Frank W. Abagnale Jr. was annoyed.
The Times of London had reviewed my 2019 book about serial liars, “Duped,” and a photograph of Leonardo DiCaprio in full pilot regalia accompanied the piece.
It was the famous still from “Catch Me if You Can,” Steven Spielberg’s 2002 film inspired by Abagnale’s best-selling memoir from 1980.
Via email, the “reformed” con artist and writer — who now advises businesses, banks, shops and the FBI on fraud prevention and cybercrime — wanted me to know that it bothered him that “on a regular basis someone writes an article about a bank robbery, forgery, con artist, and even cybercrime they usually discuss with me.
“The crime I committed was writing bad checks,” he wrote. “I used to be 16 years old on the time. I served five years total in prisons in Europe and the US Federal prison system. In 1974, after serving 4 years in federal prison, the federal government took me out of prison to work for the FBI. I even have done so now for greater than 43 years.”
He added that he had repaid all of his debts.
His distress surprised me.
![Frank Abagnale and Leonardo DiCaprio during filming of](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/NYPICHPDPICT000006664774.jpg?w=1024)
![Leonado in](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/NYPICHPDPICT000006664780.jpg?w=1024)
Abagnale never seemed embarrassed by his past — not on “To Tell the Truth” nor “The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson” nor in high-paying speaking gigs across the country.
His grifter-made-good story was an enormous selling point.
In keeping with each Abagnale himself and his autobiography, within the mid-Sixties and early ’70s, when he was between 16 and 21, he had impersonated a Pan Am pilot, flying some 3,000,000 miles to 82 countries totally free.
He claimed to have posed as a health care provider in Marietta, Georgia, a sociology professor at Utah’s Brigham Young University, and a lawyer within the attorney general’s office in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
During that period, he allegedly cashed 17,000 bogus checks totaling $2.5 million dollars, with the FBI in hot pursuit.
![Frank Abagnale in a pilot's uniform](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/NYPICHPDPICT000006668784.jpg)
That’s the legend, anyway — as told in print, film, theater and speeches worldwide. It’s a story that has brought Abagnale fame, fortune, and most of all, legitimacy.
So why did he object to being in a book about deception?
I asked Abagnale — who founded Abagnale & Associates, a firm that advises corporations on fraud prevention, in 1976 — this query in my reply email, but he never responded.
And I put it out of my head until June 2020, when one other email popped up in my in-box, this time from a person named Jim Keith.
In 1981, Keith, then manager of security at a JC Penney in St. Louis, heard Abagnale speak at an area highschool about turning his life around.
![Leonardo DiCaprio in](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/NYPICHPDPICT000006664786.jpg?w=1024)
Keith and an area detective were within the audience. Much of the speech was full of “technical information regarding bad checks” and it was, to Keith, incorrect.
“We walked away with a sick feeling that we and people students were sold a bill of worthless goods,” Keith said.
Infuriated, he began researching Abagnale.
Keith was, his daughter, Heather Crosby, told the Post, “Like a dog with a bone … He was determined to indicate this guy was a fraud.”
Accusations that Abagnale had fabricated his life story had been swirling for a number of years, starting with the San Francisco Chronicle in 1978 and the Every day Oklahoman soon after.
![Frank Abagnale mugshot from 1965](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/NYPICHPDPICT000007835619.jpg)
But with no household web, those stories never reached critical mass. Abagnale’s fantastical feats remained unchallenged.
Keith eventually teamed up with a professor named William Toney, a former border patrol officer and professor of criminal justice at Stephen Austin University in Nagodoches, Texas.
He, too, had witnessed an Abagnale talk and didn’t buy it. So he enlisted his students to assist investigate.
Keith sent me an 87-page file of old newspaper clippings, court documents, letters — from airlines, university officials, government sources and others — together with correspondence from Toney, who died in 2010.
A few of what Abagnale said was true.
![Christopher Walken and Leonardo DiCaprio in](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/NYPICHPDPICT000006664791.jpg?w=1024)
He did forge checks, masquerade as pilots, sit in a number of jump seats, escape a jailhouse and go to prison in Europe.
