Heist

by Jeff Diamant

  They had moved back to Gastonia three years later and lived with her parents for six months, but then they rented a place of their own. Every Friday night, they would go out to eat, either for fried fish, Chinese food, or steaks.

  Tammy had loved him. He had loved her. He thought back to how they’d met at the Winn-Dixie, to how it ended the first time when she dumped him, to how their romance was slowly rekindled through the mail while he was in the Persian Gulf. He even had a fond memory of how she lost her diamond engagement ring—down the toilet, by accident—and just wore the wedding band. Did she still wear it? Did she still love him? He doubted he’d ever see or talk to her again.

  He also wished he could find a way to let his parents know he was alive. He knew his mother was heartbroken and probably depressed. But he figured the FBI was watching his family closely. If he called Tammy or his parents, the authorities would trace the contact, and as bad as he felt, he didn’t want to risk getting captured or getting them in trouble, which might happen if they hid contact with him from the FBI.

  In addition, it never escaped David that his marriage and his life in North Carolina hadn’t satisfied him when he was there. He had absolutely despised working at Loomis Fargo, and he and Tammy didn’t get to see each other as much as spouses should. And while she knew she wanted children, he wasn’t sure fatherhood was for him.

  • • •

  For most of January, David stayed inside his hotel rooms, watching HBO and eating M&M’s. He watched a seemingly endless loop of Men in Black, with Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones, and GoldenEye, the James Bond movie. There were times he would have gladly traded his depression and his loneliness at the holidays for the predictable life he had fled.

  As for Bruno, David decided he would meet with him only in a public place. There’d be no more hotel or apartment meetings. Bruno resisted but realized he had no choice, so their next meeting was at a restaurant. Bruno didn’t bring any money, telling David he had given it to Robert, who would pass it along to him.

  So David arranged to see Robert, who again warned him not to meet Bruno anywhere that wasn’t public. Robert also told David he’d decided not to meet with David anymore because the situation was becoming too risky, too dangerous. In late January 1998, when David and Bruno next spoke, David told him to leave the latest $10,000 cash drop with a third party. David would then retrieve it from that person. Bruno resisted, and in a case of the pot calling the kettle black, he accused David of trying to set him up. But David would have none of it.

  “I don’t give a damn about you. Fuck you,” David said. And he hung up on Bruno, who realized Robert had probably blown his cover.

  At least Bruno could now spend the $10,000 around town. He would tell Steve that airport police in Dallas had stopped him on his plane connection and taken it.

  As for David, he remained at the mercy of his fellow thieves if he wanted his share. In mid-February, he told Kelly, on the phone, about his argument with Bruno. He said he was considering turning himself in.

  Desperate to outwit any followers, he booked a room at a quiet inn, the Hotel La Tortuga. It was just a two-minute walk from Avenida 5 (Fifth Avenue), Playa del Carmen’s popular pedestrian strip of bars, restaurants, and mariachi bands, but David stayed alone in his room most of the time, reserving it day by day under the name James T. Kelly and paying with wads of cash that he would remove, crumpled, from his pocket.

  He would place the money on the front desk and say, “Take out what you need for another night.” His ninety-dollar room was cooled by a ceiling fan and had a king-sized bed, a TV, and a whirlpool. Each day, the attendant had to restock his room’s minibar supply of M&M’s with two new packs. The hotel staff found him strange.

  He never stopped talking with Kelly, persuading her in February to wire him $5,000. From a Western Union in Gastonia, she sent the money to a Michael McKinney. It would tide David over for a while.

  Despite his stated concerns, Kelly kept telling David to meet with Bruno. He wondered if she knew about this supposed murder plot, though his suspicions weren’t deep enough that he ever stopped wanting and asking her to come to Mexico. He told her he loved her, but she made no commitments, even when he tried to add to her worries about staying in North Carolina.

  “I’ll bet you money your phone’s tapped right now,” he told her. She may have cringed in fear, but she didn’t budge.

