The man who sold the Eiffel Tower
Paris, France, 1925
This case is a work of fiction. The characters, names, places and events in the game do not portray real people. The account below is a factual summary, based on public sources, of the case that served as inspiration.
In 1925, the con man Victor Lustig, born in 1890 in Bohemia, then part of Austria-Hungary, read in a Paris newspaper that the Eiffel Tower was rusting, was expensive to maintain and paint, and that some of the public was already talking about dismantling it. He hired a forger to produce official government letterhead and wrote to a small group of the city's biggest scrap dealers, presenting himself as a deputy director of the Ministry of Posts and Telegraphs and asking for absolute secrecy. He received the dealers in a salon at the Hôtel de Crillon, one of the most luxurious hotels in Paris, and announced that the government would sell the tower as scrap, about 7,000 tons of iron.
Lustig rented limousines, took the scrap dealers to visit the tower and watched to see which of them would fall for the scheme. He chose André Poisson, a newcomer to the city and insecure, who wanted to break into Paris's circle of major dealers. When Poisson began asking questions, Lustig hinted that a civil servant earned little and that such a big decision deserved a favor. The request for a bribe convinced Poisson that the man really was from the government: according to Smithsonian magazine, he paid the equivalent of about 70,000 dollars between the price and the bribe, and Lustig left for Austria less than an hour later.
Sources
In the game
Tower for Sale
Paris, Saturday, May 23, 1925, 6 pm. In suite 412 of the Grand Hôtel Mirabeau, a stone's throw from the Concorde, a contract with the gold seal of the Ministry of Posts and Telegraphs lies on the table: the sale of the great iron tower as scrap, 7,000 tons of iron.
Embarrassed, Poisson did not file a complaint, and nothing appeared in the newspapers. Lustig returned to Paris to repeat the scheme with another group of scrap dealers, but suspected that one of them had alerted the police and fled to the United States. There he pulled other cons, such as the fake money-printing machine, and set up a large counterfeiting operation. He was arrested in New York in May 1935, when a key in his wallet led agents to a subway locker holding 51,000 dollars in fake bills and the printing plates. He escaped from jail on the eve of his trial, was recaptured in Pittsburgh, sentenced to 20 years and died in federal custody in 1947.
