This is the story of a robbery. It was Philadelphia, in the final days of spring, 1963. The penetrating heat reflected off the street and made the air look murky. Beads of sweat beat steadily upon the keys of my father’s cash register. He’d never worked there—neither had any of his fellow cashiers. He’d come, along with several dozen other veteran Penn Fruit checkers, to help with the grand opening. Everything was on sale—some items priced below cost—and the lines stretched into the aisles. The stacks of bills were just beginning to push against the till’s spring-loaded arms when he heard a voice behind him: “Everything okay?” He wiped the sweaty keys of his machine and nodded. “Great. We’ll pull tills in 15.” Just in time, thought my father.

Fifteen minutes later, two beaming managers appeared: “Mind if we step in son?” While my father punctuated the transaction—“Thank you for shopping at Penn Fruit”—the managers chatted with the now-stalled customers: “Find everything okay this morning? This’ll just take a second.” As my father stepped aside, the first manager slipped behind the register. He counted the ones, fives, tens and twenties, calling off the totals to the second manager who noted them on a clipboard. When finished, they tucked the cash and the count-sheet into a zippered black deposit bag. This mundane exercise was repeated, exactly, at each of the 10 running registers.

My father continued cashiering. While debating what to eat for lunch, he heard another voice behind him: “How’s everything going?” There was no time for a response. “We’re gonna pull tills in 15.” The sentence hung in the air. “You just pulled tills,” replied my father. The manager seemed slightly dazed: “No we didn’t.”

Those two men walked away with over $1,000 in untraceable bills. Not a bad hour’s pay—especially in 1963. The police investigated, of course, but by the time management discovered they’d been robbed, the “managers” were—in my imagination, at least—enjoying expensive whiskey in a cool, dark establishment, the jukebox just loud enough to foil eavesdroppers. People who take pride in their work are few and far between. Bravo, gentlemen.

An illusion, if we may invoke Webster’s New World College Dictionary, is “a mistaken perception of reality.” With that definition in mind, the Penn Fruit “managers” seem less like common criminals and more like master illusionists. Classifying them otherwise seems almost…criminal. Okay, David Copperfield can make the Statue of Liberty disappear, and he can walk through the Great Wall of China. But during the execution, elaborate as it may be, the audience still knows it’s a trick. And what’s the risk? Public humiliation? An advertising deal? A supermodel’s disdain?

Jail time makes those “penalties” look about as horrible as an open bar. With a few simple props—uniforms, name tags, a clipboard, a small zippered bag—and two sets of brass balls, the men who robbed that grocery made people believe. Think about that. Because making people believe is better than most politicians do. Making people believe is better than most lovers do. Hell, making people believe is better than most preachers can do. Belief is a con man’s bread and butter, because he needs your trust; his bottom line is riding on it. These illusionists manipulate the wiggle room between real and imaginary, and, in the right setting, a world-class “flim-flam man” can marry them like a drunken Vegas couple. For this breed—which can pluck off your shirt like a dead petal from a daisy—illusion is reality, because its returns are as material as said shirt.

Artists, to paraphrase Nietzsche, are people who don’t have the balls to become criminal or brain-rot severe enough to warrant commitment. An astute observation, no doubt. But what about the artist who’s perfected criminality? Because like any other field, the criminal world has its superstars, people who can lie like Michael Jordan shoots a basketball. People who wield a telephone like Mario Andretti wields a gear shift. People like Frank Abagnale and Nick Leeson.

In the opening pages of Catch Me if You Can, the basis for the movie of the same name, Abagnale writes that “almost any fault, sin or crime is considered more leniently if there’s an element of class involved.” And during his criminal career, this laureate of larceny tried valiantly to insure he was, in the event of capture, treated as leniently as possible. For any cubicle-jockey who has contemplated a different career path—bank robbery, say—while suffocating against the dull roar of desktop computers, this manifesto of malfeasance seems positively inspirational.

Abagnale’s book is gripping not because it decodes the complexities of deliberate check-bouncing, or “paper-hanging,”—which it most certainly does—but because it demonstrates how linear his thought process was, how easily he achieved what ordinary people immediately deem impossible. Ultimately, Catch Me if You Can is the story of somebody who simply wouldn’t take no for an answer, the diary of a man who crafted near-impenetrable illusions with the sheer force of his will.

Initially, Abagnale chose to impersonate an airline pilot. Why? Because few people can cash out-of-state checks with less suspicion than an airline pilot, and Abagnale wanted to cash many, many bogus checks. So how did he become a pilot? First, he called Pan American Airlines, pretending to be a pilot who’d had his uniform stolen. They happily referred him to their supplier. When he needed pilot’s wings, he donned his purloined uniform, marched into Pan Am’s personnel office and explained that his 2-year-old had swiped his. He walked away with a fresh set. At this point, he lacked just two things to complete his masquerade: an FAA license and a laminated Pan Am ID.

