NEVER SAW ME COMING: How I Outsmarted the F.B.I. and the Entire Banking System — and Pocketed $40 Million, by Tanya Smith
When Tanya Smith was in high school, spending time with her upwardly mobile father in 1980s Minneapolis, she developed a kind of class consciousness — a curiosity about money and race and a desire to know just how much income qualified someone as “rich.”
Most people would probably just try to guess; Smith had a different solution. Deploying what we now term “social engineering,” she would call banks and trick workers into revealing exactly how much was in someone’s account. This led to more experiments with low-level scamming, some of it, she says, for a good cause. “Between the ages of 15 and 16, I managed to void people’s utility bills, at least temporarily, at least 300 times,” she writes in her memoir, “Never Saw Me Coming.” Smith “also handled overdue mortgages.”
In recounting her childhood, Smith conveys a certain admiration for this younger self. She was, by her own account, both smart and fearless.
But as the story unfolds, the mood darkens. Smith has a twin, Tammy, who gets into drugs as Smith becomes further involved in her white-collar crimes and moves to live a glamorous life in Los Angeles; her parents, rendered as saintly figures, recede into the background, and a series of flashy and obviously ill-intentioned men enter the picture. Smith’s educational promise evaporates as her biggest scam — basically, finding ways to tap into a bank’s reserve funds to send phony wire transfers — becomes her full-time job.
The initial glamour of cavorting around with celebrities gives way to the more depressing (and familiar) picture of a young woman losing control of her life. By the time we’ve reached the book’s final third, Smith is in prison. She breaks out twice. She also gives birth twice while incarcerated.
Financial crimes are not generally prosecuted in proportion to their incidence. Globally, it’s estimated that more than $3 trillion was lost to white-collar crime in the United States in 2023, but only 113 crimes were prosecuted. There are many reasons for this; most boil down to the labyrinthine nature of our financial systems and the resources needed to secure convictions. Even those crimes that do get prosecuted rarely lead to prison time; a 2017 study found that federal judges in white-collar cases “frequently sentence well below the fraud guideline.”
But Smith? She got 24 years, and ended up serving 13 — at the time, the harshest sentence of its kind ever meted out.
She chalks up her treatment to racism, often referring to a single moment. Having finally been arrested after several years of scamming, she’s sitting across a table from a few F.B.I. guys, and it becomes clear that they simply can’t comprehend that the mastermind behind a complicated, yearslong bank scam could be the young Black woman before them.
“It’s not you,” she quotes the detective as saying. “Here’s how I know: You’re a Neee-gro.” The moment so incenses her that she confesses — only to be ignored.
Much in this book gets sorted neatly into categories of Good and Bad. Smith’s parents are lovely, teaching her about kindness and inclusivity. Her boyfriends are quite obviously awful. But I got the sense, reading this book, that Smith struggled with how to judge her own role as the author of her very eventful life. Was she a modern-day Robin Hood, stealing from the rich and giving to … well, herself, but also to some other deserving folks? Or was she simply a sociopathic child who tricked Michael Jackson’s grandfather into disclosing the musician’s whereabouts so she could meet him?
What does Smith really think of the younger version of herself, coaxing tired bank managers into giving her money — and, in one very memorable incident, conning someone into giving her a whole computer system?
The plot moves quickly, but sometimes it’s hard to know what we are supposed to feel about the action. A little more introspection would have gone a long way. The language, too, often veers into generalized descriptions of, say, beautiful dresses and fancy parties that lack specificity or texture.
But these complaints are minor. The narrative is propulsive, the pacing is fantastic and the accumulated events land with real weight. It’s impossible not to root for our narrator, or enjoy the mink coats and hangs with Prince (the older brother of a childhood friend), or be somehow delighted that Smith keeps running into the Manson family member Squeaky Fromme in different prisons.
For all the buoyancy of the ride up, Smith’s memoir is ultimately a sad story. But it’s not a hopeless one. She ends up living by her wits as a single mother — the same wits that got her into so much trouble as a younger woman.
By the book’s end, the reader can really feel just how much the over-sentencing stole from her. It wasn’t just Smith who paid for her crimes; her whole family, in different ways, did too. They still do.
NEVER SAW ME COMING: How I Outsmarted the F.B.I. and the Entire Banking System — and Pocketed $40 Million | By Tanya Smith | Little, Brown | 422 pp. | $32