August 6, 2014 • 25 mins
He's most famous for selling an iconic structure he didn't own, but Robert Miller, known better by his alias Count Victor Lustig, led a life of spectacular cons, daring escapes, smooth talking and counterfeiting. Read the show notes here.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, welcome to the podcast. I'm
Holly Try, I'm Tracy Wilson. Uh. And it's no secret
that we love a good con man story. We really
loved our Baron of Arizona episode. Uh. And today's topic
(00:24):
is right in that vein, and the gentleman we're going
to talk about is completely larger than life. He is
such a fascinating creature and he is famous for a
con of simply epic proportions where he sold a large,
iconic structure that he did not own. But we'll get
to that. I don't want to spit that out right
out of the gate, because we'll get there. And uh, you,
(00:45):
if you know anything about him, you have already seen that,
because that's often the thing that defines him when he's
talked about in historical articles. So first we're going to
talk about who this gentleman was, kind of his early
beginnings before we get into his life of conning people.
So that person we are talking about today is Victor
Lustick and he was actually born Robert V. Miller in
(01:06):
Bohemia and that's now known as the Czech Republic. He
was born January four, eighteen ninety and he was one
of several children who was born to the mayor of
the tiny, tiny town of Hastina. And while Lustick was
not his true name, it's the one he most commonly used,
and that's how it's reported. So we're just going to
(01:26):
call him that instead of calling him Miller. Yeah, we'll
read one text, a little news article where they refer
to him as Robert Miller, but beyond that, and we'll
use their their naming convention. But beyond that, we're going
to go by Lustick. And even as a child, he
was incredibly precocious, and as he grew into adulthood his
(01:46):
proclivity for trouble really grew with him. And he was
an extremely smart man, and he had a natural talent
for language, and he was fluent in Czech, German, French,
Italian and English. He attended the University of Paris, but
was not long into his higher education before he was
spending way more time gambling at games of chance than
he was hitting the books. During his college years, he
(02:09):
also got a scar from a jealous man in a
fight over a girl, and this would become his identifying
mark later in life, and after he left school, he
did not finish. He just took off. Lustick began traveling
throughout Europe under a number of aliases, and all the
while he was committing petty crimes to support himself and
kind of duping people out of their money. Uh. And
(02:31):
it's during this period that he first assumed the persona
of Victor Lustick, which became, as we said, his favorite.
He started introducing himself as a count and traveling around
on cruise ships so he would take advantage of the
wealthy passengers and then gamble with the less wealthy ones. Yeah.
He basically just saw cruise ships as a huge cash
cow on the water. Uh. And a con that he
(02:53):
worked on these trips was built around these small mahogany boxes,
which you know, it was basically just a small box.
It would have a slit cut on either end. Uh.
And additionally, one side of each box he would just
load up with mechanical bits, so it would have levers
and knobs and buttons and look very um complicated and
(03:13):
really mechanically engineered. And he would claim that this complex
looking box that he was showing people, because he would
only show one at a time, was in fact a
money duplicator. He had a lot of these boxes, but
he only ever revealed one at a time when he
was working a con. And so he would show the
(03:33):
victim a hundred dollar bill sticking out of one side
of it, and there would be a blank piece of
paper sticking out of the other side. He would turn
some knobs and throw some switches, and after a while
a second hundred dollar bill, which had been hidden in
the box the whole time, would come out. Yeah, so
it would look like that blank piece of paper had
then been printed on and become a hundred dollar bill.
(03:55):
And of course marks that were shown this amazing piece
of machinery wanted money duplicating boxes of their own, and
so Lustick would often entertain multiple interested parties and he
would kind of, uh seed the situation, so he would
get these people to bid against each other and drive
the price up. And because he used this con on
pleasure cruises. Uh, this is so smart, he would you know,
(04:19):
kind of keep this bidding going and and keep people interested.
And then finally near the end of the trip he
would finally accept one of the offers, like the highest
bidder and hand over the box. And then by the
time the ruse was revealed, he had disembarked and vanished.
They were out of their money, and he was gone
and on to his next adventure. World War One put
(04:40):
an end to pleasure cruising for a while, and so
that put an end also to count lustick source of income.
He didn't really have many prospects and no interest at
all in taking on a real job, so he decided
to set out for the United States. And before we
get into his uh first little adventure in the US,
let's have word from a sponsor, we're going to go
(05:01):
back to the world of a spectacular conman, Victor Lustick.
So heading into the nineteen twenties, m Luctick really started
to become more and more interested in bigger cons uh.
So in nine two he was in Missouri, and at
this point he was going by the name of Robert
Duval and Lustig had scoped out this piece of property,
(05:22):
which was a ranch that had been repossessed by the bank,
and he decided that it would become a central element
in this plan. He had to pull one over on
the American Savings Bank. He made the bank an offer
on the ranch of twenty two thousand dollars and liberty bonds.
He also asked them to trade cash for an additional
ten thousand dollars worth of war bonds. And when this
(05:43):
exchange of money was made, he did kind of a
slight of hand and replaced the envelopes holding the cash
and the bonds with two identical but worthless envelopes. And
after the envelopes were exchanged and the con man had
both the bonds and the cash in hand, Stick of
course made a run for it and he got as
far as Kansas City before he was arrested. But he
(06:06):
was so completely imbued with this gift of gab and
this sort of you know, ability to just disarm people
and convince them of complete falsehoods, he actually managed to
talk his way out of this particular kettle of hot
water and go free. And we don't have the details
on how that took place. Tracy was theorizing when we
were talking about it that probably any lawman involved were
(06:28):
too embarrassed to really recount the full episode after the fact.