  • • •

  Meanwhile, Tammy Ghantt was living with her parents nearly full-time, trying to keep sane by taking her young niece to the movies.

  When David lived with her, they had spent different parts of Christmas at each other’s parents’ houses—Christmas Eve with her folks, Christmas Day with his. This year it was different. In mid-December, Tammy visited David’s family in Hendersonville. It was a depressing scene, with conversation after conversation revolving around David, where he might be, and whether he was okay. They even talked to pictures of him, telling him to come home.

  Sometimes, through the grief, Tammy managed a happy memory. She thought of David’s goofy sense of humor. He could do great impersonations of the cartoon characters Ren and Stimpy, and of Tim Allen from Home Improvement. He would sing the Barney the Dinosaur song for kicks in a funny voice, and he would give his nieces and nephews “wet Willies,” sticking his saliva-covered finger in their ears for a laugh.

  He was a good husband, Tammy thought. Not a thief. He wouldn’t have willingly deserted his wife, not in a million years. Somebody had to have put him up to it.

  Coming Together

  In early January, an intriguing piece of information crossed the desk of FBI agent John Wydra. Kelly Campbell’s new minivan, according to his record checks, had been titled to herself and a man named Robert Dean Wilson. The second name sounded familiar to Wydra. It was an alias for Steven Eugene Chambers when he had scammed money from banks.

  This seemed like the connection the FBI was looking for, appearing to tie Steve Chambers to Kelly Campbell, who agents had already comfortably tied to David Ghantt. But they needed to investigate further. They didn’t know for sure the buyer wasn’t a genuine Robert Wilson.

  So Wydra and another agent drove to the Harrelson Toyota dealership in Fort Mill, South Carolina. Records showed the minivan was bought there, and they wanted to speak with the salesman who sold it. They showed him pictures of Campbell and Chambers and asked if they were the two who bought the vehicle. The salesman said yes, adding that the purchase had stood out to him because they had paid entirely in twenties, bringing the money on two separate occasions. The agents had already suspected an all-cash purchase, as the records made no mention of a loan.

  • • •

  On January 12, as agents considered their next step, the FBI received a visit from a man claiming to be an old friend of Steve Chambers. He was accompanied by a lawyer and his uncle, who was a private investigator. The lawyer had contacted the FBI two days earlier, so the FBI already knew the reason for the visit.

  The friend told the agents he had known Steve Chambers a long time ago, had lost contact, and was now hanging out with him again. A few days earlier, Chambers had offered him $100,000 to take $2.5 million to the Cayman Islands. Wanting to do it, he had asked his uncle if anything seemed fishy or illegal about the deal, which of course it did. The uncle wasted no time calling his lawyer, after which they contacted the FBI. The agent who they spoke to told them Chambers was being watched by the bureau and persuaded them to bring the nephew in to speak with agents there.

  The nephew said he had been suspicious about the source of Steve’s wealth after seeing his new house in Cramer Mountain. He told them Steve had explained his riches with the line, “It all comes from taking risks.” He also said Chambers had invited him to the New Year’s Eve party at his house, and that Kelly Campbell was there.

  Agent Rozzi told the nephew that the FBI was already investigating Chambers, Campbell, and
Payne, but that they hadn’t finished. Rozzi asked if he would consider helping them gather evidence by letting his phone conversations with Steve be taped. The FBI wanted to see if Steve would admit involvement in the heist or blurt out anything about David Ghantt. Rozzi explained that the FBI needed to find the stolen money and to locate Ghantt, who many agents believed was dead.

  “We may have a murder on our hands,” Rozzi said. “We’ve already heard what you’ve told us. But we haven’t been able to get anybody inside this group.”

  The nephew was nervous. He had a family and a steady job, and becoming an informant would be stressful and take time. Rozzi told him the FBI would compensate him for any time he missed at work, if it came to that.

  The nephew decided he would do it, and three months after the heist took place, the agents finally had someone in Steve Chambers’s circle—an outer circle, perhaps—working for them.

