Mr Abagnale -- who was played by Leonardo DiCaprio in the film Catch Me if You Can -- made a living impersonating doctors, pilots and other professional workers, but claims that faking legal knowledge was the simplest of the lot, reports the Minneapolis-St Paul Business Journal.
‘Of all the things I did, the easiest profession [to fake] was the lawyer,’ said Mr Abagnale, now a fraud consultant who lectures at the FBI Academy. ‘As the lawyer, I found most of it was a matter of research, which I was great at -- that's what I did to death-- and then basically persuading people that you're right and they're wrong... I found that the easiest of all the professions to impersonate.’
Although the con-man failed the bar exam twice, he passed the third time aged just 19 and soon landed a job in the Louisiana Attorney General's office.