But this will not be the first time he talks
himself out of trouble. He went back to Europe and
in he was once again running cons in Paris. At
this point, it was more than twenty five years after
the Paris Exposition, which was when the Eiffel Tower had
been built. This iconic structure had become kind of a
(06:52):
problem for the city. It cost a lot to keep
it up, and there weren't a lot of funds to
maintain the tower. They had planned to maybe move it,
but that plan had fallen through and it was kind
of becoming run down and unloved. There were a lot
of people, both in the public and among the officials.
He just wanted to have the whole thing removed or
torn down, being done with it. As a brief aside,
(07:15):
that sort of breaks my heart, like thinking about the
possibility that the Eiffel Tower could have been torn down.
But of course, when Lustig heard of these problems surrounding
the tower, it said that he read a news article
detailing all of the problems with keeping it standing in Paris.
He concocted this plan that he would profit from this
sort of source of drama amongst the Parisian people, and
(07:38):
so he assumed yet another identity. This time he posed
as Deputy Director General of the Minister of the Post
a telegraph. Using these new folk credentials. He set himself
up at the Hotel de Creole and he arranged to
meet with scrap metal dealers to pitch this idea of
them taking the Eiffel Tower off Paris's hands. To cover
(07:59):
his track, he explained to the potential buyers that they
had to keep it all on the down low initially
because city officials were naturally very afraid that the citizens
of Paris were going to be angry if they knew
their tower might just go to a scrap heat. He
demanded absolute discretion from anyone who expressed interest, and this
(08:19):
plan sounded quite good indeed to one of the scrap
metal dealers, whose name was Andre Poison. And Poisen was
not a Paris native, which was part of what made
him a perfect mark. I think, uh likelihood, Listig saw
him as a little bit of a you know, a
country bumpkin, even though he was really an accomplished businessman. Uh.
(08:41):
He definitely knew the scrap industry and he had money,
but he was not especially wiley. And to further bait
the hook, Listig uh did this little interesting move where
he kind of intimated to Poissons that he was just
a lowly government official and he didn't make much money,
and he kind of started hinting that his big decision
in on which scrap dealers should get this deal was
(09:02):
going to hinge on a bribe of some sort. This
faux bribe request really legitimized Lustic in Poissant's eyes. Clearly
this was a legitimate bureaucrat if he was hinting around
that he should be bribed. Yeah. Interesting thing that that's
how you convince someone that you're the real deal is
by doing nefarious things. But it worked, uh, And eventually
(09:26):
Poisson put down a cash deposit with Lustig of about
seventy thousand dollars, which is you'll see it broken down
in descriptions of the situation of like twenty thousand was
sort of for the bribe to get Lustig's favor, and
fifty thousand was like the guarantee that he would be
the one to get the rights to tear down the
Eiffel Tower. And at this point was seventy thousand dollars
(09:48):
in hand. Lustick left, he had headed to Austria, and Poisson,
for his part, went to city officials because at this
point he had been awarded the contract to the best
of his knowledge, and he wanted to arrang age the
tearing down of the famous structure. And when he went
to discuss this matter, he was met with blank stairs
and confused faces. Uh, And he eventually realized, of course,
(10:09):
that he had been duped, and he was terribly embarrassed,
so much so that he refused to get the police
involved and to press charges against Lustig. He just wanted
the whole thing to go away. And Victor Lustig, for
his part, from Austria, was watching the papers waiting to
hear news about this deception being revealed. But when nothing broke,
he slowly realized that Poissant had not wanted this to
(10:33):
go public and that he was basically in the clear. So,
even though he had already sold the Eiffel Tower once
and that was quite a feat, he loved that con
so much that he decided to do it again a
few weeks later. This time he suspected that police had
been talking to his new mark, and he just got
out of Paris, out of France and out of Europe
entirely to avoid being detained. Yeah, he got cold feet,
(10:55):
thinking he was never going to get that lucky two
times in a row after he had kind of started
the wheels in motion, and this is how he ended
up back in the United States in x where he
launched yet another series of money box cons. This time
he contracted a New York carpenter to make him special boxes,
and he also added some other layers to the con.
(11:17):
He would tell his mark that the replicator took six
hours to reproduce a bill. This gave the target some
time to WAPs rhapsodic about what they would do with
the machine, if indeed they were to get it. Yeah,
so he kind of gave him time to daydream about
all of the money that they could potentially make. Uh.
And after the six hours had passed, as Listic and
(11:38):
his mark waited together, they he stuck with them through
the whole time. The second bill would be produced, just
as it had been in his con on the cruise ships,
and Listick would then encourage Marks to take both of
the bills to a bank to have them verified as
legal tender. So once the bank verified yes, this two
bills are legitimate, the Mark would be willing to pay
a tidy sum for the box. And in the six
(12:00):
hours that they would spend waiting for their next bill,
Victor Lustick had plenty of time to vanish into thin air,
and this con came to be known as the Romanian
box scheme, and according to New York Police, one group
of marks pulled their money to purchase one of the
boxes for a staggering forty six thousand dollars. In one incident,
(12:20):
Victor Listick managed to police a Texas sheriff and tax
collector for a hundred and twenty three thousand dollars using
the money box scheme. That money should have gone to
municipal taxes. Once the Texan sheriff cornered him in Chicago,
Lustick returned the money and simultaneously convinced him that it
was his fault for not using the duplicator correctly. Again,
(12:42):
just a master of convincing people of things, the con
man took dozens of new aliases as he cycled through
this money box con over and over, and he was
actually arrested many many times in the process, and in
more than forty recorded cases, he either talked his way
out of the charges entirely, or he escaped from jail
before going to trial and just vanished into thin air.
