Looking for Sean O’Riley

But who’s the cat in this “cat and mouse” game? Let’s see how Abagnale’s criminal career ended! “[...] in Washington, D.C., F.B.I. Inspector Sean O’Riley was ordered to drop all his other cases and concentrate solely on nabbing me.” (book “Catch Me If You Can”, page 77)

So, it’s Carl Hanratty (introduced in scene 2 and played by Tom Hanks) in the movie, and Sean O’Riley in the book. (The kid who gets paid to impersonate Abagnale as a diversion at the Miami Airport in scene 17 (1:39:16-1:45:17) misunderstands his name to be Handratty — another humiliation for the F.B.I. agent!)

Looking for William Rehder

Let’s start by saying that the real Hanratty was not a man called Sean O’Riley, the name used in the book “Catch Me If You Can”. The careful reader will find this warning in the book’s legend: “[...] all of the characters and some of the events have been altered, and all names, dates and places have been changed.” Duly noted!

Or read the interview with Abagnale added to the 2003 edition of the book: “‘O’Reilly’ is still alive and, I’m pleased to say, doing well. I have been on the telephone. He has watched my children grow up.” (page 214) Note that the interview speaks of “O’Reilly” between quotes, indicating that this is not his real name!

On page 202 of the book, prison Lieutenant Combs calls O’Riley the ultimate bank robbery specialist: “I’ve read about this guy O’Riley, [...] he’s supposed to be hell on wheels for nabbing bank robbers.”

And so I started searching for the bank robbery specialist(s) of the F.B.I. Admittedly, that took a while — I didn’t get anywhere with the search engines. I got a break when I studied the movie’s end credits closely. William J. Rehder is listed as “Technical Advisor” for the F.B.I.

Scene 22 (end titles) — 2:12:29

(Consulting on the movie set of “Catch Me If You Can” was not a first for Rehder! He collaborated on Kathryn Bigelow’s movie “Point Break” (1991). “Before ‘Point Break’ was filmed, I was told by the Special Agent in Charge [“SACs” are in charge of an F.B.I. field office] to take Keanu Reeves, a pleasant but somewhat spacey young man, under my wing and give him some pointers on how to portray an F.B.I. agent chasing bank robbers. Unfortunately, none of those pointers came within a million miles of the finished film.” (book “Where the Money Is”, page 262))
IMDB page on Point Break — Wikipedia page on Point Break

More importantly, in July 2003, the retired F.B.I. agent William J. Rehder published a book on bank robbers in 2003: “Where the Money Is”, with the help of ghost writer Gordon Dillow.

     

William Rehder (with Gordon Dillow)
“Where the Money Is”
True Tales from the Bank Robbery Capital of the World
W. W. Norton, 2003
ISBN 393051560

The title may require a bit of explanation for many readers. It’s of course a reference to a bank robber’s famous one-liner. Question: “Why do you rob banks?” Willie Sutton: “Because that’s where the money is!” Sutton always denied ever having said that, but he did author a book about his extensive criminal career called “Where the Money Was”. The process of considering the obvious first is now commonly called “Sutton’s law”, it’s mainly taught to medical students as a means to an efficient diagnosis.

      

Could Rehder be the real Hanratty-O’Riley with his name cleverly hidden in the end titles as “technical advisor”? Let’s make the case for William J. Rehder then…

Tom Hanks, William Rehder and Frank Abagnale on the movie set

William Rehder was indeed the F.B.I.’s number one man when it came to bank robberies.

I spent the next three decades chasing bank robbers for the F.B.I., almost all of it in Los Angeles, my first and last field office assignment after a year in Cleveland. In fact, as far as I can determine, I spent more years chasing bank robbers, and was involved in more bank robbery cases, than any other agent in Bureau history. In time I became known, if you’ll pardon the professional immodesty, as America’s foremost authority on the bank robbery genre.

[...] I developed the position of bank robbery coordinator, a kind of profiling job that required me to track serial bank bandits, to study their methods and habits, and try to predict when and where they would hit next. If you robbed a bank in Los Angeles, or almost anywhere else in America, my job was to get inside your head, to figure out what your story was. Although most of them never realized it, thousands of bank bandits had me looking over their shoulders. (book “Where the Money Is”, page 46)

Years later, CBS’s “48 Hours” TV news magazine would describe me as “the F.B.I.’s secret weapon in the war against bank robbers”. (book “Where the Money Is”, page 69)

Since my retirement I’ve often been asked to talk about bank robberies to various groups of bankers, security officials, and law enforcement officers. They bill me, flatteringly, as “America’s foremost authority on bank robberies”. (book “Where the Money Is”, page 98)

The psychological profile fits: F.B.I. agent or not, Rehder is a humane, mild-mannered person — as is Hanratty in the movie.

