Heist

by Jeff Diamant

  “I wouldn’t say I’m too smart,” Steve told Murphy. “If I was, I probably wouldn’t be sitting where I’m sitting right now.”

  Murphy had Steve describe his earlier life as a bookmaker, after establishing that bookmaking and gambling accounted for two-thirds of Steve’s income in the mid-1990s. “Now, tell us about bookmaking,” Murphy asked. “What do you do?”

  “What do you do?”

  “Yeah. What is involved?”

  “Bookmaking is, people lay bets with you on ball games—football, baseball, basketball. [You] go by the point spread, over and under. Depends on what they want to bet, how much they want to bet, how many teams they want to bet on.”

  Murphy also had Steve recount the substance of his fraud convictions. Basically, Steve told the jury, he had used phony names to open tiny accounts at area banks and then cashed phony checks on the accounts. In an unrelated tax scam, he made money by filing tax returns under false names.

  In another exchange, Murphy led Steve to describe a phony business name in the paperwork for Kelly Campbell’s minivan purchase, a transaction for which Steve had been present. “Now, on that application, did it ask you for the name of your employer?”

  “Yes, it does,” Chambers said.

  “And what was your response to that?”

  “Chambers Industries.”

  “What is Chambers Industries?”

  “I like to call it an industry. It’s better than saying Chambers Bookmaking or anything like that. So I come up with Chambers Industries.”

  Then Murphy asked about the murder plot. “Do you recall telling Mr. McKinney that he could walk up to Mr. Ghantt with a silencer on the gun and just shoot him and keep walking?”

  “Yes, we had that conversation,” Steve said.

  The cross-examination ended with Murphy noting that Steve’s plea bargain allowed him the prospect of a reduced sentence in exchange for government testimony. “Now, tell us, Mr. Chambers, what you would do for your freedom.”

  “What would I do?”

  “What acts would you engage in, what conduct would you engage in, for the sake of your freedom?”

  “I don’t think I follow you here.”

  “Would you steal for your freedom?”

  “Yes, I probably would.”

  “Would you lie for your freedom?”

  “Yes, I probably would.”

  “Would you deceive for your freedom?”

  “Yes, I probably would.”

  “But today,” Murphy deadpanned, “you have been truthful, correct?”

  “Yes, I have.”

  When the cross-examination ended, Whisler took the floor again and asked Steve why he had assumed Guller knew the source of the money.

  “When I called Mr. Guller up to help Kelly out as far as the FBI questioning her about a polygraph test, I had spoken to Mr. Guller about that. That was right in the first week of October, after Kelly had been interviewed after the robbery. And Mr. Guller had said that he would handle the case for her. I paid him five hundred dollars down to talk to the FBI, to keep the FBI away from her. Kelly went to be interviewed by Mr. Guller. And then, of course, later on, I ended up purchasing the $635,000 home.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Well, it just led me to believe that Mr. Guller knew where the funds came from. I don’t think it took a rocket scientist to figure that out. That’s my opinion.”

  • • •

  Kelly Campbell was the next government witness. The prosecutor began by having her acknowledge her frequent marijuana use before her arrest, knowing Guller’s lawyers might bring it up anyway. He then had her recount how, after the heist, Steve set her up with Guller for the call to the FBI.

  During the cross-examination, when Harold Bender asked her to recount more details of the heist planning, she said the theft had been Steve’s idea, contradicting Steve, who had pinned it on her.

  “Steve Chambers was the brains? The mastermind?”

  “Yes.”

  “Steve Chambers called the shots?”

  “Yes, he did… He made all of the plans of how the money was going to be taken care of, where it was going to be hid. He had control of all the money. He made all of the plans as to how to carry it out. He said who got what.”

  Of course, Kelly and Steve had both played key roles in the plot’s development. But the prosecutor, perhaps worried that the government’s two witnesses had contradicted each other, asked Kelly again about her pot use. She had started smoking it around age thirteen, she said, and at the time of the heist she was smoking about three joints a day.

