11 Catch Me If You Can

“As far as my personal funds are concerned, yes,” I said. “I’m not sure about the company funds as yet, and won’t be until I look closer at the projects, but in any event we’ll want to place a substantial amount here.”

“Well, for your personal account, Mr. Adams, all you have to do is write me a check for the remaining balance in your New York bank and that will close that account out.”

“Is that all?” I said, feigning surprise. “I didn’t realize it was that simple.” I took my checkbook from my inside pocket and, holding it so he couldn’t see it, ran my finger down an imaginary column of figures, murmuring. Then I looked up at him. “May I use your adding machine, please? I wrote some checks yesterday and didn’t balance my checkbook and I’m not much on adding figures in my head.”

“Certainly,” he said and turned the machine for my use. I ran a few figures and then nodded.

“Well, I make my balance $17,876.28, and I’m sure that’s correct,” I said. “But let’s just open an account for $17,000. I’ll be going back to New York on occasion and I’d like to maintain a small balance there.”

I wrote him a check for $17,000 and gave him the necessary information for setting up an account. I gave my address as the hotel where I had registered. “I’ll be staying there until I can find a suitable apartment or house to lease,” I said.

The young banker nodded. “You realize, of course, Mr. Adams, you can’t write any checks on your account until your check has cleared in New York,” he said. “That shouldn’t take over four or five days, however, and in the meantime if you run short of funds, come to me and I’ll take care of it. Here are some temporary checks for such an event.”

I shook my head. “That’s kind of you, but I anticipated the delay,” I said. “I have ample funds for my needs.”

I shook hands with him and left. That night I flew to Miami and the following afternoon I appeared in front of another glass-fronted bank, again in a Rolls-Royce but at the wheel myself, and casually but again expensively attired. I glanced at my watch as I entered the lobby. The Philadelphia bank would be open for another thirty minutes. A strikingly handsome and chicly dressed woman who had noted my arrival greeted me as I stepped into the lobby.

“May I help you, sir?” she asked, smiling. On closer inspection she was much older than I had first thought, but she was still an alluring woman.

“I hope so,” I said, returning the smile. “But I think I’d better speak to the bank manager.”

Her eyes lit impishly. “I am the bank manager,” she said, laughing. “Now, what’s your problem? You certainly don’t appear to need a loan.”

I threw up my hands in mock defeat. “No, no, nothing like that,” I said. “My name’s Frank Adams and I’m from Philadelphia and I’ve been looking around Miami for years for a suitable vacation home. Well, today I found a fantastic deal, a floating house near Biscayne Bay, but the man wants cash and he wants a $15,000 deposit by five o’clock today. He won’t take a personal check and I don’t have a bank account here.

“I’m wondering, could I write you a check on my bank in Philadelphia and you issue me a cashier’s check, payable to cash, for $15,000? I realize you’ll have to call my bank to verify that I have the money, but I’ll pay for the call. I really want this house. It would mean I could spend half my time down here.” I paused, a pleading look on my face.

She pursed her lips prettily. “What’s the name of your bank in Philadelphia, and your account number?” she asked. I gave her the name of the bank, the telephone number and my account number. She walked to a desk and, picking up the telephone, called Philadelphia.

“Bookkeeping, please,” she said when she was connected. Then: “Yes, I have a check here, drawn on account number 505-602, Mr. Frank Adams, in the amount of $15,000.1 would like to verify the check, please.”

I held my breath, suddenly aware of the burly bank guard standing in one corner of the lobby. It had been my experience that clerks in bank bookkeeping departments, when asked to verify a check, merely looked at the balance.

They rarely went behind the request to check on the status of the account. I hoped that would be the case here. If not, well, I could only hope the bank guard was a lousy shot.

I heard her say, “All right, thank you,” and then she replaced the receiver and looked at me with a speculative expression. “Tell you what, Frank Adams,” she said with another of her brilliant smiles. “I’ll take your check if you’ll come to a party I’m having tonight. I’m short of handsome and charming men. How about it?”

“You got a deal,” I said, grinning, and wrote her a check on the Philadelphia bank for $15,000, receiving in return a $15,000 cashier’s check, payable to cash.

I went to the party. It was a fantastic bash. But then she was a fantastic lady—in more ways than several.

I cashed the check the next morning, returned the Rolls-Royce and caught a plane for San Diego. I reflected on the woman and her party several times during the flight and nearly laughed out loud when I was struck with one thought.

I wondered what her reaction would be when she learned she’d treated me to two parties on the same day, and the one had been a real cash ball.

CHAPTER SEVEN

How to Tour Europe on a Felony a Day

I developed a scam for every occasion and sometimes I waived the occasion. I modified the American banking system to suit myself and siphoned money out of bank vaults like a coon drains an egg. When I jumped the border into Mexico in late 1967,1 had illicit cash assets of nearly $500,000 and several dozen bank officials had crimson derrieres.

It was practically all done with numbers, a statistical shell game with the pea always in my pocket.

Look at one of your own personal checks. There’s a check number in the upper right-hand corner, right? Thaf s probably the only one you notice, and you notice it only if you keep an accurate check register. Most people don’t even know their own account number, and while a great number of bank employees may be able to decipher the bank code numbers across the bottom of a check, very few scan a check that closely.

In the 1960s bank security was very lax, at least as far as I was concerned. It was my experience, when presenting a personal check, drawn on a Miami bank, say, to another Miami bank, about the only security precaution taken by the teller was a glance at the number in the upper right-hand corner. The higher that number, the more readily acceptable the check. It was as if the teller was telling herself or himself, “Ah-hah, check number 2876—boy, this guy has been with his bank a long time. This check’s gotta be okay.”

So I’m in an East Coast city, Boston, for example. I open an account in the Bean State Bank for $200, using the name Jason Parker and a boardinghouse address. Within a few days, I receive 200 personalized checks, numbered 1-200 consecutively in the upper right-hand corner, my name and address in the left-hand corner and, of course, that string of odd little numbers across the left-hand bottom edge. The series of numbers commenced with the numbers 01, since Boston is located within the First Federal Reserve District.

The most successful cattle rustlers in the Old West were experts at brand blotting and brand changing. I was an expert in check number blotting and changing, using press-on numbers and press-on magnetic-tape numbers.

When I finished with check number 1, it was check number 3100, and the series of numbers above the left-hand bottom edge started with the number 12. Otherwise, the check looks the same.

Now I walk into the Old Settlers Farm and Home Savings Association, which is just a mile from the Bean State Bank. “I want to open a savings account,” I tell the clerk who greets me. “My wife tells me we’re keeping too much money in a checking account.”

“All right, sir, how much do you wish to deposit?” he or she asks. Let’s say it’s a he. Bank dummies are divided equally among the sexes.

“Oh, $6,500,1 guess,” I reply, writing out a check to the OSFHSA. The teller takes the check and glances at the number in the upper right-hand corner. He also notices it’s drawn on the Bean State Bank. He smiles. “All right, Mr. Parker. Now, there is a three-day waiting period before you can make any withdrawals. We have to allow time for your check to clear, and since it’s an in-town check the three-day waiting period applies.”

“I understand,” I reply. I do, too. I’ve already ascertained that’s the waiting period enforced by savings and loan institutions for in-town checks.

I wait six days and on the morning of the sixth day I return to Old Settlers. But I deliberately seek out a different teller. I hand him my passbook. “I need to withdraw $5,500,” I say. If the teller had questioned the amount of the withdrawal, I would have said that I was buying a house or given some other plausible reason. But few savings and loan bank tellers pry into a customer’s personal affairs.

This one didn’t. He checked the account file. The account was six days old. The in-town check had obviously cleared. He returned my passbook with a cashier’s check for $5,500.

I cashed it at the Bean State Bank and left town . . . before my check for $6,500 returned from Los Angeles, where the clearing-house bank computer had routed it.

I invested in another I-Tek camera and printing press and did the same thing with my phony Pan Am expense checks. I made up different batches for passing in different areas of the country, although all the checks were purportedly payable by Chase Manhattan Bank, New York.

New York is in the Second Federal Reserve District. Bona fide checks on banks in New York all have a series of numerals beginning with the number 02. But all the phony checks I passed on the East Coast, or in northeastern or southeastern states, were routed first to San Francisco or Los Angeles. All the phony checks I passed in the Southwest, Northwest or along the West Coast were first routed to Philadelphia, Boston or some other point across the continent.

My numbers game was the perfect system for floats and stalls. I always had a week’s running time before the hounds picked up the spoor. I learned later that I was the first check swindler to use the routing numbers racket. It drove bankers up the wall. They didn’t know what the hell was going on. They do now, and they owe me.

I worked my schemes overtime, all over the nation, until I decided I was just too hot to cool down. I had to leave the country. And I decided I could worry about a passport in Mexico as fretfully as I could in Richmond or Seattle, since all I needed to visit Mexico was a visa. I obtained one from the Mexican Consulate in San Antonio, using the name Frank Williams and presenting myself as a Pan Am pilot, and deadheaded to Mexico City on an Aero-Mexico jet.

I did not take the entire proceeds of my crime spree with me. Like a dog with access to a butcher-shop bone box and forty acres of soft ground, I buried my loot all over the United States, stashing stacks of cash in bank safe-deposit boxes from coast to coast and from the Rio Grande to the Canadian border.

I did take some $50,000 with me into Mexico, concealed in thin sheafs in the lining of my suitcases and the linings of my jackets. A good customs officer could have turned up the cash speedily, but I didn’t have to go through customs. I was wearing my Pan Am uniform and was waived along with the AeroMexico crew.

I stayed in Mexico City a week. Then I met a Pan Am stewardess, enjoying a five-day holiday in Mexico, and accepted her invitation to go to Acapulco for a weekend. We were airborne when she suddenly groaned and said a naughty word. “What’s the matter?” I asked, surprised to hear such language from such lovely lips.

“I meant to cash my paycheck at the airport,” she said. “I’ve got exactly three pesos in my purse. Oh, well, I guess the hotel will cash it.”

“I’ll cash it, if it’s not too much,” I said. “I’m sending my own check off tonight for deposit, and I can just run it through my bank. How much is it?”

I really didn’t care how much cash was involved. A real Pan Am check! I wanted it. I got it for $288.15, and stowed it carefully away. I never did cash it, although it netted me a fortune.

I liked Acapulco. It teemed with beautiful people, most of them rich, famous or on the make for something or other, sometimes all three. We stayed at a hotel frequented by airline crews, but I never felt in jeopardy. Acapulco is not a place one goes to talk shop.

I stayed on after the stewardess returned to her base in Miami. And the hotel manager became friendly with me, so friendly that I decided to sound him out on my dilemma.

He joined me at dinner one night and since he seemed in an especially affable mood, I decided to make a try then and there. “Pete, I’m in a helluva jam,” I ventured.

“The hell you are!” he exclaimed in concerned tones.

“Yeah,” I replied. “My supervisor in New York just called me. He wants me to go to London on the noon plane from Mexico City tomorrow and pick up a flight that’s being held there because the pilot is sick.”

Pete grinned. “That’s a jam? I should have your troubles.”

I shook my head. “The thing is, Pete, I don’t have my passport with me. I left it in New York and I’m supposed to have it with me all the time. I can’t make it back to New York in time to get my passport and get to London on schedule. And if the super learns I’m here without a passport, he’ll fire me. What the hell am I gonna do, Pete?”

He whistled. “Yeah, you are in a jam, aren’t you?” His features took on a musing look, and then he nodded. “I don’t know that this will work, but have you ever heard of a woman named Kitty Corbett?”

I hadn’t and said so. “Well, she’s a writer on Mexican affairs, an old dame. She’s been down here twenty or thirty years and is real respected. They say she has clout from the Presidential Palace in Mexico City to Washington, D.C., the White House even, I understand. I believe it, too.” He grinned. “The thing is, that’s her at the table by the window. Now, I know she plays mamma to every down-and-out American who puts a con on her, and she loves to do favors for anybody who seeks her out wanting something. Makes her feel like the queen mother, I guess. Anyway, let’s go over and buy her a drink, put some sweet lines on her and cry a little. Maybe she can come up with an answer.”

Kitty Corbett was a gracious old woman. And sharp. After a few minutes, she smiled at Pete. “Okay, innkeeper, what’s up? You never sit down with me unless you want something. What is it this time?”

Pete threw up his hands and laughed. “I don’t want a thing, honest! But Frank here has a problem. Tell her, Frank.”

I told her virtually the same story I’d put on Pete, except I went a little heavier on the melodrama. She looked at me when I finished. “You need a passport real bad, I’d say,” she commented.

“Trouble is, you’ve got one. If s just in the wrong place. You can’t have two passports, you know. Thaf s illegal.”

“I know,” I said, grimacing. “That worries me, too. But I can’t lose this job. It might be years before another airline picked me up, if at all. I was on Pan Am’s waiting list for three years.” I paused, then exclaimed, “Flying jet liners is all I ever wanted to do!”

Kitty Corbett nodded sympathetically, lost in thought.

Then she pursed her mouth. “Pete, get me a telephone over here.”

Pete signaled and a waiter brought a telephone to the table and plugged it into a nearby wall jack. Kitty Corbett picked it up, jiggled the hook and then began talking to the operator in Spanish. It required several minutes, but she was put through to whomever she was calling.

“Sonja? Kitty Corbett here,” she said. “Listen, I’ve got a favor to ask …” She went on and detailed my predicament and then listened as the party on the other end replied.

“I know all that, Sonja,” she said. “And I’ve got it figured out. Just issue him a temporary passport, just as you would if his had been lost or stolen. Hell, when he gets back to New York he can tear up the temporary passport, or tear up the old one and get a new one.”

She listened again for a minute, then held her hand over the receiver and looked at me. “You don’t happen to have your birth certificate with you, do you?”

“Yes, I do,” I said. “I carry it in my wallet. It’s a little worn, but still legible.”

Kitty Corbett nodded and turned again to the phone. “Yes, Sonja, he has a birth certificate. . . . You think you can handle it? Great! You’re a love and I owe you. See you next week.”

She hung up and smiled. “Well, Frank, if you can get to the American Consulate in Mexico City by ten o’clock tomorrow, Sonja Gundersen, the assistant consul, will issue you a temporary passport. You’ve lost yours, understand? And if you tell anyone about this, I’ll kill you.”

I kissed her and ordered a bottle of the best champagne. I even had a glass myself. Then I called the airport and found there was a flight leaving in an hour. I made a reservation and turned to Pete. “Listen, I’m going to leave a lot of my stuff here. I don’t have time to pack. Have someone pack what I leave and store it in your office, and I’ll pick it up in a couple of weeks, maybe sooner. I’m going to try and come back through here.”

I stuffed one suitcase with my uniform and one suit, and my money. Pete had a cab waiting when I went down to the lobby. I really liked the guy, and I wished there were some way to thank him.

I thought of a way. I laid one of my phony Pan Am checks on him. On the hotel he managed, anyway.

I cashed another one at the airport before boarding the flight to Mexico City. In Mexico City, I stowed my bag in a locker after changing into my Pan Am pilot’s garb and walked into Miss Gundersen’s office at 9:45 A.M.

Sonja Gundersen was a crisp, starched blonde and she didn’t waste any time. “Your birth certificate, please.”

I took it from my wallet and handed it to her. She scanned it and looked at me. “I thought Kitty said your name was Frank Williams. This says your name is Frank W. Abagnale, Jr.”

I smiled. “It is. Frank William Abagnale, Jr. You know Kitty. She had a little too much champagne last night. She kept introducing me to all her friends as Frank Williams, too. But I thought she gave you my full name.”

“She may have,” agreed Miss Gundersen. “I had trouble hearing a lot of what she said. These damned Mexican telephones. Anyway you’re obviously a Pan Am pilot, and part of your name is Frank William, so you must be the one.”

As instructed, I had stopped and obtained two passport-sized photographs. I gave those to Miss Gundersen, and walked out of the consulate building fifteen minutes later with a temporary passport in my pocket. I went back to the airport and changed into a suit and bought a ticket for London at the British Overseas Airways counter, paying cash.

I was -told the flight was delayed. It wouldn’t depart until seven that evening.

I changed back into my pilot’s uniform and spent six hours papering Mexico City with my decorative duds. I was $6,500 richer when I flew off to London, and the Mexican federates joined the posse on my tail.

In London I checked into the Royal Gardens Hotel in Kensington, using the name F. W. Adams and representing myself as a TWA pilot on furlough. I used my alternate alias on the premise that London police would soon be receiving queries on Frank W. Abagnale, Jr., also known as Frank Williams, erstwhile Pan Am pilot.

I stayed only a few days in London. I was beginning to feel pressure on me, the same uneasiness that had plagued me in the States. I realized in London that leaving the U.S. hadn’t solved my problem, that Mexican police and Scotland Yard officers were in the same business as cops in New York or Los Angeles—that of catching crooks. And I was a crook.

Given that knowledge, and the small fortune in cash I had stashed away in various places, it would have been prudent of me to live as quietly and discreetly as possible under an assumed name in some out-of-the-way foreign niche. I recognized the merits of such a course, but prudence was a quality I didn’t seem to possess.

I was actually incapable of sound judgment, I realize now, driven by compulsions over which I had no control. I was now living by rationalizations: I was the hunted, the police were the hunters, ergo, the police were the bad guys. I had to steal to survive, to finance my continual flight from the bad guys, consequently I was justified in my illegal means of support. So, after less than a week in England, I papered Piccadilly with some of my piccadillies and flew off to Paris, smug in the irrational assumption that I’d resorted to fraud again in self-defense.

A psychiatrist would have viewed my actions differently. He would have said I wanted to be caught. For now the British police began to put together a dossier on me.

Perhaps I was seeking to be caught. Perhaps I was subconsciously seeking help and my subliminal mind told me the authorities would offer that help, but I had no such conscious thoughts at the time.

I was fully aware that I was on a mad carrousel ride, a merry-go-round whirling ungoverned from which I seemed unable to dismount, but I sure as hell didn’t want cops to stop the whirligig.

I hadn’t been in Paris three hours when I met Monique Lavalier and entered into a relationship that was not only to broaden my venal vistas but, ultimately, was also to destroy my honey hive. Looking back, I owe Monique a debt of thanks. So does Pan Am, although some of the firm’s officials might argue the point.

Monique was a stewardess for Air France. I met her in the Windsor Hotel bar, where she and several dozen other Air France flight-crew people were giving a party for a retiring captain pilot. If I met the honoree, I don’t remember him, for I was mesmerized by Monique. She was as heady and sparkling as the fine champagne being served. I was invited to the party by an Air France first officer who saw me, dressed in my Pan Am attire, checking in at the desk. He promptly accosted me, hustled me into the bar, and my real protests evaporated when he introduced me to Monique.

She had all of Rosalie’s charms and qualities and none of Rosalie’s inhibitions. Apparently I affected Monique the same way she affected me, for we became inseparable during the time I was in Paris and on subsequent visits. Monique, if she had any thoughts of marrying me, never mentioned it, but she did, three days after we met, take me home to present me to her family. The Lavaliers were delightful people, and I was particularly intrigued with Papa Lavalier.

He was a job printer, operator of a small printing shop on the outskirts of Paris. I was immediately seized with an idea for improving upon my check-swindling scam involving phony Pan Am vouchers.

“You know, I have some good connections in the Pan Am business office,” I said casually during lunch. “Maybe I can get Pan Am to give you some printing business.”

Papa Lavalier beamed. “Yes, yes!” he exclaimed. “Anything you want done, we will try and do, and we would be most grateful, monsieur.” Monique acted as an interpreter, for none of her family had the slightest command of English. That afternoon her father took me on a tour of his plant, which he operated with two of Monique’s brothers. He employed one other young man, who, like Monique, spoke fractured English, but Papa Lavalier said he and his sons would personally perform any printing jobs I might secure for their little firm. “Whatever you want printed in English, my father and my brothers can do it,” Monique said proudly. “They are the best printers in France.”

I still had the actual Pan Am payroll check I’d cashed for the stewardess in Mexico. Studying it, I was struck by the difference between it and my imaginative version of a Pan Am check. My imitations were impressive, certainly, else I wouldn’t have been able to pass so many of them, but one placed next to the real thing fairly shrieked “counterfeit!” I had been lucky to get by with passing them. Obviously the tellers who’d accepted them had never handled a real Pan Am check.

It occurred to me, however, that Pan Am checks might be very familiar to European bank tellers, since the carrier did the bulk of its business outside the continental United States. The thought had crossed my mind in London, even, when the teller in the one bank I’d bilked had seemed overly studious of my artwork.

“It’s an expense check,” I’d said, pointing to the bold black letters so stating.

“Oh, yes, of course,” he’d replied, and had cashed the check, but with a trace of reluctance.

Now I had another thought. Maybe Pan Am had a different-type check, maybe a different-colored check, perhaps, for different continents. I thought it best to check on the theory before proceeding with my plan. The next morning I called Pan Am’s Paris office and asked to speak to someone in the business office. I was connected with a man who sounded very young and very inexperienced, and soon proved he was the latter. I was becoming convinced that Lady Luck was my personal switchboard operator.

“Say, listen, this is Jack Rogers over at Daigle Freight Forwarding,” I said. “I got a check here, and I think your company must have sent it to us by mistake.”

“Uh, well, Mr. Rogers, why do you say that?” he inquired.

“Because I got a check here for $1,900, sent from your New York office, and I don’t have an invoice to match the payment notation,” I replied. “I can’t find any record of having handled anything for you people. You got any idea what this check’s for?”

“Well, not right offhand, Mr. Rogers. Are you sure the check’s from us?”

“Well, it seems to me it is,” I said. “It’s a regular green check with Pan American in big letters across the top and it’s made out to us for $1,900.”

“Mr. Rogers, that doesn’t sound like one of our checks,” the fellow said. “Our checks are blue, and they have Pan Am—Pan Am—Pan Am in faded-out wording all over the face, along with a global map of the world. Does yours have that on it?”

I was holding the stewardess’s check in my hand. He had described it perfectly, but I didn’t tell him that. “You gotta Pan Am check there?” I demanded, in the tone of a man who wanted to remove all doubts.

“Well, yes, I do, but. . .”

I cut him off. “Who’s it signed by? What’s the comptroller’s name?” I asked.

He told me. It was the same name appearing on the check in my hand. “What’s the string of little numbers across the bottom read?” I pressed.

“Why, 02 …” and he rattled them off to me. They matched the numbers on the stew’s check.

“Nah, that’s not the guy who signed this check and the numbers don’t match,” I lied. “But you people do bank with Chase Manhattan, don’t you?”

“Yes, we do, but so do a lot of other companies, and you may have a check from some other firm operating under the name Pan American. I don’t think you have one of our checks, Mr. Rogers. I suggest you return it and establish some sort of correspondence,” he said helpfully.