We’ve already quoted the ultimate proof for this, actually: “‘O’Reilly’ is still alive and, I’m pleased to say, doing well. I have been on the telephone. He has watched my children grow up.” (book “Catch Me If You Can”, page 214) (Rehder lives in Los Angeles; Abagnale lived in Tulsa, Oklahoma for many years and moved to Charleston, South Carolina in 2009, even if he has an office on Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C.) Unless you know many policemen that fraternize with the criminals they put behind bars…

In the book “Where the Money Is”, on page 97-98, Rehder discusses Eddie Dodson [not his real name!] who committed a record number of small-time bank robberies in Los Angeles and was sentenced to long prison terms twice: “And he and I have become — well, friends. [...] We’ve exchanged letters, and spent hours on the phone together — two retirees talking about old times. [...] We’ve even talked about going on the road together after he gets out.” (Eddie Dodson was armed, Abagnale never carried a weapon or committed violence.) Same argument: how many policemen are willing to etc.?

It all looks good so far, doesn’t it? But two things bothered me greatly: for one, Rehder does not mention Abagnale anywhere. How could he not discuss this spectacular case — one he worked full-time at some point, direct orders from the top — in his book? And he certainly didn’t have to protect Abagnale’s identity: Abagnale’s book was first published in 1980, 23 years before Rehder’s book. Talk about a cat out of the bag!

Rehder’s age turned out to be another problem: he joined the F.B.I. in 1966 and started work on bank robberies in 1967 in Los Angeles where he spent his entire career after a 1-year stint in Cleveland as an F.B.I. “rookie”. If indeed he went after Abagnale, it must have been at the very start of his career, not later on when many years of experience had made him the Bureau’s “top dog” to solve bank jobs.

(What do we really know about Hanratty’s age? Nothing! The published screenplay contains a single clue (on page 154). It has the movie end with the following title card: “Special agent Carl Hanratty retired in 1986 [...]”. (That’s specific information because F.B.I. agents retire at the age of 57.) Only, this bit was dropped from the movie and a date is quickly changed to protect somebody’s identity...)

And so my search for the real Hanratty ended in frustration: my candidate was a perfect fit, but the timeline didn’t make any sense! I became convinced that not William Rehder but his predecessor was Carl Hanratty.

(One more thing: you can now get to know William Rehder a bit better by watching the bonus material “The F.B.I. Perspective”. It takes the recent release of “Catch Me If You Can” on Blu-ray to get your hands on it, though! None of the previouses releases I’m aware of include this section — as much as it would have helped me in my search for the real Carl Hanratty...)

An Obituary for Joseph Shea

And so Carl Hanratty remained an “unsub” to me in the end. Twice a year, I would hit the search engines again to see if new data had become available. No results for a number of years.

Nevertheless, this story has a happy ending! After his death, Hanratty’s identity was disclosed on the Internet — although it’s still virtually impossible to find much real information on him…

The real Carl Hanratty was — drumrolls please — F.B.I. agent Joseph (“Joe”) Gerald Shea, a man of Boston Irish descent! (Is that “East Coast” enough for you?)

Make no mistake: that Joe Shea is indeed Carl Hanratty is beyond doubt! Abagnale’s book “Stealing Your Life”, contains the following dedication: “In memory of Joseph G. Shea, Special Agent, Federal Bureau of Investigation (Carl Hanratty)”. Well, there you have it!

Frank W. Abagnale
“Stealing Your Life”
The Ultimate Identity Theft Prevention Plan
Thorndike Press, 2007
ISBN 0786298707

(Remember for instance the Apollo 15 astronaut Dave Scott who took a bribe from a German stamp dealer to take a collection of commemorative postal covers to the moon and back for him. Mr. David Scott became an instant “persona non grata” at N.A.S.A. for this bit of chicanery. He and his crew members Alfred Worden and James Irwin, who were in on the stunt, never flew again.)

