In 1925, Victor Lustig convinced a Paris scrap-metal dealer that the French government was selling the Eiffel Tower.
His secret was a mixture of official papers, careful acting, and victims too embarrassed to report him.
He later returned to Paris and tried to sell it again.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it's the start of another three-part mini-series, this time on famous con artists.
[00:00:30] In today's episode, we'll be meeting Victor Lustig, the smooth-talking "count" who managed to sell the Eiffel Tower, and then came back to try to sell it again.
[00:00:42] In part two, we'll meet Gregor MacGregor, the Scottish soldier who invented an entire country and sold it to the British public.
[00:00:51] And in part three, it's the story of Charles Ponzi, the Italian who ran a scheme so spectacular that his name became a word in the English language.
[00:01:02] OK then, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:09] It is a spring morning in 1925, and a man is having breakfast in a suite at the Hôtel de Crillon, one of the grandest hotels in Paris.
[00:01:21] He is in his mid-thirties. He is beautifully dressed, he speaks five languages, and has a long scar down his left cheek. He introduces himself to everyone as Count Victor Lustig.
[00:01:37] He is not a count. In fact, barely anything he says about himself is true.
[00:01:44] On this particular morning, he picks up a newspaper and starts to read an article about the Eiffel Tower.
[00:01:53] The tower, the article says, is in a sorry state. It is rusting, the paint is peeling, and it costs the French government a small fortune to maintain.
[00:02:07] The journalist even suggests, half-jokingly, that the people of Paris might be better off simply tearing it down.
[00:02:17] Lustig reads the article twice. Then he puts down the newspaper and smiles.
[00:02:24] He has just had the idea for one of the greatest con jobs of the twentieth century.
[00:02:31] This man, Victor Lustig, was born in 1890, in a small town in Bohemia, in what is now the Czech Republic but was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
[00:02:44] His was a middle-class upbringing. His father was a tobacco salesman, and although he was abusive to his wife and children, he would take Victor with him on business trips around Europe.
[00:02:57] This, it would seem, gave the young boy an early insight into the riches of the great 19th century cities of Europe: Zurich, Prague, and of course, Paris.
[00:03:11] The boy, Victor, was clearly bright, but not particularly interested in hard work. There are reports of him being rude to teachers and running away from home, but still managing to get excellent grades.
[00:03:27] And like any sensible person who wants to seamlessly pass through different countries, he learned many languages. It's not clear quite how many, but it's thought that by the time he was an adult, he could move between Czech, German, English, French and Italian without any apparent effort — an important skill if you want to shift between different personalities.
[00:03:54] In 1909, he went to study at the Sorbonne in Paris, although it is unclear how much time he actually spent studying.
[00:04:03] What he did spend a lot of time doing was gambling, and it was here that he honed his skills at people-reading.
[00:04:12] Gambling, after all, is about figuring out your opponents — are they bluffing or are they telling the truth? And perhaps more importantly, can you trick them into believing you?
[00:04:27] As you might imagine, Lustig became very good at this.
[00:04:31] And knowing what he would get up to later in life, it seems highly probable that he would also have been cheating his way through these games, but he would no doubt have used his charisma and cunning to make his opponents think they were just having a bad night.
[00:04:49] And, because this was early 20th century Paris, he also got into his fair share of romantic troubles, and the scar on his cheek was courtesy of the jealous boyfriend of a woman he'd been spending a little too much time with.
[00:05:05] So, here was a young man with charm, languages, quick wits, and no particular interest in honest work.
[00:05:15] He found his first hunting ground on the great ocean liners that crossed the Atlantic between Europe and New York.
[00:05:24] These ships were floating palaces, full of wealthy passengers with money to spend and time to kill. Lustig would travel first class, typically posing as a European aristocrat or a successful theatre producer.
[00:05:42] He would befriend rich passengers over dinner and cards, and tell them about some hit Broadway musical he was about to produce or some investment opportunity he had discovered. By the time the ship docked, they would practically beg him to let them invest in the project, a project which, of course, was entirely fictional. It did not exist.
[00:06:07] When the First World War put an end to the golden age of the ocean liner, Lustig moved to the United States, where he perfected the scheme he would become famous for: the money box.
[00:06:22] The money box was a small wooden chest, beautifully made, full of impressive-looking rollers and brass dials. Its special property, what made it magical, was that it could print perfect copies of banknotes. Lustig was always reluctant to talk about it, he said, and he only ever told people who could be trusted, who could be let in on the secret.
[00:06:50] He would demonstrate it in action. A real hundred-dollar bill went in one slot, a piece of blank paper went in another, and the machine would begin its work.
[00:07:03] The only drawback, Lustig explained, was that the process was slow. It took six hours to produce a single note.
[00:07:12] And sure enough, six hours later, out came two identical hundred-dollar bills. They even appeared to have the same serial number, and they would be accepted by any bank in the country.
[00:07:27] And they were both real hundred-dollar bills. The "printed" bill was simply a genuine note that Lustig had hidden inside the machine beforehand, albeit with its serial number changed to match the one that would be "copied".
[00:07:44] Lustig would smile proudly, but would never explicitly offer to sell the machine.
[00:07:51] Of course, the victim would always offer.
[00:07:54] Lustig would refuse. The victim would offer more. Lustig would refuse again, then finally, as if he was doing them a great favour, agree to part with the wonderful machine for an appropriate price. Ten thousand dollars, sometimes double or triple that.
[00:08:12] One group of New York gamblers reportedly paid forty-six thousand, which is more than $700,000 in inflation-adjusted terms.
[00:08:24] The buyer would rush home with their prize, load it with paper, insert a hundred-dollar bill, and wait. Six hours later, out would come a real banknote, the last one Lustig had hidden inside. Then they would load it again, wait another six hours, and the machine would spit out a blank piece of paper.
[00:08:48] Understandably, they would try to find the man who had sold them the box. Could he help? Had something gone wrong, or had he tricked them?
[00:08:57] By that time, Lustig would be hundreds of miles away, in another city, under another name.
