by Jeff Diamant
After Thanksgiving, Steve asked Guller for his briefcases back. The lawyer returned them on consecutive Sunday mornings, November 30 and December 7, in a restaurant parking lot in Gastonia. When Guller returned the second briefcase, Steve asked if he had taken his $10,000. Guller said yes, he had.
• • •
Steve’s decision to keep the money in safe-deposit boxes led him to sully the hands of people who were previously uninvolved in the heist.
On December 12, Steve and Michele invited relatives over to celebrate Michele’s daughter’s sixth birthday. At the Cinderella-themed party, as guests ate from deli trays and admired the three-tiered castle cake, Steve asked his father-in-law, Dennis Floyd, a truck driver, to come downstairs with him. They played pool on Steve’s $10,000 table and made small talk before sitting down at the bar.
Steve said, “You know, we do a lot of gambling, and Michele tells me you’re in a financial bind.”
“If you drive a truck, you’re always in a financial bind,” Dennis Floyd replied.
Steve told his father-in-law he would give him $20,000 to store $1 million in cash. Dennis Floyd would need to sign up to manage a safe-deposit box—in his own name—in which Steve would hide the cash.
Dennis Floyd said he would do it.
Days later, Michele drove her BMW to her parents’ house in Mount Holly to pick up her stepfather and drive them to a bank. She had $1 million in a briefcase.
She was wearing a silver raincoat. Her stepdad was wearing a black leather jacket. They were like Bonnie and Clyde, Michele thought. After Michele pulled into a parking space, they walked inside and cosigned for access to a safe-deposit box.
In the coming weeks, Steve would pay his in-laws another $20,000 to open more safe-deposit boxes that would hold another $900,000 of his “gambling money.” In total, Dennis Floyd would rent seven boxes.
The Chamberses also asked Steve’s parents to hide money and other items in safe-deposit boxes. When his parents asked why, they told Steve’s mother they had won at gambling in Las Vegas and told his father they had important papers and jewels that needed extra security. Steve’s parents then cosigned for three boxes, and Steve said he would help them with a down payment for a new home.
Steve also got friends in on the act. The best man at his wedding, David Craig, accepted $80,000 to open six safe-deposit boxes in his own name that would hold a total of $1.9 million. Steve told him the money belonged to a friend who needed it shipped somewhere. In addition, Calvin Hodge took $40,000 from Steve to open three safe-deposit boxes in his own name that would hold $900,000. He also rented a storage unit that held $770,000.
Steve involved his cousin Nathan Grant as well, asking him to cosign for a safe-deposit box with Amy Grigg. About $400,000 went inside.
Despite the theft from Lincoln Self Storage, Steve still trusted his cousin. He occasionally cracked, “You owe me $1.96 million,” but only as a joke. Nathan and Amy, worried that whomever Steve had been holding the money for would come after them, told him they were scared, but he told them not to worry, that the people “up north” didn’t know they were involved.
True, Steve and Michele had already set off alarm bells with their spending right after the heist, but when it came to managing the money, all had been going well to this point. But the Calloways’ theft from the locker had changed everything, affecting how Steve did business and leading him to invite close friends and relatives, even his parents, into the mess he’d created. It would be a long time before Steve knew who had stolen his stolen money.
Even during the best of times, criminal multimillionaires have a lot on their minds. Several potential problems were gnawing at Steve. What would happen if David Ghantt decided to turn himself in? What if the murder plot went wrong? What was the best way to hide the money? He was nervous about all of these issues and more, and figured it made sense to use his old FBI contact to try to gauge the bureau’s progress on the heist investigation. His season of brazen acts, one after the other, could hardly be topped by his initiating contact with the FBI a few months after the heist. He placed a Christmas call to the bureau’s Charlotte office.
Steve asked for Phil King, the agent he had worked with when he was an informant. He claimed he just wanted to say hello, to find out how King was doing. Steve asked King if he was working on any special cases, hoping the answer would help him gauge the FBI’s progress on the heist investigation.
