Lessons in influence from the greatest con artist who ever lived
What Victor Lustig can teach us about getting our way
I don’t have many heroes but Victor Lustig is one of them. If you look at him, he doesn’t have a face that can inspire trust and yet he may have been the greatest con artist who ever lived. This is the man who sold the Eiffel Tower after all — not once, but twice. It’s worth wondering how he went about influencing people and whether it can be translated contructively into our lives.
In 1925 the French government was deciding what to do about the Eiffel Tower. At the time it was expensive to maintain and was falling into disrepair. Lustig read a newspaper article suggesting that public opinion was leaning towards removing it. Hard to imagine today but this gave Victor an idea. He hired a hotel suite and had official stationary forged before calling a group of scrap metal dealers in for a meeting.
Posing as a government representative he told them the tower was too expensive and he was in charge of finding someone to take charge of decommissioning it. He also stressed that due to the likely public outcry they would need to keep this to themselves. Having selected the most likely dealer from the group he then convinced him that he was a corrupt official. The dealer in question, André Poisson, was an ambitious man. Not only did he pay…
