Heist

by Jeff Diamant

  Guller didn’t act surprised to see the cash, despite having represented Steve on the worthless-check charges, an infraction suggesting that Steve was low on legitimate funds and could obtain large amounts only through scheming. As an attorney, Guller was not supposed to knowingly help clients get away with crimes. But he had about two hundred clients at a time, and he didn’t always remember the details of their cases. When he asked Steve where the money came from, Steve said he’d won a lot of it gambling in Atlantic City.

  Days earlier, Guller had told Steve and Michele that if they were going to use that amount of cash to buy the house, they would have to fill out forms reporting the source of the money. For obvious reasons, Steve didn’t want to do that. Another possibility, Guller said, was securing checks for the transaction. They could still close on the $635,000 house as scheduled, but they would need those checks in the next week or so.

  At the closing, Steve and Michele agreed to pay almost two-thirds up front. The sellers, their attorney, and two real-estate agents were also present. Steve and Michele didn’t talk much during the fifteen-minute meeting. They signed the deed of trust.

  The sellers, interior decorators named Sally Stowe Abernathy and J. R. Abernathy, were told that their buyers could afford a $433,000 down payment because Steve owned a string of Laundromats and had played in the NFL. The Abernathys had agreed to finance the remaining amount at $8,860 a month for two years. The Abernathys were profiting handsomely, having bought the home just two years earlier for $485,000. In an outside agreement, Steve and Michele would pay them about $40,000 in cash for furniture Michele liked that they had left in the house.

  After the closing, Steve asked Guller if he could leave the two bags of cash in his law office for the time being. Guller said yes—a decision that would haunt him—but added that if Steve didn’t come through with the checks, and soon, the cash would have to be used for the deal. Steve was confident he could get the checks on time and thought Guller’s office was as good a place as any to store the cash. And he figured that although Guller probably knew he had lived in a mobile home, he didn’t have to worry that the lawyer would call the police or get him in trouble. After all, he hadn’t told Guller where the money came from, and he figured the lawyer wouldn’t ask the wrong questions. He figured Guller’s office assistants would keep quiet as well.

  Steve began asking Guller about other ways to disburse money. Guller told him that keeping cash deposits to under $10,000 wouldn’t typically oblige banks to file mandatory reports with the government. Guller, who sensed that Chambers either was a hood or just wanted to be seen as one, figured it wasn’t a problem to tell a client how the government worked.

  It wasn’t the first time Steve had asked Guller this type of question. Steve once asked if a person could be indicted for simply lending money to criminals if he didn’t know what the debtors were using it for. Not knowing what Steve was talking about, Guller had responded that as long as Steve didn’t know, he was probably okay.

  Steve’s lawyer was well-known in the community, having served leadership roles with the Gaston County March of Dimes, the Red Cross, the Young Lawyers Association, and his synagogue. Years earlier, playing football for East Mecklenburg High School on the other side of the Catawba River, in Charlotte, the five-foot-seven center and linebacker had won all-conference honors.

  But a relative’s health issues had contributed to debt problems, and Guller’s practice had been in trouble with the law and under the scrutiny of the state bar association. In 1989, his second wife pleaded guilty to embezzling from escrow accounts that clients had established with his practice. The state bar association ruled that Guller was indirectly responsible, allowing that he didn’t know about the theft. He remained a practicing attorney with a reputation for combativeness in favor of his clients.

  • • •

  Steve now had a $433,000 challenge. He had to secure that amount in checks or money orders for the down payment. His game plan was to pay people he knew to get the checks for him. Steve would “lend” them briefcases of cash, from which the helpers would buy him money orders or cashier’s checks that he could use for the house purchase. For their troubles, the helpers would get from 5 to 10 percent of the check amounts, in cash.

  As part of these house-purchasing efforts came one of Steve and Michele’s most startling cash indiscretions, which easily dwarfed Michele’s previous breach of bank etiquette. Days after the closing, Michele walked into the Wachovia Bank in Belmont with $200,000 in cash inside a briefcase. She had $150,000 in hundreds and the rest in fifties and twenties, and she asked the teller for an official bank check, payable to herself under her former married name, Shelley Harris. Naturally, the bank teller declined and afterward filed a suspicious activity report.

