Cheryl Diamond model born outlaw spent her childhood international fugitive ...

Cheryl Diamond was born an outlaw.

As a child, she claims she mastered the art of forgery, learned to shoplift, withstand an interrogation and most importantly – she knew how to disappear. 'It's the simple mistakes that get you caught,' she says.

Now aged 34 and living in Rome, the former outlaw details her unimaginable life in her gripping new memoir,  Nowhere Girl: A Memoir of a Fugitive Childhood. With Interpol reports and sworn affidavits to back it up, Cheryl Diamond proves that truth is stranger than fiction.  

Belying her serene blue eyes and cascading blonde hair is a life of global intrigue - and a childhood that was more akin to the pages of James Bond than Dr. Seuss.

She claims her first memory was a near death experience at the age of four when brake failure sent her family's rickety car hurtling down the Himalayas. They survived, only to narrowly escape a tense face-off with two Kashmiri soldiers.

To her, life was one thrilling adventure.

By the time she was nine, Diamond and her seemingly unbreakable family of five had already lived in more than a dozen countries, across five continents, under six aliases. One day they were in Cairo, the next in Vienna.

The drill was always the same: move without warning, destroy all evidence, and change names with new invented backstories. Repeat. They slipped by on forged documents, crisscrossing the globe while always remaining a few steps ahead of Interpol.

In the meantime, Diamond managed to train as a near-level Olympic gymnast, work as a teenage fashion model in New York City and publish her first book at the age of 19 - all under different aliases.

But as she got older, the mystery of her past and that of her parents began to unravel: Who were they? And what were they running from? Diamond didn't know their real names and birthdates – or her own for that matter. 

With her identity burned many times over, Cheryl Diamond (a pen name) realized that she belonged nowhere in the world. There was no real proof that she existed. After winging an entire life on fake passports, it seemed that getting a real one would prove to be the greatest challenge of all.  

Though the details are hazy, Cheryl Diamond says she was born 'Harbhajan Khalsa Nanak' sometime in 1986, in New Zealand to a captivating yet controlling conman named George, and her mother Anne. 

Or as she put it, she was 'the baby of two renegades; dreamt of in a Panamanian prison, conceived on a money-laundering run, and grown in her mother's belly during a transcontinental escape.'

'Back then it all seemed so right,' she says. 'I could not imagine that my future had already been written in the stamp of a fake passport before I was even conceived.'  

As the youngest of three siblings with a ten-year age gap, Cheryl was the center of her family's universe. And despite the unusual circumstances, she remembers the halcyon days of her childhood on the run as joyful and exciting. 

So 'why did we run so fast and for so long? Why did we risk it all?' she writes in real-time. 'That answer is simple. We were being hunted.'  

Beginning at a very young age, Cheryl noticed that her father, George, checked into hotels under different last names. 'Most often Cash, Sterling, and Gold, my father seemed to like money-related names.'

It was never clear where their money came from, she said, 'I'm taught to shoplift, but that's just to build character.' Nonetheless, money was 'always there, just a wire transfer away. Ready to buy us freedom.'

When they moved, it was always sudden and generally involved frantic packing, leaving possessions in storage facilities (or not) and dashing to the airport to go wherever Cheryl's father decided - by looking at the upcoming flights leaving that day.  

Life on the road meant that most lessons were taught on the fly, said Diamond. 'Since Dad considers all educational institutions breeding grounds for government propaganda and square-thinking bureaucrats.' Lessons in core subjects like math, and writing were few and far in between, taught by her mother mostly on the swirling carpet of five star hotels while on the run. 

But her hardest lesson was something very different, she said. 'I had to learn our rules:' 1) Always have a back story. 'With each new country, Dad not only changes our last name, but also builds a different history, a different place we're from,' she wrote. 'He drills me in mock interrogations when I least expect it.'

2) Never give outsiders your home phone number. Instead, set up an answering service in a different town where people can leave a message after the beep. 3) Forward all mail to a P.O. Box and take abrupt turns, circuitous routes before picking it up. 4) Pay for everything in cash.

Nothing was as important as their cardinal rule: 'When you leave a place—no matter how much you love it, no matter how many friends you've made—you can never, ever go back,' she writes.

So deeply ingrained were these guidelines that Diamond never dared to question them at first. Nor did she question why her family fled countries, seemingly at the drop of a hat (and often in the middle of the night).  

It wasn't until Cheryl was 15 that she discovered how much of her family was a lie. Her two siblings were in fact, half siblings. Her mother, Anne, whom she always thought was French, was really Italian and raised in Luxembourg.

And the person hunting them? She claims was actually Cheryl's grandfather - a high-powered operative in the Luxembourg secret police who disagreed with Anne's unconventional lifestyle and threatened to use his influence to declare her an unfit mother and take her children away.  

George was a handsome and charming gold bullion trader from Canada who offered Anne a way out. And so the stage was set for the great international drama that would take this family of five across several continents and forever alter the course of their lives. 

True, they weren't criminals yet, but they eventually would be. 'Sometimes when someone starts treating you like a criminal, you have to become one to escape,' said Diamond.

With the walls closing in, they needed money and they needed it fast. Faced with little choice, George drained an account containing almost $2million of investor's money in his gold bullion fund. 'In that moment he became the criminal Anne's father had framed him as,' wrote Diamond. 

Years later, Cheryl wondered if it was all necessary. After her family bought new passports, they were successfully off the grid; and yet they continued to flee. 'My father must have known we didn’t have to run anymore.' Questioning his motives, she believes that their decades-long escape was really the deluded plot of a megalomaniac to isolate and control his family. 

'Maybe he was using the past to control us, or perhaps we had all lived in fear so long that none of us knew how to stop.' 

By the time Cheryl was born, her family had already spent a few years on the road as nomadic Sikhs. Her real name, 'Harbhajan Khalsa Nanak,' translates to Song of God/ Pure/ Truth in Sanskrit. 'It's not just a name, it's everything I know we stand for,' she writes. 

As practicing Sikhs, they abided by the sacred tradition of keeping long uncut hair, maintained a strict vegetarian diet and automatically recited prayers in Punjabi before every meal. As a family, they performed weekly half-hour silent meditations, and daily Kundalini yoga sessions.

'We must make quite a confusing picture,' she wrote. 'Just an average family of Sikhs. Except the father is a broad-shouldered six-foot Viking, face deeply tanned, with a head of untamed red-blond hair.'

But like many things in their life, Sikhism would fly out the window with a new identity, backstory and country. George would eventually convert his family to Judaism, and Cheryl will celebrate a Bat Mitzvah while attending an Orthodox school in Virginia. It was a decision that he seemingly made on a whim, she says, after he stumbled 'across the idea that Jewish people dominate the world financial

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