Just the usual stuff, King said.
Steve wished him a Merry Christmas and jokingly asked, “Did you buy me a gift?”
King returned the sentiment and the joke. Then they hung up.
Christmas Bear
Steve and Michele had no qualms about inviting people outside their inner circle into their home. In mid-December 1997, Steve called an old friend with whom he had worked as a teenager at Belmont Hosiery, a sock factory where he’d also worked with Eric Payne. They had lost touch for about a decade afterward but reconnected in 1994 at a little-league baseball game. Steve invited the friend, who now worked as a printing-company manager, to his New Year’s Eve party.
The friend, who lived in Belmont, told him he thought the drive to Lincoln County would be too far, at least forty-five minutes.
“Don’t worry,” Steve said. “I moved.”
“Where to?”
“I live in Cramer Mountain now.”
“Get outta town!”
The friend drove to see Steve before the New Year’s Eve party. The grand piano, the pool table, and the poker table all caught his eye. Steve told him that the place cost more than half a million dollars, and that he’d already paid most of it off.
“How the hell did you manage that?” the friend asked.
“It all comes from taking risks,” Steve said.
“It looks like you’re doing pretty good,” the friend replied. “Can you get me hooked up?”
“I might have something for you,” Steve said. The friend asked for a loan for $25,000 at 1 percent interest. When Steve would eventually offer him $100,000 to smuggle $2.5 million to the Cayman Islands, the friend responded that he would think about the deal and get back to him.
• • •
Another houseguest was Ruth Staley, mother of the previous owner of the Chamberses’ furniture store. Steve and Michele liked Ruth Staley. One Friday in late December, they invited her and her three grandchildren to their house for pizza, saying they always bought pizza for their kids on Fridays to celebrate the end of the week.
Ruth accepted the invite, and the size of their house impressed her. During the visit, she noticed the barrels in the garage and commented favorably on their royal blue color. “What do you have in those?” she asked.
“Dog food,” Michele said.
Meanwhile, Steve was keeping a close eye on Kelly Campbell. He wanted to make sure she didn’t do anything to get them in trouble, and she remained a frequent guest at his house. Of course, compared to Steve, Kelly wasn’t spending much at all. She had bought the new minivan, leather jackets, an all-terrain vehicle, and dirt bikes, and had just taken her kids to Disney World—the first time she’d ever flown in a plane. She was more or less following Steve’s advice from the night of the crime, that everyone should lie low and hold off on big purchases. Still, some of her acquaintances had noticed she’d been spending more money than usual; she explained that she’d been selling pot.
She was still talking to David on the phone every week or so. During a December call, he told her he didn’t want to meet Bruno anymore. He wouldn’t say why, but he was insistent that somebody else deliver the cash to him. He clearly trusted her less than before.
When Kelly mentioned her recent trip to Florida with her kids, David revealed that he knew about the money being spent on houses and vehicles, and that he wasn’t pleased, especially since he had seen less than $40,000 of the $17 million.
“Yeah, that’s what Steve is doing,” Kelly told him, “but I haven’t bought anything but a van.”
David would’ve been even more upset to hear of the extravagance of Eric Payne, Steve’s last-minute recruit who had played no role in the planning but seemed to be outspending David by a large margin. Payne had bought a motorcycle, a pickup truck, a diamond necklace for his wife, Amy, and a computer for their daughter. Eric’s family also went in for plastic surgery. His wife and two sisters had breast implants. Amy also got a nose job.
Of course, whatever the Paynes were spending was nothing compared to Steve and Michele’s activity. And while Kelly never complained to Steve about his extravagance, one day he volunteered to her, “I know you’re probably thinking, here I am buying all these things, when I told y’all not to. But I got ways to make it look legitimate.”
Kelly didn’t argue with him. She took his word for it. But the FBI’s late-December interview with her at the Gaston Mall had made her increasingly nervous that her connection to David would lead to her arrest. She worried that Jeff Guller, the attorney, had not done all he could to make the agents leave her alone.
