Heist

by Jeff Diamant

  Indeed, Gary lived off Gaston County crime, getting monthly checks from newspapers and TV stations for his calls. He claimed that he gave booze to select local law-enforcement officers in exchange for news tips, and he called reporters at home in the middle of the night when he deemed the events of the streets newsworthy. During the day, he would phone the newspapers’ crime reporters in Gaston County and tell them about the most recent incidents, not even bothering to say hello but starting out with the likes of, “Got yourself a shootin’ on Airline Avenue. That sumbitch emptied his bullets and got his ass outta there.”

  Gary’s law-enforcement friends did not include FBI agents, so he had nothing of value to share with the media on the heist. The FBI was not telling the press about Kelly Campbell, revealing only that David Ghantt might have had help.

  The first week after the heist, FBI agents worked sixteen-hour days. Womble stayed in touch with Tammy Ghantt and David’s other relatives, trying to reconstruct David’s forty-eight hours prior to the theft to determine motives that might reveal where he’d gone. But the FBI agent learned little of value except that David was an avid reader of detective novels. All that meant for the FBI was that David might have considered their investigative techniques and had probably been thinking about the crime for a while.

  Womble, Rozzi, and other agents posted fliers of Ghantt in the area, hoping someone would spot him and call the authorities. On their own, people were calling the FBI with supposed sightings of Ghantt at the airport or at a topless bar—leads that wound up going nowhere. Agents also drove to hotels to check registration books and show Ghantt’s picture to clerks in case he had used a phony name to check in. John Wydra and other agents interviewed workers at businesses near the Loomis Fargo building on Wilkinson Boulevard to see if anybody had heard or seen anything unusual the night of the theft. The only clue came from the manager at a sandwich shop call Niko’s Grill, who said Ghantt had eaten lunch there hours before the theft. Of course, this information went nowhere.

  A significant indication that Ghantt had help popped up a week after the theft, through information presented in twice-daily FBI briefings for the agents on the case. The clue came from numbers entered into Ghantt’s pager from right before and during the theft. Most of the calls were from his own mobile-phone number. He hadn’t called it himself, it seemed safe to assume. Someone else had to be using his phone, a clever attempt to keep the accomplice in the clear.

  But one number sequence repeated often in the pager seemed intriguing: 143, 143, 143. At first, the agents—most of them in their thirties and forties—had no idea what it meant. But one of them soon realized that he’d read about the code in a recent newspaper article about beeper-speak. It meant “I love you.” Another agent, Phil King, recalled that his daughter’s boyfriend often punched 143 into her pager.

  The FBI didn’t know who had entered the code, but the numbers were a sign that a woman besides his wife probably had communicated with Ghantt during the theft. Whether that woman was Kelly Campbell or not was unclear, but at the very least Ghantt seemed to have someone on the side who probably knew what he had done.

  The clock was ticking. The first week of the investigation was mostly a bust, and the forty agents all knew that solving a case like this grows more difficult as time passes. Evidence disappears. Potential witnesses leave town, forget information, or even die. The criminals themselves can move farther and farther away.

  The FBI hoped the TV show America’s Most Wanted could help. On October 11, most of the agents gathered at headquarters to watch a segment of the show featuring Ghantt that was scheduled to air across the country. The start time on the East Coast was 9:00 p.m. Other agents positioned themselves on the city’s streets so they could quickly check the flood of tips expected to barrage the bureau after the show. Meanwhile, these agents canvassed every business located on the most direct route from the Loomis Fargo warehouse to where the van was found in the woods. They asked if anyone had seen anything suspicious on October 4. Nobody had.

  The bulk of the staff waited at headquarters for the show to begin. First broadcast in 1988, America’s Most Wanted has been credited with helping to catch more than 1,200 criminals. Wydra, Rozzi, supervisor Rick Shaffer, and others watched baseball on the TV in the command post, a playoff game between the Cleveland Indians and Baltimore Orioles. America’s Most Wanted would be on the same channel right after the game.

