Catch Me If You Can

by Frank W. Abagnale

  I was disillusioned within the week. I realized I wasn’t going to be able to live in New York on $60 a week, even if I stayed in the shabbiest hotel and ate at the Automats. Even more disheartening, I was reduced to the role of spectator in the dating game. To the girls I’d met so far, a stroll in Central Park and a hot dog from a street vendor’s cart would not qualify as an enchanted evening. I wasn’t too enchanted with such a dalliance myself. Hot dogs make me belch.

  I analyzed the situation and arrived at this conclusion: I wasn’t being paid lowly wages because I was a high school dropout but because I was only sixteen. A boy simply wasn’t worth a man’s wages.

  So I aged ten years overnight. It had always surprised people, especially women, to learn I was still a teen-ager. I decided that since I appeared older, I might as well be older. I had excelled in graphic arts in school. I did a credible job of altering the birth date on my driver’s license from 1948 to 1938. Then I went out to test the job market as a twenty-six-year-old high school dropout, with proof of my age in my wallet.

  I learned the pay scale for a man without a high school diploma wasn’t something that would embarrass the creators of the Minimum Wage Act. No one questioned my new age, but the best offer made me was $2.75 an hour as a truck driver’s helper. Some prospective employers bluntly told me that it wasn’t age that determined a worker’s salary, but education. The more education he had, the more he was paid. I ruefully concluded that a high school dropout was like a three-legged wolf in the wilderness.

  He might survive, but he’d survive on less. It did not occur to me until later that diplomas, like birth dates, are also easily faked.

  I could have survived on $110 a week, but I couldn’t live on that amount. I was too enamored of the ladies, and any horse player can tell you that the surest way to stay broke is playing the fillies. The girls I was romancing were all running fillies, and they were costing me a bundle.

  I started writing checks on my $200 account whenever I was low on fun funds.

  It was a reserve I hadn’t wanted to tap, and I tried to be conservative. I’d cash a check for only $10, or at most $20, and at first I conducted all my check transactions in a branch of the Chase Manhattan Bank. Then I learned that stores, hotels, grocery markets and other business firms would also cash personal checks, provided the amount wasn’t overly large and proper identification was presented. I found my altered driver’s license was considered suitable identification, and I started dropping in at the handiest hotel or department store whenever I needed to cash a $20 or $25 check. No one asked me any questions. No one checked with the bank to see if the check was good. I’d simply present my jazzed-up driver’s license with my check and the driver’s license would be handed back with the cash.

  It was easy. Too easy. Within a few days I knew I was overdrawn on my account and the checks I was writing were no good. However, I continued to cash a check whenever I needed money to supplement my paycheck or to finance a gourmet evening with some beautiful chick. Since my paycheck seemed always in need of a subsidy, and because New York has more beautiful chicks than a poultry farm, I was soon writing two or three bad checks daily.

  I rationalized my actions. Dad would take care of the insufficient checks, I told myself. Or I’d assuage my conscience with con man’s salve: if people were stupid enough to cash a check without verifying its validity, they deserved to be swindled.

  I also consoled myself with the fact that I was a juvenile. Even if I were caught, it was unlikely that I’d receive any stern punishment, considering the softness of New York ’s juvenile laws and the leniency of the city’s juvenile judges. As a first offender, I’d probably be released to my parents. I probably wouldn’t even have to make restitution.

  My scruples fortified by such nebulous defenses, I quit my job and began to support myself on the proceeds of my spurious checks. I didn’t keep track of the number of bum checks I passed, but my standard of living improved remarkably. So did my standard of loving.

  After two months of cranking out worthless checks, however, I faced myself with some unpleasant truths. I was a crook. Nothing more, nothing less. In the parlance of the streets, I had become a professional paperhanger. That didn’t bother me too much, for I was a successful paperhanger, and at the moment to be a success at anything was the most important factor in the world to me.

  What did bother me were the occupational hazards involved in being a check swindler. I knew my father had reported my absence to the police. Generally, the cops don’t spend a lot of time looking for a missing sixteen-year-old, unless foul play is suspected. However, my case was undoubtedly an exception, for I had provided plenty of foul play with my scores of bad checks. The police, I knew, were looking for me as a thief, not a runaway. Every merchant and businessman I’d bilked was also on the alert for me, I speculated.

