by Chris Barton
Without much effort, and definitely without anything resembling a plan, you turned back the clock on your date of birth: On your pictureless driver’s license, you changed the 1948 to 1938. Now you were twenty-six-year-old Frank W. Abagnale Jr. Trouble is, the twenty-six-year-old version of Frank Abagnale was just as much of a high school dropout as the sixteen-year-old version. More employable, perhaps, but as you soon found out, getting employed and getting decent pay are two very different things. Your income wasn’t nearly enough to keep you afloat in Manhattan.
All along, of course, you were tapping into that $200 account. A $15 check cashed here, a $25 check cashed there—you kept them as small as you could, but those numbers added up. Within a week or two of your arrival in the city, your account has been drawn down to nothing.
Which is where you are today—or rather, where you were until just now, as you casually make for the bank exit.
Who would have thought that you could just write a check no matter how little money—if any—was behind it? If this giant bank doesn’t want to be taken advantage of, it shouldn’t make it so easy.
All you had to do was ad-lib a story for the teller, something along the lines of how you lost your bag containing your wallet but luckily had your checkbook in your back pocket: “I don’t have an account here, and I need to get home on the train. I don’t have any money. Could somebody cash a check for me?”
“No sir, I can’t do that,” she replied, “but if you go over to see that man behind the desk, he may cash it for you.”
The man behind the desk took pity on you. He put his initials on the check and said, “Give this back to the teller and she’ll cash it for you.”
Piece of cake. You didn’t even have to show a photo I.D., for crying out loud—Frank W. Abagnale Jr. (even the sixteen-year-old version) could look like anyone, and nobody would be the wiser.
In the days since, you’ve repeated that con again and again. And as you emerge from a bank with that ill-gotten cash in your pocket, you know that not everyone can do what you do. Yes, at night you cry yourself to sleep—you were big enough to leave home, but you hadn’t been too big to have your dad kiss you good night right up until the end. In the daylight, though, you’ve got confidence that most people just don’t.
Something about you makes those bank tellers take your checks more seriously than they do the average Joe’s—makes them take your checks, period. You’ve always been at ease around grown-ups. In fact, you’ve preferred their company to that of kids your age, and your comfort with adults must show. They don’t even look at your checks, really—they look at you, your height, your hair, and give you exactly what you want.
Are you reckless? Sure. After all, those checks have your real name and hometown address. You don’t even question the wisdom of sticking around midtown, where you might be seen by one of the customers you used to make deliveries to for your dad—or even get seen by your dad himself. It’s the part of Manhattan you’re most familiar with, so at least for now, that’s where you stay.
Common sense says that even in a town as big as New York, you’re going to run out of places to bounce your rubber checks sooner or later. But the thing is, you’re still just sixteen. Not actually old enough to vote or join the army—or to drink, even if you wanted to—you aren’t entirely sure you’re ready to head out to another city. And even if you are up to it, you aren’t eager to find yourself in a town where bank tellers aren’t as friendly to a New York State driver’s license.
You think about this for a while. You think about nothing but this for a while. And it’s surely on your mind, even if it’s at the back, as you walk up Forty-second Street—just a couple of blocks from your dad’s store—one afternoon amid the five o’clock hustle and traffic.
Right now, back home in Westchester County, guys your age are shooting hoops and spinning Beatles 45s. You, you’re fifty-five minutes and another world away. You’re strolling past the Commodore Hotel when a car pulls up in front. Out steps an Eastern Airlines pilot and his crew.
Heads turn. Doors open. Respect is shown.
Is anyone else at this scene thinking what you’re thinking? That nobody’s ever going to seriously question that man in uniform before cashing his check?
And is anyone else here wondering what you’re wondering? Which is: Just how old do you have to be to pass for an airline pilot?
About twenty-six, is your guess.
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?
FRANK ABAGNALE JR. had barely begun. Between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one and under a bevy of names, he posed as a pilot (never actually piloting a plane), a doctor (never actually practicing medicine), lawyer, Secret Service agent, and so forth, passing bad checks and conning banks out of millions of dollars. Frank wasn’t delusional—he knew he would get caught, and he did. After a brutal stint in a French prison, he began a decades-long career training FBI agents to detect fraud and teaching banks how to improve security.
AFTERWORD
CHRIS BARTON
NOVEMBER 2010
AUSTIN, TEXAS
Who do you think you are?
Really, you ask yourself, just who do you think you are? You’ve got some nerve thinking you can get inside the heads of the ten people you’ve written about in this book. And where do you get off thinking you can put the readers inside those people’s heads as well?