(13:05):
Among his most brazen cons, he swindled al Capone out
of fifty thousand dollars, and he promised to repay the
loan twofold in two months. When it was time to
pay up, Lustig only gave back fifty thousand dollars, and
he blamed a scheme gone wrong for the forfeit of
the other fifty thousand. But allegedly Capone was quite impressed
(13:26):
with his stand up nature, so much so that he
gave him five thousand dollars. And it said the Capone,
who was known for both his pride and his temper,
was never told that he had been deceived in this
matter by the people who knew about it. Yeah, basically, Uh,
the thing here is that Listen, who was kind of
long conning him, he never had intention to do anything
(13:49):
at the fifty thou dollars. He just sucked it away
somewhere until the time had passed, somehow, knowing that he
would get this five thousand dollars or some monetary compensation
just for being so darn mist just kind of fascinating,
especially from Al Capo. So Listick continued these cons for years,
and then he got into counterfeiting. He joined up with
(14:11):
a chemist and the pair of them launched this full
tail counterfeiting operation, eventually producing more than one hundred thousand
dollars in high quality fake bills every month. Yeah, they're
uh foe. Money was by all accounts, really quite good,
like where they would even you know, imitate sort of
the fibers that run through actual currency to a degree
(14:33):
that it was really pretty hard to discern that from
the real deal, and his skill at producing fake money,
along with his partner, unfortunately gained the attention of the
Secret Service. Uh. They eventually assembled a special task force
to identify the source of this sudden influx of counterfeit
money into the economy. Because a hundred thousand dollars a
month is a lot. Their investigation led to the arrest
(14:56):
of a Texas lawman passing fake bills in New Orleans.
And if you're wondering, yes, it is the same Texas
lawman that Listick had returned money to earlier in this story.
That money was, at least in part, not the real deal.
The sheriff was more than happy to cooperate with a
Secret Service to provide all the info he had on Listing,
although he was still in trouble for having used taxpayer
(15:19):
money to pay Listick for the money box in the
first place. Yeah, it didn't get him out of hot water,
but I think at that point he felt so wronged
and angry about the whole thing, and he was like,
I will give you every piece of information I can,
please get this guy. Uh. And once Listick was identified
as a suspect, the Secret Service tailed him for more
than seven months, and finally in ninety five, he was
(15:41):
arrested in New York after his girlfriend actually tipped off police.
She was in a little bit of a jealous rage
over the fact that Listick had had a dalliance with
another woman who was allegedly the girlfriend of the chemist
that he was doing business with. Agents described his demeanor
as poised and serene throughout his rest, and when they
found a key in the pocket of his coat and
(16:03):
questioned him about what it opened, he met their questions
with polite shrugs and silence. The key, it was eventually discovered,
opened a locker at the Times Square subway station. UH.
The locker search yielded more than fifty thousand dollars in
counterfeit cash, as well as the plates that had been
used to print it, and so Listick was imprisoned at
(16:25):
the Federal Detention House of New York City. The Count,
as his captors liked to call him, was scheduled for
trial on September two, five, but he was unable to
attend due to having escaped. He tied his bed sheets
together into a rope and escaped out a window, and
he pretended to wash the windows of the floors below
(16:45):
as he repelled down the building. This is very impressive
to me. It is. It's quite ingenious. Um And the
Chicago Tribune has an account of the escape which is
dated on September two, and it says the escape actually
happened on the first, and it says, quote, mildly interested
street loungers today watched Robert V. Miller, reputed international swindler,
(17:08):
slipped down a rope of bed sheets and flee from
the Federal detention prison. Miller, who police listed in an
arrest record in many American cities and several European countries,
had been held under fifty thousand dollars bail since arrested
May thirteenth on a charge of possessing counterfeit money and plates.
Prison officials did not know of Miller's escape until a
(17:28):
witness told them. Under various names. Police said Miller had
has been arrested in Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, Indianapolis, Oklahoma City, St. Louis,
and Miami frequently on confidence game charges. So the Federal
House of Detention in possibly the least secure holding facility
(17:50):
in the United States, and that was kind of like
the big thing around it is that it was allegedly
very difficult to escape from there, but he managed it
just fine, like he climbed out a window on bit cheats. Yeah,
the stereotypical method of escape. It's like the kind of
thing that comes right out of a Coen Brothers film,
and you can't believe that it could ever possibly work,
(18:12):
but it did work in this case. It's unbelievable. So
there was an all hands man hunt and Victor Listick
was recaptured several weeks later in Pittsburgh. At the end
of nineteen thirty five, his case finally went to trial,
with proceedings beginning on December five. The trial concluded with
a guilty sentence and fifteen years in prison as punishment.
