Movie brings back past for criminal gone straight

By Marshall Fine
Westchester (N.Y.) Journal News

Leonardo DiCaprio chats with the real-life Frank Abagnale Jr. on the set of "Catch Me If You Can." DiCaprio portrays the former con man in the film, which opened in theaters on Christmas Day. Andrew Cooper • DreamWorks Pictures

"I needed a day or two of lying in bed, looking at the ceiling, thinking every scene out," says Abagnale, 54, whose teenage adventures in check fraud and con artistry were the subject of the book on which the film is based. "It was a more serious film than I thought it would be. And a lot more accurate."

When he finally did respond, Abagnale says, he told Spielberg four things:

"First, the movie says that divorce is devastating to some children," Abagnale says. "Second, it says we lived in an innocent time in the 1960s, where people trusted people. Third, you will get caught and go to jail if you do what I did. And fourth, in the end there's redemption, because this is a great country where everybody gets a second chance."

"Catch Me If You Can," which opened Christmas Day, has been a long time coming: Abagnale, who impersonated an airline pilot, a doctor and a lawyer between the ages of 16 and 21, sold the film rights to his book 25 years ago. At the time, he was riding the celebrity wave, promoting the book on TV.

But, in the intervening years, he says, he put his youthful indiscretions behind him, started a business and raised a family. To suddenly be confronted with a massive new interest in the escapades of his youth is a shade uncomfortable.

Not that Abagnale has any secrets from his family — or his clients. Based in Oklahoma, he has a 26-year-old consulting firm that works with a handful of businesses on an annual retainer, advising them on topics such as bank fraud, identity theft and the increasingly sophisticated technology required to detect and prevent them.

"Up until the movie was coming out, everyone I met, in the back of their mind, knew who I was," he says. "But no one would bring it up to me. You could tell they knew but they wouldn't bring it up. Now even clients I've known a long time are asking me about it. I thought I'd left it behind but now I have to deal with it again."

Abagnale grew up in suburban New York. His father owned a store, Gramercy Stationery, in Manhattan, where Abagnale would work in the summer, making deliveries.

"It was a wonderful place to be brought up," says Abagnale. "The '50s and '60s were a great time to grow up and be a kid. It was a nice residential, quiet community — and yet you could be in New York (City) in less than an hour. It was a nice way to live."

When his parents divorced, Abagnale ran away to Manhattan, using blank checks from an account his father had opened for him until he ran out of money, then creating fake payroll checks out of counter-checks sold at stationery stores, using an IBM Selectric typewriter as his main tool.

"I was very primitive when I started out," he says. "As time went on, I started learning to print my own checks. By the time I was 21, I could do color separations and four-color printing. Today, all that isn't necessary.

"Back in those days, passing a bad check was 90 percent presentation and 10 percent check. Today, it's 10 percent presentation and 90 percent check. You can sit in a room and create anything you want on a laptop. That's why the real con men are gone. The necessity is not there."

Abagnale claims never to have planned any of his moves; rather, he saw opportunities and took them. It began when, while frustrated at efforts to cash checks, he spotted a flight crew walking out of a hotel.

"I thought, if I could get a uniform, I could cash checks," he says. "Once I got a uniform, I thought, I wonder if I could use this to get on a plane. I wonder if I could use this to stay in the hotels airline pilots stay at and do it for free. The more opportunistic I became, the more opportunities I saw."

After five years and millions in fraudulent checks, Abagnale was caught and imprisoned, spending a total of five years in jail in France and the United States. When he was paroled, he went to work for the FBI, teaching federal agents about the tricks of fraud.

"Then I thought, if the FBI doesn't know the things I know, what do banks and corporations know?" he says. "I wondered if I could make money teaching them not to be victims. And I've been doing that for 26 years."

Publicity about the movie means that interview requests have begun to pour into his office, with people eager to ask Abagnale about his colorful past. But Abagnale doesn't need or want additional notoriety.

"My office must get 40 calls a day, but this is not what I do for a living," he says. "Oh, well, fame is fleeting. In six months, everyone will have forgotten about me again."