  In short, I was hot. I knew I could elude the cops for a while yet, but I also knew I’d eventually be caught if I stayed in New York and continued to litter cash drawers with useless chits.

  The alternative was to leave New York, and the prospect frightened me. That still-remote corner of the world suddenly seemed chill and friendless. In Manhattan, despite my brash show of independence, I’d always clutched a security blanket. Mom and Dad were just a phone call or a short train ride away. I knew they’d be loyal, no matter my misdeeds. The outlook appeared decidedly gloomy if I fled to Chicago, Miami, Washington or some other distant metropolis.

  I was practiced in only one art, writing fraudulent checks. I didn’t even contemplate any other source of income, and to me that was a matter of prime concern. Could I flimflam merchants in another city as easily as I had swindled New Yorkers? In New York I had an actual, if valueless, checking account, and a valid, if ten years off, driver’s license, which together allowed me to work my nefarious trade in a lucrative manner. Both my stack of personalized checks (the name was real, only the funds were fictional) and my tinseled driver’s license would be useless in any other city. I’d have to change my name, acquire bogus identification and set up a bank account under my alias before I could operate. It all seemed complex and danger-ridden to me. I was a successful crook. I wasn’t yet a confident crook.

  I was still wrestling with the perplexities of my situation several days later while walking along Forty-second Street when the revolving doors of the Commodore Hotel disgorged the solution to my quandary.

  As I drew near the hotel entrance, an Eastern Airlines flight crew emerged: a captain, co-pilot, flight engineer and four stewardesses. They were all laughing and animated, caught up in a joie de vivre of their own. The men were all lean and handsome, and their gold-piped uniforms lent them a buccaneerish air. The girls were all trim and lovely, as graceful and colorful as butterflies abroad in a meadow. I stopped and watched as they boarded a crew bus, and I thought I had never seen such a splendid group of people.

  I walked on, still enmeshed in the net of their glamour, and suddenly I was seized with an idea so daring in scope, so dazzling in design, that I whelmed myself.

  What if I were a pilot? Not an actual pilot, of course. I had no heart for the grueling years of study, training, flight schooling, work and other mundane toils that fit a man for a jet liner’s cockpit. But what if I had the uniform and the trappings of an airline pilot? Why, I thought, I could walk into any hotel, bank or business in the country and cash a check. Airline pilots are men to be admired and respected. Men to be trusted. Men of means. And you don’t expect an airline pilot to be a local resident. Or a check swindler.

  I shook off the spell. The idea was too ludicrous, too ridiculous to consider. Challenging, yes, but foolish.

  Then I was at Forty-second and Park Avenue and the Pan American World Airways Building loomed over me. I looked up at the soaring office building, and I didn’t see a structure of steel, stone and glass. I saw a mountain to be climbed.

  The executives of the famed carrier were unaware of the fact, but then and there Pan Am acquired
its most costly jet jockey. And one who couldn’t fly, at that. But what the hell. It’s a scientific fact that the bumblebee can’t fly, either. But he does, and makes a lot of honey on the side.

  And that’s all I intended to be. A bumblebee in Pan Am’s honey hive.

  I sat up all night, cogitating, and fell asleep just before dawn with a tentative plan in mind. It was one I’d have to play by ear, I felt, but isn’t that the basis of all knowledge? You listen and you learn.

  I awoke shortly after 1 p.m., grabbed the Yellow Pages and looked up Pan Am’s number. I dialed the main switchboard number and asked to speak to someone in the purchasing department. I was connected promptly.

  “This is Johnson, can I help you?”

  Like Caesar at the Rubicon, I cast the die. “Yes,” I said.

  “My name is Robert Black and I’m a co-pilot with Pan American, based in Los Angeles.” I paused for his reaction, my heart thumping.

  “Yes, what can I do for you, Mr. Black?” He was courteous and matter-of-fact and I plunged ahead.