(18:33):
Because he had also escaped while awaiting trial, an additional
five years were tacked onto the sentence, bringing it to
a round twenty yes, and he did serve time. He
did not escape again, but twelve years into his sentence,
on March eleventh of ninety seven, Victor Listig died in
prison at Alcatraz at the age of fifty seven. And
(18:54):
what's interesting is that even though he was sort of this,
you know, international con man of some renown, his passing
did not make news at the time, and nobody even
really knew about it until his brother mentioned it to
a paper two years later. But up to that point,
no one even knew that the Count had died. So
he almost kind of did yet another like vanish into
thin air thing with his death, in that he just
(19:17):
died quietly and no one knew. Yeah, I'm also kind
of inwardly laughing at the fact that he had so
many daring and and obvious escapes but did not also
escape from Alcatraz. That would have been like the cherry
on top of the legend Sunday you have not escaped,
(19:38):
sold the Eiffel Tower and also escaped from Alcatraz. So
accounts really differ as to his cause of death. One
paper reported that it was a brain tumor, and others
said it was complications of pneumonia. There's not really clear
agreement on that. Yeah, especially because they were reporting it
two years after the fact, it kind of left the
(19:58):
door open for a lot of speculator shin. Presumably there's
a death certificate somewhere, maybe, but you know it maybe
not attentively filled out. And what's interesting too, is that
for years after his death, he kind of had this
legacy in that uh, Secret Service agents were reporting that
his counterfeit bills would occasionally surface, or sometimes they would
(20:21):
even be brought to the Secret Service by people who
kind of suspected it might be a listic bill. So
there's a list of ten rules for aspiring conmen that's
often attributed to Victor lou Stick, although we don't really
have clear evidence that that attribution is correct, but even so,
we're gonna tell you what they are. Number one is
(20:42):
be a patient listener. This is more important than fast talking.
Number two is never look bored. Number three is wait
for the other person to reveal their political opinions, then
agree with them. Number four very similar, let the other
person reveal their religious views and then have the same ones.
Number five hints at sex talk, but don't follow it
(21:05):
up unless the other fellow shows a strong interest. Yeah,
it's sort of establishing like a conspiratorial um friendship. Number
six is never discussed illness unless some special concern is shown.
Number seven is never pry into a person's personal circumstances.
I'll tell you eventually. Number eight is never boast, just
(21:27):
let your importance be quietly obvious. Number nine is never
be untidy, and number ten is never get drunk. So
keep your wits about you and go along with everything.
The Mark says, Uh, it's sort of as just a personal,
semi hilarious coda to all of this. I did not
(21:48):
know this before I started worrying on research for this episode,
and I didn't actually realize it until I was almost
done putting all my notes together. But there was an
episode of Chesterfield Presents which was like this half hour
drama the Chesterfield Cigarette sponsored that was made about Listi
in nine two, and it was called Count Victor Listig,
(22:08):
The Fabulous Swindler. And what makes it personally funny is
that it starred Vincent Price, who started the Baron of Arizona,
which is the other Swindler episode that we have done recently.
I did not mean to do. Uh. The Vincent Price
Follies of Conmon but it happened accidentally. So now I
want to see what other episodes we can find that
(22:29):
will tie to Vincent Price. Oh, I could do that easy.
I could do a lot of Vincent Price inspired episodes well,
because he was such a prolific actor. You know, he
was in everything, hundreds and hundreds of credits. So but
instead we're gonna go to listener mail. This particular piece
is from our listeners, Sabrina uh, and it is about
our feed Hua episode. And she says, high ladies, I
(22:50):
just listened to your show on a FI dua and
I was really surprised you didn't mention the casket girls,
uh so called because of the small chests that they
brought from ants of the Gulf area. The FI cassette
arrived in Mobile, Alabama starting in seventeen o four, then Biloxi, Mississippi,
and finally New Orleans. They were brought to the US
for the same reasons as the Canadians to marry. I
(23:14):
heard about these girls on the show The Originals last
season and looked them up, and it was real New
Orleans lores that they brought vampires to the area, which
was of course played as fact in the show. The
fact that many of the girls were sickly and gone
by the time they reached the colony is why the
vampire story ran rampants. Anyway, thanks for the show. I
didn't mention them one because it happened kind of after
(23:34):
the Pied Duoix. I had heard of them, but I
didn't know a ton about them. And also, unlike the
Fi Duhua, which was h like a royal decree that
was a whole French government uh set up this, my
understanding is that it was kind of like a private enterprise,
like it wasn't a big government sanctioned effort um. But
(23:55):
it is fascinating there. Also, I haven't found as much
information on them. I would certainly love to. Uh. But
that's another good story to think about, is you know
somebimes just see them listed as the casket girls, uh,
which makes it seem like a whole other thing and
ties into that whole vamporism, the secondary backstory and lore.
But that's the scoop on that. Uh. So thank you, Sabrina.
(24:17):
We always love a good tie in. If you would
like to write to us, if you know any Tians
about Victor Lustick. I'm sure there are cajillions of them
out there. You can write to us at History Podcast
at house to works dot com. You can also connect
with us at Facebook dot com, slash missed in History,
on Twitter at misst in history. We're at Misston History
dot tumbler dot com, or also at pinterest dot com
(24:38):
slash missed in history. If you would like to connect
with us on our website, it's missed in history dot com.
