“I’m an ex-convict, and the establishment doesn’t like to give an ex-con a chance,” Trevi shouted in Spanish. “If you still love me, come see me (perform) tonight.” Then she flounced her hair, twirled her skirt and vanished – much the way she had six years ago, after the first whispers about the singer and a mysterious, sadistic sex clan.

Her surprise rush-hour appearance last month made one thing clear: A year on the run, four years in prison, her child’s vanished corpse and a mysterious jailhouse pregnancy have not tamed the singer known as La Atrevida, or “Miss Audacious.”

Now Trevi is launching the most ambitious concert tour of her sensational career, performing in stadiums across the United States – a country she hadn’t conquered even at the height of her fame.

“What she’s doing is really amazing,” says Rudy Mangual, editor of Latin Beat Magazine. “Frankly, we’d written her off, but we’re hearing more and more about her all the time. To go right from prison to the U.S. market, that takes guts.”

“People love a villain,” says Chuy Varela, a Latin music writer who has followed the strange twists in the Trevi saga. “After all she’s been through – the incarcerations, the weird things with the girls – she’s still singing and getting all crazy on stage. If she gets a really good tune out of it all, watch out.”

Trevi’s previous five albums were smash hits, her first two movies broke Mexican box-office records and her pin-up calendars sold in the millions. Her 1998 contract with Televisa – which years before had scorned her – made Trevi the highest-paid female performer in Latin America. Talks were underway in Hollywood for Trevi’s U.S. movie debut.

Then came a bombshell: One of Trevi’s former backup singers, Aline Hernandez, was about to release a tell-all book claiming that when she was 13 years old, Trevi had lured her into a secret sex clan run by Andrade.

According to Hernandez, Trevi coerced her to strip naked for an “audition” with Andrade, then convinced her to keep the ordeal secret. Hernandez would claim that dozens of other young girls had been recruited by Trevi and raped, beaten and brainwashed by Andrade.

By the time “Aline: La Gloria por el Infierno” (“Going through Hell for Gloria”) was published, Trevi and Andrade had disappeared. Within days, Trevi’s face was on “Most Wanted” posters across the country. The search spread to Europe after the parents of Karina Yapor, a 14-year-old girl who vanished with Trevi and Andrade, received word that their daughter had abandoned a newborn baby in a Madrid hospital.

It would be more than a year before Trevi was spotted beneath a wide hat and dark glasses on a Rio de Janeiro street in January 2000. In the apartment where Trevi had been hiding out with Andrade, police found six other young women, two of them pregnant. Five young women, including two sisters, would give birth to babies they claimed were Andrade’s.

Trevi herself had a baby by Andrade while they were on the run, but the infant girl disappeared and has never been found. Trevi claims the baby accidentally choked to death and was dumped in the river by one of the clan girls. Trevi would later get pregnant again, this time while awaiting extradition from a Brazilian prison. Her lawyers claimed she was raped by guards, but DNA testing would reveal the father was, once again, Andrade.

Andrade was convicted by a Mexican court of raping and kidnapping Karina Yapor and sentenced to seven years in prison. But last September, Trevi was suddenly cleared of all charges and freed. Rather than waiting for sticky questions to die down about the whereabouts of her missing daughter, and why, if she was innocent, she’d accompanied Andrade on the run, Trevi immediately relaunched her career.

Instead of trying to win back old fans intimately familiar with ugly details of her past, Trevi has a new strategy. She’s now targeting American fans who know little of her scandals or may actually admire her criminal image.

So far, it seems to be working.

An album of songs she wrote behind bars, Como Nace El Universo (How the Universe was Born), sold more than 100,000 copies in the U.S. in less than a week. It’s had lukewarm sales in Mexico, however, and Trevi could only fill half the seats for a Mexico City concert in March.

Complicating Trevi’s return to the stage is yet another odd development in her personal soap opera: She has just announced she’s pregnant by her new fiancee, a lawyer who helped free her from prison before being arrested himself in Texas on charges of smuggling money across the border.

That’s why she suddenly began appearing on commuter buses – not so much to beg for attendance at her shows, but to introduce her new image. No longer was she Gloria Trevi, bubbly perpetual teenager. Now she’s Gloria Trevi, jail-hardened beauty with nothing to fear and amazing stories to tell.

What’s most curious about Trevi’s self-branding is the fact that she isn’t really an ex-con – she was completely exonerated by the Mexican courts. In fact, it’s unlikely she would have even spent a single night behind bars if she hadn’t suddenly fled with Andrade and the clan when Aline Hernandez’s book was about to appear.

But just as she’d previously turned the sad secret of her adolescent affair with Andrade into the more media-friendly image of a scrappy street-singer-turned-star, Trevi is now transforming the ugly secrets of her years with the clan into a more marketable image of a bruised but scrappy fighter.

“This generation finds it very attractive to be locked up,” says Latin Beat‘s Mangual. “I thought it would be the other way around for a pop queen, that it might discredit her, but its starting to look like her trouble with the law could be the thing that puts her over. There are a million beautiful girls on the pop scene, but as usual, Gloria is doing things a little differently.”

Of course, despite her scandalous past and make-believe present, one more thing may return Trevi to the top: her talent.