There are some frauds so well conducted that it would be stupidity not to be deceived by them.

—Charles Cotton

The Eiffel Tower is one of the most recognizable and well-trafficked monuments in the world. Each year, it’s estimated well over six million visitors wait in long lines to experience this gorgeous landmark. It may be hard to believe, but when it was built the tower was subject to ridicule and was only supposed to stand for 20 years before being disassembled.

Gustave Eiffel designed his namesake tower for the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris. No one had ever built a structure so tall before so the fact that it was erected in just over two years is a technical feat that was unparalleled at the time. Naysayers told Eiffel the tower would be impossible to build. The wind would make it too dangerous for people to ascend to such heights and the government wasn’t keen on spending an estimated $1 million on the project. His contract stipulated that the tower would be allowed to stand for 20 years to be able to earn enough of a profit to make it worthwhile, at which point the erector set–looking structure would be taken down piece by piece.

The engineering and construction involved required an incredible amount of precision. The iron plates used to build the tower would have stretched 43 miles long if they were laid end-to-end and called for over seven million holes to be drilled into them. The iron used to construct the tower weighed over 7,000 tons and required more than 60 tons of paint. Each piece was traced out to be accurate within a tenth of a millimeter. There were 2.5 million rivets used in construction. Including the flagpole at the top, the Eiffel Tower reached 1,000 feet in height when it was finished.^[1]

Although the tower was more beautiful than most could have imagined, it was initially panned by critics. Many of France’s leading artists and intellectuals derided the tower, calling it “a truly tragic street lamp” and an “iron gymnasium apparatus, incomplete, confused, and deformed.” The Americans and Brits weren’t fans either, mostly because they were jealous. The New York Times called it “an abomination and eyesore.” Editors at the London Times referred to it as the “monstrous erection in the middle of the noble public buildings of Paris.” Americans didn’t appreciate how the Eiffel Tower surpassed the Washington Monument as the tallest man-made structure at that time. Once it was completed even the most ardent critics eventually came around to the fact that it was a masterpiece, yet the government still wasn’t positive they would keep the structure in place forever. In the years after the tower was built it began to fall into disrepair. It was costing the city a fortune in maintenance and upkeep.^[2]

A man by the name of Victor Lustig saw this situation as an opportunity to profit from the uncertainty surrounding the future of this magnificent monument. Lustig decided he would sell the Eiffel Tower to the highest bidder … twice.

The Count

The man who tried to sell the Eiffel Tower had up to 45 different aliases. No one knew his real name or exactly where he came from, but he told authorities at one point his name was Robert Miller. As a young man traveling on an ocean liner from Europe to America, Miller came up with the name Victor “the Count” Lustig to fit in with the aristocrats on the ship. The name was a ploy to gain their trust. An ability to know his audience and adapt to any situation would prove to be an invaluable asset to Lustig over time. He began his career as a gambler but graduated to financial scams after figuring out how the wealthy class operated.

The Count’s most successful scam was called the Romanian Money Box. To find his marks, Lustig would hang around expensive hotels, arriving by limo to show he belonged with the upper echelon of society. In bars and restaurants he would casually let it slip that he owned a secret money-printing box. After the seed was planted, the mark would go to Lustig’s hotel room for a demonstration of how the contraption worked. Lustig would insert a single $100 bill into a small slot in the machine, which was a small wooden box full of knobs and brass dials. A substance called “radium” was Lustig’s secret weapon for copying the bills. At least that’s what he told his unsuspecting victims. For show, he would turn a few knobs and tell the person the only downside was that it took six hours to make a new bill using this secret substance.

After dinner and drinks, they would head back up to the room to find that a perfect copy of the $100 bill had popped out the other end of the box. When the wealthy elite saw this magical money-making machine actually worked they would offer to buy it on the spot. But the Count played it cool, always holding out for a short time, which invariably drove up the price people were willing to pay.^[3] One of the best ways to persuade someone to do something is to allow them to come to the conclusion themselves. Once you’ve convinced yourself you’re going to do something, you are unlikely to change your mind. Lustig let them convince themselves it was worth it.

