Angie Barrett Does Not Use Butt Cream
Or so she says— and from the looks of her, she doesn’t need it. Although she once stole hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of clothes from Neiman’s—and did hard time in the state penitentiary—she’s clawed her way to the top of the Dallas socialite heap and now hosts her own reality TV show. Who says there are no second acts?
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For someone who loved fashion, Dallas was, as Angie told me, “a kind of heaven.” Dallas women were renowned for looking as if they had stepped out of the pages of Vogue. They worshipped Dior the way museum curators worshipped Monet. And many of them felt that their lives were not complete without periodic trips to one of the hallowed temples of American fashion: the flagship Neiman Marcus in downtown—in those years, one of the few stores outside of New York where the most luxurious clothes in the world could be found.
After they married, Allen worked at a store that sold men’s clothes; Angie went to work at a clothing store for women at the tony NorthPark Center. Noticing how good Angie was with customers, the manager of a more expensive boutique in the mall quickly hired her away, and then she was hired away again by another boutique. By the early eighties she was working at Lou Lattimore, one of the best boutiques in the city, and she was developing a clientele of wealthy Dallas women.
Some of her clients became so fond of Angie that they began inviting her to lunch, to their children’s school plays, and to dinners at their homes. A few women began asking her to come along to social events. When Diana Strauss, one of Dallas’s great clotheshorses, threw a huge fundraiser featuring Robert Redford, she invited Angie to attend. There, the Dallas social bug began to bite at her. “I sat at my table and looked around at everyone—at this world of beautiful people and beautiful clothes—and I thought, ‘Now this is the definition of glamour,’” Angie said.
Angie and Allen bought a two-bedroom home for themselves and their two daughters on the outskirts of Highland Park, paying $975 a month in mortgage. Hoping to cash in on the city’s housing boom and make real money, Allen quit his retail job in 1984 and enrolled in real estate school. That same year, a manager at the downtown Neiman Marcus offered Angie the opportunity to work in its exclusive Silver Key Club, which catered to the store’s biggest spenders, most of whom were well-known socialites. Suddenly Angie, at age 29, found herself working in the store she’d once dreamed about as a child, associating with world-class shopaholics, women so rich that they didn’t think twice about spending $50,000 a month on clothes.
By early 1985, however, she was lying awake at nights in bed, terrified. Allen was making next to nothing in real estate, and her commissions at Neiman Marcus didn’t come close to covering the mortgage, the babysitter, and the other bills.
“And is that when you decided to become a criminal?” I asked. “Just like that?”
I didn’t ask that question until our fourth meeting. Until then, we had only danced around the subject. But during this interview, we were sitting alone seventeen floors up in the quiet Crescent Club, near downtown. “It was something I was going to do just one time and one time only,” she said, looking out the window. “Right when things were going bad, this woman named Heide Levy, who was a former customer of mine from another boutique, called me and said, ‘If you can ever bring me clothes, I can sell them and give you cash.’ And that began churning around in my brain.
“And so one day, I took a sales receipt from a previous sale I had made and attached it to a set of clothes I had not sold. Then I walked out the employees’ entrance with the clothes, telling the security woman I needed to deliver them to one of my customers. If she had looked at the receipt and the clothes, she would have realized the vendor numbers and the designers didn’t match up. But she didn’t look. She checked me out and I was gone. My heart was pounding, my stomach was turning upside down, and I just kept trying to think, ‘I’m saving us from foreclosure for another month.’”
The crime she had committed was a rather simple one, hardly the stuff of Hollywood. But she unknowingly had set into motion a scandal that would soon become the talk of Dallas. Levy, a well-connected woman in University Park (Highland Park’s sister city) took the clothes Angie had stolen and then fenced them out of her home in a kind of glorified garage sale, splitting the profits with Angie.
Before long, word was spreading among the neighborhood women. Discount clothes straight from Neiman Marcus! Original price tags still on the clothes! See Heide Levy! Most of the women who came to Levy’s didn’t ask too many questions about where the clothes came from. Those who did were told that a very rich Dallas woman, irritated that her husband would not give her more spending money, was buying the clothes under her husband’s open charge account at Neiman’s and then having the clothes resold.
“I kept telling myself to stop, but I never did,” Angie said. “My mind was crazy, in total autopilot survival mode.” In August 1985, when store executives finally realized that clothes were disappearing and then traced those clothes back to Angie, she wept and confessed to everything. (She said she didn’t come close to stealing $531,000 worth of merchandise, as Neiman’s had claimed. She said that that was the store’s entire loss for the whole year. But she decided not to fight their allegations.)
Meanwhile, police detectives working the case began receiving phone calls from attorneys who said they were representing well-known Dallas women who had bought clothes from Levy. The attorneys insisted that the women were shocked—absolutely shocked!—that the clothes had been stolen. They were socially upstanding women, the attorneys said, who were only trying to save their husbands some money. Levy’s attorney also argued vehemently that Levy had no idea that the clothes were stolen.
Perhaps for that reason, Levy received only a ten-year probated sentence. Angie, however, was convicted of larceny and sentenced to three years in the state penitentiary. The fallout was immediate. Her husband filed for divorce and won custody of their children. The socialites who had once bought clothes from her refused to speak to her—only one of the women sent her a note wishing her well, Angie said—and, according to one source, Neiman Marcus executives, furious at the way they had been hoodwinked, eventually decreed that she would not be welcome at Neiman Marcus ever again. Banned from Neiman Marcus: For a woman who loved clothes, was there any worse punishment?
WHEN IT CAME time to head off to prison, the still-fashion-conscious Angie, unaware that she would be able to wear only a white uniform behind bars, packed her finest dresses and favorite Lancôme makeup into leather French luggage. She was taken to one of the women’s units in Gatesville, just outside Waco, where burly female guards led her to her dormitory and told her that she would be awakening every morning at four-thirty to work in the prison kitchen.
All day long, she served food and cleaned dishes. During the afternoon recreation period, she did sit-ups to keep her stomach toned. At night, she lay in her bed and listened to her fellow inmates talk about how they had murdered their husbands or sold drugs. When they asked about her past, she told them about the beautiful clothing she had stolen from Neiman Marcus.
“You ripped off Neiman Marcus?” the inmates said. “Girl!”
“I ruined my life,” she said, her eyes filling with tears. “I ruined my life.”
IN OCTOBER 1991 the members of Dallas’s “fete set,” as the Dallas Morning News likes to call the society crowd, had gathered at the Anatole Hotel for the annual TACA Custom Auction Gala to support the city’s arts programs. It was a beautiful affair. Men in tuxedos and bejeweled women dressed as colorfully as Rose Bowl floats stood in little circles, laughing uproariously at the latest story about who had done what to whom.
At some point, one socialite noticed another woman, blond and well dressed, perusing the silent auction items lining a corner of the ballroom. She thought the woman looked familiar. Another socialite thought the same thing, and then another. Then someone gasped, “It’s Angie King!”
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