On landing in America, Lustig followed
Arnstein’s advice and began spinning
increasingly elaborate cons for more money,
fleecing suckers from coast to coast. His
most high-profile mark was mafia don
Al Capone. When Lustig eventually returned
the $50,000 Capone had invested in one
of his scams, his apology was so charming
that the ruthless gangster gave him more
money in gratitude for his ‘honesty’.
Life in America was good. But in 1925,
after learning that the French government
was thinking about pulling down the Eiel
Tower due to the cost of repairs, Lustig
saw an opportunity. He made a beeline to
Paris, checked into a hotel and, as Deputy
Director General of the Ministère de Postes et
Télégraphes, wrote to a group of the top scrap-
metal merchants, inviting them to discuss the
demolition of the Eiel Tower and selling of its
parts. Their interests piqued by what promised
to be the scrap-metal deal of the century, the
merchants hurried to the hotel, where Lustig
provided them with canapés and champagne –
though only a little of each, in the recognisably
stingy style of a government event. Although
he was ostensibly calling for bids from all of
them, Lustig had already chosen his mark:
one André Poisson. Having risen from peasant
stock, Poisson was new money, which Lustig
assumed would make him more desperate
than the others to make something of himself,
and therefore more likely to spend recklessly
and ask fewer questions.
After the oicial meeting, Lustig met with
Poisson separately and complained to him
bitterly about the impoverished life of a
government oicial. Poisson understood he
was being asked to oer a bribe, which he did.
To his delight, it worked, and for $100,000
the merchant found himself the proud owner
of the Eiel Tower. Now the proud owner of
$100,000, Lustig hopped to Austria, where
he lived a life of luxury, making no attempt
to hide, but scouring the daily French papers
over breakfast, looking forward to reading
news of his incredible scam. But nothing came.
Poisson, on discovering he’d been conned,
was so embarrassed he couldn’t bring himself
to report it to the police. Unsatisfied, Lustig
returned to Paris and pulled the exact same
stunt with a dierent group of merchants.
This time his unlucky mark did go to the
police, and Lustig fled back to the U.S.,
very much the richer.Once safely in New York, Lustig got even
more inventive. He had a carpenter make up
some elegant wooden boxes with a few knobs
and dials on the side, which he presented to
his new marks as a ‘Rumanian Money Box’:
a machine that could supposedly copy and
print endless banknotes. Whatever real
note you put in, it would produce an identical
replica... you only had to wait six hours for
the ‘chemical bath’ to take eect. And it was
all, Lustig assured his prospective buyers,
“perfectly legal”. After demonstrating the
abilities of the machine using two real $ 100
notes (one already planted inside the box),
Lustig would sell the box for an enormous
fee and then have at least six hours to make
himself scarce. On more than one occasion,
one of Lustig’s rubes managed to track him
down, only to have the conman convince
them they must have broken the machine
and would simply have to buy a new one.After uncharacteristically robbing a man
outright in Massachusetts, Lustig was caughtHIS FAKE BILLS SEEMED SO REAL THEY
THREATENED TO SHAKE CONFIDENCE
IN THE AMERICAN ECONOMY.
<<
and put in prison. He didn’t stay there long:
the Count managed to talk the corrupt local
police into releasing him, and even sold the
sheri a Rumanian Money Box for $10,000.
When the sheri realised he’d been scammed,
he became enraged and tracked Lustig down
at gunpoint. Lustig apologised and ‘returned’
the $10,000. The sheri was picked up and
imprisoned a couple of weeks later for
using counterfeit money.When he wasn’t pretending to duplicate
banknotes, Lustig could often be found
actually duplicating them. His fake bills were
virtually indistinguishable from the real
stu, and the shyster eventually produced
so many of them that they threatened to
shake confidence in the American economy.
Ripping o individuals was one thing, but
the Federal Reserve proved too big a mark
even for Lustig. The Secret Service was
called in, and federal agents pursued him
across the country in a game of cat and
mouse. In 1935, after a fast and violent
car chase at the end of which Lustig
crashed, they finally got their man.After escaping from the first prison they
put him in using a rope made of braided
sheet fibres, Lustig, now 46, was quickly
caught again and shipped to Alcatraz, the
only prison that could hold him. Ten years
later, the last of his extraordinary 1,192
medical requests turned out to be a real
complaint. He died from complications
arising from pneumonia in a Missouri
secure medical facility in 1947. Lustig
left no grave, and to this day it is the
treasured speculation of many of his
admirers that the Count’s death may
in fact have been his greatest con. •