And if you would like to learn more about what
we talked about today, you can go to our parents
site and type in the words con Man in the
search bar and you will come up with an article
called how con Artists Work, which talks about kind of
(24:58):
some of these same confidence games that Listick was so
extremely adept at. If you want to research almost anything else,
you can do that at our parent website, which is
how stuff Works dot com. And if you want to
come and visit us at Miston History dot com, you
should do that as well for more on this and
thousands of other topics, because it how stuff Works dot
(25:19):
com
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, welcome to the podcast. I'm
Holly Try, I'm Tracy Wilson. Uh. And it's no secret
that we love a good con man story. We really
loved our Baron of Arizona episode. Uh. And today's topic
(00:24):
is right in that vein, and the gentleman we're going
to talk about is completely larger than life. He is
such a fascinating creature and he is famous for a
con of simply epic proportions where he sold a large,
iconic structure that he did not own. But we'll get
to that. I don't want to spit that out right
out of the gate, because we'll get there. And uh, you,
(00:45):
if you know anything about him, you have already seen that,
because that's often the thing that defines him when he's
talked about in historical articles. So first we're going to
talk about who this gentleman was, kind of his early
beginnings before we get into his life of conning people.
So that person we are talking about today is Victor
Lustick and he was actually born Robert V. Miller in
(01:06):
Bohemia and that's now known as the Czech Republic. He
was born January four, eighteen ninety and he was one
of several children who was born to the mayor of
the tiny, tiny town of Hastina. And while Lustick was
not his true name, it's the one he most commonly used,
and that's how it's reported. So we're just going to
(01:26):
call him that instead of calling him Miller. Yeah, we'll
read one text, a little news article where they refer
to him as Robert Miller, but beyond that, and we'll
use their their naming convention. But beyond that, we're going
to go by Lustick. And even as a child, he
was incredibly precocious, and as he grew into adulthood his
(01:46):
proclivity for trouble really grew with him. And he was
an extremely smart man, and he had a natural talent
for language, and he was fluent in Czech, German, French,
Italian and English. He attended the University of Paris, but
was not long into his higher education before he was
spending way more time gambling at games of chance than
he was hitting the books. During his college years, he
(02:09):
also got a scar from a jealous man in a
fight over a girl, and this would become his identifying
mark later in life, and after he left school, he
did not finish. He just took off. Lustick began traveling
throughout Europe under a number of aliases, and all the
while he was committing petty crimes to support himself and
kind of duping people out of their money. Uh. And
(02:31):
it's during this period that he first assumed the persona
of Victor Lustick, which became, as we said, his favorite.
He started introducing himself as a count and traveling around
on cruise ships so he would take advantage of the
wealthy passengers and then gamble with the less wealthy ones. Yeah.
He basically just saw cruise ships as a huge cash
cow on the water. Uh. And a con that he
(02:53):
worked on these trips was built around these small mahogany boxes,
which you know, it was basically just a small box.
It would have a slit cut on either end. Uh.
And additionally, one side of each box he would just
load up with mechanical bits, so it would have levers
and knobs and buttons and look very um complicated and
(03:13):
really mechanically engineered. And he would claim that this complex
looking box that he was showing people, because he would
only show one at a time, was in fact a
money duplicator. He had a lot of these boxes, but
he only ever revealed one at a time when he
was working a con. And so he would show the
(03:33):
victim a hundred dollar bill sticking out of one side
of it, and there would be a blank piece of
paper sticking out of the other side. He would turn
some knobs and throw some switches, and after a while
a second hundred dollar bill, which had been hidden in
the box the whole time, would come out. Yeah, so
it would look like that blank piece of paper had
then been printed on and become a hundred dollar bill.
(03:55):
And of course marks that were shown this amazing piece
of machinery wanted money duplicating boxes of their own, and
so Lustick would often entertain multiple interested parties and he
would kind of, uh seed the situation, so he would
get these people to bid against each other and drive
the price up. And because he used this con on
pleasure cruises. Uh, this is so smart, he would you know,
(04:19):
kind of keep this bidding going and and keep people interested.
And then finally near the end of the trip he
would finally accept one of the offers, like the highest
bidder and hand over the box. And then by the
time the ruse was revealed, he had disembarked and vanished.
They were out of their money, and he was gone
and on to his next adventure. World War One put
(04:40):
an end to pleasure cruising for a while, and so
that put an end also to count lustick source of income.
He didn't really have many prospects and no interest at
all in taking on a real job, so he decided
to set out for the United States. And before we
get into his uh first little adventure in the US,
let's have word from a sponsor, we're going to go
(05:01):
back to the world of a spectacular conman, Victor Lustick.
So heading into the nineteen twenties, m Luctick really started
to become more and more interested in bigger cons uh.
So in nine two he was in Missouri, and at
this point he was going by the name of Robert
Duval and Lustig had scoped out this piece of property,
(05:22):
which was a ranch that had been repossessed by the bank,
and he decided that it would become a central element
in this plan. He had to pull one over on
the American Savings Bank. He made the bank an offer
on the ranch of twenty two thousand dollars and liberty bonds.
He also asked them to trade cash for an additional
ten thousand dollars worth of war bonds. And when this
(05:43):
exchange of money was made, he did kind of a
slight of hand and replaced the envelopes holding the cash
and the bonds with two identical but worthless envelopes. And
after the envelopes were exchanged and the con man had
both the bonds and the cash in hand, Stick of
course made a run for it and he got as
far as Kansas City before he was arrested. But he
(06:06):
was so completely imbued with this gift of gab and
this sort of you know, ability to just disarm people
and convince them of complete falsehoods, he actually managed to
talk his way out of this particular kettle of hot
water and go free. And we don't have the details
on how that took place. Tracy was theorizing when we
were talking about it that probably any lawman involved were
(06:28):
too embarrassed to really recount the full episode after the fact.
