3 memorable con artists

Head over to iTunes for your free audio podcast. Episode 6 – Con artists.

These 3 guys made an art out of the con. Here’s why:

Victor Lustig – 1925 – “sells” the Eiffel Tower, he also conned Al Capone!

Where? – Hailing from Bohemia, which is now in the Czech Republic, he then moved to Paris.

How? – Some years after the 1st Word War, France was still struggling to rebuild. The Eiffel Tower, when originally installed, was only supposed to be a temporary fixture. Now the city of Paris was spending a great deal of upkeep money on the iconic tower. Playing upon these two facts, in 1925 Lustig convinced a number of scrap metal companies from the city to pay him for the rights to the scrap metal which would result from the supposed demolition of Paris’s beloved monument. He took the money and ran, naturally.

Some years later he turned up in U.S. where he managed to convince none other than Al Capone to invest $50,000 in a deal he said would make both of them some money. Lustig stored the money away for around two months before returning it to Capone, stating that the deal had not worked out. Honest and smart on that occasion, he was eventually arrested in 1934 for counterfeiting. He died in a U.S. prison in 1947.

Robert Hendry Freegard – British barman and car salesman who convinced people he was in the MI5 (British secret service), and got them to pay him money for “spy school”, and had them believe they had been selected by the MI5 to work for them.

Where? – England

How? – British barman and car salesman who convinced people he was an undercover member of the MI5 (British secret service). He would select his target, sometimes in an attempt to seduce women, other times in order to extort money. He would convince his victims that they had been chosen to work for the British secret service, and that as a result the IRA were targeting them for assassination. With this leverage in place he convinced people to pay him money for “spy school”, hide in the woods for several days and all under the guise of a loyalty test to the MI5.

He was eventually caught, arrested and charged with two counts of kidnapping, 10 of theft and 8 of deception. 3 years ago he appealed against his ife sentence conviction and won. It is unsure whether he has been released from prison, but if anyone approaches you, especially in a used car sales room, or a bar, acting like James Bond, don’t believe a word he says.

Frank Abagnale Jnr. – inspired the movie “Catch me if you can”, due to his particular skill at forging documents and being generally very inventive and blessed with a knack for convincing people he was, among other things, a commercial airline pilot, teacher and a prison security guard (a prison where he was an inmate).

Where? – Originally from the U.S., he operated worldwide with considerable measures of success.

How? – Abagnale started his career forging cheques in the 1960s. For five years he managed to pass dodgy cheques worth $2.5 million worldwide. He was a consummate perfectionist, and natural actor and a true con artist.

Early on, Abagnale was able to travel the world for free, disguised as a Pan Am pilot, taking advantage of Pan Am’s policy to offer pilots, even of competing airlines, free short haul passage on any of their aircraft routes, if that pilot had to move there at short notice. He was eventually almost caught doing that after two years, so he decided to become a doctor, he was successful at this for another 11 months.

Eventually his crimes caught up with him. He spent time in a French, then a Swedish prison, finally returning to USA to be placed in prison there, before once escaping, disguised as an officer of the Bureau of Prisons, only to be recaptured, placed in prison for another 5 years, whereby the U.S. government recognised his potential to help them recognise other fraudsters out there, and he was released. Today he is worth millions through his company Abagnale and Associates, a financial fraud consultancy.

Check out the CONfidence podcast here on iTunes for more.