The Count
The man who tried to sell the Eiffel Tower had up to 45 different aliases. No one knew his real name or exactly where he came from, but he told authorities at one point his name was Robert Miller. As a young man traveling on an ocean liner from Europe to America, Miller came up with the name Victor “the Count” Lustig to fit in with the aristocrats on the ship. The name was a ploy to gain their trust. An ability to know his audience and adapt to any situation would prove to be an invaluable asset to Lustig over time. He began his career as a gambler but graduated to financial scams after figuring out how the wealthy class operated.
The Count’s most successful scam was called the Romanian Money Box. To find his marks, Lustig would hang around expensive hotels, arriving by limo to show he belonged with the upper echelon of society. In bars and restaurants he would casually let it slip that he owned a secret money-printing box. After the seed was planted, the mark would go to Lustig’s hotel room for a demonstration of how the contraption worked. Lustig would insert a single $100 bill into a small slot in the machine, which was a small wooden box full of knobs and brass dials. A substance called “radium” was Lustig’s secret weapon for copying the bills. At least that’s what he told his unsuspecting victims. For show, he would turn a few knobs and tell the person the only downside was that it took six hours to make a new bill using this secret substance.
After dinner and drinks, they would head back up to the room to find that a perfect copy of the $100 bill had popped out the other end of the box. When the wealthy elite saw this magical money-making machine actually worked they would offer to buy it on the spot. But the Count played it cool, always holding out for a short time, which invariably drove up the price people were willing to pay.[3] One of the best ways to persuade someone to do something is to allow them to come to the conclusion themselves. Once you’ve convinced yourself you’re going to do something, you are unlikely to change your mind. Lustig let them convince themselves it was worth it.
Of course, no such magical box that could produce perfect copies of $100 bills actually existed. The “copies” that came out of the box were actual $100 bills Lustig had placed in the jury-rigged machine himself. Blinded by their greed, people would pay tens of thousands of dollars for a machine that had just $200 in it. The beauty of his scam is it would take 12 hours to produce those two bills and by the time these people realized they’d been swindled, Lustig had half a day of a head start to make his exit.
After wearing out his welcome in New York City, Lustig decided to try his hand in Chicago. In the 1920s, Al Capone ran the criminal rackets in the Windy City. Lustig was fearless, so he decided to pay a visit to the notorious gangster when he got to town to seek Capone’s approval to operate on the mob boss’s territory. Lustig told Capone he needed $50,000 to pull off a grand trade, promising the mobster he could double his money in just two months. The man known as Scarface said, “Okay, Count, double it in 60 days like you said.” Two months later he was back in front of Capone asking for forgiveness. The get-rich-quick scheme had fallen through. Capone was furious. Just as he was about to explode, Lustig handed the crime boss his original $50,000 investment back and said, “Here, sir, is your money, to the penny. Again, my sincerest apologies. This is most embarrassing. Things didn’t work out the way I had thought they would, I should have loved to have doubled your money for you and for myself – Lord knows that I need it – but the plan just did not materialize.”[4]
Capone told Lustig he was expecting either $100,000 or nothing so he was taken aback by the man’s honesty. Somehow the most notorious gangster on the planet not only gave him a pass, but Capone even counted out $5,000 from the pile to give the Count a head start in his business dealings! Here’s the kicker: Lustig had never even dreamed up a money scheme to begin with. The $50,000 was sitting in a security box the entire month. It was his plan all along to gain the mob boss’s trust and that’s exactly what he did. Of course, Lustig was only playing an honest man for this ruse. He once said, “I cannot stand honest men. They lead desperate lives, full of boredom.”[5]
Selling the Eiffel Tower
After a number of run-ins with the law, Lustig was looking to pull off one last big score to get out of the life of a con artist. Because the authorities in the US were onto his hijinks, Lustig went to Paris to pull off his pièce de résistance. Around the time Lustig returned to Paris, there were many stories in the local papers about the dilapidated state of the famous Eiffel Tower. A lightbulb went off in Lustig’s head. He set about creating a fake government role for himself, complete with his own stationary and business cards done up with an official French seal. There was even an official-sounding, yet completely made-up title: “Deputy Director General of the Ministry of Posts and Telegraphs.” Again using one of the finest hotels in the city, he set up shop at the Hôtel de Crillon, a stone palace on the Place de la Concorde. The biggest scrap metal dealers in town were summoned to the luxurious hotel for a secret business proposal.
“Because of engineering faults, costly repairs, and political problems I cannot discuss, the tearing down of the Eiffel Tower has become mandatory,” he reportedly told this group in a quiet hotel room. The Count then shocked the small group of metal dealers by announcing the Eiffel Tower would be sold to the highest bidder. Many at the table were in disbelief but Lustig assured them if the government was able to turn a profit on the deal, it would minimize the protests from citizens.[6] The 1,000-foot tall structure contains more than 7,000 metric tons of iron, along with 2.5 million rivets that held it together, so these scrap metal dealers could calculate the sale of this amount of metal would net a fortune to those who tore it down and sold off the parts. To make the process more believable, the dealers were even taken on a tour of the monument to give them a better sense of the scale of the operation.
Bids were due by the next morning along with the promise of complete secrecy from those involved. Lustig told his marks the government didn’t want word to get out for fear of a public outcry against tearing it down. Although he took bids from all interested parties, the patsy was picked out well in advance. Andre Poisson was relatively new to the area and trying to make a name for himself. What better way to make a name for yourself than by winning the biggest scrap metal project in the country’s history? A few days later Lustig informed Poisson his offer of 250,000 francs (roughly $1 million today) was in fact the winning bid. Once he learned he won, Poisson finally became wary of the whole operation. So to seal the deal, Lustig demanded a bribe for securing the transaction. Everyone assumed all Parisian government officials were corrupt, so the bribe was the final nail in the coffin to make it seem legit. Poisson was in.[7]
Lustig secured the cash and handed over the “official” paperwork to finalize the sale. After a number of failed attempts to claim possession of the Eiffel Tower, Poisson finally realized he’d been swindled. By this point, Lustig had already fled the country. But a funny thing happened as he waited to see a news story about the man who tried to sell the Eiffel Tower – the story never came. Lustig was initially befuddled, but eventually realized Poisson was so embarrassed he was taken advantage of that he never bothered telling the authorities to save face. Never one to rest on his laurels, Lustig decided to test his good fortune by going back to Paris to try selling the Eiffel Tower a second time! This time he wasn’t quite so lucky. The potential buyer went to the police before handing over the money, and Lustig was forced to flee the country yet again.[8]
Back in the States, the Count perfected his counterfeiting skills to the tune of more than $2.3 million over a five-year period. When the police finally apprehended him, Lustig had one more trick up his sleeve. As he awaited sentencing he pulled a jailbreak fit for a scene right out of a movie. Using a pair of stolen wire cutters (no one knows how he came to possess them) to open up his third-story window, he tied nine bedsheets together and used them as a rope to climb down three stories. The only problem was there was a crowd of roughly 100 people on Eleventh Avenue in New York City who saw him climbing down.