[00:09:05] And there were plenty of names. Over his career, Lustig used dozens of false identities, complete with matching documents: Robert Duval, Robert Miller, and more than one invented count. By the end, the file the American authorities kept on him listed forty-seven different aliases.
[00:09:27] Now, the money box was a clever trick, and the six hour delay made the entire thing work.
[00:09:34] But there was a second layer of protection, and that was that his victims almost never went to the police. After all, printing fake currency was a crime. They were hardly likely to go to the authorities and say that they had been planning to commit a felony, a serious crime, but had been tricked by a criminal.
[00:09:57] However, this didn't work every time. One of his money box victims was a real Texas sheriff, who handed over thousands of dollars for the machine.
[00:10:10] Now, why a real sheriff would be buying a money-printing box is another question altogether, and one you can perhaps answer by accepting that law officials back then weren't always more law-abiding than regular citizens.
[00:10:26] In any case, when the sheriff worked out that he had been swindled, he tracked Lustig across the country, all the way to Chicago, and confronted him, furious and armed.
[00:10:40] Lustig remained calm. Perhaps the smooth-talking young man had prepared for this very eventuality.
[00:10:49] He listened patiently, frowned, inspected the machine, and explained that it was in perfect working order; the sheriff must simply have been operating it incorrectly.
[00:11:02] He went through the instructions again, step by step, got the machine back into working order, apologised sincerely for the confusion, and by way of apology, handed the sheriff a thick envelope of cash for his trouble.
[00:11:18] The sheriff went home satisfied. What excellent customer service!
[00:11:23] His mind was changed, however, when he tried to pay for something with one of the banknotes Lustig had given him and ended up being arrested for having counterfeit currency.
[00:11:34] The compensation money was fake. Lustig had managed to con the same man twice.
[00:11:42] Now, back to Paris, in May 1925, and that newspaper article.
[00:11:48] To understand what Lustig did next, you need to know that the Eiffel Tower was never meant to be permanent.
[00:11:57] It had been built in 1889 as the entrance to the World's Fair and the original permission was for it to stand for just twenty years.
[00:12:09] Many Parisians hated it.
[00:12:11] Some of France's most famous artists had signed a public protest against it, comparing it to a gigantic black factory chimney looming over their beautiful city.
[00:12:23] The famous author Guy de Maupassant even famously said he ate lunch at the Tower's restaurant every day because it was the only place in Paris where you couldn't see the wretched thing.
[00:12:36] By 1925, it was thirty-six years old, rusting, and not the sort of place American tourists would propose under as they do today.
[00:12:47] So when a newspaper article suggested it might one day be dismantled, this was not a completely absurd idea.
[00:12:57] Lustig's plan was built on that small foundation of plausibility.
[00:13:02] First, he paid a skilled forger to produce official government stationery for him, complete with the seal of the ministry responsible for the tower.
[00:13:14] Then he wrote to six of the biggest scrap metal dealers in Paris, on that official paper, inviting them to a confidential meeting at the Hôtel de Crillon.
[00:13:27] All six came. Of course they came. I mean, a letter from a senior government official, on official paper, summoning them to one of the finest hotels in Paris? This wasn't something you'd turn your nose up at.
[00:13:41] And Lustig was relying on a rule that had served him his whole career: the bigger and bolder the lie, the fewer questions people ask.
[00:13:51] A man selling gold watches in a smoky bar expects some level of suspicion.
[00:13:58] But who on earth would have the nerve to invent the sale of the Eiffel Tower? The sheer size of the claim was its own protection.
[00:14:08] Lustig received them in his suite and introduced himself as the Deputy Director-General of the ministry. He apologised for the secrecy, and then he delivered the pitch.
[00:14:21] The government, he explained, had made a difficult decision. The Eiffel Tower was simply too expensive to maintain, and it was to be sold for scrap.
[00:14:33] Seven thousand tonnes of iron, gentlemen. The state required a discreet buyer, because if the news got out before the contracts were signed, there would be a public outcry.
[00:14:45] He even took them to the tower itself, in a rented limousine, and walked them around it like an estate agent showing off a house. Of course, it's not like the metal dealers didn't know what it was, but this all added to the spectacle.
[00:15:02] If you are interested, gentlemen, please submit your offer, what you are willing to pay for the metal.
[00:15:08] The dealers submitted their bids. But Lustig had already chosen his winner.
[00:15:16] His name was André Poisson.
[00:15:19] He was newer to the business than the others, less established, and desperate to break into the inner circle of Parisian commerce. Lustig had watched him during the meeting and seen exactly what he needed to see: desperation. Poisson needed this more than any of the others.
[00:15:42] Poisson's wife, to her credit, smelled a rat. She thought the whole thing seemed suspicious. Why the secrecy? Why the hotel suite instead of a government office?
[00:15:54] Lustig seemed to anticipate this scepticism, and approached it, I have to say, quite cleverly.
[00:16:02] He called Poisson to a private meeting, and he confessed.
[00:16:07] Yes, there was something else going on. The truth was, he said, that he was a government official with a mere government official's salary. Men in his position were expected to entertain, to dress well, to live a certain kind of life.
[00:16:25] He was, he admitted with some embarrassment, looking for a little something extra for himself, a sweetener, and then the deal would be Poisson's.
[00:16:36] He was asking for a bribe.
[00:16:39] And this, strangely enough, is what seems to have convinced Poisson. A fraudster might fake a ministry letter.
[00:16:48] But surely only a real, flesh-and-blood French official would ask for a bribe.
[00:16:55] Poisson handed over the money for the tower, plus the bribe on top. It's unclear exactly how much this was, for reasons I'll explain in a minute, but it was a small fortune. I mean, you don't have to be a scrap metal expert to know that 7,000 tonnes of iron would be worth quite a lot.
[00:17:18] Lustig was on a train to Austria within hours, carrying a suitcase full of cash.
[00:17:25] And then he did something remarkable. He sat in Vienna and read the French newspapers, every day, looking for the story.
[00:17:35] It never appeared.