But this will not be the first time he talks
himself out of trouble. He went back to Europe and
in he was once again running cons in Paris. At
this point, it was more than twenty five years after
the Paris Exposition, which was when the Eiffel Tower had
been built. This iconic structure had become kind of a
(06:52):
problem for the city. It cost a lot to keep
it up, and there weren't a lot of funds to
maintain the tower. They had planned to maybe move it,
but that plan had fallen through and it was kind
of becoming run down and unloved. There were a lot
of people, both in the public and among the officials.
He just wanted to have the whole thing removed or
torn down, being done with it. As a brief aside,
(07:15):
that sort of breaks my heart, like thinking about the
possibility that the Eiffel Tower could have been torn down.
But of course, when Lustig heard of these problems surrounding
the tower, it said that he read a news article
detailing all of the problems with keeping it standing in Paris.
He concocted this plan that he would profit from this
sort of source of drama amongst the Parisian people, and
(07:38):
so he assumed yet another identity. This time he posed
as Deputy Director General of the Minister of the Post
a telegraph. Using these new folk credentials. He set himself
up at the Hotel de Creole and he arranged to
meet with scrap metal dealers to pitch this idea of
them taking the Eiffel Tower off Paris's hands. To cover
(07:59):
his track, he explained to the potential buyers that they
had to keep it all on the down low initially
because city officials were naturally very afraid that the citizens
of Paris were going to be angry if they knew
their tower might just go to a scrap heat. He
demanded absolute discretion from anyone who expressed interest, and this
(08:19):
plan sounded quite good indeed to one of the scrap
metal dealers, whose name was Andre Poison. And Poisen was
not a Paris native, which was part of what made
him a perfect mark. I think, uh likelihood, Listig saw
him as a little bit of a you know, a
country bumpkin, even though he was really an accomplished businessman. Uh.
(08:41):
He definitely knew the scrap industry and he had money,
but he was not especially wiley. And to further bait
the hook, Listig uh did this little interesting move where
he kind of intimated to Poissons that he was just
a lowly government official and he didn't make much money,
and he kind of started hinting that his big decision
in on which scrap dealers should get this deal was
(09:02):
going to hinge on a bribe of some sort. This
faux bribe request really legitimized Lustic in Poissant's eyes. Clearly
this was a legitimate bureaucrat if he was hinting around
that he should be bribed. Yeah. Interesting thing that that's
how you convince someone that you're the real deal is
by doing nefarious things. But it worked, uh, And eventually
(09:26):
Poisson put down a cash deposit with Lustig of about
seventy thousand dollars, which is you'll see it broken down
in descriptions of the situation of like twenty thousand was
sort of for the bribe to get Lustig's favor, and
fifty thousand was like the guarantee that he would be
the one to get the rights to tear down the
Eiffel Tower. And at this point was seventy thousand dollars
(09:48):
in hand. Lustick left, he had headed to Austria, and Poisson,
for his part, went to city officials because at this
point he had been awarded the contract to the best
of his knowledge, and he wanted to arrang age the
tearing down of the famous structure. And when he went
to discuss this matter, he was met with blank stairs
and confused faces. Uh, And he eventually realized, of course,
(10:09):
that he had been duped, and he was terribly embarrassed,
so much so that he refused to get the police
involved and to press charges against Lustig. He just wanted
the whole thing to go away. And Victor Lustig, for
his part, from Austria, was watching the papers waiting to
hear news about this deception being revealed. But when nothing broke,
he slowly realized that Poissant had not wanted this to
(10:33):
go public and that he was basically in the clear. So,
even though he had already sold the Eiffel Tower once
and that was quite a feat, he loved that con
so much that he decided to do it again a
few weeks later. This time he suspected that police had
been talking to his new mark, and he just got
out of Paris, out of France and out of Europe
entirely to avoid being detained. Yeah, he got cold feet,
(10:55):
thinking he was never going to get that lucky two
times in a row after he had kind of started
the wheels in motion, and this is how he ended
up back in the United States in x where he
launched yet another series of money box cons. This time
he contracted a New York carpenter to make him special boxes,
and he also added some other layers to the con.
(11:17):
He would tell his mark that the replicator took six
hours to reproduce a bill. This gave the target some
time to WAPs rhapsodic about what they would do with
the machine, if indeed they were to get it. Yeah,
so he kind of gave him time to daydream about
all of the money that they could potentially make. Uh.
And after the six hours had passed, as Listic and
(11:38):
his mark waited together, they he stuck with them through
the whole time. The second bill would be produced, just
as it had been in his con on the cruise ships,
and Listick would then encourage Marks to take both of
the bills to a bank to have them verified as
legal tender. So once the bank verified yes, this two
bills are legitimate, the Mark would be willing to pay
a tidy sum for the box. And in the six
(12:00):
hours that they would spend waiting for their next bill,
Victor Lustick had plenty of time to vanish into thin air,
and this con came to be known as the Romanian
box scheme, and according to New York Police, one group
of marks pulled their money to purchase one of the
boxes for a staggering forty six thousand dollars. In one incident,
(12:20):
Victor Listick managed to police a Texas sheriff and tax
collector for a hundred and twenty three thousand dollars using
the money box scheme. That money should have gone to
municipal taxes. Once the Texan sheriff cornered him in Chicago,
Lustick returned the money and simultaneously convinced him that it
was his fault for not using the duplicator correctly. Again,
(12:42):
just a master of convincing people of things, the con
man took dozens of new aliases as he cycled through
this money box con over and over, and he was
actually arrested many many times in the process, and in
more than forty recorded cases, he either talked his way
out of the charges entirely, or he escaped from jail
before going to trial and just vanished into thin air.