  Then Steve and Michele drove an hour north to Salisbury, North Carolina, to a First Union National Bank. There they had an accommodating teller named Kim Goodman, who not only knew the Chamberses but was expecting their visit. She and her husband, Mike Goodman—a friend of Steve’s—had previously agreed that she would accept their check transaction in return for $10,000 in cash, which Steve would give to Kim on her lunch break that day. She convinced her superiors the deal was legitimate and filed the necessary paperwork.

  By the end of the first week of November, Steve also obtained a $100,000 check with help from a friend, Calvin Hodge, and an $80,000 cashier’s check with help from Calvin’s father, John Hodge. Steve, who claimed he needed their help because he didn’t have a checking or savings account, was more discreet in these efforts. Days after the closing, he put $108,000 in a briefcase and hauled it to a Burger King in the small Gaston County town of Dallas, where Calvin Hodge, an ice-cream-truck driver, waited for him. Hodge had agreed to convert the cash into a check at his local bank. He would keep the extra $8,000 as a fee.

  The checks and money orders went into Guller’s escrow account at First Citizens Bank. On November 6, the money was used as the down payment. As a legal fee for handling the house closing, Steve paid Guller $1,000.

  In the meantime, Steve had to deal with legal problems that predated the heist. On November 12, he pled guilty to forty-two counts of obtaining property by false pretenses, the charges in his old check-writing scheme. He avoided state prison, coming away with five years of probation, community service, restitution, and a small fine.

  While discussing the case with Guller before the plea, Steve bragged that he was “pretty slick” to have gotten his false checks cashed before the law caught up to him.

  “Not slick enough,” Guller shot back. “You’re not smart. You’re a distinctive-looking guy. You’re six feet tall, two hundred fifty or two hundred sixty pounds, with a beard. How are people not going to recognize you?”

  Staying Close to Home

  The Chamberses’ new home certainly left an impression. Those who opened the front door and stepped into the foyer immediately saw a curved staircase adorned with a faux leopard-skin stair runner, which climbed above a Haddorff grand piano, a large beveled mirror with a leopard-fabric frame, and a bronze statue of a woman. To the left was the dining room, which had a bust of Caesar on a pedestal overlooking the fine china laid out on a polished wooden table.

  From there, a right turn led into the huge kitchen festooned with a statue of a fat chef, a ceramic elephant, and oil paintings of a leopard and elephant. An open layout connected the kitchen to the living room, where a gas-log fireplace and wooden entertainment center were bedecked with trimmings that included a statue of a horse, a goose decoy, and prints of elephants. The bookends on their shelves were statuettes of female nudes.

  The most stunning part of the house may have been the master bedroom, which was sunken six steps from the rest of the first floor and had a glass fireplace, a leather-padded headboard, and, in its private bathroom, a sunken whirlpool six feet in diameter, flanked by four fluted columns. If filling the tub would take too long, they
could instead use the spacious, marbled walk-in shower.

  Next to the master bedroom was the study, where a Baccarat crystal chandelier hung from the ceiling and a black-and-gold family crest was on the wall. Steve could conduct his business at a gorgeous eight-drawer desk and be comforted by the presence of a handmade Civil War chess set.

  Downstairs, their well-furnished basement had a game room and wine cellar. To the right of the stairs was a glossy, black-tiled bar stocked with Corona and Coors Light. A clown-faced lava lamp sat on the bar, sometimes accompanied in the room by a cheap painting of Elvis on velvet. They hadn’t bought the velvet Elvis themselves; it had been left there by the previous owners, interior decorators for whom it was a gag gift, not actual wall art.

  The game-room walls also featured a framed print of Robert E. Lee and plaques commemorating Steve’s supposed former team, the Dallas Cowboys. Guarding the pictures was a wooden cigar-store Indian that stood six feet tall. The jewel of the room was a pool table that cost just under ten grand. A door from the game room opened into the three-hundred-square-foot wine cellar, which had gold wallpapering and a brick floor.

