CRIME: Victor Lustig: He Sold the Eiffel Tower Twice

October 2, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

He sold the Eiffel Tower. Then he went back and tried to sell it again. On a Sunday evening in May 1935, a well-dressed man with a mustache and a long scar on his left cheek walked down Broadway on New York’s Upper West Side. U.S. Secret Service agents had been trailing him for seven months. When they moved in, he didn’t run. He smiled and handed over a suitcase full of expensive clothes. Inside his coat they found a key to a locker in the Times Square subway station, which held $51,000 in counterfeit bills and the metal plates used to print them. The man’s name, as far as anyone could ever prove, was Victor Lustig. He swindled bankers, a sheriff, and Al Capone, and none of them ever laid a hand on him.

The Making of a Con Man

Most of what is known about Lustig’s early life comes from Lustig himself, so the details are unreliable. He claimed to have been born on January 4, 1890, in Hostinné, Bohemia (now the Czech Republic), but a historian later searched town records and found no proof he ever lived there. Lustig told different stories depending on the audience—poor peasant family when he wanted sympathy, descended from nobility when he wanted to impress. What is certain is that he had a gift for languages, became fluent in several, and by age 19 had made his way to Paris.

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What you'll learn

1 (00:42) **The Arrest of Victor Lustig** - A well-dressed man is arrested on Broadway by Secret Service agents after a seven-month manhunt; they find a key on him that leads to a subway locker containing $51,000 in counterfeit bills and printing plates.
2 (02:06) **Introducing the Greatest Con Artist** - The episode frames Victor Lustig as a man who swindled bankers, a sheriff, and even Al Capone, and whose most famous con was selling the Eiffel Tower—twice.
3 (04:55) **The Mystery of Lustig's Origins** - Lustig's early life is almost impossible to verify, as he gave conflicting stories about his birthplace, family, and even his name.
4 (06:50) **Early Crimes and the "Ten Commandments"** - Lustig began his criminal career in Paris with petty crimes like pickpocketing and card tricks, eventually developing a sophisticated con artist's code.
5 (09:44) **The "Romanian Box" Money Machine** - Lustig's most famous prop was a small wooden box he claimed could copy money, a trick he used to sell the machine itself to greedy buyers.
6 (11:14) **Other Schemes and the Move to America** - Lustig ran a fake off-track betting operation that is essentially the same con at the heart of the film *The Sting*, and eventually moved to the U.S. as the Roaring '20s began.
7 (13:34) **The Spark for the Eiffel Tower Con** - In 1925, a bored and wealthy Lustig read a newspaper article about the Eiffel Tower's costly maintenance, which floated the idea of tearing it down for scrap.

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Show Notes

In 1925, a con man calling himself Count Victor Lustig read that the Eiffel Tower was costly to maintain. He took a suite at one of the best hotels in Paris and invited five scrap dealers to a confidential meeting. On stationery bearing a government seal, he introduced himself as a ministry official, said the state had secretly decided to demolish it, and offered them its 7,000 tons of iron. One dealer paid, and was too humiliated to report it. So Lustig came back and ran it again. He went on to sell a fake money-printing machine to a Texas sheriff, take $5,000 off Al Capone, and print so much counterfeit cash that the Secret Service named it for him. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson traces the ten rules Victor Lustig wrote down for deceiving people, the confidence trick that sold a national monument twice, and the jealous phone call that finally put the smoothest con man in America inside Alcatraz.

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