CATCH ME IF YOU CAN: THE MOST INTELLIGENT CRIMINAL IN HISTORY FRANK ABAGNALE

 THE MOST INTELLIGENT CRIMINAL IN HISTORY

Frank William Abagnale

How he was able to work as a doctor without going to medical school, a lawyer without being to law school, and a pilot with no training remains a mystery. No one knows how he was able to pull this off.

This can only be done by a highly intelligent criminal.

Born April 27, 1948, Frank William Abagnale is an American author and convicted felon. Abagnale gained notoriety in the late 1970s by committing a diverse range of workplace frauds.

He carried out most of his criminal activities between the ages of 16 and 21. Within this period, he forged his driver’s license to seem ten years older, and then opened several bank accounts using different identities.

Abagnale claimed to have worked as an assistant state attorney general in the U.S. state of Louisiana, a hospital physician in Georgia, and impersonated a Pan American World Airways pilot who logged over two million air miles by deadheading.

In order to remove suspicion while cashing his forged checks, he decided to become a pilot. He forged a pilot’s license and an employee ID.

He forged $2.5 million worth of bank checks across 26 countries he had flown to as a pilot.

Shortly after he stopped working as a pilot he moved to Georgia where he became a pediatrician. He quit after he almost killed a baby.

He then moved on to work as a lawyer claiming to have graduated from Harvard. When he was arrested in 1969 twelve countries sought his extradition.

While he was in prison he posed as an undercover inspector and this made him receive special treatments. He was able to escape from prison but was re-arrested.

He was released on parole, the condition being that he must work for the FBI.

Frank was born in the Bronx, New York City to an Algerian- American mother who died in November, 2014, and an Italian-American father who died in March, 1972.

He spent his early life in Bronxville, New York. His parents separated when he was 12 and divorced when he was 15 years old.

After the divorce, Abagnale moved with his father, and his new stepmother, to Mount Vernon, New York.

Abagnale claims his first victim was his father, who gave him a gasoline credit card and a truck, and was ultimately liable for a bill amounting to $3,400. Abagnale was only 15 at the time.

In December 1964, he enlisted in the United States Navy at the age of 16. He was discharged after less than three months, and was released on February 18, 1965. Two weeks after his release, Abagnale was arrested for petty larceny in Mount Vernon on February 26, 1965.

The following month, in March 1965, Abagnale identified himself as a Scarsdale, New York, police officer and entered the apartment of a Mount Vernon, New York, resident claiming that he was investigating her teenaged daughter.

Suspicious, the victim called the Mount Vernon police, who found Abagnale with a toy gun and a paper police badge. Abagnale was arrested and booked on a vagrancy charge after being identified in a lineup by the victim. The following day, Abagnale was ordered by the court to be committed to Grasslands psychiatric institute, in Westchester County, for observation.

In June 1965, the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested Abagnale in Eureka, California, for car theft after he stole a Ford Mustang from one of his father's neighbors.

He financed a cross-country trip from New York to California with blank checks stolen from a family business located on the Bronx River Parkway.

Abagnale was also charged with impersonating a US customs official, although this charge was subsequently dropped.

After being released into the custody of his father to face the stolen-car charges, 17-year-old Abagnale decided to impersonate a pilot.

He obtained a uniform at a Manhattan uniform company, purchased with the money he obtained from the forgery of checks and on July 7, 1965, informed local media that he was a graduate of the American Airlines pilot school in Fort Worth, Texas, but he was arrested for theft of checks in Tuckahoe, New York days later.

Abagnale was sentenced to three years at the Great Meadow Prison in Comstock, New York for these stolen checks. After serving only two years of his sentence, he was released into the custody of his mother, but he broke the terms of his parole with a stolen-car conviction in Boston, Massachusetts, and was returned to Great Meadow for one year.

