The former con man and focus of the 2002 hit movie "Catch Me If You Can" Frank Abagnale told a crowd at Packard Music Hall in Warren "it's not so much the people you impersonate when you're a teenager ... It's the crimes you perpetrate."

Abagnale was one of the world's most famous con artists in the 1960s, earning the name "The Skywayman" and "The Great Impostor" as he cashed $2.6 million in phony checks and assumed the roles of an airline pilot, a doctor, a college professor and an assistant district attorney. He committed all these crimes before he was old enough to drink.

Abagnale spoke Wednesday as part of the Trumbull Town Hall Lecture series, one of the programs offered by the YWCA of Warren.

He talked about his life and described how the divorce of his parents when he was 16 changed everything he knew.

He was taken out of school one day and brought to family court, where the judge told him to decide whether he wanted to live with his father or his mother. Up to that point, Abagnale said, his parents had never mentioned anything about a divorce to Abagnale or his three siblings.

"So here was this stranger telling me to decide which of the two people -- who I loved most in my life -- that I loved more," he said. "I ran from the courtroom, and the judge called for a recess. But before my parents could even get out the door, I was gone."

At first, Abagnale said, he tried to earn an honest living. But he found out that in New York City at 16, it's hard to get a job to live on.

"So I changed one digit on my driver's license," he said, making him a decade older. "And soon, people were paying me a little more, giving me a few more hours. But I still couldn't support myself."

So Abagnale began by walking into banks in New York and cashing checks from a checking account his father had opened for him.

"I would go up to banks where they didn't know me, and they would cash my checks," Abagnale said. "Years later, reporters would say it was because of my mannerisms, my upbringing, my dress, my speech."

One con lead to another, and in three years, he'd written millions of dollars of bad checks, assumed the identities of a pilot, which gained him millions of miles in free air travel (though he never touched the controls), a doctor and a lawyer.

Eventually, though, his crimes had to catch up with him, Abagnale said.

"Only a fool would believe you can break the law for so long and not get caught," he said. "The law may sleep for a while, but it never dies."

Abagnale served six months in both French and Swiss prisons before being extradited to the United States, where he was sentenced to 12 years in federal prison for "all crimes, known and unknown," according to his latest book, "The Art of the Steal."

He was paroled after four years on the condition that he work for the FBI in an anti-fraud capacity for the length of his parole.

Three decades later, Abagnale is still with the bureau and serves as a consultant to big businesses, giving them advice on how to track down frauds and cons and telling them how to keep from being scammed. He is credited with devising many now-common banking security features.

"It's hard to look in your wallet and find something that I've not helped develop," he said.

All in all, Abagnale said, it wasn't prison that reformed him.

"I could tell you that I'm a born again Christian; I could tell you prison rehabilitated me; or I could tell you that I just grew up," Abagnale said. "But really, all it was, was I met my wife. She changed me ... that and the respect I need from my three sons."

Abagnale now lives in Oklahoma with his wife of 26 years and three college-age sons, one of whom is about to graduate from law school.

You can e-mail Herald Staff Writer Amanda Smith-Teutsch at: ateutsch@sharonherald.com