Behind the Bastards - Part One: The King of Con Artists, Victor Lustig

Episode Date: March 30, 2021

Robert is joined by Shereen Lani Younes to discuss Victor Lustig.FOOTNOTES: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/man-who-sold-eiffel-tower-twice-180958370/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CCount%E2%80%9D%20Victor%20Lustig%2C%2046,%E2%80%94not%20once%2C%20but%20twice http://www.progetto.cz/victor-lustig-la-primula-rossa-boema/?lang=en https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-smoothest-con-man-that-ever-lived-29861908/  Maysh, Jeff. Handsome Devil (Kindle Single) (p. 16). Kindle Edition. https://www.hindustantimes.com/delhi/cops-nab-conman-inspired-by-natwarlal-from-noida/story-y6kZIciV9avMgiLx2xBbNM.html  https://www.bhaskar.com/news/NAT-NAN-7-interesting-facts-about-biggest-fraudster-of-india-natwarlal-5174373-PHO.html  https://www.inuth.com/india/the-legend-of-natwarlal-the-iconic-conman-who-sold-taj-mahal-not-once-but-thrice/  https://www.abhijitbhaduri.com/blog/2016/02/06/the-confidence-game  https://www.indiatimes.com/news/india/10-things-you-need-to-know-about-the-man-who-sold-the-taj-mahal-thrice-247513.html  https://books.google.com/books?id=VA9TaE2V0eMC&q=natwarlal+shrivastav&pg=PA22#v=snippet&q=natwarlal%20shrivastav&f=false https://web.archive.org/web/20161116072947/http://www.timescrest.com/opinion/nuts-about-natwarlal-5243  https://www.hindustantimes.com/india/natwarlal-leaves-em-guessing-even-in-death/story-mYkqbv8grOOw0oFEsIryrJ.html  http://www.scrolldroll.com/natwar-lal/  https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/crime/story/19800815-natwarlal-a-con-man-par-excellence-a-master-forger-a-escape-artist-to-rival-houdini-821356-2014-01-27  https://www.scoopwhoop.com/Natwarlal-Indias-Greatest-Conman-Who-Sold-Taj-Mahal/#:~:text=Born%20as%20Mithilesh%20Kumar%20Srivastava,50%20aliases%20to%20dupe%20people.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new

podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever

you get your podcasts. What's still in the Zevia on my work laptop and fucking my life up for days? Me at 11.30 when I finished working last night. This is Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards, recording immediately after the worst disaster to happen to me in in tens of hours, just a just a tremendous fuck up last night as I was standing up from my work desk. And I am, I am, I am in a bad way, friends and family. My guest today to help me through this, this tragically difficult time is Shereen Lonnie Eunice. Shereen, how are you doing? Thank you for waiting 40 minutes for me to get my gaming laptop ready to be my working laptop. It is okay. Me and Sophie had a much needed catch up. Yeah, that's good. And I, I mean,

yeah, you're having a much better worst day than I am. And I'm having a trash day. Yeah, I'm very sorry. And I mean, honestly, I commend you for even recording with me today, you know. Oh, no, no, no. The show must go on. And if the laptop that wrote it seems to be perma fucked. But I guess we'll, time will tell on that one. Yeah, I do think it's funny that you were drinking a Zebia though. Those are great. They're delighted. That's Robert's favorite thing. I, I don't know what I have. I have all the flavors in the house. I don't know which one I was. I thought your favorite was the ginger root beer. That's probably my favorite. But there's different Zebia's for different times. There's like a squirt style Zebia that's like kind of citrusy. That's very good.

The grape one is quite nice. That's one of my favorites. I love the grape one. I like cherry cola. If I'm in kind of a, yeah, the ginger ale is great. I have the cherry cola and the Dr. Pepper knock-offs for when I'm like, because they have caffeine. That's like my, my during the day drink. There's a, there's a, there's a decaf cola that I'll have later in the evening before I switch over to my nighttime Zebia's that I take. Do you ever have water in between? No. Why would I fish fucking that? Do you want to watch fish come in your, in your, in your body? No. No, thank you. I was going to, I brought that up because I, I thought it was maybe one of those things where like you were, you're going to hate Zebia forever now, but you can't do that. You're, you're, no, no,

no, no. It's not the Zebia's fault that I dropped a beverage. That, that, that can't be blamed upon the Zebia. There have been hundreds of Zebia's on this desk that did not trash my laptop. So the fault must lie with me or I don't know if the government feels like a good thing to blame the government for it. It's not every day a white man takes responsibility. So I really applaud you for that. Yeah. It's, it's definitely an even mix of me and the government. I mean, how do you feel about con artists? Con artists. Con artists. I mean, depending on the con, I low key kind of respect. We all do, right? I'm fascinated by them. Yeah. Because I think it's like, there's, I don't know what it is, but there's probably a particular personality

type or something. It's like equivalent to pathological lying to me. And they're very good at it. There's something very like scary, interesting to me about that, you know? Yeah. And they're, you know, there's con artists in every society. And we will in part two talk about a con artist in India. But I think con artists are the most American thing you can be. Because this is a nation as a song I partly remember said that Americans love freedom and nothing says freedom like getting away with a crime. And that's like what we love con artists. Like even when they're fucking us, as long as it's not like we hate them when they've specifically fucked us over. But as long as they haven't specifically fucked us over, we love them.

And I didn't mean respect like a loving respect. I just meant like, depending on the con, like that's what I'm saying. Like if it's like a funny scam that doesn't hurt anyone, I'm all about that. But obviously the majority, you're right. It's the most American thing to do is to exploit people and then benefit from it, you know? Yeah. I mean, they mostly hurt people. Like I love Elron Hubbard. I'm very on the record about my deep appreciation for that man and his schemes. Because they're just so. I don't love Elron Hubbard. How did you say that with a straight face? He's the absolute best. He stole his own baby. He stole his own baby. He stole his own baby and made himself a god and then had teenagers search for gold in the ocean. He was a sick, sick person.

He was wonderful. Yes, he did. He left an unthinkable amount of human shrapnel in his wake, but he's so fun to read about. And the guy we're talking about today is a better person. And if we're being entirely honest, both of our characters today, I don't know, I guess you could probably if they're if they count as among the worst people in history, they're on the very low end of that bar. These are not, you know, mass, probably not mass rapists, definitely not mass murderers. But they did scam and destroy the financial lives of a lot of people, depending on your they both targeted rich people. So it's going to be pretty easy to sympathize with both of them. I felt like we needed a little bit of a break. Yeah. And I love a good coin artist story.

That's the thing. I'm all about a Robin Hood story, you know, like if you're scamming from corporations or very rich people, like if you're scamming Jeff Bezos, keep doing that, you know what I mean? Like, I would love you to keep doing that. But yeah, I'm a Robin Hood kind of scammer. I like that. Both the guys we're talking about today for loved to portray themselves as Robin Hood style characters. They were not. They did steal from the rich to give to themselves. And generally more like still from the upper middle class to give to themselves. Robin Hood would be taking it a bit far, but they're both very entertaining men. And we're going to start with the tale of Victor Lustig. Have you ever heard of Victor Lustig?

