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By GREG JUNEK
Business Editor

The Tyler Morning Telegraph newspaper received the Torch Award for Marketplace Ethics for a business of 56-200 or more employees at the Central East Texas Better Business Bureau Torch Award ceremony Tuesday night at Villa Di Felicita.

Businesses in four size categories received the awards. The category of 56-200 or more employees was the largest category.

Nelson Clyde IV, president of T.B. Butler Publishing Co. Inc., publisher of the newspaper, received the award from Jeff Austin III, who represented Austin Bank, the 2006 award recipient company of the same category.

“We are blessed to serve this community; we feel privileged to do it,” Clyde said. “Many of you are our customers and we’re just grateful to be able to do what we do.”

Stepping Stone School in Tyler received the award for the category of 21-55 employees. Executive Director Camille Brown accepted the award.

Hayes RV Center in Longview captured the 10-20 employee category honor. Owner David Hayes accepted the award.

The award for a business in the smallest category, one to nine employees, went to Proforma Horizon Total Source in Whitehouse. Troy Bevill accepted the award for his company.

Kay Robinson, BBB president, said about 275 people had registered to attend the invitation event, the BBB’s third in four years.

Torch Award recipients were nominated by other businesses or members of the community. They could also nominate themselves, Ms. Robinson said. The BBB received 64 nominations.

A judge panel of Tom Mullins, Tyler Economic Development Council president and chief executive officer; Doris Sharp, director of technical preparation at The University of Texas at Tyler; Mark McDaniel, Tyler deputy city manager; and Dawn Franks, Fourth Partner Foundation program officer, chose the award recipients.

The BBB system established the Torch Award in 1996 to promote ethical business practices and to heighten public appreciation for businesses that incorporate these practices in their operations. The Central East Texas BBB began having awards ceremonies in 2005.

Also Tuesday, guest speaker Frank W. Abagnale, known 30 years ago for his embezzling exploits and now a respected authority on forgery, embezzlement and secure documents, told the audience how he became so adept at a life of crime.

The end message was that nothing replaces a family in a person’s life, and that men are not judged by their wealth or talent, but by the kind of father they are.

“I was one of those few children who got to grow up in the world with a daddy,” Abagnale said. “The world is full of fathers, but actually there are very few men worthy of being called “Daddy” by their child.”

Abagnale, whose exploits were depicted in his best-selling book, “Catch Me If You Can,” and a movie by the same name, said his life of deception was triggered by his parents’ divorce, unbeknownst to him until the day he was taken out of school and dropped off at a family courtroom in New York state.

When the judge noted the young Abagnale was 16 and of legal age to choose which parent he would live with, he bolted from the courtroom and set out on his own. He saw his mother a few years later, but that day in the courtroom was the last time he would see his father, and that haunted him for years.

“All children need their mother and their father; all children are entitled to their mother and their father,” he said. “Although it is not popular to say so, divorce is a very devastating thing for a child to have to deal with, and then have to deal with the rest of their natural life. For me, a complete stranger said I had to choose one parent over the other. There was no choice but to run.”

Abagnale’s first mission on his own was to get a job, but he said that at 16 years old, nobody would pay him very much. But he was able to get a drivers license and alter the year of his birth on it to make him appear to be 10 years older.

His father had previously established a checking account for him, so he wrote checks until they bounced. When he realized it was time to leave New York he happened to notice a Pan Am flight crew at a hotel board a van for the airport, and he knew if he could pose as a Pan Am pilot he could fly anywhere in the world.

He learned the jargon for each occupation whose member he impersonated. It included pilot jargon while he faked being a pilot and medical jargon when he posed as a pediatrician in another state.

Abagnale even passed the bar exam in Louisiana and worked for a while for the attorney general.

Before he was arrested at age 21, Abagnale had cashed $2.5 million in fraudulent checks in every state and 26 foreign countries over a five-year period.

The French police caught him at age 21 and for five years he served time in French, Swedish and U.S. prison systems. He was released on the condition that he would help the government, without pay, by teaching and helping federal law enforcement agencies.

Abagnale has lectured and consulted with hundreds of financial institutions, corporations and government agencies worldwide for the past 25 years. He has worked with the FBI for more than 25 years.

He met his future wife while on an undercover assignment in Houston. He broke protocol after the assignment was over and told her who he was.

Abagnale said his wife is the person who made his life complete again after so many years.

“I could tell you that I was a born-again Christian, I could tell you that prison rehabilitated me, I could tell you that I was a kid who made some mistakes and grew up,” he said. “But the truth is God gave me a wife, she gave me three beautiful children, she gave me a family and she changed my life.”

And while some might see his life of deception as glamorous, Abagnale says it was not. In fact, he said, he cried himself to sleep every night until he was 19 years old. Abagnale said that while on the run he missed all of the things in which a teenager participates, such as football games and a senior prom.

Instead, he could never get close to anyone and he had to spend every holiday in a place where often he did not speak the local language.

Combined Agency Inc. was the diamond sponsor for the Torch Awards. Southside Bank, The Genecov Group, Travel Masters and Sellers-Patterson Associates were gold sponsors. Edward Jones Investments/Randall Childress, Austin Bank, Trinity Mother Frances Health System, East Texas Truck Systems, Hibbs-Hallmark & Co., Capital One and Brookshire Grocery Co. were silver sponsors. Vincent Graphics & Supply was the in-kind sponsor.

Updated Wednesday, April 30, 2008 at 10:36 a.m. CDT