Heist

by Jeff Diamant

  FBI agents Dick Womble, Mark Rozzi, and Rick Schwein sat in the Loomis manager’s office staring at a TV screen just before noon on October 5. The manager was furious as he watched the video. Ghantt had almost been fired earlier in the week for briefly leaving money unattended outside the city’s Federal Reserve building. Was this his revenge for being yelled at? To make matters worse, the stolen money wasn’t marked with known serial numbers. This was a disaster.

  The agents, on the other hand, were pleased that Ghantt had left a tape behind. The video quality was mediocre—black-and-white, not terribly clear—but it was good enough. All too often, stricken companies realize after it’s too late that they haven’t replaced security tapes for a long time and that their videos are worthless. But this one left no doubt that Ghantt was the thief. His lean frame and thinning hair were easily recognizable. A prosecutor using this tape would have an easy time in court.

  Womble was excited there was a clear suspect, though the amount of money lost remained uncertain. Loomis workers hadn’t yet been able to open the vault because Ghantt had set its timer to stay locked through the weekend, and he had stolen the only sets of keys that existed.

  Reviewing the video, Womble and the other agents were amazed by how long Ghantt had worked to finish the job. He had started around 6:45 p.m. and didn’t finish for about an hour. Clearly, this was the work of an amateur.

  They also were astonished by the amount of labor involved in moving what seemed like more than a ton of cash. Even a stronger man would’ve struggled with those masses of stacked bills. The agents watched the entire video, some of it in fast-forward mode, looking for a glimpse of any other suspects, but no evidence arose that this wasn’t a solo performance.

  The FBI had been working the case all day. Loomis officials had called the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police about 9:30 a.m. on October 5, after its employees couldn’t open the vault. The police then called the FBI, because most of the money Loomis Fargo hauled around belonged to banks, and bank robberies are federal crimes.

  Schwein, the on-duty agent that weekend, fielded the police call and immediately notified the bureau’s violent crime investigators—known in Charlotte’s FBI office as Squad Six. Squad Six, which included Womble and Rozzi, regularly investigated bank thefts. In fact, Charlotte’s FBI agents had recently helped recover the money stolen by Philip Noel Johnson, who had hidden most of his $18.8 million Loomis stash in a shed in the mountains of western North Carolina.

  While talking to the Loomis warehouse manager, the agents learned that the firm suspected three employees it was unable to contact. But one turned up in church, and another also had been located. The only one still missing was Ghantt, who had worked at the warehouse the previous night with a trainee and nobody else, Loomis officials told the FBI. A twenty-seven-year-old vault supervisor, Ghantt had no criminal record. But his near-firing after the Federal Reserve incident supplied a possible motive.

  Actually, the warehouse alarm had gone off the night before, because Ghantt had incorrectly programmed it after stealing the money. But the police had arrived and departed, having checked the building’s exterior and noticing nothing askance.

  If it was true that more than $10 million had been stolen, as Loomis officials suspected, they were dealing with one of the biggest heists in U.S. history. The FBI needed to learn about David Scott Ghantt, as much as possible and as quickly as possible.

  The Federal Bureau of Investigation, founded in 1908, has taken advantage of many of the world’s technological advances, but the first part of most investigations still involves person-to-person interviews. Besides providing useful information, a good interview can lead to two or three more, each of which can provide tips or other information.

  Agent Womble was tasked with interviewing Ghantt’s relatives and quickly learned that Ghantt’s wife, sisters, and parents were as shocked as the Loomis officials. The wife, Tammy, was distraught that he was missing and said she knew absolutely nothing about what had happened, and Womble believed her. She refused to believe that David was a calculating thief and was convinced that someone put him up to this.

  “This is not my David,” she told Womble. Her husband was caring, nice, sweet, gentle, and funny.

  The previous evening had begun quite uneventfully for her. She ate dinner with her mom at the Cracker Barrel restaurant in Gastonia and called David at work, telling him not to grab anything on the way home. She had takeout for him—chicken and potatoes.

  “Refrigerate it,” David had told her. “I’ll be home late tonight.”

