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Making
things happen - with integrity. A weekly CyberMemo designed to keep you on task. Monday January 13, 2003 Volume V Number 2 |
FOCUS - Abagnale the Paperhanger
Frank Abagnale, the real Frank Abagnale, has been a player in the promotional tour. When a movie project attracts such an ensemble of major Hollywood names (Spielberg, Hanks, John Williams, DiCaprio) the world takes notice. But the validation of this ambitious venture is nailed down in a face to face encounter with the real life character, who delivers a high degree of credibility and captures a vast potential audience via media outlets which have become marketing tools for the movie biz (TODAY, GMA, ET, Extra, Oprah, Dr. Phil).
Frank Abagnale is a real guy. His story is true. His story is also as implausible as it is brilliant. And it is correct, the storytellers have taken liberties; cinematic and dramatic license to enhance, underscore, and embellish. But given the facts, none of the inaccuracies really diminish the extraordinary nature of this young life of crime. It’s right up there with Bonnie and Clyde and Baby Faced Nelson and Jesse James; criminals who became legends adored for their exploits. But Frank Abagnale is different from the others in that his crimes didn’t really hurt anyone (physically at least) and in the end, his is a dramatic conversion story. He paid his dues to society and then became a convert from a life of crime to a complete devotion to truth, justice and the American way.
By the time he was old enough to purchase a
legal glass of beer in California, Frank Abagnale cashed nearly four million
dollars in phony checks. He passed himself off as a physician, an attorney,
and an airline pilot. He traveled all over the world in
first class, bought
expensive cars, designer clothes, and jewelry, lavished elegant gifts on his
family and friends and made himself at home in the finest hotels and
restaurants in the most glamorous cities across the globe. He slipped through
the dragnet of law enforcement time and again, often with barely seconds to
spare.
Listen to Frank now, graying and a bit paunchy, well past middle age, and his likeable grin still wins you over. He’s good natured. Sober about his past, he is a man released from a more devastating prison-house than the federal penitentiary. His life of crime left him as terribly alone as a man can be. No one on planet earth knew him, except for two - his villainous estranged father and the Javert-like FBI agent Carl Hanratty, obsessed with his capture. To everyone else, Frank was someone other than Frank. His assumed identities were all phony. Everywhere he went, and that included exotic ports all over the world, he was someone else.
Frank’s was more than a double life. It was a triple-quadruple-quintuplet life, in multiples. But ultimately, possessing all the toys and trinkets and perks that money can buy, it was no life at all. Catch-me-if-you-can was really no-way-out.
Today, Frank is employed by the federal government as a fraud specialist. Corporations have hired him as a consultant to combat theft and scams and swindlers of all sorts. But he knows something different now – he knows that real contentment comes from playing by the rules, living in honest relationship, and embracing reality as it is.
Frank has come a long way from the dank and dark and damp hole of a French prison cell in Marseille, where Hanratty found him nearly dead. The extradition not only snatched him from the death knell in a forgotten isolation of a concrete cubicle, but opened the way to an inspiring rehabilitation; a changed life.
* * * * * * * * *
Everyone imagines life lived out as someone else, at one time or another. Particularly when times are hard. Disappointment strikes. Someone lets you down. You begin to wonder what it might be like to change your circumstance.
It’s a fantasy exploited by books and movies and other sorts of fiction.
Frank Abagnale learned it from his father. You are what people think you are. Frank Sr. maintained a high profile in the community as a war veteran (WWII) and a local business owner. But his shenanigans put him on the run from the taxman; leaving him penniless with a marriage on the rocks. Frank Jr. admired his father; and learned his duplicitous ways. An only child, Frank would do anything to get his mother and father back together, and to restore what his father lost.
Anything.
Broken, cynical, defeated, Frank Sr. convinced Frank Jr. that all of life is a game of cat and mouse. The best you can do is cheat and charm your way to the finish line. There is no way out.
Frank Jr. took those cues, and launched a four year run that would capture a nation’s curiosity.
* * * * * * * * *
This week, the winds blew. Some, at nearly one hundred miles per hour. Most of the time, there is a gentle breeze from the west, a constant light wind off the water. But occasionally, particularly during the winter months, a region of high pressure builds over the desert, in California’s desert basin, Nevada and Arizona, and pushes dry air down through mountain passes, building as it goes, until those westerlies are turned around entirely, and high gusts blow down from the east. “The Santa Anas,” we call them. Often, they pick up after dark.
