Of all the great confidence men, Victor Lustig is the one whose legend most outruns the documented record — and that is fitting, because Lustig spent his life making people believe things that were not true, and there is good reason to think he did the same to history. Many of the famous stories about him blur fact and fiction, and a fair number of them were probably embellished by Lustig himself, who understood that a con man’s reputation is just another thing to be inflated and sold. So this is a story that has to be told with one eyebrow permanently raised. But even when you strip away the apocrypha, what remains is extraordinary: a multilingual charmer who used dozens of false identities, who pulled off perhaps the single most audacious swindle in the history of fraud, and who was finally undone not by his confidence tricks at all but by the more pedestrian crime of printing fake money.
A count from nowhere
The basic facts of Lustig’s early life are, appropriately, murky. He was born somewhere in Bohemia — in what is now the Czech Republic — around 1890, though the precise place and date are poorly documented and disputed. What is clear is that he was brilliant, charming, and gifted with languages, eventually fluent in several, which made him equally at home fleecing Americans, Frenchmen, Germans, and Englishmen. Over his career he is reckoned to have used at least forty-five different aliases — the FBI later put the figure even higher — but the one that stuck, the persona that became his brand, was “Count Lustig.” He was no count, of course. He simply understood, earlier and better than most, that a title and a good suit and an air of unhurried aristocratic boredom would open doors and loosen wallets that no amount of honest effort ever could.
He cut his teeth on the great transatlantic ocean liners that carried the wealthy back and forth between Europe and America. A luxury liner was, for a con man, a perfect closed world: a floating hotel full of rich, bored passengers with money to burn and days to kill, no way to escape his company, and no way to check his story until they had docked and he had vanished. There he refined the smooth, patient, gentlemanly style that would define him — the con artist not as a fast-talking hustler but as a cultured companion, a man it was a pleasure to be deceived by.
The tower for scrap
The con that made him immortal took place in Paris in 1925, and even told plainly it sounds like a tall tale.
Lustig was reading a newspaper when he came across an article noting that the Eiffel Tower, then thirty-six years old, was in poor repair and expensive to maintain, and that the city was not entirely sure what to do with it. The tower had originally been built as a temporary structure for the 1889 World’s Fair and there had been periodic mutterings about whether it was worth keeping. In that small item Lustig saw the outline of a masterpiece.
He had counterfeit government stationery printed and installed himself in a fine hotel under the guise of a senior official — by the popular account, the “Deputy Director-General of the Ministry of Posts and Telegraphs.” He then discreetly summoned a handful of the city’s leading scrap-metal dealers to a confidential meeting, swore them to secrecy, and explained, gravely, that the government had concluded the Eiffel Tower was too costly to maintain and was to be demolished and sold for scrap — and that, because the news would be politically sensitive and unpopular with the public, the matter was being handled quietly, through a private sale, before any announcement. The tower contained thousands of tonnes of iron. To a scrap dealer, it was a fortune in raw material, and the secrecy only made it more believable: of course the government would want to keep such an embarrassing demolition quiet.
Lustig read the assembled dealers shrewdly and fixed on the one most eager to prove himself, a man named André Poisson, who was hungry for a deal grand enough to establish him among the city’s elite. And here Lustig added the master’s flourish. Rather than simply take Poisson’s money, he hinted — with the weary discretion of a poorly-paid official — that the deal might go Poisson’s way if a certain consideration were extended to the man overseeing it. In other words, he solicited a bribe. It was a stroke of genius, because a bribe made the whole thing more convincing, not less: a corrupt official asking for a kickback is a far more familiar and trustworthy figure than an honest one, and Poisson, now certain he was dealing with a real bureaucrat because real bureaucrats took bribes, paid both for the tower and for the privilege of being allowed to buy it. Lustig took the money and immediately fled to Austria.
And then comes the detail that elevates the story from great con to legend — and which, like much of Lustig’s life, is wonderful and difficult to fully verify. Poisson, when he realized he had been swindled, was reportedly so humiliated — so unwilling to admit that he had handed a fortune to a stranger for a national monument — that he never went to the police. Lustig, monitoring the newspapers from abroad and finding no mention of the crime, drew the only conclusion a true artist could: if no one had reported it, the con still worked. So months later he returned to Paris, gathered a fresh set of scrap dealers, and tried to sell the Eiffel Tower a second time. This time, the story goes, the mark grew suspicious and went to the police, and Lustig had to flee again — but the sheer nerve of going back to sell the same landmark twice is the reason his name has survived a century.