  “Late” meant around 9:00 p.m., Tammy figured. So she worried when, after awaking at 1:00 a.m., she found herself alone under the covers. She called David at work, then on his pager, then on his cell phone, and then on his pager again. Nothing. She’d always been nervous he might catch a bullet working for Loomis Fargo, with all that money around, and now she was ready to believe the worst.

  Finally, at 2:30 a.m., she telephoned David’s parents in Hendersonville, nearly two hours west in the North Carolina mountains. They said they’d rush over, and as they made their way to the Ghantts’ mobile home in Kings Mountain, Tammy called the authorities. An officer for the Charlotte-Mecklenburg County Police told her they couldn’t do anything because David lived in Kings Mountain, which was located in Cleveland County. Then someone at the Cleveland County Sheriff’s Office told her they couldn’t help because David was last seen in Charlotte. Finally, Tammy found a Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officer who promised to start investigating. After she hung up, she paced the floor and stared at framed pictures of David on the wall.

  David’s parents arrived about 5:00 a.m., exhausted and extremely worried. First thing in the morning, the three of them decided, they would post missing-person fliers of David in Gastonia and Charlotte. Maybe they would look for a private eye, since the cops hadn’t seemed very helpful.

  In the morning, the authorities called to say they had found David’s pickup truck in the Loomis parking lot. Tammy didn’t know what to make of that. A few hours later, Mark Rozzi called to ask if she could come to Charlotte’s FBI office to talk.

  But Tammy had more questions for the FBI than answers. Where was he? Was he even alive? She was desperate for information, but Rozzi had little to offer.

  • • •

  At 4:00 p.m., agents John Wydra and Julia Mueller were dispatched to the Loomis warehouse to help other FBI agents with crime-scene work. They examined the building’s interior, dusted for fingerprints, and searched Ghantt’s abandoned pickup truck. Then they began interviewing current and former Loomis Fargo employees, trying to learn anything they could about Ghantt and the heist.

  It came out that Ghantt had few close friends at Loomis. No one at work seemed to know him very well. Wydra and Mueller talked to about twenty Loomis workers, gaining a few tidbits here and there but nothing that revealed a path to his whereabouts. The agents weren’t accusatory, but they watched for signals that the employees might be lying. While they learned little of value, they took down names and numbers of a few other people who might know more.

  Wydra usually worked for the Charlotte FBI branch’s Squad Four, focusing on white-collar crime. His specialty was tracing money laundering. But on this day, almost all the agents were working together with Squad Six, the violent crime unit, trying to sort out what happened and answer basic questions. Was Ghantt dead? If he was alive, where did he go? Did he take all the money with him? Did he leave any clues? And how did he pull this off, anyway?

  Early that evening, agents and supervisors assembled at the FBI’s headquarters for North Carolina at 400 South Tryon Street in downtown Charlotte. It was becoming apparent that nearly all of Charlotte’s FBI agents would be asked to work this case almost exclusively for several days, maybe weeks.

  On the ninth floor, around the Squad Six desks and cubicles, Womble and Rozzi briefed the others on what they had learned a
bout Ghantt from his relatives. The sheer boldness of the act had amazed them all. Ghantt seemed to have just taken the money and run, leaving his family behind to wonder. The agents also learned that even now, Loomis Fargo was unable to open the vault to count its losses. The company planned to break into the vault the next day. Meanwhile, Loomis officials were developing a sense of how much was missing—about $15 million, they thought, but they were uncertain. There was only one solid piece of information, compliments of the videotape.

  Yet while Ghantt was the only person caught on video, the agents didn’t assume he’d worked alone. Some even wondered if an accomplice had shot him afterward. Federal prosecutors, on the other hand, assumed he was still alive. On the afternoon of October 6, an assistant U.S. attorney named David Keesler had Womble read evidence against Ghantt to a federal grand jury that happened to have its regularly scheduled monthly meeting in Charlotte that day.

