There’s an interesting story in today’s LA TIMES about a con man who managed to pose as a Pan Am pilot! Here’s an excerpt from the article and the URL for the entire article. It’s an amazing read.
OntPax
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http://www.calendarlive.com/movies/l...ch6dec06.story
December 6, 2002
Portrait of the Con Artist as a Young Man
Frank Abagnale's teen crimes landed him in prison. Now a successful security expert, he's wary of attention from a film about his youth . . .
He was prematurely gray, so when he added 10 years to his resume, it worked. But money was still too tight, and he was routinely cashing checks without money in his account, figuring it didn't matter because he was a kid. Then one day he noticed a group of airline pilots and thought how easy it would be to cash bad checks in pilot's garb.
It was a more innocent time, a time when people were far less inclined to ask for your ID, when an airline asked fewer questions of a young man who called to say he'd lost his pilot's uniform and needed another one. Or a kid who called with questions for his high school newspaper story on pilot procedures and documents. Soon, Abagnale had obtained a Pan Am uniform, forged an airline ID badge and FAA pilot's license, and was hitching free jump-seat rides across the country and staying in hotels where the crews stayed, cashing bogus checks at banks or airline counters. He started printing his own checks. He compiled a detailed journal of pilot terminology to improve his bluffing, and begged off whenever another pilot offered him a chance to leave the jump seat and take a turn at the controls.
The same mental agility and charm that make him a riveting public speaker today helped him to quickly adopt new personas and produce new credentials. "What also helped me a lot was being an adolescent and having no fear," he said in an interview, "where an adult in the same situation would have analyzed the hell out of it, worrying about the consequences." Tall, handsome and friendly, he was, by his account, a magnet for attractive stewardesses and always on the lookout for a female bank teller he could innocently chat up for intelligence.
He had no permanent home. He stayed in motion. Slowing down meant confronting an inevitable ache. "It was a very lonely life," he says. "Even though I met all those girls, they all thought I was someone I wasn't." The pilot's uniform made him special, universally liked and respected; he used it, he wrote in his 1980 book on conning, the same way a junkie uses heroin.
"If you believe you have a foolproof system, you have failed to take into consideration the creativity of fools....There are no criminals looking for a challenge. They're only looking for opportunities."
His refinements in his later teens included buying an $8,000 camera that let him duplicate Pan Am expense checks. He improved on that when he met an Air France stewardess whose father, the owner of a printing shop in France, unwittingly helped Abagnale print bogus Pan Am payroll checks. Sometimes he enriched himself through elemental creativity, like the time he walked into a bank, grabbed a handful of deposit slips, used press-type lettering to insert his own account number in the empty space and returned the slips — meaning that the people who used them (without noticing the change) were depositing their money in his account. That netted $40,000 in four days, he said.