  At first, the room filled with anticipation over potential new tips. But the baseball score soon became a concern. It was tied late in the game, and the prospect of extra innings loomed as 9:00 p.m. approached. If neither team scored, the game threatened to prevent the Ghantt segment of the show from airing. Maybe, the agents hoped, the network would air all of the show anyway after the game. They didn’t know how that would work.

  To the dismay of everyone present, the game didn’t end until almost 10:00 p.m., when the Indians’ Marquis Grissom crossed home plate in the twelfth inning, four hours and fifty-one minutes after the game began. It was the longest League Championship Series game in baseball history.

  The agents saw that the station would still air the show after the game, but not the whole episode. When it came on, details of another crime were being shown, and then quickly a commercial filled the screen. Maybe the Ghantt segment would run next, they hoped.

  When the show returned after commercials, the agents heard the narrator telling viewers to call in if they saw David Ghantt. Clearly, the Ghantt segment was over, without anyone on the East Coast having seen it. The agents cursed and fired wadded paper and crumpled Doritos bags at the screen. Supervisor Shaffer, an Indians fan, held his head in his hands. Wydra and the others were furious. Only western viewers would see it that night.

  The agents positioned on the street learned nothing valuable. The FBI would receive one Ghantt tip that evening, from someone who thought he had seen Ghantt gambling in Las Vegas. The caller didn’t even know the name of the casino.

  • • •

  The FBI believed David Ghantt’s wife, Tammy, when she said the day after the crime that she knew nothing about the heist. And surveillance of her had turned up nothing. She even helped in the taping of the America’s Most Wanted segment, ending it by pleading to her husband, “Please, if there’s any way possible, call us or the FBI and let us know you are alive and well… And remember, David, no matter what, we do love you.”

  Agents gave her a lie-detector test anyway, on October 11, just to be on the safe side. Though the results of lie-detector tests are not considered reliable enough to be allowed as evidence at trials, many agents, detectives, and prosecutors find them useful tools for investigations.

  Agent Bob Drdak conducted the test, asking Tammy some basic questions.

  Had she seen David since the theft?

  She said she hadn’t.

  Had she talked to him since?

  Again, she said she hadn’t.

  Strangely, the test results came back inconclusive. This surprised the agents, who assumed she would easily pass. They decided to test her again two days later, on October 13. Drdak started by asking Tammy if she wanted to change any of her answers from the first test.

  What she said probably explained why she hadn’t passed the first time. She explained to Drdak that the other day, when he’d asked if she’d seen David, she’d thought of her husband’s picture near the foot of her bed. She had seen the picture, as well as their home videos, which was like seeing him, she had thought. So maybe she hadn’t answered that question with certainty. The same was true when he asked if she’d talked to David. Since the theft, she had called his voice mail and heard his voice.

  Drdak explained that he was interested only in whether she had actually seen him alive or heard him speak to her live. He then rephrased his polygraph questions accordingly.

  “Besides seeing his picture in your bedroom or on home videos, have you seen D
avid since the theft?”

  “No,” Tammy said.

  “Besides on voice mail, have you heard his voice since the theft?”

  “No,” she said.

  Tammy passed. And while their belief in her credibility did nothing to help them find David, it helped them to feel sure that she wasn’t lying.

  Nerves

  Kelly Campbell was nervous and scared. And when Kelly Campbell was nervous and scared, she smoked pot. Lots of it.

  In the two weeks after the heist, Kelly, twenty-seven, was smoking marijuana morning, noon, and night. And she had solid reasons to be nervous and scared. After all, she had lied point-blank to the FBI when the agents came to her door. She had indeed been in contact with David, having received a page when he arrived in Mexico. She knew she couldn’t pass a lie-detector test and dreaded the prospect of agents returning to pressure her.

  After the agents left her, she had called Steve Chambers for advice. He told her not to worry about it, that he had a lawyer who would call the FBI on her behalf. The lawyer would help keep her out of trouble and say she wasn’t going to take the test.