  “It got to a point where I was smoking pot like most people smoke cigarettes,” she said.

  “Just a minute,” the judge said. “When you say, ‘Like most people smoke cigarettes,’ I don’t really know whether most people smoke cigarettes or not, but assuming they do, what do you mean by that?”

  Kelly said, “When I’d get up in the morning, I would smoke a joint. If I was going to go shopping, I had to smoke a joint. I felt like I couldn’t function unless I was stoned.”

  • • •

  The next government witness, Guller’s former office assistant, offered more damaging testimony. Jennifer Norman told the jurors that she and the office secretary had grown suspicious over Steve and Michele’s ability to buy the $635,000 house, given that Guller had just represented Steve on false-check charges. Then, when she saw Steve’s bags of money, she was certain it came from the Loomis Fargo heist. She said she told Guller this and that she even mentioned the reward that was announced on America’s Most Wanted. But Guller had told her she couldn’t prove it, she testified.

  After a few more questions from Whisler, she said this: “He told me that he didn’t really care where the money came from. He was getting paid. And in the law office, I mean, he let a lot of people finance out—you know, pay down and whatever. And Steve was always one to pay up front, and so his comment was, ‘I don’t care. I get paid.’ Because like I said, Steve was always one to pay up front. He paid his bill.”

  Norman also told jurors that she actually placed a call to America’s Most Wanted about Steve Chambers but was basically blown off, because the only suspect at that time was David Ghantt.

  In the cross-examination, Murphy had Norman acknowledge that she lacked legal or paralegal training, and that Guller had never discussed any of his clients with her; therefore, it wasn’t significant that he hadn’t engaged her in conversation about Steve Chambers.

  • • •

  The next government witness was John Hodge, the sixty-nine-year-old father of Calvin Hodge. Both father and son had pleaded guilty to money laundering. John Hodge spoke in an extremely high-pitched voice and was clearly proud to be participating in such a distinguished courtroom setting, even while recounting his deeds of questionable repute.

  He told the jury that Steve Chambers had asked him after the heist to secure a $100,000 check for him. Steve would give Hodge that amount in cash, plus a fee, and Hodge would then use money from his personal account to get Steve the check. Hodge had refused Steve’s request for the $100,000 check but agreed to one for $80,000. In return for that, Steve paid him a 10 percent fee that equaled $8,000. Soon afterward, he asked Hodge to get him another check, this one for $62,000, for Steve’s mobile-home purchase. Hodge’s fee was 10 percent for this check also, bringing his total in fees to $14,200.

  Keesler asked, “What did you think about the fact that Mr. Chambers was going to pay you money to go get these checks?”

  “Well,” Hodge told the jurors, with nothing but earnestness in his voice, “years ago, I used to be what you call a speculator and a ‘ten percenter,’ if any of you is familiar with either one of them. And that’s where you would do something, and they would pay you ten percent for doing it, and that was my purpose of doing the transaction is
the ten percent, and not knowing any more about the situation than what it was. But I personally wouldn’t do it again under the circumstances, any circumstances.”

  If the jury hadn’t been watching Keesler for his response to this perhaps overly honest answer from his own witness, he likely would’ve covered his face in his hands.

  • • •

  Another witness, FBI agent Bart Boodee, testified about his interviews with Guller after the heist arrests. He described how Guller changed his story about the cash sitting in his office after Boodee had mentioned that lying to the FBI was a felony. Boodee said that, at first, Guller told him the cash had been in his office only briefly. But then, after Boodee’s “reminder,” Guller acknowledged it was there for weeks, and that before he returned it, Steve told him to withdraw some money as a gratuity for holding it. Guller told Boodee that he declined the offer at first, the agent testified, but he finally partook, taking $10,000 for himself.

  • • •

  John Wydra was the final prosecution witness. Using an elaborate computer display projected onto a screen, he outlined the transactions Guller performed or had discussed performing for Steve. All told, Wydra showed the jury a figure of $1.2 million that “Chambers had available to him with Guller’s knowledge.”