[00:17:37] Lustig had calculated, correctly, that Poisson would be too ashamed to go to the police. To report the crime would be to announce to all of Paris that he had been duped in the most outrageous of ways. His reputation, the very thing he had been trying to establish, would be destroyed in an instant.
[00:17:59] The silence told Lustig something else, too: the scam was reusable.
[00:18:06] So a few months later, he came back to Paris and ran the entire scheme again, with a fresh set of scrap metal dealers. This time, though, one of them went to the police, and when Lustig got wind that the authorities were onto him, he fled on the first ship to America.
[00:18:26] Remarkably, he was never convicted for it, and as far as the records show, he was never even charged. Poisson stayed silent, and by the time anyone else spoke up, Lustig was on another continent. The full story only came out years later, from the victims themselves, once the embarrassment had faded.
[00:18:49] Back in America, Lustig continued his life as a professional con man, selling more money boxes, counterfeiting currency, and generally getting up to no good.
[00:19:00] He even, at one point in the Great Depression, managed to con the legendary mobster Al Capone.
[00:19:07] The story goes like this.
[00:19:09] Lustig went to Capone and proposed a deal. Give me fifty thousand dollars, he said, and I will double it in two months through a stock market operation.
[00:19:22] Capone handed over the money, with the clear understanding that something very unpleasant would happen to Lustig if it disappeared.
[00:19:31] Lustig took the fifty thousand dollars, put it in a safe deposit box, and did absolutely nothing with it.
[00:19:40] Two months later, he returned to Capone, wearing his best suit and his most apologetic expression. The deal had fallen through, he said. He was terribly sorry. But he would reimburse Capone out of his own funds. And he handed back the fifty thousand dollars, every single note of it.
[00:20:02] Capone was astonished. He dealt with liars and thieves all day long, and here was a man returning money he could very easily have run away with. He was so impressed by this display of honesty that he peeled off five thousand dollars and gave it to Lustig for his trouble.
[00:20:21] Which, of course, is exactly what Lustig had wanted from the very beginning.
[00:20:26] Now, the law did eventually catch up with Lustig.
[00:20:29] Or rather, a jilted lover did.
[00:20:32] In 1935, his mistress discovered that he was seeing another woman, and she made an anonymous phone call to the authorities, informing on a fake currency business Lustig was running.
[00:20:46] When agents stopped him on a New York street, Lustig was as smooth as ever.
[00:20:51] But he had a key in his pocket that he could not explain. The key led to a locker in Times Square subway station, and the locker contained fifty-one thousand dollars in counterfeit notes, along with the printing plates used to make them.
[00:21:09] The game was up.
[00:21:11] But even then, he had one last performance in him.
[00:21:15] The day before his trial, Lustig escaped from jail in New York. He had made a rope from bedsheets, and he lowered himself down the side of the building in broad daylight.
[00:21:28] When people on the street below stopped and stared, he calmly took out a cloth and began wiping the windows as he went down, floor by floor, like a window cleaner going about his business. At the bottom, he bowed to his audience, and vanished.
[00:21:47] He was, however, recaptured in Pittsburgh almost a month later. This time there would be no talking his way out. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to twenty years, to be served in the new maximum-security prison on a rock in San Francisco Bay: Alcatraz.
[00:22:07] Lustig spent more than a decade there. In March 1947, he developed pneumonia, and he died in a prison hospital in Springfield, Missouri, at the age of fifty-seven.
[00:22:20] On his death certificate, under "occupation" a clerk wrote "apprentice salesman".
[00:22:27] His sales might have been utterly dishonest, but it seems a little unfair to classify them as "apprentice".
[00:22:35] After all, if you can sell something you do not own, and that thing is the Eiffel Tower, and you almost manage to sell it twice, then you might be the greatest salesman in the world.
[00:22:49] OK, then, that is it for today's episode — the first part of our three-part series on famous con artists.
[00:22:57] Next up we'll be moving into the story of Gregor MacGregor, the Scottish soldier who went one better than selling a monument, and invented an entire country, complete with settlers, bonds and its own currency.
[00:23:09] And in part three, we'll follow Charles Ponzi to Boston in the summer of 1920, to see how one man took in a million dollars a day, and how his name ended up in a dictionary.
[00:23:21] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:23:26] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it's the start of another three-part mini-series, this time on famous con artists.
[00:00:30] In today's episode, we'll be meeting Victor Lustig, the smooth-talking "count" who managed to sell the Eiffel Tower, and then came back to try to sell it again.
[00:00:42] In part two, we'll meet Gregor MacGregor, the Scottish soldier who invented an entire country and sold it to the British public.
[00:00:51] And in part three, it's the story of Charles Ponzi, the Italian who ran a scheme so spectacular that his name became a word in the English language.
[00:01:02] OK then, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:09] It is a spring morning in 1925, and a man is having breakfast in a suite at the Hôtel de Crillon, one of the grandest hotels in Paris.
[00:01:21] He is in his mid-thirties. He is beautifully dressed, he speaks five languages, and has a long scar down his left cheek. He introduces himself to everyone as Count Victor Lustig.
[00:01:37] He is not a count. In fact, barely anything he says about himself is true.
[00:01:44] On this particular morning, he picks up a newspaper and starts to read an article about the Eiffel Tower.
[00:01:53] The tower, the article says, is in a sorry state. It is rusting, the paint is peeling, and it costs the French government a small fortune to maintain.
[00:02:07] The journalist even suggests, half-jokingly, that the people of Paris might be better off simply tearing it down.
[00:02:17] Lustig reads the article twice. Then he puts down the newspaper and smiles.
[00:02:24] He has just had the idea for one of the greatest con jobs of the twentieth century.
[00:02:31] This man, Victor Lustig, was born in 1890, in a small town in Bohemia, in what is now the Czech Republic but was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
[00:02:44] His was a middle-class upbringing. His father was a tobacco salesman, and although he was abusive to his wife and children, he would take Victor with him on business trips around Europe.
[00:02:57] This, it would seem, gave the young boy an early insight into the riches of the great 19th century cities of Europe: Zurich, Prague, and of course, Paris.