  It was an open-and-shut indictment. By day’s end, David Ghantt was charged with bank larceny. For that, the maximum penalty was ten years in prison and a fine. All the agents had to do now was find him.

  • • •

  At about 5:40 p.m. on October 6, soon after Womble completed his testimony to the grand jury, the FBI received a phone call from a man who had just finished mowing his lawn in western Mecklenburg County. He had noticed a seemingly abandoned white vehicle in the woods and said it fit the description of the missing Loomis van broadcast on the news.

  Speculation was rampant within the bureau. Maybe all the missing money was inside. Maybe David was there, handcuffed and waiting for them. Maybe all they’d find in the cargo area was his lifeless body.

  About six agents and Loomis officials arrived at the wooded area, a lovers’ lane littered with beer cans and cigarette butts, late in the afternoon. Immediately, they saw it was the right truck. The doors were locked, so they looked through the tinted windows. Inside, they saw mounds of money, still shrink-wrapped, behind the driver’s seat. It was clear to the Loomis officials that most of the stolen money was not there. It was unclear if there was a body inside.

  A flatbed truck was called to haul the van to an FBI garage at headquarters, where they could examine its contents in a secure area. There, with FBI supervisor Vic O’Korn present, they opened the vehicle and quickly saw that the stacks of bills inside were mostly ones and fives. The thieves had taken the larger denominations. On the front seat were David Ghantt’s gun and the two other Loomis surveillance videotapes that had been stolen. No one knew why he had left them behind.

  Counting the money took only half an hour, as the wrappers around the stacks were marked with their totals: $3.3 million altogether, less than one-fifth of the stolen amount. The FBI knew this because Loomis had used heavy machinery to break through the vault’s steel-and-concrete wall earlier in the day and determined the total take: $17,044,033.

  Mileage records for the van showed it hadn’t been driven far after the heist. But the value of that information seemed minimal, given that most of the money had obviously been off-loaded. Perhaps David had rented another vehicle nearby. FBI supervisors dispatched agents to show Ghantt’s picture at rental-car companies in town, but none of the clerks recognized his face. The agents were awash in dead ends.

  Yet the more the FBI learned about the basic circumstances of the case, including the abandonment of the truck, the more likely it seemed that David Ghantt had accomplices. Pulling this off alone would’ve been too difficult. A solo act would’ve required him to have planted the rental van in the secluded area where the Loomis vehicle was eventually found, and then, after the theft, to have transferred the money from the Loomis van into that rental vehicle.

  There were problems with this scenario. First, presumably Ghantt would’ve needed a ride from someone after planting the rental van in the woods. Second, the weight and volume of the money stolen—more than a ton, at 2,748 pounds and sixty-four cubic feet of bills—seemed too large for such a skinny man to have moved twice in the same evening. That he had accomplished it even once, from the vault to the Loomis van, seemed remarkable enough.

  Then there was the question of the money left behind. If Ghantt had acted alone, the thinking went, he probably would have made proper accommodations for all the money he stole. Perhaps, according to this theory, he had accomplices whose vehicle was just too small to fit everything. In either case, the FBI noted the thief’s or thieves’ presence of mind in focusing on the large bills. The $3.3 million in recovered cash was almost entirely in smaller bills. While it constituted only one-fifth of the total amount stolen, it comprised two-fifths of the weight.

  • • •

  An important tip emerged the week after the theft, after agents Wydra and Mueller interviewed more past and current Loomis employees. A few said that Ghantt had recently mentioned he was dating a former worker there, a woman named Kelly Jane Campbell. The interviewees said she was full of attitude, the kind of person who blurted out whatever came to mind. She had stopped working at Loomis about a year earlier.

  The dominant early impression the agents had of Ghantt was that of a loner, so if his colleagues were mentioning a girlfriend, she was worth talking to. They decided to check her out. Wydra and Mueller continued interviewing Loomis employees while two other agents drove to Kelly Campbell’s home on Tuesday.