Steve referred her to another Gastonia attorney he knew. Kelly told this lawyer the FBI wanted to polygraph her and paid the lawyer’s firm $10,000 as a retainer. The lawyer set up a private lie-detector test administered by a retired FBI agent to see how she would do. She failed miserably.
Steve had hired this second lawyer for himself because he was upset with the plea bargain that Guller had arranged on his fraud case. He was considering buying a bar or a nightclub as a way to launder money, but the state wouldn’t grant a liquor license to a convicted felon, so he needed his criminal record cleared. Steve wanted both lawyers, separately, to explore having his guilty plea overturned.
• • •
Santa Claus was flush with funds this year, so gift-giving time was the highlight of the Christmas party at 503 Stuart Ridge, where a twelve-foot tree loomed impressively over the guests and catering was provided by Boston Market—turkey, ham, and all the trimmings. The Chamberses were good at giving presents, and they didn’t skimp.
Michele’s grandfather Roy Willis received a small, wrapped box from Michele and Steve, who made sure their video camera caught his reaction as he slowly opened the package. Inside, he found a small Matchbox pickup truck and a key. He was speechless, realizing immediately what they had done. His newly rich granddaughter and her husband had bought him a real pickup, and it was probably outside. He’d never had one before, and he wept with joy.
Michele’s gift from Steve was even more astounding. He gave her a brown teddy bear, and when she undid its zipper, she saw her real gift—a three-and-a-half-carat diamond ring. She didn’t know it yet, but Steve had paid $43,000 for it. When the employee at the jeweler’s shop in Charlotte had asked him for information to fill out the mandatory cash-reporting form, Steve had provided a phony name and a made-up social security number.
• • •
Shortly after Christmas, in early January 1998, Steve and Michele invited their friends for a night on the town. They even set up Kelly with a blind date, knowing she and her husband were having problems. Steve rented a limousine that shuttled the group to a Charlotte steak house. He tipped the limo driver hundreds of dollars, giving him a twenty each time he opened the door.
After dinner, they were driven to a nearby nightclub called Crickets in Gastonia. Kelly and her date were decidedly not hitting it off. One sign of this was that her date was dancing closely with Michele. This justifiably perturbed Steve, whose reaction caused a scene. The manager at Crickets asked them to leave, and on his way out, Steve told the manager, in a huff, that he was going to come back one day and buy the place.
This wasn’t a pipe dream. It would’ve been Steve’s biggest non-house purchase yet. The place was a dive with pool tables, a dance floor, and a bar, but Steve figured it might be the perfect way to launder money. He soon had a rough marketing plan. He would change its name to The Big House—as in prison—and the slogan would be, “If you’re gonna do the time, do it right.” He and Michele had visited a similar bar in upstate New York. He talked with the owner and came up with a tentative purchase price of $450,000.
• • •
Completely underneath Steve Chambers’s radar, Jody and Jennifer Calloway managed a smooth getaway from North Carolina with their approximately $1.3 million in twice-stolen money. Jennifer had family in Colorado, so they decided to move there. As part of their plan, each would tell the boss at their job that the other one was being transferred, and they would write almost identical resignation letters.
Twenty-eight-year-old Jody was a U.S. Air Force veteran who had worked two years at Pattons Inc., an air-compressor company. His hourly wage was $11.45. “Although I have been afforded a great opportunity with such an innovative company,” Jody wrote his boss, “I am putting my two-week notice in. My wife has accepted a job outside of North Carolina which would be to our family’s advantage. I am sad that I have to leave when I am just becoming fully proficient at my job. However, I would like to thank you for giving me the chance to work with and become part of a winning team.”
