Heist

by Jeff Diamant

  His lawyer, Jeff Guller, said he knew an attorney who was known for working with government officials to help people get convictions pardoned. Steve said he was willing to pay this person $10,000 or $20,000 in up-front money, a sort of good-faith deposit, and that he ultimately would pay as much as $250,000 for a pardon.

  • • •

  In the midst of his domestic money laundering, Steve was still trying to have David Ghantt killed in Mexico or, failing that, to at least keep him satisfied to the extent that he wouldn’t turn himself in and send the FBI their way.

  On February 20, Kelly called Steve from a short vacation in Myrtle Beach. Without using David’s name, she told Steve she had talked with him. She said he was growing nervous about McKinney, who David knew only as Bruno, and didn’t want to deal with him anymore. They were going to have to send somebody else to make the next cash delivery, and it had to be soon, Kelly told Steve.

  The next time David and Kelly talked, it would be to discuss his next move in Mexico. As far was Steve was concerned, this would be an important call. David would be giving them his new contact information. Steve wanted Kelly to call him with David’s location as soon as she received it, so he could give it to McKinney.

  At the appointed time, 7:00 p.m. on February 22, David called the pay phone outside a convenience store in Charlotte, where Kelly was supposed to be to pick it up. But Kelly had been too tired to drive from her Mount Holly home to take the call, so no one answered.

  He called again at 7:17, and when a man standing nearby answered, David said he had the wrong number and hung up. At 7:29, when David called back, hoping against hope that Kelly would be there, the man picked up again.

  “Who is it?” David asked.

  “I’m just standing here, and I picked up the phone, man,” the answerer said.

  “Thank you very much,” David said. And he hung up.

  David wasn’t the only person miffed at Kelly for missing the call. Steve was furious. He tried, in their next conversation, to impress on her the importance of getting David’s new location.

  Meanwhile, David paged her to arrange yet another call, this one for the next day. The pager message was 223984009898143—February 23, 1998, four o’clock, on phone number 9898 (the last four digits of the phone at the convenience store). Of course, the 143 meant “I love you.”

  This time, Kelly showed up for the call. David said he was near Cozumel, just off Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.

  “Coza-who?” Kelly asked.

  “Cozumel,” David said. “Cozumel.”

  Actually, David was lying. He was really in Playa del Carmen, which was just a ferry ride from Cozumel, but he didn’t want to reveal his actual location. He still didn’t want to deal with Bruno. Kelly assured him somebody would visit with more cash at 5:00 p.m. on either of the next two days.

  David gave Kelly an answering-service number for the person making the delivery. Then he changed the subject, pressing her again to come to Mexico. This time, Kelly didn’t even offer an excuse. She told him she wasn’t certain anymore that life in a different country would suit her. She didn’t say outright that she would never move down, but David was worried. Was she backing out of the plan? Something seemed off about her. She told him that while she used to think more money would make her happy, now she wasn’t so sure.

  Before they hung up, they expressed love for each other. Still, David was confused.

  Kelly was not. She immediately called Steve with David’s location and contact number, mentioning again that he didn’t want to deal with McKinney. Details of the murder plot came up, and again they discussed injecting him with a fatal dose of bleach. Steve suggested that Kelly travel to Mexico to draw David out for the killer. Maybe she could make love to him, and somebody else could inject him with Clorox.

  Whichever method of murder they would ultimately choose, David’s reluctance to deal with McKinney presented a serious problem, and Steve knew it.

  “He’s absolutely saying he don’t want you to come back down there,” Steve told McKinney on the phone. “So the only thing I’m wondering is, how are you gonna get close to him?”

  “It all depends where he’s at,” McKinney said. “Unless we send somebody—a decoy—down there, and I can shadow him.”

  The decoy idea sounded good to Steve. “You might need to call and cancel that reservation for in the morning and let [me] see if we can get somebody down there who can pull him out. That’s the only damn thing I know to do, ’cause he’ll see you coming from a mile away now… I don’t guess there’s a way you can get hold of a rifle or any damn thing?”

  “I probably could,” McKinney said. “But it’d take me forever to get it.”

  “If he won’t take nothing from you, I don’t know how else you can get close enough to him,” Steve said. “You know what I’m saying?”

  “Well, there’s ways,” McKinney said.

  “I don’t want you going in there and trying to do it and you not being able to do it,” Steve said. “You know what I’m saying?”

  “Yeah,” McKinney said.

  “That might fuck up the whole situation all the way around,” Steve said. “Like I said, just hang tight until the morning, and I’ll call… I’ll know if we can get this person to pull him out and, you know, get close to him or whatever, and then that way give you a chance to get close to him and do it that way.”

