47 Years Ago
The August 10, 1978 Golden Transcript included an article titled “Retired con artist to conduct business fraud seminar here.”
Frank W. Abagnale, Jr. estimated by the FBI to have passed $2.5 million in bad checks, will be conducted a business fraud seminar at Metals Hall on the Colorado School of Mines campus Aug. 15, Colorado Retail Council (CRC) executive director Lee Bennet has announced.
The article called Abagnale “the world’s greatest retired con-man.”
Thirty years old, Abagnale began his career after dropping out of the tenth grade. With an IQ of 136, and a zest of making people believe he was whatever he pretended to be, he successfully passed himself off as a pilot for a major U.S. airline; worked as a lawyer on a state attorney general’s staff and successfully prosecuted 33 civil suits; was a consulting resident pediatrician in a Georgia hospital; and impersonated an FBI agent.
This all sounded familiar, and I realized that Abagnale’s story was the basis of a 2002 movie, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as the con-man and Tom Hanks as the FBI agent who tracked him down: Catch Me If You Can.
It was a good movie! It’s available from the library.
