Background and career
Frank William Abagnale Jr. (; born April 27, 1948) is an American-French con man, convicted felon, author, and security consultant whose documented crimes consist primarily of cheque fraud and petty theft targeting individuals and small businesses. He later became famous for claiming that, while still a teenager, he impersonated a Pan American World Airways pilot, physician, lawyer, and university professor while traveling internationally and passing millions of dollars in fraudulent checks. These claims formed the basis of his 1980 autobiography, Catch Me If You Can, co-written with Stan Redding. The book inspired the film of the same name, directed by Steven Spielberg in 2002, in which Abagnale was portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio, and later a Broadway musical adaptation. Journalistic investigations beginning in 1978 found no evidence to support most of Abagnale's biographical claims, and later research found that Abagnale was incarcerated for much of the period during which he claimed to have carried them out. Records do support limited airline impersonation, check fraud, travel in Europe, and imprisonment in France, Sweden, and the United States, but his documented federal Pan Am check case involved ten forged checks totaling less than $1,500. In 2020, author Alan C. Logan published an investigation drawing on public records, prison documents, and newspaper archives that concluded the majority of Abagnale's claimed criminal history was fabricated. Abagnale runs Abagnale and Associates, a consulting firm he founded in 1976.
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. 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. He claims this led to his being sent to a reform school in Westchester County, New York run by Catholic Charities USA. 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 his attending. 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. 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. 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. On July 7, 1965, Abagnale informed local media that he was a graduate of an American Airlines pilot school in Fort Worth, Texas, but was arrested days later for check theft in Tuckahoe, New York. 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. 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.
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. 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. University of Arizona officials confirmed that Abagnale had interacted with 12 female students. None were enrolled in any program, and Abagnale was never employed by Pan Am. 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, with an additional two years for the jail escape. Abagnale was released on parole on February 8, 1974, after serving approximately two years of his sentence at Federal Correctional Institution in Petersburg, Virginia. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. He has also appeared on To Tell the Truth and served as an appointed member of various fraud and identity theft advisory bodies.
Steven Spielberg directed the film adaptation, Catch Me If You Can, released in December 2002, with Leonardo DiCaprio as Abagnale and Tom Hanks as fictitious FBI agent Carl Hanratty 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. 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.
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. 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:
