Count Victor Lustig may have been the most successful con artist of the 20th Century. From the Belle Époque to the Great Depression, through the Roaring Twenties and across two continents, this elegant swindler eluded the grasp of the law while racking in hundreds of thousands of dollars. Newspapers described him as “a storybook character.” Federal agents said of him that he was “as elusive as a puff of cigarette smoke and as charming as a young girl’s dream.” Today we remember him as Victor Lustig, the man who sold the Eiffel Tower.

Count Victor Lustig was born on January 4, 1890, into an aristocratic Austro-Hungarian family. His birthplace was the town of Hostinné, which was then part of the Province of Bohemia, now the modern-day Czech Republic. Or at least, that’s one of the stories he told. Victor Lustig was born the son of Ludwig, the middle-class mayor of Hostinné. Or maybe not. The man who would later be known as Count Victor Lustig was born Robert V. Miller in Hostinné, in a family he described as the “poorest peasant people,” and was raised in a house made from stone, little more than a cave. Or was he?

The man who would be known as Victor Lustig, Robert Miller, and more than 40 other aliases was born sometime in 1890, somewhere near the border between Bohemia and Poland, to two parents, whom we can safely guess were a lady and a guy. Any more detail than that, I would not bet my hard-earned money on it. Relying on any of these stories would imply trusting the word of he who would grow up to become the King of Swindlers, the Arch Duke of Grifters, the CEO of Confidence Tricks, Inc.

On one detail we can all agree: he was a Bohemian, in both meanings of this word. He definitely came from the land of Bohemia, and he led a lifestyle that could be described as ‘Bohemian,’ at least according to my handy Oxford English Dictionary: “A socially unconventional person, especially one who is involved in the arts.” And what was the capital of the Bohemian lifestyle, or la vie bohémienne, if not Paris at the height of the Belle Époque? And that’s exactly where we are going to pick up again the story of our protagonist, whom I will call ‘Victor’ from now on.

Very little is known of Victor’s childhood and early teens. But we know with a certain degree of confidence that he lived in Paris around 1908 and 1909. He may have lived there to attend university, which backs the version that he came from a middle-class background. But apparently, he spent little time studying, being more suited to a life of gambling, womanizing, and generally having great fun. Not everybody agreed with his idea of fun, especially when it involved sleeping with somebody else’s girlfriend. When Victor was 19, he was scarred on his left cheek by the jealous lover of his girlfriend, a scar that would remain visible for the rest of his life.

Victor’s bohemian lifestyle left other durable marks on him, albeit more metaphorical. During his formative years, Victor became proficient in several languages, including English, French, and Italian. More importantly, he started perfecting his money-making skills – on the wrong side of the law, of course. Starting as a pickpocket, Victor soon graduated to burglar and then branched out to street hustling, finally earning a master’s in scamming and confidence tricks. Especially card tricks: according to a true crime magazine of his time, by his late teens, “Lustig could make a deck of cards do everything but talk.”

After clearing the pockets of many a Parisian, Victor moved to a new level of conmanship: being a conman aboard cruise ships. Between 1909 and the outbreak of WWI, Victor traveled back and forth across the Atlantic, from France to New York and back, picking his marks (in other words: his victims) among the nouveaux riches traveling in 1st Class. It was in this period that he created his most famous persona, Count Victor Lustig, a nobleman from the fallen kingdom of Bohemia. He acquired a set of well-tailored clothes and affected his mannerisms to appear wealthy, aristocratic – but never boastful, nor arrogant – and most of all: worthy of confidence.

Despite being in his early twenties, he managed to convince his marks that he was a Broadway producer in search of investors to put on a new dazzling musical show. This evolution into a smoother style of swindling did not happen by magic. Victor needed a master, and he found one during one of these Atlantic trips: Nicky Arnstein, an American professional gambler and con artist, famous for being the husband of actress Fanny Brice. Lustig would acknowledge Arnstein as the one who taught him the true art of the con, the one who raised him from the status of promising rookie to Smooth Scam-master General. Arnstein’s teachings would influence the ‘10 Golden Rules of the Con’ which Victor formalized later in his life. Curious about these ‘Golden Rules’? I will give you two for the moment:
1. Be a patient listener. It is this, not fast talking, that gets a con man his coups.
2. Never look bored.

In this spirit, I will ask you to continue to listen patiently and try not to look too bored. Let’s continue with Lustig’s life for the moment…

When World War I broke out, transatlantic travel for the rich became less frequent and more dangerous. In a way, the U-boats were responsible for the next stage in Lustig’s career: the con artist settled in the US, mainly Kansas City. As ever, the details of his life in this period are sketchy and unreliable, but we know of some juicy bits. During and immediately after the War, Victor partnered with a sidekick known as “Dapper” Dan Collins, whom the New York Times described as “a former circus lion tamer and death-defying bicycle rider.”

Smooth Victor and Dapper Dan’s main scam was called the “Rumanian money box.” This was an ordinary box, fashioned to look like a complicated machine, with rollers and dials. If you put a banknote inside it, say a $100 bill, and then inserted some chemicals, the machine would take 6 hours to print an identical copy of your money – so realistic that no bank teller could identify it as counterfeit. After 12 hours of recovery time, the Rumanian box was ready to print another bill.