But the remaining of his not-so-humble brags were “inaccurate, misleading, exaggerated or totally false,” claimed Keith, who died in 2021 at 77.
As Abagnale’s former speaking agent, Mark Zinder, 66, told the Post, “He was a two-bit criminal. I’m embarrassed that I ever related to the person.”
Abagnale never pretended to be a professor at Brigham Young or a physician in Georgia. He never posed as a lawyer within the Baton Rough attorney general’s office.
He was never a consultant to the US Senate Judiciary Committee.
![Frank Abagnale's mugshot from 1974.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/NYPICHPDPICT000006668790.jpg?w=1024)
Chief counsel Vinton D. Lides told Keith that an “initial check of employment records for the last ten years, doesn’t indicate that one Frank W. Abagnale, Jr. has ever been employed as a consultant, or in some other capability, by this Committee.”
(Although Abagnale has claimed to have used the aliases Frank Williams, Frank Adams, Robert Conrad, and Robert Monjo, there’s no evidence he did.)
Nor did Abagnale steal money from a deposit drop at Boston’s Logan Airport while dressed as a security guard, as he’d claimed in his memoir and talks.
And his Pan Am antics were seriously embellished.
“I’m sorry to not have the time or the inclination to rebut the identical dribble this individual has been peddling for years,” Andrew K. Bentley, Pan Am’s director of security, wrote Keith on Mary 18, 1982.
![Frank Abagnale and Paula Parks Campbell](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/NYPICHPDPICT000006668787.jpg)
It’s also unimaginable for Abagnale to have accomplished his criminal enterprises between ages 16 and 21: He spent much of those years behind bars.
That’s also why he could never have cashed 17,000 fraudulent checks price $2.5 million, said Alan C. Logan, writer of “The Biggest Hoax On Earth,” about Abagnale. “The time he wasn’t in some prison or jail amounts to about 14 months. Cashing 17,000 checks in that period is 40 checks per day.”
In November 1970, the 21-year-old was picked up in Cobb County, Georgia, after cashing 10 fake checks price a grand total of…$1,448.60. He was sent to a federal penitentiary in Petersburg, Virginia, in April 1971 and sentenced to 12 years.
Abagnale has claimed that the government sprung him from Petersburg to work with the FBI, but “There isn’t a evidence to support this claim,” said Logan. The FBI wouldn’t comment.
![Paul Parks Campbell](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/NYPICHPDPICT000006656625.jpg?w=683)
While an FBI agent was in search of him, there may be also no proof that the bureau arrange a task force dedicated to his capture.
In actual fact, Abagnale was arrested again, in 1974, for stealing art and photography equipment from a Texas summer camp where he was working. He was 26.
In 1982, Toney presented his findings on Abagnale on the International Platform Association, a speakers’ convention in Washington, DC. Others on the schedule included Carl Sagan, David Brinkley, F. Lee Bailey — and Frank Abagnale, Jr.
But after getting wind of Toney’s talk, “How one can Catch a Con Man,” Abagnale never showed up.
In keeping with records obtained by The Post, Abagnale threatened to sue Toney for libel and slander; Toney filed suit against Abagnale for “damages.”
![Pan Am letter saying Frank Abagnale never worked for the company](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/NYPICHPDPICT000006717662.jpg?w=768)
They settled out of court in 1985.
As for Abagnale’s justification in his memoir and in speeches that he only robbed large corporations, that’s news to Paula Parks Campbell, a former flight attendant who met him — wearing his TWA pilot uniform — on a plane from Recent York to Miami in 1969.
“TWA was the large,” says Campbell, 75, who lives outside Baton Rouge.
Abagnale sent two dozen red roses and a 5-pound box of chocolate to her hotel. When she landed in Recent Orleans the next day, he was there on the airport.
“He was very charming, but he smelled bad,” Campbell told The Post. “It wasn’t body odor. It was fear.”
![Letter from Brigham Young University saying Frank Abagnale never worked there](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/NYPICHPDPICT000006717647.jpg?w=768)
When he surprised her at 4 other airports, she began to get uneasy but decided to have him meet her parents in Baton Rouge.
