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In 1925, a very elegant man met with several Parisian businessmen and proposed selling them the Eiffel Tower. Despite the absurdity of the transaction, he managed to do it. And then he did it again. Ah, Paris. The city of croissants, soufflés, creperies and all those clichés that come to mind when we think of the City of Light. And the biggest of them, also an icon: the Eiffel Tower. A symbol of Paris, of France and, in my opinion, of Europe: 7,300 tons of wrought iron erected at an imposing height of over 300 meters that dominates the entire city.
It is therefore normal that the first thing any visitor does when arriving in the French capital is to direct their eyes towards the Eiffel Tower, which is what Count Victor Lustig did in 1925 when he disembarked at the Gare d’Austerlitz. And he regarded it with desire. Was he dazzled by its beauty? No. What he was looking at was, above all, those 7,300 tons of iron, because Count Lustig — who was no count — had come to Paris to carry out the biggest scam in history.
Lustig, a charming man, fluent in five languages, a good talker and an even better listener, was born in a small town in the Austro-Hungarian empire and knew from a young age that his gifts were ideal for a diplomatic career. But the financial rewards of the profession did not appeal to him, so he decided to put those snake-charming skills to use by becoming the most brilliant swindler on the planet.
In his younger years he had been a gambler and a womanizer, which earned him a large scar on his face, something he would boast about, claiming that it was the “fruit of a duel of honor between nobles.” It was also at this time that he began to put the false title before his surname, just in case it worked.
The fact is that by 1925, the fake count had already pulled off a few scams involving counterfeiting money, but as was the case with diplomacy, these small-time jobs weren’t enough for him; if he wanted to be the world’s biggest swindler, he had to pull off the world’s biggest scam. So when he arrived in Paris, he had prepared to pull off the ultimate caper: selling the Eiffel Tower. You might be thinking: “How on earth are you going to sell a 300-meter-tall, 7,000-ton monument?” In the same way that anyone would eat an elephant. In little pieces. Lustig planned to sell the landmark in parts and as scrap metal because, in 1925, the Eiffel Tower was not exactly the revered symbol it is today; rather, it was an expensive pain in the ass for the city.
After the Great War, and while the country was already in the process of economic recovery, the Tower had become a problem. The maintenance of the rivets and joints, the constant cleaning, the painting and repainting (before taking on its final appearance, it was red, yellow and orange), the oiling of the elevators… all of this was very expensive. So much so that a rumor circulated in Parisian society that sooner or later, the Tower would be dismantled.
When this rumor reached Lustig’s ears, he saw dollar signs. This was his chance. He went to Paris, commissioned a trusted forger to make him letterheads and medals of the French Republic, and rented a room at the luxurious Hôtel de Crillon. There he called together six scrap metal businessmen, introduced himself as deputy director of the National Postal and Telegraph Service, and explained how ugly the Eiffel Tower was, and that it didn’t match the Gothic grandeur of Notre-Dame or the neoclassical style of the Arc de Triomphe. After his speech, he told them that, although the matter was top secret and they shouldn’t tell anyone, the government was determined to dismantle it and sell it as scrap metal. And then he dropped the bait: that lucrative contract would go to the businessman who submitted the highest bid for the 7,300 tons of iron.
While 100 years ago people may have been more prone to naivety, they were not stupid either, so most of the junk dealers thought, quite rightly, that the elegant man with the scar on his face was trying to scam them. However, one of them fell for it: André Poisson (which makes the story even more ironic, as “poisson” means “fish”).
Since Lustig knew that the perfect con is created when the conned thinks they are the smartest person in the room, he quickly detected that Poisson was clever. Extremely clever. The businessman hinted that he would do whatever it took to get the contract and, like a sniper, Lustig knew that this was the exact moment to pull the trigger: “If you’re really prepared to do whatever it takes, perhaps you and I can come to an agreement… personally.” Poisson immediately understood what that agreement was and paid him 70,000 francs as a bribe to secure the contract. Lustig accepted, they shook hands, and until next time, which of course never came because Lustig ran off with the money knowing that Poisson would never speak as that would expose him as corrupt.
But things did not stop there, for Lustig was a truly dissatisfied man, and, seeing that the biggest scam in history had worked once, he decided that he would make it work a second time. No sooner said than done: a year later he returned to Paris and called together a group of scrap metal businessmen (different from the first, of course) with the intention of telling them the same story again. This time things went more smoothly. Too smoothly. So smoothly, in fact, that it was actually a police set-up.
A few hours before the pantomime, a snitch informed Lustig of what awaited him at the hotel, so he hopped on an ocean liner and headed off to the United States. Both during the voyage and once in America, Lustig continued a lucrative career as a con artist throughout a life that would undoubtedly make a decent script for a Hollywood movie. But that is another story that perhaps should be told another time.