I don't know. I don't think so. Yeah, he's he's a hoot. So Victor was born on January 4th, 1890, probably, in Hostin, Austria, Hungary. So this is back when, you know, that country existed before they made a series of bad decisions. 20. Why are we saying probably? Well, because he's a con artist and there's debate as to whether I mean, to be honest, does it also say he's six two? There's no hard evidence this man was born at all. He definitely existed. But we have no idea where he was born. I like Shereen's. I like Shereen's comment. He also says six two and he got his degree from insert fake university here. Wait, who are we talking about here? Oh, I was just teasing about how you can't rely on what people like that. You can't rely on the

age or whatever. And I was just making a joke that men lie about their height. That's all. Yeah, I mean, he lied about absolutely every aspect of his life. And that's probably that's why I say probably he claimed for his whole life to have been born in Hostin, Austria, Hungary. There's no evidence that he was born there. There's no evidence that he was born at all, although he absolutely existed. Like there's no evidence of where specifically he was born, I should say. So interesting when you think about that. Yes, it is interesting. Yeah, he covered his prep. Well, shit. Yeah, it's also he was born in the 1890s, which is like it was a lot easier to cover your shit back then, because all public records were just like a guy with a

sheet of paper inside a building downtown. And then all of Europe burned down several times. So it a lot of people were able to hide shit as a result of the world wars. That's fair. No one knew about DNA or anything. That's yeah, exactly. Like it's just a piece of paper with a description of you as a baby on it. It's pretty easy to to escape back in those days. So the most credible version of his early life that we have suggests that he was a very intelligent young boy born to a nearly impoverished family, something of a genius. And based on the rest of his life, I believe this, like obviously, he was a narcissist who lied constantly. He was also a genius. So I have no no doubt that he was a very intelligent boy. He himself described his parents

Ludwig and Emma as quote, poor peasant people who scraped out a living on a rough land in a grim stone house. So these are like poor peasants living off the land. And he's a very gifted boy noted by all of his teachers to have been very intelligent. Again, Victor is our source, but you know, his life kind of does back this up. And I have no trouble seeing him as a brilliant youth who was stifled by the demands of his peasant life and its lack of opportunity. So he's smart. He wants more out of life. His parents are dirt poor, farm and pig shit in the middle of nowhere, right? That's kind of the way this kid grows up. He must have been bored and somewhat desperate as a young man. Now, according to Victor, his parents separated when he was eight,

because they could not afford to take care of him or his older and younger sibling. He was sent to live with his father's relatives, a situation he found even worse than his previous life. By age 12, he had run away from his second home and decided to make a life for himself somewhere else in Europe. Within a year, he had made it to Budapest, a beautiful and exciting city that offered much more in terms of opportunity and stimulation. Victor would later tell a secret service agent who was interrogating him that one specific event in Budapest inspired his subsequent criminal career. In the spring of 1903, he was scavenging for food in the dumpster of a Budapest hotel. It was nighttime, the moon was out, and he saw a young rich woman on the balcony

of that hotel wearing a golden evening gown. He later recalled, To me, she was a fairy princess. She was with a man much older than she. I saw the waiter come and take their order. My mouth began to water because all I'd had to eat for three weeks had come out of garbage cans. So, you know, what? I'm already getting the bullshit meter. And again, there's good chance he grew up poor. He's also a consummate liar. We'll get to that in a second. So as he claims, he's watching like as from the dumpster watching this rich couple and the food gets delivered. But instead of eating it, they leave it on the table. The man pulls out a wad of cash, gives it to the more money than Victor has ever seen in his whole life,

and he gives it to the woman who Victor slowly realized was a prostitute. And then the two depart for the bedroom, leaving this fancy meal on the table to be thrown out. Quote, they both got up without touching a morsel of that delicious food. What I saw that night shattered my faith in women forever. Wait, that's the takeaway? Yeah, it's the takeaway. That's that's what that's one of his takeaways. Yeah. Wait, what? Can't trust women because some of them are

It's not about food waste. It's not about rich people wasting shit. It's about women. It is some of it's about rich people wasting shit. Like it's all of that. I don't like that first takeaway at all. No, it's terrible. Again, this is a man talking in like the 20s is when he's relating the story to a secret service agent. So again, this backstory comes courtesy of a criminal being interrogated after he was caught for his many crimes talking to a cop. So grain assault here. That's very maybe I just I'm thinking about this because I just realized the last time I heard your voice was when I was listening to the Lolita podcast, but that's a very like

the the protagonist name. Like, like, Oh, Humber Humber. Yeah, the whole book is him re talking to someone about his life. And it's just like, and that's fully half of this guy's life story, right? We do have objective facts about him because he committed a bunch of well-documented crimes. But in terms of his early life, we're just kind of trusting Victor here. And I'm sure there are elements of truth to this because any really good lie is based on elements of truth. And he was a good liar. But also, he's talking to a cop. This is the story he gives to a cop, right? Victor claims that in addition to convincing him that women could

not be trusted, this also convinced him that no person with enough money to waste a meal deserved to keep their wealth. He dedicated himself Batman like to relieving the rich from their money from that point forward. Not only that, but he would spend the rest of his life pursuing beautiful women as many as he could sleep with because obviously they were willing to fuck anyone with money. And he was going to have a lot of it. So he takes a couple of lessons out of this moment. Right. Right. Yeah. I agree with you up until the beautiful woman think to be honest. Absolutely. Like, I don't agree. If you're going to waste a meal, you shouldn't be you deserve to be scammed. Exactly. You I would love to lift some wealth off of the wealthy, you know, like,

I agree with that. And then realizing at the very end, it's just he wants to get laid a bunch, you know, that's. And again, as another spoiler, by the time he tells this story, he's the most famous con man in America. And he is telling this to a cop, but he is also telling this because he knows this is going to become the public story of his life. And he wants as much sympathy as he can get. And this interrogation where he tells his life story happens during the apex of the Great Depression. Most working people could sympathize with a story like this. Oh, he's not a bad like all of the great get like my cousin, pretty boy Floyd's whole story is, yeah, he robbed banks, but he did it to give money to the little people. And there's evidence

that he did. You can argue a lot of that was him protecting himself by making sure that regular people wouldn't want to turn him in. And Victor's got a similar story. A lot of these con artists do. So he's trying to frame himself as I'm a crusader for the little guy fighting the corrupt rich. You know, I mean, if you have the opportunity to leave your own narrative, of course, you have to make yourself more like, especially during the time, a good carn artist would know that like people are going to sympathize with this, you know, it's very layered. It still happens. We're saying this the same week as eight women or eight people, including six Asian women were shot to death at a series of massage partners in Atlanta. And the police uncritically reported

the shooter's claims that like it was a obviously Victor's a much better person than this. Victor does not murder anybody. But it is the story of, OK, law enforcement has caught me. I'm going away. But at least if I tell if they repeat the story, I tell them, maybe I will at least be able to like set up a better narrative about myself, you know? Yeah, that's what's happening here as well. Obviously, a much better person than that. Yeah, I mean, the having a bad day thing, even thinking about it makes my blood boil. And yes, yes, just just the idea that the cops were like, you tell us if you were a racist, right? Like, yeah, racist don't decide if they're racist. The racist in that case is trying to he's specifically trying to set him out self up to

be more sympathetic for both cops and sort of like other white supremacists in Georgia, you know, like, oh, he's just a guy with a sexual addiction and these damn, you know, these evil interlopers coming into our country, fucking up our morals. Victor is playing towards the impoverished masses of the Great Depression, being like, look, you guys got fucked over by the banks. All I did was steal from bankers because I as a child starving in the street, I knew that I needed to get revenge on them, you know? Yeah, yeah, it's smart. He's a very smart man. Yeah. Yeah. And again, I should note also profoundly anti woman, although for the time, I don't think this would have stood out. Because again, talking like the 20s and 30s,

you know? Yeah. So I don't doubt, though, that Victor did spend time poor and developed a an anger at the wealthy because he did focus on the wealthy his entire career was not conning farmers out of their homes. And his frustration with the wealthy probably did have an influence on his career. I would that there I would, however, be very shocked to hear that the exact story he told during his interrogation was true in any way. There's probably aspects of truth to it. He was in Budapest, probably. But yeah. So Victor claims that his younger brother, Emile, had moved to Budapest at around the same time and had taken to the life of a small time crook. And they're both in their early teens at this point. Victor claims to have followed after

him, starting with simple panhandling and moving on to picking pockets and then to burglaring homes and businesses. And then finally, to the noble trade of a street hustler. Have you ever seen one of those movies where there's like a guy in New York or whatever playing one of those games? Or you guess which cup has the ball in it for money? That's the kind of shit Victor was doing, usually with cards. Like he was kind of a card shark. And he loved doing this kind of thing. He loves street hustling. He has fast little hands. And before long, he had become an expert card shark, learning how to cheat at various games in a hundred different ways. It was said he could make a deck of cards, quote, do everything but talk. So he's very good with cards.

