Never Saw Me Coming by Tanya Smith: The female ‘Robin Hood’ who conned US banks out of
NEVER SAW ME COMING: HOW I OUTSMARTED THE FBI AND THE ENTIRE BANKING SYSTEM by Tanya Smith (Quercus £20, 432pp)
Never Saw Me Coming by Tanya Smith is available now from the Mail Bookshop
CRIME as we all know doesn’t pay, but boy does Tanya Smith’s memoir of white-collar fraud in the 1980s – partying with rock stars, floor-length minks and Harry Winston diamonds – make it look fun before it all goes bad.
For those who devoured Jackie Collins, you’ll love this rags-to-riches-to-jail tale. Think sex and shopping – but with the added bonus of major banking fraud thrown in.
It’s a must-read from the first chapter when Smith, having persuaded a prison guard to provide her with sunglasses, a tight skirt and high heels, breaks out of jail, and goes on the run for a year, less than two years into her sentence.
By the time her life of crime is finally over, she’s managed to steal $40 millon (£30m), and amass gold bars, cars and diamonds (even losing half a million dollars worth of notes that she buried because they decomposed).
So how did a middle-class black woman from a good family (her parents come across as nothing short of saintly) end up being the kind of criminal the FBI splashes posters of across her home city, and who received the longest sentence ever given for a white-collar crime – 24 years, of which she served 13.
And how is it that you can’t help rooting for her despite her misdemeanours? The answer lies in her childhood. Our heroine is clearly clever and streetwise. In the 1970s as a 15-year-old Michael Jackson fan, she learns how to con phone operators into handing over celebrities’ phone numbers.
The trick: she realises that if you get yourself transferred from department to department, people will just assume that you are calling from within the company and hand over information.
After pursuing Jackson, she ends up in a long phone friendship with Jackson’s grandfather, Samuel. Then she has a lightbulb moment – realising she can apply the same method to get people’s bank details, starting with friends and acquaintances.
YET there’s a serious social issue behind the glitz and the glamour. Perhaps Smith would not have gone as far if it wasn’t for a conversation she has with her dad, asking why her black friends are so poor in relation to the white kids at school.
As he lays out the reasons – systemic racism and lack of intergenerational wealth – she is inspired to become a kind of Minneapolis Robin Hood. She uses her skills to convince utility companies to amend the balances of those unable to pay their bills (at least temporarily) and then moves on to cancel overdue mortgage payments by pretending to be a bank employee.
She says the payment has been made but not gone through the system, so they need to ‘update it’.
But then it goes further – and the robbing from the rich to give to the poor moves on to keeping it for herself, using hacked wire transfers by appropriating a bank computer and learning the routing codes.
Life of glamour: Tanya SMith
When she’s first caught, the authorities dismiss her. The FBI agents can’t believe that a mere girl would be behind this fraud – and anyway, as one nastily racist agent puts it, black people ‘don’t have the brains to commit sophisticated crimes like this’.
The rage at this assumption makes Smith even more determined to prove them wrong. The sums keep on getting bigger – it’s estimated to be $40 million from US banks – until the whole empire falls down.
Even in prison, she applies her wits to fighting the system, overturning part of her sentence thanks to her study of law in the prison library.
But in every good crime blockbuster, the mastermind always has a blind spot – and for Smith it’s the men in her life. Her lovers con her almost as effectively as she outwits the banks.
The reader is left in despair as yet another man tells her how fine she is, muscles in on her scam (incompetently), takes her cash and beats her. Thanks to her weakness for such weak men, she gets caught and gives birth in prison twice.
And there are other darker stories on the edges – her parents, who both die while Smith is still caught up in her criminal career, and, of course, her children. Because of the length of her sentence, Smith misses out on the childhood of her first two children, Justin and Denise; her third child, Makala, is the one who encourages her to tell her tale now.
While your attention may be caught by the fast cars and designer clothes, it’s clear there have been very real consequences to Smith’s decisions.
This is a truly compulsive tale – not only because of the sheer audacity of Smith’s scams, but also because of some amazing vignettes.
Prince lives round the corner and writes a song for her and her twin when they’ve annoyed him. She plays blackjack with Mike Tyson and Michael Jordan.
This book screams Hollywood and so it’s no surprise that one of the endorsements is from singer/actor Janelle Monae – the acknowledgements thank both her and Universal Pictures, suggesting we’ll see this on the big screen pretty soon.
Smith claims she’s now happy living quietly in southern California ‘enjoying the peace of suburban motherhood’. But on the basis of Never Saw Me Coming, you can’t help but wonder what (legal) business she might turn that ingenious mind of hers to next.