Catch Me If You Can Page 0,59

have to allow time for your check to clear, and since it's an in-town check the three-day waiting period applies."

"I understand," I reply. I do, too. I've already ascertained that's the waiting period enforced by savings and loan institutions for in-town checks.

I wait six days and on the morning of the sixth day I return to Old Settlers. But I deliberately seek out a different teller. I hand him my passbook. "I need to withdraw $5,500," I say. If the teller had questioned the amount of the withdrawal, I would have said that I was buying a house or given some other plausible reason. But few savings and loan bank tellers pry into a customer's personal affairs.

This one didn't. He checked the account file. The account was six days old. The in-town check had obviously cleared. He returned my passbook with a cashier's check for $5,500.

I cashed it at the Bean State Bank and left town... before my check for $6,500 returned from Los Angeles, where the clearing-house bank computer had routed it.

I invested in another I-Tek camera and printing press and did the same thing with my phony Pan Am expense checks. I made up different batches for passing in different areas of the country, although all the checks were purportedly payable by Chase Manhattan Bank, New York.

New York is in the Second Federal Reserve District. Bona fide checks on banks in New York all have a series of numerals beginning with the number 02. But all the phony checks I passed on the East Coast, or in northeastern or southeastern states, were routed first to San Francisco or Los Angeles. All the phony checks I passed in the Southwest, Northwest or along the West Coast were first routed to Philadelphia, Boston or some other point across the continent.

My numbers game was the perfect system for floats and stalls. I always had a week's running time before the hounds picked up the spoor. I learned later that I was the first check swindler to use the routing numbers racket. It drove bankers up the wall. They didn't know what the hell was going on. They do now, and they owe me.

I worked my schemes overtime, all over the nation, until I decided I was just too hot to cool down. I had to leave the country. And I decided I could worry about a passport in Mexico as fretfully as I could in Richmond or Seattle, since all I needed to visit Mexico was a visa. I obtained one from the Mexican Consulate in San Antonio, using the name Frank Williams and presenting myself as a Pan Am pilot, and deadheaded to Mexico City on an Aero-Mexico jet.

I did not take the entire proceeds of my crime spree with me. Like a dog with access to a butcher-shop bone box and forty acres of soft ground, I buried my loot all over the United States, stashing stacks of cash in bank safe-deposit boxes from coast to coast and from the Rio Grande to the Canadian border.

I did take some $50,000 with me into Mexico, concealed in thin sheafs in the lining of my suitcases and the linings of my jackets. A good customs officer could have turned up the cash speedily, but I didn't have to go through customs. I was wearing my Pan Am uniform and was waived along with the AeroMexico crew.

I stayed in Mexico City a week. Then I met a Pan Am stewardess, enjoying a five-day holiday in Mexico, and accepted her invitation to go to Acapulco for a weekend. We were airborne when she suddenly groaned and said a naughty word. "What's the matter?" I asked, surprised to hear such language from such lovely lips.

"I meant to cash my paycheck at the airport," she said. "I've got exactly three pesos in my purse. Oh, well, I guess the hotel will cash it."

"I'll cash it, if it's not too much," I said. "I'm sending my own check off tonight for deposit, and I can just run it through my bank. How much is it?"

I really didn't care how much cash was involved. A real Pan Am check! I wanted it. I got it for $288.15, and stowed it carefully away. I never did cash it, although it netted me a fortune.

I liked Acapulco. It teemed with beautiful people, most of them rich, famous or on the make for something or other, sometimes all three. We stayed at a hotel frequented by airline crews, but I