Of course, no such magical box that could produce perfect copies of $100 bills actually existed. The “copies” that came out of the box were actual $100 bills Lustig had placed in the jury-rigged machine himself. Blinded by their greed, people would pay tens of thousands of dollars for a machine that had just $200 in it. The beauty of his scam is it would take 12 hours to produce those two bills and by the time these people realized they’d been swindled, Lustig had half a day of a head start to make his exit.

After wearing out his welcome in New York City, Lustig decided to try his hand in Chicago. In the 1920s, Al Capone ran the criminal rackets in the Windy City. Lustig was fearless, so he decided to pay a visit to the notorious gangster when he got to town to seek Capone’s approval to operate on the mob boss’s territory. Lustig told Capone he needed $50,000 to pull off a grand trade, promising the mobster he could double his money in just two months. The man known as Scarface said, “Okay, Count, double it in 60 days like you said.” Two months later he was back in front of Capone asking for forgiveness. The get-rich-quick scheme had fallen through. Capone was furious. Just as he was about to explode, Lustig handed the crime boss his original $50,000 investment back and said, “Here, sir, is your money, to the penny. Again, my sincerest apologies. This is most embarrassing. Things didn’t work out the way I had thought they would, I should have loved to have doubled your money for you and for myself – Lord knows that I need it – but the plan just did not materialize.”^[4]

Capone told Lustig he was expecting either $100,000 or nothing so he was taken aback by the man’s honesty. Somehow the most notorious gangster on the planet not only gave him a pass, but Capone even counted out $5,000 from the pile to give the Count a head start in his business dealings! Here’s the kicker: Lustig had never even dreamed up a money scheme to begin with. The $50,000 was sitting in a security box the entire month. It was his plan all along to gain the mob boss’s trust and that’s exactly what he did. Of course, Lustig was only playing an honest man for this ruse. He once said, “I cannot stand honest men. They lead desperate lives, full of boredom.”^[5]

Selling the Eiffel Tower

After a number of run-ins with the law, Lustig was looking to pull off one last big score to get out of the life of a con artist. Because the authorities in the US were onto his hijinks, Lustig went to Paris to pull off his pièce de résistance. Around the time Lustig returned to Paris, there were many stories in the local papers about the dilapidated state of the famous Eiffel Tower. A lightbulb went off in Lustig’s head. He set about creating a fake government role for himself, complete with his own stationary and business cards done up with an official French seal. There was even an official-sounding, yet completely made-up title: “Deputy Director General of the Ministry of Posts and Telegraphs.” Again using one of the finest hotels in the city, he set up shop at the Hôtel de Crillon, a stone palace on the Place de la Concorde. The biggest scrap metal dealers in town were summoned to the luxurious hotel for a secret business proposal.

“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 this group in a quiet hotel room. The Count then shocked the small group of metal dealers by announcing the Eiffel Tower would be sold to the highest bidder. Many at the table were in disbelief but Lustig assured them if the government was able to turn a profit on the deal, it would minimize the protests from citizens.^[6] The 1,000-foot tall structure contains more than 7,000 metric tons of iron, along with 2.5 million rivets that held it together, so these scrap metal dealers could calculate the sale of this amount of metal would net a fortune to those who tore it down and sold off the parts. To make the process more believable, the dealers were even taken on a tour of the monument to give them a better sense of the scale of the operation.

