Frank Abagnale - Catch Me If You Can

It was like going on safari in the Bronx Zoo. Cashiers couldn’t get the money out of the tills fast enough. Most of them didn’t even ask for identification. I shoved my phony ID card and my ersatz pilot’s license in their faces anyway. I didn’t want my handiwork to go unnoticed. The first couple of checks I wrote were good. The others had all the value of bubble-gum wrappers.

I started hanging around La Guardia regularly, not with any intentions of catching a flight, but to meet airline personnel and to eavesdrop on airline talk. Testing my vocabulary, so to speak. I shunned Kennedy, since Pan Am operated out of there. I was afraid that the first Pan Am pilot I encountered at Kennedy would recognize me as a fraud, court-martial me on the spot and strip me of my wings and buttons.

At La Guardia I made out like a possum in a persimmon tree. Some books are judged by their covers, it seems, and in my uniform I was an immediate best seller. I’d walk into a coffee shop, where there would usually be a dozen or more pilots or other crewmen taking a break, and invariably someone would invite me to join him or them. More often it was them, for airline people tend to gaggle like geese. It was the same in cocktail lounges around the airport. I never took a drink in the bars, since I had yet to try alcohol and wasn’t sure how it would affect me, but no one questioned my abstinence.

Any pilot, I’d learned, could gracefully decline a drink by pleading the required “twelve hours between the bottle and the throttle.” It apparently never occurred to anyone that I’d never seen a throttle. I was always accepted at par value. I wore the uniform of a Pan Am pilot, therefore I must be a Pan Am pilot. Barnum would have loved airline people.

I didn’t do a lot of talking initially. I usually let the conversations flow around me, monitoring the words and phrases, and within a short time I was speaking airlinese like a native. La Guardia, for me, was the Berlitz of the air.

Some of my language books were absolutely gorgeous. I guess the stewardesses just weren’t that used to seeing a really young pilot, one that appeared to be an age peer. “Hel-looo!” one would say in passing, putting a pretty move on me, and the invitation in her voice would be unmistakable. I felt I could turn down only so many invitations without seeming to be rude, and I was soon dating several of the girls. I took them to dinner, to the theater, to the ballet, to the symphony, to night clubs and to movies. Also to my place or their place.

I loved them for their minds.

The rest of them was wonderful, too. But for the first time I was more interested in a girl’s knowledge of her work than in her body. I didn’t object, of course, if the one came with the other. A bedroom can be an excellent classroom.

I was an apt student. I mean, it takes a certain degree of academic concentration to learn all about airline travel-expense procedures, say, when someone is biting you on the shoulder and digging her fingernails into your back. It takes a dedicated pupil to say to a naked lady, “Gee, is this your flight manual? It’s a little different from the ones our stewardesses use.”

I picked their brains discreetly. I even spent a week in a Massachusetts mountain resort with three stewardesses, and not one of them was skeptical of my pilot’s status, although there were some doubts expressed concerning my stamina.

Don’t get the impression that stewardesses, as a group, are promiscuous. They aren’t. The myth that all stewardesses are passionate nymphs is just that, a myth. If anything, “stews” are more circumspect and discriminating in their sexual lives than women in other fields. The ones I knew were all intelligent, sophisticated and responsible young women, good in their jobs, and I didn’t make out en masse. The ones who were playmates would have hopped into bed with me had they been secretaries, nurses, bookkeepers or whatever. Stews are good people. I have very pleasant memories of the ones I met, and if some of the memories are more pleasant than others, they’re not necessarily sexually oriented.

I didn’t score at all with one I recall vividly. She was a Delta flight attendant whom I’d met during my initial studies of airline jargon. She had a car at the airport and offered to drive me back to Manhattan one afternoon.

“Would you drop me at the Plaza?” I requested as we walked through the lobby of the terminal. “I need to cash a check and I’m known there.” I wasn’t known there, but I intended to be.

The stewardess stopped and gestured at the dozens of airline ticket counters that lined every side of the huge lobby. There must be more than a hundred airlines that have ticket facilities at La Guardia. “Cash your check at one of those counters. Any one of them will take your check.”

“They will?” I said, somewhat surprised but managing to conceal the fact. “It’s a personal check and we don’t operate out of here, you know.”

She shrugged. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “You’re a Pan Am pilot in uniform, and any airline here will take your personal check as a courtesy. They do that at Kennedy, don’t they?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never had occasion to cash a check at a ticket counter before,” I said truthfully.

American’s counter was the nearest. I walked over and confronted a ticket clerk who wasn’t busy. “Can you cash a $100 personal check for me?” I asked, checkbook in hand.

“Sure, be glad to,” he said, smiling, and took the bouncing beauty with barely a glance at it. He didn’t even ask me for identification.

I had occasion to cash checks at airline counters frequently thereafter. I worked La Guardia like a fox on a turkey ranch. The air facility was so immense that the risk of my being caught was minimal. I’d cash a check at the Eastern counter, for instance, then go to another section of the terminal and tap some other airline’s till. I was cautious. I never went back to the same counter twice. I worked a condensed version of the scam at Newark, and hit Teterboro a few elastic licks. I was producing rubber faster than a Ceylon planter.

Every gambler has a road game. Mine was hitting the hotels and motels where airline crews put up in transit. I even bought a round-trip airline ticket to Boston, an honest ticket paid for with dishonest money, and papered Logan Airport and its surrounding crew hostelries with scenic chits before scurrying back to New York.

Flushed with success, emboldened by the ease with which I passed myself off as a pilot, I decided I was finally ready for “Operation Deadhead.”

I’d been living in a walk-up flat on the West Side. I’d rented the small apartment under the name Frank Williams and I’d paid my rent punctually and in cash. The landlady, whom I saw only to tender the rent money, thought I worked in a stationery store. None of the other tenants knew me and I’d never appeared around the building in my pilot’s uniform. I had no telephone and I’d never received mail at the address.

When I packed and left the flat, there was no trail to follow. The best bell-mouthed hound in the Blue Ridge Mountains couldn’t have picked up my spoor.

I took a bus to La Guardia and went to Eastern’s operations office. There were three young men working behind the enclosure’s counter. “Yes, sir, can I help you?” one of them asked.

“I need to deadhead to Miami on your next flight, if you’ve got room,” I said, producing my sham Pan Am ID.

“We’ve got one going out in fifteen minutes, Mr. Williams,” he said. “Would you like to make that one, or wait until our afternoon flight? The jump seat’s open on either one.”

I didn’t want to tarry. “I’ll take this flight,” I said. “It’ll give me more time on the beach.”