During WWI he settled in Paris but took up residence in the USA after the war. He shuttled between Miami and the plush casinos of Havana, representing himself as a producer of Broadway shows. He let it be known that he sometimes accepted investments in his productions. He eventually focused on a wealthy shoe manufacturer from Connecticut who thought he could be successful as an actor. Lustig said he would put up one third of the costs but was looking for two other investors but claimed to be reluctant to accept money from friends in case the show was a flop and the friendship was threatened. This made the shoe manufacturer even more eager. When they met in Lustig's hotel in New York, Lustig opened his suitcase to show his 33000 dollars, which happened to be counterfeit. The man handed over an envelope with his 33000 share and Lustig placed all in a suitcase oh a shelf in a cupboard.

During dinner a bellman from the hotel summoned Lustig to answer a telephone call, ostensibly from his casting director. He used this excuse to leave the hotel, taking the suitcase with him to Europe. The dupe called in the police and private detectives to trace Lustig but to no avail.

In 1923 her returned to Palm Beach in Florida where there were countless millionaires. He acquired a Rolls Royce and employed a uniformed chauffeur. With his charming accent and quaint old-world manners, he made friends quickly. His next victim, one George Loller, a mechanic who had made a fortune during the war manufacturing car and truck parts, owned a huge yacht even though he was being hard-pressed for money now his company was facing hard times. Lustig let it be known that his family had lost its wealth as a result of the war but that he had hit upon a foolproof way of making a good living. He claimed he had a machine that produced paper money! In his hotel room he showed Loller his Romanian Box trick. It was a beautifully lacquered box about the size of a shoe box and was fitted with shiny brass knobs and glass-faced dials. It had slots on two sides each larger than piece of paper money. Spinning a yarn about how he had acquired the machine, Lustig inserted a $1000 bill in one side of the box and blank piece of paper in the other. A chemical process was going to transfer the image of the banknote to the blank without damaging the original. The process would take four hours, so they wined and dined together. Afterwards, the 'count fiddled with the knobs and out popped two $1000 bills, each with the same serial number. Lustig's secret was that he had employed a master forger to replicate the original bill. Loller begged to buy the machine and Lustig, with a fine show of reluctance, agreed to sell it for $25000. Naturally when Loller in his yacht tried to make it work, nothing happened and he discovered that the box contained only rubber bands and blank pieces of paper. Naturally too, when he rushed to confront the count, Lustig had disappeared.

In 1925 Lustig turned up in Paris in the fine Crillon hotel with an associate called 'Dapper Dan' Collins who was introduced as his private secretary. One day the newspapers told how the Eiffel Tower was so much in need of repairs that it might be more economical to demolish it. Lustig now abandoned the identity of a count and passed himself off as a government official. He organised a meeting of several scrap iron dealers and advised that he was authorised to sell the tower's 7000 tons of iron as scrap to the highest bidder. One scrap merchant, Jacques Buriot, put in a bid in a sealed envelope and was visited by both Collins and Lustig to reassure him of the bona fides of the project. Buriot sent off a cheque and received and official-looking document on government stationery but of course the cheque was immediately cashed and the scoundrels fled through Germany to Austria where they took up residence in one of Vienna's better hotels.

Lustig tried the same scheme again two years later. Unlike Buriot who was too ashamed to take his complaint to the police, the new victim promptly contacted the authorities but Lustig has skipped with the proceeds again. Back again in the USA, Lustig even had dealings with Al Capone and managed to con even this racketeer.

By the early 1930s the count had played 23 different roles and had been arrested four times. Because his victims seldom came forward to testify, Lustig had rarely been convicted and never jailed for any extended period. However, in 1934 a forger named William Watts identified Lustig to the police as a distributor of counterfeit money and the count was sentenced to 20 years on Alcatraz - where a convict acquaintance worked in the laundry, one Al Capone. Lustig's death certificate in 1947 listed his occupation as Salesman!