        

Any collaboration the F.B.I. gives to Hollywood is discrete and often “uncredited” — even after you retire. And I’m not even mentioning the Hoover years when the Bureau exerted the tighest possible control on press relations, certainly a culture that was deeply ingrained in Joseph Shea.

        

Several sources claim that Tom Hanks himself came up with the name Carl Hanratty, but only the actor can confirm that. It’s supposedly a combination of Carl Betz, a star on the “Donna Reed Show”, and Terry Hanratty, a former Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback.

In the end, I never did discover the true identity of Carl Hanratty. As far as I can tell, his children spilled the beans at his death, in his obituary. Not that this bothers me: we’re all entitled to our privacy, and my quest was limited to fair, legitimate means — studying the written sources closely, searching among the public information available on the Internet etc. After all, I’m a philologist and movie buff, not a paparazzo or a sleazy reporter!

Even now, there’s hardly any information available on Joe Shea. In the bonus material on the two-disc special edition of the DVD, Frank Abagnale tells us that the real Hanratty is Boston Irish (bonus DVD, Cast Me If You Can: The Casting of the Film — Tom Hanks as Carl Hanratty, 0:51-0:55). And in a written source, Abagnale reports that Joe Shea died in 2005 at the age of 85. He’s buried at Georgia Memorial Park Cemetery, Marietta.

That date is indeed correct. Joe Shea was born in Brookline, Massachussets, in 1919; his mother was Irish born. (Told you: Boston Irish!) He joined the Army in 1942 and spent the war as Command Sergeant Major in the 36th Division. Sent to the European theatre, he participated in the crucial Battle of Monte Cassino! This campaign was part of the push towards Rome; it led to 54,000 allied casualties. It is well known in the U.S.A.: when Abagnale lived in Tulsa, Oklahoma, his three sons attended the Monte Cassino school…

          

After the war, Joseph studied Accounting at the Boston College and joined the F.B.I. as an identification clerk to become a Special Agent in 1951. During his career, he worked in several regional offices, including Louisville, Atlanta and Chicago — more about the Windy City shortly.

Another known case he worked on is the Barbara Mackle kidnapping of 1968; it inspired an autobiography and two TV movies. (“83 Hours ’til Dawn” (1990) is utterly unremarkable despite a cast that includes Paul Winfield, Samantha Mathis and Lee Ermey, the drill instructor from Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket”.) The twenty-year old student Mackle, whose father Robert owned one of the biggest home-building companies in America and was a personal friend of President Richard Nixon, survived being buried alive in a box for more than three days.

      

Still, his role in this case was marginal at best. The 400-page book, which mentions dozens and dozens of F.B.I. agents, doesn’t contain his name. The book also explains why: most of the 150 agents in the Miami F.B.I. field office, where the Mackle family lived, worked on the case (page 209). So did the Atlanta field office with 100 agents (page 263). Georgia is where Barbara Jane Mackle studied, was kidnapped and buried alive in the woods. And we know agent Joseph Shea worked in Atlanta and lived in Marietta, Georgia for years.

A family member found it worthwhile to include the Mackle kidnapping in Shea’s obit, which is the only reason we know about it. In reality, his involvement was insignificant.

Shea retired in December 1977 — that date makes perfect sense given our timeline! —, moved to a farm in Kentucky before he returned to Marietta in 1997, where his two daughters Reva and Ruth then lived.

On to Chicago and more Americana: F.B.I. agent Joseph Shea spent much of his career on the “Organized Crime” task force of the Chicago field office. And so it happens that his name crops up in the “Warren Commission Report”, no less!

    

But hold your horses: whatever the Bureau did wrong — which is one hell of a lot, actually — Joseph Shea did not do it. Here’s the account of his minute and ultimately marginal contribution to the investigation of John Kennedy’s assassination…

The week after the president’s execution in Dallas, he was asked to look into Jack Ruby, the murderer of Lee Harvey Oswald, for a few hours and couldn’t come up with anything even remotely interesting. Talking to connected nightclub owners — a long shot to begin with — turned into a dead end after seconds.

     

Anyway, here are the F.B.I. reports in full.

Commission Exhibit 1209 (interview with Tony Leonardi) (PDF file, 57 KB)
Commission Exhibit 1211 (report on Ruby’s acquaintances in Chicago) + Commission Exhibit 1212 (interview with Frank Loverde) (PDF file, 80 KB)

I’m sure every F.B.I. agent on the anti-mob team, if not the entire field office, put in his bit to investigate Jack Ruby, né Jack Rubinstein, of Chicago.

