The Art of the Steal Read online

  I ended up being paroled to Houston, Texas. My instructions were to report to a United States parole officer within seventy-two hours of my arrival. And I was told that it would very much behoove me to find a job within those three days.

  WELCOME BACK TO THE REAL WORLD

  The real world was beckoning again, but I couldn’t be sure I was ready for it. People who have never been in jail don’t understand what happens to a person. Even if you’re serving a short sentence, when you’re in prison, you become institutionalized. You get up in the morning, and breakfast has been prepared for you. They take care of your medical needs. Your clothes are cleaned and pressed for you. You get lunch. You get dinner. You become dependent. Then, all of a sudden, the government says, you’re free. You’re on the train to Houston. You have no money. You don’t know a soul. Even for an intelligent, resourceful person like myself, it was very difficult. Nobody likes an ex-con, and nobody likes an ex-con less than an employer, whether it’s a bank officer or a bowling alley manager.

  Even those who were ostensibly there to help me weren’t that helpful. The supervisor at the parole office was both cold and defensive. He made it clear that, to him, any ex-con was repellent. “I don’t want you here, Abagnale,” he told me. “You were forced on me. I don’t like con men, and I want you to know that before we even start our relationship. I don’t think you’ll last a month before you’re headed back to the joint. Whatever, you had better understand this. Don’t make a wrong move with me. I want to see you every week, and when you get a job, I’ll be out to see you regularly. Mess up, and I’m sure you will, and I’ll personally escort you back to prison.”

  I didn’t waste my time with talk. This guy was not going to be any help. I was on my own.

  My first job was at a pizza parlor. I was a combination waiter, cook, and managerial trainee. I didn’t bother to tell my boss that I was an ex-convict, and I wasn’t asked. I was an early believer in don’t ask, don’t tell. The work was about as tedious as you might imagine. I liked eating pizza well enough, but I didn’t much care for serving it. On the side, to make ends meet, I drove a bus from the airport to downtown.

  No matter how menial the job, I was a good worker. I was even entrusted with depositing the cash receipts at the pizza parlor, and every dollar got to the bank. But after about six months on the job, officials of the chain that operated the place took a closer look into my background in anticipation of naming me a manager of one of their shops. Discovering that I was a federal prison parolee, they fired me.

  So I moved on. Within a week, I was hired as a stockboy in a supermarket, assigned to the night shift. Again, when applying for the job, I didn’t point out my dark past. The job wasn’t much, but one day I noticed a customer, a fetching young woman who was in graduate school. We started dating and we really clicked. I didn’t reveal my past for several months, and when I did, while we were sitting on a park bench, she at first found it difficult to accept. But she realized that I was just a naïve kid when I committed the crimes, and that I was a changed man.

  Her parents had a harder time warming to the notion of their daughter’s ex-con suitor. She really worked on them, especially her father. She pleaded with him to go talk to my parole officer, for she knew he would tell him how I had changed. That pessimistic parole supervisor had assigned me to a highly supportive and unbiased parole officer who did all he could to elevate my spirits. He was a truly decent man, a born-again Christian with a generous humor who was always bringing up God in our discussions. We had a great relationship.

  Finally, to appease her, my girlfriend’s father did call my parole officer. He gave me a good build-up. He said, “I don’t think Frank will ever go back to prison. He went down the wrong road, and he’s smart enough to know the right road now.” But then he had to insert a final thought: “I must tell you, though, I have five daughters, and I wouldn’t let one of them get within six miles of Frank.” That set me back months.

  But finally they did accept me, and my girlfriend and I got married soon afterward.

  After nine months in the supermarket, the district manager buttonholed me one day and said that they were opening a new store in the suburbs, which would be their first store to stay open twenty-four hours. He told me he wanted me to be the night manager. I was flattered. I liked that job, and I did it well. As always, I had made a point of being presentable and personable, and was dedicated to what I was doing. Then came the familiar story. A security check turned up my checkered past, and once again I was brusquely shown the door.