“Yeah, I’ll do that, and thanks,” I said.

Monique flew the Berlin-Stockholm-Copenhagen run for Air France, a two-day turnaround trip, and then was off for two days. She had a flight that day. She was barely airborne when I appeared in her father’s shop. He was delighted to see me, and we had no trouble conversing between the French I had learned from my mother and the English of his young printer.

I displayed the check I’d gotten from the Pan Am stewardess, but with her name and the amount of the check blocked out. “I talked to our business-office people,” I said. “Now, we’ve been having these checks printed in America, a pretty expensive process. I told them I thought you could do the job as well and at a substantial savings. Do you think you can duplicate this check in payroll-book form?

“If you think you can, I am authorized to give you a trial order of ten thousand, provided you can beat the New York price.”

He was examining the check. “And what is your printer’s cost for these in New York, monsieur?” he asked.

I hadn’t the faintest idea, but I named a figure I felt wouldn’t offend New York printers. “Three hundred and fifty dollars per thousand,” I said.

He nodded. “I can provide your company with a quality product that will exactly duplicate this one, and at $200 per thousand,” he said eagerly. “I think you will find our work most satisfactory.”

He hesitated, seemingly embarrassed. “Monsieur, I know you and my daughter are close friends, and I trust you implicitly, but it is customary that we receive a deposit of fifty percent,” he said apologetically.

I laughed. “You will have your deposit this afternoon,” I said.

I went to a Paris bank, dressed in my Pan Am pilot’s uniform, and placed $1,000 on the counter of one of the tellers’ cages. “I would like a cashier’s check in that amount, please,” I said. “The remittor should be Pan American World Airways, and make the check payable to Maurice Lavalier and Sons, Printers, if you will.”

I delivered the check that afternoon. Papa Lavalier had an inspection sample ready for the following day. I examined the work and had to restrain myself from whooping. The checks were beautiful. No, gorgeous. Real Pan Am checks, four to a page, twenty-five pages to the book, perforated and on IBM card stock! I felt on top of the mountain, and no matter it was a check swindler’s pinnacle.

Papa Lavalier filled the entire order within a week, and I again acquired a legitimate cashier’s check, purportedly issued by Pan Am, for the balance due him.

Papa Lavalier furnished me with invoices and receipts and was pleased that I was pleased. It probably never occurred to him, having never dealt with Americans before, that there was anything strange about our dealings. I was a Pan Am pilot. His daughter vouched for me. And the checks he received were valid checks, issued by Pan Am.

“I hope we can do more work for your company, my friend,” he said.

“Oh, you will, you will,” I assured him. “In fact, we’re so delighted with your work that we may refer others to you.”

There were other referrals, all phony, and all handled personally by me, but Papa Lavalier never questioned anything I asked. From the time he delivered the 10,000 Pan Am checks, he was the printer of any spurious document I needed or desired, an innocent dupe who felt grateful to me for having opened the door of the “American market” to him.

Of course I had no need of 10,000 Pan Am checks. The size of the order was simply to avert any suspicion. Even Papa Lavalier knew Pan Am was a behemoth of the airline industry. An order for a lesser number of checks might have made him wary.

I kept a thousand of the checks and fueled the incinerators of Paris with the remainder. Then I bought an IBM electric typewriter and made out a check to myself for $781.45, which I presented to the nearest bank, garbed as a Pan Am pilot.

It was a small bank. “Monsieur, I am certain this check is a good one, but I would have to verify it before I cash it, and we are not allowed to make transatlantic calls at the bank’s expense,” he said with a wry smile. “If you would care to pay for the call…” He looked at me ques-tioningly.

I shrugged. “Sure, go ahead. I’ll pay whatever the call costs.”

I hadn’t anticipated such a precaution on the bank’s part, but neither was I alarmed. And I had inadvertently chosen a time to cash the check when its worth as a counterfeit could be tested. It was 3:15 P.M. in Paris. The banks in New York had been open for fifteen minutes. It required about the same length of time for the teller to be connected with the bookkeeping department of the Chase Manhattan Bank. The French teller was proficient in English, although with an accent. “I have a check here, presented by a Pan American pilot, drawn on your bank in the amount of $781.45, American dollars,” said the teller, and proceeded to give the account number across the bottom left-hand corner of the sham check.

“I see, yes, thank you very much.. . . Oh, the weather here is fine, thank you.” He hung up and smiled. “Every time I talk to America, they want to know about the weather.” He handed me the check to endorse and commenced counting out the amount of the check, less $8.92 for the telephone call. All things considered, it was not an unreasonable service charge.

I showered Paris and its suburban environs with the bogus checks, and rented a safe-deposit box, for a five-year period paid in advance, in which to store my loot. Very rarely was a check questioned, and then it was only a matter of verification, and if the banks in New York were closed, I would return to the bank when they were open. Only once did I experience a tense moment. Instead of calling Chase Manhattan, one teller called Pan Am’s business office in New York! Not once was my assumed name mentioned, but I heard the teller give the name of the bank, the account number and the name of the Pan Am comptroller.

Pan Am must have verified the check, for the teller paid it.

I was astonished myself at the ease and smoothness of my new operation. My God, I was now having my fictitious checks cleared by telephone and by Pan Am itself. I rented a car and while Monique was flying I drove around France, cashing the checks in every village bank and big-city treasury that loomed in sight. I have never verified the suspicion, but I often thought in later months and years that the reason I was so successful with those particular Pan Am checks was because Pan Am was paying them!

Papa Lavalier received a lot of business from me. I had him make me up a new Pan Am ID card, much more impressive than my own fraudulent one, after a real Pan Am pilot carelessly left his IE) card on the bar in the Windsor. “I’ll give it to him,” I told the bartender. I did mail it to him, in care of Pan Am’s New York offices, but only after I’d had Papa Lavalier copy it and substitute my own phony name, fake rank and photograph.

I had told the Lavaliers that I was in Paris as a special representative of Pan Am, doing public relations for the firm. A month after meeting Monique, however, I told her I had to return to flying status as a standby pilot, and caught a plane to New York. I arrived shortly before noon on a Tuesday and went immediately to the nearest branch of the Chase Manhattan Bank, where I purchased a $1,200 cashier’s check, with “Roger D. Williams” as remittor and “Frank W. Williams” as payee.

I took a plane back to Paris that same day, checked into the King George V this time, and once in my room altered the Federal Reserve District number on the check so that, when cashed, it would be routed to San Francisco or Los Angeles.

Then I took the check to Papa Lavalier. “I need three hundred of these,” I said.

I thought surely he would question the duplication of what was obviously a money order, but he didn’t. I learned later that he never really understood what he was printing when he did jobs for me, but performed with a blind faith in my integrity.

I flew back to New York the day after receiving the three hundred duplicates, each an image of the original. There are 112 branches of Chase Manhattan in the New York metropolitan area alone. Over a period of three days I called at sixty of the branches, presenting one of the replicas in each bank. Only once in the sixty instances were there more than perfunctory words passed.

“Sir, I know this is one of Chase’s checks, but it wasn’t issued from this branch,” she said apologetically. “I will have to call the issuing bank. Can you wait a minute?”

“Certainly, go ahead,” I said easily.

She made her call within earshot of me. No part of the conversation surprised me. “Yes, this is Janice in Queens. Cashier’s check 023685, can you tell me whom it was issued to, how much, when and what’s the current status on it?” She waited, then apparently repeated what she’d been told. “Frank W. Williams, $1,200, January 5, currently outstanding. I must have it right here. Thank you very much.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” she said, smiling as she counted out the cash.

“That’s all right,” I said. “And you should never apologize for doing your job well.” I meant it, too. That girl got stung, but she’s still the kind banks should hire. And she saved Chase a bundle. I had intended to hit at least 100 Chase branches, but after she made her call, I pulled up on that particular caper.

I figured I couldn’t afford another call to the bank that had issued the original check. I knew the odds favored me, but I couldn’t chance the same bookkeeping clerk answering the phone if some other teller decided to go behind the check.

New York made me nervous. I felt I should head for a foreign clime again, but I couldn’t decide whether to return to Paris and Monique or visit some new and exciting place.

While I was debating with myself, I flew to Boston, where I got myself flung into jail and robbed a bank. The former was a shock, like an unplanned pregnancy. The latter was the result of an irresistible impulse.

I went to Boston simply to get out of New York. I thought it would be as good as any place along the eastern seaboard as a point of embarkation, and it also had a lot of banks. On arrival, I stowed my bags in an airport rental locker, put the key in my ID folder and called at several of the banks, exchanging some of my Pan Am check facsimiles for genuine currency. I returned to the airport early in the evening, intending to catch an overseas flight as soon as possible. I had garnered over $5,000 in my felonious foray through Bean Town, and I stowed $4,800 of it in my bags before checking on what foreign flights were available that night.

I didn’t have a chance to make my inquiries until late that night. Turning away from the locker, I encountered a pretty Allegheny Airlines stewardess from my embryo days as a pilot without portfolio.

“Frank! What a neat surprise!” she exclaimed. Naturally, we had to have a reunion. I didn’t get back to the airport until after 11 P.M., and by then I’d decided to go to Miami and make an overseas connection from there.

I walked up to the Allegheny Airlines counter. “When’s your next connecting flight to Miami?” I asked the ticket agent on duty, a man. I had changed into my pilot’s uniform.

“You just missed it.” He grimaced.

“Who’s got the next flight, National, American, who?” I inquired.

“No one,” he said. “You’ve missed any flight to Miami until tomorrow. Nothing flies out of here after midnight. Boston’s got a noise-control ordinance, now, and no outgoing traffic is allowed after midnight. No airline can put a plane in the air until 6:30 A.M., and the first flight to Miami is National’s at 10:15 A.M.”

“But it’s only 11:40 now,” I said.

He grinned. “Okay. You want to go to Burlington, Vermont? That’s the last flight out tonight.”

All things considered, I declined. I walked over and sat down in one of the lobby chairs, mulling the situation. The lobby, like most large airport vestibules, was ringed with gift shops, newsstands, coffee shops, bars and various other shops, and I noted idly, while cogitating, that most of them were closing. I also noted, suddenly interested, that many of them were stopping at the night depository of a large Boston bank, situated near the middle of one exit corridor, and dropping bags or bulky envelopes—obviously their day’s receipts—into the steel-faced receptacle.

My observation was interrupted by two chilling words:

“Frank Abagnale?”

I looked up, quelling a surge of panic. Two tall, grim-visaged Massachusetts state troopers, in uniform, stood over me.

“You are Frank Abagnale, aren’t you?” demanded the one in stony tones.

“My name is Frank, but it’s Frank Williams,” I said, and I was surprised that the calm, unflustered reply had issued from my throat.

“May I see your identification, please?” asked the one. The words were spoken politely, but his eyes said if I didn’t promptly produce my ID, he was going to pick me up by the ankles and shake it out of my pockets.

I handed over my ID card and my fraudulent FAA pilot’s license. “Look, I don’t know what this is all about, but you’re badly mistaken,” I said as I tendered the documents. “I fly for Pan American, and these ought to be proof enough.”

The one studied the ID card and license, then passed them to his partner. “Why don’t you knock off the bullshit, son? You’re Frank Abagnale, aren’t you?” said the second one, almost gently.

“Frank who?” I protested, feigning anger to cover my increasing nervousness. “I don’t know who the hell you’re after, but it’s not me!”

The one frowned. “Well, we ain’t gonna stand around here arguing with you,” he growled. “Come on, we’re taking you in.”

They didn’t ask where my luggage was, and I didn’t volunteer. They took me outside, placed me in their patrol car and drove me directly to the state police offices. There I was ushered into the office of a harried-looking lieutenant, whom I assumed was the shift commander.

“What the hell is this?” he demanded in exasperated tones.

“Well, we think it’s Frank Abagnale, Lieutenant,” said one of the troopers. “He says he’s a pilot for Pan Am.”

The lieutenant eyed me. “You don’t look very old to be a pilot,” he said. “Why don’t you tell the truth? You’re Frank Abagnale. We’ve been looking for him for a long time. He’s supposed to be a pilot, too. You fit his description—perfectly.”

“I’m thirty years old, my name is Frank Williams and I fly for Pan Am, and I want to talk to my lawyer,” I shouted.

The lieutenant sighed. “You ain’t been charged with nothin‘ yet,” he said. “Take him over to the city jail, book him for vagrancy and then let him call a lawyer. And call the feds. He’s their pigeon. Let them straighten it out.”

“Vagrancy!” I protested. “I’m no vagrant. I’ve got nearly $200 on me.”

The lieutenant nodded. “Yeah, but you ain’t proved you’re gainfully employed,” he said wearily. “Get ‘im out of here.”

I was taken to the county jail in downtown Boston, which had all the appearances of a facility that should have long ago been condemned, and had been, and I was turned over to the booking sergeant.

“Damn me, what did he do?” he queried, looking at me.

“Just book him for vagrancy. Someone will pick him up in the morning,” said the one trooper.

“Vagrant!” bellowed the sergeant. “By damn, if he’s a vagrant, I hope you guys never bring in any bums.”

“Just book him,” grunted the one trooper, and he and his partner left.

“Empty your pockets, lad,” the sergeant said gruffly, pulling a form in triplicate from a drawer. “I’ll give you a receipt for your goods.”

I started placing my valuables before him. “Listen, can I keep my ID card and pilot’s license?” I asked. “Company regulations say I have to have them on me at all times. I’m not sure if being arrested is included, but I’d still like to keep them, if you don’t mind.”

The sergeant examined the card and the license and pushed them toward me. “Sure,” he said kindly. “I’d say there’s been some kind of mix-up here, lad. I’m glad I’m not involved.”

A jailer took me upstairs and placed me in a dingy, rusty cell adjoining the drunk tank. “If you need anything, just holler,” he said sympathetically.

I nodded, not replying, and slumped on the cot. I was suddenly depressed, miserable and scared. The game was over, I had to admit. The FBI would pick me up in the morning, I knew, and then it would be just one courtroom after another, I figured. I looked around the jail cell and hoped that prison cells were more tenable. Jesus, this was a rat hole. And I didn’t have a prayer of getting out. But then no man has a prayer, I thought regretfully, when he worships a hustler’s god.

Even a hustler’s god, however, has a legion of angels. And one appeared to me now, preceded by a thin, wavering whistle, like a kid bolstering his courage in a graveyard. He hauled up in front of my cell, an apparition in a hideous, green-checked suit topped by a face that might have come out of a lobster pot, questioning lips punctuated by an odorous cigar and eyes that regarded me as a weasel might look on a mouse.

“Well, now, what the hell might you be doing in there?” he asked around the cigar.

I didn’t know who he was. He didn’t look like anyone who could help me. “Vagrancy,” I said shortly.

“Vagrancy!” he exclaimed, examining me with his shrewd eyes. “You’re a pilot with Pan Am, aren’t you? How the hell can you be a vagrant? Did somebody steal all your planes?”

“Who’re you?” I asked.

He fished in his pocket and thrust a card through the bars. “Aloyius James ‘Bailout’ Bailey, my high-flying friend,” he said. “Bail bondsman par excellence. The cops bring ‘em, I spring ’em. You’re on their turf, now, pal. I can put you on mine. The street.”

Hope didn’t exactly spring eternal in my breast, but it crow-hopped.

“Well, I’ll tell you the truth,” I said cautiously. “There was this guy at the airport. He was getting pretty obnoxious with a girl. I racked his ass. They ran us both in for fighting. I should’ve stayed out of it. I’ll probably lose my job when the skipper finds out I’m in jail.”

He stared at me, unbelieving. “What the hell you sayin‘? You ain’t got nobody to bail you out? Call one of your friends, for Chris’ sakes.”

I shrugged. “I don’t have any friends here. I flew in on a charter cargo job. I’m based in Los Angeles.”

“What about the rest of your crew?” he demanded. “Call one of them.”

“They went on to Istanbul,” I lied. “I got time off due me. I was going to deadhead to Miami to see a chick.”

“Well, goddamned! You have got your ass in a crack, haven’t you?” said Aloyius James “Bailout” Bailey. Then he smiled, and his features suddenly took on the charm of a jolly leprechaun. “Well, my fighter-pilot chum, let’s see if we can’t get your butt out of this Boston bastille.”

He disappeared and was gone for an agonizing length of time, all of ten minutes. Then he hove to in front of my cell again. “Goddamn, your bond is $5,000,” he said in a surprised tone. “Sarge says you must have given the troopers a hard time. How much money you got?”

My hopes came to a standstill again. “Just $200, maybe not that much,” I sighed.

He mulled the reply; his eyes narrowed. “You got any identification?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said, passing my ID and pilot’s license through the bars. “You can see how long I’ve been a pilot, and I’ve been with Pan Am seven years.”

He handed back the documents. “You got a personal check?” he asked abruptly.

“Yeah, that is, the sergeant downstairs has it,” I said. “Why?”

“Because I’m gonna take your check, that’s why, Jet Jockey,” he said with a grin. “You can write it out when the sarge lets you loose.”

The sarge let me loose thirty-five minutes later. I wrote Bailey a check for the standard 10 percent, $500, and handed him a hundred in cash. “That’s a bonus, in lieu of a kiss,” I said, laughing with joy. “I’d give you the kiss except for that damned cigar!”

He drove me to the airport after I told him I was taking the first flight to Miami.

This is what happened later. I have it on unimpeachable sources, as the White House reporters are fond of saying. An ecstatic O’Riley, high enough with joy to require a pilot’s license himself, showed up at the jail. “Abagnale, or whatever the hell name you’ve got him booked under, trot him out,” he chortled.

“He made bond at three-thirty this morning,” volunteered a jailer. The sergeant had gone home.

O’Riley flirted with apoplexy. “Bond! Bond! Who the hell bonded him out?” he finally shrieked in strangled tones.

“Bailey, ‘Bailout’ Bailey, who else?” replied the jailer.

O’Riley wrathfully sought out Bailey. “Did you post bond for a Frank Wiliams this morning? he demanded.

Bailey looked at him, astonishd. “The pilot? Sure, I went his bail. Why the hell not?”

“How’d he pay you? How much?” O’Riley grated.

“Why, the regular amount, $500. I’ve got his check right here,” said Bailey, offering the voucher.

O’Riley looked at the check and then dropped it on Bailey’s desk. “Serves your ass right,” he growled, and turned toward the door.

“What do you mean?” Bailey demanded as the FBI agent grasped the door handle.

O’Riley grinned wickedly. “Run it through your bank account, turd, and you’ll find out what I mean.”

Outside, a Massachusetts detective turned to O’Riley. “We can get out an APB on him.”

O’Riley shook his head. “Forget it. That bastard’s five hundred miles away. No Boston cop’s gonna catch him.”

A prudent man would have been five hundred miles away. I wasn’t prudent. When you’re hot, you’re hot, and I had the cajones of a billy goat.

No sooner had Bailey dropped me at the airport, and was gone, than I grabbed a cab and checked in at a nearby motel.

The next morning I called the bank that had a branch at the airport. “Security, please,” I said when the switchboard operator answered.

“Security.”

“Yeah, listen, this is Connors, the new guard. I don’t have a uniform for tonight’s shift. My damned uniform got ripped up in an accident. Where can I get a replacement, lady?” I spoke in outrage.

“Well, we get our uniforms from Beke Brothers,” the woman replied in mollifying tones. “Just go down there, Mr. Connors. They’ll outfit you with a replacement.”

I looked up the address of Beke Brothers. I also had my fingers do some walking through other sections of the Yellow Pages.

I went first to Beke Brothers. No one questioned my status. Within fifteen minutes I walked out with a complete guard’s outfit: shirt, tie, trousers and hat, the name of the bank emblazoned over the breast pocket and on the right shoulder of the shirt. I stopped at a police-supply firm and picked up a Sam Browne belt and holster. I called at a gun shop and picked up a replica of a .38 police special.

It was harmless, but only an idiot would have ignored it were it pointed at him. I then rented a station wagon, and when I left my motel each door sported a sign proclaiming

“SECURITY—BEAN STATE NATIONAL BANK.”

At 11:15 P.M. I was standing at attention in front of the night-deposit box of the Bean State National Bank Airport Branch, and a beautifully lettered sign adorned the safe’s depository: “NIGHT DEPOSIT VAULT OUT OF ORDER, PLEASE

MAKE DEPOSITS WITH SECURITY OFFICER.“

There was an upright dolly, with a large mail-type bag bulking open, in front of the depository.

At least thirty-five people dropped bags or envelopes into the container.

Not one of them said more than “Good evening” or “Good night.”

When the last shop had closed, I secured the top of the canvas bag and began hauling the loot to the station wagon. I became stuck trying to get the dolly over the weather strip of the exit door. Try as I might, I couldn’t get the damned thing across the little ridge. It was just too heavy.

“What’s going on, buddy?”

I twisted my head and nearly soiled my drawers. They weren’t the same ones, but a pair of state troopers was standing less than five feet away.

“Well, the box is out of order, and the truck broke down, and I’ve got the bank’s station wagon out here and no goddamned hydraulic pulley, and I ain’t exactly Samson,” I said, grinning sheepishly.

The older one, a ruddy-faced redhead, laughed. “Well, hell, let us help you with it,” he said, and stepped forward and grabbed the handle of the dolly. With three of us tugging, it came over the ridge easily. They helped me drag the dolly to the station wagon and assisted me in lifting the bulky, cumbersome cargo into the back of the vehicle. I slammed shut the tailgate and turned to the officers.

“I appreciate it, boys,” I said, smiling. “I’d spring for the coffee, but I’ve got to get this little fortune to the bank.”

They laughed and one lifted a hand. “Hey, no sweat. Next time, okay?”

Less than an hour later, I had the booty in my motel room and was sorting out the cash. Bills only. I tossed the change, credit-card receipts and checks into the bathtub.

I netted $62,800 in currency. I changed into a casual suit, wrapped the haul in a spare shirt and drove to the airport, where I retrieved my bags. An hour later I was on a flight to Miami. I had a thirty-minute layover in New York. I used the time to call the manager of the airport in Boston. I didn’t get him but I got his secretary.

“Listen, tell the Bean State Bank people they can get the majority of the loot from last night’s depository caper in the bathtub of Room 208, Rest Haven Motel,” I said and hung up.

The next day I winged out of Miami, bound for Istanbul.

I had an hour’s layover in Tel Aviv.

I used it upholding my code of honor. In my entire career, I never yenched a square John as an individual.

I sought out a branch of an American bank. And laid a sheaf of bills on the counter before a teller.

“I want a $5,000 cashier’s check,” I said.

“Yes, sir. And your name?”

“Frank Abagnale, Jr.,” I said.

