King Con

-



King Con






A-) Victor Lustig was one of the most imaginative criminals in history.

He won and lost several fortunes, had forty-five false identities, and was arrested at least fifty times! Born near Prague in 1890, Victor grew up in a middle-class family and learned to speak five languages fluently. However, he soon turned to a life of crime and in the 1920s he emigrated to the USA.
In Missouri in 1922 he used his most famous alias - rich austrian aristocrat ''Count'' Victor Lustig. He paid a bank $22,000 for a very old farmhouse that nobody wanted to buy. At the same time he asked the bank manager to lend him $10,000. The man agreed and they exchanged envelopes. However, the envelope that Victor handed over did not contain any money, and Victor got away with both his original $22,000 and the bank's $10,000

C- )Three years later he returned to Europe. He had already made over $40,000 in the USA. one afternon in a Paris café, Lustig saw a newspaper article which said that the Eiffel Tower was in poor condition. The repairs were going to be extremely expensive and a few politicians had suggested demolishing it! This gave Lustig an ingenious idea - to sell the Eiffel Tower.

D-) First, he asked a forger to make some 'offical' government notepaper. Then, as 'Deputy Director General of the Post Office' he wrote to five companies which he thought might be interested in buying the Eiffel Tower. He told the businessman that the government had decided to demolish the tower and sell the material from it. He explained that the tower was already thirty-six years old and the architect had never planned to build a permanent structure. Because the government's decision was controversial, the businessmen promised to keep the plan secret

E-) The five company directors then made their offers to buyy the Eiffel Tower. Lustig chose the highest offer took thecash, and escaped to Austria to enjoy his money. Each day, Lustig checked the Paris newspapers for news of his amazing con. But there was nothing - the businessmen, Monsieur Poisson, was to embarrassed to tell anyone how lustig cheated him.
F-) So Lustig returned to Paris, wrote to another fives companies  and sold the Eiffel Tower for second time! However, this time his victim went to the police and lustig had to flee to the USA

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Was Fred Flinstone a vegetarian?

-
Image
     Some anthropologists now think that for millions of years man's diet was more than 80 percent vegetarian. Alan vega investigates Twenty-four million years ago when our ancestors lived in the tropical forests of central Africa,they probably ate plants and fruit, and from time to time a few insects. When these prehistoric people started to travel north into the savannah their diet changed too. and they began to eat a lot of seeds and other plant material. And this is probably how man lived for the next twenty-two million years, eating roots, seeds, fruits, nuts,vegetables and occasionally a little meat.       The Aztecs and Incas ate a lot of cereals, beans, and fruit and not much meat at all. In classical India most people didn't eat meat and the japaneese were mainly vegetarian until a few generations ago. The main food of the slaves who built the Pyramids was boiled onions! Even today, some societies whose lifestyles are un...
Read more

IS GRAFFITI ART?

-
Image
Is GRAFFITI ART?   A-) Sandra Jameson, art critic of The Times         The other day I saw some graffiti on an old factory wall. It was absolutely fantastic: imaginative and beautifully done. Much better, In fact, than a lot of art that you can see in art galleries and exhibitions. Unfortunately, not all graffiti is so beautiful. Although it is true that some talented artists started their careers by painting on walls, most graffiti has no artistic merit at all. It's just people shouting to the world, 'I exist!' I understand why they do it. Young people don't own any buildings, and spraying wall is a way of 'owning' a piece of where you live. But it's a pity it's often so ugly. I think we should tolerate graffiti on old abandoned buildings. After all, they can't look any worse than they do. But it's wrong to paint graffiti on the walls of buildings where people live or work. Teresa Powell, Member of Parliment for East Swindon ...
Read more

Penicillin - The Miracle Drug

-
Image
       In 1928, Alexander Fleming, a scottish doctor and scientist, was working at a hospital in london. He was trying to find ways to fight bacteria. At that time many people died because of bacterial infections; sometimes from very small cuts       Fleming was studying a dangerous bacteria called staphylococci. He was in a hurry because he was going to go on holiday, so heforgot to wash all his equipment in the labarotry before he left. There was one dis in which staphylococci was growing. When fleming came back from holiday a few weeks later, he noticed that there was something in the dish. He didn't know what the thing was, but saw that it was stopping the harmful staphylococci bacteria from growing. Fleming called it penicillin. He knew that penicillin could be an important discovery, and so he did some experiments with it. However, Fleming was not a chemist and he found it diffucult to make pure penicillin. He aske...
Read more