Three nights in a row those winds wreaked havoc on Southern California, knocking down power lines and old trees and utility poles, lifting patio covers and mowing down signs and fences. We welcomed some house guests from Sweden, their first visit to Southern California. All night, the wind howled, a frightening whine and whistle, and we ate our dinner by candle-light.
Kris and Ben live at the end of a cul-de-sac where all the neighbors are new home-owners. The project was just completed before Christmas. Everything is new, including the trash pick-up routine. The night of the big winds, all the neighbors moved their trash out to the curb for pick up the next morning, and when the seventy mile Santa Ana’s blew down Cajon pass through the night, down the street of the new neighborhood, trash bins went over, tumbling down the street, paper and refuse on the fly, toward Kris and Ben’s front yard.
Sometimes, the wind blows.
* * * * * * * * *
There is a poignant moment in the film, Catch Me if You Can, when Frank Jr., finally captured in France, moved to the United States and imprisoned in a maximum security prison, when his captor, Agent Carl Hanratty, suggests that he may well be the perfect FBI agent, helping the Feds catch other “paperhangers” (bad check artists).
Hanratty becomes a father figure to young Abagnale, and offers him a life in the legitimate world. For the first time since his childhood, Frank finds a valid role to play. He’s got a name. He doesn’t have to pretend. Make up more lies. He’s just who he is.
Frank is released from a prison cell. He’s required to work a full time week in the offices of the FBI (Check Fraud Division). But he’s free on weekends.
One night, on the walk back to his apartment, he ponders a window display where there is on exhibit an airline pilot in uniform, along with a crew of stewardesses (that’s what they called flight attendants back then). The old juices kick in, and Frank becomes his old self, secures another Pan Am outfit and by Friday night, walks down the corridor of the airport terminal, ready to book another free deadhead flight to destination unknown, escaping Hanratty once more.
Hanratty meets him in the hallway. Knowing this day would surely come. It's a premonition that brought the agent to the airport this time. But there are no back-ups. No police force to capture Frank and haul him back to a lonely cell for parole violation. Hanratty just says, "Frank, if you really want that old life again, go 'head. Take it. I'm not going to stop you this time. It's up to you."
Frank is left with a choice.
Does he return to his old life? On the run? With no identity he can call his own? A perpetual fugitive? Or does he embrace the new freedom he’s only recently come to know… and return to legitimate life… where he is free to live and love and occupy a place without fear and isolation?
It takes a couple days.
But Frank Abagnale, Jr., breaks the pattern set by his father, and at that moment, is transformed.
On his own, by his own choice, of his own volition, he returns to the office, never again to play the imposter.
* * * * * * * *
It’s Monday morning. You are a leader.
You play roles. Sometimes, you find yourself in performance as a character that is a contradiction to you. You know you are playing a phony role. It’s Truth or Consequences. You know it’s a dead end. There may be a kind of exhilaration associated with the game. But you know it’s a charade.
Leonard DiCaprio plays the role of Frank Abagnale. Tom Hanks is FBI agent Hanratty. In the hit movie, Catch Me If You Can (a Spielberg film) they tell a larger story than the intriguing exploits of a young con man, a master imposter. It’s a story of family. How infidelity and breakups and dishonesty and dysfunction can create lasting, awful turmoil in an impressionable child. It’s a story of identity – how can I build meaningful relationships if I don’t know who I am? If I am pretending to be someone I am not? It’s a story of redemption, and second chances. It’s a story of the pay-off of hard headed determination, and persistence.
Sometimes the winds blow. Sometimes the trash gets explosed, and spread all over the neighborhood.
As a leader, you need to know who you are. What you value. What you bring to the table. It’s the real you that matters.
Be that person.
Stay true to your real identity.
As Hanratty tells Abagnale, “The house always wins.” Sooner or later, the charade will be exposed. The outstanding checks come due.
Might as well deal with it now. That’s where real freedom is.
You’ve got a name. That name will live on long after you.
God knows your name.
Be the real you. That's what He had in mind from the start.
Posted in Valley Center, California
© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2003
Special Thanks to my good friend David Belcher, owner of Rhino Media Group and creator of WisdomGram
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