(FORTUNE Magazine) – If there were a forgery hall of fame, Frank Abagnale would have his own wing. From the time he turned 16 until he was nabbed at 21, Abagnale led the life of a criminal mastermind. The wide-eyed kid, who resembled Jim Nabors, scattered about $2.5 million in bad checks around the globe, masqueraded as a Pan Am pilot, posed as a pediatrician, and taught sociology at a Utah university, even though he never graduated from high school.

Once nabbed, Abagnale served five years in prison for forgery-related crimes. Since his release, Abagnale has gone legit and become a leading fraud-prevention consultant to FORTUNE 500 companies like Citigroup. His life story caught the attention of Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks SKG. The studio is turning Abagnale's 1980 bestselling memoir, Catch Me If You Can (which is being reissued by Broadway Books), into a movie, with a screenplay written by Jeff Nathanson of Twister fame.

FORTUNE caught up with Abagnale, 52, this month as he was delivering a lecture on how to spot bad checks and forged documents to about 100 people in the Buffalo Niagara Marriott in western New York. Onstage Abagnale, bouncy and charismatic, enlivens the most mundane subjects like bank risk management and accounts-payable control. "I get requests to do over 300 presentations a year," he says. "I do about half of that."

Abagnale's renaissance seems strange--his cons are quaint compared with the high jinks of today's skilled hackers. He operated in a world straight out of a 1960s Rat Pack movie. In his book, college professors are eggheads, airline stewardesses are glamour girls (if Abagnale's accounts are to be believed, his antics attracted a lot of women), and bankers are bumbling squares who deserve to be ripped off. "In my heyday as a hawker of bad paper, I knew as much about checks as any teller employed in any bank in the world, and more than the majority," Abagnale boasts in Catch Me If You Can. "I'm not sure a great many bankers possessed the knowledge I had of checks."

One of his favorite props was a Pan Am pilot's uniform and wings. The getup garnered a lot of trust--when he wore it, he could cash checks anywhere he wanted. "I worked LaGuardia like a fox on a turkey ranch," Abagnale writes. "I'd cash a check at the Eastern Air Line counter, for instance, then go to another section of the terminal and tap some other airline's till....I was producing rubber faster than a Ceylon planter."

Abagnale's celebrity only grew after he went legit. He was a regular on the talk-show circuit, including a memorable 1978 appearance on the Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. "They said I'd be on for six minutes," Abagnale says. "The group after me was the Pointer Sisters, who were at the peak of their thing. But I got on the show, and Johnny just loved me. He said, 'We're going to do the rest of the show with him,' and someone said, 'We've got the Pointers Sisters,' and Johnny said, 'Tell the Pointer Sisters to come back.'"

Johnny Carson and geeky bankers don't sound like the kind of supporting players who make a Hollywood blockbuster today, but Michel Shane, one of the producers of the DreamWorks film, says he thinks Abagnale's life has all the ingredients of a hit. The former con artist is a sympathetic character--a confused kid from a broken home (granted, it was in tony Larchmont, N.Y.) who had to get by solely on his wits. "During the day he was the king," Shane says. "He pulled scams on everybody. He was smarter than everybody. But at night he was a little kid again. He was crying himself to sleep."

Today Abagnale, who looks more Monty Hall than Jim Nabors, says he has mixed feelings about his revived fame. Married with three sons, he doesn't want to glorify his criminal past. "I like to believe that people come to hear me because I know what I'm talking about," Abagnale says. Maybe. But his humility is short-lived. In the same conversation he's casting his own movie. "You know, Leonardo DiCaprio wanted to play me."