https://www.theirishworld.com/frank-abagnale/^ Lots of old pictures
Everyone knows the story of Frank Abagnale Jr: A con man who had the FBI running around after him for years while he passed himself off as an airline pilot, doctor and lawyer. His story has already become a best-selling autobiography and the Steven Spielberg film,
Catch Me if You Can, which starred Leonardo Di Caprio as Abagnale and Tom Hanks as the FBI agent on his tail. It has even been made into a Broadway musical.
A new book shows it was all based on a lie.
The Irish author Alan C Logan presents evidence in his new book
The Greatest Hoax on Earth that Frank Abagnale’s outrageous story could not have been true as he was in prison at times when he was claiming to be taking in everyone with his daredevil scams.
According to Abagnale’s accepted story, he was committing massive cheque fraud and flying around the world impersonating a pilot when he was no more than a teenager. Logan has found evidence that between the ages of 17 and 20, Abagnale was incarcerated. His fantastic story was a massive fabrication and that is the biggest con the man ever pulled: Having people believe it.
And far from being a sophisticated fraudster that hit the big corporations, he ripped off ordinary hard-working people. The tiny grain of truth in Catch Me if You Can is that for a brief period in 1970, when Abagnale was 22 years old, he did dress as a Pan Am pilot for three months.
There was no FBI task force set up to take Abagnale down. The real FBI chase was just three months long. Despite Leonardo Di Caprio being depicted escaping police custody, he did not escape from the ultra-secure Atlanta Federal Penitentiary as he was never incarcerated there. After his federal parole in 1974, Abagnale was re-arrested in Friendswood, Texas, for theft from a kids camp.
It was only by accident that Alan started looking into Abagnale’s story... “And pretty quickly I found a little tiny article from February 14 of 1969, where Frank William Abagnale Jr. had been arrested in Baton Rouge for vagrancy.
“And I’m like, ‘That’s odd because giving these talks at Google he maintained he was arrested only once in his life, and that was in France. So right away there’s something not adding up here. “So over time, I was able to track down the victims of Abagnale in Baton Rouge.
“That was Paula Parks, a Delta Airlines flight attendant and her family. “She told me a wild story that Abagnale essentially used false pretences to move in with her family. “I went to the Baton Rouge Police Department and everything that Paula was telling me was there in black and white. “While he was staying with them, he rifled through their belongings and found their chequebooks and was writing cheques... “He was also convicted of stealing from a local family and he was facing 12 years in the State Penitentiary in Louisiana. “But he was treated lightly.
“But in any case, Abagnale, already a recidivist at this point, was given the 12 years as probation and psychiatric treatment. “Instead he fled to Sweden and France, was quickly arrested there but not before ripping off two local people in Sweden that I was able to track down. “And one of the first things that the Swedish victim told me was, ‘That man still owes me money’.
...“The Parks family had maintained these letters that Abagnale had written to her parents while he was jailed in Baton Rouge. “Abagnale’s parents also sent letters expressing the need for psychiatric treatment for their son while he was in Baton Rouge jail. “The key part about that is that his mother disclosed in one of the letters that for the previous three years, he had been in Comstock Prison, New York. “So when Paula gave me the letters, I understood the significance of that and went to the New York State archives that sure enough put Frank Williams Abagnale Jr. there the three years prior, between ages of 17 and 20, in prison in Comstock, New York.
“Part of the mystique is that he evaded everybody for five years, and was such a slippery character that no one could catch up with him. “Actually, the reverse is kind of true. He was caught time and time again. Multiple arrests, there really wasn’t any significant amount of time that this guy was unattended and on the run. “It lasted about three months.
“He did cash ten personal cheques dressed up as Pan Am airline cheques. “Those became the basis of his conviction. I was able to secure all the federal paperwork on that and it amounted to less than $1,500. “He only served about three and a half years in the Federal Penitentiary and was released in 1974. “Again, people think that he immediately was reformed and went to work for the FBI. “But in fact, he went down to Friendswood, Texas and he had obtained a job working with children under false pretenses.
...Despite these arrests on his record, Abagnale claims that he has only been arrested once and that was in Montpellier. He would go on the entertainment show To Tell the Truth with his tales of being an imposter and fraud.
“There was a journalist called Stephen Hall for the San Francisco Chronicle who essentially shredded Abagnale’s tales. “And so did Ira Perry of the Daily Oklahoman in a really robust takedown of all the claims. “What they didn’t have though were his actual whereabouts.