The trick behind it was elaborate but brilliant:
1. Collect a handful of $100 bills from your bank, ensuring their serial numbers are all sequential.
2. Alter the banknotes so that they all have the same serial number.
3. Keep one note for demonstration purposes and then stuff the other notes into the machine.
4. Find your marks and get them interested in the machine.
5. Now, demonstrate how the Rumanian box works. Spend the six hours of waiting time with your marks, while you dine, wine, and charm them.
6. Open the box and – voila! There are two banknotes now! How cool is that, your money has doubled.

Next step: to further convince the marks, take them to a bank and deposit the freshly printed bill. Watch them gasp and amaze when the bank teller fails to realize it’s fake money! Grand Finale: sell the Rumanian box to your mark for anything up to $10,000. It will repay for itself after all! While the marks waited for the 12 hours for the machine to ‘rest’ before they used it again, Lustig and Collins would skip town, ready to trick somebody else. The genius idea for the operation was that nobody would report the scam, as it would amount to a confession of counterfeiting.

A similar scam, in the sense that it exploited the victim’s dishonest leanings, took place in Montreal in the early 1920s. Here Victor gained the trust of a wealthy banker named Linus Merton: he first had his wallet stolen and then returned it intact. He then lured him into a gambling scheme: Victor said that his cousin Emil – perhaps Dapper Dan – was able to delay by one minute the telegraph wires relaying the results of horse races. This vital minute would allow Victor and Merton to always place winning bets. Lustig convinced the banker to place a bet for a whopping $30,000. No surprise there, when the Lustig cousins disappeared from Canada. Again, they left behind a victim too ashamed and too guilty of bet-fixing to go to the police.

The next big job took place in 1922, in Missouri. Under the name of Robert Duval, he offered to the American Savings Bank $32,000 in World War I war bonds, the famous Liberty bonds, in exchange for $10,000 in cash and some farmland. At the moment of closing the deal, he switched the envelope containing the bonds with an empty one. With a simple sleight of hand trick, he walked out with the bonds, the farm, and the cash. American Savings hired some private detectives who succeeded in tracking Lustig in Kansas City. Victor could rely on his ultimate weapon: smooth talk. He convinced the detectives that if the bank pressed charges and the story went public, then clients would lose confidence in them. That would spell ruin for American Savings.

So, not only did he convince the bank to drop all the charges – they even paid him an extra $1,000 to buy his silence!

The run-in with the private detectives was not the only time that Victor Lustig had risked ending up behind bars. In fact, he had been arrested around 40 times, but every time he managed to talk or bribe himself out of those sticky situations. In extreme cases, he simply had his wife bail him out, for him to disappear again. Victor’s wife was called Roberta Noret, a pretty, young Kansan whom he had married on November 3, 1919. But more on Victor’s private life later – for now, let’s stick to talking shop.

In May 1925, Victor and Dapper Dan moved to Paris, possibly to escape increased attention from American law enforcement. In the Paris capital, they read an article about the status of disrepair of the Eiffel Tower and how maintenance expenses would be too costly for local government. That sparked the idea for Victor’s craziest scam: he would sell the Eiffel Tower.

The idea actually was not that crazy. The Tower had been erected in 1889 as a temporary structure, to be taken down no later than 1909, and yet it was still standing. It was effectively expensive to maintain, and public opinion was split about it, many considering it an eyesore. So how about the French Government decided to sell it as scrap metal? Lustig carefully prepared his con. He first forged a set of stationery for the Ministry in charge of posts and telegraphs. This was realistic, as the Tower was used as a giant post to transmit radio signals. He then used the letterhead to summon the five largest scrap metal dealers in Paris. They were invited to a secret meeting at the exclusive Hôtel de Crillon, in Place de la Concorde.

Here was the deal: the French Government was considering tearing down the Eiffel Tower and selling its pieces as scrap metal. Lustig insisted that the five dealers kept quiet about it, as the Government did not want the deal to leak to the press. At the meeting, Victor identified the fish he was going to catch: the conveniently named André Poisson. His business was relatively small compared to the others’ and because of that was low in self-esteem. Lustig arranged a separate meeting with Poisson, and expressing sympathy for his budding business, offered the deal to him… in exchange for a sizeable kickback. And it was thus that Count Victor Lustig not only sold the Eiffel Tower as a heap of scrap metal, but he also pocketed a nice bribe on the side.

The following day, Victor and Dan left France for Vienna and waited patiently for the storm to calm down. To their surprise, though, the French newspapers did not report the scam. Lustig correctly assumed that Poisson had been too embarrassed to press charges. It was too good to be true. What did he do next? Well, he returned to Paris and attempted the exact same scam a second time – with different metal dealers, of course. But this second time around, one of the dealers was immediately suspicious and reported this self-described Ministry official to the police. Victor was quick to flee: using one of his many aliases and forged passports, he embarked again and returned to America.

