Good ‘night’ at Vienna

That a fool and his money are easily parted is a well-known saying. No one proved this better than a man called Victor Lustig who, in 1925, sold the Eiffel Tower twice — once successfully. What Lustig did was brilliantly simple: he got hold of a bunch of greedy scrap-dealers and, on the basis of a forged government document, told them that he was the deputy director general of the department of Posts and Telegraph and had been asked by the French government to sell the tower off as scrap as it was too expensive to maintain. Since originally the tower (built for the 1899 Paris expo) was to have been dismantled in 1909, everyone believed him. Lustig charmed the scrap-dealers off their feet and warned them that they were not to talk about the sale as the matter was a top state secret. But he had already decided on the buyer, whom he had correctly assessed as a greedy and corrupt fool, and convinced him saying that, as a government official, he was open to a little lolly on the side. Lustig then took his money for the tower and went off to Vienna — only to return some months later and try the same stunt again, believing rightly that the first buyer would not spill the beans. However, this time he did not succeed because word had gotten out. But Lustig was never arrested.