Heist

by Jeff Diamant

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  Copyright © 2002, 2015 by Jeff Diamant

  Cover and internal design © 2015 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Cover design by Arthur Cherry

  Cover images © cla78/Getty Images, Ruslan Nassyrov/Getty Images

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  This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering legal, accounting, or other professional service. If legal advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional person should be sought.—From a Declaration of Principles Jointly Adopted by a Committee of the American Bar Association and a Committee of Publishers and Associations

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  Originally published in 2002 in the United States of America by John F. Blair, Publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Diamant, Jeff.

  Heist : the oddball crew behind the $17 million Loomis Fargo theft / Jeff Diamant.

  pages cm

  Revised edition of the author’s Heist! 2002.

  (trade paper : alk. paper) 1. Larceny—North Carolina—Charlotte. 2. Loomis, Fargo & Co. 3. Criminal investigation—North Carolina—Charlotte. I. Title.

  HV6661.N82.D5 2015

  364.16’20975676—dc23

  015006077

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  Inside the Vault

  Teamwork

  The Key to Success

  Creative Money Laundering

  Caught on Video

  How Baseball Hindered the FBI

  Nerves

  Fun on the Run

  Close to Home

  Staying Close to Home

  Tercel to BMW

  Dead Man in Mexico?

  Stolen Stolen Money

  Christmas Bear

  A Careful David

  Coming Together

  Getting Close to Him

  Taking Care of Business

  Final Touches

  Glad to See You

  All Over

  Public Defenders

  Flying Home

  The M&M’s Contest

  Legal Trouble

  Staying in Jail

  Of Brain Size and Bust Size

  A Revealing Trial

  Selling Elvis

  Regrets

  Out West

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  Author’s Note

  In 1997, I was a reporter on the crime beat at the Charlotte Observer, just a few years out of college, when a group of North Carolinians who didn’t think things through stole $17 million from an armored-car firm called Loomis, Fargo & Co. When they were arrested in 1998 and their jaw-dropping exploits revealed, I assumed I’d never see anything quite like it again. To this point in my career, that’s been true.

  Not that it’s been slow for me. Since then I’ve covered many other fascinating stories, often of national and international significance—the presidential election recount of 2000, the aftermath of 9/11, and the papal funeral and subsequent conclave of 2005, among other things. Unlike those events, the heist, it is safe to say, will never be mentioned in a history textbook. Yet thanks to the foolishness associated with it, and the compelling stories of the people involved, it has a special spot in the memories of Carolinians who followed it in the late 1990s. That’s especially true for the journalists who covered it.

  • • •

  As the lead reporter on the case for the largest newspaper in the state, I was able to develop sources that helped me tell the most complete story possible at the time. Facing stiff competition from local media, especially the Gaston Gazette, as well as national publications and news shows that occasionally came to town, I was the first to secure in-depth interviews with most of the defendants in prison or at their homes, as well as with the law-enforcement agents who explained their investigative process in detail. Most of the important information gleaned from individual interviews was corroborated through interviews with others, and on the infrequent occasions when accounts differed, I resolved matters through available court documents and further interviews. My work paid off with enough information to fill a four-part series in the Charlotte Observer that was later republished in the Washington Post. This book is the product of many, many more hours of work.

  Public interest in the heist has never disappeared. The latest cable documentary appeared on MSNBC in 2014, and now, in 2015, Hollywood is in on it. It’s easy to understand the staying power; this is a captivating tale of greed, broken dreams, and things gone wondrously wrong, a tale that spurs readers, between guffaws and eye rolls, to place themselves in the characters’ shoes and consider how they might have acted differently. I hope you enjoy it.

  Inside the Vault

  “Don’t double-cross us,” the woman on the phone told David Ghantt. “Don’t back out on us. Steve’s a serious guy.”

  David didn’t appreciate her tone. Who was she to be pressuring him? Steve was a serious guy? It was David who was hours away from committing the most daring act of his life, and she was going off about Steve being a serious guy?

  He angrily hung up the phone at Loomis, Fargo & Co., his soon-to-be former employer in Charlotte, North Carolina. It was 2:00 p.m. on October 4, 1997, and tension was building between two planners of what would rank high among the largest heists in United States history.

  The woman on the phone was Kelly Jane Campbell, and David had a mad crush on her. She had attitude. Spunk. A parrot tattoo on her right ankle. She was five-foot-seven, had dirty-blond hair, and had worked with him for about a year at Loomis Fargo, until she left for another job in 1996. But they’d stayed in touch, and now they were poised to attempt a crime like almost no other.