[00:03:11] The boy, Victor, was clearly bright, but not particularly interested in hard work. There are reports of him being rude to teachers and running away from home, but still managing to get excellent grades.
[00:03:27] And like any sensible person who wants to seamlessly pass through different countries, he learned many languages. It's not clear quite how many, but it's thought that by the time he was an adult, he could move between Czech, German, English, French and Italian without any apparent effort — an important skill if you want to shift between different personalities.
[00:03:54] In 1909, he went to study at the Sorbonne in Paris, although it is unclear how much time he actually spent studying.
[00:04:03] What he did spend a lot of time doing was gambling, and it was here that he honed his skills at people-reading.
[00:04:12] Gambling, after all, is about figuring out your opponents — are they bluffing or are they telling the truth? And perhaps more importantly, can you trick them into believing you?
[00:04:27] As you might imagine, Lustig became very good at this.
[00:04:31] And knowing what he would get up to later in life, it seems highly probable that he would also have been cheating his way through these games, but he would no doubt have used his charisma and cunning to make his opponents think they were just having a bad night.
[00:04:49] And, because this was early 20th century Paris, he also got into his fair share of romantic troubles, and the scar on his cheek was courtesy of the jealous boyfriend of a woman he'd been spending a little too much time with.
[00:05:05] So, here was a young man with charm, languages, quick wits, and no particular interest in honest work.
[00:05:15] He found his first hunting ground on the great ocean liners that crossed the Atlantic between Europe and New York.
[00:05:24] These ships were floating palaces, full of wealthy passengers with money to spend and time to kill. Lustig would travel first class, typically posing as a European aristocrat or a successful theatre producer.
[00:05:42] He would befriend rich passengers over dinner and cards, and tell them about some hit Broadway musical he was about to produce or some investment opportunity he had discovered. By the time the ship docked, they would practically beg him to let them invest in the project, a project which, of course, was entirely fictional. It did not exist.
[00:06:07] When the First World War put an end to the golden age of the ocean liner, Lustig moved to the United States, where he perfected the scheme he would become famous for: the money box.
[00:06:22] The money box was a small wooden chest, beautifully made, full of impressive-looking rollers and brass dials. Its special property, what made it magical, was that it could print perfect copies of banknotes. Lustig was always reluctant to talk about it, he said, and he only ever told people who could be trusted, who could be let in on the secret.
[00:06:50] He would demonstrate it in action. A real hundred-dollar bill went in one slot, a piece of blank paper went in another, and the machine would begin its work.
[00:07:03] The only drawback, Lustig explained, was that the process was slow. It took six hours to produce a single note.
[00:07:12] And sure enough, six hours later, out came two identical hundred-dollar bills. They even appeared to have the same serial number, and they would be accepted by any bank in the country.
[00:07:27] And they were both real hundred-dollar bills. The "printed" bill was simply a genuine note that Lustig had hidden inside the machine beforehand, albeit with its serial number changed to match the one that would be "copied".
[00:07:44] Lustig would smile proudly, but would never explicitly offer to sell the machine.
[00:07:51] Of course, the victim would always offer.
[00:07:54] Lustig would refuse. The victim would offer more. Lustig would refuse again, then finally, as if he was doing them a great favour, agree to part with the wonderful machine for an appropriate price. Ten thousand dollars, sometimes double or triple that.
[00:08:12] One group of New York gamblers reportedly paid forty-six thousand, which is more than $700,000 in inflation-adjusted terms.
[00:08:24] The buyer would rush home with their prize, load it with paper, insert a hundred-dollar bill, and wait. Six hours later, out would come a real banknote, the last one Lustig had hidden inside. Then they would load it again, wait another six hours, and the machine would spit out a blank piece of paper.
[00:08:48] Understandably, they would try to find the man who had sold them the box. Could he help? Had something gone wrong, or had he tricked them?
[00:08:57] By that time, Lustig would be hundreds of miles away, in another city, under another name.
[00:09:05] And there were plenty of names. Over his career, Lustig used dozens of false identities, complete with matching documents: Robert Duval, Robert Miller, and more than one invented count. By the end, the file the American authorities kept on him listed forty-seven different aliases.
[00:09:27] Now, the money box was a clever trick, and the six hour delay made the entire thing work.
[00:09:34] But there was a second layer of protection, and that was that his victims almost never went to the police. After all, printing fake currency was a crime. They were hardly likely to go to the authorities and say that they had been planning to commit a felony, a serious crime, but had been tricked by a criminal.
[00:09:57] However, this didn't work every time. One of his money box victims was a real Texas sheriff, who handed over thousands of dollars for the machine.
[00:10:10] Now, why a real sheriff would be buying a money-printing box is another question altogether, and one you can perhaps answer by accepting that law officials back then weren't always more law-abiding than regular citizens.
[00:10:26] In any case, when the sheriff worked out that he had been swindled, he tracked Lustig across the country, all the way to Chicago, and confronted him, furious and armed.
[00:10:40] Lustig remained calm. Perhaps the smooth-talking young man had prepared for this very eventuality.
[00:10:49] He listened patiently, frowned, inspected the machine, and explained that it was in perfect working order; the sheriff must simply have been operating it incorrectly.
[00:11:02] He went through the instructions again, step by step, got the machine back into working order, apologised sincerely for the confusion, and by way of apology, handed the sheriff a thick envelope of cash for his trouble.
[00:11:18] The sheriff went home satisfied. What excellent customer service!
[00:11:23] His mind was changed, however, when he tried to pay for something with one of the banknotes Lustig had given him and ended up being arrested for having counterfeit currency.
[00:11:34] The compensation money was fake. Lustig had managed to con the same man twice.
[00:11:42] Now, back to Paris, in May 1925, and that newspaper article.
[00:11:48] To understand what Lustig did next, you need to know that the Eiffel Tower was never meant to be permanent.
[00:11:57] It had been built in 1889 as the entrance to the World's Fair and the original permission was for it to stand for just twenty years.
[00:12:09] Many Parisians hated it.