Jennifer, a General Electric employee, wrote her boss, “Although I have been afforded a great opportunity to work with such an innovative company, I am putting my two-week notice in. My husband has accepted a job outside of North Carolina which would be to our family’s advantage. I am sad that I have to leave when I am just becoming fully proficient at my job. However, I would like to thank you for giving me the chance to become part of a world-winning team. I am very proud to say that I have worked for GE. Since I have worked here I actually felt myself grow as an individual and professionally. I hope that one day our paths will cross again.
“Again, thank you,” she finished, “for the invaluable experience of what a company should be.”
Her last day was January 9, 1998. They moved to Littleton, Colorado, where they used their stolen cash to persuade a landlord to rent them a house despite their lack of employment. They accomplished this by paying their security deposit and six months of rent up front. Their home in Littleton was nothing like Steve and Michele’s mansion in North Carolina, but it was a significant upgrade from their Carolina living arrangements. It had 1,400 square feet, a finished basement, and a two-car garage. They bought two vehicles—a Ford Explorer for $32,784 and a year-old Chevy Tahoe for $23,982.
This was more money than they’d been able to spend before, but it didn’t raise any eyebrows in Colorado, where they weren’t previously well-known to the community. And unlike their unwitting North Carolina benefactors, who set off red flags everywhere they went, flashing their cash all over the place, the Calloways took out five-year loans, lived relatively quietly, and perhaps most importantly, had moved two time zones away from the scene of the crime.
A Careful David
He was lonely in Mexico with nowhere else to go. His wife probably loathed the very thought of him. His new honey in North Carolina was stalling him. And to make matters worse, the man making his cash drops was likely trying to kill him.
In January 1998, David Ghantt began to wish he’d never stolen the money. Though he still felt no remorse for what he’d done to Loomis Fargo, he increasingly wondered if the heist was worth it, since the stolen money seemed completely beyond his control and, more importantly, it wasn’t clear how much longer he’d be alive. Occasionally—just occasionally—he thought of calling the FBI with the truth about the heist and the hit man.
His nerves had been shot ever since Robert told him that Bruno was working to kill him. Having been recognized as the Loomis thief at the Hard Rock Café had paled in comparison as a panic inducer.
He was now staying at hotels in Playa del Carmen. Its beaches lacked the beauty of Cancun’s, but the odds seemed slimmer that he would be recognized. Still, he nervously looked over his shoulder as he walked the stre
ets, wondering if Bruno was stalking him among the other pedestrians or maybe lying in wait somewhere with a rifle and a scope.
Two or three times a day when David walked the avenues, he cut through side alleys and turned his head to see if anybody was following him. If that didn’t reveal anything—and it never did—he would stop suddenly, turn around, and smoke a cigarette for two minutes, just to see if anyone else had changed paths abruptly or looked as though they didn’t fit in. While getting his hair dyed brown one day, he overheard other men in the barbershop use the word policia. He excused himself to go to the bathroom, left twenty dollars, and bolted out the back with his hair half-dyed. He washed out the brown dye once in his room.
At restaurants, he sat near the exit and the bathrooms, so that he was always ready to slip away if necessary. At night, he kept the lights on, staying awake partially out of fear and partially because the lights were on. Some nights, he stayed up with a pot of coffee; on others, he’d down an entire bottle of Jack Daniel’s.
He didn’t know that Bruno was actually Mike McKinney, but he stopped using McKinney’s name for himself out of concern he would be traced. Instead, he used the name James Kelly, because it was similar to John Kelly, a character he enjoyed from Tom Clancy’s novel Without Remorse. He went by the name John Clark, from the same novel, at the Hotel El Tukan in Playa del Carmen. He even checked into one motel under the name George Jetson, from the cartoon.
Just being in Cancun and Playa del Carmen, with their nonstop throngs of pleasure-seekers, was making him lonely and isolated. He began to miss his wife. Life with Tammy hadn’t been terribly exciting, but it was safe and predictable, especially after they married in 1992 and moved to Hilton Head to live with David’s sister. On weekends, they would walk along the beach and play Skee-Ball and video games at the arcade.