After his release on December 24, 1968, 20-year-old Abagnale disguised himself as a TWA pilot and moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where he talked his way into the house of a local music teacher, whose daughter was a Delta Air Lines stewardess he had met in New York.

In Baton Rouge, Abagnale also befriended a local minister, claimed he had a master's degree in social work from Ithaca College, and sought work with vulnerable youth with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

The reverend introduced him to Louisiana State University faculty, who determined he was an "obvious phony". The reverend, after Abagnale told him he was a furloughed TWA pilot, became suspicious and called the airline, which informed him that Abagnale was a fraud. The reverend notified the Baton Rouge Police Department, and Abagnale was arrested on February 14, 1969, initially on vagrancy charges.

Upon his arrest, he was found to have illegally driven his Florida rental car out of state and to possess falsified airline employee identification. The following day, detectives determined that Abagnale had stolen blank checks from his host family and a local business in Baton Rouge, and he was subsequently charged with theft and forgery.

Unable to make bail, he was convicted on June 2, 1969, and was sentenced to 12 years of supervised probation, but he soon fled Louisiana for Europe.

Two weeks after the Louisiana bench warrant was issued, Abagnale was arrested in Montpellier, France, in September 1969. He had stolen an automobile and defrauded two local families in Klippan, Sweden. He was sentenced to four months for theft in France, though he served only three months in Perpignan's prison.

He was then extradited to Sweden, where he was convicted of gross fraud by forgery. He served two months in a Malmö prison, was banned from Sweden for eight years, and was required to compensate his Swedish victims (which he allegedly failed to do).

At 22 years Abagnale was deported back to the United States in June 1970, when his appeal failed.

After returning to the United States, 22-year-old Abagnale dressed in a pilot's uniform and traveled around college campuses, passing bad checks and claiming he was there to recruit stewardesses for Pan Am. At the University of Arizona, he stated that he was a pilot and a doctor. According to Paul Holsen, a student at the time, Abagnale conducted physical examinations on several female college students who wanted to be part of flight crews. None of the women were ever enrolled in Abagnale's fictional program.

After Abagnale cashed a personal check made to look like a Pan Am paycheck, on July 30, 1970, in Durham, North Carolina, he again came to the attention of the FBI. 

He was arrested in Cobb County, Georgia, three months later, on November 2, 1970, after cashing 10 fake Pan Am payroll checks in different towns. Abagnale escaped from the Cobb County jail and was picked up 4 days later in New York City. 

He was sentenced to 10 years in 1971 for forging checks that totaled $1,448.60, and he received an additional two years for escaping from the local Cobb County jailhouse

Abagnale approached a bank with an offer in 1975. He explained to the bank what he had done and offered to speak to the bank's staff and show them various tricks that "paperhangers" use to defraud banks. His offer included the condition that if they did not find his information helpful, they would owe him nothing; otherwise, they would owe him only $50, with an agreement that they would provide his name to other banks.

With that, he began a new career as a speaker and security consultant. During this time, he falsified his resume to show he had worked with the Los Angeles Police Department and Scotland Yard.

In 1976, he founded Abagnale & Associates, which advises companies on secure documents. In 2015, Abagnale was named the AARP Fraud Watch Ambassador, where he helps "to provide online programs and community forums to educate consumers about ways to protect themselves from identity theft and cybercrime."

In 2018, he began co-hosting the AARP podcast The Perfect Scam about scammers and how they operate.

Despite public records showing Abagnale targeted individuals and small family businesses, Abagnale has long claimed publicly that he "never, ever ripped off any individuals.

Till this day Frank has been working for the FBI.

Each of those three professions he impersonated takes years before anyone could practice them.

How was he able to work as a doctor without going to medical school, a lawyer without being to law school, and a pilot with no training remains a mystery. No one knows how he was able to pull this off.

This can only be done by a highly intelligent criminal.

The most intelligent criminal in history is still alive today, 75 years old and he is Frank William Abagnale jr.

His life inspired a movie, Catch Me if You Can