Man On The Run; The racy life of the world's most notorious con man

Sunday Herald, The, Jan 26, 2003 by By

'HELLO," says the charming man with snowy hair: "I'm Frank Abagnale." After more than 25 years of honest living, he has become used to saying it. Before that, he would introduce himself as Frank Adams or Frank Williams or Robert Conrad. Those were the days when he was posing as an airline pilot, paediatrician, lawyer and lecturer, whichever respectable front allowed him to work his scams, cashing phoney cheques, with the odd bank job thrown in to keep things interesting.

Between 1964 and his capture in 1969, Frank W Abagnale Jr was the world's most notorious con man, the Skywayman of tabloid legend, wanted by the police of 26 countries, fraudulently earning $2.5 million before his 21st birthday. "Hi," I say, "I've been looking forward to talking to you." And I mean it.

Abagnale, now 54 and living in Tulsa, Oklahoma, is the subject of the new Steven Spielberg film, Catch Me If You Can, in which he is played by Leonardo DiCaprio. "I don't think I looked like him. It's kind of hard to be as good looking as Leo."

The film is based on his book of the same name, originally published in 1980, and co-written with the journalist Stan Redding in punchy hipsterisms; bars are "sauce parlours", cars "fox traps". If anything, the book is even more jaw-dropping than the film. For instance, Spielberg's movie makes no mention of Abagnale's escape from the Federal Detention Centre in Atlanta, having managed to convince the guards that he was a prison inspector working incognito and should be let go.

Now a professional public speaker who commands up to $30,000 per appearance, Abagnale must have told his incredible story thousands of times. In the interests of getting something new, you try to trip him up with unexpected questions, cause him to lose his footing in the familiar topography of his tale. A couple of times, maybe, he is given pause by a line of enquiry, but he doesn't hesitate long. As the FBI can attest, this is a man who isn't easily caught out.

Just like in all the great legal dramas, we start by talking about motive. When Abagnale was in prison, both in the USA and Sweden, he volunteered for psychological testing. But this was just a way of getting his sentence reduced; he knew why he became a con man and didn't need any shrink bringing Freud into it. "It was an easy way to get money," he says. "I didn't have to stick a gun in someone's face, I didn't have to hurt anybody, and if I walked in a big bank I could justify in my 16-year-old mind that this is a bank with a billion dollars, so if I write them a hundred dollar cheque it's not going to kill them."

He wasn't just doing it to get the girls then? After all, the current issue of Maxim magazine ranks him among the world's greatest lovers, and one of his old adversaries in the NYPD has observed that he screwed every airline in the sky, including most of their stewardesses. "I loved girls," he says with an it's-a-fair-cop laugh. "And yes, I loved going to bed with a lot of girls, but I never really saw that as my big motivation."

At first, it was just a way to survive. When his parents divorced and Abagnale was asked to choose with whom he wanted to live, he opted out by running away to nearby New York City. There he took a minimum wage job, making a $1.50 an hour. It wasn't enough, so Abagnale changed the date of birth on his driver's licence from 1948 to 1938, figuring that he could earn more as a 26-year-old than a teenager. He was already six feet tall with some premature grey hair, so it was believable.

But he still wasn't making enough, so Abagnale started writing bad cheques. He wrote so many that he needed an alias, a trustworthy facade, and that was how he came to impersonate a co-pilot for Pan Am. Before too long, Abagnale was "deadheading" all over the world for free, taking full advantage of complimentary flights and free lodging at luxury hotels. He made a lot of money, went to bed with a lot of women, sat on a lot of beaches and quickly became high on the FBI's list of priorities. Sounds like a gas? It wasn't.

"It became a very lonely way to live," says Abagnale. "You can only write so many cheques and go to so many places. After a while, I got tired of always having to be somebody else - I could never be myself. I got tired of being ultimately alone all the time. Because no matter what girl I met, and no matter how much I liked her, I couldn't carry on a relationship because I knew that she was 25 and I was 16, 17, and it just wasn't going to happen. So, y'know, I had to end those relationships when I really didn't wanna end them.

"Leo DiCaprio says that I am probably the greatest actor that ever lived because I was literally acting all the time. The only time I wasn't acting was if I was in a room by myself at night in a hotel. But if the maid came in or the phone rang, I was acting again. There was a need to keep up that image."

So was he actually quite glad to get caught? "Oh, absolutely. Anybody that did the things that I did, or any criminal that's on the run, eventually you wanna get caught. I mean, nobody wants to go to prison, but by the same token you want it to come to an end at some point. Because you know you can't start over until you come to that end. Down deep, you wanna get caught."