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Alan Logan is revisiting the story of a famous con man who held a SEMINAR about his life as a con man for the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry (LABI) a year ago and in so doing, may have fraudulently received a speaking fee estimated at $20,000 because of LABI’s apparent inability to recognize a con.
But you really can’t blame LABI. The 2002 movie Catch Me if You Can, about Frank Abagnale Jr.’s mythical life as a master con man was certainly entertaining and convincing. And the film, directed by Steven Spielberg no less, featured a cast comprised of several of Hollywood’s heavy hitters: Tom Hanks, Leonardo DiCaprio, Christopher Walken, Martin Sheen, James Brolen and Jennifer Garner, among others.
In early 2020, he wrote a book about medical con man Robert Vernon Spears, who was the prime suspect in a mysterious 1959 commercial airline disaster. He compared Spears, whose story was verifiable to that of Abagnale and found that “nothing was adding up, nothing was verifiable.”
In his own book, Catch Me if You Can, published in 1980, Abagnale claimed that between the mid-1960s and the early 1970s, he impersonated a pilot for Pan American Airlines, a doctor in Georgia, a professor at Brigham Young University and a lawyer for the Louisiana Attorney General’s office in Baton Rouge and even passed the bar exam – and cashed bad checks worth more than $2 million in more than 26 countries.
In his TWA uniform
Trouble is, he was in prison for much of that time and wasn’t paroled until 1974. After his release, he moved to Friendswood, Texas, where he was soon arrested again for theft.
In more traditional clothing
He did meet Delta Airlines flight attendant Paula Parks from Baton Rouge (now a resident of Livingston Parish) and while stalking her, befriended her parents – from whom he stole blank checks from them and wrote $1200 in bad checks.
Baton Rouge flight attendant Paula ParksAbagnale with Paula’s father, Bud Parks, in the Parks’ Baton Rouge homeAbagnale and Paula’s mom, Charlotte Parks
Abagnale appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson (several times), the Today show with Tom Brokow, and on To Tell the Truth, the only time all three mystery guests lied. But reporters for the San Francisco Chronicle and The Daily Oklahoman picked up the scent of a bogus story and began picking his story apart, piece-by-lying piece.
Ken DeJean, First Assistant Attorney General in the 1970s and ‘80s, has also debunked Abagnale’s claim that he posed as a lawyer in that office. “After his second appearance on The Tonight Show, I called the producer and tried to set him straight and I talked to a reporter for The National Enquirer, which was planning to do a story on him,” DeJean said. “I gave The National Enquirer reporter a set of questions to ask Abagnale: What did the Attorney General look like? How old was he? How tall was he? Describe our office? What floor (of the State Capitol) is our office on?
“He didn’t answer a single question correctly,” DeJean said, adding that the tabloid subsequently killed the story. Abagnale described Attorney General Jack P.F. Gremillion as being in his forties, six feet tall, slim with blonde hair (he was in his sixties, short, portly, and balding).
Likewise, his claim to have been included in the FBI’s 100th anniversary coffee table book turned out to be more of Abagnale’s flim-flam. There is such a coffee table book, but it contains no mention anywhere in it of Abagnale.
There is plenty information available to show that Abagnale has been running a con about his fictional life as an imposter but apparently no one at LABI bothered to vet him thoroughly before booking him for its seminar.
It’s apparently a fairly simple process to run a scam if no one’s checking your story.
But Logan has.
You might want to check his NEW BOOK before scheduling the next speaker for your organization.
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