Bids were due by the next morning along with the promise of complete secrecy from those involved. Lustig told his marks the government didn’t want word to get out for fear of a public outcry against tearing it down. Although he took bids from all interested parties, the patsy was picked out well in advance. Andre Poisson was relatively new to the area and trying to make a name for himself. What better way to make a name for yourself than by winning the biggest scrap metal project in the country’s history? A few days later Lustig informed Poisson his offer of 250,000 francs (roughly $1 million today) was in fact the winning bid. Once he learned he won, Poisson finally became wary of the whole operation. So to seal the deal, Lustig demanded a bribe for securing the transaction. Everyone assumed all Parisian government officials were corrupt, so the bribe was the final nail in the coffin to make it seem legit. Poisson was in.^[7]

Lustig secured the cash and handed over the “official” paperwork to finalize the sale. After a number of failed attempts to claim possession of the Eiffel Tower, Poisson finally realized he’d been swindled. By this point, Lustig had already fled the country. But a funny thing happened as he waited to see a news story about the man who tried to sell the Eiffel Tower – the story never came. Lustig was initially befuddled, but eventually realized Poisson was so embarrassed he was taken advantage of that he never bothered telling the authorities to save face. Never one to rest on his laurels, Lustig decided to test his good fortune by going back to Paris to try selling the Eiffel Tower a second time! This time he wasn’t quite so lucky. The potential buyer went to the police before handing over the money, and Lustig was forced to flee the country yet again.^[8]

Back in the States, the Count perfected his counterfeiting skills to the tune of more than $2.3 million over a five-year period. When the police finally apprehended him, Lustig had one more trick up his sleeve. As he awaited sentencing he pulled a jailbreak fit for a scene right out of a movie. Using a pair of stolen wire cutters (no one knows how he came to possess them) to open up his third-story window, he tied nine bedsheets together and used them as a rope to climb down three stories. The only problem was there was a crowd of roughly 100 people on Eleventh Avenue in New York City who saw him climbing down. Once he realized people were onto him, he took a rag from his pocket and pretended to clean the windows on his way down to pass himself off as a window cleaner. When he planted his feet on the ground, he gave the crowd a bow and ran away.^[9]

Once the authorities finally caught up with the notorious con man, they took no chances, sending their new prisoner off to Alcatraz for a 20-year sentence. His death certificate listed his name as Robert V. Miller, but to this day no one knows his true identity or where he really came from. It wasn’t until 1906 that Parisian officials extended the Eiffel Tower’s contract to 1915, and a number of years later that they finally made it a permanent piece of the city’s magnificent landscape.^[10]

Everyone Is in Sales

In the movie Gladiator, Russell Crowe’s character Maximus seeks the counsel of Proximo, a former champion gladiator, on how to win in the arena:

Maximus:

You ask me what I want. I too want to stand before the Emperor as you did.

Proximo:

Then listen to me. Learn from me. I wasn’t the best because I killed quickly. I was the best because the crowd loved me. Win the crowd. And you will win your freedom.

Maximus:

I will win the crowd. I will give them something they have never seen before.

Maximus did just that, shouting the best line of the movie to the crowd after one of his victories:

ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?!

Maximus was a strong fighter and intelligent strategist but needed to sell himself to succeed. Lustig was one of the greatest con men ever because he knew how to win a crowd through some tried-and-true sales tactics. The actual product or service involved in his scams didn’t matter all that much because Lustig was selling a dream, an easy way out, or an opportunity to get rich quickly. In a way, he was also an entertainer, giving the people what they wanted because he understood his marks so well. Even though his sole goal in life was to con others out of their money, there are some lessons we can learn from how Lustig approached the sales process.

Those in the sales profession get a bad rap in that most buyers assume salespeople are always trying to rip them off. But most things in life have an element of sales involved. Finding a good job is about selling yourself and your strengths. Finding a spouse is about marketing your good qualities. To put forward the thoughts and ideas that you care about requires the ability to convince others your opinions matter. This is especially true when you’re first coming up in the working world without the requisite experience. Networking plays a huge role when finding a job these days, so you need the ability to convince others they should make a sale on your behalf to help with job opportunities.

