In 1973, unbeknownst to her parents, 13-year-old Tanya Smith flew from her home in Minneapolis, Minn., to Encino, Calif., where she made her way to the doorstep of her crush, Michael Jackson. The fantasy ended when Jackson’s mother, Katherine, came on the intercom and informed her that Michael and his brothers were away on tour.

 Just two years later, she would harness the same investigative techniques she used to find Jackson’s phone number and address to embark upon a white-collar crime spree that lasted more than 12 years. By the time it ended with a prison sentence in 1986, Smith estimates she’d drained $40 million from American banks in more than 10 states, as well as internationally. 

Precisely how she did so is detailed in her page-turning memoir, Never Saw Me Coming. Among her eager readers, presumably, will be the FBI, who, according to Smith, still don’t know how she pulled it all off. She might have shared her secrets or even helped them, she says in a recent Zoom interview, had they asked politely. But they didn’t.

 Although Smith, now a youthful-looking 64, started using computers in the early 80s to enable the bank and wire fraud that eventually landed her – and her estranged twin sister – behind bars, she was never a hacker. On a resumé, her strongest suits would probably be problem solving and interpersonal skills, given that her crimes were mostly accomplished using an old-fashioned dial phone and her impeccable manner.

That manner is on display when I talked to Smith on screen from her Los Angeles home. It’s 7 a.m. on the west coast, but she’s already returned from her hourlong daily bike ride, on which she often brings food to the unhoused. Her gentle, slightly-sleepy brown eyes and easy smile won’t fit most people’s idea of a dangerous criminal mastermind. Yet this, she says, is how the FBI portrayed her, even though none of her crimes – which, to this day she thinks of as victimless – were violent.

In 1987, Smith was sentenced to 13 years in prison. Due, in part, to a brazen 1989 escape that put her on the lam for eight months, it eventually morphed to 24-and-a-half years, which, Smith writes in her book,  “is one of the longest – if not the longest – imposed for a white-collar crime.” She notes that junk-bond king Michael Milken, whom Smith was briefly in prison with, had his 10-year sentence reduced to 22 months.  Another prison roommate, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a volatile member of the Manson family who tried to assassinate former U.S. President Gerald Ford, got less time for a jailbreak than Smith did, and she says Fromme was treated with kid gloves, comparatively. When both women were brought into court on the same day, Fromme was in handcuffs, while Smith was in wrist and leg shackles, as well as a waist chain.

The takeaway, for her? If you’re a white-collar criminal, it pays to be white. “You can’t look at the colour of my skin and say ‘she’s Black, so we’re going to give her 24-and-a-half years,’ then the white guy just gets a slap on the wrist,” says Smith. She ended up serving 12 years, thanks to her discovery – through tireless research at the prison library – of a loophole related to how crimes get charged within sprees. Agreeing Smith had been unjustly sentenced, a U.S. District Court judge ordered her immediate release in May 1999.

A desire to right racial inequalities in her community led Smith down her chosen path in the first place. Although her family was comfortably middle class – her father ran Minneapolis’ Capri Theater, where Prince got his start, and Smith was pals with Prince’s sister – she couldn’t help but notice her less affluent Black neighbours were getting their power turned off, or losing their homes, due to unpaid bills or mortgages.

 When tracking down Michael Jackson’s contact details, Smith discovered it was easy to pass herself off as a phone company employee simply by getting transferred between departments a few times. It turned out the trick worked with banks, too. Using what she called her “white voice,” Smith started voiding the debts of friends and family – who were usually ignorant of her machinations – by posing as a bank employee, then getting real bank employees to transfer money from the institutions’ cash reserves to personal accounts. This backfired when Smith sent $5,000 to her grandmother’s account and she alerted the bank; she still refused to touch the money even after the bank insisted the transfer was legitimate.

 “I was just trying to even the playing field,” she says. “How do you not help a kid whose lights were turned off and can’t read his book? How do you not help a woman that’s getting kicked out of the house she’s lived in for 40 years because she’s old and can’t get a job to finish paying her mortgage?”

 By Grade 12, Smith was doing five or six “transactions,” as she euphemistically termed them, a day. Rumours about her abilities spread, and Smith took on a role that was part Robin Hood, part mafia don, as she responded to neighbours’ requests to “fix” their problems. 

At the same time, Smith was getting enough of a crash course in the banking system’s inner workings that she soon graduated to arranging cash withdrawals, again, by posing as a co-worker. Now, however,  the money would be sent to fake customer accounts and collected by people Smith called “runners.” As the scam got bigger, the runners would be hired only through intermediaries – sometimes Smith’s boyfriends – in order to shield her identity. While some of the money continued to go to the needy, a lot ended up funding Smith’s increasingly lavish lifestyle, including gifts to a series of boyfriends she showered with furs, high-end cars and front-of-the-line access to the hottest clubs.

 Greed is the downfall of many criminals. For Smith, it was a different sin: pride. When the FBI caught wind of the cash withdrawals, they brought Smith in for questioning. “Neeee-grroes murder, steal, and rob, but they don’t have the brains to commit sophisticated crimes like this,“ she writes in the book, recalling one racist detective’s comment.  Offended by their presumption, she told them, point blank, she was the brains not the pawn. “You know they’re hassling you because you’re Black and a genius,” her lawyer told her. 

 More than 40 years later, the memory of that disturbing interaction prompts a sudden flow of tears. At the time, though, it made her defiant. “I was like, I’m going to show you what this Black woman can do. And I felt like I wasn’t just fighting for myself, but like I was fighting for women. I never grew up with this Black and white thing. I had friends of all races. I never disliked someone because of their ethnic background or the colour of their skin.” So she continued to steal money through transactions while under investigation, and even from prison, audaciously using the funds to pay for her legal defence.

Smith’s rollercoaster of a life story will be the subject of a forthcoming feature film, but, for now, she will only share that it has attracted top Hollywood talent, because she is anticipating an announcement to coincide with the book’s Aug. 13 publication. A second memoir, covering the years since her release from prison, is also in the works.

 So why, after 25 years of silence, did she decide to share her story now? Smith credits the encouragement of her 22-year-old daughter Makala, a recent psychology grad.  “She’s my psychologist now,” says Smith. “She said to me: ‘Tanya, do you know how many women make these mistakes? They can learn a lot from you and it’s also a great story to tell.’ Mostly, she knew it would relieve me. And it’s been true.”