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

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Jan 26, 2003 | by By

In fact, he was collared more than once. The first time was in Boston, where he took advantage of a mix-up to get bailed from jail before the FBI arrived. Then, living in semi-retirement in Montpellier, at the grand old age of 20, Abagnale was arrested by French police and thrown in Perpignan prison, a 17th-century stone fortress. In a stone cell, five feet wide, tall and deep, he lived for five months without light, without visitors, deprived of food, lying among maggots and lice and his own faeces. Desperately trying to keep control of his own hallucinations, Abagnale would imagine himself back in the cockpit of a 707.

On his release, he reoffended and went on the run, memorably escaping from a moving plane at JFK airport, removing a toilet bowl and squeezing out on to the runway while the FBI hammered at the locked door. But despite this bravado, the fight seemed to have gone out of Abagnale, and his eventual arrest in New York came as a relief. Had Perpignan changed him?

"No," he replies, "I'll be honest with you. When people ask, 'What changed you?' they want me to say something like 'I read the Bible and God changed my life' or 'Prison rehabilitated me and got me on the right road' or the very simple answer of 'I just grew up and got wiser'.

"But the truth is that the only reason I changed is 26 years ago in Houston, I met my wife, Kelly. I didn't have a dime to my name, I told her the truth, who I was. I explained that I was out of prison on parole, she continued to see me, and when I asked her to marry me, she agreed against the wishes of her parents.

"She changed my life. She gave me everything that I was always looking for in life. She gave me my own family, she gave me three boys fatherhood changed my life tremendously. And, y'know, when I look back on my life, she's the one I owe everything to. I am the man I am today because of Kelly and my children. Not because of my government, not because of prison, not because I grew older and wiser."

Of his sons, two are at university, one is studying law. It obviously runs in the family - Abagnale once posed as a graduate from Harvard law school and spent time working as an assistant to the state attorney general in Miami, having passed his bar exams after only two weeks of study.

Telling his children about his criminal past was not a problem. "When the oldest was about nine years old, I gave him my book. And I said to him, 'Son, I want you to read this, and when you're done with it, I want to talk to you about it, but not before.'

"He read it in a couple of days, and then I said to him: 'Did you understand that the person in the book was me?' He said: 'Yes.' I said: 'Did you understand that the book is basically a real book about something I actually did, and not a story?' And he said 'Yes.' Then I explained to him that I had got into trouble when I was young, that I went to prison, that I met his mother when I came out of prison and that this is what I do today."

What Abagnale does today is run his own consulting firm, Abagnale & Associates, advising governments, corporations and individuals how to avoid being conned. He designs cheques that can't be forged, makes electronic transactions crook-proof. He earns much more money doing this than he ever made as a scam-artist, and given that he was a millionaire twice over and then some by the time he was 21, you can understand that while virtue is its own reward, it's nice when it comes with a side-order of immense wealth.