Heist

by Jeff Diamant

  As sweat moistened Scott’s face and clothes on the cool October evening, he heard a siren in the night. The wailing terrified all three of them as it grew louder. Could the police really have been tipped so soon? Scott walked to the edge of the Loomis van, felt himself stop breathing, put his hands up, and froze.

  The siren faded. He saw the flashing lights of an ambulance distancing itself on the highway. Just an ambulance. It seemed like either a cruel joke or a miracle. Relieved, the men got back to work.

  Steve’s phone rang. It was Kelly, passing an urgent reminder from David to make sure they took the two videotapes that David had left in the Loomis van.

  Steve told Scott to grab them, and the men kept working, developing an easy rhythm as the minutes rolled by, taking armloads of cash from the Loomis van, walking a few yards to the Budget van, and filling the plastic barrels with money.

  Their haul was so large that the barrels in the rented van couldn’t hold it all. They would have to leave millions behind, Steve realized. The alternative—scattering shrink-wrapped cash in the rear of the van—was a nonstarter that would spell doom if a cop pulled them over on the way back to Steve’s home, for whatever reason, and made them open the back.

  Cool and in charge, Steve told Scott to ignore the stacks of ones and fives and stick to the larger denominations. And leaving money could actually work to their advantage; maybe whoever found it would steal it themselves, drive the van elsewhere, and cloud the group’s trail.

  The barrels in the rental van were full about forty minutes after the money had arrived at Reynolds & Reynolds. The next task was to abandon the white Loomis van, which of course still had money inside. Scott and Steve handled this while Eric drove the rented van full of loot to a nearby British Petroleum filling station in Mount Holly, where the other two would meet him minutes later.

  Scott, followed closely by Steve’s Mazda, drove the Loomis van to a wooded area less than a mile from Reynolds & Reynolds, off Moores Chapel Road. Forgetting to turn the car off or take the videotapes, Scott jumped out, closed the door, and hopped into Steve’s car.

  “Did you cut the van off?”

  “No, I kept it running,” Scott said.

  Steve was not pleased. He had wanted Scott to turn the ignition off. That way, whoever found the van would be able to drive it to a new location that would throw off FBI. But now it was stuck there.

  As they approached the BP station to meet Eric at about 9:00 p.m., Scott found yet another reason to worry. A Mount Holly police car was waiting in the gas station’s parking lot. “We’re gonna get caught,” he said worriedly to Steve.

  Steve kept his cool. He never flinched in these situations. True, he had never done anything quite like this, but he had a solid career as a small-time crook under his belt. With the officer only dozens of feet from the Budget rental van, Steve left the Mazda and walked nonchalantly to the driver’s side of the loaded van while Scott casually slid behind the wheel of the Mazda.

  The police officer ignored them.

  In two vehicles, the three men left the BP station and drove back onto I-85 and into the heart of Gaston County. “I brought you into this because I trust you,” Steve told Eric on the way. “If it went down, I know you wouldn’t rat me out.” Already, Steve was planning for the worst-case scenario.

  As they drove, Steve called Scott on his cell phone to make sure his nervous cousin was all right. Scott said he was fine. The men took Interstate 85 exit to Route 321 North, starting a thirty-minute ride into the northwestern reaches of rural Lincoln County, to Steve’s mobile home, which was located near a creek at the end of a gravel road.

  There, Steve’s wife, Michele, was waiting with ten bags of rubber bands, a calculator, cardboard boxes, and a slashed-and-emptied mattress that one of her children had slept on in a bunk bed before it was gutted.

  When the men arrived around 10:00 p.m., the money was finally secured on Steve’s property. And it was time to count.

  Steve and Eric carried the barrels into the mobile home while Scott looked for something to drink. He knew he had just made the worst mistake of his life and needed to relax, so he grabbed a Sun Drop soda. The twenty-six-year-old plant worker, who had dark hair and a medium build, was clearly out of his element. He had obtained his GED two years earlier and had a six-year-old daughter who lived with her mother, while Scott lived with his girlfriend in a mobile home.

