While crime is one of the greatest problems faced by humanity today, our obsession with the inner workings of the criminal mind and true-crime TV simply grows at an accelerated rate.
What unites this talented- for a lack of a better word- con-artists is the way they had managed to awe the public through their fascinating ingenuity, machiavellan scheming, or bold opppurtunims, rendering these criminals immortalized in history.
1. Victor Lustig
Born in 1890 in what is now known as the Czech Republic, Lustig started his criminal life as a swindler that sold tickets from transatlantic ocean liners to wealthy travelers. From there, he upgraded to selling a machine that printed perfect $100 bills through a method that used a "chemical processing" but was only a machine loaded with the money beforehand. Hugely impressed, gullible victims bought these artifacts for as much as $30,000.
However, what makes this con-man special is that his biggest acts were set on selling the Eiffel Tower for scrap metal and conning Al Capone.
With the Eiffel Tower, he saw the oppurtunity when a newspaper article stated that France's iconic monument was going to be dismantled and moved to another location in 1909. Sending fake government letters in fake government stationary, he managed to convince five businessmen to meet him at the Hotel de Crillon with one victim in mind for he was the weakest of all the men: Andre Poissson, a small entrepreneur that desperetaly wanted to join the ranks of the elite Parisian businessmen.
At the end of his act, Lustig managed to get away with $77,000 from Poisson. And, predicting that the man would be too embarrased to report the fraud, Victor Lusting was never persecuted.
But what dubbed Lustig the title of "The smoothest con-man that ever lived" was how he managed to con Al Capone with a deal that promised if the crime boss invested $50,000 to finance a stock deal, then his money would be doubled. However, Lustig later returned the money intact with a note that showed his sincerest apologies, making Al Capone fond of Lustig's honesty and rewarded him with $5,000. Though risky, according to experts this was the outcome the con-man wanted and expected, rendering him one of the most suave con-artists that ever lived.
2. Elmyr De Hory
His career as an art forger began in April of 1946 when one of his wealthiest friend, Lady Malcolm Campbell, thought an abstract painting of a young girl by him was a work of Pablo Picasso, hence Hory selling it for more than $1,000.
Following the unexpected sale, Hory impersonated a Hungarian aristocrat displaced in the postwar diaspora selling what remained of his family's art collection. Through this act, he managed to sell three "Picasso" paintings to an art gallery owner for almost $4,000, and afterwards he traveled Europe, selling fake "Picassos" to every art dealer and gallery owner that would take the bait.
Setting his sights on the American art world, he moved to the U.S. and expanded his repertoire of bogus paintings to include other famous artists such as Matisse, Modigliani, and Renoir. Successful until 1955 because of the exposure his forgeries by the art dealed named Joseph Faulkner, Hory spent most of his wealth bribing the police into setting him free.
Later, however, he made a partnership that lasted eight years with Fernand Legros a man that proclaimed himself Hory's personal art dealer and managed to sell more than fifty fake paintings in less than two years. The pair, moving to Ibiza in a belief that they were safe there, continued to sell the forgeries internationally until 1967, when Spanish authorities charged and persecuted Hory for the "crime" of homosexuality, rendering him noticeable from international authorities that already persecuted the duo for Hory's fake paintings.
Though Hory took his own life with sleeping pills in 1976 and Legros dying a pauper in 1983, they were known as the best art forgers for they mangaged to sell and create more than 1,000 works during his career. And, some art experts say, that some of Hory's paintings have yet to be discovered and still hang in galleries around the world.
3. Doris Payne
A single mother of two in her early twenties in 1952, she realized she could support herself through the theft of high-end jewerly and selling them to a bootlegger. Devising a clever modus operandi that consisted of her natural charm and sleight of hand while dressed as a wealthy woman, she managed to distract store clerks while she tried a variety of expensive jewerly that was moved around until the clerks lost track of the pieces she had tried on, all the while asking about the cut and number of carats to maintain a distraction. The clerks, of course, didn't notice the theft until much later, allowing Payne to get away easily.
Payne, using around tweny different aliases and passports to travel the world robbing jewelry stores, is known for the famous heist in 1974 as she robbed a 10.5-carat emerald-cut diamond worth $500,000 from Cartier in Monte Carlo.
However, she was arrested in 2013 at age 83 after a lucrative 60-year career.
Con-artists, nothing more than a confident smile and sleight of hand, have managed to dupe from powerful people to novices. Some are successful because their clever modus operandi, others because of their Machiavellianism mixed with narcissism, and finally because the crimes of the grifter can be hard to prove, and the perpretatos are less likely to be persecuted, causing con-artists to live infamy.