“All right, Mr. Abagnale. Do you want this check made out to you?”

I shook my head. “No,” I said. “Make it payable to Aloyius James ‘Bailout’ Bailey, in Boston, Massachusetts.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

A Small Crew Will Do— It’s Just a Paper Airplane

An entourage is expected of some people. The President. Queen Elizabeth. Frank Sinatra. Muhammad Ali. Arnold Palmer. Most celebrities, in fact.

And airline pilots.

“Where’s your crew, sir?” asked the desk clerk in the Istanbul hotel. It was a question I’d encountered before.

“I don’t have a crew with me,” I replied. “I just flew in to replace a pilot who became ill.” It was my standard answer to such queries, which were much more numerous in Europe and the Middle East than in the United States. Continental hotels, obviously, were more accustomed to catering to entire air crews. A lone pilot aroused curiosity.

And curiosity breeds suspicion.

I needed a crew, I mused that evening while dining in a Turkish restaurant. I had doffed my uniform. Save on special occasions, I now wore it only when checking in and checking out of a hotel, passing a check or cadging a free ride.

The matter of a crew had entered my mind before. In fact, it entered my mind each time I saw a command pilot surrounded by his crew. His status was not only more believable than mine, but he also always seemed to be having much more fun than I. Stews, I had noticed, tended to act as handmaidens to the pilots. My life as a bogus birdman, on the other hand, was essentially a lonely existence. But then a man on the run is usually a forlorn figure. It’s hard to play the social lion when you’re moving like a scalded cat. My dalliances, by and large, had all the permanency of rabbits’ relationships and about the same degree of satisfaction.

My fantasies of an aircrew of my own, of course, were motivated by more than just a desire for companionship. An aircrew—and I thought of an aircrew only in terms of stewardesses—would lend concrete validity to my role of airline pilot. I had learned that a solitary pilot was always subject to scrutiny. Conversely, a pilot trailing a squad of lovely stewardesses would almost certainly be above- suspicion. If I had a beautiful bevy of flight attendants with me in my travels, I could scatter my valueless checks like confetti and they’d be accepted like rice at a wedding, I thought. Not that I was having any trouble passing them at present, but I was passing them one at a time. With a crew behind me, I could cash the sham checks in multiple numbers.

I left Istanbul after a week and flew to Athens. “Don’t you have a crew with you, sir?” asked the hotel desk clerk. I gave him my usual reply, feeling harassed.

The next day I flew to Paris to visit the Lavaliers. “I wish you flew for Air France. I could be a member of your crew,” Monique said at one point during the visit. The remark convinced me that an aircrew was a necessity.

But how did a pilot without portfolio, who didn’t know how to fly, go about assembling an aircrew? I could hardly gather a few girls at random and propose, “Hey, kids, wanna go to Europe? I’ve got this great scheme for passing worthless checks . . .” And since I had absolutely no connections in the underworld, American or European, I couldn’t look for help there.

I was in West Berlin when a solution presented itself. It was long-range and fraught with risks, but it was also challenging. Pan Am’s hives had always provided the bulk of my honey. If the carrier wasn’t my parent company, I was in a sense its bastard child, and this was an issue demanding filial loyalty.

I’d let Pan Am furnish me a flight crew.

I flew to New York and on arrival called Pan Am’s personnel office, representing myself as the placement director of a small western college, Prescott Presbyterian Normal. “I’m aware that you people send employment recruiting teams to various colleges and universities, and I wondered if you might possibly have our school on your schedule this year?” I said.

“I’m sorry, we don’t,” said the Pan Am personnel officer who took my call. “However, we will have a team on the University of Arizona campus during the last two weeks in October, interviewing students for various positions, and I’m sure they’d be glad to talk to any of your students who might be interested in a career with Pan Am. If you like, we can mail you some brochures.”

“That would be nice,” I said, and gave him a fictitious address for my nonexistent college.

Mine was a plan that demanded the boldness of a mountain climber. I donned my uniform and went to Pan Am’s Hangar 14 at Kennedy. With my phony ID card dangling from my breast pocket, I had no trouble at all gaining entrance, and I spent a leisurely half hour roaming through the stores department until I had accumulated the supplies I needed: envelopes, large manila holders and stationery, all boasting Pan Am’s letterhead, a pad of employment application forms and a stack of colorful brochures.

Back in my motel room, I sat down and composed a letter to the director of the University of Arizona placement office. Pan Am, I said, was initiating a new recruiting technique this year. In addition to the regular personnel recruiters who would visit the campus in October, the letter stated, Pan Am was also fielding pilots and stewardesses to interview prospective pilots and flight attendants, since actual flight personnel could offer a better perspective of what a flying position with Pan Am would entail and could also better evaluate the applicants.

“A pilot will be visiting your campus on Monday, September 9, and will be available for three days to interview stewardess applicants,” the spurious letter stated. “Under separate cover, we are sending you some brochures and employment application forms which you might wish to distribute to interested students.”

I signed the name of Pan Am’s director of personnel to the letter and placed it in a Pan Am envelope. I packaged the brochures and application forms in one of the large manila holders. Then I went to Pan Am’s office building, sought out the airline’s mail room and dropped the missives off with a young clerk, brusquely ordering they be sent air mail.

I thought Pan Am’s own postage meter, with its little Pan Am blurb, “World’s Most Experienced Airline,” would add a little class to the counterfeit mailings.

I dispatched the letter and the other material on August 18. On August 28 I called the University of Arizona and was connected with John Henderson, director of student placement.

“Mr. Henderson, this is Frank Williams, a co-pilot for Pan American World Airways,” I said. “I am scheduled to visit your campus in a couple of weeks, and I’m calling to see if you received our material and if the dates are suitable.”

“Oh, yes, Mr. Williams,” enthused Henderson. “We’re looking forward to your visit and we did receive your material. In fact, we’ve posted it about campus, and you should have a goodly number of applicants.”

“Well, I don’t know what was in the letter you received,” I lied. “But I have been instructed by the flight supervisor to interview only juniors and seniors.”

“We understand that, Mr. Williams,” Henderson said. “In fact, all the inquiries I have received so far have been from juniors or seniors.” He volunteered quarters on the campus for me, but I declined, saying I’d already made reservations with a hotel favored by the company.

I appeared on the University of Arizona campus at 8 A.M., Monday, September 9, and Henderson greeted me cordially. I was, of course, in uniform. Henderson had set aside a small room for my use during my stay. “We have thirty applicants to date, and I have scheduled them to appear in lots of ten each day,” he said. “I know, of course, you’ll be talking to them individually, and you can set your own daily schedule, if you wish. But the first ten will be here at 9 A.M.”

“Well, I think I’ll talk to them as a group at first, and then interview them individually,” I said.

The first group of ten coeds was, collectively and individually, simply lovely. More than ever, looking at them, I saw the need for a crew of my own. The ten of them eyed me like I was Elvis Presley about to swing into action.

I affected a businesslike air. “First of all, ladies, I want you to know this is as new to me as it is to you. I’m more used to a cockpit than a classroom, but the company has assigned me this task and I hope I can carry it out successfully. With your help and understanding, I think I can.

“I say ‘understanding’ because I don’t have the final say as to who will be hired and who will not. My job is just to select girls who I think would be most suitable as flight attendants and to make a recommendation in their behalf The personnel director has the authority to reject any or all of the candidates I offer. However, I can also say that you might be hired on my recommendation without your having to be interviewed by anyone else.

“There is also this—it’s unlikely any of you will be hired by Pan Am before you graduate. But if you are selected as a future stewardess, it’s our policy to give you some sort of assistance during your last year in school just so you won’t be tempted to take some other job. Am I making myself clear?”

I was. The girls said so. I then dismissed them as a group and began interviewing them individually. I wasn’t really sure of the type of girl I wanted in my “crew,” but I was sure of the type I didn’t want. I didn’t want a girl who couldn’t handle it if she learned she’d been conned into an elaborate scam.

Totally naive and patently prudish candidates I crossed off immediately. Those who were personable and attractive, but superstraight (the kind of girl an airline would like as a stewardess), I marked as questionable. I put check marks after the names of girls who impressed me as easygoing, somewhat gullible, a little daring or devil-may-care, ultraliberal or not likely to panic in a crisis. I thought the girls who possessed such traits would be the best bets for my make-believe flight squad.

Henderson sat in during the morning sessions, but during the lunch break he led me to a file room behind his office and showed me an entrance near where I was interviewing the girls. He handed me a key to the door. “There’s very rarely anyone on duty here, since our student records system is completely computerized,” he said. “So you’ll need this key. Now, I’ve pulled the files of all the applicants and put them aside on this desk here, in case you want to study the record of a particular girl. This way, you can operate pretty much on your own, although we’ll be available to help you if you feel you need help, of course.”

I was intrigued with the record-keeping system and Henderson obligingly showed me how the system worked before taking me to lunch as his guest.

I finished with the first ten applicants early in the afternoon and the following morning met the second batch of candidates. I gave them the same spiel, and like the first ten, they were equally amenable to my terms. The last girls, too, were exposed to the same con, and by the afternoon of the third day I had narrowed the field to twelve candidates.

I spent a couple of hours studying the files of the twelve on an individual basis, recalling my own interviews with them and my impressions of them, before settling on eight. I was leaving the records room when I was seized with an amusing whim, one that took me less than thirty minutes to satisfy. When I left the room, Frank Abagnale, Jr., a native of Bronxville, had transcripts in the files showing him to have earned both a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in social work.

The next morning I delivered my “thesis” to my eight finalists, since they were the lambs who had made possible my whimsical sheepskins.

The girls were excited when I assembled them, in the perfect mood for the con I put down. “Calm down, please, calm down,” I implored them. “You haven’t been hired as stewardesses. I think you ought to know that now.”

The words achieved the desired multiple shock. And momentary total silence. Then I grinned and laid it on them. “That’s because you’re all juniors and we want you to finish your education before joining Pan Am,” I said.

“I think I mentioned before that the company likes to assist approved stewardess candidates during their last year in school, and I’ve been authorized to make you eight girls an offer I think you’ll find interesting.

“I have been informed that the company intends to hire a number of girls as summer interns for the coming year, and these girls will be sent to Europe in different groups to act as advertising representatives and public relations people. That is, they’ll be used as models for photographs for Pan Am ads in various world publications—I’m sure you’ve all seen the kind I’m talking about—and some will be used as speakers at schools, civic group meetings, business seminars and that sort of thing. It’s a show-the-com-pany-flag type of tour and usually we use real stewardesses or professional models dressed up in flight-attendant uniforms.

“But this coming summer, we’re going to use girls who’ve applied for stewardess positions and it will serve as sort of a pretraining period for them. I personally think it’s a good idea for several reasons. One, it will allow our ad people to use pictures of our own personnel, depicted in cities we serve, and secondly, we won’t have to pull actual stewardesses off the flight line when a photo situation calls for an actual stewardess. That’s always made it tougher on the other stewardesses in the past, because summer months are our peak passenger months, and when we have to pull attendants off flight duty, other girls have to do their work.

“Now, if any or all of you would like to take part in the program this summer, I’m authorized to hire you. You’ll have an expense-paid tour of Europe. You’ll be paid the same salary as a starting stewardess, and you’ll dress as stewardesses, but you won’t be stewardesses. We’ll supply your uniforms. Also, you’ll be given a letter of employment, which is very important in this instance. It means that those of you who do decide to become stewardesses after graduation will be applying as former Pan Am employees, and you’ll be given priority over all other applicants.

“Do I have any takers among you?”

They all volunteered. “Okay,” I said, smiling. “Now, you’ll all need passports. That’s your responsibility. I’ll also need your addresses so the company can keep in touch with you. I’m sure you’ll have your letters of employment within a month. That’s it, ladies. I’ve certainly enjoyed meeting you all, and I hope that if and when you become stewardesses, some of you will be assigned to my crew.”

I informed Henderson of the offer I’d made the girls, and he was as delighted as they had been. In fact, Henderson, his wife and the eight girls all hosted me that night at a delightful dinner party around the pool in the Hendersons’ back yard.

I flew back to New York and rented a box with mail-answering service that had offices in the Pan Am Building. It was the perfect cover, since it allowed me to use Pan Am’s own address in subsequent correspondence I had with the girls, but all their replies would be directed to my box with the mail-service firm.

After a week or so, I sent a “letter of employment” to each of them, along with a covering letter signed by myself (as Frank Williams) informing each of them that—surprise! surprise!—I had been assigned by the company to head up the European operation involving them, so they were to be my “crew” after all. I also enclosed a phony little form I’d made up, requesting all their measurements for purposes of having their uniforms made up. I directed each of them to address any future questions or information directly to me, in care of my box number.

Then I turned to getting ready for the tour myself. The passport I had was only a temporary one, and in my real name. I decided I needed a regular passport that I could use as Frank Williams and decided to take a chance that the passport office in New York was too busy for its employees to play cop.

I walked into the office one morning, turned in my temporary passport and ten days later was issued a regular passport. I was pleased to have the document, but it was, after all, issued to Frank W. Abagnale, Jr. It was not a passport that would serve “Pan Am First Officer Frank W. Williams,” should the need ever arise. I started looking around and found what I needed in the hall of records of a large East Coast city. It was the death notice of Francis W. Williams, age twenty months, who had died at that young age on November 22,1939. The archives disclosed the infant had been born on March 12, 1938, in a local hospital. I obtained a certified copy of the birth certificate for $3.00 by presenting myself to one of the clerks as the same Francis W. Williams. It seemed logical to me, and I’m sure it would make sense to anyone else, that anyone named “Francis” would prefer to be called “Frank.”

I took the copy of the birth certificate to the passport office in Philadelphia, together with the necessary photos, and two weeks later had a second passport, one that matched my Pan Am uniform. I was now ready to “command” my crew, if nothing occurred in the next several months to upset my Arizona apple cart.

I spent those months knocking around the country, keeping a low profile in the main, but occasionally dropping a few phony Pan Am checks or counterfeit cashier’s checks.

At one point I ended up in Miami, staying in the penthouse suite of a Miami Beach hotel, the Fontainebleau, under the guise of a California stock broker, complete with a briefcase full of $20s, $50s and $100s, and a rented Rolls-Royce, which I had leased in Los Angeles and driven to Florida.

It was all part of a grand scam I had in mind, which was to drop some really big counterfeit cashier’s checks on some of the Miami banks and some of its more elite hotels after establishing a reputable front. I earned the reputable front in large part sheerly by accident. I had made it a point to acquaint myself with some of the hotel’s top management people, and one of them stopped me in the lobby one afternoon and introduced me to a Florida broker, one whose financial genius was known even to me.

A staunch Floridian, he had the true Floridian’s thinly disguised contempt for California, and I gathered from most of his remarks during our casual encounter that he didn’t hold California stockbrokers in any esteem, either. He was so blatantly rude and arrogant at times that the hotel executive was patently embarrassed. After a few minutes I excused myself, he was so hostile. He grasped my arm as I was leaving.

“What’s your opinion on the Saturn Electronics offering?” he asked with a supercilious smirk. I’d never heard of the company and in fact didn’t know any such firm existed. But I regarded him blandly, then dropped one eyelid. “Buy all of it you can get your hands on,” I said and walked off.

A few days later I encountered the man again as we were both waiting for our cars to be brought to the front entrance. He greeted me with grudging respect, which surprised me. “I should have listened to you on that Saturn stock,” he said. “How the hell did you know Galaxy Communications was going to take over the company?”

I just grinned and gave him another wink. Later I learned that Saturn Electronics, after its acquisition by Galaxy, had closed from five to eight points up on each of the previous four days.

That evening I was accosted at the elevator by a well-groomed man in his thirties who introduced himself as a prominent city official.

“Rick [one of the hotel executives] told me about you, Mr. Williams,” he said. “He said you might be setting up an office here and perhaps make your home in Miami during part of the year.”

I nodded. “Well, I’m thinking about it seriously,” I said, smiling. “I’ll probably make up my mind within a few weeks.”

“Well, perhaps I can help you/‘ he said. ”My wife and I are giving a party tonight and some of the city’s and the state’s top government and business leaders are going to be there, including the mayor and some people from the governor’s staff. I’d like to invite you, if you’d consider coming. I think it would be an enjoyable evening for you, and like I say, you might meet some people who will help you make up your mind.“

I accepted his invitation, because he was right, in a way. It was quite possible some of his guests could help me. By letting me fleece them.

It was a black-tie affair, but I had no trouble finding a tuxedo rental shop that was open and which could fit me on such short notice. I also had no trouble locating the city father’s home, which proved to be uncomfortably close to a certain banker’s home. I hoped she wasn’t a guest also, but I had the parking attendant position my car for a quick getaway, just in case.

She wasn’t a guest, but the most stunning and attractive blonde I’ve ever encountered, before and since, was a guest. I noticed her moments after I joined the throng of guests, and she kept attracting my attention all evening. Oddly enough, although she seemed always to be the center of a circle of admirers, she didn’t seem to be with any one of the men paying her court. My host confirmed the fact.

“That’s Cheryl,” he said. “She’s a standard decoration at parties like this. She’s a model and she’s been on the covers of several magazines. We have a pretty good arrangement with her. She lends excitement to our parties and we make sure she gets mentioned in all the society columns. Come on, I’ll introduce you.”

She made it immediately known that she’d been curious about me also. “I saw you arrive,” she said, extending her hand. “That’s a lovely Rolls. Is it yours or did you borrow it for the occasion?”

“No, it’s one of mine,” I said.

Her eyebrows arched. “One of yours? Do you have more than one Rolls-Royce?”

“I have several,” I replied. “I’m a collector.” I knew from the gleam in her eyes that I’d made a dear friend. She was obviously impressed by wealth and material possessions. In fact, I was continually surprised throughout the remainder of the evening that such a beautiful exterior masked such a venal and covetous interior. However, I wasn’t interested in her lack of virtues. I was attracted by her obvious vices. She was avariciously gorgeous.

We weren’t together the entire evening. We would part occasionally and go prowling separately, like two leopards seeking prey in the same jungle. I found the prey I was hunting, a couple of fat and juicy bank pigeons. She also found her prey. Me.

I took her aside about 2:30 A.M. “Look, this party’s about dead,” I proposed. “Why don’t we go back to my penthouse and have some breakfast?”

Her reply was a blow to my ego. “What’s it worth to you for me to go back to your hotel with you?” she asked, eying me provocatively.

“I thought you were a model,” I blurted, surprised.

She smiled. “There’re different kinds of modeling. Some modeling jobs come higher than others,” she said.

I had never paid a girl to go to bed with me. The world of professional sex was an unknown realm. To my knowledge, I’d never before met a hooker or a call girl. But apparently I had now. However, I still wanted her in my bed, and having established her true calling, I made an attempt to establish her price. What the hell, I had plenty of money. “Uh, $300?” I ventured.

She grimaced prettily and shook her head. “No, I’m afraid $300 isn’t enough,‘ she said.

I was astonished. Obviously I’d been cavorting in luxury for years without knowing the value of the wares I’d enjoyed. “Oh, all right, let’s double it and say $600,” I said.

She gave me a coolly speculative look. “That’s closer,” she said. “But for a man of your means, I should think it would be higher.”

I looked at her and was irritated. I had established and followed a certain felonious code of ethics since taking up crime as a profession. Among other things, I’d never diddled an individual. For instance, I’d never purchased a wardrobe or any other personal item with a hot check. Too many department stores and business firms held an individual salesperson responsible for bogus checks. If a salesman took a check for a suit, and the check bounced, the cost of the suit came out of the clerk’s salary. My targets had always been corporate targets—banks, airlines, hotels, motels or other establishments protected by insurance. When I splurged on a new wardrobe or anything else of a personal nature, I always hit a bank or a hotel for the needed cash.

It suddenly occurred to me that Cheryl would make a lovely exception to my rule. “Look, we could stand here all night and argue price,” I said. “I hate quibbling. Instead of going to my place, why don’t we go to your apartment, spend an hour or so there, and I’ll give you $1,000.”

She reached for her purse. “Let’s go,” she agreed. “But I don’t have an apartment at the moment. I lost my lease and I’m staying at a hotel in Miami Beach.” She named the hotel, which was one not too far from mine, and we were there within thirty minutes.

She was inserting her key into the door of her suite when I turned, saying, “I’ll be right back.”

She grabbed my arm. “Hey, where’re you going?” she asked, somewhat agitated. “You’re not going to back out, are you?”

I took her hand off my arm. “Look, you don’t think I carry $1,000 in my pocket, do you?” I said. “I’m going downstairs and cash a check.”

“At three-thirty in the morning!” she exclaimed. “You’re not going to get a check cashed for that amount at this hour. You couldn’t get one cashed for $100.”

I smiled loftily. “I think so. I know the owners of this hotel. Besides, this is a certified cashier’s check, drawn on the Chase Manhattan Bank in New York. It’s like gold here. I cash them all the time.”

“Let me see it,” she asked. I reached inside my jacket pocket and extracted one of the Chase Manhattan counterfeits I’d acquired before coming to Miami. It was in the amount of $1,400. She examined the voucher and nodded. “It is like gold,” she agreed. “Why don’t you just endorse it over to me?”

“Uh-uh/‘ I declined. ”This check is for $1,400. We agreed on $1,000, and while $400 isn’t that important, a deal is a deal.“

“I agree,” she said. “So endorse it. I’ll give you the $400.” She dug in her purse and came up with a thin sheaf of $100s, from which she took four and handed them to me. I endorsed the check and handed it to her.

I have the sequel from what reporters call “reliable sources.” Several days later, when her bank informed her the cashier’s check was a counterfeit, she called the Dade County Sheriff’s Department, furious. She eventually was contacted by O’Riley.

“Why’d he give you this check?” asked O’Riley.

“That doesn’t matter,” she snapped. “He gave it to me, and it’s bad, and I want the bastard caught.”

“I know,” said O’Riley. “But I also need to know how this man thinks, so I can catch him. Your description fits Frank Abagnale, but he’s never given any bad paper to an individual. He doesn’t even pass bad paper in retail stores. Why, all of a sudden, is he giving a square John, and a beautiful woman at that, a worthless check for $1,400? What was the purpose?”

O’Riley is something of a con artist himself. He obtained the full story from her. “I don’t mind his getting a free piece/‘ she concluded bitterly. ”Hell, I’ve given it away before. But that bastard conned me out of $400 cash. That I resent.“

I have always agreed with O’Riley’s assessment of the matter. We both got screwed.

However, her session with me was probably more delightful and less costly than the encounters I had with the two bankers before leaving Miami. I ripped them off for more than $20,000 each. I also flimflammed the Fontaine-bleau by paying my bill with a counterfeit cashier’s check that yielded me several hundred dollars change.