  The truth is, I had felt extremely comfortable being a supermarket manager. I liked overseeing people and making the decisions that had to be made. There were enough complications to the work to intellectually challenge me and satisfy my ego. Had I not been fired, I honestly think that today I would still be running a supermarket, making decisions about canned peas and corn flakes.

  The cycle continued for me. Nobody cared about my performance on the job, only my illicit past. Nobody was willing to believe that I was a different person. Once a con man, in their view, always a con man. It’s a terrible feeling to want to reconstruct your life, and yet find yourself blocked at every turn. This made for a lot of tension.

  A hopelessness sank in. This was not the routine hopelessness of a bad day or a bad week, but a deep despair and a recognition that nothing could go right again. Even though I knew the dire consequences, I seriously began to think of reverting to my past criminal behavior. There seemed to be no other way to get anywhere. I was angry at the establishment for refusing to give me that second chance that I knew I would make good on.

  In my latest incarnation, I was working at night as a movie projectionist—that projectionist’s license I acquired in prison had come in handy after all. In this case, I had told the manager about my past, and he didn’t really care. I was upstairs locked in this booth for eight hours; what harm could I do? The job paid pretty well, but it was hardly thought-provoking work. I thought to myself that I was smarter than this, that I was wasting genuine talents that I possessed. What had made me so good as a con artist was my photographic memory that enabled me to acquire the knowledge and pose as someone else in an astonishingly short span of time. I could focus on things with an extraordinary intensity. And I was extremely observant, always noticing the small things that others didn’t. These traits gave me an extra edge that I milked for all they were worth. But they didn’t go very far in the cramped milieu of a projectionist’s booth.

  WHEN WRONGS CAN MAKE A RIGHT

  Something had to change and change fast. Luckily, it did. One day my parole officer said to me, “You know so much about false documents and check kiting, have you ever given thought to going out and giving talks to law enforcement agencies about these things?”

  “Well, no,” I said.

  “Well, the government has approached me about this,” he said. “There would be no pay. And, of course, nobody could force you to do it.”

  “How would it work?” I asked.

  “You’d just talk to law enforcement agents about cons and counterfeit documents and how to recognize them,” he said. “Give them tips on how con artists work, so they could get better at catching them.”

  “I guess I could do that,” I said. “I wouldn’t have a problem with it.”

  So I began to go around locally and talk in front of members of the sheriff’s office and the constable’s office. I’d lecture to local FBI agents and postal inspectors. I didn’t have any prepared remarks or slides or anything. I just told them what I did and how I did it, how I’d get false IDs and how I would open bank accounts and then withdraw money that wasn’t really there. The agents asked me questions, and I found that I never had to say that I didn’t know the answer.

  The next thing I knew, the head of security for Target stores approached me and asked if I could come and talk to some of their store managers. I saw no reason not to, and so I did that, too. I got a warm and interested reception. They d
idn’t pay me, either.

  I was still working as a projectionist but these gigs forced me to take a long hard look at myself and my prospects. I still had vision and a dreamer’s idealism. I was enjoying these little security presentations, and they ignited a new excitement in me. A plan slowly formed in my mind, one that I thought would allow me to use my expertise in a redemptive way and permit me to engage in a more satisfying life than the one I had in the projectionist’s booth. I went to my new parole officer and told him what I had in mind.

  I said that, in doing these little talks, I realized that I had as much knowledge as any man alive concerning the mechanics of forgery, check swindling, counterfeiting, and other similar crimes. I’d now realized that if I directed this knowledge into the right channels, I could help people. For instance, every time I went to the store and wrote a check, I would see two or three mistakes made on the part of the clerk or cashier, mistakes that a flimflam artist would take advantage of. I had concluded that it was simply a lack of training.