There's an element of performance there, right? Like, oh, yeah, yeah, to perform, he is a performer. In a different time, he might have been an actor. He was a good actor. You have to be to be this kind of con artist. So he was, however, especially, you know, early teens into his late teens, he was caught several times. You know, he's learning how to do this, right? And you're going to fuck up. In 1908, when he was 18, he spent two months in a Prague prison for stealing. In November of that year, he was arrested in Vienna for larceny, quote, attempted false pretenses and being a hobo. So by this point, we know a few things. The tricks that had worked for him in Budapest

apparently had not translated well to other cities. And as a young adult, Victor was not exactly raking in the big bucks. He never gave up on being a con man, though. And he spent the next four years working a series of schemes in Vienna, Prague and Zurich. He was arrested and jailed for periods in all three cities in 1912. Eventually, he made the call to move to Paris, where he scammed people in bridge and poker and got in trouble over his constant flirtation with the girlfriends of his Marps. In the book, handsome devil Jeff Mesh writes, quote, he paid too close attention to the girlfriend of a French sailor who snapped a wine glass from its stem and slashed his handsome face. The resulting scar, Lustig would later boast to spellbound

audiences, came from a duel of honor at Heidelberg. So he gets he's he's like in a bar being a card shark and he starts like flirting with the girlfriend of a French sailor who slashes his fucking face with a wine glass. And I just thought like further drives home like I hate women. I don't know that it does. I guess he doesn't his the word is a spoiler for the rest of his life. He's cheats on women constantly. I don't have any evidence. He's I don't think he beats them. He's just kind of like a sleazy guy. Right. I hate not beats. Oh, okay. Yeah. Did I say beats on an accident? No, no, no, no, no, hate. I just I think of like, I don't know. Probably. He's definitely misogynist. Yeah, I just feel like it's a very in cell mentality, right? Like he

blames the prostitute for whatever he saw when he was a kid, apparently. And then a woman doesn't like her his coming on to him. And she's probably a bitch, you know, here's the thing. We'll see how you feel about this. He might have been lying about all of that just because he thought that Americans were misogynistic enough that that would be a productive lie to tell. I don't know. We'll see how you think about it from there because he's he's got an entry. He's got a really interesting relationship with his daughter. Okay, interesting. Okay, he has a daughter. Yeah, he gets a daughter expecting. Yeah. And he's he's apparently anyway, we'll we'll get to that. So this lie about the scar on his face is is really smart. An example of how resource believes you get slashed in the

face, you turn it into something that can make you money. And having a dueling scar at this time, especially in Germanic parts of Europe was a huge deal. This was something that if if you went to a school in Germany or the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in particular, if you were a noble child, like an aristocrat, you would not make it out of college without a facial scar. You had to get one. Otherwise, you would be mocked the rest of your life. It was deregure. It was a thing that you did in particular. There were the all these these fencing clubs, dueling clubs in colleges, all of the colleges and kind of the Germanic and like Eastern European world. And it started just as a thing of you're going to be dueling, you're dueling often with live blades, you're going to get slashed.

But it became such like a there were so many men who got famous who would have dueling scars that every man who was anyone had to get a dueling scar. And so what would happen in these clubs is that young men would mutually agree to scar each other and then lie. They would like slash each other's faces so that they would make sure they got out of college with a nice scar on their face. If you look at pictures of like officers in the German and Austro-Hungarian military, if the early part of World War One in particular, almost all of them are going to have some sort of mark on their face because it's just like what you did at the time. Otherwise, you weren't really a man. You weren't really a man of class, you know. That's interesting. And when you learn

shit like that, World War One makes a lot more sense. Just how like stupidly modulate. Yeah, we all got to get a scar on our faces. That is very that's a very good point back then, especially it was probably just like. Yeah. Yeah. I don't want to be I don't want to be emasculated by not having this this wound that shows I can fight. Yeah. So let's just get it myself. This this is a big deal for Victor because the fact that he gets the facial scar makes it easy for him to claim that, especially since he comes from Austria-Hungary, now that he's got a facial scar, it makes it easier. As long as he dresses nice, nobody's going to doubt that he's an aristocrat, which is kind of becomes a big part of his life after this. So this this really having this scar, it's like the

fact that this he gets this scar in a drunken brawl is the best thing that could have happened to him. Um, so during his time in the bars and brothels of Paris, Victor heard lurid stories of the riches and opportunity in the United States and what might be one of the first signs that he really was brilliant. Victor did not immediately commit to moving to the new world. Instead, he started booking passage on first class cruise ships, listening that the board rich people hanging out on those cruise ships would be a captive audience for his scams. So he's like, this is turning into Titanic. Yeah, that's exactly what he's doing. Right. And that was a whole type of guy, like the dude in like Jack and Titanic, right? He's like a scammer trying to

get shit out of rich people on the Titanic. There was a whole class of man who would do that, because there's all these different boats that are going from from Europe to the United States. And that's really the best place to con rich people out of their money, because they're bored, they've got all their cash with them. And you're not going to, if you can get them to, you can con them into investing in something in, you know, New York or whatever, they're not going to, you're going to have weeks on that boat before they realize you're lying to them. It's a great place to do a scam. Stuart Donnelly, who was a con man who worked the same racket, later recalled, quote, Victor had managed to fleece quite a number of smart American businessmen.

And he did it with a handicap of knowing only a few words of English. He was the only swindler I ever knew who could do his fast talking through an interpreter. And I have to imagine that the interpreter was actually something Victor found a way to use to his advantage. He would often later in life claim to have been a wealthy count. And I can see how if he was dressing really well and hiring a slick interpreter, he could con rich guys into investments and purchases they thought were completely legitimate. Just because like, oh, there's this rich count and he's got his interpreter who's going to like, right, help him make deals, give some more credibility, give some more credibility. Yeah, he's good at this.

Victor took the voyage across the Atlantic and back four times before he met the man who would become his mentor, Nikki Arnstein. Nikki was an enormous. He's like six foot six, half German Jew from New Jersey. Nikki recognized talent in Victor. And rather than try to protect his territory, Nikki took the other scammer under his scammy wing. Jeff Mesh explains the crash course he gave in con artistry. Quote, you always always let the sucker suggest the game. The master explained as the two men leaned on the ship's rail staring out over the vast ocean. He must press you to get you to play. Victor copied his mentors every move adopted his fancy clothing and manners and studied his effortless swagger. So he basically goes to con college on these

boats and meets this guy who's really good at it. And like, yeah, it works out well for him. The experience got lusted thinking about the rules to successful conning and trying to actually like develop kind of a scientific list of what allowed you to con well. And he would spend the next several years refining this list. Unfortunately for him and unfortunately for a couple of other people, World War One started in 1914, in part due to the aforementioned German rich kids with facial scars. We don't know what Victor got up to during the war years, but pretty much everyone who studies him seems to agree. There's absolutely no way he fought for any side in that war. Just not a chance. Yeah, too self serving for that. You know, who else wouldn't fight in World

War One? Hubbard? No. Well, no, he fought kind of fought in World War Two. Don't defend him. He, he, he bombed Mexico during World War Two. Robert, just stop it. And you know, who else would have bombed Mexico during World War Two? Oh, Ron Hubbard. I was going to say Raytheon. Oh, yeah. Raytheon. There's a hell of a lot of weddings in Mexico and Raytheon, if there's one thing Raytheon hates, it's a wedding. Good times. This is a very long way for you to say that it's time for ads. It is time for ads. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast

series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And on the gun badass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you

may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

We're back. Okay, so by the time he was 28 years old and by the time World War One ended, Victor was in New York City, which suggests that all of the violence and the evident collapse of the old European social order convinced him that the United States was going to be a better place to con people for the foreseeable future. Moving to the USA had a number of benefits aside from its separation from the violence. For one thing, he'd learned English and his time conning rich Europeans meant he was already pretty good at pretending to be one of those. And so in America, Victor Lustig became Count Victor Lustig. He claimed to have been exiled from his domain due to the fighting in the Balkans. He said he'd lost all of his castles in a revolution.

