Frank Abagnale

Frank William Abagnale Jr. (born April 27, 1948) is an American-French former con artist, convicted criminal, author, and security consultant. His verified offenses mainly involve check fraud and small-scale theft aimed at individuals and local businesses. He gained widespread notoriety for later alleging that as a teenager he posed as a Pan Am pilot, a doctor, a lawyer, and a college professor while traveling overseas and cashing millions in fraudulent checks. Those claims became the basis of his 1980 autobiography *Catch Me If You Can*, co-written with Stan Redding, which led to a 2002 Steven Spielberg film starring Leonardo DiCaprio and later a Broadway musical. However, documentary evidence has since cast doubt on or directly contradicted many of Abagnale’s stories.

Journalistic investigations starting in 1978 found no proof for most of his biographical assertions, and subsequent research showed he was in prison during large stretches of the time he claimed to have been committing those crimes. Records do confirm some limited airline impersonation, check fraud, travel in Europe, and stints in French, Swedish, and U.S. prisons, but his documented federal Pan Am check case involved only ten forged checks totaling under $1,500. In 2020, researcher Alan C. Logan published a study using public records, prison files, and newspaper archives that concluded the bulk of Abagnale’s claimed criminal history was invented. Abagnale now runs Abagnale and Associates, a consulting firm he started in 1976.

**Early life** Abagnale was born in the Bronx, New York City, to a French Pied-noir mother and an Italian-American father, and grew up in Bronxville, New York. His parents separated when he was 12 and divorced when he was 15, after which he lived with his father and stepmother in Mount Vernon, New York. In his autobiography, he says his first fraud was charging $3,400 to a gas credit card his father gave him, which he claims led to a stay at a Catholic Charities reform school in Westchester County. He has also stated in interviews that he attended Iona Preparatory School through tenth grade, but his name does not appear in the school’s yearbooks from that time, and no alumni recall him being there.

In December 1964, at age 16, Abagnale enlisted in the U.S. Navy but was discharged after less than three months, 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 a Mount Vernon woman’s apartment, claiming to investigate her daughter. The victim called police, who found him with a toy gun and a paper badge; he was arrested for vagrancy and ordered to Grasslands psychiatric institute for observation. In June 1965, the FBI arrested him in Eureka, California, for stealing a Ford Mustang from a neighbor of his father, having financed a cross-country trip with blank checks stolen from a family business on the Bronx River Parkway. On July 7, 1965, he told local media 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 received a three-year sentence 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 sent back to Great Meadow for another 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 Baton Rouge police arrested him on February 14, 1969, for vagrancy. He was found to have driven a Florida rental car out of state and to possess fake airline ID. Detectives the next day discovered 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 given 12 years of supervised probation. He soon fled to Europe.

**Europe** Two weeks after a Louisiana bench warrant was issued, Abagnale was arrested in Montpellier, France, in September 1969, for stealing a car and defrauding two families in Klippan, Sweden. He received a four-month theft sentence in France and served about three months in a Perpignan prison. 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.

**United States** Back in the U.S., Abagnale traveled to 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 doctor and conducted physical exams on female students who thought they were applying to a flight attendant program. University officials confirmed he interacted with 12 female students; none was enrolled in any program, and Abagnale was never employed by Pan Am. On July 30, 1970, he cashed a personal check made to look like 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 federal check fraud.