'Fascinating' Daily Mail
'An incredible story' Daily Mirror?
***?***The period after the First World War was a golden age for the
confidence man. 'A new kind of entrepreneur is stirring amongst us, '
The Times wrote in 1919. 'He is prone to the most detestable tactics,
and is a stranger to charity and public spirit. One may nonetheless note
his acuity in separating others from their money.'
Enter Victor Lustig (not his real name). An Austro-Hungarian with a dark
streak, by the age of sixteen he had learned how to hustle at billiards
and lay odds at the local racecourse. By nineteen he had acquired a
livid facial scar in an altercation with a jealous husband.
That blemish aside, he was a man of athletic good looks, with a taste
for larceny and foreign intrigue. He spoke six languages and went under
nearly as many aliases in the course of a continent-hopping life that
also saw him act as a double (or possibly triple) agent. Along the way,
he found time to dupe an impressive variety of banks and hotels on both
sides of the Atlantic; to escape from no fewer than three supposedly
impregnable prisons; and to swindle Al Capone out of thousands of
dollars, while living to tell the tale. Undoubtedly the greatest of his
hoaxes was the sale, to a wealthy but gullible Parisian scrap-metal
dealer, of the Eiffel Tower in 1925.
In a narrative that thrills like a crime caper, best-selling biographer
Christopher Sandford draws on newly released documents to tell the whole
story of the greatest conman of the twentieth century.
