Catch Me If You Can: The True Story of a Real Fake

“This book is based on the true-life exploits of Frank Abagnale. To protect the rights 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.”
This warning on the the copyright page of Catch Me if You Can should serve as a warning that this is actually a work of fiction, not “The True Story of a Real Fake.” This is a case where the book isn’t any better rooted in reality than the movie. Like the Little House books, it’s a riveting read–but shouldn’t be marketed as non-fiction or biography. Among the duplicities in the book:
– “When Mom finally divorced my father, I elected to live with Dad.” In numerous recorded speeches, Frank says that he ran away the instant he found out his parents were getting divorced. Literally, the last time his father saw him was running out of Family Court.
– “Ten minutes before the pilot was to make his landing approach, I rose and strolled back to one of the lavatories and locked myself inside.” In his speeches, Frank blames the ‘toilet’ scene on the movie scriptwriters, claiming he actually escaped through the galley.
– He never mentions (although the movie does) that he went directly from prison to working for the FBI (which he has continued to do to this day). All the stuff about him not being able to get a job due to his criminal record was apparently put in the book to conceal that he was an FBI undercover agent during his early years in the FBI, continuing to impersonate and con people, but this time with the government’s aid and approval.

This was hard to rate. It was an interesting read and I liked parts of it, but I was VERY disappointed in the amount of made up stuff in this book. It is supposedly a “True Story”, but about 1/2 way through the book I began to realize there is no way some of this stuff happened and I found outright errors (e.g. the U.S. won’t extradict any US citizen? Wrong!) By the end I was wondering which parts were true, and that really reduced my enjoyment overall. I Feel Like I was Conned Too. I did some googling and found that Mr. Abagnate even states/admits that many things were exaggerated by the co-writer and he wished that were not done. I believe that there are a lot of things that really happened in this book, but also a lot of things that are totally made up. (And some obvious sections where the co-author had go back and write a supplimental paragraph because a logical error was found in the draft. Not a smooth cover job.) Anyway, it would have been great without the made up stuff. Then I wouldn’t wondered how much I had been suckered.

I read the book years ago and actually got to meet Frank Abagnale when he gave a lecture at my college. He’s a very entertaining speaker and when my then-fiancee and I met him afterwards I could see first hand the con-man charisma he could turn on and off.

Abagnale hit upon some check-kiting techniques which were at the time, unprecedented. He took full advantage of glaring weaknesses in the American banking system and raked in millions. That much is true, exactly how much of the rest is true in his book, who knows? The book’s editors no doubt didn’t do much if any research into some of the claims made in the book so I would suspect that the ratio of truth to con job in the book is probably 50/50 at best. Still entertaining, and worth $10 for a Kindle copy.

I listened to his Google Talk and it was exhilarating. He said he is summoned to a family court at age 16. The judge says choose your mom or dad to live with since they are divorcing. He cries, runs away for good, never seeing or talking to his dad again. Ever. Now the book. None of the above. He knew about the divorce. Lives with his mom for a while then lives with dad, etc etc. The only thing true about this guy is that conned me. 🙁

The movie fell way short of the actual story in the book. The movie highlighted some of his most amazing scams, but the book also shows how he learned to scam better and more proficient so he could get away with taking mostly banks for even more. He also finally was caught, but the reality was far worse than what was hinted at in the movie. He spent a long time locked in a dungeon in France with guards as the only humans he might see. It was pretty gruesome. The book also covers his problems trying to live a straight life when his record made it almost impossible to get even minimum wage work. How eventually his inside knowledge was what made it possible for him to get paid to give banks seminars about their vulnerabilities, and how that led to a very successful carrier in teaching and changing security in the way security is handled all over the world. All that funny money we all carry…Those were basically his ideas to make money hard to reproduce on high quality printers.

This is really a damn good book. I bought his second book thinking it would continue the story from the first book, but it doesnt do very much of that. His second and subsequent books are all guides for both personal and business securities. Which is good none the less

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