  The decoy being discussed was Nathan Grant, Steve’s cousin who had maintained his trust through the locker incident in Lincoln County that cost Steve about $1.3 million. Steve told his cousin he would pay him $1,000 to fly to Mexico to give someone twenty grand. For his plane ticket, Nathan would be using his middle name, Tommy.

  On Sunday, March 1, Steve called Nathan to his house and gave him $24,000 in cash. He said Nathan should give half of it to his traveling partner the next morning. The plan was that when they arrived in Mexico, they should, between them, give $20,000 to the recipient. Nathan and his traveling partner could each keep $2,000 for themselves.

  Taking Care of Business

  Even in the midst of a murder plot, Steve’s mind was on other things. He was wheeling and dealing on multiple fronts, or at least trying to. His efforts were involving him in activities everywhere from Gastonia to Raleigh to Mexico City.

  In Gastonia, Mike Staley wanted more money than the $25,000 Steve had given him for his furniture store, and he was dropping hints he would make life difficult if he wasn’t satisfied. Having been inside Steve’s house and seen a bag filled with cash, he suspected Steve was involved in the Loomis Fargo heist. One day, after accusing Steve of stalling on the payments he expected, Staley looked straight at him and said, “I hope you burned your clothes.” Steve stared back and said nothing.

  At the moment, Steve didn’t want to anger anybody who might pose a problem for him. He asked his lawyer, Jeff Guller, to prepare a promissory note saying he owed Staley $20,000 more.

  “It’s just more or less a little mumbo-jumbo shit between us,” Steve told Guller over the phone on February 24. “Staley knows he’s going to be paid cash to him any damn way, so he ain’t going to fuck around and say too much about nothing.”

  “Yeah,” Guller said.

  “Just every four months, the first of the month, he wants, you know, five grand.”

  “Okay,” Guller said. He asked Steve what the money was for.

  “It’s just an agreement between me and him about something he’s done for me, you know what I’m saying?”

  “Okay.”

  “Something kind of under the table,” Steve said.

  “Gotcha,” Guller said. “So I’ll just put ‘For services rendered.’”

  The conversation then turned to the pardon Steve wanted that would help him buy the nightclub. Guller said he had pursued the matter and that it would take between six and eight months to get it, because Stev
e’s convictions were only four months old. Also, the $10,000 or $20,000 required up front wouldn’t buy total assurance that the pardon would come through.

  “I have made the inquiries, and I have kind of stayed after them,” Guller said. “I’ve gotten it going as far as I can get it going for right now without now starting to put some money toward it.”

  Steve had viewed the transaction as a sure thing. He didn’t want to risk throwing money away. “I just don’t want this shit stuffed in somebody’s damn pocket,” he said.

  “No,” Guller said. “Not at all. See, I’m getting involved with it to make sure things are going on.”

  Steve asked what it would cost him.

  “You said, ‘I’m willing to spend $250,000’ on Friday,” Guller said. “And certainly, I don’t want it to cost that much… I want to keep it under $100,000 if I can, but you know, I don’t know.”

  “Right,” Steve said.

  “I’m not even telling anybody you’re willing to go that high,” Guller said. “I want them to come back to me and say, ‘Okay, we need ten here, ten there, and ten there.’ Fine. But I’m not even willing to say you are willing to go to any more than that.”

  Steve asked Guller when he needed the first payment.

  “Yesterday,” Guller said. “Just whenever.”

  But before the pardon could be arranged, Steve decided to back out of the Crickets deal. Guller advised him that keeping the required alcohol records for the state would be burdensome. Steve had paid the nightclub owner $100,000 as a deposit but got it back, using the excuse that someone from the Internal Revenue Service was asking him about the deal.

  Final Touches

  David Ghantt was probably alive. To the FBI, that was the wiretaps’ most important revelation.

  The agents had done a lot of listening since Judge Voorhees let them secretly record Steve’s phone calls beginning February 11. The first clue that Ghantt was alive came on February 20, when agents recorded a call between Steve Chambers and Kelly Campbell. While Ghantt wasn’t mentioned by name, Campbell said she had talked to “him,” and that “he” needed a new person to “make the drop” to him in the near future. She’d said his next call to her would be February 22 at 7:00 p.m. outside the Nichols Food Store in Charlotte. Chambers told her to find out how much money he wanted.

  Other calls showed that Chambers was spending money like there was no tomorrow. They heard about the $43,000 diamond ring. Agents heard him consider buying a Rolex and hiring a bodyguard. They heard him discuss money laundering and buying the Crickets nightclub. But they never heard him say anything on the phone that unmistakably implicated him in the heist or indicated where the money was.

  On February 21, they heard the suspects getting nervous. “People are talking,” Eric Payne told Chambers over the phone, before suggesting that Chambers beat up whoever was saying they were involved in the heist.

