79 pages • 2 hours read
Frank Abagnale, Stan ReddingCatch Me If You Can: The True Story of a Real Fake
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1980A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 9-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 9 Summary: “Does This Tab Include the Tip?”
Abagnale explains that he chose to settle in Montpellier, France because the region is the ancestral home of his mother. He buys a small cottage with a high fence and spends his days driving around, hiking, or hanging out with a local vineyard owner. He stops by to see his grandparents and discreetly asks about his mother. He learns she has told relatives Frank is hitchhiking around the world.
At a market he regularly goes to, Abagnale is accosted by three gun-wielding gendarmes. They hustle him into the back of unmarked sedan and take him to the police station. A hardened detective identifies Abagnale by name and slaps him when he attempts to deny his identity. He threatens to place Abagnale in a cell with no food until he cooperates, and Abagnale signs an affidavit confessing to his crimes in France. The trial is straightforward and Abagnale offers no defense, but the lawyer cites Abagnale’s youth and the fact that he comes from a broken home as reasons for Abagnale’s criminal actions. Abagnale is sentenced to a year in prison.
The French prison is very rough. Abagnale is forced to live in a dark cell with only an empty bucket to relieve himself into. He subsists on a starvation-level diet. To comfort himself, he fantasizes about being a real pilot. A man from the American Consulate comes to the prison. He explains that he is powerless to assist Abagnale because every man is treated with equal harshness. He explains that authorities from another country will soon arrive.
When a guard comes to escort Abagnale from the prison, Abagnale is horrified by the sight of mold, excrement, and maggots that have accumulated in the cell. He is led to a room with a mirror and is terrified by his own reflection. The gendarmes outfit Abagnale into a variety of crude restraints and lead him through a series of train and car rides. He feels hungry, weak, and sick. He is taken to the Scandinavian Airlines Service counter at Orly Airport, where he is met by a man and woman from the Swedish police. The woman demands that Abagnale’s chains be removed at once.
Chapter 10 Summary: “Put Out an APB—Frank Abagnale Has Escaped!”
The woman introduces herself as Jan Lundstrom. She explains that the Swedish value humane treatment of prisoners. At the station in Malmo, Abagnale is taken to an elegantly-furnished apartment, where he meets with a doctor. The doctor says Abagnale is suffering from severe malnutrition and calls an ambulance. He is taken to a private room in a Swedish hospital where he spends a month recuperating.
With the aid of a translator, Lundstrom interrogates Abagnale about his criminal activities in Sweden. After two days, she becomes exasperated and asks why he isn’t being honest. When he explains that he doesn’t want to go to jail for twenty years, Lundstrom laughs because in Sweden, the maximum sentence for his crime is one year.
Abagnale is taken to a very comfortable Swedish prison wherein he can wear his own clothes, freely send letters, attend school, and work a regular job with fair wages. Abagnale remarks that escape would’ve been easy, but escape never entered his mind. He is informed many other nations have made formal requests to extradite him, including Italy, where prisons are even harsher than they are in France. A Swedish judge comes to speak with Abagnale personally. The judge asks Abagnale if, given the chance to start anew, he would choose a constructive life. When Abagnale answers affirmatively, the judge tells him that he has ordered revocation of Abagnale’s passport so Abagnale can be sent back to the U.S., regardless of pending extradition. The judge explains that no other country can try Abagnale once he is sent back to his own country.
In New York, Abagnale escapes through a toilet hatch on the plane he flies in on. He scales a cyclone fence and hails a passing cab. Abagnale visits a girl in the Bronx who has a stash of his money and clothes. He takes a train to Montreal and collects $20,000 from a safe deposit box. He intends to take a flight to Brazil, having learned in prison that Brazil and the U.S. have no extradition treaty. At the Montreal Airport, he is picked up by the Mounted Police and delivered to U.S. police, who take him to jail in Fulton County, Georgia.
Conditions are bad in the Fulton County jail, and he is soon after sent to an even harsher Federal jail in Atlanta. There, Abagnale takes advantage of two guards who suspect him of being a prison inspector. He tricks them with an elaborate plan involving the aid of a female friend, who helps create fake business cards for both FBI agent O’Riley and an inspector from the U.S. Bureau of Prisons. Abagnale approaches the guards claiming to be a prison inspector and produces his fake card. He then claims he needs to call O’Riley, and the guards dial the number on Abagnale’s fake O’Riley card. The number directs to a payphone in a local mall, where Abagnale’s friend answers, pretending to be O’Riley’s secretary. The guards are satisfied that Abagnale is a prison inspector and they release him.
Abagnale takes a bus to New York, where he collects more of his belongings, then takes a train to Washington, D.C. and checks into a motel. An hour after checking into his room, he glances through his drapes and sees several police cars. He later learns that the hotel registration clerk was a former airline stewardess who recognized him immediately.
Luckily, O’Riley has ordered police to wait until his arrival to arrest Abagnale. This enables Abagnale to exit through the back door, wearing a dark coat. Impersonating an FBI agent, he asks for O’Riley, and is directed to the front of the building. Abagnale walks past the hotel parking lot, making his final escape.
Chapters 9-10 Analysis
While in France, Abagnale finds peculiar peace as a disguised man pretending to be a former film director from Los Angeles. He learns from his grandparents that his mother has perpetuated her own cynical performance back in New York, telling friends and family there that Abagnale is hitchhiking around the world. Ironically, she does not realize that her lie is very near to the truth.
Abagnale’s encounter with the mirror in Chapter Nine is an interesting inversion of the mirror scene at the beginning of Chapter One. In Chapter One, Abagnale reflects that “a man’s alter ego is nothing more than his favorite image of himself” (1), suggesting Abagnale’s search for an ideal self is behind his pilot persona. This suggestion is affirmed by Abagnale’s prison daydreams of being a real pilot, of truly occupying this ideal self. In Chapter Nine, he encounters a darker side of his reflection, one he is unable to recognize (or perhaps refuses to recognize): “It was a man. It had to be a man, but God in heaven, what manner of man was this?” (240). This moment can be interpreted as Abagnale’s encountering of the Jungian “shadow self” beneath his persona. It could also be read as a horrified refusal to face his reflection, and, by extension, the consequences of his actions.
Chapters Nine and Ten also present vividly-contrasting descriptions of prison life between France and Sweden. Through these descriptions, Abagnale suggests two differing political philosophies: the French see prison as a punishment, while the Swedish see prison as an opportunity for rehabilitation. Abagnale strongly endorses the Swedish perspective, expressing that as a prisoner, he never even contemplated escape. Abagnale explores further political insinuations with the prison he escapes from in Atlanta, suggesting his escape was in large part owed to the civil rights movement. If the prison guards had not already been suspicious of the prison industrial complex (and had prior experiences with prison investigators), he probably couldn’t have pulled off his scam.