  Eric also was nervous. At five-foot-ten and one hundred ninety pounds, with a firm chin and brown mustache, he carried the air of a tough guy. But while he may not have been the nicest guy in the world, he wasn’t an experienced criminal. The most serious conviction on his record was for driving while impaired.

  The counting began, assembly-line style. Scott passed bundles of cash to Eric, who passed them to Steve, who called out the amounts written on the bundles to Michele, who added everything up on the calculator.

  Scott stopped counting when he reached $100,000. “We’re gonna get caught,” he said. “We’re gonna get caught.”

  Steve told him to calm down. “We won’t get caught,” he said, “if everyone does what they’re supposed to do.”

  “We’re gonna get caught,” Scott repeated, staring wide-eyed at the floor.

  Michele, keeping tabs, just laughed. “Look at all this money!” she exclaimed. “Look at all this money!”

  Steve and Michele loaded twenty-dollar bills, in $10,000 stacks several inches thick, into the slashed mattress. They planned to close it up and put it back on the top bunk above where one of their kids slept.

  Scott stopped pacing and leaned against the kitchen counter, folding his hands across his chest and staring at the mattress. “Jesus,” he told Michele. “If that falls on your son’s head, it’s gonna kill him.” When the mattress was full of cash, Steve took one end and told Michele to grab the other. They tried to lift it together, but it was too heavy. So they unloaded the cash from it and returned it to the barrels.

  Steve, calm throughout, swore everyone in the group to eternal silence.

  As Scott got ready to go home, Steve reminded him to stay calm. The count had reached $2.7 million, and Scott just couldn’t bear to be around anymore, though his nervousness didn’t keep him from carrying $6,000 with him as a first installment. He would have taken more, but he didn’t want his girlfriend to suspect anything. While fearing he would be arrested that night, he somehow managed to fall asleep next to her after returning home, only to be awakened by a loud pounding on the door and shouts of “Police! It’s the police!” Panicked, he again wondered how everything could have fallen apart so fast. But it turned out to be just a drunken relative.

  The others at Heist Central continued counting after Scott left, past midnight. Kelly joined them after her drive from Columbia. The total was more than $14 million. Michele wrote the amount on paper. “I’m rich,” she said, laughing again. “I love this money!”

  Steve placed dog food over the money in the barrels and moved them to a shed behind his mobile home, securing the shed with a Master Lock. He went to sleep at 6:00 a.m.

  When he awoke four hours later, he set about the task of moving the money from his home to other locations. He sent Michele to rent space at a storage facility about a mile from their home, and on her return he placed the barrels in the back of their Ford pickup truck. Together they drove to the storage facility to leave the money. Later, Steve would also bury $150,000 in a duffel bag off a trail behind his mobile home.

  In the coming days, Steve would better secure the stolen cash. On October 6, Scott’s brother, Nathan Grant, and Nathan’s girlfriend, Amy, helped Steve move it to two facilities he felt were more secure, Bubba’s Mini Storage and Lincoln Self Storage. Steve had arranged for Nathan, a twenty-year-old mill worker, to rent locker space there, lying to him by saying he was just hiding gambling winnings. Before bringing the money over they stashed it in duffel bags, cardb
oard boxes, and suitcases. The facilities had gates that allowed vehicles to pass once the driver punched in security codes. Only Steve and Nathan kept the keys to the lockers inside.

  For their help, Steve would pay Nathan and Amy $70,000. The small circle of heist beneficiaries was widening.

  Creative Money Laundering

  Earlier that day, October 6, Michele Chambers, holding a black briefcase filled with cash, had walked into a NationsBank branch office in Mount Holly, about six miles west of the scene of the crime. She had approached the teller, a woman with glasses.

  Michele tried to sound self-assured. “How much cash can I deposit,” she asked the teller, “without you having to file paperwork?”

