Frank Abagnale

Frank William Abagnale Jr. was born in the Bronx, New York City, on April 27, 1948, to a French Pied-noir mother and an Italian-American father.^[9][10] He spent his early years in Bronxville, New York. His parents separated when he was 12 and divorced when he was 15, after which he moved with his father and stepmother to Mount Vernon, New York.

In his autobiography, Abagnale describes his first fraud as charging $3,400 to a gasoline credit card his father had given him.^[11] He claims this led to his being sent to a reform school in Westchester County, New York run by Catholic Charities USA.^[11] In numerous interviews, he also stated that he attended Iona Preparatory School through the tenth grade; however, his name does not appear in the school's yearbooks from that period and no alumni recall him attending.^[12]

In December 1964, Abagnale enlisted in the U.S. Navy at age 16. He was discharged after less than three months, released on February 18, 1965. Less than two weeks later, he was arrested for petty larceny in Mount Vernon.^[13] In March 1965, he posed as a police officer and entered the apartment of a Mount Vernon resident, claiming to investigate her daughter. The victim called police, who found Abagnale with a toy gun and a paper badge. He was arrested on a vagrancy charge and ordered the following day to be committed to Grasslands psychiatric institute for observation.^[14][15]

In June 1965, the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested Abagnale in Eureka, California, for stealing a Ford Mustang from a neighbor of his father. He had financed a cross-country trip with blank checks stolen from a family business on the Bronx River Parkway.^[2][16] On July 7, 1965, Abagnale informed local media that he was a graduate of an American Airlines pilot school in Fort Worth, Texas,^[17] but was arrested days later for check theft in Tuckahoe, New York.^[1][16] He was sentenced to three years at Great Meadow Correctional Facility in Comstock, New York. Released after two years into his mother's custody, he violated parole with a stolen-car conviction in Boston and was returned to Great Meadow for a further year.

After his release on December 24, 1968, Abagnale moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where he posed as a TWA pilot and befriended a local minister who introduced him to Louisiana State University faculty. They identified him as a fraud, the minister contacted TWA, which confirmed the deception, and the Baton Rouge Police Department arrested him on February 14, 1969, on vagrancy charges. He was found to have driven a Florida rental car out of state and to possess falsified airline identification.^[18] Detectives the following day determined he had also stolen blank checks from his host family and a local business; he was charged with theft and forgery, convicted on June 2, 1969, and sentenced to 12 years of supervised probation. He soon fled to Europe.^[19][3]

Two weeks after a Louisiana bench warrant was issued, Abagnale was arrested in Montpellier, France, in September 1969, after stealing an automobile and defrauding two families in Klippan, Sweden. He was sentenced to four months for theft in France and served approximately three months in a prison in Perpignan.^[20]

He was then extradited to Sweden, where he was convicted of gross fraud by forgery, served two months in a Malmö prison, and was banned from Sweden for eight years. He was deported back to the United States in June 1970 after his appeal failed.

After returning to the United States, Abagnale traveled around college campuses passing bad checks and claiming to recruit stewardesses for Pan Am. At the University of Arizona in 1970, he posed as both a pilot and a physician and conducted physical examinations on female students who believed they were applying to a flight attendant program.^[21] University of Arizona officials confirmed that Abagnale had interacted with 12 female students.^[5] None were enrolled in any program, and Abagnale was never employed by Pan Am.^[5]

On July 30, 1970, Abagnale cashed a personal check made to resemble a Pan Am paycheck in Durham, North Carolina, drawing FBI attention. He was arrested in Cobb County, Georgia, on November 2, 1970, after cashing ten fake Pan Am payroll checks across five states. He escaped from the Cobb County jail and was recaptured four days later in New York City. In 1971, he was sentenced to ten years for forging checks totaling less than $1,500,^[22] with an additional two years for the jail escape.^[5]

Abagnale was released on parole on February 8, 1974, after serving approximately two years of his sentence at Federal Correctional Institution in Petersburg, Virginia.^[23] Later that year, he was arrested again at a children's summer camp in Friendswood, Texas, for stealing cameras from co-workers while posing as a pilot.^[24] After receiving a fine, he obtained a position at a Houston-area orphanage by falsely claiming a pilot's credentials and a master's degree. His parole officer discovered the deception and moved him into quarters above his own home. Abagnale subsequently took a position at Aetna, from which he was fired and sued for check fraud.