  After hanging up on her, David returned to work. The only other employee with him on this day was a trainee. David was supposed to be showing him the ropes of the job, which included cash pickups and deliveries. Loomis Fargo, the nation’s largest privately held armored-car company, used vans to transport hundreds of millions of dollars a day belonging to banks and other businesses, stocking automated teller machines and storing money in the Loomis vault between deliveries.

  The trainee didn’t yet know how the place worked, a fact David planned to
use to his advantage. At 2:20 p.m., the phone rang; it was Kelly again. “Everything’s gonna be all right,” she told him. The plan was still on, but David remained steamed. “Just remind Steve,” he said, “that I might be trouble my own self.” Getting that off his chest calmed him some, and the conversation returned to the plan.

  David said he needed Kelly to drive to Loomis before the theft that night to remove a duffel bag from his parked pickup truck. The bag held his mobile phone and handgun. He added that he would be able to send the trainee home at about 6:00 p.m. and would then need about an hour to load the money from carts, shelves, and the floor into a Loomis company van.

  “Do you know how much there’s gonna be?” she asked.

  “About fourteen or fifteen million dollars,” he said.

  When they hung up, she called his pager and left the code 1-4-3, beeper-speak for “I love you,” based on the number of letters in each word.

  Kelly had approached David with the idea in the summer, knowing he had a crush on her and winning him over with the promise that a shady friend of hers with Mafia ties would help them. The friend was Steve Chambers, and Kelly said he knew his way around the world of crime. David and Steve had never met, but Steve had already secured somebody else’s birth certificate and social security card for him and given it to Kelly to pass along. David and Kelly had driven to Rock Hill, South Carolina, and used the documents to obtain a fake ID that David would also rely on after the theft.

  The reason David didn’t know Steve’s last name was so they couldn’t identify each other to the police or FBI, should cops or G-men ever enter the picture. These weren’t the hardest of criminals, and though there was logic to not knowing each other’s names, they had derived some of their methods from Hollywood depictions of crime. In Reservoir Dogs, released just five years earlier, the pawns in a robbery knew each other only by assigned colors: Mr. Pink, Mr. Blue, Mr. Orange, Mr. Blonde.

  The actual crime itself required none of Hollywood’s imagination. David would simply empty the vault and deliver the money to the others. The loot would later be divided among David, Kelly, and Steve. David’s share would be sent to Mexico, where he planned to hide and where he expected Kelly to join him.

  David’s vision for all of this actually derived more from books than from movies. As a child, he had preferred reading to playing sports, and he would say, as an adult, that although he couldn’t have told you “who was on first,” he knew as a kid who the Egyptian god of the dead was. As an adult, he preferred Shakespeare, Tom Clancy, and any book he could find about the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  In fact, he had recently finished a book about the FBI and felt it provided insight into the agency’s investigative techniques, insight he thought could help the little gang succeed. This was several years before the advent of smartphones and the post-9/11 increase in federal surveillance of electronic communications, and public knowledge about this tracking was less widespread. David told Kelly they would have to control themselves and not spend the money too quickly, because the FBI could electronically trace a suspect’s recent spending activity through bank papers, credit card records, and land transactions.

  “For the first year after a crime,” he told her, “they’re all over you, with six to ten agents. But after a year, they cut it down to two agents. And after two years, the case is just a file. If we can sit on the money for a year, maybe two, it could work.”

  That was taking the long view. A more immediate need was securing help to move the stolen money to safety the night of the crime. David knew this was important from having followed the recent news about a Florida man who had brazenly committed the biggest heist from an armored-car company in United States history, a loner named Philip Noel Johnson, who also had worked for Loomis.

  Johnson had stolen $18.8 million earlier in the year, on March 19, 1997, only to be caught five months later, in late August, while crossing into Texas from Mexico to retrieve some of the money, which he’d hidden in a shed in mountainous western North Carolina. A customs inspector, asking routine questions of bus passengers, focused her attention on him when his answers reminded her of Tommy Flanagan, the pathological-liar character played by Jon Lovitz on Saturday Night Live.

  Asked the purpose of his visit, Johnson had replied, “To visit friends.”

  The guard asked, “To visit friends?”

  Johnson said, “Yeah, that’s it. To visit friends.”

  In David’s eyes, Johnson’s big mistake was that he did it alone. Learning from this error, David planned to leave the stolen money behind with his coconspirators while he fled to Mexico. He would then have the bulk of his share sent south of the border. If it didn’t work out, he could return to the United States later with a new identity.

