Reading Unit 11 lesson 1

Reading Unit 11 lesson 1

Butch Cassidy

Notorious outlaw Butch Cassidy received the full-blown Hollywood treatment in the 1969 Western, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Cassidy's real name was Robert Leroy Parker. Born in 1866, poverty seems to have led Parker to take up cattle rustling as a young man. At the time, large cattle ranches were doing their best to put smaller ranchers out of business and it could be that Parker saw nothing wrong in stealing cattle from the former.

Parkerthen moved on to robbing banks and formed an elite outlaw group known as 'The Wild Bunch', whose other famous member was The Sundance Kid (real name Harry Longabaugh). The group became notorious for their well-planned bank robberies and got away with increasingly large sums of money. The law eventually began to close in on them and by 1902 the group had disbanded.

It was reported that Parker and Longabaugh died in a shootout in Bolivia in 1909. However, Parker is now thought to have faked his death; there is recent evidence that he gave up his life of crime, returned to America, married and became an entrepreneur, finally dying in 1937.

Frank Abagnale Junior

Frank Abagnale Junior is another glamorous criminal with a film, Catch Me If You Can (2002), based on his life story. However, unlike Butch Cassidy, he's alive and known to be making a good living as a security consultant and celebrity. During his brief and audacious criminal career between the ages of 15 and 21 he made $2.5 million by forging cheques, using his talent as an impersonator in order to do so -among his false identities were a doctor, a lawyer and an airline pilot. Once, while in police custody, he escaped from a taxiing plane. The police finally caught up with him and he served fewer than five years in prison, after which he began working for the federal government.