Some of you may have watched the 2002 movie Catch Me if You Can, in which young Leo plays Frank Abagnale, a mastermind of fraud and deception, but the real story of Hollywood's favorite conman is even crazier than Hollywood says. Let’s turn back time and take a look at the incredible life of the teenager who somehow faked being a pilot, a doctor, and a lawyer.
Who Is Frank Abagnale Jr?
Frank Abagnale Jr. was born on April 27th, 1948 in Upstate New York. His parents, Frank Abagnale Senior and his French wife Paulette, had three other children, but none were destined for a life quite like Frank’s. Frank’s parents had met in Algiers during World War II when Frank Senior was stationed in Oran, and Paulette was still in her teens when the pair wed.
After the war, the two moved to New York, where Frank Senior started his own stationary business. But he quickly became an absent husband and parent as he found more success, and in the end Paulette had no choice but to divorce him. Frank Junior was extremely close to his father and would even attend business meetings with him, which is where he learned basic details about business transactions. But, like most kids from broken homes, Frank’s parents’ divorce was the event that would turn his life upside down. Despite having a relatively stable childhood, Abagnale soon resorted to petty crimes like shoplifting as an outlet for all that pent-up teenage angst. But that wasn’t enough to stimulate his rebellious streak in the long-run. Ironically, Frank’s own father was the first victim of his con artist career. When he was 15, his father gave him a gasoline credit card and a truck to assist him in commuting to his part-time job. To earn a little extra date money, Abagnale devised a clever scheme where he would use the gasoline card to “buy” products like tires, batteries and other car-related items at gas stations and then asked the attendants to give him cash in return for the products. He would make a tidy profit and even allowed the clerks who processed the transactions to pocket a portion of the proceeds.
But the scam eventually fell apart when Frank’s father got his credit card bill and was dumbfounded to discover that it added up to thousands of dollars, $3,400, to be exact, which is almost $29,000 today! Little did Frank know, his father was struggling financially, and he was in deep, deep trouble.
Shortly after being caught, Abagnale’s mother sent her son away to a school for “wayward boys”. But, having gotten tangled up in his parents tensions for far too long, Frank decided to run away from home at the tender age of 16. With basically no money in his bank account and no formal education, Frank had no way of supporting himself. Using his wicked initiative once again, he altered his driving license to make himself look 10 years older and exaggerated his education to help him secure better-paying jobs.
Despite all this, he still found it incredibly hard to make ends meet, once again, it seemed like professional scamming was the only answer. Eventually, Frank quit working altogether and decided to start writing bad checks to support himself. Within no time, Frank had written hundreds of bad checks and had overdrawn his tiny bank account by thousands of dollars. But it couldn’t last forever. Because the banks would always demand payment eventually, Frank had to come up with more innovative methods of conning other people out of their money.At first, he moved on to opening other accounts at different banks, creating new false identities to sustain this charade. Over time, he developed new ways of defrauding the banks. Sometimes, he would print out his own copies of checks, like payroll checks, deposit them and encourage banks to advance him cash on the basis of his account balances. Another trick he used came about when he noticed that people frequently left the account number section blank on deposit slips. Frank instantly knew what to do to use this to his advantage. He took a stack of bank deposit slips, magnetically printed his account number on them and then added them back to the stack of real slips in the bank. The next morning, Frank woke up to $42,000 in his account as a result of the deposits on those slips by bank customers entering his account rather than the accounts of those who had actually filled them out.
If all that wasn’t impressive enough for a 16-year-old dropout, wait till you hear this. On another occasion, Frank noticed that the location where airlines and car rental businesses would drop off their daily collections of money in a bag and then deposit them into a drop box on the apartment premises. At this point, it’s safe to a assume that a little lightbulb had appeared above his head once again. So, he got hold of a security guard costume from a local Halloween store, put a sign over the box saying, “out of service, place deposits with security guard on duty” and waited for people to leave their money with him. Sure enough, hapless customers dropped their money right into Frank’s possession. Years after this event, Frank has even confessed how surprised he was that this particular scam worked, after all, how can a drop-off box be out of service?
