On Sept. 28, 1935, Robert V. Miller stepped out of a North Side hotel and took his last breath as a free man before Secret Service and FBI agents arrested him. Four weeks earlier, Miller had escaped from a federal detention facility. He was facing trial on counterfeiting charges, a prosecution that ended a 30-year intercontinental crime spree. His crimes included fraud, forgery and selling the Eiffel Tower — twice. He even tried to steal $50,000 from Al Capone and lived to tell about it.Miller was one of almost 50 names used by the man the Secret Service once dubbed “the most successful con man in history.” Miller’s three-decade crime spree spanned much of Europe and North America. Most 20th century news consumers knew Miller as Count Victor Lustig. As Lustig, he had become entangled with Mae Scheible, the Pittsburgh-based sex work entrepreneur known as the “Million Dollar Madam” and “Public Hostess Number One.” A grifter is bornBorn in 1890 in then Bohemia (now, the Czech Republic), Miller grew up with a brother and sister in a rented two-room stone house. He wrote in a 1935 Leavenworth prison intake form that his family were “poor peasant people” and that they lived in a “very poor residential district.”Raised by relatives after his parents separated, Miller quit school at age 12. By the time he was 17, he was pulling capers throughout western Europe. Miller’s first known arrests (for theft) were in 1908. By 1910, his record included seven arrests and convictions for fraud, larceny and one charge in Switzerland for “contravention against laws concerning fire.” By 1914, Miller had moved to England and began booking trips on trans-Atlantic ships carrying wealthy passengers between Europe and the United States. Traveling first class on some of the most luxurious ocean liners of the time, Miller began ripping off other passengers by cheating at cards and pulling other cons, including selling forged securities.Robert Miller (Victor Lustig) FBI wanted poster released after his escape from a New York City federal detention facility. Photo courtesy Jeff Maysh.“I have worked out a blueprint for travel on the boats,” Miller wrote to his brother in a 1915 letter transcribed by author Christopher Sandford. “Anyone can earn thousands of dollars by doing nothing that is outlawed but only winning over your fellow pilgrim’s trust. Once done, you will scoop up his money.”Miller was no street corner shell game operator. He studied the art of the con with Julius “Nicky” Arnstein, a grifter with ties to Arnold Rothstein (best known for fixing the 1919 World Series) and who was married to actress Fanny Brice. While honing his skills on the high seas, Miller also pulled his first (known) scam selling a public landmark. Posing as a London official, in 1914 Miller allegedly sold the Tower Bridge to a gullible Australian tourist.  Miller found many marks in the United States and scooped up lots of money here, according to records included in his voluminous 1,342-page Alcatraz prison file. In 1917, he was already using the Lustig name while living in Chicago. Miller wrote in a June 1917 draft registration that he was a self-employed “ink manufacturer.”That same year, Miller was arrested in Chicago for running a confidence game in Denver. He avoided jail by forfeiting a $1,500 bond. Over the next decade, Miller racked up arrests in Detroit, Omaha, San Francisco, St. Louis, Los Angeles, New York City and Indianapolis.Page from the Alcatraz Warden’s Notebook. Photo courtesy National Archives. Link to original: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/236735166.Miller easily flitted between Europe and the United States, always looking for the next scam. While in Paris in 1925, he read a newspaper article describing rust on the Eiffel Tower. Reprising the Tower Bridge scam from a decade earlier, Miller built a fake government ministry office in the basement of the hotel where he was staying. Posing as a Ministry of Commerce official, Miller interviewed candidates interested in buying the tower as scrap metal. He sold the tower to the highest bidder, Andre´ Poisson, who believed that a 70,000-franc bribe would secure his rights to the landmark.After pocketing the money, Miller quickly left Paris. He waited to see if Poisson would report the crime to the police. When nothing appeared in the press, Miller returned to Paris and pulled the same scam. This time, Miller’s mark went to the police and Miller again avoided capture.The slippery countMiller rarely spent more than a few hours in custody. Except for a few stays in European jails in two-month stretches, he managed to talk or buy his way out of custody. If that didn’t work, he simply skipped town. Before the crime spree that led to his Pittsburgh capture in 1935, he had escaped from an Indiana jail in 1927. A four-page memo written by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover after Miller’s 1935 conviction is an impressive laundry list of crimes and subsequent successful efforts to dodge imprisonment.Miller biographer Christopher Sandford. Photo by Nicholas Sandford, courtesy of Christopher Sandford.Sandford, Miller’s biographer, found the fraudster’s audacious antics and story compelling. Prior to writing about Miller, Sandford had written celebrity biographies: Mick Jagger, Steve McQueen and Eric Clapton among them. The writer wanted a departure from predictable success stories. The result was the 2021 book, “Victor Lustig: The Man Who Conned the World.”