I put the Rolls in a storage garage and sent a telegram to the California leasing firm informing them of its whereabouts. Cheryl was right. It was a lovely car and deserved better than being abandoned to the elements and vandals.

I holed up in Sun Valley, keeping a low profile and an honest demeanor, for the winter. As spring approached, I flew back to New York, set myself up in a brownstone flat in an elegant section of Manhattan and dropped “reminder” notes to each of my prospective “stews.” The replies I received assured me that my fictional status as a Pan Am promotional executive was still believed, so I proceeded to fulfill my fleshly fantasy. I knew the name of the Hollywood firm that designed and manufactured all of the stewardess uniforms for Pan Am. I flew to Hollywood and, wearing my Pan Am pilot’s garb, called on the fashion firm. I presented a phony letter of introduction to the woman in charge of Pan Am’s account, detailed the fictional public relations tour of Europe and had my explanation accepted at face value. “We’ll have the ensembles ready in six weeks,” she said. “I presume you also want luggage for each of the girls?”

“Of course,” I said.

I stayed in the Los Angeles area while the girls’ clothing was being fashioned, attending to other facets necessary to the escapade. I paid a call to the Pan Am stores department at the Los Angeles Airport, dressed as a pilot, and picked up all the hat and uniform emblems they’d need.

I’d had all the girls send me one-inch-square color photographs of themselves. I used the photographs to make up fake Pan Am ID cards, similar to mine, and listing the status of each as “flight attendant.”

When the uniforms were ready, I picked them up personally, driving a rented station wagon with counterfeit Pan Am logos on the doors, and paid for the uniforms by signing an invoice for them.

In late May I sent each of the girls a letter, enclosing an airline ticket for each—tickets I’d bought and paid for with cash—and telling them to assemble in the lobby of the Los Angeles airport on May 26.

The gathering of my eaglets was one of the boldest and more flamboyant productions of my poseur performances. I went to one of the more luxurious inns surrounding the airport and booked a room for each of the girls, and also engaged, for the day after their arrival, one of the hotel’s conference rooms. I made all the bookings in Pan Am’s firm name, although I paid cash for the facilities. I satiated the curiosity of the assistant manager who handled the transaction by explaining this was not regular Pan Am business but a “special feature” of the airline’s promotion department.

On the morning the girls were to arrive, I donned my Pan Am pilot’s uniform and visited Pan Am’s operational department at the airport, seeking out the manager of the carrier’s car pool.

“Look, I’ve got eight stewardesses coming in at two P.M. today on a special assignment, and I need some transportation to get them to the hotel,” I said. “You think you can help me out?”

“Sure,” he said. “I’ve got a regular crew wagon available. I’ll pick them up myself. You gonna be there?”

“I’ll just meet you here at one-thirty and go with you/‘ I said. ”You need me to sign anything?“

“Nah, I got you covered/ Jetman.” He grinned. “Just have one my size.”

The girls showed up on time and were duly impressed with the gleaming Pan Am crew wagon, which was actually just an oversized station wagon. The pool chief and I loaded their luggage and he drove us all to the hotel, where he again assisted in unloading their luggage and getting the girls situated. I offered to buy him a drink after we were through, but he declined. “I like your kind of duty,” he said, grinning. “Just call on me anytime.”

The next morning I assembled the girls in the conference room, where I passed out their ID cards and presented them with their uniforms and luggage. They squealed with delight as they inspected the ensembles and the luggage, each piece of which was monogrammed with the owner’s name and Pan Am’s logo.

There were more squeals of joy as I outlined our itin-nerary: London, Paris, Rome, Athens, Geneva, Munich, Berlin, Madrid, Oslo, Copenhagen, Vienna and other European spas. I quieted them down and took on the air of a stern father.

“Now, this sounds like a lot of fun, and I hope it will be, but we’re on serious business, and I won’t put up with any nonsense,” I told them. “I have the authority to discharge any one of you for misconduct or for goofing off, and I will send you home if I have to. Let’s get one thing straight—I’m the boss and you will live by my instructions and follow the policies I outline. I think you’ll find my rules eminently fair, and you should have no trouble following them, and therefore no trouble at all.

“First off, you’ll notice that each of you is identified as a stewardess on your ID card. As far as the personnel of the hotels where we’ll be staying, and the photographers with whom we’ll be working are concerned, you are stewardesses. But we will all travel as civilians, and that includes flying or driving, and I will tell you when you are to wear the uniforms. You’re on a very desirable tour, duty that could cause some dissension and jealousy among our regular cadre of flight attendants, male and female. So if you do have occasion to mingle with regular flight crews, just say you’re with our New York public relations office, on a special assignment, and answer as few questions about your actual status as possible. If anyone presses, refer him or her to me.

“Now, you’ll be paid every two weeks, a regular company paycheck. It’s very difficult to cash a check in Europe, so when I give you your paycheck, if you’ll just endorse it, I’ll cash it at the local Pan Am office or at one of the banks or hotels with which we’ve made arrangements.

“Now I know some of you are wondering why you can’t just send your checks home to be deposited. There’re two reasons. First, the checks will probably be issued on one of our foreign accounts. The company likes the checks to be cashed in Europe. Second is the exchange rate. If you cash a check yourself, it will be cashed at the current exchange rate and you’ll usually end up losing money. So I’ll cash your checks, give you the cash and then if you want to send any money home, you can send a money order or a cashier’s check home. Does anyone have any questions?”

No one did. I smiled. “Okay, then, you’re on your own for the rest of the day and the night. But get a good night’s sleep. We leave tomorrow for London.”

We did, too, using tickets that had cost me a small fortune in cash. We landed in London in a clammy, predawn rain and I instructed the girls to change into their stewardess uniforms before we went to the hotel.

I was, understandably, nervous and apprehensive at the outset of my scheme, but I plunged ahead recklessly. I even checked us in at the Royal Gardens in Kensington, gambling that none of the employees would associate TWA Pilot Frank Adams with Pan Am First Officer Frank Williams. I hired a van to take us from the airport to the hotel, and the registration clerk, to my relief, was a total stranger to me.

“We’re Pan Am Flight 738,” I said. “We were diverted from Shannon and I don’t know if anyone made reservations for us or not.”

“No problem, Captain,” said the clerk. “That is, if the girls don’t mind doubling up. We’ve only five rooms available.”

The girls slept until nearly noon. Then I loosed them on the town by themselves, telling them I had “set up a photo session” with the local Pan Am office. What I did was to go through the London telephone book until I found what I was looking for, a commercial photography firm. I called the company and identified myself as a Pan Am public relations representative.

“I’ve got eight girls at the Royal Gardens, stewardesses, and what we need is some color and black and white shots suitable for advertisements and promotion brochures— you know, candid stuff of the girls at Piccadilly, some of them at the Thames bridges, that sort of thing,” I said. “Do you think you can handle it?”

“Oh, quite!” enthused the man to whom I spoke. “Why don’t I have one of our boys pop right over with some samples of our work? I’m sure we can do business, Mr. Williams.”

The firm’s representative and I had lunch and worked out a deal. I’d picked one of the better firms in London, it seemed. They’d even done some work in the past for Pan Am.

“Well, this is a little different, something new we’re trying,” I said. “One thing you’ll like, I’m sure, is that you’ll be paid in cash at the end of each day. Just give me an invoice for the amount.”

“What about the proofs?” asked the camera firm’s rep.

“Well, chances are we’ll be long gone to another city—

we’ve got a hectic schedule—so just send them to the public relations and advertising department of Pan Am in New York,“ I said. ”If they decide to use any of your pictures, you’ll be paid again at your normal commercial rate for each picture selected.“

He whistled and raised his glass of beer. “That is a different way of doing things, and I like it,” he said, grinning contentedly.

The next morning, a three-man camera crew in a passenger van loaded with photographic equipment called at the hotel and picked up my eight fledglings. I didn’t go with them, but simply told the chief cameraman to use his own judgment and imagination and return the girls in a reasonably sober and presentable condition.

“Gotcha, guv’nor.” He laughed and shepherded the girls into the van.

I had business of my own to conduct. I had embarked on this illicit odyssey well provisioned with sinful supplies: counterfeit cashier’s checks (products of my own handiwork), Pan Am expense checks and regular paychecks (Papa Lavalier’s unwitting artwork) and Pan Am reimbursement authorization forms (pilfered from Pan Am’s own stores department), the last more for bluff than effect.

There were a lot of factors weighing in my favor. London, and most of the other major cities on out itinerary, was dotted with branches of major American banks.

The next morning I gathered the girls in my room and explained the hotel policy on airline crews, then spread out eight phony Pan Am “expense checks” for them to endorse. Each check, of course, was for much more than the hotel bill. “I’ll need your ID cards, too, and while I’m settling the bill, you’ll all have to stand in sight of the cashier,” I said. Not one of them questioned the amount of the check she signed, if any one of them bothered to notice.

The scam went off flawlessly. The girls clustered in a group in the lobby, in view of the cashier, and I presented the nine fake checks in payment for our lodging and other charges. The cashier raised the only question.

“Oh, these are rather high, Captain, I’m not sure I have enough American dollars to make change,” she said, inspecting her cash drawer. “In fact, I don’t. You’re going to have to take pounds in change, I’m afraid.”

I acted miffed, but accepted the decision, knowing the cashier would probably make a profit, or thought she would. The pounds she gave me, however, were real. The Pan Am checks weren’t.

We flew to Rome that afternoon, where, over the next three days, the procedure was repeated. The hotel cashier in Rome, too, questioned the amount of the expense checks, but was satisfied with my explanation.

“Well, I’m sorry about that,” I said. “But we’re on an eighteen-day tour of Italy, and, of course, you can give me change in lira if you like.”

He liked, since it meant a personal profit of some fifty American dollars for him.

I decided against jaunting around Europe by air, not because of the expense but because it would have exposed the girls constantly to other airline crews. That was my biggest problem in implementing my scheme—shielding the girls from other airline people. As I previously pointed out, airline people like to talk shop, especially if they work for the same carrier.

There was, naturally, some unavoidable contact with other flight crews, since the success of my check-cashing scam demanded we stay at hotels which catered to airline personnel. There was always the risk that one of the girls, while in uniform, would encounter another, actual, Pan Am stewardess, and a disastrous dialogue would ensue.

Actual stew: “Hi, I’m Mary Alice, out of L. A. Where are you based?”

My girl: “Oh, I’m not based anywhere. I’m just over here on a P.R. thing.”

Actual stew: “You’re not a stewardess?”

My girl: “Not really. There’re eight of us, and we’re doing some photographic modeling for promotion and advertising purposes.”

Actual stew (to herself): “Like hell. I’ve been with Pan Am for five years and I never heard of any such work. I’d better report this to the chief and see if these people are for real.”

I wanted to avoid any such scenario, so I would frequently reinforce my instructions to the girls with repeat lectures. “Look, when you’re out in civilian clothes and you meet a Pan Am flight attendant in uniform, don’t say you fly for Pan Am, too, because you don’t,” I’d warn them.

“If you’re in uniform and you encounter another Pan Am stewardess, just say you’re here on vacation if your status is questioned. You may feel that’s being deceptive, and it is, but we have a reason. We don’t want other airlines to find out about this venture, because they’d most likely, with some justification, put the word out in the industry that Pan Am isn’t using real stewardesses in our travel ads or promotional brochures. And we don’t really want our line stewardesses to know, as I’ve told you, because it would likely cause dissension. For a working stewardess, this would really be a choice assignment.”

The girls cooperated splendidly in that respect. And I rented a comfortable, almost luxurious Volkswagen bus for our meandering around Europe. At times my scheme seemed more like a leisurely vacation than a felonious venture, for we often spent days, sometimes a week or more, in colorful little out-of-the-way spots in this country or that one and during such detours I curbed my crooked activities. It was not part of my plan to shaft the peasants.

But my scam got back on the track in major cities. Before entering such a metropolis, we’d stop and change into our airline uniforms, and, on our arrival at the hotel of my choosing, the scheme would pick up steam and begin operating again.

Every two weeks I paid the girls with a counterfeit payroll check, then had them endorse the checks over to me in return for cash. Since I was paying all their expenses (although each thought Pan Am was picking up the tab), most of them purchased money orders and sent them home to their parents or their bank.

The girls were entirely guiltless, of course. Not one, during the summer, ever had an inkling she was involved in a criminal venture. Each thought she was legitimately employed by Pan Am. They were completely duped by my con.

Mine was an idyllic intrigue, but often hectic and taxing. Riding herd on eight lovely, vivacious, exuberant, energetic girls is akin to a cowboy riding herd on a bunch of wild steers while mounted on a lame horse—damned near impossible. I had determined at the outset of the scheme that there would be no personal involvement with any of the girls, but my resolve was endangered a score of times during the course of the summer. Each of them was an outrageous flirt, and I, of course, was a prince of philanderers, and when one of the girls was inclined to make a sexual advance (and each of them did on several occasions), I was hardly prone to fend her off. But I always managed.

I did not lead a celibate life during the summer. I had ample opportunities to engage in side liaisons with the girls of whatever localities we were frequenting, and I took advantage of each and every opportunity.

Monique was not one of the liaisons. When we visited Paris and I sought her out, she informed me our relationship was finished. “I’ll still be your friend, Frank, and I hope you’ll still help Papa in his business, but I want to settle down and you don’t,” she said. “I’ve met another man, a pilot for Air France, and we’re pretty serious about our future.”

I assured her of my understanding and, in fact, was somewhat relieved. I also affirmed that her father would continue to get “Pan Am business,” although that statement was a lie. I was beginning to feel some guilt concerning my duplicitous use of Papa Lavalier, and had opted to release him as a pawn in my scurrilous game. Anyway, he’d already provided me with enough supplies to drain a dozen bank vaults if I used them all.

The girls and I ended our tour of Europe in Copenhagen, where I put them on a plane for Arizona. I dispatched them back to the States with their arms laden with roses and a flowery speech designed to allay any suspicions that might arise in their minds in coming weeks.

“Keep your uniforms, keep your ID cards and keep your check stubs [I’d always returned a check stub when I cashed a check],” I instructed them. “If the company wants the uniforms and IDs returned, you’ll be contacted. As far as employment goes, just return to school, because we’re not going to hire you on a permanent basis until you graduate, and then you’ll be contacted by a company representative. It probably won’t be me, because I’ve been ordered back to flight duty. But I hope you’ll all end up as part of my crew again, for I’ve had a wonderful time with you this summer.”

I had had a wonderful time, all things considered. If the girls put a lot of gray strands in my hair, they also, unwittingly, put a lot of green stuff in my pockets. Something like $300,000 in all.

The girls did hear from Pan Am, as a matter of fact. After three months of a steady stream of photographs, from dozens of European cities and all showing the same eight girls in Pan Am stewardess costumes, advertising executives of Pan Am launched an investigation. Eventually the entire matter ended up in O’Riley’s hands and he deftly sorted it out and put it into focus for the carrier’s officers and also for the girls.

I understand all eight of them took it gracefully, if with some vivid and descriptive language.

I stayed in Europe for several weeks after parting with the girls, then returned to the States, where I wandered around like a gypsy for several weeks, never staying in one place for more than two or three days. I was becoming moody again, nervous and edgy, and the knowledge that I would probably always be a man on the move, a fox perpetually hunted by the hounds, was beginning to weigh on my conscience, affecting my conscious life.

I virtually ceased my check-swindling activities, fearful the hounds were close enough and reluctant to create additional spoor. Only rarely was I challenged to display my creative criminality.

One such time was in a large midwestern city. I was sitting in the airport restaurant after arrival, enjoying lunch, when I became interested in the conversation in the adjoining booth, an exchange between an elderly, stern-faced man and a very young, servile companion, apparently an employee. I gathered from the conversation that the older man was a banker, en route to a convention in San Francisco, and from the remarks he made to the young man it was clear he expected his bank to make money in his absence. He was cool, crusty, arrogant and obviously proud of his lofty status, and when he was paged on the airport intercom I learned his name. Jasper P. Cashman.

That afternoon I did some discreet digging into Jasper P. Cashman’s background, utilizing a local newspaper’s library. J. P. Cashman was a prominent man in his community, a self-made tycoon. He’d started as a teller in his bank when the financial house had assets of less than $5 million. He was president now and the bank’s assets exceeded $100 million.

I scouted the bank the following day. It was a new building, still boasting its expansion motto on the large front window. The interior was roomy and pleasing. Tellers on one side, junior officers scattered across an opposite wall. Senior officers in airy, glassed-in offices. Cashman’s offices on the third floor. J. P. Cashman didn’t believe in close contact with the underlings.

I rented a car, drove to a modest city 175 miles distant and opened a checking account for $10,000 with a counterfeit cashier’s check. Then I returned to Cashman’s town and the next day called at his bank. I wasn’t really interested in the money involved in my swindle. Cashman’s manner had irked me, and I simply wanted to sting him.

I was the picture of the affluent businessman when I entered the bank. Gray three-piece suit. Alligators, luster-shined. Countess Mara tie. A leather brief-case, slim and elegant.

Cashman’s companion at the airport was one of the junior officers. His desk was neat and tidy. His nameplate sparkled with newness. He obviously was newly promoted. I dropped into the chair in front of his desk.

“Yes, sir, can I help you?” he asked, patently impressed by my dress and bearing.

“Yes, you can, as a matter of fact,” I said easily. “I’m Robert Leeman from Junction, and I need to cash a check, a rather large one. I’ve all the proper identification and you can call my bank for verification, but I don’t think that’ll be necessary. J. P. Cashman knows me, and he’ll verify the check. You can call him. No, I’ll do it myself, since I need to talk to him anyway.”

Before he could react, I reached over, picked up his telephone and dialed Cashman’s correct extension. Cash-man’s secretary answered.

“Yes, Mr. Cashman, please. … He isn’t.. . . Oh, yes, he mentioned that last week and it slipped my mind. Well, listen, would you tell him when he returns that Bob Leeman dropped by, and tell him Jean and I are looking forward to seeing him and Mildred in Junction for the hunt. He’ll know what I mean. . . . Yes, thank you.”

I replaced the telephone and stood up, grimacing. “Doesn’t look like my day,” I said ruefully. “I needed the cash, too. I can’t get to Junction and back in time for this deal. Well, good day, sir.“

I started to turn and the young officer stopped me. “Uh, how big is the check you wanted to cash, Mr. Leeman?”

“Pretty good sized,” I said. “I need $7,500. Do you think you can take care of it? I can give you the number of my bank in Junction.” Without waiting for a reply, I dropped back into the chair, briskly wrote out a check for $7,500 and handed it to him. As I figured, he didn’t call the bank in Junction. He stood up and turned toward one of the glassed-in offices. “Sir, I’ll have to have Mr. James, the vice president, okay this, which I’m sure he will. I’ll be back in a moment.”

He walked into James’s office and said (as I later learned) exactly what I’d conditioned him to say. “Sir, there’s a Mr. Leeman here from Junction and he needs to cash this rather large check. He’s a personal friend of Mr. Cashman, and he wanted to see Mr. Cashman, but as you know Mr. Cashman’s in San Francisco.”

“A personal friend of the old man’s?”

“Yes, sir, business and social, I understand.”

“Cash it. We sure as hell don’t want to irritate any of the old man’s associates.”

A minute later the young officer was handing the phony check to a teller. “Cash this for the gentleman, please. Mr. Leeman, I’m glad I could help you.”

I wasn’t too well pleased with the Pavlov’s-dog swindle. In fact, I didn’t enjoy it at all. I left town that day and several days later stopped in a remote Vermont village to do some meditating. Mine were gloomy cogitations. I was no longer living, I decided, I was merely surviving. I had accumulated a fortune with my nefarious impersonations, swindles and felonies, but I wasn’t enjoying the fruits of my libidinous labors. I concluded it was time to retire, to go to earth like a fox in a remote and secure lair where I could relax and commence building a new and crime-free life.

I reviewed the places I had been on the atlas of my mind. I was mildly astonished at the extensiveness of my travels, recalling my journeys of the past few years. I had crisscrossed the globe from Singapore to Stockholm, from Tahiti to Trieste, from Baltimore to the Baltics, and to other places I had forgotten I’d visited.

But one place I hadn’t forgotten. And its name kept popping into my thoughts as I sought a safe haven. Montpellier, France.

Montpellier. That was my safe haven, I finally decided. And having made the decision, I didn’t give it a second thought.

I should have.

CHAPTER NINE

Does This Tab Include the Tip?

Quantitatively, the vineyards of Bas Languedoc produce more wine than the other three great French wine departments combined. Qualitatively, with one or two exceptions, the wine of Languedoc has all the bouquet, body and taste of flat root beer. The considerate host serves an ordinary Languedoc wine only with leftover meat loaf, and preferably to guests whom he’d rather not see again.

It is, in the main, really bad juice.

Fortunately for France, the vintners, grape pickers, bottlers and the vast majority of the rest of the population consume the bulk of Languedoc’s wines. France exports only its great wines from the vineyards of Burgundy, Bordeaux and Champagne, which are justly famous for quality and excellence.

I learned all about viniculture in Montpellier. The first thing I learned was not to drink the local vins du pays.

I was probably the only water drinker in town. However, I didn’t go to Montpellier for either the wine or the water. I was there to hide. Permanently, I hoped. I had reached the pinnacle of a criminal mountain and the view wasn’t that great. Now I wanted an honest valley to shelter me in its hollow.

I had passed through Montpellier, driving from Marseille to Barcelona, during one of my first bad-check forays through Europe. Outside of town I had parked beneath a huge olive tree and picnicked on cheese, bread, sausages and soft drinks I’d picked up in the city. Close at hand, pickers swarmed like ants through a vast grape orchard and far away the snow-tipped peaks of the Pyrenees glistened in the sun. I felt comfortable, at ease, almost happy. As if I were home.

In a sense, I was. This part of southern France was my mother’s native land. She had been born here and after she married my father, and following the breakout of guerrilla warfare in Algiers, her parents had returned here with their other children. My maternal grandparents, several uncles and aunts and a covey of cousins still lived within an hour’s drive of the olive tree. I quelled an impulse to turn aside and visit my mother’s people and drove on to Spain.

I had never forgotten that tranquil, enjoyable interlude near Montpellier. And when, at the ripe old age of twenty, I decided to retire from my life as a counterfeit person, dealing in counterfeit wares, I chose Montpellier as my retreat. I was not happy that I had to return there behind yet another counterfeit identity, but I had no choice.

Montpellier, in many ways, was ideal for my purpose. It was not a tourist attraction. It was situated too far inland from the Mediterranean to lure the Riviera set, yet close enough that a seashore outing was available at the end of a short drive.