Here are some of the most important aspects of the sales process to remember:

• Know your audience. When Spike Lee was making Malcolm X he knew the movie would go over budget before they even began shooting. The studio didn’t have a budget for a three-hour movie but that’s what Lee wanted. Out of that same budget, Lee was being paid $1 million to direct the film so he decided to put that entire amount right back into the movie, but it still wasn’t enough. To get the movie made to his liking, Lee knew he needed to call up prominent people in the entertainment and professional sports worlds to get the remainder of the money. This would allow them to shoot a pivotal scene in South Africa as opposed to recreating South Africa on the Jersey Shore.

  Lee was able to secure money from the likes of Oprah, Prince, Tracy Chapman, and Janet Jackson. The last call he made was to Michael Jordan, arguably the greatest basketball player to ever play the game. But Lee went to Jordan’s rival Magic Johnson first. Johnson asked how much he needed, Lee told him, and Magic immediately sent the money. Knowing Jordan was one of the most competitive people on the planet Lee admitted, “I just happened to let slip how much Magic wrote on his check,” to which Jordan replied, “Magic gave how much?!” Not to be outdone, Jordan gave even more than Magic to seal the deal so the movie would be done to Lee’s liking.^[11]

  If you want to get people to act, you first have to understand your audience.

• Everyone can be sold to. Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvador Mundi, a 500-year-old painting of Jesus Christ, was rediscovered in 2007 at a regional auction where the original painting was masquerading as a copy.^[12] Da Vinci’s masterpiece was sold for a record-breaking $450.3 million in November 2017. Christie’s handled the auction for the painting. To drum up interest they staged high-profile public exhibitions of the painting around the globe and created a video that was more or less an ad for the painting.^[13] This confused some people at the time because the market for buyers of a painting that could sell for nearly half a billion dollars is quite small.

  The sales staff at Christie’s personally knew the list of potential buyers because it was such an exclusive club. By making a show of the process and planting the seed that it was an iconic painting, they got this small billionaires club to value the painting more highly based on the premise that it must be more valuable if others consider it valuable. You may roll your eyes at the actions of people with more money than they know what to do with by “wasting” it on art, but this is simply human nature in action. We perceive value to be higher when others perceive value to be high. It’s a vicious cycle but that’s how all of this works in some ways.
• Understand who has the informational advantage. In the pre-digital days the seller had an enormous information advantage over the buyer. The Internet has leveled this playing field. People can actually look stuff up now and instantaneously compare products, services, and prices on their little handheld supercomputers. Everyone is in sales, whether they’re selling products, services, or ideas. The trick is to find a way to do it without resorting to shady sales tactics that may have worked in the past. In his book, The Win without Pitching Manifesto, Blair Enns give three ways to sell for those who don’t simply want to trick an unwitting customer:
  1. Help the unaware
  2. Inspire the interested
  3. Reassure those who have formed intent

Enns writes:

The psychology of buying is the psychology of changing. Selling, therefore, is change management. The very best salespeople are respectful, selective facilitators of change. They help people move forward to solve their problems and capitalize on their opportunities. The rest talk people into things.^[14]

Obviously, Victor Lustig talked people into things because he was a master manipulator with a huge ego. But he also understood people and utilized the soft skills of trust and persuasion as well as anyone. Never one to be shy from his own accomplishments, Lustig even penned a list called the Ten Commandments of the Con. Numbers three and four on the list show how eager he was to get in the good graces of his marks:

Wait for the other person to reveal any political opinions, then agree with them.

Let the other person reveal religious views, then have the same ones.

Trust is a huge component of the sales process because we prefer doing business with likeable, trustworthy people. When our ancestors were in small tribes and villages, the people around us were those we trusted the most, so our brains are hardwired to be more comfortable with people who seem trustworthy. Unfortunately, this is a double-edged sword as the people who often seem the most trustworthy are also the ones who possess the ability to take advantage of you. Trust, but verify.