“My parents and brother fell in love with him,” she said.
After dinner, her mother invited Abagnale to return and he or she’d teach him to fish. But on the ride back to Recent Orleans, Campbell told him she didn’t need to see him anymore.
A couple of days later, nevertheless, Abagnale popped up at her parents’ door unannounced, telling them he was on furlough from TWA.
They invited him to remain over — it ended up being six weeks.
Her parents, a nurse and teacher, treated Abagnale like certainly one of their children.
![](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/NYPICHPDPICT000006664783.jpg?w=1024)
He thanked them by rifling through her parents’ checkbooks and moving into the savings accounts of her brother and a family friend, stealing about $1200 from them.
“He said he never hurt little people, just went after big businesses,” said Campbell. “That’s the one which sticks in my craw. My mama’s heart was broken.”
Soon after, Abagnale sent a mea culpa to the family.
“There are not any words to precise how ashamed and sorry I’m,” he wrote. “You people have showed me more love in six weeks than I even have ever seen in my lifetime. Though I’ll go to prison, every cent I owe you might be repaid.”
Campbell, whose parents are long gone, continues to be waiting.
![Frank Abagnale](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/NYPICHPDPICT000006668822.jpg?w=719)
So is Mark Zinder, who sued Abagnale for breach of contract and lost commission for
speeches Abagnale never gave, and said he continues to be owed $15,000.
And Nelda McQuarry, who said she invested $20,000 with Abagnale in what turned out to be a real-estate scam.
Abagnale moved from Houston to Tulsa in 1985, together with his wife, Kelly Welbes Abagnale.
In 1991, the couple, who had three sons, filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, claiming to have $308.752 in assets and $1.6 million in debt. (They now live in Daniel’s Island, South Carolina, and are apparently not in bankruptcy.)
There are signs that the ruse is perhaps slowing down.
Abagnale was appointed a “Fraud Watch Ambassador” for AARP in 2015, educating consumers on scam prevention.
![Letter from the US Penitentiary in Athens, Georgia, disputing Abagnale's timeline of his jail time.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/NYPICHPDPICT000006717656.jpg?w=1024)
He co-hosted AARP’s podcast “The Perfect Scam” from 2018 until no less than 2022.
But, in response to an organization spokesperson, Abagnale is “not related to AARP.” A July 2022 article on the corporate’s website notes that “lots of his tales have since been debunked.”
Google added a disclaimer to a 2017 Abagnale talk that has garnered 15 million views, noting that it “doesn’t lay claim to the validity of the actions described therein.”
Abagnale doesn’t prefer to talk about his past, especially to not journalists (through a rep, he declined to comment).
When “Catch Me If You Can” got here out in 2002, he issued an announcement about the book and film.
![](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/NYPICHPDPICT000006664784.jpg?w=691)
The writer, the late Stan Redding, “overdramatized and exaggerated among the story … He all the time jogged my memory that he was just telling a story and never writing my biography,” Abagnale wrote.
(On the Penguin Random House website, the book is featured within the biography and memoir category.)
In March 2022, Abagnale surprised students at a Ringgold, Georgia, highschool for a performance of the stage adaptation of the movie. He reiterated that, “All the pieces I did I did between the age of 16 and 21. I used to be caught after I was 21.”
That very same month, Javier Leiva, host of The Pretend podcast, which devoted eight episodes to Abagnale’s faux shenanigans, attended a speech Abagnale gave in Las Vegas.
![Frank Abagnale](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/03/NYPICHPDPICT000006664773.jpg?w=685)
Ninety percent of the lecture was about IT security/fraud prevention, but “the undertone of his false life-story was palpable,” said Leiva.
Abagnale walked on stage to John Williams’ theme song for “Catch Me If You Can,” and elaborated on his alleged check-forging scheme.
At the tip of his email to me, Abagnale asked, “Is 50 years not long enough to receive some redemption for a criminal offense committed when one was a young person?”
“Everyone has a right to a second likelihood,” said Leiva. “Forgiveness is a virtue. But basing your entire profession on a lie and continuing to cash in on it isn’t redemption — it’s just a special version of the identical con.”