Now, despite the finery with which he draped himself in order to play this role, Victor's first US schemes were distinctly middling an ambition. His first was the pocketbook scam. He would be friend to mark on a train or in some other transitory point. After talking for a while, the two would find a wallet and work together to return it to its rightful owner, a wealthy gambler who was also Lustig's accomplice in the scheme. Lustig would convince his new friend to turn down the cash reward from the gambler, but agree to let the gambler gamble the cash in the wallet on a horse race and that he and his new friend would take the proceeds from that, which were expected to be somewhere around $25,000. During this process, Lustig would get the mark excited one

way or the other and convince him to add his own money to the bet in order to increase the payout. At the end of the con, Victor would hand his friend a bag that was supposed to be full of cash, but was really full of old newspapers and then of course walk away pocketing the money and splitting it with his partner. So that was his con. That was his early first U.S. con. You do this a bunch. Oh, what a first grift. Yeah, we all get to start somewhere, right? Before I was podcasting professionally, I would just shout at people from street corners. Robert, that makes sense. Why did you say before you started podcasting? You still do that. Yeah, it's an art form shouting at people from street corners. It's a calling in a lot of ways. Everyone's got to start somewhere,

you know? Victor, you, yeah. At World War I, had to start somewhere, which was... That's one way to bring it back. Yeah, so Victor was arrested in 1918, a little before the war's end for one such pocketbook scheme. He jumped bail rather than go to trial and this happened in Kansas City. But even though Kansas City is kind of where he... It's the first place we have on record of him getting in trouble in the U.S. It also held a prize for him, the only woman he would ever probably maybe love, Roberta Norrin. Now, Roberta had grown up in a small town in Kansas and after her father's death had nearly been forced into child labor because, you know, this is 1918. This is what you do with kids as you make them work to death if they don't have rich parents.

She got out of that barely and she meets Victor. And by the time she meets him, she's like still in her late teens. I think she's probably an adult. Victor is like a decade older than her. He is much more experienced. He's already a veteran conman. So clearly there's a power imbalance here. And he tells her a bunch of really pretty lies. He claims to be a count to her and he paints her a picture that, oh, if you leave with me, we can leave Kansas behind. We'll visit the great cities of the world. You'll be wealthy and pampered. And he's not lying about like he's lying about being a count, but he's not lying about taking her out of Kansas and giving her a bunch of fine things. They go to Paris immediately and obviously like, of course, she goes with him, right?

You're a teenager in rural Kansas in 1918, who's barely escaped slavery. Kansas isn't great today. It was even worse back then. And some dashing European count says, I'm going to give you all the finery in the world and take you to Europe. Of course you go with him, right? Yeah. And I'm sure like once you're there and you're like, oh, he wasn't just all talk. Like once you're in Paris, you're like, oh, I trust this person, you know? He has money. They're in Paris. He's got a scar on his face and a weird European accent. There's no way for her to not know he's a count. And for a while, things are great. He buys her elegant dresses. He tells her sweet things. And by late 1919, the two were married in New York City.

Together, they made quite a sight at society gatherings, a European count and his American countess. Very few Americans knew enough about where the Balkans were or what they were to ask any questions about Lustig's supposed domain. Eventually, Victor did come clean about the fact that he was not a European count. And she does not seem to have cared. She was in love with him either way. And just as importantly, he had rescued her from a life of Midwestern poverty. And I think pretty much anyone would have made the same call in her shoes. Like, yeah, 100%. Yeah, like a real one. Of course. Of course. Yeah. So for a few blissful years, Victor and Roberta conned their way up and down the eastern seaboard. Victor was a contemporary of men like

Charles Ponzi, who will do an episode on someday. Ponzi was an immigrant from Italy. And in fact, a lot of American conment, all of the best ones in this period are European pretty much. They're guys who come here. And maybe it's just a matter of like, if you don't grow up in American society, you're better able to manipulate it just because you see the culture from a different angle. I don't know. Some of this probably has to do with, yeah, I think there's, I think it also has to do with the fact that a lot of Americans will trust anything a stranger with an accent tells them, especially in the 1920s. Yeah, especially if it's like a, like a more westerny or like European accent, you know, they're like, oh, it's person's smarter than I am.

Count wouldn't lie to me. In 1922, Roberta and Victor had their first child, a daughter. Her name was Betty Jean, but Victor nicknamed her Scezix for reasons I could explain, but I am not going to because it's funnier if I don't. So this was broadly a good time for the family, but the law was never very far behind them. And as a result, Scezix grew up with a father who constantly warned her about the man. He taught her Morse code so that if they got questioned, he could tap the message, do not talk into her hand. And she would know to shut up. Wow, wow. Which is pretty cool. I mean, you're not wrong. Cool, but creepy as fuck. What's her name? Betty Jean, the nickname is Scezix. Scezix?

Scezix. Jesus. Okay. You want to guess why she's got that nickname? Just give me a guess. Scezix. It's not actually that funniest story, but I want to know what your guess would be. I don't even know the or like Scezix. Maybe she... Scezix. Want to say it again? Scezix. Scezix. I'm saying it right. Maybe she saw a pair of skis at a shop and she was like, that was her first word. She saw the skis. I got to have them. Ski. Papa, ski. And then he was like, you know what? For you, it's what you're going to have. Scezix. Let's just pretend that's the truth and move on. Tell me the actual truth. It's a character from a comic strip called Gasoline Alley that was popular the time.

Characters like a baby who's found in a bassinet by one of the characters in the comic. I never read Gasoline Alley. I think it was a big influence on Bill Waterson, the guy who did Calvin and Hobbes. It was one of like the first great, really popular newspaper comics. Yeah, I would never guess that. Yes, nobody would. It's funnier if you don't know. The truth is just like, oh, he liked this comic and named his daughter after the character. Yeah. Now, Victor, having grown up poor, had vowed that his daughter would never eat from the trash as he had. And he kept this promise. His daughter would spend her life wearing fine furs, going to private schools, and it is unclear the extent to which Victor came clean to his wife about his background.

She definitely knew he was a con man, but she seems to have believed for some time that he was also a count. Now, Lustig was, if nothing else, consistent about maintaining his cover. When he would make friends in new cities, he would forbid them from sharing gossip or telling dirty jokes around him. He treated all women as ladies in the European sense, and he acted with the kind of dignified air that Americans expected from their nobility. So when he pretends to be a noble, he's not hamming it up. He's very reserved and restrained, and he's very consistent about the performance that he puts on. It's part of why I'd say this guy's a very good actor. He goes method on this shit. People will tell jokes that he'll be playing cards with a group of shady characters,

and some will say something dirty, and he'll yell. You don't say those words around me. I'm a nobleman. Wow. It's deep. Deep scam. Deep scam. With a daughter to feed, Count Lustig increased the grandiosity of his schemes. The year she was born, he presented himself to a bank in New York, pretending to own a company that wanted to buy land to make a chemical plant. She goes to his bank and says, I need some land. The banker shows him a plot of land that is completely worthless, because he thinks like this European doesn't know the value of any land. And sure enough, Count Lustig agrees to pay $25,000 for this useless land. So they agree to do the deal, but Lustig tells the banker he could only pay in a $50,000 Liberty bond. So he's like,

I'll give you this $50,000 bond. You'll give me 25 grand in cash. That seems like a good deal. Right? And the president of the bank agrees. So while they're settling out the paperwork, so that he gives the Liberty bond to the banker, the banker gives him the cash, he puts the Liberty bond in a like a filing cabinet behind him. And while they're settling on the paperwork, Lustig fakes a heart attack. So the bank president runs out to fetch help, and Lustig opens the file cabinet and takes the original Liberty bond back out, then he closes it and departs for his cab to seek medical aid and just flees town with his family, having taken both the Liberty bond and 25 graded cash from the bank.

That is not where I thought the story was headed. It's a great scam. Yeah. That is incredible. Wonderful scam. I also just, this shouldn't be a video podcast sometimes, only because when you say things, my face just contorts the most like, what do I, it's I'm just speechless. But yeah, that is elaborate. And you know what? I respect it. I'm not going to respect it. And his, his daughter, we have a number of interviews from his daughter and she, she would for her whole life stick to the idea that her father's, her father was a con man, yes, but his victims were the real villains. She described them using his language as

researched miscreants as, and he's researched as the people he cons to make sure they deserve it. His cons were then a good deed to uncover their misdeeds. And in the case of this banker, it was he's trying, he was trying to scam this poor European man out of like out of 25 grand to buy a worthless plot of land. He needed to be hurt. You know, he needed to have his money taken and it was insured anyway, which is fair. It was. That's why it's again, never a moral to rob a bank. You said it. I said, of course, we have a t-shirt that says it. Oh, sorry. I'm not cutting up on your merch, Robert. Thank you. There are always rob insured banks t-shirts are very popular.