[00:12:11] Some of France's most famous artists had signed a public protest against it, comparing it to a gigantic black factory chimney looming over their beautiful city.
[00:12:23] The famous author Guy de Maupassant even famously said he ate lunch at the Tower's restaurant every day because it was the only place in Paris where you couldn't see the wretched thing.
[00:12:36] By 1925, it was thirty-six years old, rusting, and not the sort of place American tourists would propose under as they do today.
[00:12:47] So when a newspaper article suggested it might one day be dismantled, this was not a completely absurd idea.
[00:12:57] Lustig's plan was built on that small foundation of plausibility.
[00:13:02] First, he paid a skilled forger to produce official government stationery for him, complete with the seal of the ministry responsible for the tower.
[00:13:14] Then he wrote to six of the biggest scrap metal dealers in Paris, on that official paper, inviting them to a confidential meeting at the Hôtel de Crillon.
[00:13:27] All six came. Of course they came. I mean, a letter from a senior government official, on official paper, summoning them to one of the finest hotels in Paris? This wasn't something you'd turn your nose up at.
[00:13:41] And Lustig was relying on a rule that had served him his whole career: the bigger and bolder the lie, the fewer questions people ask.
[00:13:51] A man selling gold watches in a smoky bar expects some level of suspicion.
[00:13:58] But who on earth would have the nerve to invent the sale of the Eiffel Tower? The sheer size of the claim was its own protection.
[00:14:08] Lustig received them in his suite and introduced himself as the Deputy Director-General of the ministry. He apologised for the secrecy, and then he delivered the pitch.
[00:14:21] The government, he explained, had made a difficult decision. The Eiffel Tower was simply too expensive to maintain, and it was to be sold for scrap.
[00:14:33] Seven thousand tonnes of iron, gentlemen. The state required a discreet buyer, because if the news got out before the contracts were signed, there would be a public outcry.
[00:14:45] He even took them to the tower itself, in a rented limousine, and walked them around it like an estate agent showing off a house. Of course, it's not like the metal dealers didn't know what it was, but this all added to the spectacle.
[00:15:02] If you are interested, gentlemen, please submit your offer, what you are willing to pay for the metal.
[00:15:08] The dealers submitted their bids. But Lustig had already chosen his winner.
[00:15:16] His name was André Poisson.
[00:15:19] He was newer to the business than the others, less established, and desperate to break into the inner circle of Parisian commerce. Lustig had watched him during the meeting and seen exactly what he needed to see: desperation. Poisson needed this more than any of the others.
[00:15:42] Poisson's wife, to her credit, smelled a rat. She thought the whole thing seemed suspicious. Why the secrecy? Why the hotel suite instead of a government office?
[00:15:54] Lustig seemed to anticipate this scepticism, and approached it, I have to say, quite cleverly.
[00:16:02] He called Poisson to a private meeting, and he confessed.
[00:16:07] Yes, there was something else going on. The truth was, he said, that he was a government official with a mere government official's salary. Men in his position were expected to entertain, to dress well, to live a certain kind of life.
[00:16:25] He was, he admitted with some embarrassment, looking for a little something extra for himself, a sweetener, and then the deal would be Poisson's.
[00:16:36] He was asking for a bribe.
[00:16:39] And this, strangely enough, is what seems to have convinced Poisson. A fraudster might fake a ministry letter.
[00:16:48] But surely only a real, flesh-and-blood French official would ask for a bribe.
[00:16:55] Poisson handed over the money for the tower, plus the bribe on top. It's unclear exactly how much this was, for reasons I'll explain in a minute, but it was a small fortune. I mean, you don't have to be a scrap metal expert to know that 7,000 tonnes of iron would be worth quite a lot.
[00:17:18] Lustig was on a train to Austria within hours, carrying a suitcase full of cash.
[00:17:25] And then he did something remarkable. He sat in Vienna and read the French newspapers, every day, looking for the story.
[00:17:35] It never appeared.
[00:17:37] Lustig had calculated, correctly, that Poisson would be too ashamed to go to the police. To report the crime would be to announce to all of Paris that he had been duped in the most outrageous of ways. His reputation, the very thing he had been trying to establish, would be destroyed in an instant.
[00:17:59] The silence told Lustig something else, too: the scam was reusable.
[00:18:06] So a few months later, he came back to Paris and ran the entire scheme again, with a fresh set of scrap metal dealers. This time, though, one of them went to the police, and when Lustig got wind that the authorities were onto him, he fled on the first ship to America.
[00:18:26] Remarkably, he was never convicted for it, and as far as the records show, he was never even charged. Poisson stayed silent, and by the time anyone else spoke up, Lustig was on another continent. The full story only came out years later, from the victims themselves, once the embarrassment had faded.
[00:18:49] Back in America, Lustig continued his life as a professional con man, selling more money boxes, counterfeiting currency, and generally getting up to no good.
[00:19:00] He even, at one point in the Great Depression, managed to con the legendary mobster Al Capone.
[00:19:07] The story goes like this.
[00:19:09] Lustig went to Capone and proposed a deal. Give me fifty thousand dollars, he said, and I will double it in two months through a stock market operation.
[00:19:22] Capone handed over the money, with the clear understanding that something very unpleasant would happen to Lustig if it disappeared.
[00:19:31] Lustig took the fifty thousand dollars, put it in a safe deposit box, and did absolutely nothing with it.
[00:19:40] Two months later, he returned to Capone, wearing his best suit and his most apologetic expression. The deal had fallen through, he said. He was terribly sorry. But he would reimburse Capone out of his own funds. And he handed back the fifty thousand dollars, every single note of it.
[00:20:02] Capone was astonished. He dealt with liars and thieves all day long, and here was a man returning money he could very easily have run away with. He was so impressed by this display of honesty that he peeled off five thousand dollars and gave it to Lustig for his trouble.
[00:20:21] Which, of course, is exactly what Lustig had wanted from the very beginning.
[00:20:26] Now, the law did eventually catch up with Lustig.
[00:20:29] Or rather, a jilted lover did.