  Steve had told Kelly the Loomis money was hidden “up north” with three men he knew who ran a crooked bank that was charging them a fee. And the reason he had a lawyer was because the local police had recently arrested Steve in an unrelated case, from before the heist, for writing $30,000 in fraudulent checks. His lawyer, a short, salt-and-pepper-haired man named Jeff Guller, was negotiating a plea bargain for Steve that could keep him out of jail. Steve would have to plead guilty to forty-two counts of obtaining property by false pretenses, a felony.

  Guller met with Kelly, who told him she didn’t want to take a lie-detector test. He didn’t press her on it. He took the business card the agents had given her, called the FBI, and left a voice-mail message saying he represented Kelly Campbell and that she didn’t want to take a polygraph. Kelly didn’t know how useful this would be, but at least she now had professional help.

  That Kelly and Steve had been in touch at all the previous year was because of a much smaller scam than the one linking them now. They had grown up together, their friendship formed at teenage drinking parties off the back roads of Gaston County, but they had lost touch after high school. Then, sometime in the mid-1990s, Steve contacted Kelly with a scam in mind. He wanted to pay her for her husband’s employee number on his W-2 tax form, which Steve would use to file a phony tax return. She obliged.

  She and Steve began hanging out. In late 1996, after having recently quit her job at Loomis Fargo, Kelly found herself in Steve’s yard, listening to music with a bunch of his friends, grilling steaks, drinking, and playing Uno. At one point, Steve verbally cornered her about the ins and outs of her experience working at Loomis Fargo. How many people work on an armored truck? When is the best time of day to knock one off? Was there anyone there who might team up with them?

  And so it was that momentum for a heist of historic proportion originated over Budweiser and a game of Uno outside a mobile home in rural North Carolina. Steve had pondered a heist of his own for years—it seemed doable, he thought. But on that day, Kelly shot him down.

  “Don’t even think about it, Steve,” she said. “It’s too dangerous. Armored-car drivers carry guns.”

  Steve persisted. Maybe, he suggested, they could plant phony hand grenades on the armored truck and steal the money when the guards ran away. He’d heard of that approach used elsewhere.

  “Yeah, okay, Steve,” Kelly told him, rolling her eyes.

  But when she left that day, the idea stayed with her. Her life felt in need of change, dramatic change. She and her husband, Jimmy, had recently declared bankruptcy, and despite a promotion at her security-guard job, she couldn’t envision dramatically improving her lot. Plus, her marriage was failing.

  All she wanted was a house in the country, a swimming pool for her two kids, and a divorce. So she kept thinking about making Steve’s idea a reality and about asking David if he would do it. She had faith that Steve could help them succeed. After all, he was always talking about his mysterious activities “up north,” and he seemed to have lots of money for someone without a full-time job.

  In the following months, Steve repeated the idea to Kelly a few more times. Still, until the middle of summer, it remained just a silly thing between the two of them. Then, on a late afternoon in August 1997, Kelly decided to page David at work and see if she could put the plan into motion.

  Steve had told Kelly to lie to David if that was needed to persuade him, and that’s what she did. She didn’t love David. She didn’t want to move to Mexico. She didn’t want her kids to grow up on the run in a different country. But she wanted David to steal the money so she could become rich. So, in the back of her pickup truck two weeks before the heist, she let him kiss her. He was thrilled.

  The idea was to keep the inner circle small, but in the days before the heist Steve told her that he had recruited two others, Eric Payne and Scott Grant, to help. Kelly didn’t object. “You’re the one with all the brains, Steve,” she told him. “You know what you’re doing.”

  On the afternoon of October 4, the day of the theft, the group—minus David—met at the parking lot of a discount store in Belmont, North Carolina, just west of Charlotte. Then, when David told Kelly on the phone that he wouldn’t be ready until 7:00 p.m. at the earliest, they crossed the street to a bowling alley to pass the time. While Kelly ate a cheeseburger and fries, Eric Payne sidled up to her and asked, “Is this really gonna happen?”

