Diamond Doris: The True Story of the World's Most Notorious Jewel Thief

A story that I hope is turned into a movie. A woman, a Black woman, who had the jewelry world in her hands. Great read and glad someone captured this interesting story.

Doris Doris Doris...its really hard to not give away details of the life of Doris Payne but I will say this, every time I turned the page, wherever she was in the world, I was right there with her. I laughed, cried and held my breath every time I thought she was caught. Can't wait to see the movie.

I felt like I was traveling, experiencing and learning from decades and decades of Doris’s life! This was beautifully written!

Absolutely a great read! I recommend this book if you like memoirs or autobiographies! It keep me interested and I read EVERY time I had free time.

If you picture an international jewel thief pulling off heists at places like Cartier and Bulgari in the 1970s/1980s, the person you picture is probably not Doris Payne, a Black woman who grew up in a coal-mining town in West Virginia. But with confidence, elan, and charm, Doris pulled off some truly astonishing heists. This memoir, put together with help from a ghost writer, just skims over the surface. We learn about Doris’s early years, in which she watched her father, a miner, abuse her mother. She became single-mindededly focused on both finding a way to protect her mom and vowing to never put herself in a position to be abused by a man. An early experience with stealing a watch led to more and more daring thefts of jewelry as she got older. Addicted to the thrill as much as the money, she progressed to bigger and bigger jobs even as she became a mother of two and a source of financial support to her mother after she finally leaves her marriage. She talks at length about her relationships with both her married Jewish fence and a Black man who also has ties to the criminal life, both of whom she held at arm’s length. Her technique was straightforward: she’d dress well, with enough jewelry to be convincing as a woman of means, and she’d work the store clerks by engaging them in conversation and getting them to believe a major sale (and its attendant commission) was imminent, and then simply walk out of the store wearing the merchandise. Despite a decades-long career, she had only a few run-ins with police, including one in which she was detained for months by Monegasque authorities who could not find the ring she’d secreted away and couldn’t charge her. She was finally imprisoned in her 80s, but spent less than a year behind bars. This book feels like more of a highlight reel than an actual memoir. She barely touches on her relationships with her children, much less with their father (who mostly raised them). Even her longtime partner, who she never marries, is mostly a thin sketch. At one point about 2/3 of the way through the book she mentions that she’s turning 50 but there’s been no real grounding in her age prior to that so it feels kind if jarring. The writing is competent but mostly unspectacular, though her ghostwriter does a good job of incorporating what is clearly Doris’s own irreverence and wicked sense of humor. But at the end of the book, I didn’t feel like I really had much of a sense of what her life really was and who she really is beneath that disarming exterior. It’s fine, a quick read, but nothing with enough of a hook to really affirmatively recommend.