Eventually, Frank realized he could cash more bad checks if he dazzled bank tellers with a new, more impressive personality. He decided pilots were highly respected professionals, so he went about scheming his way into getting himself a genuine pilots uniform. First, he phoned Pan American World Airways and told the company that he was a pilot working for them who had lost his uniform while getting it cleaned at his hotel. Remarkably, HQ told him where to go and pick up a new one without asking any questions. Frank posed as a businessman at the airport to get a security badge and was terrified that they’d discover he was just a teenager. But he managed to get hold of the uniform regardless, which he charged to the company using a fake employee I.D.! After getting a taste of the life of a pilot, Frank started to learn everything he could about flying.
The Flying Con-Man
On one occasion, he pretended he was a high schooler doing a newspaper article on Pan Am to gain some valuable insight into the workings of the company. Next, he cleverly forged his very own pilots license and Federal Aviation Administration license under the alias Robert Black. Little did he know, Frank Abagnale would soon earn himself the nickname The Flying Con-man.
Frank’s ruse had taught him everything he needed to know about how to successfully impersonate a pilot, which he allegedly did in order to hitch rides on planes all across the world. As a teenager, he noticed that his hair was already greying, which he parlayed into his pilot persona by giving the appearance of being older and having more professional credentials than he actually did.
According to Pan Am, Abagnale flew on over 250 flights as a fake pilot between the ages of 16-18, clocking over 1 million miles and visiting 26 countries in the process! But how did he do it? Well, the ever-fortunate Frank benefitted from a process called
dead-heading whereby a company employee could catch a free flight simply by showing their ID. The only company he knew to avoid was Pan Am itself. To further eliminate any suspicions about his identity, Frank was even able to convince a group of enterprising college students to work as stewardesses alongside him.
Although he always flew as a passenger, pilots occasionally offered Frank the controls as a courtesy during the flight. On such occasions, including one flight at 33,000ft with 140 passengers on board, Abagnale would accept the offer but put the plane straight on autopilot, as he later admitted he “couldn’t fly a kite”.
Fake Attorney
Once Pan Am began to get suspicious about Frank’s motives, he decided to change identities again. In one of his many white lies, Frank told one of the stewardesses he worked with and briefly dated that he was also a Harvard Law student. She then introduced him to a lawyer friend, and the wheels started turning.
Coincidentally, Frank was told that the bar needed more lawyers and was offered a chance to apply. After whipping up a fake transcript from Harvard, he prepared himself for the compulsory exam. Although the movie makes it look like he passed the Louisiana bar exam to become a lawyer in just two weeks, it actually took three attempts and several months of studying for Frank to pass.
At the time, Louisiana allowed you to take the bar as many times as you needed, according to Frank. At just 19 years old, he was employed at the office of the Louisiana State Attorney General. He worked as a gopher boy for several months, which basically meant fetching coffee and books for his boss. Things were cushty for a while, until trouble struck once again. It turned out one of Frank’s colleagues had actually gone to Harvard Law School, and he certainly wasn’t buying what Frank was selling. This suspicious colleague doubted Frank’s credentials and decided to contact Harvard to confirm his academic qualifications. After his search turned up nothing, he convinced the State Attorney General to perform some background checks on Frank, he knew it was time to get out of there.
Fake Doctor
Sensing trouble, Frank resigned from law, and fled to Georgia after spending eight months as a fake attorney. When he applied to an apartment in Georgia, the application form asked for an occupation. Fearing that the owner might check with Pan Am if he wrote "pilot", Frank wrote "doctor" instead and listed his named as Frank Williams.