It was large enough (80,000 population) that an American taking up residence would not excite undue curiosity, yet too small to command a major airport or to entice large hotel operators. There were no Hiltons or Sheratons in Montpellier and its tiny air facility served only light aircraft. The lack of air service or swank hotels weighed in my favor. There was very little chance of my encountering a pilot, a stewardess or a hotel employee who might recognize me.

I presented myself in Montpellier as Robert Monjo, a successful author and screenwriter from Los Angeles, “successful” in order to explain the sizable account I opened in one of the local banks. At that, I didn’t deposit all the moneys I took with me to Montpellier. Had I done so, it might have aroused some curiosity as to my actual livelihood. I retained treble the amount in cash, hidden away in my luggage. As a matter of fact, the people of Montpellier were not prone to pry. I was asked only the necessary and perfunctory questions as I went about the business of becoming an expatriate citizen of the town.

I bought a small cottage, a charming and gracious little house with a tiny back yard shielded by a high board fence, where the previous owner had cultivated a minuscule garden. The operator of the store where I bought furnishings for the house lent me the services of his wife, a skilled interior decorator, in selecting the proper furniture and arranging the decor. I fixed up one room as a study and library, reinforcing my image as a writer engaged in research and literary creation.

I bought a Renault, one of the more comfortable models but not luxurious enough to attract attention. Within two weeks I felt at home, secure and content in my new surroundings.

And if God had shorted the Mediterranean Languedoc on good grapes, He made up for it in the people. They were a sturdy, amiable, courteous and gregarious populace in the main, quick to smile and to offer any assistance. The housewives in my neighborhood were always knocking on my door with gifts of pastry, fresh baked bread or a serving from their dinner pots. My immediate neighbor, Armand Perigueux, was my favorite. He was a huge, gnarled man of seventy-five and he still worked as an overseer in a vineyard, commuting to and from work on a bicycle.

He called the first time bearing two bottles of wine, one red and one white. “Most of our wines do not suit American palates,” he said in his booming, yet gentle, voice. “But there are a few good wines in the Languedoc, and these two are among them.”

I am not a tastevin, but having drunk of the good wines I determined never to sample the others. But the people of Montpellier drank more wine than any other liquid. A lunch or dinner was not served without wine. I have even seen wine consumed at breakfast.

From Armand I learned that God actually had nothing to do with Languedoc’s poor record as a producer of quality wines. Nearly one hundred years past, he said, an insect, the phylloxera, had ravaged all the vineyards of France, almost dealing a death blow to the wine industry. “I have heard that this pest was brought to France attached to the roots of vines imported from America,” said Armand. “But I do not know that to be true.”

However, Armand told me, he did know it to be truth that the great bulk of France’s grape vines were of American rootstock, immune to the wine bug, onto which French plants had been grafted. And, he said slyly after I had gained his confidence, Americans and other nationals probably consumed more Languedoc wines than they were aware of.

Almost daily, he informed me, tanker trucks filled with the cheap wines of the Languedoc chugged northward to the great wine districts, where their cargoes were blended with the choice wines of Burgundy and Bordeaux. “It is called stretching, like adding water to whiskey,” said Armand. “I do not think it is honest.”

Montpellier was a good place to learn about wines, he said. “We have the Wine University of France right here in our city,” he said proudly. “You can go there and study.”

I never visited the university. Since I had no taste for wine, although I drank it on social occasions, I had no yen to acquire a knowledge of wine. I was satisfied with the bits and pieces of information imparted by Armand. He was a good teacher. He never gave tests and he never graded me.

It was difficult for me to stay busy. Loafing is hard work. I spent a lot of time driving around. I would drive to the coast and spend a few days exploring the sand dunes. Or I would drive to the Spanish border and spend hours hiking in the foothills of the Pyrenees. Occasionally I visited Armand’s vineyard or the orchard of another winegrower. At the end of the first month, I drove to the small village where my grandparents lived and spent three days with them. My grandmother corresponded regularly with my mother, and she was aware of all the happenings at home. I wormed them out of her discreetly, for I did not want her to know I had exiled myself from my family. My mother was well, as were my sister and brothers. My father was still courting my mother, which my grandmother found amusing. My mother had apparently told my grandmother that I was “hitchhiking” around the world, seeking a goal and attempting to decide my future, and I fostered that impression during my visit.

I did not tell my grandparents that I was living in Montpellier. I told them I was on my way to Spain, with the thought in mind of enrolling in one of the Spanish universities. I visited them a second time during my stay in Montpellier. I told them on that occasion that I hadn’t found a Spanish college that challenged me and was returning to Italy to explore the universities there.

As I became more satisfied with my life in Montpellier, I actually contemplated resuming my education. Montpellier is the seat of one of France’s twenty academic districts and a small but fine state university was located in the city. I visited the campus and learned that several courses were available to foreigners, although none was taught in English. However, that was no bar to me, since French was a second tongue for me, acquired from my mother.

I also started thinking about getting a job or opening some kind of small business, perhaps a stationery store, since I was growing sleek and plump in the idle, luxurious life I was leading. Even Armand remarked on my increasing stoutness. “There is not much exercise in writing, eh, Robert?” he said, poking me in the stomach.

“Why don’t you come to work for me in the vineyards, and I will make you lean and tough.” I declined the offer. Physical labor is not my forte. Nor could I force myself to exercise.

I was still mulling the thought of registering at the university, and the idea of finding some useful employment, when both issues were rendered moot. Four months after taking up residence in Montpellier, I learned a bitter truth: when the hounds have help, there is no safe place for a fox to hide.

I shopped regularly at a small (by American standards) market on the outskirts of Montpellier, a grocery Armand had recommended. I went to the store twice weekly to supply my larder, or whenever I needed something. This occasion was one of my scheduled shopping trips and the store clerk was sacking my groceries when I remembered I needed milk. I told the boy to set my foodstuffs aside (there were others in line) and strolled to the back ot the store for the milk. Returning to the check-out counter, I walked around a shelf of canned goods and saw four men at the checker’s stand, now devoid of customers and clerk.

One had a shotgun, another had what appeared to be a short-barreled machine gun and the other two had pistols. My first thought was that bandits were robbing the store and that the employees and customers were on the floor.

But as I wheeled to seek cover behind the shelves, one of the men shouted, “Abagnale!”

I ducked behind the shelves only to be confronted by three uniformed gendarmes, all pointing pistols at me. They came at me from all sides then, men in uniform, men in plainclothes and all pointing a pistol, shotgun, machine gun or rifle at me. Orders cracked around my ears like whip pops.

“Hands up!”

“Hands on your head!”

“Up against the shelves, spread-eagle!”

“Face down on the floor!”

I had my hands up. I didn’t know which of the other commands to obey, but I sure as hell didn’t want to be shot. And some of the officers were handling their weapons in a manner that scared me. As a matter of fact, they were scaring their fellow officers.

“For God’s sake, don’t shoot,” I shouted. “One of you tell me what you want me to do and I’ll do it.”

A tall, lean man with austere features pointed his pistol at me. “Get on the floor, facedown!” he barked. I did as he instructed, helped by several less-than-gentle hands. Rough hands twisted my arms up behind my back and other uncaring hands clamped steel circlets tightly around my wrists.

I was then hauled unceremoniously to my feet and, surrounded by Surete detectives, Interpol agents, gendarmes and God knows what other kind of fuzz, I was hustled out of the store and rudely shoved into the back seat of an unmarked sedan. I can’t say French police are brutal, but I will say they handle suspects with undue firmness. I was driven directly to the Montpellier police station. No one said a word en route.

At the station, the austere detective and two other officers, also Surete agents, ushered me into a small room. French policemen have a wide latitude in the handling of criminals, especially in interrogations of suspects. They get right to the point, dispensing with the reading of any rights a criminal may have. I don’t think a crook has any rights in France.

“My name is Marcel Gaston, of the Surete!,” said the lean officer in curt tones. “You are Frank Abagnale, are you not?”

“I’m Robert Monjo,” I said in indignant tones. “I’m a writer from California, an American. I’m afraid you gentlemen have made a very serious mistake.”

Gaston slapped me, a sharp, stinging blow. “Most of the mistakes I make, monsieur, are serious mistakes, but I have not made a mistake in this instance. You are Frank Abagnale.”

“I am Robert Monjo,” I said doggedly, searching their faces for a hint of doubt.

One of the other Surety agents stepped forward, his hand balled into a fist, but Gaston put out an arm and stopped him, without releasing me from his fixed stare. Then he shrugged.

“We could beat it out of you, but that isn’t necessary,” he said. “I have all the time in the world, Abagnale, but I don’t intend to waste too much of it on you. We can hold you until doomsday, or at least until we have located witnesses to identify you. Until then, unless you choose to cooperate, I am going to place you in the cell for common drunks and petty criminals. You can stay there for a week, two weeks, a month, it makes no difference to me. However, you will not be fed and you will have no water until you decide to confess. Why don’t you just tell us what we want to know right now? We know who you are. We know what you have done. You will only inconvenience yourself.

“One other thing, Abagnale. If you force us to go to a lot of trouble to get the information you could give us at this moment, I will not forget it. And you will always remember the consequences, I promise you.”

I looked at Gaston and knew he meant every word he had spoken. Marcel Gaston was one tough bastard.

“I’m Frank Abagnale,” I said.

I never really gave them the kind of confession they wanted. I never volunteered any details on any of the offenses I’d committed in France. But if they knew of a particular caper and outlined it for me, I’d nod and say, “That’s about the way it happened, all right,” or, “Yes, that was me.”

Gaston made up a document, setting down a lot of my crimes, the circumstances of my arrest and my interrogation, and let me read it. “If that is essentially correct, you will help yourself by signing it,” he said.

I couldn’t quarrel with the instrument. He’d even included the fact that he’d slapped me. I signed it.

The affidavit also disclosed how I’d been caught. Major airlines didn’t serve Montpellier, but it was visited frequently by stewardesses and other flight personnel. An Air France flight attendant, visiting relatives in Montpellier, had spotted me shopping a couple of weeks past and had recognized me. She had seen me get into my car and had jotted down the license number. On her return to Paris, she had sought out her captain and told him of her suspicions. She was positive enough about her identification that her captain called the police.

“I’m positive it’s him. I dated him,” she insisted.

I never learned which Air France stewardess put the finger on me. No one would tell me. I had dallied with several, over the years. I hoped it wasn’t Monique, but to this day I still don’t know the informant’s identity. I don’t think it was Monique, however. Had she seen me in Montpellier, she would have confronted me.

I was kept six days in Montpellier, during which time several lawyers appeared to offer their services. I selected a middle-aged man whose mannerisms and appearance reminded me of Armand, although he frankly stated he didn’t think he could win me my freedom. “I have gone over all the police documents, and they have you dead to rights,” he commented. “The best we can hope for is a light sentence.”

I told him I’d settle for that.

Scarcely a week after my arrest, to my astonishment, I was removed to Perpignan and the day after my arrival there I was brought to trial in a court of assizes, made up of a judge, two assessors (prosecutors) and nine citizen jurors, all of whom would jointly decide my guilt or innocence.

It wasn’t much of a trial, really, lasting less than two days. Gaston listed the charges against me and the evidence he’d gathered to support the accusations. There were ample witnesses available to appear against me.

“How does the defendant plead?” inquired the judge of my attorney.

“My client will offer no defense against these charges,” replied the lawyer. “In the interest of time, we would like to sum up our position now.”

He then launched into an eloquent and impassioned plea for leniency in my behalf. He cited my youth—I was still not twenty-one—and portrayed me as an unfortunate and confused young man, the product of a broken home “and still more of a delinquent than a criminal.” He pointed out that a dozen other European nations where I had perpetrated similar crimes had placed formal demands for extradition, once my debt to France was paid.

“This young man will, in all probability, never see his native land for many, many years, and even when he does return home, he will return in chains and only to face prison there,” argued the lawyer. “I need not point out to this court the harshness of the prison life this young man will have to endure here. I ask the court to take that into account in setting a penalty.”

I was adjudged guilty. But at the time I thought jubilantly that my attorney, if he’d lost a battle, had won the war. The judge sentenced me to only one year in prison.

I was remanded to Perpignan’s prison, the “House of Arrest,” a gloomy, forbidding stone fortress constructed in the seventeenth century, and not until I had been there for a few days did I realize just how lenient the judge had been.

I was received by two guards who brusquely ordered me to strip and who then escorted me, still naked, to an upper floor where I was marched down a narrow corridor devoid of cells as such. On either side were only stone walls set with solid steel doors. The guards halted before one of the metal portals and one unlocked and opened the door. It screeched open with a sound reminiscent of a horror movie, and the other guard shoved me inside the dark cubicle. I stumbled and fell forward, striking my head against the back of the cell, for the cell was a sunken one. I had not noted the two steps leading to the floor. I was never actually to see the steps.

I was in total darkness. A damp, chilling, breath-stifling, frightening darkness. I stood up to grope around for the light switch and cracked my head against the steel ceiling.

There was no light switch. There was no light in the cell. There was, in fact, nothing in the cell but a bucket. No bed, no toilet, no wash basin, no drain, nothing. Just the bucket. The cell was not a cell, actually, it was a hole, a raised dungeon perhaps five feet wide, five feet high and five feet deep, with a ceiling and door of steel and a floor and walls of stone. The ceiling and door were chill to the touch. The walls wept chilly tears constantly.

I waited for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. No light filtered into the cell from any source. There were no cracks in the overhead or walls. The ancient door to my steel and stone box seemed to blend itself into its aperture like a hermetic seal. My eyes did not adjust. The eyes do not adjust to total darkness.

There was air entering the cell. Periodically a cold draft explored my skin like clammy fingers, raising goose bumps as much from the eerie sensation as from the chill. I wondered whence it came. Whatever its channels, they also were dark.

I slumped on the floor, shivering and feeling like I’d been entombed alive. Panic added to my shaking. I sought to calm myself by rationalizing my situation. Surely, I told myself, this was not to be the cell I would occupy during the entire year. Probably I was in here for observation. I discarded the theory immediately. Anyone observing me in this cell would have to have X-ray eyes. All right, then, I was being given a taste of what could happen to me if I misbehaved. I clung to the second supposition. Yes, this treatment was calculated to ensure my good behavior once I was released among the general prison population. After all, only unruly prisoners were confined in solitary under such harsh conditions, weren’t they? Certainly no civilized country would permit such cruel and inhumane punishment to be meted out by its prison warders without cause.

France does. Or did.

I was not fed my first day in Perpignan’s prison. I had been placed in my grim cell late in the afternoon. Several hours later, exhausted, cold, hungry, bewildered, frightened and desolate, I laid down on the hard floor and fell asleep. I slept curled in a ball, for I am six feet tall.

The screeching of the door awakened me. I sat up, wincing from the soreness and cramps caused by my uncomfortable sleeping position. The dim form of a guard loomed in the doorway. He was placing something on the steps inside my crypt. I was galvanized into action as he straightened and started to close the door.

“Wait! Wait!” I shouted, scrambling forward and placing my hands against the inside of the door, trying to restrain its closing.

“Why am I being kept in here? How long will I stay in here?”

“Until you have completed your sentence,” he said, and shoved shut the door. The words clanked on my ears with the metallic finalness of the door slamming against the stone jamb.

I fell back, stunned by the ghastly truth. A year? I was to live in this black coffin a year? Without light? Without bedding? Without clothing? Without toilet facilities? And without God knows what else? It was impossible, I told myself. No man could live in such a dark void, under such conditions, for a year. He would die, and his death would be slow and torturous. It would have been better had I been sentenced to the guillotine. I loved France. But what kind of country was it that countenanced such punishment for such a crime as mine? And if the government was ignorant of such prison conditions, the people unknowing, what manner of men were the French penologists, into whose hands I had been delivered? Depraved monsters, madmen, perverts, undoubtedly.

I was suddenly scared, actually fearful. I did not know how, or if, I could survive a year in this Stygian vault. I still have nightmares from my stay in Perpignan’s House of Arrest. Compared to Perpignan prison, the Black Hole of Calcutta was a health spa, Devil’s Island a vacation paradise.

I had not expected prison life to be easy. My one experience behind bars, and then for only a few hours, had convinced me that jails and prisons were not nice places to reside. But nothing I had ever read, heard or seen had ever indicated that imprisonment could be as brutal and heartless as this.

I felt around and located the food the guard had broughc. It was a quart container of water and a small loaf of bread. The simple breakfast had not even been brought on a tray. The guard had simply set the container of water on the top step and had dropped the bread beside it on the stone. No matter, I wolfed down the loaf of bread and gulped down the water in one swig. Then I huddled miserably against the wet granite wall and contemplated the machinations of French Justice.

Mine was not a term in prison, it was an ordeal designed to destroy the mind and body.

The menu in Perpignan prison never varied. For breakfast, I was served bread and water. Lunch consisted of a weak chicken soup and a loaf of bread. Supper was a cup of black coffee and a loaf of bread. The monotonous diet varied only in the time it was served or in the order it was served. I had no means of telling time and I soon lost track of the days, and the guards who served the meals further confused my attempts to keep a mental timetable and calendar by alternating the schedule of my meager rations. For instance, for several days breakfast, lunch and dinner might be served regularly at seven, noon and five, but then, abruptly, dinner would be served at ten A.M., supper at 2 P.M. and breakfast at 6 P.M. I am estimating the times. I really never knew at what hour I was fed, or whether it was day or night. And not infrequently I was fed only one or two times daily. Occasionally I wasn’t fed at all during the span of the day.

I never left the cell. Not once during my stay in the hoary jail was I permitted outside for exercise or recreation. If the prison had a day room where prisoners might read, write letters, listen to the radio, watch television or play games, I was not among those privileged to share the facility. I was not allowed to write letters, and if any of my relatives knew I was jailed at Perpignan and wrote me, I did not receive the mail. My requests, made of the guards who served the meals, to contact my relatives, my attorney, the Red Cross, the warden or the American consular authorities were ignored save once.

On that occasion, the guard smacked me alongside the head with his huge hand. “Don’t talk to me,” he growled. “It is not permitted. Don’t talk, don’t sing, don’t whistle, don’t hum, don’t make any sound or you will be beaten.” He slammed the heavy door shut on further pleas.

The bucket was my latrine. I was not given any toilet paper, nor was the bucket removed after use. I soon adapted to the stench, but after a few days the bucket overflowed and I had to move around and sleep in my own fecal matter. I was too numbed, in body and spirit, to be revolted. Eventually, however, the odor became too nauseating for even the guards to endure, apparently. One day, between meals, the door creaked open and another convict scurried in with the furtiveness and manner of a rat, grabbed the bucket and fled. It was returned, empty, a few minutes later. On perhaps half a dozen other occasions during my time in the tiny tomb, the procedure was repeated. But only twice during my imprisonment were the feces cleaned from the floor of the cell. Each time a guard stood by at the door while an inmate hosed out the cell and then picked up the accumulated water in the hole with a mop. Both times I managed a makeshift shower in the spray of the hose, daring the wrath of the guard. Both times the cleaning was performed in absolute silence.

Those were the only times I was able to cleanse myself to any extent during my term, although occasionally I used a portion of my water ration to rinse my hands or to anoint my face.

I was not allowed to shave nor was I ever given a haircut. I am hirsute by heritage, and without the means to curb their growth, my hair and beard sprouted prodigiously. My hair was soon below my shoulders, a tangled, sodden skein, and my beard brushed my chest. Both hair and beard were oiled and perfumed with excrement, for I could not avoid soiling myself in my own wastes.

Lice and other insects small enough to gain admittance to the fetid cell nested in my body hair and feasted on my flesh. I developed sores from my scratching and these became infected from contact with the always present filth. My body soon became a mass of scabs, a living petri dish for the culture of myriad forms of bacteria. In the cramped confines of the hole, shrouded in blackness, I lost my sense of balance and fell often as I attempted to move about, stretch myself or perform simple exercises, nicking or bruising myself against the rough walls or the hard floor and further adding to my wounds.

I weighed 210 pounds when I was received at Perpignan. The tedious diet did not contain enough nutrients or calories to maintain me. My body began to feed upon itself, the muscles and tendons devouring the stored fats and oily tissues in order to fuel the pumps of my heart and my circulatory system. Within weeks I was able to encircle my biceps with my fingers.

I was not alone in my misery. I soon concluded that most if not all of the steel doors in Perpignan prison sealed a wretched inmate.

The stone walls between the cells were too thick to permit talk between adjoining prisoners, but they were by no means soundproof. Unintelligible shouts and curses, screams of pain and anguish, and muffled groans and cries washed softly along the corridor outside almost constantly, sometimes ceasing abruptly only to start again within minutes. The sounds, always laden with despair, permeated the walls of my dank box, filtering through the stone and seeping up from the floor like the sighs and sobs of some beleaguered banshee. Sometimes, however, the sounds had the qualities of rage and anger, reminiscent of the distant howl of a hunting wolf or the defiant yipping of a hurt coyote.

Sometimes the sounds were my own, for in my loneliness I often talked to myself just to hear the sound of a human voice. Or I would stand stooped before the door and scream at the guards to let me out or demand that I be treated like a human being, with dignity and consideration if not respect. I cursed them. I cursed myself. I ranted and raved, wept and screamed, chanted and sang, laughed and bellowed, shouted and banged the bucket against the walls, splattering excrement all over my crate-like cell. I felt I was going mad.

I had no doubt that many of the men in Perpignan were mad, reduced to lunacy by the maniacal manner in which they were treated. I was certain after a few weeks that I would lose my own sanity. I lost the ability to distinguish between that which was real and that which was unreal, and began to hallucinate. I would find myself back in the Royal Gardens, surrounded by my lovely “crew,” dining sumptuously on lobster or roast beef, or strolling along the golden beaches of the Costa Brava, my arm around Monique. Only to regain my reason in the damp dungeon that was reality, wallowing in my own excreta and cursing the fates that had condemned me to Perpignan.

I think that I actually would have gone mad and died a lunatic in Perpignan prison had it not been for my vivid imagination. The creative ability that had enabled me to concoct the brilliant swindles I’d perpetrated over the years, and which had resulted in my present plight, now served as a lifeguard.

If I were going to hallucinate, I determined, mine would be planned hallucinations, and so I began to produce my own fantasies. I would sit on the floor, for instance, and recall the image I presented in my airline uniform and pretend that I was a real pilot, commander of a 707. And suddenly the cramped, vile and oozy pit in which I was prisoner became a sleek, clean jet liner, crowded with joyful, excited passengers attended by chic, glamorous stewardesses. I employed all the airline jargon I’d acquired over the years as I pretended to taxi the plane away from the terminal, obtain takeoff clearance from the tower and jockey the great machine into the air, leveling off at 35,000 feet.

