Related Articles
Janelle Monáe will star as a calculated con artist in an upcoming Universal Pictures film, Variety reports. The untitled thriller pulls from the true story of Tanya Smith, the underestimated con artist who pulled off a $40 million scam. The film will be adapted from Smith’s memoir, Never Saw Me Coming, and Universal Pictures landed the film rights to adapt the book with Monáe’s production company Wondaland Pictures producing. Smith will also executive produce. In the thriller, Monáe’s Smith orchestrates heists, accumulates millions, and evades law enforcement.
In her Never Saw Me Coming memoir, an adolescent Smith described a fascination with race and wealth. She started small with “social engineering,” calling banks and tricking the tellers into revealing a person’s account balance. After mastering low-level scams, she found ways to “void utility bills,” she writes in her memoir, and “handle overdue mortgages” as a teenager. Profiting off of her white-collar crimes, she moved to Los Angeles and lived a lavish life. Once the FBI started to catch on to her crimes, they allegedly “refused to believe a Black woman could be the architect of such sophisticated crimes,” per the project’s official press release, via Variety. Her biggest heist came after that: a scam that involved tapping into the bank’s reserve funds and sending false wire transfers.
Eventually, the law caught up with her: she was arrested and began a 13-year sentence in 1986. It was considered a harsh sentence given white-collar crimes “frequently sentence well below the fraud guideline,” according to a 2017 study. In the memoir, Smith chalks up her long sentence to racism, recounting one FBI officer allegedly saying “neeee-grroes murder, steal and rob, but they don’t have the brains to commit sophisticated crimes like this.” While incarcerated, she escaped twice and gave birth twice.
After a lengthy legal battle, she was released in May 1999. She is now “enjoying the peace of suburban motherhood,” she told the Guardian in August.
Monáe’s recent film work includes Moonlight, Hidden Figures, Harriet, and Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. Monáe last graced television screens during a Grammy’s tribute to Quincy Jones, where she moonwalked to Michael Jackson’s “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough.”
