Frank Abagnale Jr.’s Prison Con
Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic, Inc./Getty ImagesFrank Abagnale Jr. and Leonardo DiCaprio at the premiere of Catch Me If You Can in 2002.
As chronicled in Steven Spielberg’s 2002 film Catch Me If You Can, Frank Abagnale spent his youth and early adulthood as a check forger. He fooled Pan American Airlines into thinking him a pilot, spent years posing as a Brigham Young University professor, and cashed more than $2 million in bad checks.
Ultimately captured in Montpellier, France in 1969, Abagnale spent six months in a regional prison and another six months in Sweden before being deported to the United States. He was sentenced to 12 years in the Federal Detention Center in Atlanta, Georgia. However, the natural-born conman would escape in 1971.
The U.S. Marshal who transported Abagnale to the facility had forgotten his detention commitment papers. This came at a time when civil rights groups and congressional committees heavily scrutinized prisons. Abagnale used the lack of official inmate documentation to his advantage.
Wikimedia CommonsThe Federal Detention Center in Atlanta, Georgia.
Realizing that the guards were already considering the possibility that he might be a prison inspector under contract by the FBI, Abagnale got to work. Permitted to use the phone, he contacted his friend Jean Sebring in the outside world to forge a fake business card that would give Abagnale the credentials he needed.
Sebring purportedly used a card given to her by FBI Agent Jean Shea as the template, altering it to replace Shea’s contact information with Abagnale’s. With the conman receiving that card in his prison mail, he finally revealed himself as a prison inspector to the guards — who were delighted to find their suspicion confirmed.
With the card in hand and enough trust fostered in the guards, Abagnale claimed he needed to meet with an associate outside the prison walls and needed to borrow a car. Once they provided him with one, he was gone. He was ultimately arrested in Washington, D.C., two months later and re-imprisoned for four years.
While Abagnale’s story was famously chronicled to Hollywood fanfare, journalist Alan C. Logan believes it’s too unsubstantiated to hold up to scrutiny. However, others maintain that entities like the Federal Detention Center would prefer to have their slip-ups considered to be hoaxes rather than admit to their incompetence.
