The World’s Greatest Con Man Spun A Lie That No One Saw Coming

But before Spielberg’s hit film starring Leonardo DiCaprio, there was a book called Catch Me If You Can. Published in in 1980, this book was actually written by Frank Abagnale Jr. himself, and it claimed to be a semi-autobiographical work exposing some of his shocking criminal exploits. And there was an interesting disclaimer at the start of the story. It went, “This book is based on the true-life exploits of Frank Abagnale. To protect the right of those whose paths have crossed the author’s, all of the characters and some of the events have been altered, and all names, dates and places have been changed.”

Then, when Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can came out 22 years later, Abagnale proudly vouched for its version of events. He wrote the foreword when the movie’s screenplay was published in a book, and in it he claimed that the film was 90 percent accurate. Was it, though? Like a lot of Hollywood movies based on real-life events, it condensed and simplified some things right from the beginning.

For a start, Abagnale’s father, Frank Abagnale Sr., wasn’t remotely like how he’s portrayed in the film. In the movie, the older Abagnale teaches his son the ways of the conman, but in reality he didn’t at all approve of his son’s life of crime. And there was no happy ending for him, either; according to Abagnale Jr., his father died after falling down a subway station staircase.

And Tom Hanks’ character, FBI Agent Carl Hanratty, never existed at all in real life. Apparently, he’s loosely based on a real person, Special Agent Joseph Shea, who pursued Abagnale and ended up befriending him. But Hanratty in the film also shares traits with the other real-life FBI agents who sought Abagnale.

Abagnale told the City & State New York news agency in September 2015, “I wasn’t really involved in the movie, but I thought Steven Spielberg did a good job. I was one of four children —he said I was an only child. My mother never remarried, and in the movie he had her married and there was a little girl at Christmastime in the window — that didn’t exist.”

Abagnale went on, referencing the movie’s famous airport escape scene, “I escaped off the aircraft through the service doors where they bring on the food and drinks, and he had me escape through the toilet. But other than that, I think he stayed pretty close to the story.” That begs its own question, though. Is Abagnale’s version of “the story” different to everyone else’s?

The story presented by Abagnale was an exciting and outlandish one, a thrill-a-minute adventure that sounded like a movie before it actually became one. But even before the film was made, people had doubts about it. Back in 1981, then-First Assistant Attorney General Ken DeJean told The Advocate newspaper, “The man is not an imposter, he is a liar.”

After the movie came out and was a box office hit, questions of the original book’s truthfulness began to spring up again. Abagnale said his piece via a 2002 post on his website, claiming, “I was interviewed by the co-writer only about four times. I believe he did a great job of telling the story, but he also over-dramatized and exaggerated some of the story. That was his style and what the editor wanted. He always reminded me that he was just telling a story and not writing my biography.”

And in the decades after that, people seemed to accept the events depicted in the book as fact. Abagnale gained notoriety as a “reformed criminal” type of public figure and got himself a high-profile job. In 2015 he became a AARP Fraud Watch Ambassador, someone whose job it was to prevent others from being conned. That makes what happened next especially ironic.

As a new decade dawned, one author decided it was time to expose Abagnale once and for all. In December 2020 journalist Alan C. Logan published a book detailing all his research on Frank Abagnale Jr.’s claims. It had the attention-grabbing title of The Greatest Hoax on Earth: Catching Truth, While We Can. And it was explosive.

Without Spielberg’s film bringing Abagnale’s story to a wider audience, Logan might not have written the book at all. He told WHYY’s podcast The Pulse in April 2021, “I remember just having this nagging feeling and that something just wasn’t quite right about [the story]... And I just thought, well, let me look into [it] a little bit. And nothing was adding up, nothing was verifiable.”

The book indicates that the real Abagnale wasn’t anywhere as charming as the Leonardo DiCaprio version of him. You may remember that in the movie the Abagnale character strikes up a relationship with a woman called Brenda, played by Amy Adams. The real “Brenda” was named Paula Parks, and Logan was able to track her down for his book.