So yeah, and she has a little bit of a point here. Victor's cons did always center around exploiting the greed of his marks. And that is one of the reasons why it's easier to be sympathetic with him. He was not he was not like getting a conning a bunch of like poor people into getting in like a Ponzi scheme or something. Yeah. He was he was stealing from bankers and shit most of the time and gamblers and whatnot. So yeah, I don't know. It was Victor's next great con that truly elevated him to the level of a legend. He took a pile of his ill-gotten winnings and exchanged them for $50,000 in freshly minted banknotes with serial numbers in sequential order. And then using like a razor blade and stuff, he would painstakingly set to work scraping off the

last digit of each serial number and replacing it so that all 500 bills, $500 bills had the exact same serial number on them. So they appeared to be identical bills, right? Wow. Get where we're going so far. Okay. Okay. Look, Listig then paid a woodworker to make a series of small boxes two feet long, nine inches wide and a foot deep. All the boxes had bronze knobs and dials, which did nothing. And they were weighted with lead so that they would feel heavy and thus valuable. In doing this, Listig was appropriating an old scheme created by a British con man called the Romanian money box scheme. Victor brought it to the US, but he added a commitment to detail that made it truly special.

So he would start this con the way all good cons do start. He would meet some guy and like somebody with money, usually like a wealthy business owner. And over a course of some small talk, establish a baseline of trust and understanding. Then at some point in the conversation, he would ask his mark, you've heard of Emile Dubray, right? Now they hadn't because Emile Dubray never existed. But Listig would explain that Dubray was a genius from Serbia who was quote, a little unbalanced. And he would go for, I'm going to read like we have an exact copy of his spiel that he gives to the Secret Service. So I'm going to read that now. This is him, what he would tell his marks about this fake person, Emile Dubray. Okay. Emile Dubray was in Sarajevo on that fateful day in 1914

when Archduke Francis was assassinated. In fact, there was some suspicion he wasn't on the plot for he was a Serb patriot. In any event, the central powers captured him. But instead of putting him in prison, they took him to Berlin and installed him in a luxurious apartment, stuck with vintage wines and a quite delicious housemaid and gave him the facilities of their most modern laboratory. He had only one instruction, produce a quick, foolproof method of duplicating foreign currency. You see, as the German armies overran the low countries, they had to maintain them and they wish to use British and French and Dutch currency rather than their own. So at this point in the scam, Listig would take out the box, which he would claim was an evolution

of Dubray's chemical method of duplicating currency that he developed for the Germans. He'd say that the genius had only completed his research at the very end of the war, so Germany never had a chance to use it. The inventor had grown frightened that he'd be executed as a collaborator. And of course, he'd gone to the counts like Count Listig's royal father and his father had taken Dubray in and protected him. Dubray had died soon after the war and Listig had found the formula for this money duplicating box in the man's possessions. And he'd crafted this box to the inventor's specifications. At this point, Listig would take a real hundred dollar bill, one of his clone notes, out of the box. He'd put in a blank piece

of white currency paper with it, and then he would turn a crank on the box. He would tell his mark that machine worked by using a radium roller. And since radium was so expensive, the boxes cost $50,000 each just to assemble. He would then claim that the way the special chemical process worked would allow men to make perfect duplicates of any banknote or Liberty bond in circulation. It just took 18, 12 to 18 hours for the copy to be fully printed. Showing a true commitment to the scheme, Listig would wait with his mark until the new bill was ready. Using sleight of hand, he'd replace the blank paper with one of his identical hundred dollar cloned bills. The mark would then walk away convinced he'd seen Listig duplicate perfectly

a hundred dollar bill. To further submit his legitimacy, he would go with them to the bank to cash the cloned bill. And since the bills were legitimate, say for the serial number, the clerks never noticed anything. Listig would then sell the box to the mark. And of course, the mark would immediately put a blank like currency paper in there. But he'd have to start that 12 to 18 hour like waiting period, which would give Listig plenty of time to escape with the money that they'd given him. Wow. It's a pretty great con, right? That is an elaborate ass con. And again, I respect it. He's not a lazy con man. That is a lot of work. That is groundwork. You know, you got to respect the groundwork, the fucking labor.

He thought about everything. He thought about everything. He's a smart man. He establishes trust. He stays with them, you know, he goes to the bank with them. There's no way he's going to scam you. No, no. Not this guy. Look at how much work this has to be legitimate. Yeah. So he sold boxes. This was a very successful scheme. He made a fortune off of this. He sold boxes for varying prices, like kind of whatever they would put in. He'd be like, well, I'm your friend. You know, it cost me this much, but I'll get I have extras. I'll give you whatever it like you can. So he sold one for $43,000 to the owners of a pool hall in Montana. He sold another for $10,000 to merchants in Chicago, one for 25 grand to a Kansan businessman.

A crime syndicate in New York paid $46,000 for one and a banker in California paid $100,000. Wow. That's like a million dollars in this time. He is making. He would have to leave town every time, right? Oh, yes. Absolutely. He immediately books it the fuck out of there. And is he with his family during this time? We'll talk about sometimes. Often, he will talk about this a little bit later. Okay. The best thing about this scam from a con man's point of view is that very few of his victims could go to the police because doing so it means admitting that they had intended to counterfeit US currency. I mean, he loved everything. It's a great scam. It's really great scam. It's really fucking great. Oh, it's so good.

Respect, Victor. Respect. I hate to say it, but yeah, it's very, very good. One of his marks did catch him once. But hilariously, the man was so convinced that the box was real that he thought he had fucked up the machine by turning the crank early. And as soon he says like, oh, man, I'm so like, I'm glad I caught you. I'm so sorry. I turned it early and it didn't work. Oh, you idiot. You've destroyed the machine. You have to give me another 25 grand for a new box. Oh, my God. He's so good at this. He's too good. Yeah. He is amazing. He was only arrested once for the scheme, and he likely escaped conviction that time by bribing the cops with some of the fortune that he had accumulated at that point.

Lustig spent his money as quickly as he made it, of course. He could lose tens of thousands of dollars in a manner of days gambling. And he also developed a penchant for setting up. Well, we'll talk about his secret family later. By 1925, Victor Lustig was at the absolute height of his powers. He had paid his tailor to sew $15,000 into the lining of his suit. So he'd have cash to bribe his way out of emergencies. When he was arrested for swindling a real estate man out of $10,000, Lustig was sent to a jail that he immediately broke out of. And we don't know how he broke out of it. Said that he broke out of a bunch of jails. The reality is probably just paying people like he was just bribing guards and stuff to get out. Yeah. Money talks. Money

talks. Money talks. Money talks and a good current artist walks. That was very good. Wait, did you just make that up? That was wonderful. Thank you. Thank you. Are you about to do a really cool? I mean, it was like the perfect. It was a perfect time. You know what else walks? You know what else walks the good people at Raytheon? Because it is not a crime to sell weapons of war if you are Raytheon. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will

take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark and not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of

forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match, and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when

he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back from outer space. So by 1925, Victor Lustig is like he's doing the best that he's ever been doing. And it was around this period that Victor, who was probably the premier con man of at least the United States, maybe the whole Western world, authored a list of rules that he believed all successful con men ought to follow. These are like his tin commandments

of conning motherfuckers. Here's how they were reported in an article I found in the Smithsonian magazine, quote, be a patient listener. It is this not fast talking that gets a con man his coups. Number two, never look bored. Number three, wait for the other person to reveal any political opinions than agree with them. Number four, let the other person reveal religious views than have the same ones. Number five, hint at sex talk, but don't follow it up unless the other person or unless the other fellow shows a strong interest. Number six, never discuss illness unless some special concern is shown. Number seven, never pry into a person's personal circumstances. They'll tell you all eventually. Number eight, never boast. Just let your importance be quietly

obvious. Number nine, never be untidy. And number 10, never get drunk. Okay, good rules for conning people. Yeah, I mean, honestly, not bad rules for being a journalist. Not bad at all. Because you want them to you want to just mirror them, you know, you want to feel comfortable in every way. So you don't just wait for them to share information, then you just agree with it. Yeah. Well, and I mean, that part is not the good journalism stuff, but the never look bored, wait for the other person to reveal things. Don't pry into their personal circumstances. What about the don't drink it? Yeah, no, absolutely. You drink when you're writing, you drink when you're recovering from doing journalism. You don't want to be drunk conducting

an interview. It's not helpful. Sometimes you might have a beer or two, because like sometimes you that's that's the circumstances in which you're conversing with the person. And if they are drinking, but don't you think like there is an element if you are if you ignore if you know that you're going to be talking to someone that maybe has a different view than you, you're not going to just straight out say you have a different view, you're just going to let them share and just like not along, right? Yeah, you're going to share you ask them you ask them questions when those questions are relevant. You don't need to disagree with them because that's not your job in that instance. Yeah, but yeah, no, I mean, this is just good. Like he's

