Catch Me If You Can (12 page)

The former police chief of Houston once said of me: “Frank Abagnale could write a check on toilet paper, drawn on the Confederate States Treasury, sign it ‘U.R. Hooked’ and cash it at any bank in town, using a Hong Kong driver’s license for identification.”

There are several bank employees in Eureka, California, who would endorse that statement. In fact, if it were put in the form of a resolution, there are scores of tellers and bank officials around the country who would second the motion.

I was not really that crude. But some of the moves I put on bank personnel were very, very embarrassing, not to mention costly.

Eureka, for me, was my commencement as an expert forger. I was already an advanced student of paperhanging when I arrived, of course, but I took my master’s degree in check swindling in California.

I didn’t purposely pick Eureka as a milestone in my capricious career. It was meant merely as a pit stop en route to San Francisco, but the inevitable girl appeared and I stayed to play house for a few days and to ruminate on my future. I was possessed by an urge to flee the country, vaguely fearful that a posse of FBI agents, sheriffs and detectives was hard on my heels. There was no tangible reason for such trepidation. I hadn’t bilked anyone with a bouncing check in nearly two years, and “Co-pilot Frank Williams” had been in the closet for the same length of time. I should have been feeling reasonably safe, but I wasn’t. I was nervous, fretful and doubtful, and I saw a cop in every man who gave me more than a casual look.

The girl and Eureka, between them, allayed my misgivings somewhat after a couple of days, the girl with her warm and willing ways and Eureka with its potential for elevating me from petty larceny to grand theft. Eureka, in California ’s northern redwood forests, perched on the edge of the Pacific, is a delightful little city. It has the picturesque allure of a Basque fishing village, and in fact a large and colorful fishing fleet operates out of Eureka ’s harbor.

The most fascinating facet of Eureka, to me, was its banks. It had more money houses for a city its size than any comparable city I’d ever visited. And I needed money, a lot of it, if I were going to be an expatriate paperhanger.

I still had several stacks of worthless personal checks, and I was sure I could scatter a dozen or more of them around town with ease, netting $1,000 or more. But it occurred to me that the personal-check dodge wasn’t really that great. It was the easiest of bum-check capers, but it generated too much heat from too many points, and the penalty for passing a worthless $100 check was the same as that for dropping $5,000 in phony parchment.

I felt I needed a sweeter type of check, one that would yield more honey for the same amount of nectar. Like a payroll check, say. Like a Pan Am payroll check, naturally. No one would ever be able to say I wasn’t a loyal thief.

I went shopping. I obtained a book of blank counter checks from a stationery store. Such checks, still in wide use at the time, were ideal for my purposes, since it was left to the payer to fill in all the pertinent details, including the respondent bank’s name. I then rented an IBM electric typewriter with several different typeface spheres, including script, and some extra ribbon cartridges in various carbon densities. I located a hobby shop that handled models of Pan Am’s jets and bought several kits in the smaller sizes. I made a final stop at an art store and purchased a quantity of press-on magnetic-tape numerals and letters.

Thus provisioned, I retired to my motel room and set to work. I took one of the blank counter checks and across the top affixed a pan American world airways decal from one of the kits. Below the legend I typed in the airline’s New York address. In the upper left-hand corner of the check I applied the Pan Am logo, and in the opposite right-hand corner I typed in the words “expense check,” on the premise that a firm’s expense checks would differ in appearance from its regular payroll checks. It was a precautionary action on my part, since some Eureka bank tellers might have had occasion to handle regular Pan Am vouchers.

I made myself, “Frank Williams,” the payee, of course, in the amount of $568.70, a sum that seemed reasonable to me. In the lower left-hand corner I typed in “chase Manhattan bank” and the bank’s address, going over the bank legend with progressively blacker ribbons until the words appeared to have been printed on the counterfeit check.

Below the bank legend, across the bottom left-hand corner of the check, I laid down a series of numbers with magnetic tape. The numbers purportedly represented the Federal Reserve District of which Chase Manhattan was a member, the bank’s FRD identification number and Pan Am’s account number. Such numbers are very important to anyone cashing a check and tenfold as important to a hot-check swindler. A good paperhanger is essentially operating a numbers game and if he doesn’t know the right ones he’s going to end up with an entirely different set stenciled across the front and back of a state-issued shirt.

