In May 1925, Victor Lustig read a newspaper article about the Eiffel Tower. It was expensive to maintain, the article said, its paint was failing, and there was public debate about whether the city should keep it at all — it had been built as a temporary exhibition structure and was supposed to have come down in 1909.
Lustig had counterfeit stationery of the Ministère des Postes et Télégraphes printed, took a suite at the Hôtel de Crillon, and invited six of the largest scrap metal dealers in Paris to a confidential meeting.
He introduced himself as Deputy Director General of the Ministry. The government, he explained, had determined that the tower's maintenance costs were unsupportable and had decided to dismantle it and sell it for scrap. The decision was politically sensitive and could not be announced until it was final, which was why the meeting was confidential and why the dealers should say nothing.
He took them on a tour of the tower in a hired limousine, invited sealed bids, and selected André Poisson.
Poisson was a newer entrant to the trade and conscious of his standing among the established Paris dealers, which Lustig had identified. When Poisson's wife raised doubts — the secrecy, the speed, the hotel rather than a ministry office — Lustig arranged a further private meeting and confided the true explanation: that as a government official he was poorly paid, and that arrangements of this kind involved certain considerations.
He asked for a bribe.
Poisson paid the bribe and paid for the tower. Lustig left for Vienna with the money and read the papers for a month waiting for a report that never came. So he returned to Paris and ran it again, on a second group of dealers, and was only nearly caught the second time.
The bribe is the part worth studying, and it is doing three things at once.
It resolves the anomaly. Every element that made Poisson uneasy — the secrecy, the hotel, the haste — is explained by corruption, which is a familiar and comprehensible thing. A story with an explanation for its own irregularities is far stronger than a story without irregularities.
It recruits the mark into the crime. A man who has paid a bribe cannot go to the police without confessing to bribery.
And it flatters. Being let in on a corrupt arrangement is a status claim: it means you have been assessed as the kind of person who understands how things are done.
That third element is the general principle. Lustig's whole method — and it recurs through this part of the guide — was to make the mark's self-image the thing under threat, so that asking an obvious question would feel like an admission of not belonging.