Then I’d pick up the PA mike. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. Welcome aboard Flight 572 of Abagnale Airlines, Seattle to Denver. We’re presently cruising at miles per hour and we expect good weather, and thus a good flight, all the way to Denver. Those of you seated on the starboard side—that’s the right side of the aircraft—should have a good view of Mount Rainier below and off in the distance. Mount Rainier, with an elevation of 14,410 feet, is, as you probably know, the highest peak in Washington State …”

Of course I was a hero at times, fighting my huge plane through terrible storms or overcoming dire mechanical disasters to deliver my human cargo safely and to bask in the gratitude of the passengers. Especially the women. Especially the pretty women.

Or I would imagine I was a tour bus driver, displaying the splendors of the Grand Canyon or the enchantments of San Antonio, New Orleans, Rome, New York City (I actually remembered that New York City had enchantments) or some other historic city to a group of rapt tourists, entertaining them with my rapid, witty spiel. “Now, the mansion on your left, ladies and gentlemen, is the home of J. P. Greenstuff, one of the city’s founders. He made big money most of his life. Trouble is, he made it too big, and now he’s spending the rest of his life in a federal prison.”

In my fantasies, I was anyone I wanted to be, much as I’d been during the five years before my arrest, although I added to and amplified my Perpignan impersonations. I was a famous surgeon, operating on the President and saving his life with my medical skills. A great author, winning the Nobel Prize for literature. A movie director, making an Oscar-winning epic. A mountain guide, rescuing hapless climbers trapped on a dangerous mountain face. I was tinker, tailor, Indian chief, baker, banker and ingenious thief. For I sometimes restaged some of my more memorable capers. And some of my more memorable love scenes too.

But always the curtain had to come down on my plays, and I returned to reality, but knowing I’d been on a make-believe journey, in my chill, gloomy, dark and loathsome cell.

Walter Mitty in durance vile.

One day the door grated open at an unexpected time and a guard tossed something into my cell. It was a thin, dirty, evil-smelling mattress, hardly more than a tick, but I spread it out on the floor and curled up on it, reveling in its comfort. I fell asleep wondering what model deportment I had exhibited that deserved such a luxurious reward.

I was awakened by the mattress’s being jerked savagely from beneath me by a burly guard, who laughed jeeringly as he slammed the steel door shut. I do not know what time it was. It was long before I was served breakfast, however. Sometime after dinner, the door shrieked open again and the mattress was dumped on the steps. I grabbed it and fell on its softness, fondling it like it was a woman. But again I was rudely awakened by a guard’s removing the tick forcefully from under me. And yet again, at some unknown hour later, the mattress was plopped onto the steps. The truth dawned. The guards were playing a game with me, a cruel and barbaric game, but a game nonetheless. Some of their other mice have died, I told myself, and I ignored the bedding. My body had become accustomed to the smooth stone floor, or at least as accustomed to it as any blending of soft flesh and hard rock. I never used the tick again, although the guards continued providing it each night, in hopes, I supposed, that I would again use it and furnish them more sport.

In my fifth month in Perpignan’s House of Arrest (a fact established later) there was a tap on the outside of my cell door and then a portion of it slid open, admitting a weak, filtered light. I was astonished, for I had been unaware the door had a sliding panel, so cunningly was it contrived.

“Frank Abagnale?” asked a voice unmistakably American.

I floundered to the door and peered out. Standing on the outer side of the corridor, where he had recoiled from the stench, was a tall, skinny man with an equally bony face, in the act of putting a handkerchief over his mouth and nostrils.

“I’m Frank Abagnale,” I said eagerly. “Are you an American? Are you with the FBI?”

“I’m Peter Ramsey, and I’m from the American Consulate in Marseille,” replied the thin man, removing the handkerchief from his face. “How are you doing?”

I stared at him, astonished. My God, he acted like we were talking over a glass of wine in some Marseille sidewalk cafe. Words suddenly started cascading from my mouth like gravel from a sluice.

“How am I doing?” I repeated his query in near hysterical tones. “I’ll tell you how I’m doing. I’m sick, I’m sore, I’m naked, I’m hungry and I’m covered with lice. I don’t have a bed. I don’t have a toilet. I don’t have a wash basin. I’m sleeping in my own shit. I have no light, no razor, no toothbrush, no nothing. I don’t know what time it is. I don’t know what day it is. I don’t know what month it is. I don’t even know what year it is, for Christ’s sake. . . . I’m being treated like a mad dog. I’ll probably go mad if I stay in here much longer. I’m dying in here. That’s how I’m doing!”

I slumped against the door, exhausted from my tirade.

Ramsey’s features, save for an obvious reaction to the odor emanating from my cell, did not change. He nodded impassively when I finished.

“I see,” he said calmly. “Well, perhaps I should explain my visit. You see, I make the rounds of my district about twice a year, calling on Americans in this district, and I learned only recently that you were here. Now, before you get your hopes up, let me tell you now that I am powerless to assist you. … I am aware of the conditions here and of the way you’re being treated.

“And it’s precisely because of that treatment that I can’t do anything. You see, Abagnale, you’re being treated exactly the same as every Frenchman who’s confined here is treated. They’re not doing anything to you that they’re not doing to the man on either side of you, to the man in each cell in the prison, in fact. Each of them has the same accommodation as you. Each is living in the same filth. Each is eating the same food. Each is denied the privileges you’re denied.

“You haven’t been singled out for especially harsh treatment, Abagnale. And as long as they treat you as they treat their own, I can’t do a damn thing about your predicament, not even complain.

“The minute they discriminate against you, or treat you differently because you’re an American, a foreigner, then I can step in and complain. It may not do any good, but I could, then, intervene in your behalf.

“But as long as they mete out the same punishment to you as they do to their own, that’s it. French prisons are French prisons. It’s always been like this, to my knowledge, and it’ll always be like this. They don’t believe in rehabilitation. They believe in an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. In short, they believe in punishment for a convicted criminal and you’re a convicted criminal. You’re lucky, really. It used to be worse than this, if you can believe it. Prisoners were once beaten daily. As long as you’re not being specifically abused by someone, there’s nothing I can do.”

His words fell on my ears like whip strokes across my back. I felt like a death sentence had been pronounced on me. Then Ramsey, with the ghost of a grin, handed me a reprieve.

“It is my understanding that you only have another thirty days or so here,” he said. “You won’t be freed, of course. I am told that authorities from another country, which one I don’t know, are coming to take you into custody for trial in that country. Wherever you go, you’re bound to be treated better than this. Now, if you’d like me to write your parents and let them know where you are, or if you want me to get in touch with anyone else, I’ll be glad to do so.”

His was a generous gesture, one he didn’t have to make, and I was tempted, but only momentarily. “No, that won’t be necessary,” I said. “Thank you, anyway, Mr. Ramsey.”

He nodded again. “Good luck to you, Abagnale,” he said. He turned and seemed to disappear in a radiant explosion. I jumped back, shielding my eyes and screaming with pain. It was only later that I knew what had happened. The lights in the corridor were variable power lights. When a cell door was opened or a peephole broached, the lights were dimmed, low enough to avoid damage to the eyes of the prisoner who lived like a mole in his lightless hole. When a visitor like Ramsey appeared, the lights were turned up, so he might see his way. Once he halted in front of my cell, the lights had been dimmed. When he left, a guard had hit the bright switch prematurely. A concern for their sight was the only consideration accorded prisoners in Perpignan’s House of Arrest.

After Ramsey left, I sat down against the wall and, after the pain in my eyes had subsided, mulled the information he’d imparted. Was my sentence nearly over? Had it really been eleven months since I was shoved into this awful crypt? I didn’t know, I had lost all sense of time, but I felt he had told me the truth.

I tried to keep count of the days thereafter, to tally thirty days on the almanac of my mind but it was impossible. You simply can’t keep a calendar in a feculent vacuum, void of light, where any segment of time, if such existed, was devoted to surviving. I am sure it was only a few days before I returned to just holding on to my sanity.

Still, time passed. And one day the panel in the door opened, admitting the dim light that, with the one exception, was the only light I knew.

“Turn around, face the back of your cell and shut your eyes,” a voice ordered gruffly. I did as instructed, my heart hammering. Was this the day of my release? Or was something else in store for me.

“Do not turn around, but open your eyes slowly and let them get accustomed to the light,” the voice instructed. “I will leave this open for an hour, then I’ll be back.”

I slowly opened my eyes and found myself surrounded by a bright, golden glow, too bright for my weak orbs. I had to shut them against the glare. Gradually, however, my pupils adjusted to the illumination and I was able to look around me without squinting and without pain. Even so, the cell was still gloomy, like twilight on a rainy day. An hour later the guard returned, or at least the voice sounded the same.

“Close your eyes again,” he instructed. “I am going to turn up the lights further.” I did so, and when he instructed me to do so, I opened my eyes slowly and cautiously. The tiny cubicle was flooded with a luminous glare, causing me to squint again. The radiance ringed the cell like a nimbus around a dark star, illuminating fully for the first time the interior of the tiny vault. I was appalled and sickened as I looked around. The walls were moist and crusted with slimy mold. The ceiling, too, glistened with moisture. The floor was filthy with excrement, and the bucket, unemptied for some time, teemed with maggots. The odious worms were also slithering around the floor.

I vomited.

It was perhaps another hour before the guard returned. This time he opened the door. “Come with me,” he ordered. I scrambled from the foul cave without hesitation, experiencing shooting pains in my neck, shoulders, arms and legs as I straightened up for the first time since my arrival. I had difficulty walking, but I waddled after the guard like a half-drunk duck, sometimes steadying myself by putting a hand against the wall.

He led me downstairs and into a sparsely furnished room.

“Stand here,” he ordered, and disappeared through an open door that led to another chamber. I turned, inspecting the room, marveling at its size and spaciousness after so long in my moldy burrow, and then stopped as I suddenly confronted the most hideous creature I had ever encountered.

It was a man. It had to be a man, but God in heaven, what manner of man was this? He was tall and emaciated, his head crowned by a dirty, unkempt thatch of hair that spilled to his waist, his face hidden by a filthy, matted beard that fell to his belly. Spittle drooled from the slash that was his mouth, and his eyes were wildly glowing coals in their sunken sockets. He was naked and his flesh was coated with filth, sores and scabs, lending it a leprous appearance. The nails of his fingers and toes were grown out, elongated and curved like the talons of a vulture. Indeed, he looked like a vulture. I shuddered as I regarded the apparition. I shuddered again as recognition loomed.

I was facing myself in a mirror.

I was still horrified at my appearance when the guard returned, clothing draped over his arm and a pair of shoes in his hand.

I recognized the apparel as mine, the clothes I was wearing when I was received in the prison. “Put these on,” said the guard brusquely, handing me the garments and dropping the shoes on the floor. “Can’t I shower and shave first, please?” I asked.

“No, put on the clothes,” he said, giving me a malevolent look. I hurriedly garbed my filthy frame in the clothes, which were now several sizes too large for me. My belt was missing. I clutched the trousers around my wasted stomach and looked at the guard. He stepped into the next room and returned with a length of cotton rope. I cinched the waist of my trousers with that.

Almost immediately two gendarmes appeared, one of them carrying an array of restraints. One of them cinched a thick leather belt with a ringbolt in the front around my waist while the other fastened heavy shackles around my ankles. I was then handcuffed and a long, slender steel chain was looped around my neck and the handcuff chain, threaded through the ringbolt and fastened with a lock to the chain connecting my leg irons. Neither officer said a word as they trussed me. One then pointed toward the door and gave me a light shove as his partner led the way through the exit.

I shuffled after him, unable to walk because of the leg irons and fearful of my destination. I had never been chained like this before. I considered such restraints only for violent, dangerous criminals.

“Where are we going, where are you taking me?” I asked, squinting in the late afternoon sunlight. It was even more brilliant than the lights inside. Neither of them bothered to answer me.

Silently, they placed me in the back seat of an unmarked sedan and one climbed behind the wheel as the other seated himself beside me.

They drove me to the railroad station. The afternoon light, even sheltered as I was in the car, made me dizzy and nauseous. The nausea was not all due to my sudden exposure to daylight after all these months, I knew. I’d been ill—feverish, vomiting, diarrhea and racked at times by chills—for the past month or so. I had not complained to the guards in Perpignan. They would have ignored me, as they had ignored all my other pleas and protests.

At the railroad station I was taken from the car and one of the gendarmes snapped one end of a light chain onto my belt. He wrapped the other end around his one hand, and, leashed like a dog, I was led and dragged through the people assembled at the depot and shoved onto the train. The conductor showed us to a glassed-in compartment containing two benches, the door of which was adorned with a sign stating the booth was reserved for the Ministry of Justice. The other passengers looked at me in horror, shock or revulsion as we passed among them, some falling back in disgust as they detected my odor. I had long since lost all olfactory sensitivity to my own feculence, but I could sympathize with them. I had to smell like a convention of outraged skunks.

The compartment was large enough to accommodate eight persons and as the train filled and all the seats were occupied, several sturdy peasants, at various times, appeared and sought permission to ride in the compartment with us. They seemed oblivious to my malodorous condition. Each time, the gendarmes waved them on with a curt refusal.

Then three vivacious, pretty American girls appeared, dressed in a minimum of silks and nylon and festooned with shopping bags laden with souvenirs and gifts, wines and foods.

They reeked delightfully of precious perfumes, and with a broad smile, one gendarme rose and gallantly seated them on the opposite bench. They immediately tried to engage the officers in conversation, curious as to who I was and what my crime had been. Obviously, ensnared in chains as I was, I was some notorious, terrible murderer, on a par at least with Jack the Ripper. They seemed more fascinated than frightened, and animatedly discussed my offensive stench. “He smells like they’ve been keeping him in a sewer,” remarked one. The others laughingly agreed.

I did not want them to know I was an American. I felt degraded and ashamed of my appearance in their presence. The gendarmes finally made the three young women understand that they neither spoke nor understood English, and the three fell to talking among themselves as the train pulled out of the station.

I did not know where we were going. I had no sense of direction at the moment and I thought it would be useless to again seek my destination from the gendarmes. I huddled miserably between the officers, ill and despondent, occasionally looking out at the passing landscape or covertly studying the girls. I gathered from their conversational comments that they were schoolteachers from the Philadelphia area and were in Europe on a vacation. They’d been to Spain, Portugal and the Pyrenees and were now journeying to some other enchanted area. Were we en route to Paris, I wondered?

As the miles passed I grew hungry, despite my feeling of sickness. The girls took cheeses and breads from their bags, canned pates and wine, and began to eat, sharing their repast with the gendarmes. One attempted to feed me a small sandwich (my hands were restrained so that I could not have eaten had I been allowed), but one gendarme grasped her wrist gently.

“No,” he said firmly.

At some point, some hours after we left Perpignan, the young women, convinced that neither I nor the gendarmes could understand English, commenced discussing the amorous adventures they’d been having on vacation, and in such intimate detail that I was astonished. They compared the physical attributes, prowess and performance of their various lovers in such vivid language that I actually felt embarrassed. I’d never heard women engage in such locker-room tales, replete with all the four-letter words and lewd comments. I concluded I still had a lot to learn about women and at the same time I speculated as to my own standing had I been a participant in their sexual Olympics. I made a mental note to try out for their games should we ever meet again.

Our destination was Paris. The gendarmes hauled me to my feet, made their farewells to the ladies and hustled me off the train. But not before I’d said my own good-bye.

As I was pulled through the door of the compartment, I twisted my head and smiled lasciviously at the three young teachers.

“Say hello to every one in Philly for me,” I said in my best Bronx voice.

The expressions on their faces buoyed my sagging ego.

I was driven to the prefecture de police jail in Paris and turned over to the prefet de police, a plump, balding man with sleek jowls and cold, remorseless eyes. Nonetheless, those eyes registered shock and disgust at my appearance, and he set about promptly remedying my image. An officer escorted me to a shower, and after I had washed myself clean of my accumulated filth an inmate barber was summoned to snave my beard and shear my mane. I was then escorted to a cell, a small and austere little cubicle in reality, but sheer luxury compared to my previous prison accommodations. &<<•

There was a narrow iron cot with a wafer of a mattress and coarse, clean sheets, a tiny wash basin and an honest-to-john toilet. There was also a light, controlled from the outside. “You may read until nine o’clock. The light goes out then,” the guard informed me.

I didn’t have anything to read. “Look, I’m sick,” I said. “Can I see a doctor, please?”

“I will ask,” he said. He returned an hour later bearing a tray on which reposed a bowl of thin stew, a loaf of bread and a container of coffee. “No doctor,” he said. “I am sorry.” I think he meant it.

The stew had meat in it and was a veritable feast for me. In fact the meager meal was too rich for my stomach, which was unaccustomed to such hearty fare. I vomited the food within an hour after dining.

I was still unaware of my circumstances. I didn’t know whether I would be brought to trial again in Paris, whether I was to complete my term here or be handed over to some other government. All my queries were rebuffed.

I was not to stay in Paris, however. The following morning, after a breakfast of coffee, bread and cheese which I managed to keep inside me, I was taken from my cell and again shackled like a wild animal. A pair of gendarmes placed me in a windowed van, my feet secured by a chain to a bolt in the floor, and started on a route that I soon recognized. I was being driven to Orly Airport.

At the airport I was taken from the van and escorted through the terminal to the Scandanavian Airlines Service counter. My progress through the terminal attracted a maximum of attention and people even left cafes and bars to gawk at me as I shuffled along, my chains clinking and rattling.

I recognized the one clerk behind the SAS counter. She’d once cashed a phony check for me. I couldn’t now remember the amount. If she recognized me, she gave no indication of it. However, the man she’d cashed a check for had been a robust two-hundred-pounder, tanned and healthy. The chained prisoner before her now was a sick, pallid-faced skeleton of a man, stooped and hollow-eyed. In fact, after one look at me, she kept her eyes averted.

“Look, it won’t hurt for you to tell me what’s going on,” I pleaded with the gendarmes, who were scanning the human traffic in the vicinity of the ticket counter.

“We are waiting for the Swedish police,” one said in abrupt tones. “Now, shut up. Don’t speak to us again.”

He was suddenly confronted by a petite and shapely young woman with long blond hair and brilliant blue eyes, smartly dressed in a tailored blue suit over which she wore a fashionably cut trench coat. She carried a thin leather case under one arm. Behind her loomed a younger, taller Valkyrie, similarly attired, also holding an attache case tucked under an arm.

“Is this Frank Abagnale?” the smaller one asked of the gendarme on my left. He stepped in front of me, holding up his hand.

“That is none of your business,” he snapped. “At any rate, he is not allowed visitors. If this man is a friend of yours, you will not be allowed to talk to him.”

The blue eyes flashed and the small shoulders squared. “I will talk to him, Officer, and you will take those chains off him, at once!” Her tone was imperiously demanding. Then she smiled at me and the eyes were warm, the features gentle.

“You are Frank Abagnale, are you not?” she asked in perfect English. “May I call you Frank?”

CHAPTER TEN

Put Out an APB— Frank Abagnale Has Escaped!

The two gendarmes were transfixed in amazement, two grizzly bears suddenly challenged by a chipmunk. I myself stood gaping at the lovely apparition who demanded that I be released from my chains and who seemed determined to take me from my tormentors.

She extended a slender hand and placed it on my arm. “I am Inspector Jan Lundstrom of the Swedish police, the national police force,” she said, and gestured to the pretty girl behind her.

“This is my assistant, Inspector Kersten Berglund, and we are here to escort you back to Sweden, where, as I am sure you are aware, you face a criminal proceeding.”

As she talked, she extracted a small leather folder from her pocket and opened it to display to the French officers her credentials and a small gold badge.

The gendarme, perplexed, looked at his partner. The second gendarme displayed the sheaf of papers. “He is her prisoner,” he said with a shrug. “Take off the chains.”

I was unshackled. The crowd applauded, an ovation accompanied by a whistling and stamping of feet. Inspector Lundstrom drew me aside.

“I wish to make some things perfectly clear, Frank,” she said. “We do not normally use handcuffs or other restraints in Sweden. I never carry them myself. And you will not be restrained in any way during our journey. But our flight makes a stop in Denmark and my country has had to post a bond to ensure your passage through Denmark. It is a normal procedure in these cases.

“We will be on the ground only an hour in Denmark, Frank. But I have a responsibility to the French Government, to the Danish Government and to my own government to see that you are brought to Sweden in custody, that you do not escape. Now, I can assure you that you will find Swedish jails and prisons far different from French prisons. We like to think our prisoners are treated humanely.

“But let me tell you this, Frank. I am armed. Kersten is armed. We are both versed in the use of our weapons. If you try to run, if you make an attempt to escape, we will have to shoot you. And if we shoot you, Frank, we will kill you. Is that understood?”

The words were spoken calmly and without heat, much in the manner, in fact, of giving directions to a stranger, cooperative but not really friendly. She opened the large purse she carried on a shoulder strap. Bulking among its contents was a .45 semiautomatic pistol.

I looked at Inspector Berglund. She smiled angelically and patted her own purse.

“Yes, I understand,” I said. I really thought she was bluffing. Neither of my lovely captors impressed me as an Annie Oakley.

Inspector Lundstrom turned to the clerk behind the ticket counter. “We’re ready,” she said. The girl nodded and summoned another clerk, a young man, from a room behind her. He led us through an office behind the counter, through the baggage area, through operations and to the plane’s boarding stairwell.

Save for the shabby clothing I was wearing, we appeared to be just three more passengers. And from the lack of interest in my appearance, I was probably regarded as just another hippie.

We were fed on the plane before we landed in Copenhagen. It was the usual meager airline meal, but deliriously prepared, and it was the first decent meal I’d had since being committed to prison. For me, it was a delightful feast and I had to force myself to refuse my escorts’ offer of their portions.

We had a longer layover in Denmark than was expected, two hours. The two young officers promptly escorted me to one of the terminal’s restaurants and ordered a lavish lunch for the three of us, although I’m sure they couldn’t have been hungry again. I felt it was strictly an attempt to appease my still ravenous hunger, but I didn’t protest. Before we boarded the plane again, they bought me several candy bars and some English-language magazines.

Throughout the trip they treated me as if I were a friend rather than a prisoner. They insisted I call them by their given names. They conversed with me as friends, inquiring about my family, my likes, my dislikes and other general subjects. They probed only briefly into my criminal career, and then only to ask about my horrible treatment in Perpignan prison, I was surprised to learn I had served only six months in that hellhole. I had lost all track of time.

“As a foreigner, you were not eligible for parole, but the judge had discretion to reduce your term, and he did so,” said Jan. I was suddenly grateful to the stern jurist who’d sentenced me. Knowing that I had served only six months, I realized I would not have lasted a full year in Perpignan. Few prisoners did.

