It started with an obsession to meet Michael Jackson and ended with her defrauding US banks out of $40 million and being branded a “one-woman crime wave”.
Her heists were unintentionally encouraged by FBI agents who didn't believe she could pull off a complicated robbery in 1981.
She told the Post, “The agents who were trying to find out who was behind this operation laughed at me and said, 'Black people commit robberies and murders, but they're not smart enough to commit these high level crimes.' That hurt me, so I shut them up.”
Before he became a billionaire 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 just a troublemaker.
Her obsession with Jackson was so strong that in 1974 she made it her mission to speak to him on the phone.
Smith began making internal phone calls during research trips to his local library in Minneapolis, where Prince was not yet famous. I am currently being transferred to a new job at the telephone company.
“I got to the department called 'Facilities,'” she told the Post. “I already knew that Michael's parents were Joseph and Katherine. Then I got a number that corresponded to an address in Encino, California. Bingo!”
But she only got as far as her idol's father, Joe, and then for years he repeatedly threatened to “put you in jail” and ignored her.
But that was OK: Confiding in her twin sister, Taryn (not her real name in the book), Smith was heartened by how far her trial-and-error experiment had come. Her next stop was the local Farmers and Mechanics Savings Bank.
In 1977, Smith adapted the techniques she'd honed with phone companies to fool bankers: She called one banker's extension after the other, gleaning bits of information before the term social engineering even existed.
She managed to get by by stealing her boss's name and the code word of the time (a secret phrase used before computers to verify that the person on the other end of the phone was actually a banker).
Armed with her password and account number, she contacted the wire department and asked them to send $5,000 to her grandmother, Grace, who was tired of working as a maid in Texas at the time.
At the time, it was common for banks to draw funds from their reserves to fulfill transfer requests immediately.
“It was my first bank transfer and they didn't ask me any questions,” Smith said. “That's the way my brain works. I can figure out pretty much anything.”
FBI agent John Markey, who had previously investigated Smith, acknowledged in 1988 that “she is very good at her job and is getting better and better.”
She ended up in prison for a six-figure sum of transportation, but Smith argues in his book that's all she can prove of the much larger sums she received.
Is this an exaggeration? “Did she do this to sell books? Yes, sure,” her former lawyer, Barry Voss, now an author, told The Post. “But did she make a lot of money? Yes, millions of dollars.”
Smith told the Post that she kept records of what she stole and was sometimes paid in gold bars. “I have at least $40 million,” she claims.
Throughout the late 1970s and much of the '80s, she raided savings and loans across the country. “I thought I was invincible,” Ms. Smith says. “I learned that money is power.”
In 1982, when he was 22, “I was sometimes making $250,000 in a day. Sometimes I was making $500,000 in a week.”
She was attracted to a series of dodgy boyfriends and showered them with gifts — Patek Philippe watches, custom suits, sports cars — and cash.
Smith moved to Los Angeles in 1981 after his actions in Minnesota attracted federal attention and he was subjected to extensive questioning by the FBI.
Once there, she cleverly teamed up with a woman who organized people to go to banks and Western Union offices using fake identities and fabricated backgrounds.
But as Tanya became successful, her twin sister Taryn fell into a life of drug addiction: “She started with marijuana, but I don't know what she was doing, let's just say she was addicted.”
Tanya's life, on the other hand, was like a Hollywood movie: “I lived in a nice house in a gated community in East Los Angeles, like Diamond Bar, and there was an equestrian center there,” she said of her life in Hollywood.
“I drove Rolls Royces, Aston Martins and Ferraris. I loved going to dinner at Mr Chow's and asking him to bring me the best wine. I sometimes tipped the valet who parked my car $500. I shopped at Chanel and bought jewelry on Rodeo Drive.”
But diamonds aren't forever. In 1985, her accomplices were arrested and Smith was brought to justice. She was charged in Minneapolis with bank fraud and theft for a relatively small amount of money. $25,000.
Astonishingly, during the eight-day trial, Smith gave the jury a reasonable doubt by arguing that it was her twin sister who had perpetrated the fraud and that no one could tell the difference between the two.
“My plan was to confuse the judge and jury,” Tanya said. “I told my sister what I was doing and that I had to get out of town.”
As a juror Minneapolis Star Tribune“There was no hard evidence that it was Tanya… it could well have been the other twin.”
Later, in 1986, a runner made an illegal transfer of funds at a Las Vegas casino by making a blunder and demanding all cash rather than $140,000 in cash and $10,000 in chips, raising questions about the runners' intentions.
The man succumbed to questioning, police were involved, and Smith was arrested at the Orange County airport when he tried to pick up the money.
Smith was sentenced to 24 1/2 years in prison for a series of bank and wire fraud counts and was sent to the Federal Correctional Institution for Women in Alderson, West Virginia.
But that didn't put her on the right path, and in early 1988 she orchestrated an ingenious escape. The socially adept Smith tricked a security guard into bringing her own clothes and leaving them in a bathroom stall. She changed and escaped without incident, only to find a world even crueler than the one she'd left.
Money she'd left with friends had been squandered and spent. Cash she'd buried had been smashed to pieces. An abusive ex-boyfriend beat her until she committed a bank fraud on his behalf. He threatened to kill her and left her tied to the kitchen, where fumes were belching from the stove. She considered running away and turning herself in.
But the U.S. Marshals got a head start on her.
After eight months on the run, Smith was arrested and taken into custody. Pregnant at the time, she gave birth to a daughter, called Denise in the book, during her incarceration, and her parents began raising her.
Smith was released from prison in 1999, aged 39. Despite the increased security and technology since the '80s, would she ever consider committing bank fraud again?
“I wouldn't have even tried. I was ready for a new life and to raise my daughter. I managed to get hired for a customer service job in the office of a trucking company run by someone who didn't do background checks,” she said.
“One of my dad's friends gave me money to buy a house in Minneapolis. It's a really nice house. My parents died while I was in prison. My sister lives in Minneapolis now.”
Looking back on it all, the stolen money has vanished, her book has been rightsed in Hollywood and a film adaptation is on the way — and all of this may ultimately bring her a windfall — but Smith, who moved to California's San Fernando Valley in 2020, doesn't think the amount of money she stole or the lifestyle she lived will be tied to her legacy.
Instead, she said, “I was smart enough to do it.”
