[MUSIC PLAYING] [APPLAUSE] FRANK ABAGNALE: Good morning. It's a pleasure to
be here this morning. As you know, I've had a lot
of people tell my story. I had a great movie director
write a film about my life. I had a great Broadway musical
team make a Tony award-winning Broadway musical about my
life, had a popular television show on TV, "White
Collar," for four years created around my life. And most of those
very creative people have actually never
met me personally. [LAUGHTER] I was raised just North of
New York City in Westchester County, New York. I was actually one
of four children in the family, the so-called
middle child of the four. I was educated there by the
Christian Brothers of Ireland in a private Catholic
school called Ioana, where I went to
school from kindergarten to high school. By the time I had
reached the age of 16 in the 10th grade, my parents,
after 22 years of marriage, one day decided
to get a divorce. Unlike most divorces where
the children were usually the first to know,
my parents were very good about
keeping that a secret. I remember being in the 10th
grade when the father walked in the classroom one
afternoon, asked a brother to excuse me from class. When I came out in the hallway,
the father handed me my books and told me that
one of the brothers would drive me to the county
seat in White Plains, New York, where I would meet my
parents, and they would explain what was going on. I remember the brother dropped
me at the steps of a big stone building and told me
to go on up the steps and my parents would be
waiting for me in the lobby. I remember climbing the
steps, seeing a sign on the building that
said, family court, but I really didn't
understand what that meant. When I arrived in the lobby,
my parents were not there, but I was ushered into the back
of an immense courtroom, where my parents were
standing before a judge. I couldn't hear what the judge
was saying, nor my parents' response. But eventually, the judge saw
me at the back of the room and motioned me to
approach the bench. I walked up to stand
in between my parents. I remember distinctly that
the judge never looked at me. He never acknowledged
I was standing there. He simply read from his papers
and said that my parents were getting a divorce. And because I was
16 years of age, I would need to
tell the court which parent I chose to live with. I started to cry, so I turned
and ran out of the courtroom. Judge called for a 10-minute
recess, but by the time my parents got
outside, I was gone. My mother never saw me again
for about seven years, until I was a young adult.
Contrary to the movie, my father never saw me or
ever spoke to me again. One of the few things I
had taken when I left home was a checkbook. I had money from
work in the summers. I had some money in
that checking account. So every so often, I
would write a check to supplement my
income, $20, $25. The funds were there,
the checks were good. But it was my friends, my peers
who would constantly say to me, you know, you're
the only guy I know who walks into a bank in
the middle of Manhattan. You have no account there,
you don't know a soul. You talk to somebody behind a
desk and they OK your check. I go, well, my checks are good. Yeah, but if I walked in there,
they wouldn't touch my check. You walk in there,
they don't bat an eye. And years later, reporters
would write and speculate and say that that was my
upbringing, mannerisms, dress, appearance, speech. Whatever it was,
it very easy to do, so consequently when
the money ran out, I kept writing those checks. Of course, the checks
started to bounce, police started looking
for me as a runaway. So I thought maybe
it was a good time to start thinking about
leaving New York City. I was walking at 42nd Street
one afternoon about 5 o'clock in the evening, 16
years old, pondering all of these things
when I started to approach the front
door of an old hotel that used to be there called
the Commodore Hotel, now the Grand Hyatt. Just as I was about to get to
the front door of the hotel, out stepped an Eastern Airline
flight crew onto the sidewalk. I couldn't help but notice
the captain, the co-pilot, the flight engineer, about
three or four flight attendants dragging their bags to the
curb to load them in the van to take them to the airport. As they loaded the van, I
thought to myself, that's it. I could pose as a pilot. I could travel all over
the world for free. I probably could get
just about anybody anywhere to cash a check for me. As you know, I went
on to impersonate a doctor in a Georgia
hospital for a while. I took the bar exams in
Louisiana, passed the bar, went to work for Attorney
General PF Gremillion, in the civil division of the
state court, where I spent about a year practicing law. In both the job as a