right about all of this. None of this is like yeah, yeah, yeah, very reasonable stuff. Yeah. Now, Lustig shared his success with his family, buying his wife and daughter whatever they desired and filling cash boxes at various banks with money for them. He also acquired a mistress, Ruth Edding, who was a famous singer at the time. Victor kept his wife and his daughter out of his life on the road as much as possible. He justified this to them by claiming that they needed to be hidden both from his marks and from the law for their own protection. He hired a bodyguard and a maid to watch over them while he was away, which had the added benefit of ensuring his by now very suspicious wife was always watched by two employees who answered to him. And of course,

he is fucking around constantly on them and he keeps his family a secret from her. This is like his secret family. Most people who meet the count don't know that he has a wife and kid. So his actual wife and child are his secret family, but he has a string of mistresses and he also sleeps with a ton of prostitutes that he meets at various brothels because brothels are the best place to meet rich people that you can con, right? And his trips to brothels, there was a pleasure aspect. It was also a business aspect because as he later recalled, quote, there is no better place to find a mark than Adam Adams. They are the best people in the world to point out a mark to you. They know them all. Like, again, you find a madam at a brothel,

she's going to know who's got money and who is dumb, you know? Like, yeah, like that's, that's your job. He's using them as like insiders and also networking and also networking and getting sex with him and he's getting late. Although I don't think he pays often. He's a very good-looking charming man and he's making the money. So my guess is that a lot of this was just like, shit, we're both into conning rich guys and you're hot. Let's do it. You know, how good looking. I want to see. I mean, I don't know if it is by modern standards, but yeah, he was, he was considered to be very handsome. So most of the pictures we have of him are older when he was kind of balding, but he's got a very, he's got a very, like, distinctive face. And again, most

people at the time, okay, here's a decent one. Yeah, most people at the time considered him handsome. He's got like a nice, nice jawline and stuff. The standards were lower in the 20s. But yeah. So yeah, this tactic is tactic like kind of going into brothels and using them to find Marx eventually led him to fall in love with yet another woman, Billy May Scheibel, a famous Philadelphia madam. And I'm going to quote from the book Handsome Devil here about their relationship. She handed Lustig the menu, a book of nudes. These girls toiled day and night earning Scheibel $250,000 a year. Lustig soon discovered Pittsburgh's Grand Duchess of Vice had piqued his interest. Naturally, Lustig conned her using the his money making machine. But Scheibel tracked him down

rather impressively to a hotel room in another city. There Lustig did something he'd never done before. He gave the money back. Scheibel was everything his homemaking wife Roberta was not. Loud, body, sharp as a tack. They shared an innate desire to exploit American greed to separate those of high net worth and low moral value from their cash. Lustig and Scheibel became lovers and partners in crime, maintaining apartments on New York's Park Avenue, Chicago's Lakeshore Drive and a mansion in Beverly Hills, the home's Lustig's wife yearned for. Well, so he yeah, this this is maybe more maybe his soulmate, right? Like he gives the money back that he cons because he's so impressed at how good at this woman is at conning people. And they go on a conning spree.

They buy the houses that he'd always promised his actual wife. It's a bummer of a tale in some ways. But like this is he does seem to really love this woman. He's low key romantic, you know, like that's he met her and he was like, you get me. He was smooth as hell. Like, yeah. Now, Victor stayed married to his wife, but emotionally and largely physically he abandoned her at this point. Now, he did not do that abandon her financially. He kept her and his daughter well supplied with money. But the whirlwind romance that had swept Roberta out of Kansas was over. One night he had a date scheduled with his wife, but he forgot to pick her up at the hotel for an elaborate planned night out. She drank all the wine alone. And when he finally arrived,

she screamed at him. By the end of 1925, the two were divorced. His daughter never understood. Later asking, how could a man who had so often vowed eternal love for his wife, whom he really loved, have an affair with another woman? She's a bummer. Now, while Roberta headed into an unhappy marriage with some other guy, Victor sent his daughter off to an expensive convent boarding school near Pittsburgh. Now, he was it must be said a doting father and he visited her constantly. He also formed a deep friendship with the mother superior who he bought expensive jewelry for in spite of the fact that she could not wear it. Betty said that her father loved the nuns, but hated the priests because they pressured the nuns to do bullshit work around the church.

Which so kind of an interesting little detail about him. I feel like he just always plays like I like the underdog here. Yeah. He's definitely like has a has a has a has a thing for that. Right. Yeah. In May of 1925, his marriage, like this back when his marriage is on the rocks a little bit before he gets divorced, Victor headed back to Paris by luxury steamer with one of the true few men he would ever trust as a partner, Dapper Dan Collins Collins. Dapper Dan. Dapper Dan. That's his nickname. Dapper Dan Collins. Dapper Dan was an infamous trickster. He'd started off his working life as a lion tamer

and a bicycle rider in the circus, but had graduated to counterfeiting and eventually running rum into the United States during prohibition via a submarine he piloted from the Bahamas to Philly. This is a natural progression. Dapper Dan is a fascinating man. Yeah. Definitely more of a piece of shit than Victor. He cons a lot of women who don't have much like he is a kind. I don't know if you call him a sexual predator, but definitely takes significant sexual like uses sex to take financial advantage of women, which Victor does not do. He definitely lies and cheats on women constantly. He always pays them well. He's never stealing from them. So I don't know. I don't know how that I think morally

Dapper Dan is a creepier guy than Victor. Right. Neither of them are very good men. The two traveled to Paris intent on pulling off a big deal, but without a clear idea of what precisely it would be. After a few days of walking around and plotting, the count figured it out. He was going to sell the Eiffel Tower. Now, of course, the building already. Yes. I don't understand how every time I'm more surprised. Like I sell the Eiffel Tower. Sell the Eiffel Tower. Come on. That's all of the great con artists have leaps of evolution like that. Elron Hubbard. I'm going to write pulp stories for cheap little comic books, and then I'm going to create a new mental science. And then I become the profit of my own religion.

I just respect a good grip. He just has a man crush on Elron Hubbard. Could have fooled me. You know, really, it's the way he stole his own baby that impressed me most. That's a that's a champion move. Not a lot of people. He's horrible. He's a horrible person. You've got to respect the grift is what you're saying. I like the way he made all of those young people live on boats for 10 years and search for gold that he buried in past lives. I mean, yeah, that's funny now. He would throw them off the boat when he got bored because he was lunatic. I love the man. Robert, I want everyone to know has the biggest smile of ever seen. He talks about Hubbard. He looks so happy. It is

Can you please let listeners know what my face looks like right now? Sophie is not not she has she's concerned. She's disappointed. She's shaking her head. I'm bummed out whenever I realized that we've covered Elron Hubbard in such detail, but there's really nothing left for me to say about him on this show. But you still do. But I mean, I'm always thinking about him, you know, with Koresh Robert, that was a better take. I do love. I do love David Koresh and his incredible cum gutters. But that is a story for another day or for the HBO mini series. Where were we? We were. I have no idea.

