You may have heard the tale of Frank Abagnale, Jr., but it is unlikely that you have heard it directly from him, unfiltered and in his own words.

“Thirty years ago a journalist wrote a book about my life from his point of view,” said Abagnale at a seminar hosted by Itasca Bank & Trust Co. in Oak Brook. “Years later Steven Spielberg made a movie about my life. I never saw a script and he never interviewed me for it. He told it from his point of view.

“I thought today that I might share my point of view.”

What made Abagnale well known to the general public was the 2002 feature film “Catch Me If You Can” starring Tom Hanks and Leonardo DiCaprio, which told of Abagnale’s exploits as a teenage con man who traveled the world and amassed a million dollar fortune by writing bad checks and posing as an airline pilot, doctor and a lawyer.

Abagnale said that he was quite fond of the film, not because of how Spielberg depicted his perceived glamorous lifestyle but how the director honored his service to his country after he was reformed.

Once chased by the FBI, the former criminal has now called his old pursuer his employer for 32 years. Abagnale considers it a blessing that he was able to repay his debt to society in such a manner.

“I am very fortunate to live in a country that allows second chances,” said Abagnale.

He would eventually find personal redemption by working for the FBI to help catch criminals like himself through developing and patenting anti-fraud devices. The patents would make him a millionaire.

He was able to then pay back $500,000 of the money he stole that was never recovered.

However, Abagnale does not hide his past and focus solely on his accomplishments.

“I have turned down three pardons from three different presidents,” he said. “I don’t believe that a piece of paper can excuse my actions. Only my actions can do that.”

While his criminal life may have made for a fun Hollywood caper film, when Abagnale looks back on his former life he is rather contrite and troubled about the path he took.

“I wasn’t brilliant or a genius,” he said. “If I had been, I probably wouldn’t have found it necessary to break the law. People are always fascinated about the life I lived. But now I look at it as immoral and something I would be ashamed to do today.”

Abagnale dazzled the crowd with his account of his life on the run from the law, often drawing huge laughs and quite a few gasps at the audacity that the then 16-year-old displayed in conning people.

However, his true message was that of the importance of family and how his true contentment in life was not found until he was mature enough to have his own.

“Being a good husband and a good father made me content,” he said. “Being a real man means putting your wife and children first.”

His tale began in upstate New York, where as a 16-year-old child he was pulled out of Catholic school one day and driven to the White Plains county courthouse. He did not know why he was there.

He was asked to enter the courtroom where he saw his mother and his father. Unable to speak to them, he was led to the stand where the judge addressed him. It was there that he learned for the first time of his parents’ divorce.

Because he was 16, the judge said that he had to choose whether to stay with his mother or his father. Unable to bear the weight of the question and devastated by the news, Abagnale ran out of the courtroom crying. He would not see his mother for seven years and, unlike the way it was depicted in the movie, he never saw his father again.

His criminal behavior began when he started to look for part-time jobs to support himself. He quickly noticed that as a 16-year-old with no high school diploma he received little pay and few hours.

He then forged his first identification card to make him 10 years older. He found that as a 26-year-old he could get better wages. Still unsatisfied with the amount of money he was making and unwilling to return home, Abagnale posed as a pilot.

Through a series of ingenious and duplicitous steps, Abagnale was able to impersonate a Pan Am pilot. He eventually would fly more than 1 million free miles, board 250 aircraft and visit 26 countries. None of these flights were on Pan Am planes though.

“Before deregulation the airlines all acted like one big family,” he said. “I would fly the jump seat on other airlines if it was open and I would pass myself off with all of the airline jargon I learned at the airport. It was basically the same conversation every time.”

During that time Abagnale found a way to continue to cash faulty checks at each individual airline and set himself up with a small fortune.

Once the FBI was hot on his trail he hung up the pilot’s uniform and headed to Atlanta where he passed himself off as a doctor by reading medical journals at Emory University to get the dialogue down. He claimed that he was only licensed to practice in California and was able to avoid any actual practice of medicine.

After that, Abagnale did go to Louisiana and take the bar exam, but while the movie had him passing it with only two weeks of preparation, in real life it took eight, he said.

Eventually though, the con would be up, and Abagnale always knew that some day he would find himself behind bars.

“I always knew that I would get caught,” said Abagnale. “The law sometimes sleeps, but it never dies.”

He was apprehended by the French police when he was 21 years old. By that time he had cashed $2.5 million in fraudulent checks since he began the practice at 16.

His prison tour began as he was jailed in France for fraud, extradited to Sweden where he was tried and imprisoned, and finally extradited to the U.S. where he was imprisoned for another 12 years.

He eventually did four years time in the U.S. and was able to be released into the FBI to work in the counter-fraud department.

“I was very young and I saw things that I shouldn’t have,” Abagnale said about his prison time and criminal life. “I grew up very fast in that time period.”

While in prison Abagnale’s father died in a freak accident in the New York subway where he slipped and hit his head.

“My father was a very loving man,” he said. “He would tuck us in every night, even when I was a teenager, and he would tell us that he loved us.”

And while Abagnale said that he did not want to use his parents’ divorce as a crutch for the things he did, he did say that it had a profound impact on him.

“Divorce is a devastating thing for a child to bear,” said Abagnale. “I had to choose between my mom and my dad, but instead I ran. It was not a glamorous life, though. I was lonely, I didn’t have any friends and I cried myself to sleep every night until I was 19.”