Frank Abagnale - Catch Me If You Can

They rarely went behind the request to check on the status of the account. I hoped that would be the case here. If not, well, I could only hope the bank guard was a lousy shot.

I heard her say, “All right, thank you,” and then she replaced the receiver and looked at me with a speculative expression. “Tell you what, Frank Adams,” she said with another of her brilliant smiles. “I’ll take your check if you’ll come to a party I’m having tonight. I’m short of handsome and charming men. How about it?”

“You got a deal,” I said, grinning, and wrote her a check on the Philadelphia bank for $15,000, receiving in return a $15,000 cashier’s check, payable to cash.

I went to the party. It was a fantastic bash. But then she was a fantastic lady-in more ways than several.

I cashed the check the next morning, returned the Rolls-Royce and caught a plane for San Diego. I reflected on the woman and her party several times during the flight and nearly laughed out loud when I was struck with one thought.

I wondered what her reaction would be when she learned she’d treated me to two parties on the same day, and the one had been a real cash ball.

I developed a scam for every occasion and sometimes I waived the occasion. I modified the American banking system to suit myself and siphoned money out of bank vaults like a coon drains an egg. When I jumped the border into Mexico in late 1967,1 had illicit cash assets of nearly $500,000 and several dozen bank officials had crimson derrieres.

It was practically all done with numbers, a statistical shell game with the pea always in my pocket.

Look at one of your own personal checks. There’s a check number in the upper right-hand corner, right? Thaf s probably the only one you notice, and you notice it only if you keep an accurate check register. Most people don’t even know their own account number, and while a great number of bank employees may be able to decipher the bank code numbers across the bottom of a check, very few scan a check that closely.

In the 1960s bank security was very lax, at least as far as I was concerned. It was my experience, when presenting a personal check, drawn on a Miami bank, say, to another Miami bank, about the only security precaution taken by the teller was a glance at the number in the upper right-hand corner. The higher that number, the more readily acceptable the check. It was as if the teller was telling herself or himself, “Ah-hah, check number 2876-boy, this guy has been with his bank a long time. This check’s gotta be okay.”

So I’m in an East Coast city, Boston, for example. I open an account in the Bean State Bank for $200, using the name Jason Parker and a boardinghouse address. Within a few days, I receive 200 personalized checks, numbered 1-200 consecutively in the upper right-hand corner, my name and address in the left-hand corner and, of course, that string of odd little numbers across the left-hand bottom edge. The series of numbers commenced with the numbers 01, since Boston is located within the First Federal Reserve District.

The most successful cattle rustlers in the Old West were experts at brand blotting and brand changing. I was an expert in check number blotting and changing, using press-on numbers and press-on magnetic-tape numbers.

When I finished with check number 1, it was check number 3100, and the series of numbers above the left-hand bottom edge started with the number 12. Otherwise, the check looks the same.

Now I walk into the Old Settlers Farm and Home Savings Association, which is just a mile from the Bean State Bank. “I want to open a savings account,” I tell the clerk who greets me. “My wife tells me we’re keeping too much money in a checking account.”

“All right, sir, how much do you wish to deposit?” he or she asks. Let’s say it’s a he. Bank dummies are divided equally among the sexes.

“Oh, $6,500,1 guess,” I reply, writing out a check to the OSFHSA. The teller takes the check and glances at the number in the upper right-hand corner. He also notices it’s drawn on the Bean State Bank. He smiles. “All right, Mr. Parker. Now, there is a three-day waiting period before you can make any withdrawals. We have to allow time for your check to clear, and since it’s an in-town check the three-day waiting period applies.”

“I understand,” I reply. I do, too. I’ve already ascertained that’s the waiting period enforced by savings and loan institutions for in-town checks.

I wait six days and on the morning of the sixth day I return to Old Settlers. But I deliberately seek out a different teller. I hand him my passbook. “I need to withdraw $5,500,” I say. If the teller had questioned the amount of the withdrawal, I would have said that I was buying a house or given some other plausible reason. But few savings and loan bank tellers pry into a customer’s personal affairs.

This one didn’t. He checked the account file. The account was six days old. The in-town check had obviously cleared. He returned my passbook with a cashier’s check for $5,500.

I cashed it at the Bean State Bank and left town… before my check for $6,500 returned from Los Angeles, where the clearing-house bank computer had routed it.

I invested in another I-Tek camera and printing press and did the same thing with my phony Pan Am expense checks. I made up different batches for passing in different areas of the country, although all the checks were purportedly payable by Chase Manhattan Bank, New York.

New York is in the Second Federal Reserve District. Bona fide checks on banks in New York all have a series of numerals beginning with the number 02. But all the phony checks I passed on the East Coast, or in northeastern or southeastern states, were routed first to San Francisco or Los Angeles. All the phony checks I passed in the Southwest, Northwest or along the West Coast were first routed to Philadelphia, Boston or some other point across the continent.

My numbers game was the perfect system for floats and stalls. I always had a week’s running time before the hounds picked up the spoor. I learned later that I was the first check swindler to use the routing numbers racket. It drove bankers up the wall. They didn’t know what the hell was going on. They do now, and they owe me.

I worked my schemes overtime, all over the nation, until I decided I was just too hot to cool down. I had to leave the country. And I decided I could worry about a passport in Mexico as fretfully as I could in Richmond or Seattle, since all I needed to visit Mexico was a visa. I obtained one from the Mexican Consulate in San Antonio, using the name Frank Williams and presenting myself as a Pan Am pilot, and deadheaded to Mexico City on an Aero-Mexico jet.

I did not take the entire proceeds of my crime spree with me. Like a dog with access to a butcher-shop bone box and forty acres of soft ground, I buried my loot all over the United States, stashing stacks of cash in bank safe-deposit boxes from coast to coast and from the Rio Grande to the Canadian border.

I did take some $50,000 with me into Mexico, concealed in thin sheafs in the lining of my suitcases and the linings of my jackets. A good customs officer could have turned up the cash speedily, but I didn’t have to go through customs. I was wearing my Pan Am uniform and was waived along with the AeroMexico crew.

I stayed in Mexico City a week. Then I met a Pan Am stewardess, enjoying a five-day holiday in Mexico, and accepted her invitation to go to Acapulco for a weekend. We were airborne when she suddenly groaned and said a naughty word. “What’s the matter?” I asked, surprised to hear such language from such lovely lips.

“I meant to cash my paycheck at the airport,” she said. “I’ve got exactly three pesos in my purse. Oh, well, I guess the hotel will cash it.”