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Tribune News Service

By the time she was a 13-year-old in 1973, Tanya Smith had procured a plane ticket, flown to Michael Jackson’s childhood home and begged to meet the superstar singer.
By the time she was 20, she had accrued millions of US dollars by breaking into banks’ computer systems.
By 30, she was spending what would be more than 13 years in prison for wire fraud, bank fraud, conspiracy and attempted credit card fraud.
In a new memoir, Smith tells all those stories and more – including teasing a friend’s big brother, a guy named Prince, who rehearsed and performed at the Capri Theatre in Minneapolis, in the US state of Minnesota, then owned by Smith’s dad.
Never Saw Me Coming: How I Outsmarted the FBI and the Entire Banking System – and Pocketed $40 Million went on sale earlier this month.

Reading more like fiction than memoir – especially in the soap-opera-worthy scene in which, on trial, she avoids a prison sentence by producing her twin sister in court and challenges eyewitnesses to tell them apart – her book is a page-turner.
It is packed with unbelievable computer scams; prison escapes (like the one that opens the book); and heartbreaking loss – Smith is very close to her daughter, recent university graduate Makala, who learned of her mum’s former life a decade ago when she stumbled upon some news clippings.
Smith now lives in Los Angeles, where she rides her bike 24 kilometres (15 miles) a day, stopping to care for unhoused people along her route, and works a part-time customer service job. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.












View this post on Instagram























A post shared by Tanya Smith (@neversawmecomingbook)



You have been out of prison for 25 years and a lot of these memories are painful. Why pour them into a book now?
My daughter was pushing me to tell the story. I was reluctant to do it. She was like, “Mom, you have this great story. You’ve got to tell the world everything you went through.” And I finally did it. I wanted it to be really raw and relatable.
How did that process go?
I sent [a proposal] to some literary agents, about 15 of them, and all of them wanted to represent me. But it actually took about four years to write because there were so many changes and I had to get everything right. I really wanted people to know me and understand my emotions.
My parents always said I could have been anything I wanted to be. But when I was younger, I used to think, ‘I want to change the world. I want to make it better.’
Tanya Smith
Will you bump up against laws against people profiting from their crimes?
I think they have a statute of limitations on that. But I don’t know. That really wasn’t my concern. I wanted to be truthful.
So there is a movie in the works?
We’ve got some great things coming up. I wish I could talk about it. But I have to let other people announce that. [After a “lively auction”, there’s “exciting adaptation news” coming soon, according to Smith’s publisher.] My life has been a roller-coaster ride. People needed to feel that to understand me and why I did what I did.
Why did you start stealing money and depositing it in the accounts of friends and family?
My parents always said I could have been anything I wanted to be. But when I was younger, I used to think, “I want to change the world. I want to make it better.”
My two best girlfriends, it drove me crazy when people would discriminate against them. It drove me crazy when people tried to be who they weren’t so I was always defending them. I always wanted to help people.

Some fun stories in the book have to do with pre-fame US singer Prince. You were friends with his younger sister, Tyka [Nelson]. Did you have any idea he was destined for greatness?
No, never. Prince was just … we knew he was talented. We watched him play all these instruments ever since he was very young. But he was just Tyka’s brother. He was always a nice person.
As we got older, I noticed he had gotten a lot better. [He and his band] used to play a lot of music from other artists and add a little of this and that in there, and we would think, “They sound better than the real record”.
How were you able as a teenager, with a computer you hid in your family’s attic, to bust into banking networks and steal tens of millions of US dollars?
Somehow my brain just kicks in and I can figure stuff out. I can make it happen. I’ve always been like that.
Still?
If somebody has an issue and they need help, I could probably help them figure out a strategy.

You write about being questioned by Minneapolis police, who refused to believe a young black woman was smart enough to do what you were doing. You had a strong reaction to them incorrectly insisting someone else was pulling your strings, correct?
Growing up, I never experienced racism. My friends were all races of people, all religions, and I grew up in a household where we were all just human beings. So the first time I encountered racism, really, was when I was in that interrogation room.
That was the turning point for me. I was always trying to help other people but that’s when I felt, “OK, let me show you how smart this black woman is”. That’s when it became this cat-and-mouse game. “Let me show them what I can really do.”
And if you had not been treated like that, do you think your life could have gone another way?
The thing is, if they would have came to me and said, “Tanya, you’re brilliant. You’re smart. Let’s figure out a way you can help us stop people from doing these things with banks,” I would have been more than happy and willing. But that didn’t happen.
Even when I got out of prison, I couldn’t find a job because of my background, or I’d get hired for a job and then they’d run a background check.
Tanya Smith
And the racism continued in prison?
I never minded taking responsibility for the things I did but being given 24½ years for a crime that only carried a five-year penalty, that was my biggest problem.
I believe in equality. If someone does the same thing, you don’t give one person more time because of the colour of their skin. I kept writing these letters to judges and I always mentioned Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky [white, male financiers whose crimes involved more money but who received lighter sentences]. Fairness was all I expected.
Yet, while they were in country club prisons, you spent a significant amount of your prison years in solitary confinement, sometimes because of escape attempts.
That’s why I consider it unfair treatment. Even when I was locked up – I’ve never done drugs, I’ve never sold drugs, I’ve never been violent. But they treated me worse than those violent offenders in the facilities.