  “Yeah,” Kelly said. “I don’t believe it, but yeah, it’s gonna happen.”

  Fun on the Run

  By mid-October, two weeks into his new life, the skinny redhead was not quite as skinny as he’d been before.

  While the FBI checked up on Kelly back home, and while David’s picture was featured prominently in American newspapers, he was living the life of a rich international fugitive, enjoying the white-sand beaches of Cancun while trying to keep a low profile among the tourists.

  He didn’t know exactly how much he’d stolen from Loomis Fargo, having not counted the stacks as he grabbed them, but he estimated it was between $14 million and $15 million. He eagerly awaited his one-third share. For the time being, the $25,000 he took with him the night of the crime was sufficient. He was skipping from hotel to hotel in Cancun and eating at least four meals a day. He tried lobster for the first time in his life, and then ate it again and again.

  Overall, his new wealth was not quick to affect his tastes. His first two meals as a multimillion-dollar thief had been pizza at the airport in New Orleans and a Big Mac Combo at a Cancun McDonald’s. His looks changed though. To disguise himself, he’d dyed his hair brown, begun using tanning spray, and had both ears pierced.

  Free and rich in Cancun, David often thought back to his last morning in his mobile home a thousand miles north. He remembered waking up at 5:00 a.m. that day, showering, putting on his gray Loomis Fargo uniform, and preparing a pot of coffee. He’d then kissed his sleeping wife on the cheek and taken the garbage out before closing the door on his family life.

  He had been careful not to deviate from his normal routine that week, going so far as to schedule a regular dental appointment. Then, on the fateful morning, he packed three days’ worth of clothes and a .45-caliber handgun and hopped into his 1996 Dodge Dakota pickup truck. On the way to work, he pulled into a service station and picked up a box of Marlboro Light 100s, a package of crackers, and a Cheerwine, the sweet, cherry-flavored soda of the South.

  Then he took Interstate 85 heading east into Charlotte, his normal forty-five-minute commute. As usual, he flipped the radio to his favorite station, which aired the John Boy & Billy Big Show, a morning program. As he drove in, the station actually played the Steve Miller Band’s “Take the Money and Run.”

  • • •

  His choice of Cancun seemed to validate it
self early. After his plane landed on October 5, his taxi drove him down Kukulkan Boulevard, the main tourist strip. As the beaches and turquoise sea came into view, David realized why Cancun was the perfect place to wait out his heist share.

  The cabdriver stopped at the Omni Hotel, a twelve-story flamingo-pink structure. At about $130 a night, it wasn’t the most expensive hotel in town, but it would be more than sufficient. Views from the room included sparkling pools, a swim-up bar, the beach, and the Caribbean Sea.

  David was mentally drained when he checked in and slept for the better part of the next two days. Then, as his nerves began to ease, he threw himself into Cancun’s tourist scene, starting with a shopping spree. The long-sleeve shirts and pants he’d brought from home were meant for October in North Carolina, not Mexico, so he purchased a new wardrobe, laying down cash for silk shirts, four pairs of python-skin cowboy boots, and three pairs of Ray-Ban sunglasses at $200 a pop. He reveled in the nightlife, finding a favorite bar called Christine, which had a huge dance floor.

  He ventured beyond the hotel zone. A third-row ticket to a bullfight was a success, giving the once-poor Gaston County boy the chance to yell “Toro! Toro!” with the crowd, though a beef-and-cheese snack from a vendor later gave him Montezuma’s revenge that knocked him out for three days. Soon afterward, his inner amateur historian led him to tour the famous Mayan ruins at Chichen Itza, located about a hundred miles from Cancun on the Yucatan Peninsula. The attractions included El Castillo, a pyramid built 1,200 years earlier and shaped to represent the Mayan calendar, with eighteen terraces representing its eighteen twenty-day months. He also enjoyed a ball court called Juego de Pelota Principal, which was surrounded by temples where losing captains had been sacrificed in ancient days.