It began with an obsession to meet Michael Jackson. It ended with fleecing US banks for $40 million and being branded a “one woman crime wave.”
Her spree was unintentionally egged on by an FBI agent who, in 1981, couldn’t believe she’d be capable of pulling off the complex heists.
She told The Post, “An agent trying to find the brains behind the operation laughed at me and said, ‘Negros rob and murder but they are not smart enough to do sophisticated crimes like these.’ That hurt me. So I shut them down.”
Before becoming a multi-millionaire criminal, Smith, author of the recently released memoir “Never Saw Me Coming: How I Outsmarted the FBI and the Entire Banking System — and Pocketed $40 million” (Little Brown), was merely a pest.
So deep was her Jackson obsession that, in 1974, she made it her mission to speak with him on the phone.
Alongside research trips to the library in her hometown of Minneapolis – where pre-famous Prince was just another kid in the neighborhood – Smith started calling extensions at the phone company and being transferred around.
“I would get to a department called ‘facilities,’” she told The Post. “I already knew that Michael’s parents were Joseph and Catherine. Then I got the number corresponding to their Encino, California, address. Bingo!”
But she only got as far as her idol’s father, Joe, before being blown off and hit with a threat often repeated in ensuing years: “I’m going to put you in jail.”
But that was okay. Smith, who confided to her twin sister Taryn (a pseudonym in the book), was encouraged by how far her experiment in trial and error had gotten her. The next stop was the local Farmers and Mechanics Savings Bank.
In 1977, Smith applied the techniques honed against the phone company to getting one over on bank personnel. She telephonically wandered from one banker’s extension to the next, employing social engineering before the term existed and picking up crumbs of information.
She scammed the names of supervisors and code-words of the day — pre-computer, secret words which confirmed a person on the other end of the line was indeed a bank employee.
Connecting with the wire department, armed with the password and account number, she asked for $5,000 to be shipped to her Grandma Grace, at the time weary from working as a maid in Texas.
Then, it was common practice for the bank to lay out money from a reserve fund in order to immediately cover transfer requests.
“That was my first bank transfer and they never questioned me,” said Smith, “This is just how my brain works. I can figure out almost anything.”
FBI agent John Markey, who at one time investigated Smith, admitted in 1988, “She’s very good at what she does and she gets better all the time.”
Although she eventually went to prison over six-figures in transfers, Smith claims in her book that’s all they could prove of her much-larger total haul.
Is it exaggerated? “Could she do this to sell her book? Yeah,” her former attorney Barry Voss, now a writer, told The Post. “But did she make a lot of money? Yeah. Millions…”
Smith told The Post she kept records of what she stole and sometimes got paid in gold bars. “It is at least $40 million,” she asserts
From the late 1970s through much of the ’80s, she rampaged through savings and loans across the country. “I felt invincible,” said Smith. “I learned that money is power.”
By 1982, at age 22, “I would sometimes bring in $250,000 a day. I could do half-a-million in a week.”
Attracted to a string of ne’er do well boyfriends, she plied them with gifts and cash — including Patek Philippe wristwatches, custom suits and sports cars.
Smith moved to Los Angeles in 1981 after her actions in Minnesota attracted federal attention and she was subjected to a grilling from the FBI.
Once there, she smartly aligned with a woman who organized people to go to banks and Western Union offices with bogus IDs and fabricated backstories.
However, as Tanya prospered, her twin sister Taryn descended into a life of drug dependency: “She started with pot and I don’t know all the things she was doing. I just say she was on drugs.”
Meanwhile, Tanya’s life resembled a Hollywood movie. “I lived in nice homes in gated communities like Diamond Bar, east of Los Angeles, where there was an equestrian center,” she said of her Tinseltown life.
“I drove Rolls Royces, Aston Martins, Ferraris. I loved going to Mr. Chow for dinner. I’d ask them to bring me the best wine they had. I would sometimes tip the valet $500 for parking my car. I’d shop at the Chanel store and buy jewelry on Rodeo Drive.”
But diamonds were not forever. In 1985, the law caught up with Smith after an accomplice got arrested and rolled over. She went down in Minneapolis, charged with bank fraud and theft in the relatively paltry amount of $25,000.
Amazingly, over the course of an eight-day trial, Smith sewed seeds of reasonable doubt with jurors, saying it was her twin sister who committed the frauds — and that no one could tell them apart.
“My whole scheme was to confuse the judge and jurors,” Tanya said. “I told my sister what I was doing and told her she had to leave town.”
As a juror related to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, “There was not positive proof that it was Tanya … It could very well have been the other twin.”
Then in 1986 a runner screwed things up by asking for all cash instead of $140,000 in cash and $10,000 in chips at a Las Vegas casino, where she illicitly transferred funds, leading to questions about his intentions.
The guy folded under interrogation. Law enforcement stepped in. Smith was arrested at Orange County Airport while attempting to collect the money.
Smith was sentenced to 24-and-a-half years behind bars for a series of bank fraud and wire fraud charges. She was remanded to Federal Reformatory for Women, Alderson, in West Virginia.
However, that did not set her on the straight and narrow. She engineered an ingenious escape in early 1988. Ever the social engineer, Smith compromised a guard who brought her dressy civilian clothes and left the garments in a bathroom stall. Smith got changed and exited without a complication, only to encounter a crueler world than the one she had left behind.
Money entrusted with friends had been squandered and spent. Buried cash disintegrated. A violent ex-boyfriend beat her until she did her banking scams for him. He threatened to kill her, leaving Smith tied up in a kitchen with gas hissing out of the stove. She contemplated escaping and turning herself in.
But Federal Marshalls beat her to the punch.
After eight months on the lam, Smith was arrested and securely incarcerated. Pregnant at the time, she gave birth to a daughter, called Denise in the book, while imprisoned. Her parents began raising the girl.
In 1999 Smith got out of jail, 39 years old. Did she think about going back to bank scams – even with all the layers of security and technology added since the 80s?
“I wouldn’t have even tried. I was ready for a new life and to raise my daughter. I managed to get hired doing customer service in the office of a trucking company, owned by people who didn’t do background checks,” she said.
“One of my dad’s friends gave me money to buy a house in Minneapolis, and it is beautiful. Both of my parents died while I was in jail. My sister is living in Minneapolis right now.”
Looking back at it all – with the stolen money gone, though her book has been optioned by Hollywood, a movie might be in the offing and a final windfall from all of this may come her way – Smith, who moved to California’s San Fernando Valley in 2020, does not see her legacy tied into how much money she stole or the lifestyle she lived.
Instead, she said, “It’s that I was smart enough to do it.”
