KING CON! - Summary
Victor Lustig was a criminal famous for his imaginative crimes. He was born near Prague in 1890 and he emigrated to the USA in 1920s. He used his most famous alias in Missouri: he pretended to be a rich Australian aristocrat. He paid a bank $22,000 for a very old farmhouse and contemporaneously asked the bank manager to lend him $10,000. When they exchanged envelopes, the bank manager received an empty one: Victor held his money and gained $20,000. Three years later he returned to Europe and one day he discovered that the Eiffel Tower was in poor conditions and some politicians had suggested demolishing it. He asked a forger to make some government newspaper and wrote to five companies trying to sell them the Eiffel Tower. The company directors made their offers, Victor chose the highest one, took the cash and escaped to Austria. The conned businessman didn't told anyone what had happened, so Victor could repeat his con and sell the Eiffel Tower for the second time. But this time his victim went to the police and Lustig had to flee to the USA. After many others crimes, he was arrested and sent to the Alcatraz prison for 20 years.

EXERCISES Page 99

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1 A plan in Paris - C
2 Caught at last - F
3 Explaining the details - D
4 He does it again - E
5 The 'Count' and the bank manager - B
6 The origin of a thief - A

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Nouns
alias
forger
con
Adjectives
controversial
Verbs
handed over
flee

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1 An alias is a false identity.
2 A con is when someone believes a criminal's lies and gives him money.
3 A person who makes realistic copies of money, documents, etc. is a forger.
4 When something causes arguments, we say it is controversial.
5 To flee is to escape quickly, especially when you are in danger.
6 To hand over something is to give it to another person.

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Deling with new words
When you come across new words in a text:
1 don't panic - often you don't need them to understand the main ideas of the text.
2 decide what part of the speech they are.
3 guess their meaning by looking carefully at the context.

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1 People still talk about Victor Lustig today because he commited some fascinating crimes.
2 Victor thought of his plan to sell the Eifell Tower while he was reading a newspaper in Paris.
3 The French businessmen thought Victor worked as a government minister.
4 Victor's victim, Poisson, didn't go to the police because, he didn't want anyone to know how stupid he had been.
5 Victor sold the Eifell Tower a secon time because it had worked perfectly the first time.
6 The police had never arrested Victor until 1935.

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A I think Victor Lustig was a bad criminal and should be condemned.
B I don't agree. The people he conned were greedy.
A Yes, they were. But however he had commited many crimes.
B But the people he conned shoud have relized they were being conned!
A No, he had conned them and he deserved to be condemned.