  Outside, Michele and Steve added a $10,000 fence, which gave them privacy and allowed their dogs—a basset hound named Dallas and a poodle named Ty Cobb—to safely play outside. The couple enjoyed the dogs and sometimes playfully addressed the poodle as “you little bastard,” a moniker befitting the baseball legend of the early twentieth century for whom the pooch was named. Michele decided to discontinue the practice one day after hearing a toddler relative exclaim, “Ty Cobb, you wittle bastard!”

  This was all quite a step up from their mobile home in rural Lincoln County, and while the leopard decor may have seemed out-of-place in their fancy neighborhood, they weren’t regularly entertaining the types of people who would roll their eyes at it. Among the guests at Steve and Michele’s first Halloween party as millionaires was Kelly Campbell, who purchased a Cleopatra costume for the event, only to be told at the last minute not to wear it because other guests wouldn’t be dressing up. Kelly had become a frequent visitor to the house, playing pool and poker with Steve with fresh stacks of dollar bills.

  Kelly, of course, had made the heist happen in the first place by prodding David to steal the money, but now she was playing a subordinate role to Steve. Steve was making all the decisions about where to hide cash and about who got what. Kelly didn’t seem to protest much, believing Steve was “connected” and knew what he was doing to keep them out of trouble, and that the money was “up north” somewhere with his crooked bankers. She still had one-third of the loot coming to her, but she figured she wouldn’t ask Steve for it until the FBI had left her alone for a longer period. After all, it had only been a few weeks since they interviewed her at her home about David.

  She was fine with Steve in charge. Her main involvement now, besides spending small amounts of money, was in talking with Ghantt on the phone and then telling Steve what he said. Of course, she still had no intentions of moving to Mexico with David, though she let him think she did—maybe in December, when things quieted down, she would say.

  Telling David this kept him happy or at least would allay any suspicions he might harbor about them turning on him. After all, David hadn’t received any money, and if he thought Kelly was bailing on the move to Mexico, he might put two and two together, realize his share of the money and his life were in danger, turn himself in, and call the cops on them. So she decided to let him think she was still interested.

  In reality, she wanted to use her share to buy a new place of her own not far from her family. She even looked at a two-story home for sale in Bessemer City, in Gaston County, and also considered moving outside the county.

  But unlike Steve, she didn’t want David killed. She still viewed him as a friend, and she wasn’t someone who looked to kill people who got in her way. To this point, she had managed to talk Steve out of consummating the murder plot, saying it wasn’t necessary, though they had discussed various possibilities, including having David injected with Clorox. (The bleach would be fatal, they figured.) David, of course, had no clue his murder was being considered.

  The Halloween party was a low-key affair. Kelly, Steve, Michele, Eric and Amy Payne, and a few others talked with each other, sipped their beers, and listened to music. At one point, Steve took Kelly aside and turned the subject to the murder plan. If they didn’t move forward, Ghantt was bound to lead the FBI back to the rest of them. Kelly was high and finally gave in.

  “Just do whatever you need to do,” she told Steve.

  • • •

  An occasional presence at the house was Amy Grigg, the fiancée of Steve’s cousin Nathan Grant. She was supposed to keep an eye on the money at Lincoln Self Storage. In early November, the company sent her a letter saying that if she did not pay the monthly fee, it would open the locker and sell the contents. Amy asked her mother, Kathy, to go pay the bill. Kathy did so and brought home the receipt.

  Early November brought another important new house guest when Mike McKinney, the original bearer of the ID that David was now using, flew in from Illinois. Weeks earlier, McKinney had accepted Steve’s offer of $250,000 to kill someone. When McKinney arrived, Steve told him the target was a man who was hiding in Mexico. Steve would pay one-half up front. He didn’t say where he’d gotten all this money, and McKinney didn’t ask.