The fabricating of the check was exacting, arduous work, requiring more than two hours, and I was not at all happy with the finished product. I looked at it and decided it was not a check I would cash were I a teller and someone presented the check for payment.

But a thrift-shop dress is usually taken for high fashion when it’s revealed under a mink coat. So I devised a mink cover for the rabbit-fur check. I took one of the windowed envelopes, hoaxed it up with a Pan Am decal and Pan Am’s New York address, stuck a blank piece of stationery inside and mailed it to myself at my motel. The missive was delivered the following morning, and the local post office had unwittingly assisted me in my scheme. The clerk who had canceled the stamp had done such a botched job with the postmark that it was impossible to tell where the letter had been mailed from. I was delighted with the man’s sloppiness.

I donned my Pan Am pilot’s uniform, placed the check in the envelope and stuck it in the inside pocket of my jacket. I drove to the nearest bank, walked in jauntily and presented myself at a teller’s booth attended by a young woman. “Hi,” I said, smiling. “My name is Frank Williams and I’m vacationing here for a few days before reporting to Los Angeles. Would you please cash this check for me? I think I have sufficient identification.”

I took the envelope from my inside pocket, extracted the check and laid it on the counter, along with my phony Pan Am ID card and my illicit FAA pilot’s license. I purposely dropped the envelope, with its distinctive Pan Am logo and return address, on the counter.

The girl looked at my bogus identification documents and glanced at the check, but she seemed more interested in me. Commercial airline pilots in uniform were obviously a rarity in Eureka. She pushed the check back to me for endorsement, and while she counted out the money she asked chatty questions about my work and the places I’d been, questions I answered in a manner designed to bolster her apparent romantic image of airline pilots.

I was careful to take the envelope with me when I left. I had made certain that she noticed the wrapper, and it had patently enhanced her faith in the check. The transaction also verified a suspicion I had long entertained: it’s not how good a check looks but how good the person behind the check looks that influences tellers and cashiers.

I went back to my motel room and labored late into the night concocting several more of the sham checks, all in the amount of $500 or more, and the following day I successfully passed all of them in different downtown or suburban banks. Based on my knowledge of the check-routing procedures used by banks, I calculated I could spend two more days in Eureka making and dropping the bum expense checks and then have three days lead time for travel before the first one was returned as a counterfeit.

But an identity crisis, which I experienced periodically, forced me to revise my timetable.

I never immersed myself so deeply in an assumed identity that I forgot I was really Frank Abagnale, Jr. In fact, in casual encounters with people, where I felt no compulsion to play-act and nothing was to be gained by affecting a guise, I invariably presented myself as Frank Abagnale, a foot-loose fellow from the Bronx.

It was no different in Eureka. Away from my motel, where I was registered as Frank Williams, or the girl, who had succumbed to a man she believed to be a Pan Am pilot, and out of the pilot’s garb, I was simply Frank Abagnale, Jr. To a degree, my actual identity became a refuge from the pressures and tensions of posing.

In Eureka I met a fisherman off a fishing boat in a seafood restaurant. He stopped at my table to tell me he had personally caught the very fish I was eating, and then sat down to converse with me. He was a car buff, it developed, and I told him about my old Ford and what I had done to dress up the car. “Hey, that’s what I’m trying to fix up now, a 1950 Ford convertible,” he said. “You don’t have any pictures of your heap, do you?”

I shook my head. “I do, but they’re all back in my room at home,” I said.

“Gimme your address in New York and I’ll send you some pictures of my wheels when I’m finished with it,” he said. “Heck, I might even drive to New York and look you up.”

It was very unlikely that he’d either write me or come to New York to see me, and just as unlikely that I’d be there to receive either his letter or him, so I searched my pockets for a piece of paper on which to jot down my name and New York address.