[00:20:32] In 1935, his mistress discovered that he was seeing another woman, and she made an anonymous phone call to the authorities, informing on a fake currency business Lustig was running.
[00:20:46] When agents stopped him on a New York street, Lustig was as smooth as ever.
[00:20:51] But he had a key in his pocket that he could not explain. The key led to a locker in Times Square subway station, and the locker contained fifty-one thousand dollars in counterfeit notes, along with the printing plates used to make them.
[00:21:09] The game was up.
[00:21:11] But even then, he had one last performance in him.
[00:21:15] The day before his trial, Lustig escaped from jail in New York. He had made a rope from bedsheets, and he lowered himself down the side of the building in broad daylight.
[00:21:28] When people on the street below stopped and stared, he calmly took out a cloth and began wiping the windows as he went down, floor by floor, like a window cleaner going about his business. At the bottom, he bowed to his audience, and vanished.
[00:21:47] He was, however, recaptured in Pittsburgh almost a month later. This time there would be no talking his way out. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to twenty years, to be served in the new maximum-security prison on a rock in San Francisco Bay: Alcatraz.
[00:22:07] Lustig spent more than a decade there. In March 1947, he developed pneumonia, and he died in a prison hospital in Springfield, Missouri, at the age of fifty-seven.
[00:22:20] On his death certificate, under "occupation" a clerk wrote "apprentice salesman".
[00:22:27] His sales might have been utterly dishonest, but it seems a little unfair to classify them as "apprentice".
[00:22:35] After all, if you can sell something you do not own, and that thing is the Eiffel Tower, and you almost manage to sell it twice, then you might be the greatest salesman in the world.
[00:22:49] OK, then, that is it for today's episode — the first part of our three-part series on famous con artists.
[00:22:57] Next up we'll be moving into the story of Gregor MacGregor, the Scottish soldier who went one better than selling a monument, and invented an entire country, complete with settlers, bonds and its own currency.
[00:23:09] And in part three, we'll follow Charles Ponzi to Boston in the summer of 1920, to see how one man took in a million dollars a day, and how his name ended up in a dictionary.
[00:23:21] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:23:26] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it's the start of another three-part mini-series, this time on famous con artists.
[00:00:30] In today's episode, we'll be meeting Victor Lustig, the smooth-talking "count" who managed to sell the Eiffel Tower, and then came back to try to sell it again.
[00:00:42] In part two, we'll meet Gregor MacGregor, the Scottish soldier who invented an entire country and sold it to the British public.
[00:00:51] And in part three, it's the story of Charles Ponzi, the Italian who ran a scheme so spectacular that his name became a word in the English language.
[00:01:02] OK then, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:09] It is a spring morning in 1925, and a man is having breakfast in a suite at the Hôtel de Crillon, one of the grandest hotels in Paris.
[00:01:21] He is in his mid-thirties. He is beautifully dressed, he speaks five languages, and has a long scar down his left cheek. He introduces himself to everyone as Count Victor Lustig.
[00:01:37] He is not a count. In fact, barely anything he says about himself is true.
[00:01:44] On this particular morning, he picks up a newspaper and starts to read an article about the Eiffel Tower.
[00:01:53] The tower, the article says, is in a sorry state. It is rusting, the paint is peeling, and it costs the French government a small fortune to maintain.
[00:02:07] The journalist even suggests, half-jokingly, that the people of Paris might be better off simply tearing it down.
[00:02:17] Lustig reads the article twice. Then he puts down the newspaper and smiles.
[00:02:24] He has just had the idea for one of the greatest con jobs of the twentieth century.
[00:02:31] This man, Victor Lustig, was born in 1890, in a small town in Bohemia, in what is now the Czech Republic but was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
[00:02:44] His was a middle-class upbringing. His father was a tobacco salesman, and although he was abusive to his wife and children, he would take Victor with him on business trips around Europe.
[00:02:57] This, it would seem, gave the young boy an early insight into the riches of the great 19th century cities of Europe: Zurich, Prague, and of course, Paris.
[00:03:11] The boy, Victor, was clearly bright, but not particularly interested in hard work. There are reports of him being rude to teachers and running away from home, but still managing to get excellent grades.
[00:03:27] And like any sensible person who wants to seamlessly pass through different countries, he learned many languages. It's not clear quite how many, but it's thought that by the time he was an adult, he could move between Czech, German, English, French and Italian without any apparent effort — an important skill if you want to shift between different personalities.
[00:03:54] In 1909, he went to study at the Sorbonne in Paris, although it is unclear how much time he actually spent studying.
[00:04:03] What he did spend a lot of time doing was gambling, and it was here that he honed his skills at people-reading.
[00:04:12] Gambling, after all, is about figuring out your opponents — are they bluffing or are they telling the truth? And perhaps more importantly, can you trick them into believing you?
[00:04:27] As you might imagine, Lustig became very good at this.
[00:04:31] And knowing what he would get up to later in life, it seems highly probable that he would also have been cheating his way through these games, but he would no doubt have used his charisma and cunning to make his opponents think they were just having a bad night.
[00:04:49] And, because this was early 20th century Paris, he also got into his fair share of romantic troubles, and the scar on his cheek was courtesy of the jealous boyfriend of a woman he'd been spending a little too much time with.
[00:05:05] So, here was a young man with charm, languages, quick wits, and no particular interest in honest work.
[00:05:15] He found his first hunting ground on the great ocean liners that crossed the Atlantic between Europe and New York.
[00:05:24] These ships were floating palaces, full of wealthy passengers with money to spend and time to kill. Lustig would travel first class, typically posing as a European aristocrat or a successful theatre producer.
[00:05:42] He would befriend rich passengers over dinner and cards, and tell them about some hit Broadway musical he was about to produce or some investment opportunity he had discovered. By the time the ship docked, they would practically beg him to let them invest in the project, a project which, of course, was entirely fictional. It did not exist.
[00:06:07] When the First World War put an end to the golden age of the ocean liner, Lustig moved to the United States, where he perfected the scheme he would become famous for: the money box.
