Almost Genius: The Daring Cons That Nearly Succeeded

For two years, Frank Abagnale Jr. held a job as chief resident pediatrician at a Georgia hospital without a medical degree. Last week, we dove into heists that nearly got away, the ones foiled by a single, tiny mistake. But what if the con isn't a heist... what if it's an entire life? Imagine you’re sixteen years old. You’re walking through a New York airport. You see them. The pilots. Tall, confident, striding through the terminal like they own it. And in a way, they do. They command respect. They get the admiring glances. They are trusted. Frank Abagnale saw that.

And he wanted it. Not the plane, not the responsibility. Just the uniform. So he got one. He called Pan Am’s purchasing department, said he’d lost his, and they told him where to get a replacement. He forged a pilot’s license and an FAA ID card. And just like that, he wasn’t a runaway teenager anymore. He was Captain Frank Williams. For the next two years, he flew over a million miles in the cockpit jumpseat of Pan Am jets, deadheading to twenty-six different countries. He never once touched the controls. When a real pilot asked him a question, he’d just laugh and say, "Don't you ever ask me that again." And they'd laugh with him.

They thought he was joking. All the while, he was funding his lifestyle with another con — check fraud. He pioneered methods that banks had never seen. Floating checks, printing his own perfect replicas. He cashed two and a half million dollars in bad checks before he was twenty-one. When he got tired of being a pilot, he became a doctor in Georgia. When he got tired of that, he forged a Harvard Law transcript, passed the Louisiana bar exam, and went to work for the state attorney general. He was brilliant. He was audacious. And he was completely untouchable.

Or so he thought. The FBI had been chasing a ghost for years. This brilliant forger, this master impersonator. But it wasn't a flaw in one of his checks that undid him. It wasn't a slip of the tongue in the hospital. It wasn't a failed legal argument. He was caught in France. Not by some brilliant detective, but because of a tip. A flight attendant he had dated, a woman he had let into his fabricated life, recognized his face on a wanted poster. She called the authorities. The perfect con man, the one who could fool corporations and government agencies, was brought down by a personal connection.

A loose end he couldn't control. A broken heart. His capture was the end of the game. He was sent to a hellish French prison, then extradited to Sweden, then finally back to the U.S. He escaped from custody twice — once from a plane on the tarmac, and once from a federal penitentiary by convincing the guards he was an undercover prison inspector. The audacity never left him. But eventually, he ran out of runway. Facing decades in prison, the United States government offered him a deal. Get out early. But you have to work for us. You have to teach our agents how to catch guys like you.

The greatest poacher of the twentieth century was hired to be the new head gamekeeper. He went from printing fake checks to designing secure ones. From impersonating professionals to teaching federal agents how to spot an imposter. He took all the genius he used to break the system... and used it to make the system stronger.