View this post on Instagram























A post shared by Tanya Smith (@neversawmecomingbook)



The book was originally announced for release in 2021 but it is coming out three years later. Why?
For so long, before I decided to write this book, I never talked about my life. No one ever knew. My daughter never knew. So it was really heavy because I was keeping this all inside. I felt like I wasn’t being who I really am.
It was a heavy burden lifted, being able to say, “I’m Tanya Smith”, because it was really [she begins crying] difficult not being able to be who I am. I feel like just at the beginning of writing this book is when I became free.
Even when I got out of prison, I couldn’t find a job because of my background, or I’d get hired for a job and then they’d run a background check.
But someone finally gave you a chance, the man who hired you for the part-time customer service job you have had for more than eight years. Was it hard to tell him the truth about your background?
He doesn’t know yet. I didn’t tell him yet. But when the book comes out, he will. I’m OK with it now.
Never Saw Me Coming, by Tanya Smith, is published by Little, Brown


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Books and literature

Michael Jackson groupie, knew Prince pre-fame, stole US$40 million. Tanya Smith tells all

Pop artist Prince performs in the Hong Kong HarbourFest in 2003. Photo: SCMP

Tanya Smith tells her story of teenage Michael Jackson fandom, seeing Prince start out, and hacking into bank computers to steal US$40 million, in memoir Never Saw Me Coming. Photo: Tanya Smith

The cover of Smith’s book. Photo: TNS

Tyka Nelson at a Grammy after-party in 2017 in Los Angeles, California. Smith knew singer Prince as “just Tyka’s brother”. Photo: Getty Images

Pop artist Prince performs in the Hong Kong HarbourFest in 2003. Smith knew him before he was famous – he would rehearse at a theatre her father owned in the US city of Minneapolis. Photo: SCMP

Kind of Blue at 65, and how Miles Davis’ seminal 1959 jazz album changed music

American jazz musician Miles Davis. Photo: Getty Images

The bestselling jazz album of all time, Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, released on August 15, 1959, took jazz in a different direction, and influenced generations of musicians from Carlos Santana to Lana Del Rey. Photo: TNS

The cover of Kind of Blue, by Miles Davis. Photo: Columbia

Historian Ashley Kahn, pictured here in 2015, wrote a bestselling 2000 book about the album, Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece. Photo: Getty Images 

Another jazz great, John Coltrane played on A Kind of Blue. Photo: Bettmann/Corbis

Miles Davis early in his career (1948) in New York. Photo: Getty Images

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After the loss of her father, Alexandra Chan set about writing her memoir, only to discover that her grief ran far deeper than his death. Photo: courtesy of Alexandra Chan

Robert Earl Chan as a young man. He flew himself to freedom on a mail plane after being imprisoned by the Japanese during the second world war. Photo: courtesy of Alexandra Chan

The cover of Alexandra Chan’s book. Photo: courtesy of Alexandra Chan

Alexandra Chan as a baby with her parents. Photo: courtesy of Alexandra Chan

Robert Earl Chan reading letters from home during the second world war. Photo: courtesy of Alexandra Chan

Just as Alexandra Chan was about to enter kindergarten, her father settled into retirement and became a stay-at-home dad. Photo: courtesy of Alexandra Chan

A young Alexandra Chan with her mother, Karen Elizabeth Smith. Photo: courtesy of Alexandra Chan

Robert Earl Chan grew up in Savannah in the US state of Georgia. Photo: courtesy of Alexandra Chan

“Scholars in a Clouded Gorge” by Alexandra Chan is one of the Chinese brush paintings that is featured in her memoir. Photo: Alexandra Chan

Chung T’ai Peng lived and died in the United States as Robert Chan. Photo: courtesy of Alexandra Chan

“In the Garden Behind the Moon” is split into eight “books”, which are each associated with a Chinese zodiac animal. The memoir opens with the Year of the Ram (2015). Photo: Alexandra Chan

Chung T’ai Peng with his family, including baby Robert Earl Chan (centre), in 1914. His oldest son, Archie, was the first Chinese-American baby born in the state of Georgia. Photo: courtesy of Alexandra Chan

Alexandra Chan’s father and mother at a gala for cancer survivors and their families. Her mother died from a blood cancer called multiple myeloma in 2011. Photo: courtesy of Alexandra Chan

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A scene from Poltergeist. Photo: TNS

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Luciano Pavarotti signs autographs following his first concert in Hong Kong, in February 1990. In his memoir, John Duffus  (right) recalls the time Pavarotti sang a duet with Jiang Zemin in Beijing. Photo courtesy of Blacksmith Books 

Austrian President Thomas Klestil smiles while then-Chinese President Jiang Zemin sings with unidentified musicians during a banquet in Beijing in 2001, the same year he outsang Luciano Pavarotti in an Italian duet. Photo: AP

A career highlight for John Duffus was arranging a concert by The Three Tenors (Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo and Jose Carreras) at Beijing’s Forbidden City in 2001. Photo: courtesy of Blacksmith Books 

John Duffus on the Great Wall of China in 1986, during the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra’s first tour of China. Photo: courtesy of Blacksmith Books 

A poster for the 1984 Coliseum concert Duffus arranged with Capital Artists featuring three of its most popular artists, Leslie Cheung, Anita Mui and Lui Fong, and the Hong Kong Philharmonic. Photo: courtesy of Blacksmith Books 

Lifestyle

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At 13 Tanya Smith was obsessed with Michael Jackson. By 20 she’d stolen US$40 million from banks. Then came prison. Now she’s written a book


A teenage Michael Jackson fan and a bank robber, Tanya Smith spent over 13 years in jail. She’s written about that and more, including seeing singer Prince start out, in a memoir. Expect a screen adaptation soon.


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