Weekends I relaxed by immersing myself in one or the other of Utah ’s scenic wonderlands, usually accompanied by an equally wondrous companion.
The summer was gone as swiftly as the desert spring, and I knew real regret when it ended. Dr. Vanderhoff and Dr. Grimes were delighted with my work. “Keep in touch with us, Frank,” said Dr. Grimes. “If ever we have a permanent opening for a sociology professor, we’d like a chance to lure you down from the skies,” said Dr. Grimes.
At least fifty of my students sought me out to tell me how much they had enjoyed my classes and to wish me good-bye and good luck.
I was reluctant to leave that Utah Utopia, but I could find no valid reason for staying. If I lingered, my past was certain to catch up, and I did not want these people’s image of me to be tarnished.
I headed west to California. There was a storm building in the Sierras when I crossed the mountains, but it was nothing compared to the whirlwind of crime I was soon to create myself.
CHAPTER SIX. Paperhanger in a Rolls-Royce
The former police chief of Houston once said of me: “Frank Abagnale could write a check on toilet paper, drawn on the Confederate States Treasury, sign it ‘U.R. Hooked’ and cash it at any bank in town, using a Hong Kong driver’s license for identification.”
There are several bank employees in Eureka, California, who would endorse that statement. In fact, if it were put in the form of a resolution, there are scores of tellers and bank officials around the country who would second the motion.
I was not really that crude. But some of the moves I put on bank personnel were very, very embarrassing, not to mention costly.
Eureka, for me, was my commencement as an expert forger. I was already an advanced student of paperhanging when I arrived, of course, but I took my master’s degree in check swindling in California.
I didn’t purposely pick Eureka as a milestone in my capricious career. It was meant merely as a pit stop en route to San Francisco, but the inevitable girl appeared and I stayed to play house for a few days and to ruminate on my future. I was possessed by an urge to flee the country, vaguely fearful that a posse of FBI agents, sheriffs and detectives was hard on my heels. There was no tangible reason for such trepidation. I hadn’t bilked anyone with a bouncing check in nearly two years, and “Co-pilot Frank Williams” had been in the closet for the same length of time. I should have been feeling reasonably safe, but I wasn’t. I was nervous, fretful and doubtful, and I saw a cop in every man who gave me more than a casual look.
The girl and Eureka, between them, allayed my misgivings somewhat after a couple of days, the girl with her warm and willing ways and Eureka with its potential for elevating me from petty larceny to grand theft. Eureka, in California ’s northern redwood forests, perched on the edge of the Pacific, is a delightful little city. It has the picturesque allure of a Basque fishing village, and in fact a large and colorful fishing fleet operates out of Eureka ’s harbor.
The most fascinating facet of Eureka, to me, was its banks. It had more money houses for a city its size than any comparable city I’d ever visited. And I needed money, a lot of it, if I were going to be an expatriate paperhanger.
I still had several stacks of worthless personal checks, and I was sure I could scatter a dozen or more of them around town with ease, netting $1,000 or more. But it occurred to me that the personal-check dodge wasn’t really that great. It was the easiest of bum-check capers, but it generated too much heat from too many points, and the penalty for passing a worthless $100 check was the same as that for dropping $5,000 in phony parchment.
I felt I needed a sweeter type of check, one that would yield more honey for the same amount of nectar. Like a payroll check, say. Like a Pan Am payroll check, naturally. No one would ever be able to say I wasn’t a loyal thief.
I went shopping. I obtained a book of blank counter checks from a stationery store. Such checks, still in wide use at the time, were ideal for my purposes, since it was left to the payer to fill in all the pertinent details, including the respondent bank’s name. I then rented an IBM electric typewriter with several different typeface spheres, including script, and some extra ribbon cartridges in various carbon densities. I located a hobby shop that handled models of Pan Am’s jets and bought several kits in the smaller sizes. I made a final stop at an art store and purchased a quantity of press-on magnetic-tape numerals and letters.
Thus provisioned, I retired to my motel room and set to work. I took one of the blank counter checks and across the top affixed a pan American world airways decal from one of the kits. Below the legend I typed in the airline’s New York address. In the upper left-hand corner of the check I applied the Pan Am logo, and in the opposite right-hand corner I typed in the words “expense check,” on the premise that a firm’s expense checks would differ in appearance from its regular payroll checks. It was a precautionary action on my part, since some Eureka bank tellers might have had occasion to handle regular Pan Am vouchers.
I made myself, “Frank Williams,” the payee, of course, in the amount of $568.70, a sum that seemed reasonable to me. In the lower left-hand corner I typed in “chase Manhattan bank” and the bank’s address, going over the bank legend with progressively blacker ribbons until the words appeared to have been printed on the counterfeit check.
Below the bank legend, across the bottom left-hand corner of the check, I laid down a series of numbers with magnetic tape. The numbers purportedly represented the Federal Reserve District of which Chase Manhattan was a member, the bank’s FRD identification number and Pan Am’s account number. Such numbers are very important to anyone cashing a check and tenfold as important to a hot-check swindler. A good paperhanger is essentially operating a numbers game and if he doesn’t know the right ones he’s going to end up with an entirely different set stenciled across the front and back of a state-issued shirt.
The fabricating of the check was exacting, arduous work, requiring more than two hours, and I was not at all happy with the finished product. I looked at it and decided it was not a check I would cash were I a teller and someone presented the check for payment.
But a thrift-shop dress is usually taken for high fashion when it’s revealed under a mink coat. So I devised a mink cover for the rabbit-fur check. I took one of the windowed envelopes, hoaxed it up with a Pan Am decal and Pan Am’s New York address, stuck a blank piece of stationery inside and mailed it to myself at my motel. The missive was delivered the following morning, and the local post office had unwittingly assisted me in my scheme. The clerk who had canceled the stamp had done such a botched job with the postmark that it was impossible to tell where the letter had been mailed from. I was delighted with the man’s sloppiness.
I donned my Pan Am pilot’s uniform, placed the check in the envelope and stuck it in the inside pocket of my jacket. I drove to the nearest bank, walked in jauntily and presented myself at a teller’s booth attended by a young woman. “Hi,” I said, smiling. “My name is Frank Williams and I’m vacationing here for a few days before reporting to Los Angeles. Would you please cash this check for me? I think I have sufficient identification.”
I took the envelope from my inside pocket, extracted the check and laid it on the counter, along with my phony Pan Am ID card and my illicit FAA pilot’s license. I purposely dropped the envelope, with its distinctive Pan Am logo and return address, on the counter.
The girl looked at my bogus identification documents and glanced at the check, but she seemed more interested in me. Commercial airline pilots in uniform were obviously a rarity in Eureka. She pushed the check back to me for endorsement, and while she counted out the money she asked chatty questions about my work and the places I’d been, questions I answered in a manner designed to bolster her apparent romantic image of airline pilots.