  I was always looking at systems and realizing how simple it was to beat them. For example, if I was going to mail a letter and I didn’t have a stamp, I knew I could take that letter and put the address of the person I was sending it to in the upper left-hand corner, and put my name in the middle of the envelope. The post office would then return it back to that person. So I would have sent it without a stamp. If I needed to get on a flight and it was fully booked, I knew that I could go to a phone, call the airline, and say, “Hi, do you have the manifest for flight 462? I’m Mr. Smith and I’m afraid I need to cancel my reservation.” There’s almost always a Smith or a Jones on just about any flight. Then I would call right back, ask if it were possible to get onto flight 462, and I’d be told, “Oh you’re in luck, we just had a cancellation.”

  If I needed to make a long distance phone call and couldn’t pay for it, I knew a way to do it. You’d look around for the first available corporate building and get their main number. Say it was 999-2000. You’d dial 999-2020, figuring that it had to be someone’s extension. You get Bill Kenner in human resources. You’d say, “I’m sorry, I must have the wrong extension, could you put me back to the switchboard?” When the operator came on, you’d say, “This is Kenner in human resources, I need to make a long-distance call, could you give me an outside line?” And then you’d make your call.

  It was obvious to me that every system had loopholes in it. I guess I thought in loopholes. And so I realized that I could teach people who handled checks and other legal documents how to protect themselves against fraud and theft. And I wanted to charge them.

  “Well, if they’ll do it, go right ahead,” my parole officer said. “It’s up to you. But not the law enforcement people. That’s got to be free.”

  I approached a suburban bank director and outlined what I had in mind. I was upfront in relating my sordid background as a chronic bilker of banks. I told him that I wanted to spend an hour one day after the bank closed to give a lecture to his employees. I told him that consumer fraud is committed today in the blink of an eye, and you needed to be prepared. If he felt the talk was worthless, I said, he didn’t owe me anything. If he found it beneficial, then he had to pay me five hundred dollars and make a few calls to colleagues at other banks and recommend that I come in and tutor their employees. I told him that if what I taught his people stopped just one bad check from crossing a teller’s window, then he would have more than made his five hundred dollars back. He told me to come on by.

  The ways of the world are truly unpredictable. He liked my presentation, and I got both the pay and the referrals. This first paid appearance as a “white-collar crime specialist” led to another lecture at another bank, and another and another. Banks heard about me in Dallas. Then I got calls from El Paso. Before long, I was in demand not only by banks, but also by hotels, airlines, and other businesses. In retrospect, it was a godsend that I was paroled to Houston, because Houston was booming and that allowed me to get off to a very good start.

  Twenty-five years have passed. I talk to all sorts of businesses today, and I’ve increased my fee. But to this day, I never take a dime from any law enforcement agency. I do a lot of lecturing to new agents at the FBI Academy, but I won’t accept any remuneration, not even my expenses. Part of it is, I’m just grateful to be where I am. And another part of it is that I feel this is one way I can make amends for my past.

  ONCE A CON ARTIST . . .

  And so I had turned things on their head. I had converted something negative into something positive. I had found a way to meld my expertise with social good. I still had all the needs that had made me a criminal. I had simply found a legal and socially acceptable way to fulfill those needs.

  In a certain sense, I’m still a con artist. I’m just putting down a positive con these days, as opposed to the negative con I used in the past. I’ve merely redirected the talents I’ve always possessed. I’ve applied the same relentless attention to working on stopping fraud that I once applied to perpetuating fraud.

  Living this way is much better than life the wrong way. I feel I’ve been handed a rare and precious gift. Clearly, I’m in a flourishing industry. For so many people, fraud has become the tactic of maximal gain. Fraud has grown so enormous throughout the world that it touches everyone. To be honest, it will never go away. If I lived to be four hundred years old, I’d still have a good job.

  One of the nice things about my new life is that I’m making more money trying to prevent fraud than I ever did by committing fraud. Going straight does pay.

