He Was A Con Man Who Sold The Eiffel Tower Two Separate Times
Meet the man who sold the Eiffel Tower not once but twice—Victor Lustig, the ultimate con artist. He transformed the iconic monument into his personal cash cow without having even owned it.
His charm, smooth-talking skills, and a few forged documents convinced a total of two gullible buyers to fork over a fortune to him.
Victor Lustig was born in 1890 in Hostinné, Bohemia when it was still part of Austria-Hungary. He demonstrated his brilliance early on and excelled in academics, mastering multiple languages. However, he also had a mischievous nature and developed an interest in gambling while studying in Paris.
By the age of 19, Lustig had abandoned formal education and turned to a life of crime. His cleverness and knack for languages enabled him to pull off a series of schemes.
He started by scamming wealthy passengers on transatlantic ocean liners by pretending to be a Broadway producer.
He got people to invest in a show that didn’t exist and made off with their money. When ocean travel ceased due to World War I, he moved to the United States in search of new opportunities.
Lustig’s most famous con took place in Paris in 1925, when he managed to sell the Eiffel Tower twice. The idea came to him after he read a newspaper article about how costly the tower’s maintenance was.
It needed about 60 tons of paint every seven years. As a result, it had fallen into disrepair and faced possible demolition.
So, Lustig decided to manipulate the story to his own advantage. He hired someone to produce some fake government papers.
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Then, he invited a group of Parisian scrap metal dealers to a secret meeting at an upscale hotel and posed as a high-ranking French official. He told them he was in charge of selling the Eiffel Tower because the city could no longer afford its upkeep.
Lustig also explained that the sale needed to remain confidential to avoid riling up the public. He set his sights on the most vulnerable dealer there, André Poisson, a businessman who was eager to make his way into Parisian high society.
Poisson ended up giving Lustig 70,000 francs. Afterward, Lustig fled the country. Poisson was too embarrassed to report the scam, so Lustig got away with his crime.
A few months later, Lustig returned to Paris to try the scheme again. However, his new target grew suspicious of him and reported the scam to the police, causing Lustig to flee to the U.S.
He settled down in the Chicago suburbs and went on to build a million-dollar counterfeiting business that eventually led to his downfall.
He printed and distributed tens of thousands of dollars worth of counterfeit bills. Soon enough, they flooded the U.S. economy and caught the attention of federal investigators.
Lustig’s mistress tipped off Secret Service agents to his whereabouts as his infidelity angered her. Lustig was arrested in New York and charged with counterfeiting. He managed to escape from prison by faking an illness and using a homemade rope to climb out of his cell.
However, he was recaptured less than a month later. Lustig was sentenced to 20 years in Alcatraz and served 14 years before his death. He died of complications from pneumonia in 1947 at the Federal Medical Center in Springfield, Missouri.
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