The money box, and Al Capone
If the tower was Lustig’s masterpiece, his bread and butter was a swindle known as the “Rumanian money box.” It was a beautifully made wooden device, fitted with rollers and chemical compartments, that Lustig claimed could duplicate paper currency — feed in a genuine banknote, wait, and the machine would print a perfect copy. To demonstrate, he would insert a real bill, and after a suitably impressive delay, produce two real bills. The trick was that he had simply pre-loaded the machine with a second genuine note; the “duplication” was real money he had hidden inside. The delay was the con’s masterstroke. He told buyers the machine took six hours to copy each bill, which meant that by the time a fresh buyer had run his initial test notes, watched real money emerge, paid an enormous sum for the device, and gone home to make his fortune, Lustig was long gone — and the machine, of course, only ever “produced” the couple of genuine bills he had seeded it with before falling silent forever.
The most famous of all the Lustig anecdotes — and one to treat with particular caution, since it is exactly the kind of story he would have loved to tell about himself — concerns Al Capone. As it is usually told, Lustig approached the Chicago crime boss with an investment proposition and persuaded Capone to hand over a large sum, perhaps fifty thousand dollars. Lustig then simply held the money for a time and gave it all back, claiming the deal had fallen through and apologizing for the failure. Capone, who had fully expected to be either cheated or repaid with profit, was so disarmed by a man who had returned his money untouched — an honest gangster, as it were — that he pressed a few thousand dollars on Lustig as a reward for his integrity. Which was, of course, exactly the sum Lustig had been after all along. He had run a con whose entire product was the appearance of honesty. Whether it happened quite that way is impossible to confirm, but it captures the essence of the man perfectly: Lustig’s genius was never about the mechanics of any particular trick, but about understanding precisely what a given mark needed to believe.
Caught by counterfeiting
For all his elegance, Lustig came to ruin through the least elegant of crimes. In America in the 1930s he became deeply involved in counterfeiting, going into partnership with a man named William Watts — a Nebraska pharmacist with a gift for engraving — who produced the printing plates. (Some popular accounts name the partner “Tom Shaw,” but the documented plate-maker was Watts; the other name appears to be an error that has crept into the retellings.) Together they produced fake banknotes in such quantity, and of such quality, that the volume of bogus currency in circulation began to seriously alarm the U.S. Treasury and the Secret Service. The smooth confidence man who had always dealt in trust and persuasion was now flooding the economy with paper, and that drew the kind of sustained federal attention no amount of charm could deflect.
He was arrested, and on the very eve of his trial in New York in September 1935, Lustig provided his last great flourish. Held in federal detention, he tied together a makeshift rope — bedsheets, by the popular telling — and climbed out of an upper-floor window, escaping into the city the day before he was due in court. For a few weeks he was free, and the legend got one final chapter. But the escape only delayed the inevitable. He was tracked to Pittsburgh and recaptured about four weeks later, in late September 1935.
The apprentice salesman
There would be no talking his way out of this one. In December 1935, Lustig pleaded guilty and was sentenced — fifteen years for the counterfeiting, plus another five for the escape, twenty years in all — and he was sent to Alcatraz, the island fortress reserved for the federal government’s most notorious prisoners. His counterfeiting partner Watts, who turned state’s witness, got ten.
Lustig spent his remaining years behind bars, and was eventually transferred from Alcatraz to the federal medical center at Springfield, Missouri. There, on the 11th of March, 1947, the man who had sold the Eiffel Tower twice, swindled a Chicago crime lord into paying him for his honesty, and printed enough fake money to frighten the Treasury, died quietly of pneumonia.
And history left him one last, perfect joke. On his death certificate, in the box for occupation, someone had written: “apprentice salesman.” It is the most fitting epitaph imaginable for a man whose entire life was a sale — and a quietly funny final irony, that the smoothest con artist who ever lived was recorded, in the end, as a mere trainee at the only trade he ever truly practiced. He is also remembered for a set of cynical maxims that circulate under the title “the Ten Commandments for Con Men” — advice on listening patiently, never looking bored, and waiting for the mark to reveal his own political and financial opinions before agreeing with all of them — though, like so much attached to his name, whether Lustig actually wrote them is itself uncertain. Which is, in the end, the most Lustig thing about him: even his rules for deception may be a deception, and a century later we still cannot be entirely sure where the man ended and the con began.
Power and Pelf 