Published on : 26/08/2022 – 08:11
One day a financial scam. RFI invites you to return this week to these financial scams whose instigators command admiration for their ingenuity. Spotlight today on a masterful impostor: Victor Lustig, who succeeded in the improbable: selling the Eiffel Tower, symbol of France, in less than ten days!
It all started in the Paris of the Roaring Twenties, at the end of the 19th century. Paris is in full economic boom. The Eiffel Tower is not thirty years old and has no notoriety. It is even decried in a gallery from the first hammer blows by renowned artists: Guy de Maupassant, Alexandre Dumas, or as here in a poem by the playwright François Coppée dating from 1882 and read in 1956 by the actor and director Pierre Bertin: Giant, without beauty or style. It’s the metal idol. Symbol of useless strength. And triumph over the brutal fact. »
Like the other buildings of the Universal Exhibition of 1889 where it was born, the Eiffel Tower is doomed to destruction within ten years: 7,000 tons of iron must be dismantled in a context of soaring prices for this raw material at the end of the First World War.
It is in this bubbling Paris that Robert Miller, alias Victor Lustig, professional hustler, arrives from the United States. He was the son of a bourgeois family from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now the Czech Republic. A polyglot man as brilliant as he is lazy. He has already plundered a number of billionaires, cheating at cards on the big transoceanic steamships before the war of 1914 whistled the end of cruises.
In Paris, Victor Lustig is trying to lead the way. But life is expensive in France and his criminal activities, too unprofitable for his taste… It was then that he came across an article evoking the calamitous state of the Eiffel Tower left behind by the authorities. Then comes the idea of selling the Iron Lady!
It’s all in the decorum
With his aristocratic look, his good manners, and his polished language, Lustig passes himself off as a senior civil servant and, using false ministerial letterheads, brings together in secret, in the cozy lounges of the prestigious Hôtel Crillon, the five largest scrap dealers in the country to negotiate the sale. He even organizes a visit to the Eiffel Tower. One of them takes the bait, a certain André Poisson, an ambitious man who hopes to impose himself in the Parisian business world thanks to this operation.
To shoe him permanently, Lustig asks for a bribe. Fish, accustomed to these practices, runs. Pockets full, the Czech impostor scurries off and takes refuge in Vienna. He is far away when André Poisson realizes that he has been fooled, but he is too ashamed to file a complaint.
Victor Lustig can’t believe it and a month later betrays his golden rule: never repeat the same scam in the same place. He therefore returned to Paris to sell the Eiffel Tower a second time. But this time, the scrap dealer sniffs out the scam and alerts the police. Lustig barely has time to flee to the United States. There, he makes counterfeit dollars and even manages to cheat Al-Capone, the famous American gangster! Victor Lustig ends his career as a con man in Alcatraz prison. He died at the age of 57 of pneumonia (in the medical center for federal prisoners in Springfield, Missouri). In his cell, myth or reality? We would have found a postcard of the Eiffel Tower with this annotation “sold 100,000 francs”, the equivalent today of 150 euros.