  The teller told her $10,000, in accordance with a federal law mandating that banks file “suspicious activity reports” when customers make large cash deposits, or when they ask about structuring deposits to avoid filling out forms. The teller didn’t say so, but the purpose of the reports was to alert authorities to possible money laundering.

  Michele opened her briefcase on the ledge beneath the teller’s window, reached into it, and removed bands of twenty-dollar bills totaling $9,500.

  The teller kept her eyes steady, saying nothing out of the ordinary. But Michele, sensing the teller thought she was crazy, felt a need to reassure. “Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s not drug money.”

  The teller accepted the bundles, and Michele left.

  Once outside, she hopped into the waiting Mazda 626 with her husband, Steve, who was in the driver’s seat. They did not see the teller, inside the bank, fill out a suspicious activity report. The FBI itself wouldn’t see the report for about three months, as the paperwork had to go through official channels. But on this day, less than forty-eight hours after the crime, NationsBank, which rightfully owned some of the stolen money, was unwittingly helping the thieves store a portion.

  • • •

  Steve and Michele didn’t plan to live much longer in their mobile home, an abode ill-befitting the newly minted millionaires. Steve had told his accomplices not to spend the money wildly, but he and his wife had already made plans to trade up. A few weeks before the heist they had begun searching for a luxury house, even signing with a real-estate agent. Looking at homes priced at $200,000 and higher, they had settled on a 7,000-square-foot beauty with a curved staircase, a stucco exterior, and a price tag of $635,000. It was high on a small mountain in Gaston County, North Carolina, where Steve and Michele had grown up.

  On October 5, the day after the theft, Steve and Michele signed an offer to buy it, setting a closing date for later in the month. They agreed to pay $10,000 up front as good-faith money, $400,000 in cash, and $225,000 in financed payments. The Chamberses had been a couple for about five years, and the prospect of moving excited them.

  Michele, a former office manager for an insurance company, went by the nickname “Shelley.” An attractive woman and a snazzy dresser, she had 34C breasts that were just ten months old and that she wasn’t shy to show people, having paid about $4,000 for implants the previous December. They had been a Christmas present to herself, she would say.

  Michele had grown up just outside the small town of Mount Holly, and though her parents divorced when she was a kid, she had a relatively normal childhood until she was thirteen years old. That’s when she and her mom, Sandra Floyd, fell into a bitter argument over her not coming straight home from cheerleading practice one day. Sandra told Michele she couldn’t be a cheerleader. Michele told her mom she was moving out.

  She then moved in with her father, but he and Michele had trouble too. At age nineteen, she married a man named Norman Harris, who would join the marines after they had a child together. They later had a second kid. A young mother, Michele had wanted children sooner rather than later because she knew she’d soon need a partial hysterectomy due to a health condition.

  Before Norman Harris joined the armed forces and left Michele to fend for herself with a child and a job that couldn’t pay the bills, he innocently introduced her to Steve Chambers, who at the time was dating Norman’s sister, Angel. Steve and Michele didn’t get along, especially when Steve sided with Norman in their arguments.

  He was a fast talker, this Steve Chambers. He had a brown goatee and a six-foot-one, two-hundred-twenty-pound build that straddled the line between stocky and fat. He’d held low-paying jobs but had come to see a more promising future in loan-sharking and bookmaking.

  Steve’s friends knew him to be fascinated by the Northeastern mob culture, at least as he had seen it portrayed by Hollywood in Goodfellas and the Godfather movies. His lines included “Don’t tell nobody nothin’” and “Keep your mouth shut,” not to spoof Robert De Niro but as part of his own style. He took his friends to eat at Godfather’s Pizza. He flashed phony IDs.

  His friends didn’t know that Steve had an unusual relationship with the FBI, as an informant for crimes that hadn’t actually happened—crimes that he and his friends had only been discussing. He once revealed supposed plans for an armored-car robbery that never materialized. Steve even had a favorite agent, Phil King, who he would call to ask how much money he could receive for information related to specific crimes. Steve didn’t know the FBI had written him off as an informant.

