FRANK ABAGNALE
HIS escapades were so fantastic that a Hollywood movie was made about him. Catch Me If You Can was the biopic of fraudster Frank Abagnale, with Leonardo DiCaprio playing the conman.
“The true story of a real fake,” was how the film was billed. “Every scam he pulls in the movie is what he pulled in real life,” producer Stephen Spielberg vowed, with DiCaprio adding that the plot was “more fantastic than anything Hollywood could make up”. But here lies a mystery, because some critics allege that a lot of Abagnale’s life story HAS been made up – by the conman himself.
So was Catch Me If You Can truth or fiction or a bit of both?
Born in New York in 1950, Frank Abagnale was sent to reform school for credit card fraud. Freed, he began cashing fake cheques but when bank tellers asked too many questions of a 16-year-old, he created a new identity. Reinventing himself as “First Officer Abagnale” of nowdefunct American airline Pan Am, he added grey dye to his hair and forged an ID card using transfers from a model aeroplane kit. He rang the airline pretending to be a pilot whose uniform had been stolen and was sent to a tailor who kitted him out on the firm’s account.
According to Abagnale, he jetted around the world as a “staff passenger”, staying at airline hotels, cashing cheques and bedding air stewardesses. While chatting to real pilots in the cockpit, he was several times invited to take over the controls of airliners.
Abagnale boasted that by the time he was 21 he had also worked as a doctor, lawyer and sociology professor, while conning banks, airlines and hotels out of $2.5million. After spells in jail, the 53-year-old conman again hit the jackpot in 2002 with the release of the screen adaptation of his autobiography. But since the movie’s release, questions have been raised about some of his claims – including a bank robbery that never took place and a stint as a professor at a university that has no record of him.
Whatever the truth, the smooth-talker who was once America’s most wanted conman has done well from a career of crime. The 64-yearold is now a millionaire, advising firms on white-collar crime and retelling his tales of trickery on the US lecture circuit, labelling himself: “The conman who came in from the cold.”