up a career seafaring - not as
a mariner, mind you, oh no, as a con man! He spent his early 20’s sitting around on ocean liners,
sipping cocktails, cruising back and forth across the Atlantic looking for his next mark. "Agh!"
“Oh dear I’m terribly sorry about that, let me take you and your husband here to dinner
tonight, I… say you’re that broadway producer aren’t you? I read about you in the paper!”
“Why yes, as a matter of fact, we took off here to celebrate..." “The first commandment
of the con man. It’s not the fast talking yarn-spinning charlatan in a pinchbeck suit
people want to talk to. It’s the man who listens and lets his importance be quietly obvious”,
“Why it’s a pleasure sir, please, take my card”
He made bank off that arrangement, selling the rights to phony broadway shows and what have you,
and he might have kept on all his life if it weren’t for the first World War placing
something of a damper on trans-Atlantic passenger ships.
So he figured Americans were gullible enough to keep him afloat for a few years. This story is
actually taken out of order but it’s in America and y’know I wanna build to the good stuff.
Meet… the box. Just a box, about the size of a trunk. But according to Lustig,
it was a money-printing machine. Literally, you put a hundred dollar bill inside, six hours later
you’ve got another one. Bring it to anyone you like, they will never detect it’s a fraud. Well
one day a Texas Sheriff caught wind of this and came up to Lustig with less than noble intentions
for a device that could make six figures of flawless counterfeit per year, and Lustig sells
it to him. Of course in reality Victor stuffed it full of bills ahead of time, waited six hours and
slipped one out of the secret compartment. So the sheriff dropped a few grand, made a couple
hundred dollars in the first two days… and then Lustig was half way across the country.
But oh he had crossed the wrong man, this sheriff chased him all the way to Chicago.
“You sufferin dung muffin!” “Can I help you?”
“I know your game… you sold me a faulty counterfeit machine! I mean [whispered] you
sold me a faulty counterfeit machine!” “I’m sorry sir, you must be operating it wrong,
here I have another with me, let me prove it to you, what you wanna do is twist this handle…”
[six hours later] “You see? A perfectly legitimate counterfeit
machine. Here’s some cash for your troubles.” “...well thank you!”
And then in 1925 he gets the idea for his crowning achievement. “She’s definitely seen better days,
a lot of people saying she’s an eyesore. Says here they might just tear her up
and sell her for scrap. Which leads one to wonder… who would be buying?”
“Gentlemen, I’m sure you’re all wondering why I’ve gathered you here today… you’re all respectable
steel dealers at the top of your industry, my name is Deputy Director-General of the Minsitere
de Postes et Telegraphes Jean Francois. I’m here to tell you, and you must be discreet,
we don’t want anyone to overhear before we go public because it may be controversial,
we are selling the Eiffel tower… to one of you”
Well Lustig got his bids, and the Eiffel tower was as good as sold.
But he found a way to squeeze out every last penny.
“You see it was never about finding the highest bidder… but the best mark. Take a small insecure
man with a burning desire in his heart to get into the upper echelons of Paris’s financial elite
and convince him he can do it with one big deal, and he’ll follow you the extra mile”
“I’m sorry to inform you you’ve been outbid” “I’ll pay 50,000 francs!”
“A good start, but I’m afraid you’re out of your league”
“70,000!” “Let me spare you the trouble. It’s too bad,
but hey if you can shell out 70,000 Francs things can’t be too bad, not like me, I’m just a poor
severely underpaid government employee. 70,000 francs would get me by for a long time. Wink”
A week later, Lustig was sipping hot cocoa in Austria. “Of course, I might have made more than
70,000 francs with another man, but consider this: A man who wants more than anything else
not to feel inferior to his competitors discovers he threw away a small fortune bribing a con man.
Does he go to the police? Or does he give me peace and quiet? Meanwhile, according to the paper,
the Eiffel Tower… still hasn’t been sold…”
“Gentlemen. I’m sure you’re all wondering why I’ve gathered you here today”.
No joke, he sold the Eiffel tower twice in the same year! Or, almost twice,
because one of these dealers was a little smarter and then “Ah Scheiße die Bullen!”
Okay, so you know how I mentioned he went to Chicago? Did I mention he was working with Al
Capone? Capone gave him $50,000 dollars to start a scheme for him. Did I say working with, I meant
scamming, he scammed Al Capone. Because that 50k didn’t go anywhere, it sat in a lockbox for 2
months until Lustig came back on his knees saying “I-I’m sorry boss, it fell through, but - but I
scraped everything I had together to make it right to ya. Please forgive me.” And Al Capone feels so
bad seeing what this honest man went through just trying to make an honest living as a criminal,
so he gives him $5,000 to get by. And he never saw Victor Lustig again.
So what was it that brought everything tumbling down?
It was a woman Victor cheated on, she placed one phone call to the feds and busted the
biggest counterfeit scheme in New York. Lustig pinned everything on his accomplices, “but uh,
there’s just one more thing. You still haven’t placed this key”
“That goes to a safe in my house. Say, are you a Christian mister -”
“No no no, see, we tried every lock in your house, your little warehouse too. But wouldn’t you know
it, my wife was taking me to see her mother at the Astor, and wouldn’t you know it they
got these lockboxes in the subway. And I thought to myself now that is where a clever man would
hide something he didn’t want nobody to see - completely anonymous, and only a train ride away.”
Lustig escaped prison because y’know, con man extraordinaire, but the US had
a place for fellas like him. He spent ten years in Alcatraz before he died.