The plane landed in Malmo, Sweden, thirty minutes after leaving Copenhagen. To my surprise, we disembarked in Malmo, retrieved our luggage, and Jan and Kersten led the way to a marked police car, a Swedish black-and-white, parked in the terminal lot, a uniformed officer at the wheel. He helped load our luggage—the girls’ luggage, really, since I had none—into the trunk and then drove us to the police station in the village of Klippan, a short distance from Malmo.

I was intrigued by the Klippan police station. It seemed more like a quaint old inn than a police precinct. A ruddy-faced, smiling sergeant of police greeted us, Jan and Kersten in Swedish, me in only slightly accented English. He shook my hand as if he were greeting a guest. “I have been expecting you, Mr. Abagnale. I have all your papers here.”

“Sergeant, Frank needs a doctor,” said Jan in English. “He is very ill, I’m afraid, and needs immediate attention.”

It was nearly 9 P.M, but the sergeant merely nodded. “At once, Inspector Lundstrdm,” he said, beckoning to a young uniformed officer who stood watching the scene. “Karl, please take the prisoner to his quarters.”

“Ja, min herre,” he said and grinned at me. “If you will follow me, please.” I followed him in somewhat of a daze. If this was the treatment accorded criminals in Sweden, how did they treat honest folk?

He led me down the hall to a huge oaken door, which he unlocked, opened and then stood aside for me to enter. I was stunned when I stepped inside. This was no cell, it was an apartment, a huge, spacious room with a great picture window overlooking the village, a large bed with carved head and footboard and a colorful spread, rustic furniture and a separate bathroom with both a tub and a shower. Prints of gallant scenes from Sweden’s past decorated the walls, and tasteful drapes, drawn at the moment, afforded privacy from outside passersby.

“I hope you will be well soon, min herre,” said Karl in his accented English before closing the door.

“Thank you,” I replied. I didn’t know what else to say, although I wanted to say more. After his departure, I inspected the room closely. The windows were thick plate glass and could not be opened and the door also could not be opened from the inside, but no matter. I had no thoughts of escape from this prison.

I didn’t get to sleep in the bed that night. Within minutes the door opened again to admit Jan and a balding, amiable but very efficient, doctor. “Strip, please,” he said in English. I hesitated, but Jan made no move to leave, so I peeled my scant attire, really embarrassed to stand naked before her. Her face mirrored nothing but concern, however. Nudity, I learned, is sexual only under the circumstances with the Swedes.

The doctor poked, prodded, looked and listened, using a variety of instruments, and tapped, felt and pressed, all in silence, before he put away his instruments and stethoscope and nodded. “This man is suffering from severe malnutrition and vitamin deficiency, but worst of all, he has, in my opinion, double pneumonia,” he said. “I suggest you call an ambulance, Inspector.”

“Yes, Doctor,” said Jan and ran from the room.

Within thirty minutes I was ensconced in a private room in a small, clean and efficient hospital. I was there a month, recuperating, a uniformed officer outside my door at all times but seeming more a companion than a guard. Each day, either Jan or Kersten, the sergeant or Karl visited me, and each time they brought me something, a bouquet, candy, a magazine or some other little gift.

Not once during my hospital stay was I questioned about my alleged crimes, nor was any reference made to my upcoming trial or the charges against me.

I was returned to my “cell” at the end of the month, before lunch, and at noon Karl brought me a menu. “We do not have a kitchen/‘ he said apologetically. ”You may order what you wish from this, and we will bring it from the cafe. It is very good food, I assure you.“

It certainly was. Within a month I was back nudging two hundred pounds.

The day following my release from the hospital, Jan called on me, accompanied by a thin man with sprightly features.

“I am Inspector Jan Lundstrom with the Swedish National Police,” she said formally. “It is my duty to tell you that you will be held here for a period of time, and that it is also my duty to interrogate you. This is a minister, and he will act as interpreter. He speaks perfect English and is familiar with all of your American slang and idioms.”

I was flabbergasted. “Aw, come on, Jan, you speak perfect English yourself,” I protested. “What is this?”

“Swedish law requires that an interpreter fluent in the language of a prisoner be present when that prisoner is questioned, if he or she is a foreigner,” said Jan, still speaking in correct tones as if she had never seen me before.

“The law also says you have the right to an attorney, and your attorney must be present at all times during your interrogation. Since you have no funds to retain a lawyer, the government of Sweden has appointed you a counsel. Her name is Elsa Kristiansson and she will meet with you later today. Do you understand everything I have told you?”

“Perfectly,” I said.

“I will see you tomorrow, then,” she said, and left.

An hour later there was a knock on my door and then the portal opened. It was one of the guards with my supper, a bountiful and tasteful meal, which he arranged on a portable table as if he were a waiter and not a jailer.

When he returned to gather up the dishes, he grinned at me. “Would you like to take a walk?” he asked. “It will only be in the building, as I make my rounds, but I thought perhaps you might be getting tired of being shut inside.”

I accompanied him to the kitchen, where a waiter from a nearby restaurant took the tray and used dishes from him. The kitchen was not really a kitchen, just a nook where the guards could brew coffee for themselves. He then led me on a tour of the jail, a two-story affair that could accommodate only twenty prisoners. At each cell, he knocked before opening the door, greeted the occupant pleasantly and inquired of the prisoner’s needs. He bade each a cheery good night before closing and locking the door.

When I returned to my cell, Elsa Kristiansson was waiting for me, as was the interpreter, Rev. Carl Greek. I wondered at his presence until he explained that Mrs. Kristiansson did not speak any English at all. Nor did she spend any time inquiring about rny case. She merely acknowledged the introduction and then told me she would be on hand the next morning when Jan commenced her interrogation.

She was a tall, handsome woman of about forty, I judged, serene and courteous, but I had misgivings about her acting as my lawyer. Still, I had no choice. I had no funds to hire an attorney of my choice. The French police had seized all my assets in France, or so I presumed. They had not mentioned anything about my loot following my arrest or during my detention, and they certainly hadn’t returned any money to me on my release. And, here in Sweden, I had no way of getting funds from one of my many caches.

Jan appeared the next morning with Mrs. Kristiansson and Herre Greek. She commenced immediately to question me about my criminal activities in Sweden, with Bergen translating her queries for Mrs. Kristiansson, who sat silent, merely nodding now and then.

I was evasive with Jan during the first two interrogative sessions. Either I refused to answer or I would reply “I don’t remember” or “I can’t say.”

On the third day Jan became exasperated. “Frank! Frank!” she exclaimed. “Why are you so defensive? Why are you so evasive? You’re here, you’re going to go to trial, and it would be much better for you if you are honest with me. We know who you are and we know what you’ve done, and you know we have the evidence. Why are you so reluctant to talk?”

“Because I don’t want to go to prison for twenty years, even if it is a nice prison like this one,” I replied bluntly.

Bergen translated for Mrs. Kristiansson. The reaction of all three was totally unexpected. They burst into laughter, the loud, tear-producing peals of laughter usually provoked only by fine slapstick comedy. I sat looking at them in amazement.

Jan calmed herself somewhat, but still shaking with delight, she looked at me. “Twenty years?” she gulped.

“Or five years, or ten years, or whatever,” I replied defensively, irritated at their attitude.

“Five years? Ten years?” Jan exclaimed. “Frank, the maximum penalty for the crime you are charged with is one year, and I will be very surprised if you receive that much time, since you are a first offender. Frank, murderers and bank robbers rarely receive over ten years on conviction in this country. What you did is a very serious offense, but we consider a year in prison a very serious punishment, and I assure you that is the maximum sentence you face.”

I gave her a complete confession, detailing what I could recall of my transactions in Sweden. A week later I was brought to trial in Malmo before a jury of eight men and women who would determine both my guilt and my punishment, my confession having excluded any question of innocence.

Yet I almost beat the rap. Or Mrs. Kristiansson did. She surprised me by challenging the whole proceedings at the close of testimony against me. The charge against me was “serious fraud by check,” she told the presiding judge.

“I would point out to the court that the instruments introduced here today are not checks, as defined by Swedish law,” she contended. “They are instruments he made up himself. They never were checks. They are not checks at this time.

“Under Swedish law, Your Honor, these instruments could never be checks, since they are utter counterfeits. Under the law, Your Honor, my client has not really forged any checks, since these instruments are not checks, but merely creations of his own, and therefore the charges against him should be dismissed.”

The charges weren’t dismissed. But they were reduced to a lesser felony, the equivalent of obtaining money under false pretenses, and the jury sentenced me to six months in prison. I considered it a victory and rendered my enthusiastic thanks to Mrs. Kristiansson, who was also pleased with the verdict.

I was returned to my cell in the Klippan jail, and the next day Jan appeared to congratulate me. However, she also had disquieting news. I was not to serve my time in my comfortable and homey little hostelry in Klippan, but was to be transferred to the state institution in Malmo, located on the campus of Lund University, the oldest college in Europe. “You will find it very different from the prisons in France. In fact it is very different from any of your American prisons,” Jan assured me.

My misgivings evaporated when I was delivered to the prison, known on the campus as “The Criminal Ward.” There was nothing of a prison atmosphere about the ward— no fences, no guard towers, no bars, no electronic gates or doors. It blended right in with the other large and stately buildings on the campus. It was, in fact, a completely open facility.

I was checked in and escorted to my quarters, for I no longer looked on Swedish detention rooms as cells. My room in the ward was slightly smaller, but just as comfortable, and with similar furnishings and facilities, to those of the one in which I’d been lodged at Klippan.

The prison rules were relaxed, the restrictions lenient. I could wear my own clothes, and since I had only the one set, I was escorted to a clothing store in the city where I was outfitted with two changes of clothes. I was given unrestricted freedom to write and receive letters or other mail, and my mail was not censored. Since the ward housed only one hundred prisoners, and it was not deemed economical to maintain a kitchen, food was brought to prisoners from outside restaurants and the prisoner prepared his own menu within reason.

The ward was a coed prison. Several women were housed in the institution, but sexual cohabitation was prohibited between inmates. Conjugal visits were allowed between a man and wife, a wife and husband or between an inmate and his/her boy/girl friend. The prisoners had the freedom of the building between 7 A.M. and 10 P.M., and they could receive visitors in their quarters between 4 P.M. and 10 P.M. daily. The inmates were locked into their rooms at 10 P.M., curfew time in the ward.

The ward housed no violent criminals. Its inmates were check swindlers, car thieves, embezzlers and similar nonviolent criminals. However, prisoners were segregated, in multiroomed dormitories, by age, sex and type of crime. I was lodged in a dormitory with other forgers and counterfeiters of like age.

Swedish prisons actually attempt to rehabilitate a criminal. I was told I could, during my term, either attend classes at the university or work in a parachute factory situated on the prison grounds. Or I could simply serve my time in the ward. If I attended classes, the Swedish Government would pay my tuition and furnish my supplies. If I chose to work in the parachute factory, I would be paid the prevailing free-world wage for my job classification.

Escape would have been easy, save for one factor. The Swedes, at an early age, are issued identity cards They are rarely required to produce the card, but a policeman has a right to ask a citizen to display his or her identity card. And display of the ID is required for any border crossing, or international train or plane journey. I didn’t have one. I also didn’t have any money.

It really didn’t matter. Escape never entered my mind. I loved it at Malmo prison. One day, to my astonishment, one of my victims, a young bank clerk, appeared to visit me, bringing a basket of fresh fruit and some Swedish cheeses. “I thought you might like to know that I did not get into any trouble because of your cashing checks at my station,” said the young man. “Also, I wanted you to know I have no ill feelings toward you. It must be very difficult to be imprisoned.”

I had really conned that kid. I had made him my friend, in fact, even visiting in his home, in order to perpetrate my swindle. His gesture really touched me.

I both worked in the parachute factory and attended classes, which seemed to please the ward’s supervisors. I studied commercial art, although I was more adept in some of the techniques taught at Lund than the instructors.

The six months passed swiftly, too swiftly. During the fourth month, Mrs. Kristiansson appeared with alarming news. The governments of Italy, Spain, Turkey, Germany, England, Switzerland, Greece, Denmark, Norway, Egypt, Lebanon and Cyprus had all made formal requests to extradite me on completion of my sentence, and had been accorded preference in that order. I would be handed over to Italian authorities on completion of my term, and Italy would determine which country would get me after I settled my debt with the Italians.

One of my fellow inmates in the ward had served time in an Italian prison. The horror tales he recounted convinced me that Italian prisons were as bad as, if not worse than, Perpignan’s jail. Mrs. Kristiansson, too, had heard that conditions in Italian penal units were extremely harsh and brutal. She also had information that Italian judges and juries were not noted for leniency in criminal cases.

We launched a determined campaign to prevent my extradition to Italy. I bombarded the judge who had presided at my trial, the Minister of Justice and even the King himself with petitions and pleas for sanctuary, asking that I be allowed to stay in Sweden after my release or at the worst that I be deported to my native United States. I pointed out that no matter where I went, if I was denied refuge in Sweden, I would be punished again and again for the same crime, and conceivably I could be shunted from prison to prison for the rest of my life.

Each and every one of my pleadings was rejected. Extradition to Italy seemed inevitable. The night before Italian authorities were to take me into custody, I lay in my bed, unable to sleep and mulling over desperate plans for escape. I didn’t feel I could survive any amount of imprisonment in Italy if penal conditions there were as terrible as I had been told, and I actually felt it would be better for me to be killed in an escape attempt than to die in a hellhole similar to Perpignan’s.

Shortly before midnight, a guard appeared. “Get dressed, Frank, and pack all your belongings,” he instructed me. “There’re some people here to get you.”

I sat up, alarmed. “What people?” I asked. “The Italians weren’t supposed to pick me up before tomorrow, I was told.”

“They aren’t,” he replied. “These are Swedish officers.”

“Swedish officers!” I exclaimed. “What do they want?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. But they have the proper papers to take you into custody.”

He escorted me out of the ward and to a marked police car parked at the curb. A uniformed officer in the back seat opened the door and motioned for me to get in beside him. “The judge wants to see you,” he said.

They drove me to the judge’s home, a modest dwelling in an attractive neighborhood, where I was admitted by the judge’s wife. The officers remained outside. She led me to the judge’s study and gestured toward a large leather chair. “Sit down, Mr. Abagnale,” she said pleasantly. “I will bring you some tea, and the judge will be with you shortly.” She spoke perfect English.

The judge, when he appeared a few minutes later, was also fluent in English. He seated himself opposite me after greeting me and then regarded me in silence for a few minutes. I said nothing, although I wanted to ask a dozen or more questions.

Finally the judge started speaking, in a soft, deliberate manner. “Young man, I’ve had you on my mind for the past several days,” he said. “I have, in fact, made many inquiries into your background and your case. You are a bright young man, Mr. Abagnale, and I think you could have made a worthwhile contribution to society, not only in your own country but elsewhere, had you chosen a different course. It is regrettable that you have made the mistakes that you have made.”

He paused. “Yes, sir,” I said meekly, hopeful that I was here for more than a lecture.

“We are both aware, young man, that if you are returned to Italy tomorrow, you might very well face a prison sentence of up to twenty years,” the judge continued. “I have some knowledge of Italian prisons, Mr. Abagnale. They are very much like French prisons. And when you have served your sentence, you will be handed over to Spain, I understand. As you pointed out in your petition, young man, you could very well spend the rest of your life in European prisons.

“And there’s very little we can do about that, Mr. Abagnale. We have to honor Italy’s request for extradition just as France honored ours. The law is not something we can flout with impunity, sir.” He paused again.

“I know, sir,” I said, my hopes receding. “I would like to stay here, but I understand I cannot.”

He rose and began to pace around the study, talking the while. “What if you had a chance to start your life anew, Mr. Abagnale?” he asked. “Do you think you would choose a constructive life this time?”

“Yes, sir, if I had the chance,” I replied.

“Do you think you’ve learned your lesson, as the teachers say?” he pursued.

“Yes, sir, I really have,” I said, my hopes rising again He seated himself again and looked at me, finally nodding. “I did something tonight, Mr. Abagnale, that surprised even myself,” he said. “Had someone told me two weeks ago that I would take this action, I would have questioned his sanity.

“Tonight, young man, I called a friend of mine in the American Embassy and made a request that violates your rights under Swedish law. I asked him to revoke your U.S. passport, Mr. Abagnale. And he did.”

I gazed at him, and from his slight grin I knew my astonishment was visible. I was really puzzled at his action, but not for long.

“You are now an unwelcome alien in Sweden, Mr. Abagnale,” the judge said, smiling. “And I can legally order your deportation to the United States, regardless of any extradition requests pending. In a few minutes, Mr. Abagnale, I am going to order the officers outside to take you to the airport and place you on a plane for New York City. All the arrangements have been made.

“Of course, you should know that police of your own country will be waiting to arrest you when you debark from the aircraft. You are a wanted criminal in your own country, too, sir, and I felt it only proper that they be notified of my actions. The FBI has been informed of your flight number and the time of your arrival.

“I’m sure you will be tried in your own country. But at least, young man, you will be among your own people and I’m sure your family will be present to support you and to visit you in prison, if you are convicted. However, in case you aren’t aware, once you have served your term in America, none of these other countries can extradite you. The law in the United States prohibits a foreign nation from extraditing you from the land of your birth.

“I have taken this action, young man, because I feel it is in the best interests of all concerned, especially yourself. I think, when you have settled your obligations in your own country, that you can have a fruitful and happy life. … I am gambling my personal integrity on that, Mr. Abagnale. I hope you don’t prove me wrong.”

I wanted to hug and kiss him. Instead I wrung his hand and tearfully promised him that I would make something worthwhile of my future. It was a promise I was to break within eighteen hours.

The officers drove me to the airport, where, to my delight, Jan was waiting to take charge of me. She had a large envelope containing my passport, my other papers and the money I had earned in the prison parachute factory. She gave me a $20 bill for pocket money before handing over the envelope to the pilot. “This man is being deported,” she told the plane commander. “Officers of the United States will meet the plane in New York and will take him into custody. You will turn over this property to them.”

She turned to me and took my hand. “Good-bye, Frank, and good luck. I hope your future will be a happy one,” she said gravely.

I kissed her, to the astonishment of the pilot and a watching stewardess. It was the first overture I had made toward Jan, and it was a gesture of sincere admiration. “I will never forget you,” I said. And I never have. Jan Lundstrom will always be a fine and gracious person, a lovely and helpful friend, in my thoughts.

It was a nonstop flight to New York. I was seated up front, near the cockpit, where the crew could keep an eye on me, but otherwise I was treated as just another passenger. In flight I had the freedom of the passenger sections.

I do not know when I began thinking of eluding the waiting officers, or why I felt compelled to betray the judge’s trust in me. Perhaps it was when I started thinking of my short sojourn in the Boston jail, with its sordid tanks and cells. Certainly it was luxurious when compared to Perpignan’s prison, but if American prisons were comparable, I didn’t want to do time in one. My six months in the Klippan jail and the ward had spoiled me.

The jet was a VC-10, a British Viscount, an aircraft with which I was very familiar. A BOAC pilot had once given me a detailed tour of a VC-10, explaining its every structural specification, even to construction of the Johns.

From past flight experiences, I knew the jet would land on Kennedy’s Runway 13 and that it would require approximately ten minutes for the aircraft to taxi to the terminal.

Ten minutes before the pilot was to make his landing approach, I rose and strolled back to one of the lavatories and locked myself inside. I reached down and felt for the snap-out knobs I knew were located at the base of the toilet, pulled them out, twisted them and lifted out the entire toilet apparatus, a self-contained plumbing unit, to disclose the two-foot-square hatch cover for the vacuum hose used to service the aircraft on the ground.

I waited. The plane touched down with a jolt and then slowed as the pilot reversed his engines and used his flaps as brakes. At the end of the runway, I knew, he would come to almost a complete stop as he turned the jet onto the taxi strip leading to the terminal. When I judged he was almost at that point, I squeezed down into the toilet compartment, opened the hatch and wriggled through, hanging from the hatch combing by my fingers, dangling ten feet above the tarmac. I knew when I opened the hatch that an alarm beeper would sound in the cockpit, but I also knew from past flights that the hatch was often jarred open slightly by the impact of landing and that the pilot, since he was already on the ground, usually just shut off the beeper as the hatch being ajar posed no hazard.

I really didn’t care whether this pilot was of that school or not. We had landed at night. When the huge jet slowed almost to a stop, I released my hold on the combing and lit running.

I fled straight across the runway in the darkness, later learning that I had escaped unnoticed, the method of my escape unknown until an irate O’Riley and other FBI agents searched the plane and found the lifted-out toilet.

On the Van Wyck Expressway side of the airport, I scaled a cyclone fence and hailed a passing cab. “Grand Central Station,” I said. On arrival at the station, I paid the cabbie out of the $20 bill I had and took a train to the Bronx.

I didn’t go home. I felt both my mother’s apartment and my father’s home would be under surveillance, but I did call Mom and then Dad. It was the first time in more than five years that I had heard their voices, and in each instance, both Mom and I and Dad and I ended up blubbering with tears. I resisted their entreaties to come to one of their homes and surrender myself to officers. Although I felt ashamed of myself for breaking my promise to the Malmo judge, I felt I’d had enough of prison life.

Actually, I went to the Bronx to see a girl with whom I’d stashed some money and some clothing, one suit of which contained a set of keys to a Montreal bank safe-deposit box. She was surprised to see me. “Good lord, Frank!” she exclaimed. “I thought you had disappeared for good. A few more days and I was going to spend your money and give your clothes to the Salvation Army.”

I did not stop to dally. I wasn’t sure how many of my girl friends and acquaintances the FBI had been able to identify, or which ones, but I knew some had been ferreted out. I grabbed my clothes, gave her all but $50 of the money and grabbed a train for Montreal.

I had $20,000 stashed in a Montreal safe-deposit box. It was my intention to pick up the money and take the soonest flight to Sao Paulo, Brazil, where I intended to go to earth. You pick up some interesting information in prison, and in the ward I had learned that Brazil and the United States had no extradition treaty. Since I hadn’t committed any crimes in Brazil, I felt I would be safe there and that Brazilian authorities would refuse extradition even if I were caught in that country.

I picked up the money. I never made the flight. I was waiting in line at the Montreal airport to purchase a ticket when someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned to face a tall, muscular man with pleasant features, in the uniform of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

“Frank Abagnale, I am Constable James Hastings, and you are under arrest,” said the Mountie with a friendly smile.

The next day I was driven to the New York-Canada border and handed over to the U.S. Border Patrol, who turned me over to FBI agents, who took me to New York City and lodged me in the federal detention facility there.

I was arraigned before a U.S. commissioner who bound me over for trial under a $250,000 bond and remanded me to the detention house pending a decision on the part of prosecutors as to where to bring me to trial.