  Among the first defense witnesses was Lurie Limbaugh, who Steve had stolen from in 1994. Guller’s attorneys were attempting to impeach Steve’s credibility as a witness. During his testimony, Steve had downplayed the charge against him that year as a drug deal gone bad, but the defense wanted to prove not only that he’d been lying, but also that he was good at getting regular people to trust him. Limbaugh said she had met Steve at a Gastonia club, and that he offered to help her purchase a car. She took him up on it and mentioned she had $3,000 in her purse. While they were parked in a vehicle, he grabbed the money and ran away, she said.

  If Limbaugh had trusted Steve enough to be alone with him with $3,000 after knowing him such a short time, the defense attorneys seemed to be asking, was it so far-fetched for Guller to have believed that Chambers’s money came from legal gambling proceeds?

  Next on the witness stand was a well-known figure in Charlotte, former mayor Richard Vinroot. He and Guller were friends from childhood who attended the same public schools, college, and law school. They even served as co-captains of the high-school football team.

  “My opinion is that he has the highest integrity,” Vinroot told jurors.

  During the cross-examination, Keesler asked, “Mr. Vinroot, you don’t know anything about the underlying facts of this case, do you?”

  “Absolutely nothing about it,” the former mayor said. “I have, frankly, not kept up with it because I was so hurt by the allegations, of course, and worried about my friend.”

  Next, two of Guller’s Gaston County colleagues, Max Childers and Calvin Hamrick—the latter a former district attorney—also told jurors Guller was a man of integrity. They admitted knowing little, if anything, of his state-bar reprimands. And Guller’s wife, Brenda, took the stand next and said Jeff was a very good stepfather to her children from a previous marriage.

  • • •

  Guller himself was the defense’s most important witness. He took the stand after his wife, on January 7, 1999. Describing his background, he spoke of his 1966 law degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, his work as a prosecutor in the late 1960s, his six months of active duty in the National Guard, and his leadership roles in the Gaston County March of Dimes, the Red Cross, the Young Lawyers Association, and his synagogue.

  He said he had met Steve Chambers in 1995 to discuss the 1994 larceny charge. Steve told him he worked in Charlotte and made $11.50 an hour at a company named Hydrovac, where he had allegedly been employed for six years. Guller had no reason not to believe him, he said. In November 1995, Steve hadn’t shown up for a court date and the judge issued a warrant for his arrest.

  The next time Steve and Guller met was in the summer of 1997, when Steve went to see him about the worthless-check charges.

  “What was his attitude when he came to see you?” Murphy asked.

  “He seemed a little put out with me about the larceny warrant, about why I didn’t get it handled,” Guller testified. “I got a little put out with him and said, ‘Where the hell were you? I can’t deal with your case unless you come to court, and I’m not going to deal with your case unless you pay me.’”

  “What was his response or reaction to that?”

  “He said, ‘Fine, fine, we will work everything out,’ and I said okay.”

  Murphy asked, “Did he ever talk to you about bookmaking, loan-sharking, gambling, anything like that?”

  “Never, other than the fact about his Atlantic City [trips],” Guller said. He mentioned the bag of cash Chambers brought to the closing and testified that he told Steve that using it would require taking the cash to the bank to fill out paperwork about the money’s source. “He didn’t appear to want to do that,” Guller told the jury. “I said, ‘Why not?’ I said, ‘If it’s valid money, if you won it like you said, it’s already reported, so why not?’”

  The defendant said he told Chambers to bring him other funds, and soon, or they would have to deposit the cash in the bank to close on the house. He also said he asked Chambers how he could afford the house. “He said that he had won a great deal of money gambling in Atlantic City,” Guller testified.

  Murphy asked if he pursued the matter any further.

  “I did,” Guller said. “I asked him how much he won, and he didn’t say. He just said, ‘A lot of money, more than enough to buy this house.’”

