THE MAN WHO SOLD THE EIFFEL TOWER (1925)

LOCATION: Paris

PERPETRATOR: Robert Miller, aka Count Victor Lusting

MOTIVATION: Fraud

BACKGROUND: In May 1925, an article appeared in a French newspaper on the declining state of the Eiffel Tower. The iconic landmark had been in public ownership since 1909 and had been neglected for years by the Ministry of Post and Telegraph, so that it had become and an embarrassment to the city of Paris.

Lusting was in New York when he read the article about the Eiffel Tower. He traveled to Paris and took a suite luxurious Hotel de Crillon on the Place de la Concorde in the center of the city, near many of the ministries of the French Government. The next step was to send letter out on the headed paper to invite six of the largest scrap metal merchants in Paris to meeting in his suit. Once the merchants were assembled, he told them that the government had decided that it was too expensive to refurbish the Eiffel Tower and intended to sell it off to the highest bidder for scrap.

Lusting had picked his mark, a man called Andre Poisson, who took the bait, perhaps thinking that the payment of backhanders was a necessary expense in order to secure governments contracts.

Lusting cashed the check immediately and left Paris for Vienna with a suitcase full of money.

Lusting waited in Vienna spectating to hear that Poisson had reported him to the police.

Lusting went back to America, where he continued his criminal career for another ten years, branching out into counterfeiting before being arrested by the FBI in 1935.

OUTCOME: The Eiffel Tower is still standing.