This Eiffel Tower. The Eiffel Tower. So Victor Lustig goes to Paris looking for a con, right? He and his friend go there, Dapper Dan, and they know they're going to scam, but they don't know what scam they're going to do. And they spend a couple of days just kind of walking around talking to people, giving the lay of the land. And Victor keeps seeing the Eiffel Tower in the skyline. And he's like, I'm going to fucking sell that to somebody because he's he rules. That's ambitious. That is ambitious. And he's invincible at that point. He does, right? Like, he's like, I could do anything. I could sell the tower. Fuck it. So I should note that at the time, the idea that the Eiffel Tower would be for sale

was not as preposterous as it seems now. The Eiffel Tower was built for the 1889 World's Fair. And at the time, it was the tallest wrought iron building on earth. It was hated by the art community in Paris for being a threat to the art and history of France and a slight upon the hitherto untouched beauty of Paris. It was very unpopular with like. I have an art history minor. I should have known. I should have remembered that sooner, but it's like it was represent of this like really cold metal industrial thing versus like, yeah. And the reason it had gotten green lit in big part was that like we talk about this in the Krupp episodes, the late 1800s, early 1900s, everybody is like making as many things out of

steel as in possibly the industrial revolution. Yeah, like look at what we can do. Look at how big an iron building we can we can make. So the building was unpopular with a lot of folks. And by 1925, it was also badly in need of repairs. Lustig's Kahn revolved around convincing the right man that the government had decided not to repair it. His mark he decided would be an iron monger, someone in the salvage business with a lot of cash. The Count and his partner would convince the right man that the tower was being torn down and the city was soliciting bids for people who would salvage the scrap metal once it was destroyed. So that's the way in which he was selling. It's like they're going to tear it down. There's going to be all this perfectly usable scrap

metal. Who's going to buy it, right? Like you've got an opportunity to get a lot of scrap iron here for a good price. The Smithsonian writes about the next stage in this Kahn, quote, Lustig commissioned a stationery carrying the official French government seal. Next, he presented himself at the front desk of the Hotel de Creon, a stone palace on the Palace de la Concorde. From there, pretending to be a French government official, Lustig wrote to the top people in the French scrap metal industry, inviting them to a hotel for a meeting. 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 them in a quiet

hotel room. The tower would be sold to the highest bidder, he announced. His audience was captivated and their bids flowed in. Now, Lustig. I was going to say that it really is a huge benefit to like conning people was so much easier without the internet, without being able to confirm things even with good telephone service or telegraph or whatever the fuck they had back then. Like, it's just, of course, you're going to get to the officials. Like, you know what I mean? It's yeah. Yeah. Guy with an accent. He's dressed well. He has money. Yeah. You know, like it's, of course, it's easy to do that. It's like, it's like how easy it is for murderers to get away with it before DNA. It's the same thing. It's not hard for them now. About half of murderers

do get away with it in the United States. It's like 48% something like that. But yeah. Like that you said that with a smile, but continue. Look, I mean, we can talk about stumping someday. Anyway, Lustig pretended that he was the deputy director of the French Ministry of the Post and Telegraph. This was another brilliant move. If he pretended to be too high ranking, his marks might have recognized the lie, right? If you pretend I'm the head of the French Ministry, well, they might know that guy's name, you know, just kind of like, you know, the a lot of people know that the head of the Department of Education. Do you know the deputy deputy director of the Department of Education? Probably not. So the whole scam was as meticulous

as you would expect from a guy like Lustig, right? That's his whole thing is he is meticulous in his preparations. So for example, he made sure there were really fancy refreshments there, truffles and pate, but he made sure they were the cheapest brands of fancy refreshments because this is a government meeting, right? The government's going to put out truffles and pate for these rich businessmen, but they're not going to buy the nice shit. It's the government, you know? Like he thinks about all this shit. You can't try too hard, you know? He he put he that's the thing that makes him special. He thinks of everything. He thinks of everything. Yeah. After evaluating all of the businessmen in the in the room, all of whom are putting in bids,

Lustig settled on one man in particular, André Poisson. Now, André had not given the highest bid, but he was the right man to con. The fact that he was new to the being wealthy and new to being influential also meant that he would have fewer connections, which would mean he would not be as good at pursuing Lustig afterwards. So once the big meeting was over, Lustig informed Poisson that he had been selected and the two met privately. This was where the actual closer to the con came. Lustig pointed out that Poisson's bid wasn't the best, but he wanted to support the young upstart in his new business. Unfortunately, Lustig was a poor man. His government salary didn't go far. And he was going to need a bribe to give Poisson the deal to buy the Eiffel Tower scrap

metal. Now, the whole scrap industry worked by bribes at this point. So this was not seen as odd at all. And the fact that Lustig asked for a bribe actually made Poisson less suspicious, because he'd been wondering, like, why are we meeting at a hotel instead of a government office? Oh, it's because he wants a bribe. OK, I know how to do a bribe. This is how business is done in Paris, you know? Well, so Poisson writes Lustig a sizable check in exchange for the tower, and Lustig skips put town with his business partner as soon as it clears. They expected to have to lie low for a while. But that's not the way things went, as the magazine Progetto summarizes. After a few days, he realized that something didn't add up. There wasn't a word in newspapers

about the barely occurred fraud humiliated and offended. The unfortunate Andrew Poisson decided to maintain absolute silence, not making a complaint and preferring to accept the scam, rather than exposing himself to a certain humiliation. The unthinkable had been accomplished. And so with the ardor of a seasoned and limitless gambler, Lustig resumed once again. He returned to Paris to sell the Eiffel Tower again. Wow. Wow. He was like, what, once? What? Let's give it a shot. And, you know, this actually shows how smart he is, because a lot of sources will describe Lustig as the man who sold the Eiffel Tower twice. That is not accurate. His second mark was a lot savvier than Poisson, and started asking for too many guarantees,

asked to meet in a government building to do the final deed. And Lustig bails. He realizes, like, this, I'm going to get in trouble for this. Like, this guy is a little bit too bright for me to con. So he fucking bails and goes back to the United States, because he's, at this point, very smart con artist. Throughout the late 1920s, Victor continued to con without pause. He was such a big name in the world of charming criminals that he soon had imposters, copycat counts who would pretend to be him, or someone like him in order to carry out their own schemes. Count Boris Dobrinsky developed a sleight of hand money box scam that included fireworks for some reasons. So many men imitated Count Lustig that it is difficult to say for

certain which scams were him and which were made by imposters after this point. Things become clearer in December of 1928, when Victor Lustig finally made a bad decision, probably the worst one of his life, and decided to rob a businessman named Thomas Kearns. Now, you will note that I said rob and not con. Victor clearly had plans to con the man because they were meeting in Victor or in Kearns house. But he seems to have been in some sort of financial jeopardy at this point, probably as a result of all of his mistresses and his daughter and his gambling. He had expenses and he got greedy. And whatever the reason, he sneaks upstairs in this guy's house during their meeting and just takes 16 grand from a box in a drawer, just robs him, right? I think this is the only

time he does it, and it's a horrible decision. That's so weird. It seems so unlike him and very impulsive versus calculated, which is what he usually was. I think it's a mix of things. Some of it's probably financial desperation. You know, he gets into a bad spot. He needs cash quick. He doesn't have time to work the con. I think some of it's just ego. You know, you have so many hits, right? You get away with so much for so long. I'm sure that I'm sure the success of the Eiffel Tower scam played a factor to this because like that can fucking report me. I can do anything. So he fucks up. He fucks up bad. And Thomas Kearns goes immediately to the cops. They started a manhunt for this guy who was by this point very prominent and hard to miss. Lustig left town

quickly, but he almost immediately got into trouble in Texas again when he picked a sheriff as the latest victim of his money box scam. This scam worked. But again, Victor got greedy and he passed the sheriff a number of actual counterfeit bills. And this is what finally brought the secret service down on Lustig's head. Smithsonian magazine reports on what happened next and how Lustig advanced from pretending to counterfeit money with the cash box scam to actually counterfeiting money, which would be his ultimate downfall. It was Secret Service agent Peter A. Rubano, who vowed to put Lustig behind bars. Rubano was a heavy set Italian American with a double chin, sad eyes, and endless ambition. Born and raised in the Bronx, Rubano had made his name by trapping

the notorious gangster Ignacio the Wolf Lupo. Rubano delighted in seeing his name in the newspapers and he would dedicate many years to catching Lustig. When the Austrian entered the counterfeit banknote business in 1930, Lustig fell across Rubano's crosshairs. Teaming up with the Ganglin Forger, William Watts, Lustig created banknotes so flawless they fooled even bank tellers. Lustig Watts' notes were the supernotes of the era, says Joseph Boling, chief judge of the American Numismatic Association, a specialist in authenticating notes. Lustig daringly chose to copy $100 bills, those scrutinized most by bank tellers, and became, like some other government, issuing money in rivalry with the United States Treasury, a judge later commented. It was feared that a run

of fake bills this large could wobble international confidence in the dollar. Catching the count became a cat and mouse game for Rubano in the Secret Service. Lustig traveled with the trunk of disguises and could transform easily into a rabbi, a priest, a bellhopper, a porter. Dressed like a baggage man, he could escape any hotel in a pinch and even take his luggage with him, but the net was closing in. Lustig finally felt a tug on the velvet collar of his Chesterfield coat on a New York street corner on May 10th, 1935. A voice ordered, hands in the air. Lustig studied the circle of men surrounding him and noticed Agent Rubano, who led him away in handcuffs. So Lustig, the manhunt for him starts heavily in 1928 when he robs this guy. And instead of laying