lawyer and the doctor, no one ever doubted
for a second I was not eligible or qualified to do so. I on my own resigned
and moved on. Of course, like any criminal,
sooner or later you get caught, and I was no exception
to that rule. I was actually
arrested just once in my life, when I was 21
years old by the French police in a small town in southern
France called Montpellier. The French police were
actually arresting me on an Interpol warrant issued
by the Swedish police, who were looking for me
for forgery in Sweden but believed that I
was living in France. When the French authorities
took me into custody on that warrant, they
realized I had forged checks all over France, so
they refused to honor the warrant and Sweden's
request for my extradition. They later convicted
me of forgery and sent me to French prison. AUDIENCE: How did you stay
confident, or did you, when you knew you
were an imposter? FRANK ABAGNALE: You know,
people always say to me, you were brilliant,
you were a genius. No, I was an adolescent. And that was why
I was successful. I was so young that I had
no fear of being caught. I was so young that I didn't
think about consequences. Everything I did was
not premeditated. Everything was done by
opportunity or by chance. So if in fact, I
was standing out in front of a bank in
Manhattan with a $500 check, there was never a plan. I didn't say to myself, I'm
going in, cash this check. If they say this, I'll do this,
if they do this, I'll do that. I just went in and did it. And I felt that there was
nothing I couldn't do. I had tremendous
confidence in myself. But everything was for a reason. So I saw that airline
crew, I never dreamed about getting on planes
or staying in hotels around the world for free. All I saw was a uniform
and I said to myself, if I had that uniform on
and I walked in a bank, it would be a lot easier to
cash a check than me walking in as just some young kid. So the whole thing was to
get a uniform and do that. But then I quickly
realized the power of that uniform, how it
turned from night to day. No one ever said
no when I walked in to cash a check, even though
there was no bank account there or anything else. All they saw was a uniform. They didn't see me. And I realized very early on
the power of that uniform. And then I realized I had
gone to the TWA ticket counter just like he
showed in the movie. I was going to purchase
an airline ticket, and the ticket agent
said to me, are you riding for free or are
you buying the ticket? And I said, riding for free. Yeah, you're on the jumpseat. And I learned
about the jumpseat, so then I flew around
the world for free. Everything I did,
I did by chance. AUDIENCE: In your
candid opinion, did Leonardo DiCaprio and
Tom Hanks do justice to your and Joseph Shea's respective
roles in the movie? FRANK ABAGNALE: Yeah, you know,
I'm not a big movie person, so I watch very
little television. This is most of my life, not
just something I took up. Even as a kid, I didn't
watch a lot of television. I don't watch a lot
of television now. And I certainly very
rarely go to movies. So when it was announced that
Leo had, was the person picked to play the part, I really
knew nothing about him. My sons weren't too
happy that it was Leo. But I didn't know anything about
him, so I went to the movies and saw "Street
Gangs of New York." And I said to myself
sitting there, how would this person portray a
person 16 years old? He had a beard,
he was at the time they filmed that movie,
was about 27, 28 years old. I thought, no one's going
to believe this guy's 16. But because I never
saw the script, I didn't know if maybe Spielberg
was making the character a lot older and not a teenager. So when the movie came
out, it was quite amazing that Leo starts out in the
film at 14, then he's 16, then he's 18, then he's 21. He is an amazing
character actor. And he took the role and
he did an amazing job of playing the role. Tom Hanks' character was
actually named Joe Shea, S-H-E-A. He was an
Irishman from Boston. Joe Shea was my
supervisor at the FBI after I came out of prison. I answered directly to him. He and I were friends for
30 years until his death. I've written five
books on crime. The last book I wrote,
"Stealing Your Life," I dedicated that book to him
and our 30-year relationship. But he was an Irishman from
Boston, in which Tom Hanks-- he didn't want his
real name used-- so Tom Hanks used the name
of an old football player, and took that name
Carl Hanratty. But if you were watching
the screen, for me it was like watching him. He looked like him. He sounded like him. He had his mannerisms. He did an amazing
job, both of them, in portraying the
parts of real people that were still
living at that time.