But wait—it’s not like you picked these ten people at random. There were other candidates, other impostors and pretenders that you considered, but their stories and circumstances didn’t offer what you needed in order to tell their stories this way.
And what you needed was documentation—details of these masquerades captured in a personal way, or a public way, or both. These people’s memoirs, interviews, and public statements were useful, to the extent that you could trust them; after all, we’re talking about people who made their mark by misleading folks. Police reports, news accounts, and the tellings of others were helpful too, though these sources were often based either on statements grabbed amid the hubbub and swirl at the end of the deception, or on memories tapped months, years, or even decades after the incident.
So, let’s face it, all of these profiles are imperfect. There are undoubtedly things you got wrong, or didn’t get right enough. But through the telling of all ten of these stories, and through your attempts to understand all ten of these lives, you feel like you’ve gained something that a lifetime spent delving into every last detail of only one of these stories would not offer.
Now, you ought to state right up front that you’re not inclined to go out and take on a fake identity or pretend to be someone else. But if you were, you think you have a pretty good idea now of how to go about it successfully. (“Successfully” is a relative term, of course. More than half of your subjects were caught in the act—if they hadn’t been, we might never have known about them.)
Some key lessons:
1. Look the part. Getting fooled by one of these masqueraders was often just a matter of looking only at the surface—seeing a Transit Authority uniform shirt and a bag of motorman’s gear was to see a T.A. employee, not a teenager with a thing for trains; seeing a lightskinned person in a gentleman’s clothes was to see a white man, not an African American woman. It’s like Frank Abagnale told you: “All they saw standing in front of them was this uniform—not the person in the uniform, but the uniform.”
2. Let your would-be discoverers feel smart. People who feel smarter when they’re around you tend to have fond feelings for you and will be less inclined to question whether you really are who you say you are. Ferdinand Waldo Demara Jr., as “Dr. Joseph Cyr” and in his other guises, had a real knack for making experts in his fields of fakery feel this way. How did he do it? Get this: He asked their opinions and listened to what they had to say. He got information he needed, and they got an ego boost.
The mere presence of “Princess Caraboo” (aka Mary Baker) had a similar effect on people—especially on men, apparently. In
her silence and in the mystery of her origins, her visitors saw an opportunity to spout whatever random facts or bits of hearsay they had accumulated about the Far East while passing it off as actual knowledge. The more intelligent they made themselves feel, the more material she had to pick and choose from in wordlessly crafting her backstory.
3. Keep your mouth shut. The less you say, and especially the less made-up stuff you say, the less you have to keep track of, and the less likely it is that a listener will begin tugging at an inconsistency in your story in order to see what unravels. Solomon Perel got lucky that it was his Nazi girlfriend’s mother, and not his girlfriend herself, with whom he was more talkative than careful.
But in addition to knowing a lot about how to get away with a false identity, you’ve also learned quite a bit about what to expect from the experience. And it’s not something you’re eager to try for yourself.
You think of the loneliness. Ellen Craft and Riley Weston were exceptions—they had partners in their deception. The rest were on their own, whether alone in a huge but impersonal crowd (like Frank Abagnale, crying himself to sleep in Manhattan) or in the uncomfortably close company of others (you’re not the first to wonder how Sarah Rosetta Wakeman handled getting her period in the barracks). Putting on an act means putting up a wall around you, revealing next to nothing about your true self, and not having a completely honest conversation with anyone. Maybe that’s some people’s idea of a good time, but it’s not yours.
You think of the stress. Solomon Perel must have had it the worst of them all. For years he had to maintain that false identity or die. What he said, what he didn’t say, how he looked, how he acted, regardless of whether he was awake or asleep—all were potential giveaways, and the toll that must have taken on his nerves is hard to fathom. Mary Baker must have experienced some of the same, and while it would have been nowhere near as severe, who can blame her for running off? Ace Carter and Ferdinand Demara may have been heavy drinkers no matter what their circumstances were, but living lives of deception could not have helped.
You think of the fear. In the case of Craft and Perel and John Howard Griffin, the fear was mortal: Getting caught might well mean getting killed. Even when the stakes of the masquerade were lower—Riley Weston’s quest for better TV and movie roles comes to mind—there was the risk of losing out on a life that had been desperately dreamed of and tirelessly worked for. And while it’s easy to laugh now at Keron Thomas’s predicament while the A train was stuck on the tracks—with the ride of a lifetime literally brought to a screeching halt because he exceeded a twenty-mph speed limit, and his technical skill undone by the lack of a flashlight—you think your own response to that situation would have been to panic. Just a little, of course.
