4. Victor Lustig
In 1925, France was still recovering from the First World One and Paris was a fertile ground for a con man. Lustig read a newspaper article that one of city’s major problems was the maintenance of the Eiffel Tower. He forged a government document and invited major scrap dealers in a secret meeting. The idea of scrapping the Eiffel Tower wasn’t too strange at the time as it wasn’t meant to be a permanent monument in the first place. The tower was built in 1889 in Paris Exhibition and the designer originally planned to dismantle it in a few years. Lustig not only received a large sum of money from the Eiffel Tower scam, but also from bribery and money printing machine scam. He spent 20 years sentence in Alcatraz and died from pneumonia in Missouri at 1947.
