The Real Catch Me If You Can
the true story behind Frank Abagnale's con-man legend

“The Real Catch Me If You Can” is PRETEND’s eight-episode investigation into Frank Abagnale, whose claims of posing as an airline pilot, a doctor, and an attorney as a teenager in the 1960s became the basis for Steven Spielberg’s 2002 film Catch Me If You Can, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks, and for Abagnale’s bestselling autobiography.

Working alongside independent researcher Alan C. Logan, author of The Greatest Hoax on Earth, PRETEND used court records, military files, and penitentiary records to test Abagnale’s account against the historical record. The investigation found that Abagnale was incarcerated for most of the period, roughly ages 16 to 21, during which he claims to have run his elaborate cons, and that his actual imprisonment was far shorter than the years he has described. The series also found no verified record supporting Abagnale’s claim of a decades-long working relationship with the FBI, including his account of teaching a course at the FBI Academy.

The series includes an unannounced, on-camera interview with Abagnale himself in Las Vegas, during which he was confronted with his own prison records. Abagnale has continued to build a career as a paid speaker on the strength of the story, and has said his longtime co-author, Stan Redding, was responsible for exaggerations in his autobiography. The investigation’s central claim, that most of the “Catch Me If You Can” story is fabricated, has been corroborated by outside reporting, including coverage in the New York Post.

Confronting Frank Abagnale in Las Vegas

After years of written requests for an interview were declined, PRETEND approached Abagnale in person, unannounced, at a Las Vegas speaking engagement, and asked him directly about the discrepancies between his public story and the prison, court, and military records PRETEND had reviewed.

Early Arrests

Some of Abagnale’s earliest brushes with police, well before the globe-trotting story he’d later tell Johnny Carson, are documented in period booking photos and newspaper clippings.

Camp Madison, 1974

After his release, Abagnale took a job at a Texas summer camp outside Houston while posing as a furloughed Delta pilot. Camp staff, including Morris Fuselier and camp founder Tom Madison, later said he forged IDs, stole camera equipment, and skimmed camp funds. A justice of the peace ordered him to repay Fuselier $125; Fuselier says he only ever received $100 of it back.

Was Abagnale Really Recruited by the FBI?

Beyond the prison record, one of the investigation’s central threads is Abagnale’s decades-long claim of a formal relationship with the FBI, including that he was personally recruited by an FBI director, taught ethics courses at the FBI Academy, and was sent on undercover assignments.

Retired FBI agent Al Brown, one of three agents who arrested Abagnale, describes the arrest itself as routine: “a routine white collar arrest.” Brown says he has no personal knowledge that Abagnale was ever formally employed by the Bureau or taught there for decades, as Abagnale has claimed, though he confirms Abagnale has appeared as a guest speaker. The FBI’s own press office would not confirm or deny a paid relationship when PRETEND asked directly, telling PRETEND’s fact-checker that Abagnale’s status “comes down to semantics.”

Robert Franck, who headed the FBI’s Houston Division from 1974 until his 1978 retirement, says he’s never met Abagnale, despite Abagnale invoking his name publicly. That’s a specific problem for Abagnale’s story: 1974 is the same year Abagnale was living and working in the Houston area, at the summer camp described above. If Abagnale really had been a Bureau asset operating in Houston at the time, it’s unclear why the man running the Houston field office wouldn’t have known him.

Retired agent and podcaster Jerri Williams says the idea that an FBI director would personally assign a civilian undercover missions, as Abagnale has claimed, is “bullshit.” Former NSA analyst Ira Winkler says Abagnale told him mid-flight that he was a “full-fledged” FBI special agent, a claim Winkler and a colleague immediately recognized as false.

Some of Abagnale’s own numbers don’t hold up either. Per Alan Logan’s research, Abagnale has told audiences the FBI accepts “one in 10,000” applicants; the Bureau has reported roughly 16,000 applicants and about 900 hires in a typical year, a rate nowhere close to one in 10,000. He has also said the Bureau’s official 100th-anniversary book, published in 2008, singled him out as the only person ever released from prison on a deal to work for the FBI; PRETEND has not found Abagnale mentioned in that book. He has separately claimed to have turned down pardons from three sitting presidents, a claim with no record at the Office of the Pardon Attorney.

PRETEND has not identified any FBI record confirming Abagnale’s claimed decades of formal employment.

Fact-Checking a Recent Talk

Much of what Abagnale still tells paying audiences today doesn’t line up with the record either, per Alan Logan’s research.

Abagnale often opens by telling crowds, “I don’t often talk about my life,” despite having given some version of the same paid talk for decades. He has told audiences a Catholic high school pulled him out of class at 16 to tell him his parents were divorcing; per Logan’s research, he doesn’t appear in that school’s yearbooks for the grades he claims to have attended, and public records show his father had already remarried and was living elsewhere months before Abagnale turned 16. He has said he didn’t see his parents again for seven years after running away; court records instead show his father brought him home after a 1965 arrest in California, and that Abagnale was paroled into his mother’s custody from a New York state prison in 1967, at 19. He has also said his mother never remarried; she in fact married a Westchester County dentist and stayed married to him for more than 20 years, until his death in 1994.

The story of his father’s death doesn’t hold up either. Abagnale has described learning of it while sitting in “a pitch black cell” in France. Per Logan’s research, his father died on March 11, 1972, while Abagnale was incarcerated at a federal prison in Petersburg, Virginia, not France, and no contemporary news coverage supports the dramatic public fall Abagnale has described.

His claim to have dated the Louisiana attorney general’s daughter, which got him hired into the attorney general’s office, doesn’t check out either. The attorney general’s only daughter has said she never met Abagnale and was already married during the period he describes. Then-First Assistant Attorney General Kenneth DeJean told the Louisiana Voice he tried to correct the record after one of Abagnale’s Tonight Show appearances, feeding a National Enquirer reporter a list of basic verification questions about the office; Abagnale, DeJean said, “didn’t answer a single question correctly.”

Abagnale has also told audiences he was “arrested only once” in his life. Public records reviewed by PRETEND show arrests in at least nine jurisdictions between 1965 and 1974, including Mount Vernon, Eureka, Tuckahoe, Boston, Baton Rouge, Montpellier, Cobb County, New York City, and Friendswood.

Even the famous escape scene has shifted with his audience. Abagnale now says he escaped a taxiing airliner through the kitchen galley, not the toilet depicted in the film, and has said Spielberg dramatized the toilet version. But in Abagnale’s own first press interview in 1977 and his 1978 press kit, both years before the autobiography or the film existed, he told the toilet version himself.