  • • •

  When they had first heard about Steve Chambers in November among the dozens of confidential tips about possible suspects, the FBI agents figured he might be involved in drugs or gambling or securities fraud, or maybe a Ponzi scheme. He had a big house and big money, having made a major move despite lacking a legitimate source of income. But the newly discovered minivan purchase erased all doubt from the minds of Wydra and the other agents about Steve’s heist involvement. Still, they needed to be able to prove that involvement in court. And thus far they lacked evidence that the money Steve and Michele Chambers were spending around town came from Loomis Fargo.

  On a mid-January afternoon, Wydra secured crucial proof. The minivan connection had spurred the FBI to increase physical surveillance of the Chamberses. And so on Friday, January 16, Wydra and David Sousa, an Internal Revenue Service investigator, were waiting at the First Gaston Bank in Mount Holly for Michele Chambers to come deposit money. She didn’t disappoint them, keeping to her regular practice of making deposits on Mondays, Wednesdays, or Fridays, a schedule the FBI became aware of through bank records.

  Wydra and Sousa were sitting in the branch manager’s office when Michele walked inside, waited in line, and stepped up to the teller. She had $8,000 with her in a stack of bills with a thin white strip around it. Wydra and Sousa watched the teller take the money, remove the strip, and throw it in the trash can next to her station. When Michele left the bank, Wydra and Sousa immediately walked to the teller’s station and looked in the trash can, which was empty except for the strip. Wydra picked it up and saw that it had signed initials on it.

  He took it back to his office. Checking with Loomis officials, he learned that the initials belonged to a company employee who had counted money in the vault prior to October 4 but had been transferred to other duties afterward and had not since initialed wrappers around stacks of cash. That meant not only that Steve and Michele were using money from Loomis Fargo, but also that it had come from the company on October 4, since none had been reported missing from earlier dates.

  This was a major turn in the investigation, and many agents now felt the case was essentially solved. But there was division in the bureau over when arrests should be made. Some agents felt the time was ripe. They now had their sights on a couple who obviously had Loomis Fargo money and were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars around town. But others worried that making arrests without knowing the locations of Ghantt and the rest of the money could backfire. After all, while they knew the Chamberses were involved, the agents couldn’t assume they possessed all the stolen cash.

  If the FBI arrested Chambers and Campbell while Ghantt or somebody else had the bulk of the money elsewhere, the bureau might never recover it. And if Ghantt were actually dead with no confession or body present to prove it, the defendants could simply lie and say he was on the run somewhere. And what if they’d planned to hide most of the cash and keep mum if some of them got arrested? In addition, the agents had no clear proof that Steve and Michele Chambers had actually helped Ghantt steal the Loomis money. Maybe other accomplices had passed it to them.

  William Perry, who was in charge of the FBI’s Charlotte office, decided the evidence accumulated to this point was too circumstantial to guarantee convictions. He wanted the agents to wait until they either found Ghantt and the money or could prove that Ghantt was dead. The agents started working seven-day weeks again, receiving help from FBI surveillance experts from New York and Atlanta.

  As for Steve’s old friend who agreed to let the FBI record him and Steve, the game plan was to have him goad Steve into talking about his involvement in the heist. The first few recorded calls, placed January 18 and January 20, failed to do that. Days later, doing what the FBI called “tickling the wires,” he phoned Chambers and raised the issue to see how he would respond.

  “I’m hearing stuff around town,” he said, “that you had something to do with the Fargo heist.”

  Steve denied it. “That’s just Eric running his mouth,” he said, referring to Payne, who they both knew.

  Steve seemed unlikely to implicate himself in the heist over the phone. But the FBI hoped he would at least allude to the aftermath. They wanted to listen to his phone conversations. While the tips and the house purchase pointed to him as the lead beneficiary and money manager, agents viewed wiretaps as the best way to find out what was really happening.