low, he goes on to start counterfeiting and counterfeiting so well that the U.S. government worries he might collapse the national economy. How does he turn out so much so many counterfeit bills? It's the attention to detail that he uses with all of his schemes. He applies that to counterfeiting. He picks the best counterfeiter and he gets the bills almost perfect. You're going to find pictures of his notes today. There's still some of the best forgeries that have ever been made. And again, this is happening during the Great Depression and he gets to be so good at making fake bills that they're worried he's going to crash a confidence in the U.S. economy. So it becomes kind of a matter of national security to catch this guy. And again,

he just got too big for his britches, you know? All those costumes and stuff. I feel like who's going to play him in the movie, you know, like Leo de Caprio? I think, yeah, the Caprio could probably pull it off, you know? Just a natural succession from Jack, I think. Yeah. Well, he played Frank Abagnale and catch me if you can. Yeah, right, right. Yeah, yeah. He's good at doing that kind of con man. I would also accept George Clooney. They don't look alike, but George Clooney can do a hell of a con man. I love. I would always accept George Clooney. Yeah, of course. Now, let's take it. I would agree with you on that. I'm a fan of his love of pigs. I'm a fan of his face, but go ahead. His life was

saved by a pig. I don't. OK, that's just I have to fact check that. That is a fact. George Clooney would not be when he was a young man. He he's always loved pigs, popular pigs, I think. And he was a young man. He hadn't made it big yet. And he was sleeping with his pig in his tiny apartment. And his pig started freaking out. And George took the pig out for a walk, thinking that it needed to go to the bathroom. And it turned out the pig had since that there was going to be an earthquake. And the earthquake collapsed the building that he had been sleeping in. Wow. Yeah. So thank you, pigs, for giving us George Clooney. Yeah, I wonder if he eats bacon. I don't know. I know he cuts his own hair. He's a great man. Oh, bless Clooney.

With a weird, like, 1980s contraption that you put around your head and it gives you a buzz cut. I mean, I thought I was a man, Robert. I love me some things. And I'm over here like great face. Yeah. He's like, he's hot. He's hot. He's absolutely gorgeous. Yeah. His wife is a baddie. I don't know anything about his point. I have to say. So Lustig was taken to the Federal Detention Center in Manhattan, which was supposed to be inescapable. Of course, he immediately escaped. In September, Lustig crafted a rope from prison bed sheets, cut through his bars using items he'd had smuggled in and swung down out his window and repelled downwards. This was extremely visible and a crowd form to watch him repelling down the side of the

of the prison. So Lustig took a rag from his pocket and started pretending to be cleaning the windows. When he reached the ground, he bowed to his audience and darted off, quote, like a deer. He's a performer. That's great. That's so good. Yeah. He loves the stage. He loves the stage. He would have been a great actor. When police realized that Lustig had escaped, they found a note on his pillow, a handwritten extract from the book Les Miserables. And this is the quote from the book that he put on his pillow. He allowed himself to be led in a promise. Jean Valjean had his promise, even to a convict, especially to a convict. It may give the convict confidence and guide him on the right path. Law was not made by God and

man can be wrong. Which is like, I mean, you were counterfeiting bills. Yeah. He's still trying to craft. He's crafting his own narrative still. Like, he knows people are going to talk about that. He's like, oh, he's he's well read and cultured. He's like Jean Valjean. You know, he's a convict, but he's a hero. Exactly. Lustig stayed free for more than three weeks. He was eventually caught in Pittsburgh by a joint FBI secret service task force. They spotted him getting into a car and gave chase. His driver attempted to escape and the police eventually rammed the car, locking their wheels together and grinding both wheels to a halt. The agents ripped the doors open and pointed their guns at the men inside. Lustig told the

agents, well, boys, here I am. Never flustered. He's he's a great character. Yeah. Yeah. He was taken before a judge in November of 1935. The New York Herald Tribune described him thus. His pale, lean face was a study at his tapering white hands rested on the bar before a bench. Another journalist overheard a secret service agent tell Lustig, Count, you're the smoothest con man who ever lived. All the sympathy and his undeniable smoothness was not enough to save the count from Alcatraz Island, where he was sent. His body was searched when he arrived and he was hustled or hosed down with freezing water and then interned in one of the most brutal prisons the US justice system ever derived to humiliate him. The count was marched naked to

his cell. And I think as a result of getting sprayed with cold water, he marched naked. He gets sick. He gets very sick almost immediately. And he remains sick for the entire time he's in Alcatraz. He makes nearly 1200 medical requests and is issued 507 prescriptions. His guards assumed he was faking an illness as part of an elaborate escape plan, but he was not. He was genuinely ill. His ex-wife, Roberta, who had divorced her husband by this point, was still in love with him. And she repeatedly tried to free him, even offering the director of prison $70,000. Eventually, his release was set for August of 1948. Lustig did not think he could make it that long. On November 29, 1946, he woke up with massive swelling on the left side of his head. The

Alcatraz doctors finally took his sickness seriously and shipped him to a secure medical facility in Missouri. It turned out he had severe pneumonia, which had not been adequately treated over his time in prison. They attempted to help him, but it was far too late. Betty, his daughter, by this point, an adult herself, managed to track her father down to the hospital, where she arrived in March of 1947. From the book Handsome Devil, quote, she knew instantly that she had waited too long. Betty found her father paralyzed, watched carefully by guards. She took his hand and whispered in his ear, Morse code, I love you, daddy. She tapped onto his palm. His teeth, his fingers tapped back faintly. I love you too, Skeezix. He died two days after her visit. Wow. Yeah. It's bummer.

I mean, it really is like the very extreme case of like the boy who cried wolf, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, right. Like, of course they didn't believe me. I'm not one to defend the prison system, but like kind of hard to believe the man who did nothing but lie for 70 years or however it was. I mean, I will say that's a very good callback to the Morse code thing. Like that is a very cinematic thing. It's a movie waiting to happen. It's a perfectly cinematic. I'm sure there have been movies made about this guy. Wait, I have a question. Did I miss? What happened to the soul mate lady? Oh, I mean, they just split up at some point. Oh, okay. Yeah. He's never really able to stay

with anybody because his true love is conning people, you know? Yeah. It is daughter. He is as good a father as a man who does the things he does can be. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, so I mean, that's the story of Victor Lustig. I don't hate him. It's hard to hate him, right? He's not a good man, but he's not a monster, you know? Yeah. He was a great con man and he's an amazing con man, an incredible con man. Yeah. He thought about everything he conned people and they wouldn't go to the police because they were also like that. That cash box scam is fucking a plus. Yeah. Plus. And I do respect that he targeted the wealthy 100 percent, eat the rich. I'm all for it. Yeah. I don't hate him. Yeah.

All con men target greed. Unfortunately, a lot of them target the greed of people who are also very poor. And Lustig seemed to pretty much just go after people who were greedy and rich. Yeah. And hard to hate that. Hard to hate that. Not great to women. She slept around constantly, treated his wife like shit. She really loved him. But he taught his daughter Morse code. So he did teach his daughter Morse code. That is not nothing. Wow. Yeah. That's the story of Victor Lustig. And now it's time for the story of Shereen's Plugables. Yeah. Oh, me. Oh, my God. Thank you so much. That was an interesting segue. I'll give you that. It's pronounced Seagwa. I'm Shereen Launayunas. You can follow me on Instagram. It's

shero hero S H E E R O H E R O. And then on Twitter, it's shero hero six six six. Like the devil. I have a podcast called Ethnicly Ambiguous with Anna Hosniak. But that was honestly, I really enjoyed hearing about this man. I wanted to give you a fun one, Shereen. We've had some we've had some heavy conversations on this show. You put me through the ringer. I put you through the ringer. So here's a guy who never murdered any babies or destroyed anybody's bodies. Just con some rich folks. And that's a good time. Right. Everybody needs it's it's a rough world out there. The show is always pretty heavy. Let's talk about some con artists for a week. You know, let's have a good one. That was my thinking with this episode. Well,

thank you for for letting me talk about it. Yeah. It was very refreshing. It's always good to talk about a con artist. We'll talk about another con artist on Thursday. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, Hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sorted tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to let's start a coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you find your favorite shows. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut that he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow,

hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the

iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.