  The route took agents Gerry Senatore and David Martinez from the well-tailored streets of Charlotte’s banking district to the back roads of rural Gaston County. Approaching their destination, the agents turned off a two-lane road onto a gravel street that looked like it dead-ended into tall trees but actually continued into hidden, winding asphalt roads that passed a compound of mobile homes unseen from the main street. At the end of the road, Kelly Campbell lived in a white mobile home surrounded by the goats, dogs, and roosters kept by her and her husband, Jimmy, nicknamed “Spanky.”

  The agents knocked on her door. She opened it.

  Tall and pleasantly plump with dirty-blond shoulder-length hair, Kelly Campbell didn’t smile often, even around people she could tolerate. When she did smile, it was worth it. Her eyes sparkled and the grin she displayed was sweet.

  But she wasn’t smiling now. She begrudgingly let the FBI agents inside and called her father to babysit her daughter for a while. Seated in her living room, the agents told her that people at Loomis Fargo said she and David Ghantt had dated. Could she tell them anything about where he was?

  Campbell said she’d heard about the heist but didn’t know anything about it. She and Ghantt were friends, she said, but that was it. They hadn’t dated. She described him as quick tempered and goofy and said they had smoked some pot together, but that was it.

  The agents didn’t care about her pot smoking, but they wanted to see if she was telling the truth. They asked if she had any marijuana at home. She said she did. One agent asked her to bring it out to them.

  “Why?” she asked. “So you and your buddy can go down the road and smoke it?”

  She brought out about an ounce. The other Loomis employees were right about her, the agents thought; Kelly Campbell spoke her mind.

  When they changed the subject, asking if she had any idea where Ghantt was, Kelly offered that he liked the mountains and maybe was staying around Hendersonville or Wilkesboro, North Carolina, where his parents lived.

  The agents then asked if she would take a lie-detector test. She declined. They were persistent, but they couldn’t sway her. Investigators often view reluctance to take a lie-detector test as a sign a suspect is hiding something, but in this case, the agents realized, what she might have been hiding was drug use or a possible affair with David. It certainly didn’t seem from her surroundings that she had come into money recently.

  They left but decided they would keep an eye on her.

  How Baseball Hindered the FBI

  “Van, Driver, Money Missing,” shouted the lead headline on the front page
of the Charlotte Observer, the biggest newspaper in the Carolinas, on October 6, 1997. “A very substantial amount of money,” possibly as much as $15 million, had vanished, along with an armored car and the driver, David Ghantt, the story said. It continued, “If the money was stolen and that amount is correct, this would be one of the largest heists in U.S. history. The same company, Loomis, Fargo & Co., lost $18.83 million in March in a heist in Jacksonville, Florida.”

  Ghantt was six-foot-one and had strawberry blond hair and blue eyes, according to the newspaper and the TV news on Monday. He weighed about one hundred sixty-five pounds and had a tattoo of a pistol and a rose on his left arm, the FBI said.

  Over the next twelve months, the heist would rank high among the biggest news stories in the Carolinas, and the media already planned to monitor the investigation closely. In the days afterward, Observer editors dispatched two reporters to Ghantt’s mobile home to gather information about him from his relatives. But the man answering the door politely asked them to leave.

  Tammy and David’s other relatives were too upset to talk with the press. So most of what was printed was basic biographical material from the FBI and public records. Reporters suspected that if David was alive, he was far away, though some suggested that anybody who would steal that much cash might be dumb enough to stay near the scene of the crime.

  Gary German hoped David Ghantt was nearby, just because the story would be funnier that way. German was not a reporter looking for a big scoop; rather, he was one of the strangest steady newspaper sources the Observer ever had. A talkative, foul-mouthed man permanently bedridden from a car accident and fascinated by local crime, he did little with his time but listen to police scanners to hear officers’ radio transmissions of interesting breaking news.

  He then took it upon himself to alert newspapers and TV stations to nighttime street trouble that had slipped beneath their radar. The local media gladly accepted the help. Since they often lacked the money to fully staff their newsrooms twenty-four hours a day, night-owl Gary’s early-morning calls to TV camera crews helped them reach crime scenes before the bodies were taken away. Such footage virtually ensured that a story made the TV news.