Unveiled: The Shocking Truth Behind the Real-Life Conman Who Inspired ‘Catch Me If You Can’
In 2020, journalist Alan C. Logan published The Greatest Hoax on Earth: Catching Truth, While We Can, a book that debunked Abagnale’s story. Logan spent years combing through records, and he failed to find much of anything that supported Abagnale’s claims. What’s more, he discovered that Abagnale had deliberately left out — and even outright lied about — other parts of his life, such as a prison stint that took place at the exact time he was supposedly committing his greatest crimes.
So, the true story of Catch Me If You Can isn’t what it appears to be onscreen — it’s a con all of its own.
The Many Petty Cons Of Frank Abagnale Jr.
Frank Abagnale Jr. started his grift in the mid-1960s, according to his own accounts. Born in 1948, the young New Yorker began carrying out various cons when he was just 15, around the same time his parents divorced. He was sent to a reform school and later spent three months in the U.S. Navy, but he went right back to his criminal ways upon his discharge in 1965.
He was arrested for petty larceny in February 1965, vagrancy the following month, and car theft in June. Because 17-year-old Abagnale was still a minor at the time of the car theft charges, he was released to his father, and that’s when he began impersonating a pilot. He even told his hometown media that he’d “graduated from the American Airlines school as the top New York state student,” as the Mount Vernon Argus reported on July 7, 1965.
Mount Vernon Police DepartmentTeenage Frank Abagnale Jr.’s booking photo.
A week later, Abagnale was arrested once again for forging $350 worth of stolen checks. He spent the next three years in prison, and upon his release in late 1968, he pretended to be a pilot and headed to Louisiana. After less than two months there, he was apprehended for vagrancy, theft, forgery, and the possession of falsified airline employee identification after locals caught onto him.
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