What are two ways they deceived people + how did they get away with it?
Think about the ideas in the two passages below, and then write an informative/explanatory essay explaining how these people successfully deceived others for many years. Be sure to use information from BOTH texts in your essay. ***Your response should be a minimum of 4-5 paragraphs in length.
Victor Lustig by Calvin George
In 1925, a man who called himself Victor Lustig arrived in Paris and
learned about a dilemma concerning the Eiffel Tower (the huge, iron monument constructed by Alexandre Gustave Eiffel’s company for the 1889 World’s Fair. By the time that Lustig visited Paris, the rusty, dilapidated tower required expensive repairs, sparking a debate about whether the government should invest in costly maintenance or demolish the iron carbuncle.
Posing as the Deputy Director General of the Ministère des Postes et Télégraphes (the French administration of postal services and telecommunications), Lustig settled into a fashionable hotel and sent bid requests to local scrap metal dealers for the right to destroy the tower and take possession of 7,000 tons of metal. A dealer who was new to Paris paid Lustig a $20,000 bribe and an additional $50,000 to ensure that he would be awarded the contract. After Lustig acquired the $70,000, he vanished like a guilty specter.
During the following year, Lustig conned people with his Rumanian money box (a handcrafted mahogany box that appeared to duplicate money). Lustig would insert a $100 bill and a piece of paper into a narrow slot cut at one end of the box and then manipulate a complicated series of levers. Six hours later, he would turn a crank, and from another slot, the $100 bill emerged with a second $100 bill—which Lustig had hidden within the box. After confirming that both bills were genuine, gullible customers paid between $10,000 to $30,000 for the box.
Lustig’s greed became his downfall while living in the United States. In 1930, he started a counterfeiting operation with a chemist, distributing more than $100,000 per month of the phony bills. Years earlier, Lustig had swindled a Texas sheriff with the Rumanian money box. The sheriff found Lustig in Chicago, and Lustig made amends with a large cash payment; the bills were counterfeit. On the trail of unknown counterfeiters, the Secret Service arrested the sheriff for paying with counterfeit bills in New Orleans. Furious that Lustig had tricked him again, the sheriff enthusiastically provided a description of the con man. Meanwhile, millions of dollars of counterfeit money continued to flood the market.
In 1935, Lustig’s jealous girlfriend told police where they could find Lustig in New York City. Secret Service agents captured Lustig and located his subway station locker, which held more than $50,000 in counterfeit bills and the plates used to print the money.
Lustig was charged and held in a cell on the third floor of the Federal Detention Headquarters. The con man cut the bars in his window and used bedsheets to make a rope. As he climbed down the rope, he wiped windows, pretending to be a window washer. Lustig was captured a month later in Pittsburgh and sentenced to 20 years in Alcatraz.
Albert Abrams
by Jonah Callus
In 1910, San Francisco native Dr. Albert Abrams
published a book called Spondylotherapy that described how to
cure diseases by pounding on the spine. Some call this book
Abrams’ first venture into the world of quack medicine. If
Abrams was testing the water of quack medicine with his spine
pounding therapy, then he enthusiastically jumped feet first into quackery with his book New Concepts in Diagnosis and Treatment (1916). Here, Abrams described the practice of “radionics.”
According to Abrams, every disease has its unique vibratory rate, which can be detected and treated with his electronic box, the “oscilloclast.” The box could reveal a diagnosis with a drop of blood, saliva, or a hair strand. Diagnosis could be performed by placing a piece of blood-stained paper on two electrodes. Another electrode was affixed to the forehead of a healthy person called a proxy, who stood on a rubber mat facing west. The medical expert tapped the proxy’s stomach to detect areas producing a certain tone, and this result enabled diagnosis of the blood donor. Abrams claimed that his technique was so sensitive that it could reveal a person’s religion.
After diagnosis, the so-called medical expert set the oscilloclast to the same vibration rate as the disease. Then, the machine’s vibrations supposedly extinguished the disease vibrations and shattered the disease like a sledgehammer hitting a teacup. By 1923, more than 3,000 medical experts leased oscilloclasts from Abrams.
While the machines produced money for Abrams and his followers, physicians refuted the technique in medical journals. For example, the January 26, 1924 issue of The Lancet included an article by Dr. F. Howard Humphris, who described experiments performed by doctors in several states. They sent blood samples to radionics experts, who reported various human diseases. In one case, the blood had been obtained from a guinea pig, and in another case, a rooster.
Dr. Humphris also quoted an evaluation of the oscilloclast attributed to Robert A. Millikan (who was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1923). “It’s a contraption,” Millikan reportedly said, “which might have been thrown together by a ten-year-old boy who knows a little about electricity to mystify an eight-year-old boy who knows nothing about it.”
Scientific American presented reports on radionics over the course of a year, concluding with the September 1924 issue. Austin C. Lescarboura (who was a member of the magazine’s Abrams Investigation Committee) wrote that the Abrams technique does not merit serious attention. “At best,” he said, “it is all an illusion. At worst, it is a colossal fraud.”
Albert Abrams died a millionaire in January 1924. In his will, Abrams directed millions of dollars to the Electronic Medical Foundation to support continuing application of radionics.