You should know where this is going by now, right? Frank soon befriended a physician who happened to live in the same building as him. To Frank’s surprise, the man asked him to take a temporary job supervising interns at a local hospital. Thankfully, the position didn’t actually require doing any medical procedures, just administration and supervision, and as always, he managed to muddle through. But it wasn’t long until things took a turn for the worst. Frank had been able to fake his way through most of his duties as there were seven interns who were keen to show off their handling of the cases and get further experience by coming in during his late-night shift. But one night, Frank was almost exposed when an infant in his care became critically ill from oxygen deprivation.
Having had no genuine medical training, Frank didn’t initially understand the meaning or gravity of the situation when the nurse informed him of the term “
blue baby”, which occurs when a babies skin turns a bluish hue as a result of a number of conditions relating to oxygen transportation in the blood.Shaken up by the whole affair, Frank decided to leave the hospital after realizing that he could potentially be putting lives at risks thanks to his own incompetence. Knowing that the police and the FBI would probably be getting closer to discovering his identity by now, Frank decided to flee the United States altogether to start a new life in France. But there was one thing he hadn’t accounted for.
Arrests Of The Escape Artist
In 1969, one of Frank’s former girlfriends, and stewardesses, recognized his face on a wanted poster and decided to turn him in to the authorities. According to Frank himself, throughout his life of crime he had cashed about $2.5million worth of bad checks, but it seemed he was now ready to start life on the straight and narrow. Eventually, the police were able to catch up with Frank, now 21 years old, and he was finally apprehended in France.
When he was arrested, 12 countries in which he had committed fraud sought his extradition. After a two-day trial, he first served time in the harsh confines of Perpignan, a one year sentence that the presiding judge at his trial reduced to six months.
Next, Frank was extradited to Sweden. During a trial for forgery, his defense attorney was almost able to get his case dismissed by arguing that Frank had created the fake checks and not forged them. Instead, his charges were reduced to swindling and fraud. Following another conviction, he served six months in Malmö prison in Sweden, only to discover that he would be tried in Italy after it was over. But Frank never served time in the land of pizza and carbonara. While in Sweden, a judge asked a U.S. State Department official to revoke Frank’s passport. Without a valid passport, the Swedish authorities were now legally compelled to deport Frank back to the United States, where he was sentenced to 12 years in a federal prison for multiple counts of forgery. During his time in jail, Frank’s father also passed away, and for a while it seemed things were on a downward spiral. But Frank Abagnale was a seasoned master of deception, and he wasn’t about to go down that easy. While being deported to the U.S., Frank managed to escape from a British VC-10 airliner as it was turning onto a taxiway at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. He claims to have used the bathroom to slip out as the plane landed, but employees of the Aerospace Industries Association say it is impossible because the hatch is sealed shut. After stopping in the Bronx to change clothes and pick up a set of keys to a Montreal bank safe deposit box containing $20,000, over $130,000 today, Frank caught a train to Montreal’s Dorval airport to purchase a ticket to São Paulo, Brazil. Just when it seemed like he was getting away with it, he was apprehended by a constable of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police while standing in line at the ticket counter and handed over to U.S. Border Patrol. But if there’s one thing Frank Abagnale was not, it’s a quitter.
In April 1971, Frank managed to escape again while awaiting trial at the Federal Detention Center in Atlanta, Georgia. At the time, U.S. prisons were being condemned by civil rights groups and investigated by congressional comities. By pure chance, the accompanying U.S. marshal forgot his detention commitment papers, and Frank was mistaken for an undercover prison inspector. Of course, Frank knew he was on to a good thing and played the role perfectly. He even received nicer food and better treatment than the other inmates. How much sheer luck can one guy have?
Catch Me If You Can
Now that things were falling into place once again, Frank cooked up yet another elaborate scheme to save his bacon. In 1972, he contacted a friend called Jean Sebring, the name he gave in his 1980 book Catch Me If You Can, who gladly posed as his fiancée and agreed to help with his escape plan.