  “We flew a trip in here at eight o’clock this morning, and I’m due out of here this evening at seven,” I said. I plucked the flight times from thin air and hoped he wasn’t familiar with Pan Am’s schedules. I certainly wasn’t.

  “Now, I don’t know how this happened,” I continued, trying to sound chagrined. “I’ve been with the company seven years and never had anything like this happen. The thing is, someone -has stolen my uniform, or at least it’s missing, and the only replacement uniform I have is in my home in Los Angeles. Now, I have to fly this trip out tonight and I’m almost sure I can’t do it in civilian clothes… Do you know where I can pick up a uniform here, a supplier or whatever, or borrow one, just till we work this trip?”

  Johnson chuckled. “Well, it’s not that big a problem,” he replied. “Have you got a pencil and paper?”

  I said I did, and he continued. “Go down to the Weil-Built Uniform Company and ask for Mr. Rosen. He’ll fix you up. I’ll call him and tell him you’re coming down. What’s your name again?”

  “Robert Black,” I replied, and hoped he was asking simply because he’d forgotten. His final words reassured me.

  “Don’t worry, Mr. Black. Rosen will take good care of you,” Johnson said cheerfully. He sounded like a Boy Scout who’d just performed his good deed for the day, and he had.

  Less than an hour later I walked into the Well-Built Uniform Company. Rosen was a wispy, dour little man with a phlegmatic manner, a tailor’s tape dangling on his chest. “You Officer Black?” he asked in a reedy voice and, when I said I was, he crooked a finger. “Come on back I followed him through a maze of clothing racks boasting a variety of uniforms, apparently for several different airlines, until he stopped beside a display of dark blue suits.

  “What’s your rank?” Rosen asked, sifting through a row of jackets.

  I knew none of the airline terminology. “Co-pilot,” I said, and hoped that was the right answer.

  “First officer, huh?” he said, and began handing me jackets and trousers to try on for size. Finally, Rosen was satisfied. “This isn’t a perfect fit, but I don’t have time to make alterations. If 11 get you by until you can find time to get a proper fitting.” He took the jacket to a sewing machine and deftly and swiftly tacked three gold stripes on each sleeve cuff. Then he fitted me with a visored cap.

  I suddenly noticed the uniform jacket and cap each lacked something. “Where’s the Pan Am wings and the Pan Am emblem?” I asked.

  Rosen regarded me quizzically and I tensed. I blew it, I thought. Then Rosen shrugged. “Oh, we don’t carry those. We just manufacture uniforms. You’re talking about hardware. Hardware comes directly from Pan Am, at least here in New York. You’ll have to get the wings and the emblem from Pan Am’s stores department.”

  “Oh, okay,” I said, smiling. “In L.A. the same people who supply our uniforms supply the emblems. How much do I owe you for this uniform? I’ll write you a check.” I was reaching for my checkbook when it dawned on me that my checks bore the name Frank Abagnale, Jr., and almost certainly would expose my charade.

  Rosen himself staved off disaster. “It’s $289, but I can’t take a check.” I acted disappointed. “Well, gosh, Mr. Rosen, I’ll have to go cash a check then and bring you the cash.”

  Rosen shook his head. “Can’t take cash, either,” he said. “I’m going to have to bill this back to your employee account number and it’ll be deducted from your uniform allowance or taken out of your paycheck. That’s the way we do it here.“ Rosen was a veritable fount of airline operations information and I was grateful.

  He handed me a form in triplicate and I commenced to fill in the required information. Opposite the space for my name were five small connected boxes, and I assumed rightly that they were for an employee’s payroll account number. Five boxes. Five digits. I filled in the boxes with the first five numbers that came to mind, signed the form and pushed it back to Rosen. He snapped off the bottom copy, handed it to me.

  “Thank you very much, Mr. Rosen,” I said, and left, carrying the lovely uniform. If Rosen answered, I didn’t hear him.

  I went back to my room and dialed the Pan Am switchboard again. “Excuse me, but I was referred to the stores department,” I said, acting confused. “What is that, please? I’m not with the company, and I have to make a delivery there.”

  The switchboard girl was most helpful. “Stores is our employee commissary,” she said. “It’s in Hangar Fourteen at Kennedy Airport. Do you need directions?”

