Frank Abagnale's Real Name: Frank William Abagnale, Jr.

Quick answer: Frank Abagnale's documented full name is Frank William Abagnale, Jr. Encyclopaedia Britannica records that form and gives his birth date as April 27, 1948, in the Bronx, New York (Encyclopaedia Britannica; Library of Congress).

Real name and early life

Britannica gives the form "in full Frank William Abagnale, Jr." and names his parents as Frank William Abagnale, Sr., and Paulette Abagnale. He attended Iona Preparatory School in New Rochelle, and his parents divorced when he was 14. Britannica treats some early episodes as part of his own account, and this page follows that caution. A Library of Congress lecture page calls him Frank W. Abagnale, founder of Abagnale & Associates.

Career highlights

Britannica separates documented public records from the story told in his 1980 memoir, Catch Me If You Can: The True Story of a Real Fake. It says journalists have debunked the memoir's timeline that most of his frauds occurred between ages 16 and 21, and that claimed totals of more than 17,000 false checks and $2.5 million are highly improbable given how little time he spent out of prison in those years. Public records cited there include a brief U.S. Navy enlistment in 1964–65, a 1965 New York sentence for stealing blank checks, a later car-theft case, a 1970 federal check-fraud arrest involving $1,448.60, and a 12-year prison sentence in April 1971, followed by federal parole in 1974. Impersonation claims in the book—including work as a Pan Am pilot, a lawyer, a professor, and a doctor—are described as disputed or sharply reduced in scope.

He started Abagnale & Associates in 1976, Britannica says, and became widely known after television appearances including To Tell the Truth (1977) and The Tonight Show. The memoir was adapted into the 2002 film Catch Me If You Can, directed by Steven Spielberg, and later into a 2011 Broadway play. A 2009 Library of Congress lecture page presents him as an author and document-security consultant and lists later books including The Art of the Steal. This page records those later activities without treating the memoir's more dramatic claims as established fact.

Legal history

Documented convictions and sentences in Britannica's account include the 1965 New York check case, later imprisonment after a Boston car theft, detention abroad in the late 1960s, and the 1971 federal sentence for check fraud. He was released on federal parole in 1974.

Name notes for searchers

Frank William Abagnale, Jr., is the documented full name; he is known as Frank Abagnale. Searchers looking for the subject of Catch Me If You Can are usually aiming at the same person.