@Urist: selling his soul and going on to destroy the lives of a great many people just like himself doesn't seem like anything remotely approaching a happy ending to me...
Conmen generally leave a string of destroyed people behind them. It only comes off as him being sympathetic because it's based on the book he wrote about himself. Naturally, he cast himself as a lovable scamp who didn't hurt anyone, instead of a selfish life-wrecking asshole. It's a good thing they weaponized him. Conmen generally only destroy, they don't create.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_AbagnaleFirst con
His first victim was his father, who gave Abagnale a gasoline credit card and a truck to assist him in commuting to his part-time job. To get date money, Abagnale devised a scheme in which he used the gasoline card to "buy" tires, batteries, and other car-related items at gas stations and then asked the attendants to give him cash in return for the products. Ultimately, his father was liable for a bill amounting to $3,400, equivalent to $28,394 in 2019. Abagnale was only 15 at the time.
Another trick he used was to magnetically print his account number on blank deposit slips and add them to the stack of real blank slips in the bank. This resulted in the deposits written on those slips by bank customers entering his account rather than the accounts of the legitimate customers
Yeah, so he was a total piece of shit basically, and managed to get away with it, then became successful, and wrote that autobiography painting himself as a lovable rogue. The sad part is that he didn't get longer in jail.
For eleven months, Abagnale impersonated a chief resident pediatrician in a Georgia hospital under the alias Frank Williams. He chose this course after he was nearly arrested disembarking from a flight in New Orleans.
...
However, he was nearly exposed when an infant became critically unwell from oxygen deprivation and he didn't initially understand the meaning or gravity of the situation when a nurse informed him of a "blue baby". He left the hospital only after he realized he could put lives at risk by his inability to respond to life-and-death situations.
So in other words he pretended to be a children's doctor until he almost killed a kid, then decided it was time to vamoose. It's his words that he was "concerned" that he could put lives in jeopardy rather than the fact that if someone died, he'd get caught.
EDIT: Also, it's a stretch to say that the FBI railroaded him into grassing up other con artists. He decided to do that himself, after working out that an honest living wasn't profitable. He made out that his arm was twisted in his book, probably, but he decided on that himself:
In 1974, after he had served less than five years of his 12-year sentence at Federal Correctional Institution in Petersburg, Virginia, the United States federal government released him on the condition that he help the federal authorities, without pay, to investigate crimes committed by fraud and scam artists, and sign in once a week. Unwilling to return to his family in New York, he left the choice of parole location up to the court, which decided that he would be paroled in Houston, Texas.
After his release, Abagnale tried numerous jobs, including cook, grocer, and movie projectionist, but he was fired from most of these after it was discovered he had been hired without revealing his criminal past. Finding those jobs he was able to land unsatisfying, he approached a bank with an offer. He explained to the bank what he had done and offered to speak to the bank's staff and show them various tricks that "paperhangers" use to defraud banks. His offer included the condition that if they did not find his speech helpful, they would owe him nothing; otherwise, they would owe him only $50, with an agreement that they would provide his name to other banks. With that, he began a legitimate life as a security consultant.
So, the deal was that he was an FBI advisor, if any only if needed, and without pay. However, he decided he could make money by grassing up other bank defrauders on the side. He spent a life fucking everyone else over for money and/or sex, why wouldn't he fuck over other people like himself if he could turn a buck doing that? It's not a happy or sad ending, it's just him moving on to exploiting a different class of people once his old scams weren't going to work anymore.
Author
Topic: The Movie Discussion Thread! (Read 132300 times)