Logan relayed to The Pulse, “What really happened was that, dressed as a TWA [Trans World Airlines] pilot, which he only did for a few weeks, [Abagnale] befriended a flight attendant called Paula Parks. He followed her all over the Eastern Seaboard, identified her work schedule through deceptive means, and essentially stalked the woman.” That’s a long, long way from a movie romance.

According to Logan, Abagnale wormed his way into Parks’ family life and took advantage of her kindness. The family almost treated him as one of their own, but Abagnale repaid them by stealing money from them and others in Baton Rouge. Abagnale always claimed he never scammed people — just companies — but the research seems to say otherwise.

Alan Logan told the story in more detail during a 2021 interview with newspaper The Irish World. He explained, “I went to the Baton Rouge Police Department and everything that Paula was telling me was there in black and white. While he was staying with them, he rifled through their belongings and found their checkbooks and was writing checks… buying the mother flowers on their own dime.”

Logan said that after that incident, Abagnale “was facing 12 years in the State Penitentiary in Louisiana.” But he ended up being “treated lightly” and was “given the 12 years as probation and psychiatric treatment.” That didn’t stop Abagnale. According to Logan, he fled the country and started conning people in Sweden instead.

There’s no doubt Abagnale was a conman… but a much grubbier one than the man Leonardo DiCaprio portrayed in the film. Logan said, “You get the fable of him only targeting banks which he propagated. There’s many, many interviews where he himself said that he only targeted hotels, banks and airlines and never targeted individuals.” But the Parks story contradicts all that.

The movie shows the charming teenage Abagnale constantly evading the FBI, but according to Logan’s research that could never have happened for one good reason… Abagnale was actually in prison during the time period given. He was paroled in 1974 and then immediately did something he luckily would have never gotten away with in the modern day.

Logan told The Irish World that after being paroled, Abagnale went to Texas and got not one but two jobs working with children. “Today, they would throw the book at somebody if they went down that route,” he said. “He’s on parole, that alone should have been enough to send him right back because it’s a major parole violation.”

According to Logan, a parole officer eventually caught Abagnale working at an orphanage with a fake degree, and instead of sending him back to prison gave him a space to live above his garage. Logan said, “There’s many, many mysteries as to why Abagnale was treated lightly so often even though he was caught time and time again.”

In fact, Abagnale got off so lightly that he was able to get on the TV show To Tell the Truth and “share his story.” Except, Logan believes, it was all lies. He told The Irish World, “I think that’s the most mystifying part of this: given that biography, which is indisputable based on public records, how it was that he soared to fame in a very, very, very brief period from 1975.”

Logan asked, “How on earth did the guy get on the ironically named nationwide television show To Tell the Truth? And then he was invited because of that on to other programming, including The Tonight Show, which was the most highly rated program at the time.” But then he answered his own question: it was all to do with a lack of fact-checking.

Some people did point out at the time that Abagnale’s claims didn’t add up, Logan said. A couple of journalists investigated whether Abagnale had really disguised himself as a doctor or worked with the Baton Rouge Attorney General. But Abagnale claimed that the people involved in those cases were too embarrassed to admit they’d been conned by him.

One of the journalists, Ira Perry of the Daily Oklahoman, did an in-depth investigation in 1978 and discovered that Abagnale’s claim to have stolen millions from Pan Am probably wasn’t true. Pan Am spokesperson Bruce Haxthausen told Perry, “I’ve checked with the security people and everyone here, and it never happened… I’d say this guy is as phony as a $3 bill.”

Logan told The Pulse that the movie had cemented Abagnale’s claims as “a true story” when they weren’t. He said, “When the movie comes out, you have major Hollywood players. These are not... C-level actors. You’re talking about the elites, the most famous director of all time, with A-level Hollywood celebrities playing the roles. So think about how that would then translate. It’s got to be true because there’s no way it couldn’t be.”

And indeed the writers of the movie had never really been that concerned about whether Abagnale’s claims were true or not. In 2002 The Los Angeles Times newspaper noted, “Some viewers of Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me if You Can, the story of teenage con man Frank Abagnale, may walk out of the theater wondering how much of the picture’s audacious larceny is true. They’ll never know.”