I came up with one of the blank counter checks. I borrowed a pencil from a waiter and was writing my name and New York address on the back of the check when the fisherman was called to the telephone, a pay phone on the wall near the door. He talked for a few minutes and then waved at me. “Hey, listen, Frank, I gotta go back to the boat,” he shouted. “Come by tomorrow, willya?” He bolted out the door before I could reply. I gave the pencil back to the waiter and asked for my tab. “You need a pencil with heavier lead,” I said, indicating what I had written on the back of the counter check. The words were barely discernible.

I put the check back in my pocket instead of tearing it up, an action that was to prove both foolish and fortunate. Back in my room, I dropped it on top of the open book of counter checks, changed clothes and called the girl. We spent a pleasant evening at a fine restaurant in the tall redwoods somewhere outside of Eureka.

It was such a pleasant evening that I was still recalling it early the next morning when I sat down to create three more phony Pan Am checks. There were only three banks left in and around Eureka that didn’t have one of my artistic frauds, and I didn’t want to slight any of the three. I was caught up in my new scheme. All my fears of a posse pounding down my backtrail were forgotten. I had also completely forgotten the young fisherman of the past afternoon.

Finished with the first check, I slipped it into the now well-used envelope. Less than two hours later I completed the other two and was ready for my farewell foray in Eureka, one that went off without a hitch. By mid-afternoon I was back in my motel room, adding nearly $1,500 to the currency-cushioned lining of my two-suiter.

That night I told the girl I would be leaving the following day. “I’ll probably be flying out of Frisco or L.A., I don’t know which,” I lied. “Either way I’ll be back often. I’ll just rent a light plane and come up. We’ll look at those redwoods from the top for a change.”

She believed me. “That’s a deal,” she said, and suggested we go down to the wharves and eat seafood. She seemed more hungry than unhappy, which was agreeable with me. But halfway through the meal I looked out the window, saw a fishing boat coming in to the dock and remembered the young fisherman. I also remembered. I had jotted down my real name and my New York address-my father’s address, at least-on the back of one of the counter checks. I had a puckered feeling in the nether regions at the thought, as if someone had goosed me. What the hell had I done with that check? I couldn’t recall offhand, and trying to remember and carry on an ardent conversation with my companion made my last night with the girl something less than memorable.

Back in my room, I searched for the blank check, but to no avail. I had a lot of blank checks, but they were all still in the binder. I had to conclude that I’d made that particular blank check up as a sham Pan Am expense check and had passed it at one of the three banks. But I couldn’t have, I told myself. I had to endorse each check on its back, and surely I’d have noticed the writing. But would I have? I recalled how light the pencil had been. My writing had been barely legible, even in the bright light of afternoon. I could easily have overlooked the scrawled words when I endorsed the check, especially in view of the operating procedure I’d developed in Eureka. I had found that palming off one of the fake vouchers went much smoother and quicker when I kept the teller’s attention on me rather than the check. And to get a woman’s attention, you have to pay attention to her.

I sat down on the bed and forced a total recall of the events that had resulted in the situation, and soon satisfied myself as to what had happened. I had dropped the loose check on top of the open book of counter checks. I had picked it up first the next morning, my encounter with the fisherman unremembered, when I made up the three counterfeit expense checks. And I had placed it in the phonied-up envelope immediately after finishing it, so therefore it had been the first of the three cashed. And I now recalled the teller who’d cashed the check for me. I’d given her lots of attention. Too much, it seemed.

And a certain bank in Eureka had a counterfeit Pan Am expense check endorsed by a counterfeit co-pilot, but also bearing on the back the signature of Frank Abagnale, Jr., and the address of his father in the Bronx. Once the check was exposed as a fraud, it wouldn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to make the connection. And the case.

I suddenly felt hotter than a blast furnace. I started thinking again of leaving the country, jumping the border into Mexico. Or even more southerly climes. But this time I contemplated the idea reluctantly. In Eureka I’d devised what I considered a grand new theft scheme, one that paid off better than doctored dice in a crap game. And heady with the success of the system, I’d set aside my fears of being closely pursued and had convinced myself that I was as cool as an arctic ice floe. I had intended to work my counterfeit check scam from coast to coast and border to border. It chafed me to have to abandon my plans because I’d stupidly blown my cover.