  From a young age, Steve had associated with people who had criminal histories, and he dropped out of East Gaston High School in the tenth grade. He drove a truck for a while, worked for Coca-Cola, and pulled off some petty crimes with friends.

  When Norman Harris asked Steve to look after Michele while he served in the marines, Steve took the request seriously. Too seriously. He spent quality time with Michele and the kids, bringing food to their apartment and helping them get by. He would hug and kiss the kids, read to them, and take them out. This didn’t go unnoticed by their mother, who, one day as Steve was about to leave, told him she loved him. He told her he loved her too, and their lips met.

  Michele and her mother had repaired their relationship by then. But Sandra Floyd wasn’t pleased with her daughter’s infidelity. That’s why she and Steve Chambers didn’t get along. But there was nothing she could do. Soon enough, Michele and Norman were divorced, and in November 1996, Michele married Steve.

  • • •

  Steve’s next bit of heist business was 530 miles away, and since he didn’t like flying, he had to take a car. The week after the theft, he and Eric Payne drove to a motel in Evansville, Indiana, to give $50,000 to a man named Mike McKinney. Steve had met McKinney when McKinney was on leave from the marines with Norman Harris, who took him to Gastonia. These days McKinney was working construction. He had given Steve his birth certificate and social security card, which Steve said a friend of his needed to use after fleeing the country due to a shooting. But actually he had passed them to David Ghantt, through Kelly, for his use in Mexico. Now it was time for McKinney’s payment.

  This wouldn’t be the first time Steve had given McKinney money; just after the theft, he had wired him $2,000 to help him pay a fine for driving while intoxicated.

  On this day, October 15, 1997, Steve had a suitcase packed with $50,000 in shrink-wrapped ten-dollar bills. He opened it at the motel, took the cash out, and counted it.

  Eric asked McKinney, “Do you know where this came from?”

  Steve shushed Eric and told McKinney that somebody else had stolen the money from the Mafia. Then he took McKinney aside and offered him a job. “There’s a guy who needs to be taken out,” Steve said quietly. “Do you want it?” The marines had booted McKinney after his urine tested positive for cocaine, but he still knew how to use a gun. Steve told him he would pay him $250,000 in cash.

  McKinney said he would do it, and Steve said he would provide details later. From Steve’s perspective, killing David Ghantt would eliminate the heist’s top suspect and lessen, if not eliminate, the possibility that the FBI would connect Kelly and him to the heist. And the
n Steve and Kelly could split David’s share between them.

  • • •

  As he traveled, Steve kept in contact with Michele at home. One night, when she mentioned a thunderstorm that was roaring through the county, Steve’s thoughts understandably turned to the $150,000 he had buried near their home in a duffel bag. Michele had to retrieve it, he said, or it would turn to mush. But Michele didn’t know where it was, and for obvious reasons Steve hadn’t marked the site. He gave her directions over the phone.

  In the pouring rain, under dark skies illuminated only by lightning, Michele gave it her all. On her knees, in tears, she dug with her hands in the dirt, trying to follow Steve’s directions. But her efforts were fruitless, and in twenty minutes it made sense to give up. Steve would have to find the money himself. When he arrived home two days later, he quickly located the duffel bag. Not unexpectedly, the money was soaked and stuck together.

  What followed was the only type of money laundering that wouldn’t get Steve in trouble. At Steve’s behest they placed the green gobs in their laundry dryer and clicked the delicate cycle. Before they turned it on, Steve suggested they throw poker chips in with the “wash,” saying he had once heard this could help the bills come apart. They waited nearby as the money flipped around inside. Steve’s idea worked. The money was still good.

  Caught on Video

  David Ghantt probably didn’t know it was there.

  That was the speculation of three FBI agents and the Loomis Fargo manager. The morning after the heist, they were watching the one security tape that astonishingly had not been swiped. Why else would Ghantt have stolen only two tapes when there had been three? The one that remained had been locked in a cabinet in the manager’s office, unlike the others, which were in plain view.