  McKinney had never been a hit man before. In fact, he didn’t have a criminal record for any violence. He had been a smart, popular student at his high school in Bridgeport, Illinois, graduating with a GPA over 3.2. Standing a slim six-foot-four and sporting a close-cut brown beard, he had joined the marines after some community college and became a TOW gunner, able to fire antitank missiles.

  McKinney repeated his willingness to accept Steve’s offer. The amount of money impressed him enough that he ignored the danger associated with it. He learned he would have to travel to Mexico to deal with the target, known to him only as Scott, and that Scott would be under the impression that McKinney was giving him money. McKinney would take along cash in case no opportunity arose to kill Scott. In that case, he would give Scott money so Scott would trust his intentions and meet with him on future visits, when McKinney, of course, would again look for opportunities to kill him.

  • • •

  A few evenings later, after a meal, Michele and Steve were driving down Charlotte’s Independence Boulevard when Michele spotted a sporty, white BMW passing them. “Look at that,” she said to Steve. “Isn’t that cute?”

  “Yeah, it’s okay,” Steve said.

  The car was a BMW Z-3 roadster, a convertible.

  A few days later, while on another drive down Independence Boulevard, Steve turned into the BMW dealership. He said to his wife, “Do you want to drive one?”

  She took it for a test drive down Independence. It felt good. Very good. It cost $27,000, and they paid for it in cash.

  • • •

  Looking for another way to hide or launder his money, Steve bought a furniture business located in downtown Gastonia, across the street from the county courthouse. The seller was an acquaintance of Steve’s named Michael Staley, who had run the store as a discount outlet. Staley wanted $75,000 for the store, and when Steve declined that price, they agreed on $25,000 up front and an undetermined amount later. They wrote nothing down about future payments. Staley was recovering from stomach surgery and wanted as little trouble from the transaction as possible. He just wanted to close the deal.

  Steve changed the store’s name from Furniture Discount Center to M&S Furniture, for Michele and Steve, and closed it down temporarily to lay a new concrete floor and carpet, and to redo the bathroom. He also replaced the discount inventory with higher-end merchandise. Michele drove to area newspapers to buy ads for the new store and even purchased radio spots on a local station.

  Meanwhile, Kelly Campbell was enjoying her new rich
es for the most part. No, she had not received anywhere close to one-third of the stolen money, but she had seen six figures. For the first time in her life, she could buy things without worrying about a budget. Her once-minuscule bank account at the AT&T Family Federal Credit Union was growing too. She had deposited $800 two days after the heist and $1,715 a week later. And she was thinking about buying a minivan.

  Yet the FBI’s visit to her home soon after the heist still had her nervous a month later in early November. When she decided to buy the minivan, she asked Steve to come with her and register it under a different name so it wouldn’t draw unwanted attention.

  It was November 13 when Steve and Kelly drove to the Harrelson Toyota dealership in Fort Mill, South Carolina, just south of Charlotte. They had $16,000 worth of twenty-dollar bills with them. Steve introduced himself to the salesman as Robert Dean Wilson, an alias he had used before for his check-writing scheme, and they agreed on terms for a Sienna XLE minivan. The paperwork required a social security number for Robert Dean Wilson, so Steve made one up off the top of his head. On the loan application, he put down his place of employment as Chambers Industries. A few days later, Kelly and Steve returned to the dealership to pay off the rest of the minivan with $14,220 in twenty-dollar bills.

  A week later, for Thanksgiving, both sets of spouses—Kelly and Jimmy and Steve and Michele—drove together to Atlantic City for a few days of fun. It was Steve’s second trip there in a month. Jimmy Campbell still didn’t know what his wife had been involved in.

  When they arrived in New Jersey, they did the Atlantic City thing, gambling, strolling the boardwalk, and shopping. Kelly bought leather coats for both herself and Jimmy and shopped at a Warner Brothers store for her children. Steve gave a hundred-dollar chip to a drink server as a tip.

  In their room at the Hilton Hotel, Jimmy noticed Kelly unzip a duffel bag full of cash. She told him Steve and Michele had a bag just like it. He nervously asked his wife if the money was from the Loomis Fargo theft.