In 1975, Abagnale approached a bank and offered to educate its staff on the techniques used by check forgers, proposing that if they found his information unhelpful they would owe him nothing, and if useful, they would pay him a modest fee and recommend him to other banks. The arrangement worked, and it became the basis of a new career as a fraud prevention speaker and consultant.^[7] In 1976, he founded Abagnale and Associates, which advises corporations, financial institutions, and government agencies on document security and fraud prevention. During this period he also falsified his resume to claim prior work with the Los Angeles Police Department and Scotland Yard.^[5]

Over the following decades, Abagnale became a prolific public speaker on fraud and identity theft, commanding fees reported to be between $20,000 and $30,000 per appearance.^[25] He has appeared multiple times as a guest on The Tonight Show and made a regular appearance on the British network series The Secret Cabaret in the 1990s. In 2015, AARP named him its Fraud Watch Ambassador, and in 2018, he began co-hosting the AARP podcast The Perfect Scam.^[26] He has also appeared on To Tell the Truth and served as an appointed member of various fraud and identity theft advisory bodies.^[27]

Steven Spielberg directed the film adaptation, Catch Me If You Can, released in December 2002, with Leonardo DiCaprio as Abagnale and Tom Hanks as the FBI agent pursuing him. Christopher Walken, who portrayed Abagnale's father, received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Abagnale appeared in a brief cameo as the French police officer who arrests DiCaprio's character.^[8]

A Broadway musical adaptation, Catch Me If You Can, with a book by Terrence McNally and score by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, opened at the Neil Simon Theatre on April 10, 2011, and played 170 regular performances before closing on September 4, 2011. The production starred Aaron Tveit as Abagnale and Norbert Leo Butz as the FBI agent pursuing him. It received four Tony Award nominations, including Best Musical; Butz won Best Actor in a Musical.^[28]

Beginning in the late 1970s, Abagnale claimed in public lectures and interviews that between the ages of 16 and 21 he had impersonated a Pan American pilot, a Georgia hospital physician, a Louisiana assistant attorney general, and a sociology professor, while evading a sustained FBI manhunt across 26 countries and cashing more than $2.5 million in fraudulent checks.^[29] Journalists who investigated these claims beginning in 1978 found them to be largely or entirely unsupported. Individuals whom Abagnale had criminally targeted described the lasting effects of his actual, documented offenses:

He had a key to our front door, it was never recovered. We changed the lock. I fed him. I cooked. I don't trust people as much anymore.

Logan and Leiva investigations

In 2020, author Alan C. Logan published The Greatest Hoax on Earth, an investigation into Abagnale's claimed criminal history drawing on prison records, administrative documents, and newspaper archives. Logan demonstrated using New York State Archives records that Abagnale was incarcerated at Great Meadow Prison as inmate #25367 from July 26, 1965, to December 24, 1968, the precise period during which Abagnale claimed to have committed his most celebrated frauds. Logan's research also documented numerous petty crimes Abagnale had never publicly acknowledged.^[6] Abagnale declined to address the book's specific findings, calling it "not worthy of a comment."^[6][25]

In 2022, investigative journalist Javier Leiva independently verified Logan's findings, confirmed federal court records showing Abagnale's Pan Am check conviction involved less than $1,500, and calculated that Abagnale was free for only a matter of months between 1965 and 1970. On June 23, 2022, Leiva confronted Abagnale at the Connect IT Global conference in Las Vegas with prison and court records in hand.^[40]

On September 12, 2022, Xavier University in Cincinnati presented Abagnale with a "Heroes in Ethics" award. At the conclusion of his lecture, an audience member asked Abagnale whether he would acknowledge that his stories were fabricated. Abagnale denied telling any lies and stated he had no responsibility for the content of his autobiography, the film, or the Broadway musical. Xavier University subsequently removed all online reference to the event.^[40]

In a 2002 interview with USA Today, Abagnale acknowledged that the long-term impersonations in his autobiography were exaggerated: "I impersonated a doctor for a few days, I was a lawyer for a few days. In the book, it's like I am doing this for a year."^[41] Despite this concession, he continued to make the long-term impersonation claims in subsequent public appearances.^[12][42] Abagnale's speaking fee has been reported to be between $20,000 and $30,000.^[25]

Abagnale and his wife, Kelly, live on Daniel Island, part of Charleston, South Carolina. They have three sons. Abagnale has stated that meeting Kelly was the motivation for changing his life.^[43]

• The Greatest Hoax on Earth: Catching Truth, While We Can, Alan C. Logan, 2020. ISBN 978-1-7361-9741-7
• Catch Me If You Can, 1980. ISBN 978-0-7679-0538-1
• The Art of the Steal, Broadway Books, 2001. ISBN 978-0-7679-0683-8
• Real U Guide to Identity Theft, 2004. ISBN 978-1-932999-01-3
• Stealing Your Life, Random House/Broadway Books, 2007. ISBN 978-0-7679-2586-0
• Scam Me If You Can, 2019. ISBN 978-0-5255-3896-7

• The Great Impostor, 1961 film about Ferdinand Waldo Demara
• Elliot Castro, Scottish former fraudster
• William Douglas Street Jr., American con artist