  Estimates are that businesses lose an unprecedented $400 billion a year from fraud of one sort or another. I’m not talking about armed robbery, burglary, or narcotics, but fraud. It’s a staggering sum, equal to twice the budget of the U.S. military. If we were able to do away with fraud for just two years, we’d erase the national debt. We’d pay off Social Security for the next one hundred years.

  Today bank tellers and salespeople are asked to accept so many different forms of payment, not just cash and checks but traveler’s checks, credit cards, debit cards, money orders, NOW accounts, and credit union share drafts. Each and every one of them is susceptible to fraud. And it’s not only embezzlement of money that’s a problem. It’s also embezzlement of information. Because information has become extremely valuable. And so far as restitution is concerned? Unheard of.

  About a third of that $400 billion is from embezzlement, employees stealing from their employer. Out of embarrassment, the vast majority of companies never report these thefts to the police. They merely fire the employee, then tell human resources that if they receive a call about this person, say that they worked here but no longer work here. Consequently, the person goes on to steal from somebody else.

  One of the things that always amuses me is that back when I was on the other side of the law, it was harder to commit fraud than it is now. You’d think it would be the opposite. And five years from now, it will be easier than it is today. And that’s because of one word—technology. Technology breeds crime and it always has. Thirty-five years ago, if I had to make a check, I literally had to print the check, and so I had to be a skilled printer. I had to know how to do color separations, make negatives, and make plates. It was very time-consuming and tedious. Today, sitting at home in an apartment with a PC, a scanner, a color printer, and a color copier, you can reproduce just about any type of document, including hard cash.

  So when people ask me, if I were a con artist today, what would be different? I tell them, “Instead of making $2.5 million, I’d make $20 million. It’s that much easier.”

  And we look on white-collar crime a lot differently. China, many years ago, printed a warning on its currency that whoever forged counterfeit money would be beheaded. Until the early 1800s, forgery in England qualified as a hanging offense. Justice got a bit more civilized, but thirty-five years ago you at least got sent to prison. Today, I’d probably get probation or community service, and maybe have to
make some restitution. That’s not deterrence, that’s encouragement.

  It’s a dark, morally ambiguous world today, but one problem we have in our society is that people don’t really care if some big company was embezzled for $100,000. They figure that’s the company’s problem; they’ve got billions. Instead, people want to know what law enforcement is doing to clear the streets of murderers, rapists, drug dealers, and other violent criminals. People want them off the street, because they pose a physical threat. If you ask them about some guy selling counterfeit Gucci bags for twenty bucks down by the supermarket, their reaction is, “Well, I don’t care about that. If the purse looks good, I’ll buy one myself.” In addition to the cost of fraud, counterfeit goods are responsible for $350 billion in losses in the United States every year, but people don’t care about the problem because they think it doesn’t really affect them. What they don’t understand is that ultimately, it does affect them. It means we all pay higher fees for goods and services.

  The police are frustrated. They complain that if they go out and arrest a check writer, then the district attorney doesn’t want to fool with the guy because it’s not a high profile case. The guy just wrote some bad checks. If they do prosecute him, the judge says the prison is full. He can’t put this check writer behind bars; he needs the cells for murderers and rapists, the really scary guys. Thus, something like 98 percent of forgers go free. Prosecutors have a benchmark. Rarely will they prosecute a fraud of less than five thousand dollars. So criminals know that if they stay under the benchmarks, they’re safe.

  There’s no reason to rob a bank the old-fashioned way, with a mask, a gun, and a prayer. Why go and stick a gun in someone’s face? You’re talking about armed robbery, ten to twenty years. You could end up shooting someone. Someone could shoot you. And for what? The average bank robbery in 1998 and 1999 netted less than one thousand five hundred dollars. You’re a lot better off doing your robbing with the point of a pen. Why not walk in and cash a fraudulent check for twenty thousand dollars? Maybe you’d get six months in the county jail, if they caught you, if they prosecuted you, if they sent you to jail. And so the machinery of fraud functions almost untouched.