79 pages • 2 hours read
Frank Abagnale, Stan ReddingCatch Me If You Can: The True Story of a Real Fake
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1980A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 5-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: “A Law Degree Is Just an Illegal Technicality”
Abagnale remarks that around this time, as he later learned, a very-dedicated FBI inspector named Sean O’Riley was assigned to his case exclusively. When Frank finishes his job as the resident supervisor, he moves to another southern city and stays with a stewardess he knows. In the course of their relationship, she delves into his educational background. He lies that he became a pilot after law school at Harvard, hoping to avoid demonstrations of his aeronautical knowledge.
At a party, the stewardess introduces Abagnale to an assistant to the state’s attorney. The assistant says the attorney general needs lawyers. He asks Abagnale to take the bar in their state and join the attorney general’s office. In order to take the bar exam, Abagnale must be in possession of his Harvard transcript, as he has told people that he went to Harvard. Frank makes a counterfeit transcript constructed from a Harvard course catalog. He trims the Harvard logos from their law school catalogue. Though he initially fails the bar, he is able to improve his score over two successive attempts by studying around his missed answers. Abagnale is hired as an aide to a senior assistant, essentially serving as a glorified errand boy. He gives the impression that he’s from a wealthy family by leasing a Jaguar and buying many expensive suits. He becomes popular with the staff by treating them to regular outings.
Abagnale begins dating the daughter of a state official and joins her family each Sunday at church. One of the church members is a real Harvard Law School graduate who is very enthusiastic to talk about their alma mater. When the Harvard man becomes suspicious, Abagnale leaves for New York, then heads to Utah.
In Utah, Abagnale reads a news story about a college’s shortage of summer sociology instructors. He calls the dean and claims to be a furloughed pilot with a Ph.D. in sociology from Columbia. He interviews well and is offered the position on condition of furbishing his transcript, which he creates in the same manner he did his faux-Harvard transcript. With three weeks to prepare for his class, he audits the course of another sociology professor. In his own class, Abagnale makes the interesting decision to build discussion around his real-life criminal experiences.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Paperhanger in a Rolls-Royce”
Abagnale makes a stop in Eureka, California, where he begins to dabble in check forgery. His first homemade check is somewhat sloppy, but he legitimizes its appearance by mailing a windowed check envelope to himself. The postal clerk stamps the envelope so messily that it is impossible to tell where it was mailed from. Frank cashes the check successfully at a Eureka bank, using his Pan Am uniform and his flirtatious charm to convince a young female teller. He proceeds to cash similar sham payroll checks all around Eureka.
Abagnale sees a fisherman fixing a convertible similar to the car Frank’s father gave Frank. He chats with the fisherman, who offers to get in touch with Abagnale when the car is finished. Abagnale ducks into a diner for a pencil and jots his real name and New York number on the back of one of his self-made counterfeit checks. The fisherman leaves while he’s gone, but Abagnale forgets to dispose of the check. The next day, in the midst of spreading his fake checks around Eureka, he accidentally deposits the check with his real name on the back.
When Abagnale realizes his mistake, he calls the bank where he believes the check was deposited. The head teller confirms that a fake check was cashed and that she has contacted the FBI. Abagnale pretends he is an FBI agent and asks the head teller to set aside the check for him. He shows up at the bank in a blue business suit and the head teller presents him with the check. While this move allows Abagnale to conceal his name, it also provides O’Riley with a fresh trail to follow.
Abagnale improves his skills by studying bank journals and dating bank tellers to pick their brains. He learns all the numbers and details needed to construct a convincing fake check. He cashes many more fake checks in the San Francisco Bay Area and begins to deposit cash in numerous safe deposit boxes under different names.
In San Francisco, Abagnale falls in love with a wholesome stewardess named Rosalie. While visiting her family, he decides he wants to marry her, but he cannot do so without revealing his true identity. On a bike ride, Abagnale confesses he’s a conman, and Rosalie rides back to the house without him. Abagnale cautiously views the house from a distance and sees a police car in the driveway.
Abagnale absconds to Las Vegas, where he serendipitously meets a woman who designs checks. She describes everything Abagnale needs to know in order to professionally forge a check. Abagnale purchases an I-Tek camera and small printing press and spreads many forged checks around Las Vegas, leaving with $39,000. His luck continues in Chicago, where he opens a bank account with a new Chicago address. He makes over $40,000 with a scam wherein he adds his account number to a stack of blank deposit slips and slyly slips them on top of other slips.
Abagnale withdraws $40,000 and then spreads more fraudulent checks all the way from Hawaii to New York, before flying to Philadelphia. He pulls up to a bank he’s targeted in a chauffeured Rolls-Royce. He writes a check for $17,000 with a story about being the head of a construction company, then convinces the manager to write a 15,000-dollar cashiers’ check by telling a story about an out-of-state vacation home. The manager offers the $15,000 on the condition that Frank attends her party.
Chapters 5-6 Analysis
In Chapters Five and Six, Abagnale expands his reflections on social performance as his own social performance continues to evolve. His “scripts” begin to incorporate sophisticated “props,” from a stamped, windowed envelope to a rented Rolls Royce. As an experienced criminal, Abagnale deconstructs the elements of a successful con man: personality, observation, and research. His deconstruction mirrors the writing of 1960s sociologists such as Erving Goffman, who famously examined identity in his text, The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life.
Coincidentally or otherwise, Abagnale temporarily dons the role of sociology professor, using his own life experience as fodder for case studies and class discussion. This role is a fascinating mixture of what Goffman would call “cynical” and “sincere” social performance. In other words, Abagnale is in some ways a “cynical” sociology professor; he constantly aware that he is playing a role, using the language of his textbook and the sociologist whose class he audits. In other ways, and at the same time, he is a “sincere” sociologist, speaking from his own reality and enjoying the role so much he disappears into it. The performative authenticity of this role raises questions of Abagnale’s identity in previous roles, augmenting the identity crisis he experiences when writing his real name on the back of a fake check.
Abagnale invites the reader to interrogate boundaries between “real” and “fake” with this incident, explaining that it happened when he became too invested in his performance (with an attractive female teller) to notice the back of the check. He suggests that there may be some “real” aspect to his performances when he disappears into them, and that this realness might ultimately threaten the “fake” aspect (the more cynical self-aware performance). He playfully encourages those around him to make note of moments wherein they abandon self-awareness, including the head bank teller who derides the female clerk who cashes his check: “[she] was more than a little upset when she learned she had been duped, but then FBI agents do have a certain romantic aura of their own and a woman doesn’t have to be young to be impressed by a glamorous figure” (127). In other words: anyone is susceptible to a desirable disguise, and everyone is a complex mixture of “real” and “fake.”
This mixture is further convoluted by Abagnale’s engagement to Rosalie, which compels him to reveal his “real” identity as a con man. Rosalie responds by rejecting him and notifying the police. This incident raises questions not only about the authenticity of Abagnale’s self-proclaimed identity as a “real fake,” but of Abagnale’s assumed complicity with stewardesses he previously dated, leading the reader to imagine that Abagnale may be using these women more than he lets on, and that previous dates may have similarly turned him in if they knew his true identity.
