Victor Lustig

Czech con artist

  • Born: January 4, 1890
  • Birthplace: Hostinne, Bohemia (now in Czech Republic)
  • Died: March 11, 1947
  • Place of death: Springfield, Missouri

Major offenses: Counterfeiting and jail escape

Active: 1934

Locale: New York, New York, and Paris, France

Sentence: Twenty years in prison

Early Life

Victor Lustig (LEWS-teeg) was born and raised in a small village in Hostinne, Bohemia, which later became the Czech Republic. His father, the local burgomaster, sent the young Lustig to boarding school in Dresden, Germany, where he studied languages. At age nineteen, he broke all connections with his family and moved to Paris.

Criminal Career

In Paris, Lustig survived for a short time as a petty thief. He next took up gambling and apprenticed himself to the American gambler Nicky Arnstein. With Arnstein, Lustig began making Atlantic crossings on ocean liners for the sole purpose of fleecing passengers in games of chance. When the outbreak of World War I interrupted his transatlantic travel, Lustig settled in Paris for a few years before returning to the United States. In New York, he renewed his relationship with Arnstein, who helped him make connections with the American underworld.

Soon Lustig set off on his own. Posing as a displaced European aristocrat, he carried out a series of investment frauds throughout the United States and Canada in order to finance a luxurious lifestyle. In one of his most elaborate schemes, he created a fake off-track betting parlor. Relying on an accomplice who worked for Western Union, Lustig delayed the receipt of telegraphed race results long enough to place “winning” bets. The real payoff came when Lustig was able to trick an amateur gambler into betting on the wrong horse.

When Lustig needed cash quickly, he sometimes relied on a Rumanian Box, a device purported to produce exact copies of currency. In actuality, Lustig deceived his “marks” by using genuine one hundred dollar bills, one with its serial number meticulously altered to match the other. Lustig reportedly counted on his victims being too embarrassed by their greed and gullibility to press charges, and he was often successful in avoiding arrest.

Eiffel Tower Affair

Lustig is perhaps best known for selling the Eiffel Tower to an unsuspecting Parisian businessman. In May, 1925, while staying in Paris, Lustig discovered a small newspaper article discussing the maintenance expense on the Eiffel Tower and suggesting dismantling it as an alternative. The tower, designed and built especially for the 1889 Exposition Universelle, had not been intended as a permanent installation, and it was widely regarded in artistic circles as an eyesore. Armed with the news item and forged stationery and credentials, Lustig disguised himself as a deputy director general of the Ministère des Postes et Télégraphes to a group of scrap-metal dealers to whom he had written. At a meeting in the fashionable Hôtel de Crillon, he explained that the salvage rights to more than seven thousand tons of iron would be sold to the highest bidder. Lustig impressed upon the bidders the need to move quickly and with discretion in order to avoid public disapproval. Not only was Lustig able to convince the purchaser to deliver a certified check for the entire amount of the sale, but he also extracted a bribe from the man. Like most of Lustig’s earlier victims, the businessman was too humiliated to contact authorities upon his discovery of the fraud. After one month, Lustig attempted to repeat the scheme; however, the second buyer proved less cooperative, and Lustig was forced to flee Europe for the United States.

Although Lustig was arrested dozens of times and found his activities and travel limited by outstanding warrants, he avoided conviction—sometimes by skipping bail, sometimes by escaping from prison, sometimes by bribery or other schemes—until his arrest in 1935. Following yet another escape, this time from a federal detention center, Lustig was convicted for counterfeiting. When his accomplice, William Watt, agreed to testify for the state, Lustig pleaded guilty. He was sentenced to fifteen years for the counterfeiting charges and an additional five for escaping from prison. After spending ten years at Alcatraz, in San Francisco, he was transferred to a medical facility in Springfield, Missouri, where he died of a brain abscess on March 11, 1947.

Impact

Victor Lustig never resorted to violence or threats of violence in committing his crimes, but he left many of his victims in emotional and financial ruin. He never publicly expressed remorse for his actions. Although his off-track betting scam became the basis for the plot of the 1973 Paul Newman-Robert Redford film The Sting, Lustig generally has not been romanticized in popular culture.

Bibliography

Boese, Alex. Museum of Hoaxes. New York: Penguin Putnam, 2002. A historical survey that examines the public’s role in enabling hoaxes. Chapter 5 on the period between 1914 and 1949 discusses Lustig. Includes extensive references.

Farquhar, Michael. A Treasury of Deception: Liars, Misleaders, Hoodwinkers, and the Extraordinary True Stories of History’s Greatest Hoaxes, Fakes, and Frauds. New York: Penguin Books, 2005. A compendium of historical facts that are thematically organized.

Johnson, James F. The Man Who Sold the Eiffel Tower. New York: Doubleday, 1961. A biography of Lustig by a former secret service agent involved in solving the counterfeiting case that led to Lustig’s final arrest. Johnson portrays his subject as an extraordinarily clever but unfeeling villain.

Sifakis, Carl. Hoaxes and Scams: A Compendium of Deceptions, Ruses, and Swindles. London: Michael O’Mara Books, 1994. A reference work containing short, detailed summaries of a number of Lustig’s scams.