(13:05):
Among his most brazen cons, he swindled al Capone out
of fifty thousand dollars, and he promised to repay the
loan twofold in two months. When it was time to
pay up, Lustig only gave back fifty thousand dollars, and
he blamed a scheme gone wrong for the forfeit of
the other fifty thousand. But allegedly Capone was quite impressed
(13:26):
with his stand up nature, so much so that he
gave him five thousand dollars. And it said the Capone,
who was known for both his pride and his temper,
was never told that he had been deceived in this
matter by the people who knew about it. Yeah, basically, Uh,
the thing here is that Listen, who was kind of
long conning him, he never had intention to do anything
(13:49):
at the fifty thou dollars. He just sucked it away
somewhere until the time had passed, somehow, knowing that he
would get this five thousand dollars or some monetary compensation
just for being so darn mist just kind of fascinating,
especially from Al Capo. So Listick continued these cons for years,
and then he got into counterfeiting. He joined up with
(14:11):
a chemist and the pair of them launched this full
tail counterfeiting operation, eventually producing more than one hundred thousand
dollars in high quality fake bills every month. Yeah, they're
uh foe. Money was by all accounts, really quite good,
like where they would even you know, imitate sort of
the fibers that run through actual currency to a degree
(14:33):
that it was really pretty hard to discern that from
the real deal, and his skill at producing fake money,
along with his partner, unfortunately gained the attention of the
Secret Service. Uh. They eventually assembled a special task force
to identify the source of this sudden influx of counterfeit
money into the economy. Because a hundred thousand dollars a
month is a lot. Their investigation led to the arrest
(14:56):
of a Texas lawman passing fake bills in New Orleans.
And if you're wondering, yes, it is the same Texas
lawman that Listick had returned money to earlier in this story.
That money was, at least in part, not the real deal.
The sheriff was more than happy to cooperate with a
Secret Service to provide all the info he had on Listing,
although he was still in trouble for having used taxpayer
(15:19):
money to pay Listick for the money box in the
first place. Yeah, it didn't get him out of hot water,
but I think at that point he felt so wronged
and angry about the whole thing, and he was like,
I will give you every piece of information I can,
please get this guy. Uh. And once Listick was identified
as a suspect, the Secret Service tailed him for more
than seven months, and finally in ninety five, he was
(15:41):
arrested in New York after his girlfriend actually tipped off police.
She was in a little bit of a jealous rage
over the fact that Listick had had a dalliance with
another woman who was allegedly the girlfriend of the chemist
that he was doing business with. Agents described his demeanor
as poised and serene throughout his rest, and when they
found a key in the pocket of his coat and
(16:03):
questioned him about what it opened, he met their questions
with polite shrugs and silence. The key, it was eventually discovered,
opened a locker at the Times Square subway station. UH.
The locker search yielded more than fifty thousand dollars in
counterfeit cash, as well as the plates that had been
used to print it, and so Listick was imprisoned at
(16:25):
the Federal Detention House of New York City. The Count,
as his captors liked to call him, was scheduled for
trial on September two, five, but he was unable to
attend due to having escaped. He tied his bed sheets
together into a rope and escaped out a window, and
he pretended to wash the windows of the floors below
(16:45):
as he repelled down the building. This is very impressive
to me. It is. It's quite ingenious. Um And the
Chicago Tribune has an account of the escape which is
dated on September two, and it says the escape actually
happened on the first, and it says, quote, mildly interested
street loungers today watched Robert V. Miller, reputed international swindler,
(17:08):
slipped down a rope of bed sheets and flee from
the Federal detention prison. Miller, who police listed in an
arrest record in many American cities and several European countries,
had been held under fifty thousand dollars bail since arrested
May thirteenth on a charge of possessing counterfeit money and plates.
Prison officials did not know of Miller's escape until a
(17:28):
witness told them. Under various names. Police said Miller had
has been arrested in Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, Indianapolis, Oklahoma City, St. Louis,
and Miami frequently on confidence game charges. So the Federal
House of Detention in possibly the least secure holding facility
(17:50):
in the United States, and that was kind of like
the big thing around it is that it was allegedly
very difficult to escape from there, but he managed it
just fine, like he climbed out a window on bit cheats. Yeah,
the stereotypical method of escape. It's like the kind of
thing that comes right out of a Coen Brothers film,
and you can't believe that it could ever possibly work,
(18:12):
but it did work in this case. It's unbelievable. So
there was an all hands man hunt and Victor Listick
was recaptured several weeks later in Pittsburgh. At the end
of nineteen thirty five, his case finally went to trial,
with proceedings beginning on December five. The trial concluded with
a guilty sentence and fifteen years in prison as punishment.