Movie screenwriter Jeff Nathanson told the newspaper, “Nobody really cares about... having to know exactly what happened. But it does matter that we stayed true to sort of what we know happened emotionally to [Abagnale] as a kid.” He also added that he found the “focus on what’s true and what’s not true” to be “very hard.”

Nathanson had actually had conversations with Abagnale while writing the movie. “Frank’s an interesting guy and I consider him a friend, but... he doesn’t really allow people to get to know him all that well,” he said. “I don’t know if anyone will ever know the actual truth.” But now it does seem like Alan Logan might have uncovered it.

Logan was especially keen to debunk Abagnale’s insistence that he’d worked with the FBI after reforming his criminal ways. Abagnale has claimed he underwent secret missions to military bases and laboratories, something the FBI has never confirmed or denied. But Logan thinks it’s pretty clear he was never seriously involved with the agency.

The FBI has confirmed that Abagnale had given lectures at their academy, but that’s it. And although Abagnale claimed he was profiled in a book about the FBI, when the actual book dropped his name was nowhere in it. And yet Abagnale keeps saying he works for them — even when confronted with an alleged victim of his real cons.

According to the blog Louisiana Voice, Abagnale was a guest speaker at the 2020 Louisiana Association of Business and Industry. Around this time he was confronted by Paula Parks, now Paula Campbell. She reiterated the claim that Abagnale scammed and stole from her family while pretending to be an airline pilot.

Campbell told the blog, “I was a flight attendant for Delta Airlines at the time he was passing himself off as a TWA pilot… He gave me a ride from New Orleans to Baton Rouge so I could visit my parents. I found him creepy and offensive but my parents fell in love with his B.S. stories and invited him back.”

Campbell went on, “Several weeks later, he reappeared and they invited him to stay as their guest. While he was there, he stole cash from my brother who was working as a bag boy at a grocery store and he stole checks from my parents and forged them and cashed them.” She demanded he sign her copy of Catch Me If You Can and write, “Sorry.”

The “sorry” wasn’t for Campbell but for her parents, who had passed away in the years since. According to the Louisiana Voice blog, Abagnale claimed not to remember her family but did write the apology. When Campbell demanded to know why he never spoke in his talks about being arrested for his thievery in Baton Rouge, he allegedly told her, “That’s because I work for the FBI,” while refusing to look her in the eye.

None of these new allegations paint Abagnale in a remotely good light, and Logan is keen to get the truth out there. He told The Irish World, “I’ve often been asked, ‘Did you contact Abagnale through the process while writing the book?’ And I didn’t because I didn’t need to. We had volumes of things that he said on cassette tapes, newspaper articles, videos. There’s an abundance of material of Abagnale in his own words.”

Logan went on, “The true story, if it were to be true, would largely have Mr. Abagnale victimizing people in Baton Rouge and spending most of his teenage years behind bars. Those are the facts. There’s just no way around that. Some people think, ‘Oh, well that’s an old movie’. And that was kind of the end of the story. But this is an ongoing legend.”

Logan also said that while he liked Catch Me If You Can as a movie, “If you’re going to go to a play that’s said to be a true story, if you’re going to watch a film and it’s said to be a true story, I think people are genuinely interested in the truth or at least as close as we can get to the truth of a biography that’s presented to us.”

And Logan’s primary concern is for the people who were conned by Abagnale. He said “I’m really in this so that the suppressed voices can finally find a voice. Because it’s not just a debunking exercise. If it was strictly that, I don’t even know if I would have done it. When I heard Paula Parks’ story, there was no turning back for me.”

There’s definitely been a lot of pushback against Abagnale since Logan’s book was published. In August 2022 Google added a disclaimer to a video of Abagnale doing a “Talks at Google,” and it stated, “Google does not endorse or condone the content contained within this video, nor does it lay claim to the validity of the actions described herein.”

And in September of that year, a member of the audience confronted Abagnale after he was given a “Heroes in Ethics Award” by Xavier University. Podcaster Jim Grinstead asked him, “Would you tell the truth about the stories you’ve told? Will you admit that you just lied to everybody, and you’re still conning them?” Abagnale denied that he had ever done so, but you have to wonder, how much longer will he be able to say that?