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

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

Reading Time:5 minutes

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

Published: 4:15am, 26 Aug 2024Updated: 4:36am, 26 Aug 2024

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.