(18:33):
Because he had also escaped while awaiting trial, an additional
five years were tacked onto the sentence, bringing it to
a round twenty yes, and he did serve time. He
did not escape again, but twelve years into his sentence,
on March eleventh of ninety seven, Victor Listig died in
prison at Alcatraz at the age of fifty seven. And
(18:54):
what's interesting is that even though he was sort of this,
you know, international con man of some renown, his passing
did not make news at the time, and nobody even
really knew about it until his brother mentioned it to
a paper two years later. But up to that point,
no one even knew that the Count had died. So
he almost kind of did yet another like vanish into
thin air thing with his death, in that he just
(19:17):
died quietly and no one knew. Yeah, I'm also kind
of inwardly laughing at the fact that he had so
many daring and and obvious escapes but did not also
escape from Alcatraz. That would have been like the cherry
on top of the legend Sunday you have not escaped,
(19:38):
sold the Eiffel Tower and also escaped from Alcatraz. So
accounts really differ as to his cause of death. One
paper reported that it was a brain tumor, and others
said it was complications of pneumonia. There's not really clear
agreement on that. Yeah, especially because they were reporting it
two years after the fact, it kind of left the
(19:58):
door open for a lot of speculator shin. Presumably there's
a death certificate somewhere, maybe, but you know it maybe
not attentively filled out. And what's interesting too, is that
for years after his death, he kind of had this
legacy in that uh, Secret Service agents were reporting that
his counterfeit bills would occasionally surface, or sometimes they would
(20:21):
even be brought to the Secret Service by people who
kind of suspected it might be a listic bill. So
there's a list of ten rules for aspiring conmen that's
often attributed to Victor lou Stick, although we don't really
have clear evidence that that attribution is correct, but even so,
we're gonna tell you what they are. Number one is
(20:42):
be a patient listener. This is more important than fast talking.
Number two is never look bored. Number three is wait
for the other person to reveal their political opinions, then
agree with them. Number four very similar, let the other
person reveal their religious views and then have the same ones.
Number five hints at sex talk, but don't follow it
(21:05):
up unless the other fellow shows a strong interest. Yeah,
it's sort of establishing like a conspiratorial um friendship. Number
six is never discussed illness unless some special concern is shown.
Number seven is never pry into a person's personal circumstances.
I'll tell you eventually. Number eight is never boast, just
(21:27):
let your importance be quietly obvious. Number nine is never
be untidy, and number ten is never get drunk. So
keep your wits about you and go along with everything.
The Mark says, Uh, it's sort of as just a personal,
semi hilarious coda to all of this. I did not
(21:48):
know this before I started worrying on research for this episode,
and I didn't actually realize it until I was almost
done putting all my notes together. But there was an
episode of Chesterfield Presents which was like this half hour
drama the Chesterfield Cigarette sponsored that was made about Listi
in nine two, and it was called Count Victor Listig,
(22:08):
The Fabulous Swindler. And what makes it personally funny is
that it starred Vincent Price, who started the Baron of Arizona,
which is the other Swindler episode that we have done recently.
I did not mean to do. Uh. The Vincent Price
Follies of Conmon but it happened accidentally. So now I
want to see what other episodes we can find that
(22:29):
will tie to Vincent Price. Oh, I could do that easy.
I could do a lot of Vincent Price inspired episodes well,
because he was such a prolific actor. You know, he
was in everything, hundreds and hundreds of credits. So but
instead we're gonna go to listener mail. This particular piece
is from our listeners, Sabrina uh, and it is about
our feed Hua episode. And she says, high ladies, I
(22:50):
just listened to your show on a FI dua and
I was really surprised you didn't mention the casket girls,
uh so called because of the small chests that they
brought from ants of the Gulf area. The FI cassette
arrived in Mobile, Alabama starting in seventeen o four, then Biloxi, Mississippi,
and finally New Orleans. They were brought to the US
for the same reasons as the Canadians to marry. I
(23:14):
heard about these girls on the show The Originals last
season and looked them up, and it was real New
Orleans lores that they brought vampires to the area, which
was of course played as fact in the show. The
fact that many of the girls were sickly and gone
by the time they reached the colony is why the
vampire story ran rampants. Anyway, thanks for the show. I
didn't mention them one because it happened kind of after
(23:34):
the Pied Duoix. I had heard of them, but I
didn't know a ton about them. And also, unlike the
Fi Duhua, which was h like a royal decree that
was a whole French government uh set up this, my
understanding is that it was kind of like a private enterprise,
like it wasn't a big government sanctioned effort um. But
(23:55):
it is fascinating there. Also, I haven't found as much
information on them. I would certainly love to. Uh. But
that's another good story to think about, is you know
somebimes just see them listed as the casket girls, uh,
which makes it seem like a whole other thing and
ties into that whole vamporism, the secondary backstory and lore.
But that's the scoop on that. Uh. So thank you, Sabrina.
(24:17):
We always love a good tie in. If you would
like to write to us, if you know any Tians
about Victor Lustick. I'm sure there are cajillions of them
out there. You can write to us at History Podcast
at house to works dot com. You can also connect
with us at Facebook dot com, slash missed in History,
on Twitter at misst in history. We're at Misston History
dot tumbler dot com, or also at pinterest dot com
(24:38):
slash missed in history. If you would like to connect
with us on our website, it's missed in history dot com.
And if you would like to learn more about what
we talked about today, you can go to our parents
site and type in the words con Man in the
search bar and you will come up with an article
called how con Artists Work, which talks about kind of
(24:58):
some of these same confidence games that Listick was so
extremely adept at. If you want to research almost anything else,
you can do that at our parent website, which is
how stuff Works dot com. And if you want to
come and visit us at Miston History dot com, you
should do that as well for more on this and
thousands of other topics, because it how stuff Works dot
(25:19):
com
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