Frank Abagnale Interview | Part 1 | SVT/NRK/Skavlan

Lisl come Frank Abagnale hello hi welcome you you have you have long ago served your sentence after swindling your way to 2.4 million dollars and you were in your teens yeah and as far as I understand you had a happy childhood and and then I wonder how what made you that one of the greatest con men in modern history well I had a great childhood and I was actually one of four children in the movie they said I was an only child but I was one of four children I was a middle child when I was 16 years old and I was in the tenth grade I went to a Catholic school my parents decided to get a divorce and I remember the priest having the brother take me out of class and drive me up to the County Courthouse where they told me I would see my parents they would explain what was going on and it was a family court and the next thing I knew in a matter of a couple hours I was standing in front of a judge with my parents on either side of me at judge's saying that my parents were getting a divorce and because I was 16 years old I had to choose which parent I wanted to live with I couldn't really make that choice so I turned and ran out of the courtroom the judge called for a 10-minute recess but by the time my parents got outside I was gone so my mother never saw me again for about seven years till I was 21 my father never saw me again ever so he just ran away yep you couldn't deal with that No and then you ran to run away to New York I ran away to New York and this is back in the 1960s when a lot of kids in America ran away but that got into Haight Ashbury the hippie scene the drug scene I ended up in New York City I had no money so I first thing I thought is how am I going to survive and I was very fortunate that I looked older for my age I always had a little gray hair I looked a little older people always thought I was older so I decided to lie about my age on my driver's license which back then didn't have a photo on it was an IBM card and I was actually born in 1948 so I dropped the four and made it a three and that made me ten years older or 26 years old my father had opened a checking account for me when I was about 14 eventually the money ran out so I kept writing the checks and the police started looking for me for the bad checks they started looking for me as the run away from home and so I thought it to think I needed to get out of New York City and but I was afraid if I went to Miami or Chicago they might not cash a check for me on a New York license or in Chicago or so on so this is when you come up with the pilot idea yes and all these were just ideas that happened out of the shared moment I was walking up the 42nd Street in New York I saw an airline crew come out of a hotel and I thought to myself if I could get one of those uniforms then I could go in the bank and they'd cash a cheque for me without question and so it started out as simply the uniform to get the uniform so that when I went in a bank they wouldn't question me about my check how do you get the uniform from from this was from the Pan Am okay am i had I had a line company I the next day I saw the Pan Am building and so that gave me the idea of Pan Am and then I the next day called Pan Am's corporate headquarters and when they answered the switchboard I really had no idea what I was going to say but I asked to speak to someone in purchasing and when they came on I asked them if told them that I was a pilot that I had flown in last night but I had sent my uniform out to be dry-cleaned and now the hotel and the cleaner can't find it so he said well don't you have an extra uniform I said yes back in San Francisco where I'm based I don't have one here he said well this is going to cost you the price of any uniform and I said that's fine so he said you need to go down to the well-built uniform company and I'll call them and let you know that you're coming but that's exactly what I wanted to know they could fit you in yeah I went down and put the uniform on was a black Aberdeen uniform with the three gold stripes and the gray hair and I remember that the gentleman said to me I said well how much do I owe you for the uniform he said 286 dollars I said no problem I write you a check you never actually flew a plane never flew and you know everything I did it first started out I'll get this uniform I'll write checks then I found out that you can actually ride in planes as a pilot in the jump seat so then I flew around the world for free by simply riding on other airlines in the jump seat so by the time I was 18 I had logged over a million miles boarded 260 commercial aircraft in 26 countries around the world by just riding around as that but what we need to pilots understand from the conversation then you weren't a pilot no because all they say is the same thing over and over again so once you learn the jargon they've got the same questions on the taxi out where you based how long you've been flying what position do you fly you've pretty much picked up on that pretty quick and after a while it's just doing it so many times it became a routine and of course this is back in the days before terrorism before hijackings and bombings and so there was really no security at the airport so no one really suspected that someone would pose as a pilot but then when I would get to a city I would go to the hotel where the crew stayed I'd spend two or three nights in the airline would be billed from my room and my meal so I had my travel and my meals covered yeah but later later on you posed as a doctor also before you were 20 yes when at that 18 the FBI started looking for me and the police were looking for me so I decided to hang up the uniform and I had a lot of money so I moved to Atlanta Georgia and I moved in an apartment complex and I was filling out the application and it had many questions for a teenage boy one of them was occupation I almost wrote down airline pilot but the next question said employed by supervisors named so I thought to myself I'm gonna have to come up with something that would be impossible to check out yet something that would justify why you drive an expensive car wear expensive clothes don't work much so I wrote down the word doctor and it had a very inquisitive apartment manager she said oh I see who you're a doctor I said yes ma'am what type of doctor are you well I'm a I'm a medical doctor and so she then asked me what type of medical doctor and because it was a singles complex I felt pediatrician was pretty safe so I I moved in but I did actually meet a real doctor in the house in the apartment complex and I started going to Emory University to read up on the things that were in the medical journals from the Mayo Clinic and the John hoppers you'd be able to talk to be able to have a conversation because he was all would turned the conversation to medicine and eventually they asked me if I would cover a shift at the hospital because someone had gotten ill and I thought it was a challenge to try so I went up to the hospital for a couple of weeks and opposed did you it did you did you actually examine people no because I was only reason I did it it was because I wasn't licensed supposably licensed in Georgia where I was living only in California lies that I was from they gave me a temporary certificate which allowed me to be in an administrative capacity but not to treat anybody and plus I didn't like the sight of blood so I hated to be called down to the emergency room because I didn't like to see anybody bleeding so you know so it wasn't something I wanted to do for a long time did you find well while doing these things that you described here now did you find it thrilling it started out for me as survival how am I going to survive I'm a kid in New York

Channel: Skavlan

Views: 160,674

Rating: 4.8943663 out of 5

Keywords: Skavlan, interview, talk show, Fredrik skavlan, Frank Abagnale (Author)

Id: U2PcvC_SxS4

Length: 7min 28sec (448 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 08 2014