Was LABI flim-flammed by a flim-flam artist?
Frank Abagnale, the subject of the Leonardo DiCaprio-Tom Hanks movie Catch Me if You Can, was the featured attraction—sort of like a carnival sideshow—at Tuesday’s annual Louisiana Association of Business and Industry (LABI) luncheon at Baton Rouge’s Crowne Plaza Executive Center.
Abagnale was billed as an expert on cyber security attacks but spoke mainly about his days as a career con man—a career some say continues today.
LABI not only forked over a reported speaking fee of some $20,000, but the organization also purchased copies of Abagnale’s two books, Catch Me if You Can and Scam Me if You Can in bulk quantity—most likely at a discount—and resold them to its adoring membership. Some of those members even posed for photos with the beaming author who, in his expensive suit and silver hair, came off as some elderly corporate CEO.
Which is probably how he intended it.
But one person who wasn’t impressed—or fooled—was Paula Campbell, a resident of Watson whose parents she says were taken for hundreds of dollars by Abagnale decades ago when he roomed at their Baton Rouge residence for several weeks.
“I was a flight attendant for Delta Airlines at the time he was passing himself off as a TWA pilot, flying around the country as a deadhead (an off-duty pilot hitching a ride as a non-paying passenger) passenger,” Campbell said. “He gave me a ride from New Orleans to Baton Rouge so I could visit my parents.
“I found him creepy and offensive but my parents fell in love with his B.S. stories and invited him back. Several weeks later, he reappeared and they invited him to stay as their guest. While he was there, he stole cash from my brother who was working as a bag boy at a grocery store and he stole checks from my parents and forged them and cashed them.”
Campbell was at the LABI event and stood in line to purchase a copy of Catch Me if You Can. At the table, she told him who she was and asked him to sign the book to her late parents and to write, “Sorry,” because he had never apologized to them.
While he professed not to remember her, he did sign her copy of the book and wrote “Sorry” under his signature but faltered when writing the date as she challenged his failure to acknowledge in any of his talks that he’d been arrested in Baton Rouge. “That’s because I work for the FBI,” he explained as he appeared to avoid eye contact with her.
Which raises other questions about his claims as he travels around the country collecting generous speaking fees, which have mushroomed from $2000 in the early days to six-figure fees in the aftermath of the movie.
He suddenly developed a conscience about speaking to “young, impressionable minds” and canceled all scheduled college campus speaking engagements after being asked by officials at the University of South Carolina to sign a affidavit “attesting to the truthfulness of the speech he would give,” according to the Columbus (South Carolina) Daily Enquirer. “He refused,” the story added.
In canceling an appearance at Georgia Southwestern College in Americus, GA., he somewhat revealingly said that a college appearance would open him to “a great deal of unnecessary controversy,” the Daily Enquirer story said.
That seems a somewhat thin excuse, given the fact that Abagnale has professed to leading a life of considerable controversy for virtually all of his adult life.
Claims by Abagnale that he had defrauded banks of more than $2.5 million have been debunked as evidence by investigators could find leas than $1,000 in bad checks he had passed. Additionally, claims that corporations such as Sears, J.C. Penney, Chase Manhattan Bank and American Airlines have paid him a combined $10 million a year for crime prevention consultant work were likewise shot down when each of the companies denied any such consulting work by Abagnale.
Even easier to disprove was his assertion that he had been a professor of criminal justice at Rice University in Houston. Rice didn’t have a criminal justice program at the time the article was written in October 1982.
A year earlier, Fayette Tompkins covered an appearance by Abagnale at Tulane University in New Orleans for the Baton Rouge State-Times. Tompkins, now retired, wrote at the time that Abagnale claimed to have taken and passed the Louisiana Bar exam and had actually worked for nine months for the Louisiana Attorney General’s office under Attorney General Jack P.F. Gremillion.
The problem with that was Abagnale consistently mispronounced Gremillion’s name and no one at the AG’s office could recall a Bob Conrad (Abagnale’s supposed alias at the time) having ever worked there. Ken DeJean, now retired but then an assistant attorney general, said there were no records of any such person ever having been employed in the AG’s office.
Tom Collins, then executive counsel for the Louisiana Bar Association likewise could find no record of anyone by that name from Baton Rouge ever being admitted to the bar during that time period (the late 1960s).
In his claim, Abagnale said he won 33 cases in six months for the AG’s office, an impressive feat for an experienced attorney but extraordinary for an impostor who had dropped out of high school. Most attorneys I’ve known don’t even try nearly that many cases in so short a time. He contradicted himself in another story by saying that while at the AG’s office, he primarily served as a “gofer,” fetching coffee, etc. for the real attorneys.
Finally, there was that dismissive explanation he gave to Parks on Tuesday. “I still work for the FBI.”
All of which causes one to wonder just how well LABI vetted its keynote speaker before buying a few hundred copies of his book and paying him a hefty fee.