The ID card proved easy. Abagnale went to a badge manufacturing firm, pretending to be a representative for a fictional airline, and sold a salesman on the idea of a landing a contract for “Carib Air’s” ID badges. When he asked for a sample card—with himself as the subject—the salesman happily obliged. A Pan Am decal from a model airplane completed the illusion. The FAA license was nearly as simple. In scouring pilot magazines for an idea of what an FAA license actually looked like, he stumbled upon a company that would replicate one, on a plaque, for display. The company didn’t require proof of a license, and Abagnale didn’t provide it. He purchased a plaque, and a quick trip to a rickety print shop found it reduced to the proper size. Abagnale was then certified to fly every bird in the sky. The time spent assembling the uniform served him well. Before his arrest in the early ’70s, Abagnale had cashed over $2.5 million in forged checks.

Even with his impressive take adjusted for inflation, Frank Abagnale’s total pales in comparison to that of former derivatives trader Nick Leeson. Of the many spectacular stories found in the history of the world’s financial markets, Leeson’s is certainly one of the most compelling. This geisha-loving, hard-drinking trader treated the Singapore Monetary Exchange like a personal playground, and the repercussions of his disastrous deceptions resonated around the globe.

Strangely, Leeson never intended to become a crook. But given what we know of the road to Hell, does intent matter? When then 28-year-old Leeson began work for England’s Barings Bank, it was one of the most respected financial institutions in England, if not the world. Unfortunately, the conclusion of Mr. Leeson’s tenure with the 233-year-old firm also, not coincidently, signaled the end of the firm itself.

According to Thomas Beehler, a trader with the Chicago Trading Company, “Derivatives traders buy and sell securities whose values are contingent on some underlying asset, like commodity prices, bond and stock prices, currencies or market index values. And how derivative securities are priced and how they are valued can be two separate things. One reason that a derivative security’s prices can and will differ from its value is that different traders assign different values to these securities. The functioning of the market determines where the trade occurs, and thus, the price.” If this explanation sounds complex, it’s because derivatives trading is about as straightforward and easy-to-grasp as trigonometry—after a dose of LSD.

Initially, Leeson was regarded as something of a boy-wonder—at one point he was responsible for 10 percent of the firm’s yearly earnings—and this perception helped him immensely as he started to spiral out of control. Using a secret account this tricky trader was able to hide the millions of dollars in losses his trades were incurring, all the while gouging Barings brass for more credit. In pacifying his head honchos, some of whom allegedly didn’t even comprehend derivatives, Leeson used fictitious clients to dodge responsibility for his massive losses, explaining that because he was acting under order, these mystery men, not Barings, were liable for the debt. It’s interesting to imagine Leeson then, straining at the reins of reason, smiling against the firing squad, pacing, gesticulating and swearing against contrary evidence that Everything. Is. Just. Fine.

It’s fascinating to imagine him—even as he grasped the doomed telemetry of his transactions—making his case across the phone lines and time zones that separated him from London, using charm-school charades, deft turns of phrase, everything he had to make them believe. Which, unfortunately for Barings, they did. In the final days of his career, Leeson was no more a trader than Abagnale was an airline pilot. Devastated by derivatives, he could only sell belief. When he was arrested in 1995, the Barings Bank was in the red by $1.3 billion, thanks to Leeson’s illicit trading.

Today, the story of a company sinking due to criminal misconduct is barely news, and the “real” world is rife with illusion. Enron manufactured an energy crisis that led to rolling blackouts across California. The New York Times has admitted one of its reporters fabricated sources. The New Republic discovered that prolific young writer Stephen Glass was beginning his fiction career within its pages. But the most shocking lie came in the State of the Union address. During his speech, President Bush revealed Iraq had tried to buy nuclear material from Niger, though the CIA knew the intelligence was faulty.

It’s disturbing to see the line between illusion and reality blurring in the public sphere. But all is far from lost. If the people Abagnale and Leeson fooled had fully accepted their responsibilities—Pan Am could’ve checked if Abagnale was an employee before handing him wings, and Baring’s could’ve assigned Leeson knowledgeable supervisors—these illusionists may never have succeeded. Today’s world demands a high level of individual responsibility. Those who don’t want to be duped must ask difficult questions, both of themselves and sources once deemed unimpeachable. Don’t despair, though, those questions could be as simple as, “Do you guys really manage this store?”