[00:06:22] The money box was a small wooden chest, beautifully made, full of impressive-looking rollers and brass dials. Its special property, what made it magical, was that it could print perfect copies of banknotes. Lustig was always reluctant to talk about it, he said, and he only ever told people who could be trusted, who could be let in on the secret.
[00:06:50] He would demonstrate it in action. A real hundred-dollar bill went in one slot, a piece of blank paper went in another, and the machine would begin its work.
[00:07:03] The only drawback, Lustig explained, was that the process was slow. It took six hours to produce a single note.
[00:07:12] And sure enough, six hours later, out came two identical hundred-dollar bills. They even appeared to have the same serial number, and they would be accepted by any bank in the country.
[00:07:27] And they were both real hundred-dollar bills. The "printed" bill was simply a genuine note that Lustig had hidden inside the machine beforehand, albeit with its serial number changed to match the one that would be "copied".
[00:07:44] Lustig would smile proudly, but would never explicitly offer to sell the machine.
[00:07:51] Of course, the victim would always offer.
[00:07:54] Lustig would refuse. The victim would offer more. Lustig would refuse again, then finally, as if he was doing them a great favour, agree to part with the wonderful machine for an appropriate price. Ten thousand dollars, sometimes double or triple that.
[00:08:12] One group of New York gamblers reportedly paid forty-six thousand, which is more than $700,000 in inflation-adjusted terms.
[00:08:24] The buyer would rush home with their prize, load it with paper, insert a hundred-dollar bill, and wait. Six hours later, out would come a real banknote, the last one Lustig had hidden inside. Then they would load it again, wait another six hours, and the machine would spit out a blank piece of paper.
[00:08:48] Understandably, they would try to find the man who had sold them the box. Could he help? Had something gone wrong, or had he tricked them?
[00:08:57] By that time, Lustig would be hundreds of miles away, in another city, under another name.
[00:09:05] And there were plenty of names. Over his career, Lustig used dozens of false identities, complete with matching documents: Robert Duval, Robert Miller, and more than one invented count. By the end, the file the American authorities kept on him listed forty-seven different aliases.
[00:09:27] Now, the money box was a clever trick, and the six hour delay made the entire thing work.
[00:09:34] But there was a second layer of protection, and that was that his victims almost never went to the police. After all, printing fake currency was a crime. They were hardly likely to go to the authorities and say that they had been planning to commit a felony, a serious crime, but had been tricked by a criminal.
[00:09:57] However, this didn't work every time. One of his money box victims was a real Texas sheriff, who handed over thousands of dollars for the machine.
[00:10:10] Now, why a real sheriff would be buying a money-printing box is another question altogether, and one you can perhaps answer by accepting that law officials back then weren't always more law-abiding than regular citizens.
[00:10:26] In any case, when the sheriff worked out that he had been swindled, he tracked Lustig across the country, all the way to Chicago, and confronted him, furious and armed.
[00:10:40] Lustig remained calm. Perhaps the smooth-talking young man had prepared for this very eventuality.
[00:10:49] He listened patiently, frowned, inspected the machine, and explained that it was in perfect working order; the sheriff must simply have been operating it incorrectly.
[00:11:02] He went through the instructions again, step by step, got the machine back into working order, apologised sincerely for the confusion, and by way of apology, handed the sheriff a thick envelope of cash for his trouble.
[00:11:18] The sheriff went home satisfied. What excellent customer service!
[00:11:23] His mind was changed, however, when he tried to pay for something with one of the banknotes Lustig had given him and ended up being arrested for having counterfeit currency.
[00:11:34] The compensation money was fake. Lustig had managed to con the same man twice.
[00:11:42] Now, back to Paris, in May 1925, and that newspaper article.
[00:11:48] To understand what Lustig did next, you need to know that the Eiffel Tower was never meant to be permanent.
[00:11:57] It had been built in 1889 as the entrance to the World's Fair and the original permission was for it to stand for just twenty years.
[00:12:09] Many Parisians hated it.
[00:12:11] Some of France's most famous artists had signed a public protest against it, comparing it to a gigantic black factory chimney looming over their beautiful city.
[00:12:23] The famous author Guy de Maupassant even famously said he ate lunch at the Tower's restaurant every day because it was the only place in Paris where you couldn't see the wretched thing.
[00:12:36] By 1925, it was thirty-six years old, rusting, and not the sort of place American tourists would propose under as they do today.
[00:12:47] So when a newspaper article suggested it might one day be dismantled, this was not a completely absurd idea.
[00:12:57] Lustig's plan was built on that small foundation of plausibility.
[00:13:02] First, he paid a skilled forger to produce official government stationery for him, complete with the seal of the ministry responsible for the tower.
[00:13:14] Then he wrote to six of the biggest scrap metal dealers in Paris, on that official paper, inviting them to a confidential meeting at the Hôtel de Crillon.
[00:13:27] All six came. Of course they came. I mean, a letter from a senior government official, on official paper, summoning them to one of the finest hotels in Paris? This wasn't something you'd turn your nose up at.
[00:13:41] And Lustig was relying on a rule that had served him his whole career: the bigger and bolder the lie, the fewer questions people ask.
[00:13:51] A man selling gold watches in a smoky bar expects some level of suspicion.
[00:13:58] But who on earth would have the nerve to invent the sale of the Eiffel Tower? The sheer size of the claim was its own protection.
[00:14:08] Lustig received them in his suite and introduced himself as the Deputy Director-General of the ministry. He apologised for the secrecy, and then he delivered the pitch.
[00:14:21] The government, he explained, had made a difficult decision. The Eiffel Tower was simply too expensive to maintain, and it was to be sold for scrap.
[00:14:33] Seven thousand tonnes of iron, gentlemen. The state required a discreet buyer, because if the news got out before the contracts were signed, there would be a public outcry.
[00:14:45] He even took them to the tower itself, in a rented limousine, and walked them around it like an estate agent showing off a house. Of course, it's not like the metal dealers didn't know what it was, but this all added to the spectacle.
[00:15:02] If you are interested, gentlemen, please submit your offer, what you are willing to pay for the metal.
