Don't Fall For It. Ben Carlson
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required an incredible amount of precision. The iron plates used to build the tower would have stretched 43 miles long if they were laid end-to-end and called for over seven million holes to be drilled into them. The iron used to construct the tower weighed over 7,000 tons and required more than 60 tons of paint. Each piece was traced out to be accurate within a tenth of a millimeter. There were 2.5 million rivets used in construction. Including the flagpole at the top, the Eiffel Tower reached 1,000 feet in height when it was finished.[1]
Although the tower was more beautiful than most could have imagined, it was initially panned by critics. Many of France’s leading artists and intellectuals derided the tower, calling it “a truly tragic street lamp” and an “iron gymnasium apparatus, incomplete, confused, and deformed.” The Americans and Brits weren’t fans either, mostly because they were jealous. The New York Times called it “an abomination and eyesore.” Editors at the London Times referred to it as the “monstrous erection in the middle of the noble public buildings of Paris.” Americans didn’t appreciate how the Eiffel Tower surpassed the Washington Monument as the tallest man-made structure at that time. Once it was completed even the most ardent critics eventually came around to the fact that it was a masterpiece, yet the government still wasn’t positive they would keep the structure in place forever. In the years after the tower was built it began to fall into disrepair. It was costing the city a fortune in maintenance and upkeep.[2]
A man by the name of Victor Lustig saw this situation as an opportunity to profit from the uncertainty surrounding the future of this magnificent monument. Lustig decided he would sell the Eiffel Tower to the highest bidder … twice.
The Count
The man who tried to sell the Eiffel Tower had up to 45 different aliases. No one knew his real name or exactly where he came from, but he told authorities at one point his name was Robert Miller. As a young man traveling on an ocean liner from Europe to America, Miller came up with the name Victor “the Count” Lustig to fit in with the aristocrats on the ship. The name was a ploy to gain their trust. An ability to know his audience and adapt to any situation would prove to be an invaluable asset to Lustig over time. He began his career as a gambler but graduated to financial scams after figuring out how the wealthy class operated.
The Count’s most successful scam was called the Romanian Money Box. To find his marks, Lustig would hang around expensive hotels, arriving by limo to show he belonged with the upper echelon of society. In bars and restaurants he would casually let it slip that he owned a secret money-printing box. After the seed was planted, the mark would go to Lustig’s hotel room for a demonstration of how the contraption worked. Lustig would insert a single $100 bill into a small slot in the machine, which was a small wooden box full of knobs and brass dials. A substance called “radium” was Lustig’s secret weapon for copying the bills. At least that’s what he told his unsuspecting victims. For show, he would turn a few knobs and tell the person the only downside was that it took six hours to make a new bill using this secret substance.
After dinner and drinks, they would head back up to the room to find that a perfect copy of the $100 bill had popped out the other end of the box. When the wealthy elite saw this magical money-making machine actually worked they would offer to buy it on the spot. But the Count played it cool, always holding out for a short time, which invariably drove up the price people were willing to pay.[3] One of the best ways to persuade someone to do something is to allow them to come to the conclusion themselves. Once you’ve convinced yourself you’re going to do something, you are unlikely to change your mind. Lustig let them convince themselves it was worth it.
Of course, no such magical box that could produce perfect copies of $100 bills actually existed. The “copies” that came out of the box were actual $100 bills Lustig had placed in the jury-rigged machine himself. Blinded by their greed, people would pay tens of thousands of dollars for a machine that had just $200 in it. The beauty of his scam is it would take 12 hours to produce those two bills and by the time these people realized they’d been swindled, Lustig had half a day of a head start to make his exit.
After wearing out his welcome in New York City, Lustig decided to try his hand in Chicago. In the 1920s, Al Capone ran the criminal rackets in the Windy City. Lustig was fearless, so he decided to pay a visit to the notorious gangster when he got to town to seek Capone’s approval to operate on the mob boss’s territory. Lustig told Capone he needed $50,000 to pull off a grand trade, promising the mobster he could double his money in just two months. The man known as Scarface said, “Okay, Count, double it in 60 days like you said.” Two months later he was back in front of Capone asking for forgiveness. The get-rich-quick scheme had fallen through. Capone was furious. Just as he was about to explode, Lustig handed the crime boss his original $50,000 investment back and said, “Here, sir, is your money, to the penny. Again, my sincerest apologies. This is most embarrassing. Things didn’t work out the way I had thought they would, I should have loved to have doubled your money for you and for myself – Lord knows that I need it – but the plan just did not materialize.”[4]
Capone told Lustig he was expecting either $100,000 or nothing so he was taken aback by the man’s honesty. Somehow the most notorious gangster on the planet not only gave him a pass, but Capone even counted out $5,000 from the pile to give the Count a head start in his business dealings! Here’s the kicker: Lustig had never even dreamed up a money scheme to begin with. The $50,000 was sitting in a security box the entire month. It was his plan all along to gain the mob boss’s trust and that’s exactly what he did. Of course, Lustig was only playing an honest man for this ruse. He once said, “I cannot stand honest men. They lead desperate lives, full of boredom.”[5]
Selling the Eiffel Tower
After a number of run-ins with the law, Lustig was looking to pull off one last big score to get out of the life of a con artist. Because the authorities in the US were onto his hijinks, Lustig went to Paris to pull off his pièce de résistance. Around the time Lustig returned to Paris, there were many stories in the local papers about the dilapidated state of the famous Eiffel Tower. A lightbulb went off in Lustig’s head. He set about creating a fake government role for himself, complete with his own stationary and business cards done up with an official French seal. There was even an official-sounding, yet completely made-up title: “Deputy Director General of the Ministry of Posts and Telegraphs.” Again using one of the finest hotels in the city, he set up shop at the Hôtel de Crillon, a stone palace on the Place de la Concorde. The biggest scrap metal dealers in town were summoned to the luxurious hotel for a secret business proposal.
“Because of engineering faults, costly repairs, and political problems I cannot discuss, the tearing down of the Eiffel Tower has become mandatory,” he reportedly told this group in a quiet hotel room. The Count then shocked the small group of metal dealers by announcing the Eiffel Tower would be sold to the highest bidder. Many at the table were in disbelief but Lustig assured them if the government was able to turn a profit on the deal, it would minimize the protests from citizens.[6] The 1,000-foot tall structure contains more than 7,000 metric tons of iron, along with 2.5 million rivets that held it together, so these scrap metal dealers could calculate the sale of this amount of metal would net a fortune to those who tore it down and sold off the parts. To make the process more believable, the dealers were even taken on a tour of the monument to give them a better sense of the scale of the operation.
Bids were due by the next morning along with the promise of complete secrecy from those involved. Lustig told his marks the government didn’t want word to get out for fear of a public outcry against tearing it down. Although he took bids from all interested parties, the patsy was picked out well in advance. Andre Poisson was relatively new to the area and trying to make a name for himself. What better way to make a name for yourself than by winning the biggest scrap metal project in the country’s history? A few days later Lustig informed Poisson his offer of 250,000 francs (roughly $1 million today) was in fact the winning bid. Once he learned he won, Poisson finally became wary of the whole operation. So to seal the deal, Lustig