Upon returning to the US, Lustig set to work again. He clearly got a kick out of performing his confidence tricks, but he also needed to fund a very expensive lifestyle. He and his wife Roberta had a daughter, Bettie Jean, and their living arrangements were very costly. Roberta and Bettie Jean moved constantly from town to town, living in hotels. This was Lustig’s idea to keep them ‘secret’ and avoid that they could be traced back to him to prevent capture.

To make up for this unconventional lifestyle, Victor lavished them with gifts. When the girl reached school age, he signed her up in an expensive Catholic boarding school in Pittsburgh, run by an order of nuns. Because, you know, you have to give your children a moral example!

On top of this, Lustig had to look after his second unofficial wife, or rather long-term mistress: Billie Mae Scheible, a notorious brothel madame. The long-suffering Roberta was patient enough to put up with being basically just a courier for bail money, but she could not tolerate her husband’s affair with Billie Mae, nor the additional philandering on the side. So, she divorced him. They had a heartwarming reunion in which Roberta literally tried to kill him by running him over with her car. But he was quick on the dodge… and apparently that was enough for them to reconcile. Victor and Roberta remarried – because Lustig had to do everything twice, it seems. And divorced again, after Roberta found out that Victor was lodging Billie Mae in the same hotel as hers! Oh, the cheek!

While Lustig was not working his charms with the ladies, he was always looking for new tricks. He probably thought that scamming was too easy. So he set on scamming Chicago’s most dangerous resident: Al Capone. The plan was basic: Lustig convinced Capone to loan him $50,000 to buy some stock that would guarantee a sure profit. He then deposited the cash in a bank… and just waited. After some weeks, Victor returned to Capone and told him that the stocks had crashed and the money… it was gone. But, to apologize, he would return the $50,000 to the gangster, from his own pocket. Capone did not realize that Lustig was simply returning him his own money! And to reward his honesty, he gave him $5,000.

Victor’s next money-making scheme was literally about making money. In the early 1930s, at the height of the Great Depression, Victor got into counterfeiting with two new accomplices, a chemist named Tom Shaw and an engraver, William Watts. They were so successful that they managed to produce and circulate over one million dollars’ worth of fake money. The Treasury was so concerned that there was a genuine worry this would imbalance the US economy. This was one step too far, and it raised the attention of the Secret Service, one agent in particular: Italo-American Peter Rubano.

Which is ironic because ‘Rubano’ means ‘They steal’ in Italian. For our friends who are not familiar with US law enforcement, let me clarify one thing. Today, the Secret Service is associated with personal protection of the President and other high-ranking offices. Its original task, however, was – and still is – to track down and arrest counterfeiters. It was only after President McKinley’s assassination that the Secret Service was assigned to protect the President, because at the time they were the only agency with federal jurisdiction.

Secret Agent Rubano was able to trace back the counterfeit money to a conman with a number of aliases who had been selling some mysterious money-making boxes. This had happened when Lustig had sold a Rumanian box to a Texan sheriff. When the lawman had confronted him about the hoax, Victor had appeased him with a bribe in fake cash. Rubano and the Secret Service established a connection between the counterfeiters and the money box man, but they could not pin down Lustig. By now, he had taken to traveling with a trunk full of disguises, including rabbi, priest, and bellhop.

Finally, in May 1935, Rubano received an anonymous tip-off from a jealous mistress of Lustig’s. Maybe Billie Mae, maybe one of his many other girlfriends. The agents converged onto a hotel in New York. Count Victor Robert Lustig Miller was handcuffed just outside the hotel. The Secret Agents found a key in his pocket, which turned out to be for a locker in the Times Square subway station. Inside, they found a stash of plates and chemicals used by his gang to print money. An admiring agent told Victor that he must be the smoothest conman in the world. Victor shook his head. “I wouldn’t say that. After all, you have conned me.”

Lustig was put behind bars in the Federal House of Detention in New York, awaiting trial. But he had another trick up his sleeve. He soon realized that nobody was keeping count of the bedsheets distributed to inmates. So, little by little, he stashed enough bedsheets to fashion a rope. On September 1, 1935, he cut through the wires in the washroom window and swung to safety like a Bohemian Tarzan. To distract onlookers, he just pulled a rag from his pocket and pretended to clean the Federal House’s windows. Then, with a final jump, he landed on the pavement, bowed to his audience of passers-by, and disappeared into the night.

Lustig did not evade the chasers for long, though. He hid for a period in his daughter’s boarding school in Pittsburgh, until on September 28, FBI agent G. K. Firestone and Secret Service agent Fred Gruber spotted him ducking in a car driven by a chauffeur. The two ‘feds’ leapt into their car and gave chase. The engines roared, neck-and-neck for nine blocks. The agents yelled to the runaways to stop, but Lustig’s driver would keep on accelerating. The agents had no choice: they jerked the steering wheel sideways and rammed their car into Victor’s. The car crashed to a halt. The agents pulled out their guns and we like to think that they yelled “Stick ‘em up, Lustig!” What we do know is that Victor, smooth as silk and cool as a cucumber, told his captors: “Well, boys, here I am.”

In November of 193