[00:15:08] The dealers submitted their bids. But Lustig had already chosen his winner.
[00:15:16] His name was André Poisson.
[00:15:19] He was newer to the business than the others, less established, and desperate to break into the inner circle of Parisian commerce. Lustig had watched him during the meeting and seen exactly what he needed to see: desperation. Poisson needed this more than any of the others.
[00:15:42] Poisson's wife, to her credit, smelled a rat. She thought the whole thing seemed suspicious. Why the secrecy? Why the hotel suite instead of a government office?
[00:15:54] Lustig seemed to anticipate this scepticism, and approached it, I have to say, quite cleverly.
[00:16:02] He called Poisson to a private meeting, and he confessed.
[00:16:07] Yes, there was something else going on. The truth was, he said, that he was a government official with a mere government official's salary. Men in his position were expected to entertain, to dress well, to live a certain kind of life.
[00:16:25] He was, he admitted with some embarrassment, looking for a little something extra for himself, a sweetener, and then the deal would be Poisson's.
[00:16:36] He was asking for a bribe.
[00:16:39] And this, strangely enough, is what seems to have convinced Poisson. A fraudster might fake a ministry letter.
[00:16:48] But surely only a real, flesh-and-blood French official would ask for a bribe.
[00:16:55] Poisson handed over the money for the tower, plus the bribe on top. It's unclear exactly how much this was, for reasons I'll explain in a minute, but it was a small fortune. I mean, you don't have to be a scrap metal expert to know that 7,000 tonnes of iron would be worth quite a lot.
[00:17:18] Lustig was on a train to Austria within hours, carrying a suitcase full of cash.
[00:17:25] And then he did something remarkable. He sat in Vienna and read the French newspapers, every day, looking for the story.
[00:17:35] It never appeared.
[00:17:37] Lustig had calculated, correctly, that Poisson would be too ashamed to go to the police. To report the crime would be to announce to all of Paris that he had been duped in the most outrageous of ways. His reputation, the very thing he had been trying to establish, would be destroyed in an instant.
[00:17:59] The silence told Lustig something else, too: the scam was reusable.
[00:18:06] So a few months later, he came back to Paris and ran the entire scheme again, with a fresh set of scrap metal dealers. This time, though, one of them went to the police, and when Lustig got wind that the authorities were onto him, he fled on the first ship to America.
[00:18:26] Remarkably, he was never convicted for it, and as far as the records show, he was never even charged. Poisson stayed silent, and by the time anyone else spoke up, Lustig was on another continent. The full story only came out years later, from the victims themselves, once the embarrassment had faded.
[00:18:49] Back in America, Lustig continued his life as a professional con man, selling more money boxes, counterfeiting currency, and generally getting up to no good.
[00:19:00] He even, at one point in the Great Depression, managed to con the legendary mobster Al Capone.
[00:19:07] The story goes like this.
[00:19:09] Lustig went to Capone and proposed a deal. Give me fifty thousand dollars, he said, and I will double it in two months through a stock market operation.
[00:19:22] Capone handed over the money, with the clear understanding that something very unpleasant would happen to Lustig if it disappeared.
[00:19:31] Lustig took the fifty thousand dollars, put it in a safe deposit box, and did absolutely nothing with it.
[00:19:40] Two months later, he returned to Capone, wearing his best suit and his most apologetic expression. The deal had fallen through, he said. He was terribly sorry. But he would reimburse Capone out of his own funds. And he handed back the fifty thousand dollars, every single note of it.
[00:20:02] Capone was astonished. He dealt with liars and thieves all day long, and here was a man returning money he could very easily have run away with. He was so impressed by this display of honesty that he peeled off five thousand dollars and gave it to Lustig for his trouble.
[00:20:21] Which, of course, is exactly what Lustig had wanted from the very beginning.
[00:20:26] Now, the law did eventually catch up with Lustig.
[00:20:29] Or rather, a jilted lover did.
[00:20:32] In 1935, his mistress discovered that he was seeing another woman, and she made an anonymous phone call to the authorities, informing on a fake currency business Lustig was running.
[00:20:46] When agents stopped him on a New York street, Lustig was as smooth as ever.
[00:20:51] But he had a key in his pocket that he could not explain. The key led to a locker in Times Square subway station, and the locker contained fifty-one thousand dollars in counterfeit notes, along with the printing plates used to make them.
[00:21:09] The game was up.
[00:21:11] But even then, he had one last performance in him.
[00:21:15] The day before his trial, Lustig escaped from jail in New York. He had made a rope from bedsheets, and he lowered himself down the side of the building in broad daylight.
[00:21:28] When people on the street below stopped and stared, he calmly took out a cloth and began wiping the windows as he went down, floor by floor, like a window cleaner going about his business. At the bottom, he bowed to his audience, and vanished.
[00:21:47] He was, however, recaptured in Pittsburgh almost a month later. This time there would be no talking his way out. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to twenty years, to be served in the new maximum-security prison on a rock in San Francisco Bay: Alcatraz.
[00:22:07] Lustig spent more than a decade there. In March 1947, he developed pneumonia, and he died in a prison hospital in Springfield, Missouri, at the age of fifty-seven.
[00:22:20] On his death certificate, under "occupation" a clerk wrote "apprentice salesman".
[00:22:27] His sales might have been utterly dishonest, but it seems a little unfair to classify them as "apprentice".
[00:22:35] After all, if you can sell something you do not own, and that thing is the Eiffel Tower, and you almost manage to sell it twice, then you might be the greatest salesman in the world.
[00:22:49] OK, then, that is it for today's episode — the first part of our three-part series on famous con artists.
[00:22:57] Next up we'll be moving into the story of Gregor MacGregor, the Scottish soldier who went one better than selling a monument, and invented an entire country, complete with settlers, bonds and its own currency.
[00:23:09] And in part three, we'll follow Charles Ponzi to Boston in the summer of 1920, to see how one man took in a million dollars a day, and how his name ended up in a dictionary.
[00:23:21] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:23:26] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