  I said I didn’t and thanked her. I took an airport bus to Kennedy and was dismayed when the driver let me off in front of Hangar 14. Whatever stores Pan Am kept in Hangar 14, they had to be valuable. The hangar was a fortress, surrounded by a tall cyclone fence topped with strands of barbed wire and its entrances guarded by armed sentries. A sign on the guard shack at each entrance warned “employees only.”

  A dozen or more pilots, stewardesses and civilians entered the compound while I reconnoitered from the bus stop. I noticed the civilians stopped and displayed identification to the guards, but most of the uniformed personnel, pilots and stewardesses, merely strolled through the gate, some without even a glance at the guard. Then one turned back to say something to a sentry and I noticed he had an ID card clipped to his breast pocket below his wings .

  It was a day that threatened rain. I had brought a raincoat along, a black one similar to the ones some of the pilots had draped over their arms. I had my newly acquired pilot’s uniform in a small duffle bag. I felt a little like Custer must have felt when he chanced upon Sitting Bull’s Sioux.

  I reacted just like Custer. I charged. I went into one of the airport toilets and changed into the uniform, stuffing my civies into the duffle bag. Then I left the terminal and walked directly toward Hangar 14’s nearest entrance.

  The guard was in his shack, his back toward me. As I neared the gate, I flipped the raincoat over my left shoulder, concealing the entire left side of my jacket, and swept off my hat. When the guard turned to confront me, I was combing my hair with my fingers, my hat in my left hand.

  I didn’t break stride. I smiled and said crisply, “Good evening.” He made no effort to stop me, although he returned my greeting. A moment later I was inside Hangar 14. It was, indeed, a hangar. A gleaming 707, parked at the rear of the building, dominated the interior. But Hangar 14 was also an immense compartmented office structure containing the offices of the chief pilot and chief stewardess, the firm’s meteorology offices and dozens of other cubicles that I presumed accommodated other Pan Am functions or personnel. The place was teeming with human traffic. There seemed to be dozens of pilots, scores of stewardesses and innumerable civilians milling around. I presumed the latter were clerks, ticket agents, mechanics and other nonflying personnel.

  I hesitated in the lobby, suddenly apprehensive. Abruptly I felt like a sixteen-year-old and I was sure that anyone who looked at me would realize I was too young to b
e a pilot and would summon the nearest cop.

  I didn’t turn a head. Those who did glance at me displayed no curiosity or interest. There was a large placard on a facing wall listing various departments and with arrows pointing the way. Stores was down a corridor to my left, and proved to be a military-like cubicle with a myriad of box-holding shelves. A lanky youth with his name embroidered on the right side of his shirt rose from a chair in front of a large desk as I stopped at the counter.

  “Can I he’p ya?” he asked in molasses tones. It was the first real southern drawl I’d ever heard. I liked it.

  “Yes,” I said and attempted a rueful grin. “I need a pair of wings and a hat emblem. My two-year-old took mine off my uniform last night and he won’t, or can’t, tell me what he did with them.”

  The storekeeper laughed. “We got mo‘ wings on kids ’n gals ‘n we got on pilots, I ’spect,” he said drolly. “We shore replace a lot of ‘em, anyway. Here you are. Gimme yore name and employee number.” He took a form from a file slot on his desk and laid it on the counter with a pair of golden wings and a Pan Am cap badge and stood, pen poised.

  “Robert Black, first officer, 35099,” I said, affixing the hat emblem and pinning the wings on my tunic. “I’m out of Los Angeles. You need an address there?”

  He grinned. “Nah, damned computers don’t need noth-in‘ but numbers,” he replied, handing me a copy of the purchase form.

  I loitered leaving the building, trying to mingle unobtrusively with the crowd.

  I wanted to pick up as much information as possible on airline pilots and airline operations, and this seemed a good opportunity to glean a few tidbits. Despite the number of pilots and other aircrewmen in the building, they all seemed to be strangers to one another. I was especially interested in the plastic-enclosed cards, obviously identification of some sort, that most of the pilots sported on their breasts. The stewardesses, I observed, had similar ID cards but had them clipped to their purse straps.