  He contended he had no reason to suspect Steve was involved with the Loomis heist. “This thing was reported as maybe the second-biggest robbery in the United States. Chambers? No way did Chambers have sense enough to do something like this… I had no idea what he won in Atlantic City.”

  Steve eventually brought Guller checks to pay for the house, so Guller never had to deposit the $433,000 in the bank. But he acknowledged taking $10,000 from the bag before returning it to Steve. He said Steve told him to take that amount several times before he agreed, and that he did so only because Steve called it a Christmas gift.

  “[Chambers] called me and said, ‘Things went real well, and I appreciate what you did.’ I said, ‘Fine, thank you.’ He said, ‘I want you to take $10,000.’ And I said, ‘No, I’m not taking $10,000.’ He said, ‘I want you to take $10,000.’ I said, ‘We’ll see.’ So I didn’t do anything. He called me another time and said, ‘Have you taken your $10,000?’ And I said no. ‘I want you to take $10,000.’ I said, ‘Okay, we’ll see.’ And I didn’t. And when he called and asked for the money back, he said, ‘Have you taken your $10,000?’ I said no. He said, ‘I want you to take $10,000.’ He said, ‘Christmas is coming, take the $10,000.’ I said okay.”

  Then he recounted a proposed land deal involving Kelly Campbell’s husband, in which Guller said he would help Steve put the land under a phony name. In giving his testimony, Guller unwittingly riled the judge.

  Murphy asked, “Did you ever tell [Steve] that you could put it in a fictitious name?”

  “I may have said ‘Yeah’ or ‘Okay,’ just to get him off the phone.”

  “Did you have any intentions of doing that?”

  “Absolutely not. I wouldn’t do that for anybody.”

  “Did he ever bring any specific documents to you…?”

  “Just a minute,” Judge Osteen interrupted, facing Guller. “Why would you have said that to get him off the phone?”

  “A lot of times,” Guller said, “when I’m talking to somebody, a client or whoever, and he’s told me what he needed to tell me, that he wanted me to do some work, and then he just starts talking, and I have got another line holding or I have got somewhere else I’ve got to be or I’ve got something else to do, I just want to be off the phone.
”

  His answer appalled the judge. “Isn’t he, at that time, asking you about some legal advice? ‘Will you put it in an assumed name?’ That’s legal advice he is asking you for, isn’t it?”

  Guller said, “I think I’ve gotten the gist of what he wanted to say by then, and that was an opportunity where he just took to talk, and he liked to talk big about things that he could do.”

  “All right, sir,” the judge said. “Proceed, Mr. Murphy.”

  Keesler, in perhaps the most devastating part of his cross-examination, insinuated that Guller would’ve had to be an absolute dolt not to realize the source of Steve’s money. Citing the testimony of Jennifer Norman, who of course had called America’s Most Wanted, he reminded Guller—and the jurors—that Norman had considerably less formal education than he did.

  “You have a college and law degree, don’t you?” Keesler asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Guller said.

  “And you’re a practicing lawyer for thirty years?”

  “Yes.”

  “And none of this clicked for you, I take it?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You didn’t see anything unusual about it at all.”

  “No, sir.”

  • • •

  During his closing argument to the jurors, Harold Bender maintained that Guller simply didn’t know where the money came from. “If his client lies to him, how is he supposed to know? If Mr. Guller’s client says, ‘I won a whole lot of money in Atlantic City,’ does Mr. Guller say, ‘I don’t believe you. Get out of my office’?”

  As for Steve Chambers, Bender said, “There’s not a truthful bone in that man’s body. He involved his parents. He involved his in-laws. He involved his friends. He’s a user. He’s a manipulator. He’s the government’s primary witness.”

  Parts of Guller’s testimony could have inspired reasonable doubt against the government’s case, if the jurors believed his point of view. But he seemed uncooperative to the prosecutor on the witness stand and appeared to be lying when he said he didn’t suspect that Steve was involved in the heist. And on the tapes, he sounded like an aider and abettor to Chambers; at the very least, he sounded indifferent.