The fact that thousands of reports were published at all is quite a joke, actually. This was done at the insistence of J.F.K.’s successor Lyndon Johnson. Publishing not just the actual report but also 26 volumes of largely irrelevant appendices — including a study of Lee Harvey Oswald’s pubic hair — would prove once and for all that the government had nothing to hide. “The American public don’t read!”, he added cynically.

But has a presidential ploy ever backfired more than that? Private researchers were quick to detect inconsistencies, leads that were never followed, destroyed evidence, altered and omitted documents and what have you… Too bad, Lyndon, but the American public does read!

In interviews, Abagnale describes Hanks’ performance as highly accurate — down to Shea’s mannerisms. And he reports that Joseph Shea visited the movie set. Furthermore, I was told by a close friend that Joseph Shea attended the premiere and sat next to Tom Hanks during dinner. This information I give you for what it’s worth: I never found the photographic evidence you can reasonably expect in such cases to support the claims…

Frank Abagnale on Joseph (“Joe”) Shea (“Carl Hanratty”)

In closing, here are two genuine if small pictures of Joe Shea. In the first photo, Shea (second from the right) poses with Abagnale (first on the left) and some Bureau colleagues. The blowup is meant to put a recognizable face on the name. I know the photos are no bigger than stamps, but that’s all you can find on the Internet. (At least, my stamps are untainted by corruption.)

     

Catch the Catchy Tunes

The musical “Catch Me If You Can” (that opened on Broadway in April 2011) takes this further: in the non-singing part of track 17, “Stuck Together (Strange but True)”, Hanratty is said to have become the godfather of Abagnale’s children! (They’re called Scott, Chris and Sean.) As I found no confirmation of this fact anywhere — Abagnale hasn’t mentioned it once when discussing his friendship with Joe Shea —, we can assume this is poetic liberty.

       

His wife Kelly Welbes and middle son Chris own a fashion boutique in the historic downtown of Charleston. His youngest son creates computer games for Glu Mobile in China.

In track 11, “Little Boy, Be a Man”, the lyrics describe Hanratty as having no kids. In the movie, he’s presented as a divorcé… with a (grown-up) daughter. In reality, Joseph Shea has two daughters, but frankly, it doesn’t matter. It has no impact on the rest of the story, which makes it a purely private affair…

Besides, it’s a classic screenwriter’s trick to portray Hanratty as a single man. It places him opposite slick, suave Abagnale who picks up girls the way other people pick up their mail in the morning. In scene 11, you see Abagnale seducing a model in a posh hotel while Hanratty is washing, no, ruining his own shirts at the laundrette. And why would he volunteer to spend Christmas Eve at the office in scene 12 (1:01:04-1:03:37) when the other F.B.I. agents are at home with their family? Hell, that government job is all he’s got left, right?

Other than that, it’s just another musical. It contains hardly any factual data about Abagnale, just simple not to say bland lyrics and — luckily! — catchy, upbeat tunes. No different from any other show on Broadway. Mind you, film composer Marc Shaiman has created brilliant work alright but I have a hard time seeing this musical as distinguished work.

Here are the opening lines: “Live in living color / Let me take you for a ride / Yes, I’m live in living color / So sit back and let me be your T.V. guide.” Impressed? I’m not. And to make matters worse, the booklet of the accompanying CD prints the lyrics… ALL IN UPERCASES. JESUS, WHO CAME UP WITH THAT ONE?

       

But maybe you find my criticism unfair with the “high-flying” music missing… Be my guest and like the show if you saw it. After all, people also like “Cats”, “Hairspray” (another musical by Shaiman and Whittman) or the “The Book Of Mormon”. Or buy the CD recorded with the original cast now that the show has closed.

Marc Shaiman – Scott Wittman
“Catch Me If You Can”
Ghostlight Records, 2011
ISAN B0050546MS

(A German version of the musical premièred in Dresden in 2015; a 2-CD album, surprisingly more complete than the English CD, is available with the translated lyrics sung by the original German cast. That’s what “Erstaufführung” means. Did the musical tour the country afterwards, possibly with another cast? I couldn’t tell you…)

Marc Shaiman – Scott Wittman
“Catch Me If You Can — Das Musical”
Hitsquad Records, 2015
ISAN B0147US8B6