Two months later the U.S. attorney in the Northern District of Georgia prevailed, and U.S. marshals took me to the Fulton County, Georgia, jail to await my trial.

The Fulton County Jail was a pest hole, a real roach pit. “It’s bad news, man,” said another prisoner I met in the day room of our cruddy cellblock. “The only decent facility in the joint is the hospital, and you have to be dying to get in there.”

The only decent facility in the day room was a pay telephone. I plopped a dime in and dialed the desk sergeant. “This is Dr. John Petsky,” I said in authoritative tones.

“You have a patient of mine as a prisoner, one Frank Abagnale. Mr. Abagnale is a severe diabetic, subject to frequent comas, and I would appreciate it, Sergeant, if you could confine him in your medical ward where I can visit him and administer proper treatment.”

Within thirty minutes a jailer appeared to escort me to the hospital ward, leaving the other inmates who had heard my conversation grinning in admiration.

A week later a U.S. marshal appeared, took me into custody and transferred me to the Federal Detention Center in Atlanta to await trial. It was from this prison that I perpetrated what has to be one of the most hilarious escapes in the annals of prison history. At least I thought it was funny, and I’m still amused by the episode, although there’re several others who still hold an opposite view.

Actually, mine wasn’t so much an escape as it was a cooperative eviction, made possible by the time and the circumstances. I was ensconced in the detention facility during a period when U.S. prisons were being condemned by civil rights groups, scrutinized by congressional committees and investigated by Justice Department agents. Prison inspectors were working overtime, and undercover, and earning the enmity and hostility of prison administrators and guards.

I was brought into this atmosphere under exactly the right circumstances. The U.S. marshal who. delivered me to the facility had no commitment papers for me, but did have a short temper.

The admissions officer to whom I was offered had a lot of questions for the U.S. marshal. Who was I? Why was I being lodged here? And why didn’t the marshal have the proper papers?

The marshal blew his cool. “He’s here under a court order,” he snapped. “Just put him in a damned cell and feed him until we come after him.”

The admissions officer reluctantly accepted custody of me. He really had no choice. The marshal had stormed out. I think I could have followed him without anyone’s stopping me, in light of what I learned. “Another damned prison inspector, eh?” murmured the guard who escorted me to my cell.

“Not me, I’m here awaiting trial,” I replied truthfully.

“Sure you are,” he scoffed, slamming the cell door. “You bastards think you’re slick, don’t you? You people got two of our guys fired last month. We’ve learned how to spot you.”

I wasn’t issued the white cotton uniform the other inmates sported. I was allowed to keep my regular clothing. I noted, too, that the cell in which I was placed, while not posh, was exceedingly livable. The food was good and the Atlanta papers were brought to me daily, usually with a sarcastic remark. I was never called by name, but was addressed as “fink,” “stoolie,” “007” or some other derisive term meant to connote my assumed status as a prison inspector. Reading the Atlanta papers, which twice the first week contained stories relating to conditions in federal penal institutions, I realized the personnel of this facility really did suspect I was an undercover federal agent.

Had I been, they would have had no worries, and I v as puzzled as to why large numbers of influential people thought American prisons were a disgrace to the nation. I thought this one was great. Not quite up to the standards of the Malmo ward, but much better than some motels in which I’d stayed.

However, if the guards here wanted me to be a prison inspector, that’s what I’d be. I contacted a still loyal girl friend in Atlanta. The prison rules were not overly lenient, but once a week we were allowed to use the telephone in privacy. I got her on the phone when it was my turn.

“Look, I know what it usually takes to get out of here,” I told her. “See what you have to do to get in, will you?”

Her name was Jean Sebring, and she didn’t have to do much to get in to see me. She merely identified herself as my girl friend, my fiancee, in fact, and she was allowed to visit me. We met across a table in one of the large visiting rooms. We were separated by a three-foot-high pane of glass perforated by a wire-mesh aperture through which we could talk. A guard was at either end of the room, but out of earshot. “If you want to give him something, hold it up and we’ll nod if it’s permissible,” one guard instructed her.

I had concocted a plan before Jean arrived. It might prove to be merely an intellectual exercise, I knew, but I thought it was worth a try. However, I first had to persuade Jean to help me, for outside assistance was vital to my plot. She was not difficult to persuade. “Sure, why not?” she agreed, smiling. “I think it would be funny as hell if you pulled it off.”

“Have you met an FBI agent named Sean O’Riley or talked to him?” I asked.

She nodded. “In fact, he gave me one of his cards when he came around asking about you,” she said.

“Great!” I enthused. “I think we’re in business, baby.”

We really were. That week, Jean, posing as a free-lance magazine writer, called at the U.S. Bureau of Prisons in Washington, D.C., and finagled an interview with Inspector C. W. Dunlap, purportedly on fire safety measures in federal detention centers. She pulled it off beautifully, but then Jean is not only talented, she is also chic, sophisticated and lovely, a woman to whom any man would readily talk.

She turned at the door as she left. “Oh, may I have one of your cards, Inspector, in case some other question comes to mind and I have to call you?” she asked.

Dunlap promptly handed over his card.

She laughingly detailed her success during her next visit, in the course of which she held up Dunlap’s card, and when the one guard nodded, she passed it over the barrier to me.

Her visits only bolstered the guards’ belief that I was a Bureau of Prisons prober. “Who is she, your secretary, or is she a prison inspector, too?” one guard asked me as he returned me to my cell.

“That’s the girl I’m going to marry,” I replied cheerfully.

Jean visited a stationery print shop that week. “My father just moved into a new apartment and has a new telephone number,” she told the printer. “I want to present him with five hundred new personal cards as a house-warming gift. I want them to look exactly like this, but with his new home telephone number and his new office number inserted.” She gave the printer O’Riley’s card.

O’Riley’s new telephone numbers were the numbers of side-by-side pay telephones in an Atlanta shopping mall.

The printer had Jean’s order ready in three days. She passed me one of the cards on her next visit, and we finalized our plans. Jean said she’d enlisted the aid of a male friend just in case. “I didn’t fill him in on anything, of course; I just told him we were pulling a practical joke,” she said.

“Okay, we’ll try it tomorrow night,” I said. “Let’s hope no one wants to use those phones around 9 P.M.”

Shortly before 9 P.M. the following day, I hailed the cellblock guard, whom I had cultivated into a friendly adversary. “Listen, Rick, something’s come up and I need to see the lieutenant on duty. You were right about me. I am a prison inspector. Here’s my card.” I handed him Dunlap’s card, which bore only his Washington office number. If anyone decided to call the Bureau of Prisons, they’d be told the offices were closed.

Rick scanned the card and laughed. “By God, we knew we were right about you,” he chortled. “Combs is gonna like this. Come on.” He opened the cell door and led me to Lieutenant Combs’ office.

The lieutenant was equally pleased to learn, as he also had suspected, that I was a prison inspector. “We had you figured all along,” he growled amiably, tossing Dunlap’s card on his desk after looking at it.

I grinned. “Well, it would have all come out Tuesday anyway,” I said. “And I’ll tell you now that you people don’t have anything to worry about. You’re now running a clean, tight ship, the kind the bureau likes to brag about. You’ll like my report.”

A pleased look began to spread across Combs’ face and I plunged ahead with my gamble. “But right now I’ve got some urgent business to take care of,” I said. “I need to get hold of this FBI agent. Can you get him on the horn for me? He’ll still be at his office, I’m sure.” I handed over the doctored card bearing O’Riley’s name, his position with the FBI and the two phony telephone numbers.

Combs didn’t hesitate. He picked up his telephone and dialed the “office” number. “I’ve read about this guy O’Riley,” he remarked as he dialed. “He’s supposed to be hell on wheels for nabbing bank robbers.”

The “office” phone started ringing. Jean answered on the second ring. “Good evening, Federal Bureau of Investigation. May I help you?”

“Yes, is Inspector O’Riley in?” Combs said. “This is Combs at the detention center. We’ve got a man here who wants to talk to him.”

He didn’t even wait for “O’Riley” to answer. He just passed the phone to me. “She said she’ll get him for you,” Combs told me.

I waited an appropriate few seconds and then launched into my act. “Yes, Inspector O’Riley? My name is Dunlap, C. W. Dunlap, with the Bureau of Prisons. If you’ve got your list handy, my authorized code number is 16295-A. . . . Yes, that’s right. . . . I’m here now, but I’ve told these people who I am. … I had to. … Yes. . . .

“Listen, Inspector O’Riley, I’ve come up with some information on that Philly case you’re working, and I need to get it to you tonight. . . . No, sir, I can’t give it to you over the telephone . . . it’s too sensitive … I have to see you, and I have to see you within the hour. . . . Time is important. . . . Oh, you are. … Well, look these guys won’t blow your cover. . . . No, it’ll only take ten minutes.

. . . Wait a minute, let me talk to the lieutenant, I’m sure he’ll go along.“

I covered the mouthpiece of the telephone and looked at Combs. “Boy, these J. Edgar Hoovers are really way out. He’s working undercover on something and doesn’t want to come inside . . . some kind of Mustache Pete job or something,” I told Combs. “If he parks out front, can I go out and talk to him in his car for about ten minutes?”

Combs grimaced. “Hell, why don’t you call your people and spring yourself right now?” he asked. “You ain’t needed here anymore, are you?”

“No,” I said. “But we have to do these things by the book. A U.S. marshal will come for me Tuesday. That’s the way my boss wanted it done, and that’s the way it’ll be done. And I’d appreciate it if you people wouldn’t let on that I blew my own cover. But I had to. This is too big.”

Combs shrugged. “Sure, we’ll let you meet O’Riley. Hell, spend an hour with him, if you like.”

I went back to the telephone. “O’Riley, it’s okay. . . . Yeah, out front…. a red-over-white Buick. . . . Got it. … No, no problem. These guys are okay. I really don’t know why you’re being so damned cautious. They’re on our team, too, you know.”

Rick brought me a cup of coffee and stood by the window while I sipped the brew and chatted with Combs. “Here’s your Buick,” Rick said fifteen minutes later. Combs rose and picked up a large ring of keys. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll let you out myself.”

There was an elevator, used by guards only, behind his office. We rode it down and he escorted me past the guard in the small foyer and unlocked the barred doors. I walked through as the guard looked on curiously but without comment, and strolled down the walkway leading to the curb and the parked car. Jean was behind the wheel, her hair hidden under a man’s broad-brimmed hat and wearing a man’s coat.

She giggled as I climbed in beside her. “Hot dog! We did it!” she gurgled.

I smiled. “See how fast you can get the hell away from here,” I said, grinning from sheer jubilation.

She peeled out of there like a drag racer, burning rubber and leaving tire marks on the pavement as a memento. Away from the center, she slowed to avoid attracting the attention of any cruising radio patrolman, and then drove a meandering course through Atlanta to the bus station. I kissed her good-bye there and took a Greyhound to New York. Jean went home, packed and moved to Montana. If she was ever connected with the caper, no one was inclined to press charges.

It was a very embarrassing situation for the prison officials. It is a matter of record in FBI files that Combs and Rick sought to cover themselves, when they realized they’d been had, by reporting I had forcibly escaped custody. However, the truth, as the sage observed, soon outed.

I knew I would be the subject of an intense manhunt, and I resolved again to flee to Brazil, but I knew I would have to wait until the hunt for me cooled. For the next few days, I was certain, all points of departure from the United States would be under surveillance.

My escape made the front page of one New York paper. “Frank Abagnale, known to police the world over as the Skywayman and who once flushed himself down an airline toilet to elude officers, is at large again . . .” the story commenced.

I didn’t have a stash of money in New York, but Jean had loaned me enough to live on until the hunt for me died down. I holed up in Queens and, two weeks later, took the train to Washington, D.C., where I rented a car and checked into a motel on the outskirts of the capital.

I went to Washington because I had several caches in banks across the Potomac in Virginia, and Washington seemed to offer a safe haven, with its huge and heterogeneous population. I didn’t think I’d attract any attention there at all.

I was wrong. An hour after I checked into my room, I happened to glance out the window through a part in the drapes and saw several police officers scurrying to take up positions around this section of the motel. I learned that the registration clerk, a former airline stewardess, had recognized me immediately and had telephoned the police after an hour of fretting and wondering whether she should get involved.

Only one thing weighed in my favor, and I didn’t know it at the moment. O’Riley, on being informed that I was cornered, had told the officers not to move in on me until he arrived to take charge. O’Riley, whom I had met briefly after my arraignment, wanted this collar himself.

But at the moment I was on the verge of panic. It was late at night, but both the front and back of this section of rooms was well lighted. I didn’t think I could make it to the safety of the darkness beyond the lighted parking areas.

I knew, though, that I had to try. I slipped on my coat and fled out the back door, but held myself to a walk as I headed for the corner of the building. I had taken only a few steps, however, when two officers rounded the corner of the building. Both pointed pistols at me.

“Freeze, mister, police!” one barked in a command right out of a television police drama.

I didn’t freeze. I kept walking, right at the muzzles of their guns, whipping out my billfold as I walked. “Davis, FBI,” I said, surprised at my own coolness and the firmness of my voice.

“Is O’Riley here yet?”

The pistols were lowered. “I don’t know, sir,” said the one. “If he is, he’s around front.”

“All right,” I said crisply. “You people keep this area covered. I’ll check and see if O’Riley is here yet.”

They stood aside as I passed them I didn’t look back. I walked on into the darkness beyond the parking lot.

Epilogue

Not even the wiliest fox can elude the pack consistently, not if the hounds are persistent, and where Frank Abagnale was concerned the hounds of the law were not only persistent, they were exceedingly angry. Insult one policeman and you have insulted all policemen. Embarrass the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and you have embarrassed Scotland Yard. Humiliate a traffic cop in Miami and you have humiliated the California Highway Patrol. Frank Abagnale, for years, had insulted, embarrassed and humiliated police everywhere with regularity and maddening insouciance. And so police everywhere sought him day and night, without respite, and as much to vindicate themselves as to serve justice.

Less than a month after Abagnale evaded capture in Washington, D.C., two New York City detectives, munching hot dogs in their parked squad car, spotted him as he walked past the unmarked vehicle and accosted him. Although he denied his identity, within two hours Abagnale had been positively identified and was given into custody of FBI agents.

Within weeks, Abagnale was inundated with state and federal complaints charging forgery, passing worthless checks, swindling, using the mails to defraud, counterfeiting and similar offenses, leveled by authorities in all fifty states. Various U.S. attorneys and state prosecutors vied for jurisdiction, each claiming to have the most damaging case or cases against the prisoner. All the liens against Abagnale had validity. Although the cleverness and intelligence Abagnale had exhibited in the course of his criminal career was undisputed, he had been more bold than deceptive, more overt than discreet. A multitude of witnesses was available to identify Abagnale in one or the other of his roles, to accuse him in one or the other of his transgressions. Had all the charges against Abagnale been tossed into the air and one caught at random, the evidence in that case would have been overwhelming.

Abagnale was not unaware of his predicament and the knowledge caused him undue mental anguish. He knew he was going to serve time in some state or federal prison, perhaps several terms in several different prisons. He could not expect any American prison to be as humane as Malmo Prison. His great fear was that he might be incarcerated in an American version of Perpignan’s House of Arrest. His trepidations were not allayed when an arbitrary decision was made by federal authorities to bring him to trial in Atlanta, Georgia. More than in any other U.S. city where officials had cause to dislike him, Abagnale felt he was least popular in Atlanta.

However, he was represented by able counsel, and his lawyer struck a bargain with the United States Attorney that Abagnale eagerly endorsed.

In April 1971, Frank Abagnale appeared before a federal judge and pleaded guilty under Rule 20 of the United States Penal Code, a plea that encompassed “all crimes, known and unknown,” that Abagnale had committed in the continental United States, whether a violation of state or federal statutes. The presiding judge entered an order of nolle prosequi (no prosecution) in all but eight of the hundreds of charges pending against Abagnale, and sentenced Abagnale to ten years on each of seven counts of fraud, the terms to run concurrently, and to two years on one count of escape, the term to be served consecutively.

Abagnale was ordered to serve his twelve years in the Federal Correctional Institution in Petersburg, Virginia, where he was taken that same month. He served four years of his term, working as a clerk in one of the prison industries during those years at a “salary” of 20¢ per hour. Three times during that period, Abagnale applied for parole and each time was rejected. “If we do consider you for parole in the future, to what city would you like to be paroled?” Abagnale was asked at one point during his third appearance.

“I don’t know,” Abagnale confessed. “I would not like it to be New York, since I feel that would be an unhealthy environment for me, considering past events and circumstances. I would leave it to the parole authorities’ discretion as to where I should be paroled.”

Shortly thereafter, and for reasons Abagnale has never attempted to fathom, he was paroled to Houston, Texas, with orders to report to a U.S. parole officer there within seventy-two hours of his arrival and, if possible, to find gainful employment within the same period of time.

Frank Abagnale quickly learned, as do most freed prisoners, that there is a post-prison penalty society inflicts upon its convicts. For some, this penalty is simply a social stigma, but for the majority such post-prison punishment comprises much more than just slurs and slights. The ex-convict seeking employment invariably finds his quest much more difficult than does the hard-core unemployed, even though he may possess a needed or wanted skill (often acquired in prison). The employed ex-convict is the first to lose his job during economic downturns necessitating worker layoffs. Too often, the very fact that he is an ex-convict is sufficient reason for firing.

Abagnale’s post-release problems were compounded by the fact that the bureaucrat selected to supervise his parole was hostile and antipathetic. The parole officer bluntly apprised Abagnale of his feelings toward his ward.

“I didn’t want you here, Abagnale,” the hard-nosed official told him. “You were forced on me. I don’t like con men, and I want you to know that before we even start our relationship. … I don’t think you’ll last a month before you’re headed back to the joint. Whatever, you had better understand this. Don’t make a wrong move with me. I want to see you every week, and when you get a job, I’ll be out to see you regularly. Mess up, and I’m sure you will, and I’ll personally escort you back to prison.”

Abagnale’s first job was as a waiter, cook and managerial trainee in a pizza parlor operated by a fast-food chain. He did not inform his employer that he was an ex-convict when he applied for the job because he wasn’t asked. The job was colorless, unexciting, and made even less appealing by the periodic visits of Abagnale’s dour parole officer.

Although he was an exemplary worker, and one often entrusted with the banking of the firm’s cash receipts, Abagnale was fired after six months when company officials, checking more closely into his background in preparation for naming him a manager of one of the chain’s shops, learned he was a federal prison parolee. Abagnale within a week found employment as a grocery stocker with a supermarket chain, but again neglected to tell his employer that he was an ex-convict. After nine months, Abagnale was promoted to night manager of one of the firm’s stores and top management officials began to pay personal attention to the well-groomed, handsome and personable young man who seemed so zealously dedicated to company affairs. Obviously he was an executive prospect, and the firm’s directors commenced to prepare him as such. Abagnale’s grooming as a grocery guru, however, abruptly ended when a security check disclosed his blighted past and he again was given the boot.

In ensuing months, the discouraging procedure became repetitively familiar to Abagnale, and he began to contemplate a return to his former illicit lifestyle, feeling now that he had a justifiable grudge against the establishment. Abagnale might actually have returned to his felonious career, as have so many ex-convicts frustrated by similar situations, save for two fortuitous circumstances. First, he was removed from the supervision of his antagonistic parole officer and placed in the hands of a more rational, unbiased steward. And second, Abagnale shortly thereafter took a lengthy and introspective look at himself, his situation and what the future might or might not hold for him.

“I was working as a movie projectionist at the time,” Abagnale recalls today. “I was making good money, but there I was, five nights a week, sitting in this small room, with nothing to do, really, save to watch the same movie over and over again. I thought to myself that I was smarter than that, that I was ignoring and wasting real talents that I possessed.”

Abagnale sought out his parole officer and broached a plan he had formulated in the lonely projection booth. “I think I have as much knowledge as any man alive concerning the mechanics of forgery, check swindling, counterfeiting and similar crimes,” Abagnale told the officer. “I have often felt since I was released from prison that if I directed this knowledge into the right channels, I think I could help certain people a great deal. For instance, every time I go to the store and write a check, I see two or three mistakes made on the part of the clerk or cashier, mistakes that a bum check artist would take advantage of. I have concluded that it is simply a lack of training, and I know I can teach people who handle checks or cash vouchers how to protect themselves against fraud and theft.”

With the blessings of his parole officer, Abagnale approached a suburban bank director, outlined what he had in mind and detailed his background as a master bilker of banks. “At the moment I have no slide presentations or anything,” said Abagnale. “But I’d like to give a lecture to your employees for one hour after closing. If you think my lecture is worthless, you owe me nothing. If you think it is beneficial, you pay me $50 and make a couple of calls to friends you have in other banks to tell them what you think about my talk and what I’m doing.”

His first appearance as a “white-collar crime specialist” led to another appearance at a different bank, and then to another and yet another. Within months Abagnale was in widespread demand by banks, hotels, airlines and other businesses.

Today, three years later, Frank Abagnale is one of the nation’s most popular crime authorities, with offices in both Houston and Denver, a highly-trained staff, and gross revenues approaching $3 million. He still leads a life on the fly, constantly criss-crossing the nation to present seminars, give lectures or to appear on various television panels. Frank Abagnale leads a very satisfying life.

More importantly, he now realizes why he first embarked on a criminal voyage and why he is not now adrift on that dismal cruise.

“If I did not do what I do today—if I had stayed a pizza cook, a grocery executive or a movie projectionist—I might very well be back in prison today,” Abagnale muses. “Why? Because there’s no glamour, no excitement, no adventure and nothing to fulfill my ego in those vocations.

“What I do today, on the other hand, fulfills all my needs. I get up in front of thousands of people, and I know they’re listening to what I say. That’s an ego trip. I appear on dozens of television programs annually. To me, that’s a glamorous life. It’s an adventuresome life, because I’m constantly being challenged by white collar criminals who come up with new gimmicks to defraud clients—and I know they’re out to put me down as much as they are to make a bundle.

“Actually, I haven’t changed. All the needs that made me a criminal are still there. I have simply found a legal and socially acceptable way to fulfill those needs. I’m still a con artist. I’m just putting down a positive con these days, as opposed to the negative con I used in the past. I have simply redirected the talents I’ve always possessed. Today, if I walked into a crowded room and wanted to impress the people therein, I could impress them more by saying, ‘I’m Frank Abagnale, the impostor,’ than if I were to be the old Frank Abagnale, posing as a pilot, a doctor or whatever.”

Frank Abagnale, in reality, is still a bumblebee personality, flying where he isn’t supposed to fly at all, and making a pot of honey on the side.