“In Britain where I grew up, there’s a sort of public empathy for what they call the diamond geezer, which is English slang,” Sandford says. “It could be roughly translated as a lovable rogue, a guy who strays on the wrong side of the line legally, and yet who is not without a certain code of his own.”Sandford preferred to use Miller’s best-known alias, Victor Lustig, throughout the book, instead of the name that U.S. courts and law enforcement agencies used for the career criminal. It’s a name that fits well with an incredible story. Miller’s ties to Pittsburgh are found throughout the book. The fraudster’s teenage daughter attended a Catholic school here, and Miller allegedly met Scheible in her Oakland brothel, just before she decamped for New York City as Pittsburgh police began applying pressure to close it down.“About February 1934, Victor Lustig … was introduced to Scheible at her house on Fifth Avenue,” the FBI wrote in a 1937 report. He went there trolling for suckers — wealthy, gullible men. “There is no better place to find a mark, than at a madam’s,” Miller’s daughter Betty Jean wrote that Miller had said (in a book published after Jean’s death). “They are the best people in the world to point out a mark to you. They know them all.”Mae Scheible during her 1938 income tax evasion trial. Wire photo.Instead of a rich man, Miller pulled one of his most lucrative scams on the madam herself — Scheible. He sold her a “money-making box” for $15,000. Scheible went to the police and learned Miller’s true identity. She then tracked him down and set into motion a series of events that ultimately ended with them both in federal prisons.Miller and Scheible had a tangled relationship that included sex, larceny and lies — lots of lies. Miller and Scheible’s drama began in Pittsburgh and jumped to New York in 1935. There, the FBI and Secret Service arrested Scheible and her sidekick, Joe Ryan, as the agencies were closing in on Miller, whom they were investigating for running a massive counterfeiting operation. Federal agents seized Scheible’s business records and black book. The information contributed to their prosecution of Miller and to Scheible’s later indictment on Mann Act (also known as the White-Slave Traffic Act of 1910) charges. The case hinged on Scheible and Ryan transporting sex workers from Pittsburgh to New York.A one-way ticket to AlcatrazScheible had a notorious temper and she wanted her money back. She helped the Secret Service capture Miller in 1935. He ended up cooling his heels in a midtown Manhattan federal detention facility while awaiting trial. Shortly before his scheduled trial date, Miller escaped by using a sharpened spoon and pliers to remove the metal mesh from a third-floor window. In broad daylight, he shimmied down the building’s façade using a rope made from sheets. Miller posed as a window washer as a crowd below watched.New York City federal detention facility where Robert Miller made his daring escape in 1935. Photo courtesy National Archives.Federal agents suspected that Scheible assisted in his escape. The next day, the New York Daily News reported that Scheible had frequently visited Miller. Sandford wrote that Scheible let Miller stay with her his first night as a fugitive and that she aided his run by giving him money and clothing.Miller’s escape triggered a nationwide search. After three weeks on the run, the FBI and Secret Service tracked Miller to Lane’s Stag Hotel on Anderson Street in the North Side. Miller had been in Pittsburgh, staying there and in properties Scheible controlled.Secret Service and FBI agents captured Robert Miller after he left the North Side hotel where he was hiding out in September 1935. Photo courtesy of Sen. John Heinz History Center archives via historicpittsburgh.org.Site of Lane’s Stag Hotel on Anderson Street in the North Side. Photo by David S. Rotenstein.Back in custody and facing a grueling trial, Miller pleaded guilty to counterfeiting and escape charges. Sentenced to serve 20 years, Miller went to the new federal prison in Lewisburg, Pa. “This man will be kept in a cell in the isolation section, which will be double locked at all times,” the deputy warden warned in a memo to the captain of the guards there. Prison staff were told that Miller should never be left unguarded.From Lewisburg, Miller went to Leavenworth. Both prisons were temporary stops on the way to Alcatraz. “Lustig, as you no doubt recall escaped from the Federal Detention House in New York City,” wrote United States Attorney Lamar Hardy in a letter to the U.S. attorney general. “In view of the nature of the crime, the length of the sentence and the background of the prisoner, I respectfully recommend that he be incarcerated at Alcatraz.”Miller spent 10 years in Alcatraz. He made an indelible impression there. Miller got many reprimands for breaking prison rules and submitted lots of unusual requests to officials — including asking for assistance in patenting a new printing ink for money to proffering a peace plan to end World War II. Miller’s prison medical records show repeated treatments for chronic sinus problems. Late in 1946, his health deteriorated to the point where Miller was transferred to the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri. He died there March 11, 1947, at age 57.Miller and Scheible’s stories have become enshrined in international true crime canon. Though Pittsburgh has its own homegrown jailbreak stories, including the infamous Biddle brothers‘ 1902 escape from the Allegheny County Jail, Miller’s escape to Pittsburgh and recapture deserves a place among them.The post The world’s greatest con man was finally caught in Pittsburgh appeared first on NEXTpittsburgh.