First, Sebring posed as a freelance writer doing an article on fire safety measures in federal detention centers and obtained the business card of ‘Inspector C. W. Dunlap’ of the Bureau of Prisons. She slipped the business card to Frank during a visit, alongside another business card for “Sean O’Riley”, the FBI agent in charge of Frank’s case, which Sebring had doctored at a stationary print shop. At last, the stage was set for Frank’s next great escape.
Frank approached the correction officers to “confirm” that he was, in fact, an undercover agent and handed over Dunlap’s business card as proof. Then he told them that he needed to contact FBI agent Sean O’Riley as a matter of urgent business, again presenting O’Riley’s business card. Sebring had altered the phone number on the card, so when the officers dialed it through it was her on the other end. Sebring took the call at a payphone in an Atlanta mall, where she seamlessly posed as an operator at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, she must be one hell of an impressionist! Amazingly, Frank was allowed to meet with the so-called FBI agent in a predetermined car outside the detention center. Of course, Sebring met him at the car and immediately drove him to an Atlanta bus station where he took a Greyhound bus to New York followed by a train to Washington D.C.
While on the run, Frank bluffed his way through an attempted capture by posing as an FBI agent after being recognized by a motel registration clerk. Once again, he had his sights set on Brazil, but it seemed karma really does catch up with you after all.
A few weeks later, Frank was finally captured for the final time by two NYPD detectives when he inadvertently walked past their unmarked police car. In 1974, after he had served less than 5 years of his 12 year prison sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution in Petersburg, Virginia, the U.S. Federal Government decided to release Frank under one condition: that he crossed over to the good side. After all, Frank Abagnale was about as successful a conman as you could get, and his insider knowledge was highly valuable. The deal was that Frank would help the federal authorities, without pay, to investigate crimes committed by fraud and scam artists. The court decided he would be paroled in Houston, Texas. After his release, Frank tried out numerous jobs including cook, grocer and even a movie projectionist, but he was fired from most of them after his criminal past was uncovered. For a while, his future seemed bleak, but then he came up with another brilliant idea.
Swallowing his pride, Frank decided to approach a bank with an offer. He explained what he had done back in his scamming days and offered to show the bank’s staff various tricks that “paperhangers” like him used to defraud banks. He included the condition that, if they didn’t find his advice helpful, they owed him nothing, but if they did he would take only $50 for his service. Another part of the agreement was that if the bank liked him, they would also pass his name on to other banks. Thankfully, things turned out for the best and Frank began a legitimate life as a security consultant. Since then, Frank also married and became the proud father of three sons. Because it was hard to keep a low profile in a big city, he later convinced his federal handlers to move himself, his wife Kelly and his sons Scott, Chris and Sean to Tulsa, Oklahoma.
The family lived there for 25 years until their sons went to college, and Frank and Kelly now live in Charleston, California. Frank also set up his own company,
Abagnale & Associates, which advises companies on fraud issues. Thanks to his unmatched expertise, some 14,000 companies have adopted his anti-fraud measures.
To this day, Frank continues to work with the FBI, who he has been associated with for over 40 years, advising on issues of document fraud, check swindling, forgery, and embezzlement. The same year Frank published his memoir
Catch Me if You Can in 1980, he sold the rights to have it turned into a movie, although it would be over two decades until it was released on Christmas day in 2002. But he has since admitted that he now sees the whole thing as “egotistical” and “self-centered”. He has also been vocal about his past, writing in a statement on his website that “I consider my past immoral, unethical and illegal. It is something I am not proud of”. Although there’s no disputing how many crimes Frank Abagnale committed in his youth, the way he has transformed his life since is no easy feat. Still, who else can say they defrauded the banks of millions of dollars, impersonated a pilot, a lawyer and a doctor and had their life story turned into a Hollywood movie before they retired?If you were amazed at the story of Frank Abagnale Jr, you might want to read about the sneakiest
fraudsters of all time. Thanks for reading!