You also think of what life held in store for these ten when their masquerades ended—though you’ve tried not to. None of them knew, in the moments you’ve worked to capture, what would happen to them in the minutes that followed or in years to come, and so you’ve deliberately tried to block out your own knowledge of their futures.
It seems only fair to recognize, however, that their lives amounted to more than their deceptions. But it’s useful too. Because now that you think about it, you see that where these people ended up—all over the map—echoes the motivations behind their masquerades.
Better pay, better jobs, easy money, social justice, psychological need, plain old-fashioned kicks, sheer survival—each of those motives, plus others that you’ve no doubt missed, can be found in at least one of these stories. Take another ten masqueraders and you’d probably find as many more.
Which brings up one more question. These subjects all had their reasons for pretending to be someone else. Can you imagine what yours would be?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Writing the paragraphs below has reminded me of what a generous world this can be, and I’m glad to have the opportunity to say so.
Special thanks goes to those who made time for interviews for this project—not only Frank Abagnale and Keron Thomas, but also author and filmmaker Laura Browder, journalist Jenny Hontz, chess coach (and former T.A. motorman) Regoberto Sabio, and Ferdinand Waldo Demara’s high school acquaintance Irene Wolfendon and his Cayuga shipmates Peter Chance, Bill Doyle, Ted Meyers, and Don Saxon.
Many others provided additional support for my research, and I am grateful to each one of them, including Benton Arnovitz and Aleisa Fishman at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Robert Bonazzi, Steve Campbell at County Magazine, Deirdre Castle at the Victoria Times Colonist, Sarah Davis at the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Museum, Nekeela DeHaarte, James Fleming, Carrie Ann Flora, Marie Ford at Central Catholic High School, Beatrice Hotchin, Rebecca Smith Hurd, John LaFave at Cengage Learning, Joan LeFosse at ABC News, Ryan Mackey at the Cherokee Nation Cultural Resource Center, George Moore at the Naval Officers Association of Canada, Maren Nelson at Brown University Alumni Relations, Douglas Newman, the community at NYC Transit Forums, Marco Ricci, Marc Tyler Nobleman, Jeff Robel at the National Climatic Data Center, Bernard Spaughton, Kelly Welbes at Abagnale & Associates, John White at the College of Charleston Library, and Jennifer Ziegler.
Thanks also to the indispensible staffs at the libraries of Austin, Texas; Columbia University; Kingston, Ontario; Lawrence, Massachusetts; New York City; the University of Texas; and Washington, D.C., and to those at Library and Archives Canada and the State of Alabama Department of Archives and History, and to all those who spent time on my various Freedom of Information Act and Interlibrary Loan requests.
Wow. That’s a lot of people who helped just with my gathering of the raw materials for this book. My wife and sons may have realized before I did that this project was like researching and writing ten different picture book biographies (and then some) at the same time. Thank you, and you, and you for being so understanding and accommodating and supportive.
Editors Judy O’Malley and Nancy Mercado and my agent, Erin Murphy, showed the initial enthusiasm for this project that propelled it into the hands of Alisha Niehaus, its even-more-enthusiastic editor and allaround champion at Dial Books. Heather Alexander at Dial deserves the credit for coming up with the book’s title, after it had gone through almost as many temporary names as Demara. Thank you all, and the rest of the crew at Dial for their parts in bringing this book about, and Jean Dayton at Dayton Bookings for her much-needed support during the home stretch.
That Paul Hoppe deserves my thanks and appreciation is self-evident. But Paul also bought me a cup of coffee at New York City’s Books of Wonder, and that carries a lot of weight with me too.
Finally, my experience as the writer of these stories was infinitely less lonely than the experiences of my subjects, and much of the credit for that goes to my friends in the children’s literature community who read parts of this book and encouraged me onward. Many of those friends and I spent two and a half critique-filled days in the Austin home of Cynthia and Greg Leitich Smith, discussing and debating—among many other things about many other manuscripts—whether the second-person point of view was a good idea to start with and, regardless, how to make it better. I hope I gave as good as I got. Thank you all for your help, and thank you for letting me be myself.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
or, HOW YOU—ER, I—DID IT
KERON THOMAS
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———. “Subway joyrider draws probation; New York teen still thrilled by power of trains,” The Evening News Harrisburg (Newsday), July 15, 1993.
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