There was also a good possibility the check was still in the bank. I’d cashed it early in the afternoon, and it was possible it wouldn’t be routed to New York until the morrow. If it hadn’t left the bank, perhaps I could purchase it back. I could tell them Pan Am had issued the check in error and I shouldn’t have cashed it, or some such concocted tale. I was sure I could come up with a good story if the check was still on hand. I fell asleep mulling feasible excuses to offer.
I packed, stowed my gear in my car and paid my motel bill before calling the bank the next morning. I asked for the head teller and was connected with a woman who identified herself as “Stella Waring” in brisk tones.
“Mrs. Waring, a Pan Am pilot cashed a check in your bank yesterday,” I said. “Can you tell me…” She cut me off before I could say more.
“Yes, a bogus check,” she said, abruptly indignant and without asking my identity or my reason for calling. “We’ve notified the FBI. They’re supposed to be sending an agent for the check.”
I wasn’t challenged. I acted on impulse, an incitement to protect my real identity. “Yes,” I said. “This is the FBI. I wanted to alert you that our agent will be there in about fifteen minutes. Do you have the check, or is there someone else he should contact?”
“Just have him see me, sir, I’ll have the check,” Mrs.
Waring replied. “Of course, we’d like a Xerox of the check for our records. That is all right, isn’t it?”
“Of course,” I assured her. “I will instruct Mr. Davis to provide you with a copy.”
I was at the bank within five minutes, dressed in a blue business suit, but I discreetly cased the interior before entering. The teller who had cashed the check was nowhere in sight.
Had she been, I would not have entered. I didn’t know whether she was on a coffee break or what, and I was uneasy about her appearing while I was in the bank, but I was driven to take the risk. I strode into the lobby and the receptionist directed me to Mrs. Waring’s desk at one side of the floor. She was a trim, handsome woman in her thirties, with the dress and air of the complete businesswoman. She looked up as I stopped in front of her desk.
“Mrs. Waring, I’m Bill Davis of the FBI. I believe my boss called you earlier?” I said.
She nodded with a grimace. “Oh, yes, Mr. Davis,” she said. “I have the check right here.” She did not ask for credentials or seem suspicious of my status at all. She merely produced the check from a drawer and handed it to me. I examined it with a professional air, an attitude easily assumed since I was the manufacturer. On the back, barely perceivable, was my real name and my father’s address.
“It looks pretty junky,” I observed dryly. “I’m surprised anyone would cash it.”
Mrs. Waring smiled sour agreement. “Yes, we have some girls here that, well, they see a handsome pilot or some other man that presents a romantic figure, and they tend to lose their cool. They’re more interested in the man than in what he’s handing them,” she said in disapproving tones. “The girl who took this check, Miss Caster, was so upset she didn’t even come in this morning.”
I relaxed at the information and began to enjoy my pose as a G-man. “Well, we will have to talk to her, but we can do that later,” I said. “Have you made a copy of this yet?”
“No, but there’s a Xerox machine right there in the corner, it’ll only take me a minute,” she said.
“I’ll do it,” I said, and walked quickly to the machine before she could object. I copied only the front of the check, a factor she didn’t notice when I laid it on her desk.
“Let me sign this and date it,” I said, picking up a pen. “This copy is your receipt. You understand we need this original as evidence. It will be in the custody of the U.S. Attorney. I think this is all we need at the moment, Mrs. Waring. We certainly appreciate your, cooperation.” I pocketed the damning original and left.
I learned later that I exited the bank barely five minutes before the actual FBI agent- Eureka ’s only G-man, in fact-arrived. I also learned later that Mrs. Waring herself 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.
Posing as an FBI agent was not the smartest move I made at that point in my criminal career. Federal agents are generally highly efficient officers, but they are even more efficient and determined when someone impersonates an FBI agent. I had circumvented, temporarily, the disclosure that Frank Williams, pilot poseur, was in reality Frank Abagnale, Jr., but unknowingly I furnished O’Riley a fresh trail to follow and thereafter it was hound and hare to the end.
However, I was still in a learning stage as a forger, albeit an advanced student, and I tended to take risks an experienced check thief would shudder to chance. I was an independent actor, writing, producing and directing my own scripts. I did not know any professional criminals, I didn’t seek out criminal expertise and I shunned any place that smacked of being a criminal haunt.
The people who assisted me in my dubious capers were all honest, legitimate, respectable folk whom I duped or conned into lending me help. In reality, my total autonomy was the biggest factor in my success. The usual criminal sources of information for the police were useless to them in their search for me. The underworld grapevine simply had no intelligence on me. While my true identity was established midway in my course, the leads garnered by police were all after-the-fact leads. I was always several days gone by the time my misdeeds were exposed as such, and officers were never able to pick up my trail until I struck again, usually in some far-off city.
Once I embarked on counterfeiting checks, I realized I had reached a point of no return. I had chosen paper-hanging as a profession, my means of surviving, and having chosen a nefarious occupation, I set out to perfect my working skills. In the ensuing weeks and months, I studied check transactions and banking procedures as diligently as any investor studies the markets available to him, and I did my homework in unobtrusive ways. I dated tellers and picked their brains while stroking their bodies. I went to libraries and perused banking magazines, journals and trade books. I read financial publications and created opportunities to converse with bank officials. All my wrongful techniques, in short, were polished with rightful wax.
Of course, as someone once observed, there is no right way to do something wrong, but the most successful check swindlers have three factors in their favor, and any one of the three, or the scantiest combination of the three, can pay off like three bars on a slot machine.
The first is personality, and I look on personal grooming as part of one’s personality. Top con artists, whether they’re pushing hot paper or hawking phony oil leases, are well dressed and exude an air of confidence and authority. They’re usually, too, as charming, courteous and seemingly sincere as a politician seeking reelection, although they can, at times, effect the cool arrogance of a tycoon.
The second is observation. Observation is a skill that can be developed, but I was born blessed (or cursed) with the ability to pick up on details and items the average man overlooks. Observation, as I will illustrate later, is the only necessity for successful innovative larceny. A newsman who did a story on me noted, “A good con man reads sign like an Indian, and Frank Abagnale would have made the best Pawnee scout on the frontier look like a half-blind tenderfoot.”
The third factor is research, the big difference between the hard-nosed criminal and the super con man. A hood planning a bank holdup might case the treasury for rudimentary facts, but in the end he depends on his gun. A con artist’s only weapon is his brain. A con man who decides to hit the same bank with a fictitious check or a sophisticated check swindle researches every facet of the caper. In my heyday as a hawker of hot paper, I knew as much about checks as any teller employed in any bank in the world and more than the majority. I’m not even sure a great many bankers possessed the knowledge I had of checks.