Catch Me if You Can: The Story of the Collar Criminal

Abagnale Junior was born on April 27, 1968 in Bronxville, New York, the home of white collar crimes. Frank is the absolute picture of a fraud and knew how to successfully get away with it. He lived a very fair, stable young life with his family. However, it got completely flipped upside down when his mother left his father, Frank Senior. He decided to live with his father and this is where he got involved into wrongful activity. After this devastating divorce his mother went off on her own away from the boys. While moving in with his father he got interested in all the business deals that his father participated in, thus beginning the basic trainings and the the basic knowledge of white collar crimes, or transactions.  

In the very beginning he was always involved in mischief, but it was nothing to out of the ordinary such as small thefts from the local drugstore or other small convenient stores like that. After several practices of this he eventually got bored of it and moved on to bigger and greater things. Frankie took his father's credit card and racked up its credit. He tried to get cash back and convinced the gas station attendants to keep that cash for profit. Unknowingly so, the bill from the credit card money came back and charged Frank Senior over $1000. This killed him even more, already drowned in family problems this did not help one bit. Ashamed of all the distrat actions her son was making, Paula took actions into her own hands sending Junior to a academy school for boys. He absolutely refused to go and ran away from home, at age sixteen with no education and no money. In society you can only go so far without money so with no job and no money he started forging checks. He forged many of his own checks to earn pay into his bank account. Along the same line he lied about his age on and work experience to earn jobs that were above his grade. Frank went on with the practice for a while until he had several thousands of dollars of forged check in his name. Knowing he could only get away with this for so long he ran, again. Abagnale hid is identity once again, this time posing as a Pan Am Pilot. He called the company and lied to them saying he lost his uniform first day on the job and he needed a new one, and so he got one. With this new uniform he felt as if bank tellers would look upon him in a better manner and give him more checks to write. He was so good at what he did, he even researched up on flying and forged his own pilots license. In doing so, he rode flights over all the world with no fee at all. Just like in his past occurrences the law and the airline eventually caught up with him. However, he was always one step ahead of everyone else. This time he transferred his name down to Georgia and forged another license and became a local family doctor. His cover was about blown several times. Lucky enough for him he had a job for a short time there until he left out of dodge.

After this job he forged a Harvard Law transcript, he then took the bar exam in Louisiana and passed it! Junior got a job at law office at the age of 19 with no education and no money. For the next few years he worked a job here and a job they're, finally after a life on the run Frank came clean and settled down. Carl Hanratty was the name of the FBI agent who was chasing the young man all around the world and all over the country. Junior made a home in France and this is where Mr. Hanratty eventually threw him in handcuffs, he served jail time for a short time in France until he was eventually transferred to the states. After several long years bouncing around prisons he was eventually granted parole. Lucky enough he was able to pay for all the damage he did and become a white collar crime specialist for the United States government. Frank Abagnale Junior chased over $2.5 million dollars in forged checks from the time when he was 16 years old. To this day he was a wife and two kids and is still operating and catching people who took the same route as him. He is very successful at what he does, and he was very successful at being on the run and cashing bad checks. Eventually he just got tired of running, tired of hiding. To this day I think he is considered one the most successful white collar criminal to have ever lived.