  Obtaining judicial permission to install wiretaps was an involved process. In this decade before smartphones and texts would allow for new types of surveillance, eavesdropping on citizens’ private phone conversations was as intrusive as law enforcement could be. Judges required—and still require—strong evidence from investigators that less intrusive methods had proven ineffective and that the wiretaps would help them solve a crime.

  The supervisors called in agent Erik Blowers, an expert at securing judicial permission for electronic surveillance. The affidavit he prepared said that the bureau’s investigative techniques thus far had proven insufficient and that wiretap authority would help secure the evidence needed to bring solid charges.

  They had already tried physical surveillance, Blowers wrote, trying it on Campbell and Chambers, and while it had helped some, it ultimately wouldn’t suffice because Chambers had previously worked as an FBI informant and was familiar with investigative techniques. Besides, he might be wary of surveillance, and performing serious undercover work was difficult in the gated Cramer Mountain community.

  As for the use of confidential informants—also considered less intrusive than wiretaps—Blowers wrote that the ones they had were only on the fringes of the criminal operation and had been unable to provide the evidence they needed. And because of Steve’s work as an informant, he might be wary of anybody showing increased interest in his activities.

  Only wiretaps would get the FBI over the hump, Blowers wrote. From toll records and pen registers, agents knew that Chambers was talking to Kelly Campbell and Eric Payne, and the Chamberses’ tax records showed incomes of less than $25,000 in each of the previous two years, barely enough to afford renting a single bedroom in the house they had just bought.

  On February 10, U.S. district court judge Richard Voorhees approved wiretaps on the Chamberses’ two home telephone lines. The standard wiretap rules applied—if a conversation was not related to criminal activity, the agents had to stop listening and recording, at least for a while. But as far as the investigation went, the FBI now had its most powerful tool yet.

  Getting Close to Him

  Steve Chambers loved mob movies and often used them as models for his behavior, but he ignored an important lesson from one of the best, Goodfellas: be careful what you say on the phone.

  Henry Hill, a mobster played by Ray Liotta, laid it out: “Paulie hated phones,” Liotta’s character said, referring to New York crime boss Paulie Cicero. “He wouldn’t have one in his house. He used to get all his calls secondhand. Then he’d have to call the people back from an outside phone.”

 
That was so the FBI couldn’t listen in. But four months after the heist, Steve figured the government still didn’t know what he was up to. On his telephone, he talked about big purchases, about laundering money through the Gastonia nightclub he planned to buy, and even about hiring protection. With all this money around, he figured he needed a bodyguard.

  • • •

  Even better, he could get two bodyguards. From his home, Steve called a personal security company on February 16 and asked the woman answering the phone about hiring two full-time bodyguards. He hung up without finalizing anything.

  Full-time, professional bodyguards looked to be expensive, so Steve opted for a lesser degree of protection. On February 17, he called Mike McKinney, the hopeful hit man and former marine, and said he wanted to discuss a security arrangement for himself. McKinney accepted Steve’s offer of a weekly $400 salary.

  Security was not Steve’s only concern. He needed to convert more of his cash to certified checks or money orders for the Crickets nightclub deal, which called for $250,000 in checks plus $200,000 in cash. That day, February 17, he spoke with his friend Mike Goodman, one of the people he’d paid to acquire checks for his house purchase. Steve told him he now wanted another certified check for $200,000, and that he would pay Goodman 20 percent, or $40,000, as a fee. Steve said he wanted a check just like last time—through the help of Goodman’s wife, Kim, a bank teller. Kim told her husband to tell Steve that he and Michele should come to the bank when it wasn’t busy, and that this time they shouldn’t bring the cash in a briefcase.

  Money aside, the Crickets purchase posed another problem that would be harder to resolve than by simply paying friends to convert cash to checks. The law forbade someone with a felony conviction to get a liquor license, and Steve had recently pleaded guilty to forty-two counts of obtaining property by false pretense. As things were, he wouldn’t be able to get a liquor license. What he needed was to get his convictions pardoned.