9781422271025

truth, you have nothing extra to remember. You only have to tell the actual facts, which means you tell the story the same way every time. As you’ll read in this book, the story presented in the Redding Abagnale book, Catch Me If You Can , and in the Spielberg movie of the same name, contains numerous fictionalizations and a few outright fabrications. The ability of Frank William Abagnale Jr. to have continually upheld many of the stories fabricated by Redding and Spielberg speaks to his abilities as “the world’s greatest con man.” Abagnale did not con Pan American Airways out of millions. Instead, he got away with the equivalent of a few thousand dollars. Although Abagnale may have claimed to be a doctor in order to cash

checks or rent a room, no hospital has a record of him serving on its staff. While Abagnale claims to have passed the Louisiana bar exam and practiced law in that state, the prosecutor with whom he claims to have worked never had record of his employment. Abagnale has argued that those organizations would not want to admit to having hired a con artist. What hiring manager would want to admit that a teen or young adult (or any person, for that matter) had duped them into hiring an impostor? Catch Me If You Can is based on the autobiography of Frank Abagnale, who allegedly successfully performed cons worth millions of dollars.

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Frank Abagnale