  David placed their odds of success at 85 percent, a confidence inspired by faith not just in his planning but also in his feelings for Kelly. He wanted to leave his wife for her, and Kelly, who also was married, let him think she wanted the same. The stated plan was for her to move to Mexico to be with him after the theft. They hadn’t slept together or even fooled around much, but he was ready to commit. Their only intimate physical contact had been kissing on a mid-September night when they had driven her pickup truck to a field behind a shooting range in Gaston County to discuss their plans and the theft’s chance of success.

  At that point, Kelly and David had known each other for two years. They had met in December 1995 on one of her first days at Loomis. He had approached her inside the chain-link fence that surrounded the building and said with a flirty smile, “If you give me a cigarette, I’ll be your friend.”

  “I don’t need any more friends,” she’d shot back. “But you can still have a cigarette.”

  David got a kick out of her. They could talk about anything, even topics he couldn’t discuss with his wife. NASCAR. Four-wheeling. How he felt shorted by life. How he and his wife had trouble communicating. And Kelly thought he was funny.

  Except for the kiss in the pickup truck a few weeks before the heist, Kelly had kept things platonic. She’d left Loomis in November 1996 to take a job elsewhere as a security guard. Afterward, she and David would talk just occasionally on the phone. Their most important conversation occurred one afternoon in August 1997 after Kelly paged him at work. After discussing his job, his marriage, and his everyday struggles, they joked about Loomis and about how easy it would be to steal from the place.

  Conversations about stealing from the company weren’t rare for Loomis employees. For people earning $8.15 an hour—David’s salary—the jokes came naturally. But this time on the phone, Kelly wasn’t joking.

  “Just think about it,” she said. “What would it take to make you do it?”

  Over the next two weeks, David thought about it. Living with his wife, Tammy, in a mobile home, he had longed for the middle-class lifestyle of his childhood that had come to seem luxurious, a pipe dream for him now. Growing up, David’s family went to Disney World, sent him to religious school, and shopped at places he couldn’t afford as a self-supporting adult. In his youth, his mother had taken him to Sears and JCPenney, but as a man he shopped at Walmart, and while he knew there was nothing wrong with that, he wished he could afford more.

  He even had to watch what he bought at the grocery store. He and Tammy could have one or two meals each week that he really liked, but the rest were hot dogs or Hamburger Helper. He was on a budget for clothes, even for work boots; he had recently needed to check seven stores before finding a pair in his price range. The Charlotte area’s economy was booming all around him, and he felt passed over.

  It all seemed unfair. He was a hard worker, smart enough, and had graduated from high school. He had joined the army and earned an honorable discharge, but because of defense-industry cutbacks he hadn’t been able to find a good job for himself. Lacking a college degree, he found that his army skills felt meaningless in the 1990s job mar
ket.

  He had since held one low-paying job after another. After marrying Tammy in 1992, he worked fueling airplanes at the airport in Hilton Head, South Carolina. In 1994, they moved to Gastonia, North Carolina, where they had grown up, and David took a job driving a forklift. Later that year, he saw a newspaper ad for a job at Loomis Fargo. He put on his best pair of jeans, a button-down shirt, and his nicest cowboy boots. The supervisor liked him and gave him the job.

  In Gastonia, David would run into high-school classmates who had never struck him as especially smart. Yet their lives seemed far easier and better than his. He couldn’t understand the gap, why he wasn’t more successful, why he couldn’t at least match the financial stability of his father, who earned a comfortable salary driving a truck.

  If the American Dream involved being better off as adults than your parents were, David was experiencing a version of the American Nightmare. The unfairness gnawed at him, stirred by Kelly’s questions. He deserved better. Stealing from Loomis Fargo could make him rich, if he got away with it. He could even be famous, perhaps joining the ranks of legendary master thieves.

  Of course, this would all be a radical departure for him, and thoughts of his wife and parents did give him pause. He knew it would mean leaving Tammy. He knew his mother would be traumatized, shocked, and appalled. Growing up, David had been a nice kid, a decent student who was at worst a minor troublemaker and prankster.

  About the worst he had done as a teenager was stealing a construction company’s Porta-Jon with a friend, tying it to the back of a pickup truck, and driving around for about fifteen minutes. Then they returned it. Another time, the day after a Christmas in the late 1980s, David and some friends planted all the discarded Christmas trees from the area in one neighbor’s front yard. If a prank seemed dangerous, David backed out. When some friends stole a stop sign from a busy intersection, David made them put it back.

  But with Kelly’s new idea on the table, several dark realities converged on him. He hated his job and his bosses, he’d lost hope in his marriage, he wasn’t going to advance at Loomis, and he couldn’t afford to quit to enroll in college. He realized his life wouldn’t improve unless he did something drastic.