An
autobiographical book by
Frank Abagnale Jr. It recounts his life, during the mid sixties from age fifteen to age twenty one (or thereabouts). He was a
con man. He specialised in bad
checks and forged checks as his main means of income. He impersonated a Pan Am
pilot for years, spent almost a year as a supervising resident at a major Atlanta children's
hospital when he was eighteen, and worked as an assistant prosecutor when he was nineteen. He was a
high school drop out who stole two and a half million dollars (this was in the sixties, mind you) and was wanted by twenty countries on four continents. The book is great, at times hilarious. The man himself is a
genius, as some of his exploits will readily attest to. Unfortunately it is also being made into a movie. Go buy and read the book before it becomes a bad movie! (I could be wrong, the movie could be great, but after such disasters as
The Ninth Gate, I doubt it).
After a psych evaluation showed he had a low criminal threshold an NYPD officer said "This phony rips off several hundred banks, hustles half the hotels in the world for everything but the sheets, screws every airline in the skies, including most of their stewardesses, passes enough bad checks to paper the walls of the Pentagon, runs his own goddamned colleges and universities, makes half the cops in twenty countries look like dumbasses while he's stealing over two million dollars, and he has a low criminal threshold? What would he have done if he had a high criminal threshold, looted Fort Knox?"