Tonight Show appearance of Frank Abagnale (1978)
I had no idea he appeared so long ago. This interview was put on YouTube 6/14/22
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIYtKR24LQs
That is a very entertaining video. The guy was truly charming and you can see why he was a confidence man. The question is whether he’s conning Johnny with his stories.
Several investigative journalists and agencies have proven some of those stories apocryphal. There is a post on the YouTube video that says, “Johnny was so riveted and engaged […] that he extended [Abagnale] to 3 segments” on the fly during the first commercial break which required bumping the musical guest for that night. It also says Abagnale was so popular that he made several other appearances on The Tonight Show thereafter. It appears he was making up the majority of his stories out of thin air, so the guy essentially conned his way into TV late night
I just took a look at the Wikipedia article on him and it is worse than I thought--in terms of him not actually, not really, revealing the truth about his claims after he supposedly came clean. Some of this is due to a 2020 book about him debunking his claims. I remember watching a Google talk he gave, I'll re-watch to see if as recent as 2017 he is still exaggerating or outright lying. [links below]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Abagnale
https://www.amazon.com/Greatest-Hoax-Earth-Catching-Truth-ebook/dp/B08P3X22K5/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsMydMDi3rI
I had not heard of the book but went to the Amazon link you posted and read the comments. Some were made by people who personally knew Abagnale. Imagine having an Amazon webpage dedicated to revealing you’re a liar and your life story a hoax. The Amazon comments led me to an article about what the book uncovered.
https://www.theirishworld.com/frank-abagnale/
The devastating conclusion is that at best, Abagnale’s exploits amounted to walking around “dress[ed] as a Pan Am pilot for three months….”
The book also bursts the fiction that Abagnale’s money cons only involved big corporations and no real victims. The truth is he “Ripped off ordinary hard-working people”
Yep. Turns out he was a pretty small-time scammer during his life of crime, and his biggest con, ironically enough, has been selling himself to the public as such a high-powered and successful swindler that the FBI put a dedicated task force on the job of catching him, and took years before they could finally do it.
shareThe film 'Catch Me If you Can' was fun, seeing since the audience thought it was a true story.
None of that stuff he did is interesting in retrospect if it's all bullshit.
And it was. All bullshit. A couple of reporters thoroughly dismantled almost all of his claims, and showed, not just that they weren't true, but that they couldn't be true, because during the period he was claiming to have been doing all this stuff and evading the FBI, he was in and out of a series of prisons and local jails. The federal prison in Georgia he claimed to have escaped from, he was never incarcerated in. He did steal from ordinary people, despite his claims he only ever stole from banks and big companies (the reporters found the victims and got their stories).
Watch the video of his Tonight Show appearance in 1978. He tells a really funny story about swindling a thousand-dollar-a-night hooker (and a thousand bucks in the late sixties/early seventies, which is when this is supposed to have happened, is around five grand in today's money) into giving him a night's pleasure, and four-hundred bucks, paid to him by conning her into accepting a counterfeit $1,400.00 cashier's check and giving him change. And the audience cheers and claps because, to them, it's just one criminal getting over on another, and people admire cleverness, even when it's shady.
It's a funny story, but it's certainly complete bullshit, like most of the details about his autobiography. And it is amusing how readily people accept it, never stopping to think: hey, this guy's crimes all involved deception. Lying. What would make anyone trust that he's telling the truth now?
The guy is obviously just a compulsive liar who got lucky. He reminds of that guy Tucker Max. You heard of him? Used to tell all these frat boy stories that sounded like jackanory but it got him famous in the pre-social media age. He went on Opie & Anthony and got called out on it, I'm not sure he recovered: https://youtu.be/dMRo30ptGbc?feature=shared&t=285
The Tonight show story would be really funny if it was true, but it's obviously not. Can you imagine that story going down today on Fallon and the audience all laughing? They'd be crying, and he'd be public enemy number one.