http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Abagnale
Frank William Abagnale, Jr. (born April 27, 1948) is an American security consultant best known for his history as a former confidence trickster, check forger, skilled impostor and escape artist. He became notorious in the 1960s for successfully passing US$4 million worth of meticulously forged checks across 26 countries over the course of five years, starting when he was only 17 years old. In the process, he claimed to have assumed no fewer than eight separate identities, successfully impersonated an airline pilot, a doctor, a prison inspector and a lawyer. He escaped from police custody twice (once from a taxiing airliner and once from a US federal penitentiary), all before he was 21 years old.[1]
Abagnale’s life story provided the inspiration for the feature film Catch Me If You Can, based on his ghostwritten autobiography of the same name. He is currently a consultant and lecturer at the academy and field offices for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He also runs Abagnale & Associates, a financial fraud consultancy company.[2]
Abagnale forged a Harvard University law transcript, passed the bar exam of Louisiana and got a job at the office of the state attorney general of Louisiana at the age of nineteen. This happened while he was posing as Pan Am First Officer “Robert Black”. He told a stewardess he had briefly dated that he was also a Harvard law student and she introduced him to a lawyer friend. Abagnale was told the bar needed more lawyers and was offered a chance to apply. After making a fake transcript from Harvard, he prepared himself for the compulsory exam. Despite failing twice, he claims to have passed the bar exam legitimately on the third try after 8 weeks of study, because “Louisiana at the time allowed you to (take) the Bar over and over as many times as you needed. It was really a matter of eliminating what you got wrong.”[7]
In his biography, he described the premise of his legal job as a “gopher boy” who simply fetched coffee and books for his boss. However, there was a real Harvard graduate who also worked for that attorney general, and he hounded Abagnale with questions about his tenure at Harvard. Naturally, Abagnale could not answer questions about a university he had never attended, and he later resigned after eight months to protect himself, after learning the suspecting graduate was making inquiries into his background.
Amazing.