BY ANGIE WAGNER
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 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.
The salesgirl showed her several diamond rings -- this one . . . no, this one . . . how about that one? Soon, jewelry was being swapped in and out of cases at a dizzying pace. Payne slipped rings on and off.
Then Payne was gone. And so was a $36,000 marquis cut, 2.48-carat diamond ring.
This was how Doris Payne went about her work. 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.
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. Occasionally, she was caught. Mostly, she was not.
***
She grew up in Slab Fork, W.Va., the youngest of six children. When she was a teenager, the family moved to Cleveland.
One day, her mother gave Payne money 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.
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 Benjamin didn't want to be seen being nice to a black girl.
He rushed her off, and she made it to the door before she realized she still had a small gold watch on her wrist. Benjamin had forgotten.
''Oh Mr. Benjamin,'' she shouted gleefully, holding up her wrist, ''I forgot this watch.''
Benjamin snatched the watch from her arm.
People, she had learned, could forget.
It became a teenage game. Payne would enter a jewelry store with her girlfriend and try on watches. She didn't steal. Not yet.
***
When she was around 23, Payne took a bus to a Pittsburgh jewelry store and easily walked out with a square-cut diamond with a price tag of $22,000. Then she went to a pawnbroker.
No questions. No ID requested. She got $7,500 cash.
Payne was a one-woman gang, with her own patter. 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.
She usually hid the ring in her hand, or sometimes on her finger in plain sight, then strolled out to a waiting cab. Then she went straight to the airport to get out of town.
***
Payne got her ideas from ads and articles in fancy magazines, especially Town & Country. She flipped through the pages, spied a ring she liked and then traveled from her base in Bedford, Ohio, to the store that advertised it.
The Jewelers Security Alliance, an industry trade group, got on to Payne in the 1970s. Bulletins went out, warning jewelry stores about a slick, well-dressed black woman who was stealing diamond rings.
What made Doris Payne different was that she was so prolific and so good.
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'' near the Mediterranean. One day, she asked the woman in charge for nail clippers and for a needle and thread to mend her dress. She pried the ring from its setting and sewed the diamond into her girdle.
She wore her girdle day and night. Her room was searched every day, but the diamond remained hidden.
She wasn't always so lucky. She has been arrested more times than she can remember. The most time she ever served was in Colorado, where she did almost five years for swiping a ring from a Neiman Marcus store in 1998.
***
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.
It has 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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