The name of an international criminal, retired cornet Savin, also known as the Count de Toulouse-Lautrec, for many years did not leave the newspaper pages of Europe, Russia and the world. Nikolai Savin lived a long and turbulent life filled with high-profile scandals and scams, for which he served a total of 25 years in prison - he believed in his own fantasies.
It is fair to say that Savin in the army not only drank wine, fought and dragged women. In 1877, he voluntarily joined the 9th Army Corps in Bulgaria during the Russo-Turkish War and showed himself a brave soldier, was wounded at Plevna. Had it not been for his criminal streak, he could have been a heroic officer. He was dismissed from the army for a scam - he tried to get insurance for his burned down house, which he himself had set on fire.
The first major scandal broke three years earlier, when Savin served as aide-de-camp to Grand Duke Nikolai Konstantinovich, the nephew of Russian Emperor Alexander II.The Grand Duke's mother had lost expensive diamonds adorning an icon. The police found the stones in one of the pawnshops in St. Petersburg. Here and it turned out that the customer of the theft was the Grand Duke, who needed the money for the dancer Fanny Lear, rounded him up. Adjutants, including Savin, were also suspects in the case. The case was hushed up, the Grand Duke was declared mentally ill, and Savin was simply dismissed from the service.
In December 1881, Savin left for Paris, where he declared himself a political émigré. In numerous newspaper interviews, he said that the money from the stolen diamonds was allegedly intended for the revolution. Soon he became very popular, lived on the high street, did not get out of the casinos in Nice and Monte Carlo. True, after a series of high-profile scandals, he was no longer allowed in the casino, but Nicholas and on it and profited - rolled scandal at the entrance, promised to strip naked and yell that he was robbed here. Demanded a thousand francs payoff and got what he wanted. He tried to dine for free in the most expensive restaurants without a penny in his pocket. After a big meal, Savin would put a candied cockroach in his dessert and cause a scandal, then leave without paying.
He managed to marry rich girls more than once and squander their money in the moment. One of the high-profile scams was the supply of horses for the Italian army under a contract with the Minister of Military Affairs. Savin, having received a multimillion-dollar advance payment, fled. Realizing that it was dangerous to stay in Europe, Nicholas decided to return to Russia. But in Konigsberg he was arrested for a new scam, and he fled to America.
Here he appeared as Count Nikolai de Toulouse-Lautrec Savin. He ran a successful scam with contracts for the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway. Worked card cheating and marriage scams, but with the latter was not lucky, and Savin focused on cards. He lived in New York in a luxury mansion, opened an office for the purchase of land in Cuba. He made good money on the scam and got married. Then he disappeared with the dowry. In Russia, he still got, but from Europe, where he again stuck, but was arrested and exiled. In 1891 in Moscow, he was convicted of four frauds and sent into exile, in the Tomsk region. The swindler escaped and ended up in Europe again. He was as lucky as anyone else! Savin almost became king of Bulgaria!
The retired cornet's last high-profile scam was the sale of the Winter Palace. It was just after the February Revolution in St. Petersburg. Savin in those days served as head of the guard at the Winter Palace, and so, when the palace wanted to see a rich tourist from America, called Savin to the negotiations (he spoke perfect English). The interlocutor looked impressive, and the American immediately stated that he wanted to buy the palace: "Are you the owner?" Savin, without blinking, said: "Yes, ofc!" And named an astronomical price, and even lied that the Persian sheikh had already agreed to pay. The American immediately offered a larger sum, and the deal was done. They agreed to meet at five o'clock. Savin found in the storeroom an old, heavy bunch of 60 keys and wrote a receipt on a piece of an old document with a stamped seal. At the appointed hour they exchanged - Savin received two suitcases full of money, and the American received the keys and the "bill of sale." The businessman found out about the deception the next day when he arrived with the workers - he wanted to dismantle the Winter Palace stone by stone and take it to the United States to put it back together again. At the same time, the American learned the contents of the receipt, according to which he also owed a large sum to the Russian citizen Khlestakov. At the bottom of the receipt was written: "Fools do not sow, do not reap!"
Soon Savin disappeared from the journalists' view for a long time, it was said that he was serving a sentence in Europe for several convictions. He resurfaced in Manchuria, in Harbin, where he tried to pull off a scam involving the sale of a large shipment of gold watches - as many as three railcars! But he was exposed in time. From Harbin Savin went to Shanghai, lived a miserable existence and eventually drank himself to death. In 1937 he was found by an Orthodox monk in the hospital of the Catholic mission - Savin was unrecognizable. He was dying of cirrhosis of the liver and very much wanted to confess to an Orthodox priest.
The great swindler, even in confession, seems to have been lying, telling the monk the story of how he found his son in Shanghai, born to a woman he had once abandoned. That's why he started the watch scam - he wanted to help his son. The name of the woman and the son he never named. Nikolai Savin died the night after confession. He was buried in a small church, and the same monk poured a handful of Russian soil in his grave ...
