Nice ring to it: Diamonds are a girl's best friend

Doris Payne's life has been a long, exciting ride.
LAS VEGAS (AP) -- When Doris Payne went to work, she stepped into her fancy dress, high heels and donned a wide-brimmed hat. Her creamy, mocha skin was made up just so, her handbag always designer. Sometimes a pair of plain gold earrings would do. Always, she looked immaculate, well-to-do.
It was a lonely job. She worked by herself and few people knew what she did.
New York. Colorado. Nevada. California. They all beckoned, and so did Greece and France, England and Switzerland as she plied her trade over five decades.
She is 75 now, and she remembers the things she has done with amusement. Yes, she says, that was me, and she throws back her head and laughs.
There was the February day, eight years ago, when she strolled into the Neiman Marcus store on the Las Vegas Strip.
Employee Linda Sbrocco showed her several diamond rings -- this one ... no, this one ... how about that one? Soon Sbrocco was swapping jewelry in and out of cases at a dizzying pace. Payne slipped rings on and off, and had Sbrocco do the same.
Then Payne was gone. And so was a $36,000 marquis cut, 2.48-carat, diamond ring.
Doing her job
This was how Doris Payne went about her work as an international jewel thief.
She glided in, engaged the clerk in one of her stories, confused them and easily slipped away with a diamond ring, usually to a waiting taxi cab.
She is, says retired Denver Police Detective Gail Riddell, like a character from a movie -- a female Cary Grant, smooth and confident.
And she has been very, very successful. Every month or every other month -- no one knows how many times over more than 50 years -- she strolled into a jewelry store and strolled out with a ring worth thousands of dollars.
Occasionally, she was caught. Mostly, she was not.
She grew up in Slab Fork, W.Va. When she was a teenager, the family moved to Cleveland. One day, her mother gave Payne a $5 bill -- $2 to get her hair straightened, the rest to pay the family's bill at a clothing and jewelry store.
"My mom says if I get good grades this year, she's going to buy me a watch," Payne boasted to the store owner, Bill Benjamin.
Mr. Benjamin was kind and friendly, and he showed her some watches. She tried a few on, but then a boisterous white man entered the store, and suddenly it seemed that Mr. Benjamin didn't want to be seen being nice to a black girl.
Turning point
He rushed her off and she made it to the door before she realized she still had a small gold watch on her wrist. Mr. Benjamin had forgotten.
"Oh Mr. Benjamin," she shouted gleefully, holding up her wrist, "I forgot this watch."
Mr. Benjamin snatched the watch from her arm.
People, she had learned, could forget.
After high school, Payne and her mother lived together, her mother having left her abusive father. Payne was pregnant at 18 with a son, and would later have a daughter, too.
Doris wanted her mother to know that she had figured out a way to raise money, to take care of her. "I know how to cause the man in the jewelry store to forget," she confided.
"That's stealing," her mother warned.
"It's not stealing because I'm only taking what they give me," Payne said.
When she was around 23, she took a Greyhound bus to a Pittsburgh fine jewelry store and easily walked out with a square-cut diamond with a price tag of $22,000. Then she went to a pawn broker and told the man she wanted to sell the ring.
No questions. No ID requested. She got $7,500 cash.
On her own
Payne was a one-woman gang, with her own patter. Maybe she'd come into some money and wanted to buy a few pieces of jewelry. Or maybe her jewelry had been stolen and she needed to replace it.
The story didn't matter; she took her leads from the sales clerks and confused them easily. She had them take rings out all over the store and tried many on, asking about the cut, clarity, the carat. Usually jewelry stores show only one expensive item at a time. But when a customer comes in and claims they have thousands of dollars to spend, rules are often relaxed.
She usually hid the ring in her hand, or sometimes on her finger in plain sight, then strolled out of the store into a waiting cab. Then she went straight to the airport to get out of town. Almost as soon as she stole, she sold.
In the early 1970s, Payne tried her skills overseas. First Paris. Then Monte Carlo, where she flew in 1974 and paid a visit to Cartier, coming away with a platinum diamond ring. When she got to the airport in Nice, custom agents stopped her.
During the investigation, Payne says she was kept in a "fifth-rate motel" by the Mediterranean. One day she asked the woman in charge for nail clippers and for a needle and thread to mend her dress. She used the clippers to pry the ring from its setting, sewed the diamond into her girdle and then tossed the setting into the sea, she says.
She wore her girdle day and night, even when it was wet from washing. Her room was searched every day, but the diamond remained hidden.
She wasn't always so lucky. She's been arrested more times than she can remember. One detective said her arrest report is more than 6 feet long -- she's done time in Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia, Colorado and Wisconsin. Through the decades, she has used at least 22 aliases, among them Audrey Davis, Thelma White, Sonya Dowels, Marie Clements, Donna Gilbert.
The name may have changed, but the persona was always the same -- charming, pleasant, refined, with a sweet Southern way about her.
Where is she now?
Doris Payne is again behind bars, this time in Las Vegas' Clark County jail on charges that she stole a diamond ring from one of her old haunts -- a Neiman Marcus store, this one in Palo Alto, Calif. -- and sold it in Las Vegas. She also faces charges of stealing another ring from a Las Vegas jewelry store, violating parole in Colorado and skipping town while out on bail from a previous Las Vegas theft at a Neiman Marcus.
It's been a long journey. It was fun dressing up, fun forging this career all on her own. It was never about making money or spending it. It was about the game.
"I don't know," she said. "I think the whole thing just got out of hand. It kind of went amok."
Jean Herbert, a longtime friend, asked Payne about her future: "I said, 'You're in your 70s, you cannot wear the bars of the jail out.' I said, 'Aren't you tired?'"
She never got an answer.
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