  Agents also listened to a recording that almost stopped their hearts. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police left a message on Steve’s answering machine telling him there was a warrant for his arrest involving a worthless check—a check unrelated to the heist, of course. The police left a number to call. The agents acted fast, persuading a Charlotte police supervisor to hold off on pursuing the worthless-check charge, due to more pressing matters.

  • • •

  While Campbell and Chambers seemed to be talking about David Ghantt, the FBI wanted to be certain. They received permission from a federal judge to wiretap the pay phones outside Nichols Food Store and were present at the call Ghantt made on February 22 when Campbell had not shown up.

  To be on the safe side, the FBI had sent undercover agents to wait outside the store at both 7:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m., when they believed the unnamed “he” was supposed to call there.

  No one called that morning. In the evening, two agents with cameras sat in a car outside the store, ready to snap into the rearview mirror to catch an image of Campbell on the pay phone. Three other agents sat at a table inside the store. They all expected this to be a big break in the investigation, and when 7:00 p.m. came and went, they figured she was just running a little late.

  She never arrived. At 7:17 p.m., a pay phone outside the store rang. The undercover agents stood by as phone surveillance machines monitored by their colleagues traced the call to somewhere in Mexico. Did that mean Ghantt was in Mexico? There was no way to know for sure, because when agent Brian Roepe picked up the phone and said hello, the man on the other end said, “I have the wrong number,” and hung up.

  The phone rang again at seventy twenty-three and stopped when no one answered. When it rang a third time at seven twenty-nine, Roepe picked it up.

  “Who is it?” the caller asked.

  “I’m just standing here, and I picked up the phone, man,” Roepe said.

  “Thank you very much,” the caller said and hung up.

  The consensus in the bureau was that it had to be Ghantt. The man had called when Ghantt’s beeper transmission told them to expect a call. The agents’ confidence was strengthened by a call recorded that evening between Chambers and Campbell. When Chambers asked if Campbell talked to their caller as expected, she said she had been too tired to drive to the pay phone. Exasperated, Chambers told her he needed to know where the caller was, so he could send his people “down there.”

  Later that evening, Campbell called Chambers back and told him another call would come through at 4:00 p.m. the next day. Chambers told her not to miss it and to call him after the conversation.

  The next day, February 23, the FBI recorded the phone call between Campbell and a man agents now knew was David Ghantt. An undercover agent snapped a picture of Kelly talking on the phone outside the store. In the conversation, Ghantt said he was around Cozumel, Mexico, and gave Kelly a phone number for the money deliverer to call him once he arrived. Ghantt told Campbell he loved her, strengthening the agents’ suspicion of a relationship between the two.

  But her ensuing call to Chambers alarmed the FBI, as did other calls that agents heard on February 24 between Chambers and Mike McKinney, who discussed rifles, human decoys, and “getting close” to somebody. It was clear that Ghantt’s coconspirators were talking about trying to kill him. Campbell was giving information to Chambers about Ghantt’s whereabouts, and Chambers was using that information to plot his murder. The scheme appeared to involve cash deliveries, though it was unclear to the FBI why Chambers would give money to a man he was trying to kill.

  Knowing about the murder plot changed everything for the investigation. Saving Ghantt’s life now became the top priority. Agents had to find him and take him into custody before somebody killed him, even if blowing their cover meant recovering less cash.

  But they had to figure out where he was first. While Ghantt had said he was in Cozumel, the FBI didn’t know his exact location. The Mexican phone company hadn’t been able to track his last call.

  The agents even tried to insert their informant into the mix, telling Steve’s old friend to try to persuade Chambers to send him to visit Ghantt in Mexico, rather than McKinney. The agents advised the friend to bad-mouth McKinney’s reliability so Chambers would send the friend instead. A golf date with Chambers was scheduled where the informant planned to discuss this, but it rained, so they postponed it.

  • • •

  The bureau’s supervisors wanted to send four agents to Mexico to find Ghantt. But first they needed clearance from the Mexican authorities, because the United States isn’t supposed to send working law-enforcement officers abroad without permission from the host country.

  The Mexicans’ response to the request was not to the FBI’s liking. The bureau was allowed to send just a single agent, and he had to be unarmed. This agent could accompany armed officers with Interpol, the international police agency that links police departments worldwide and that, in Mexico, was composed of select officers from M
exico City.

  The bureau decided to send Mark Rozzi, one of the first agents to respond to the theft almost five months earlier. He left on a US Airways flight from Charlotte the next morning, and upon his arrival in Mexico City he met five Interpol officers who escorted him to a private police plane. It flew them to Cozumel, where they thought Ghantt was hiding.

  The water and the beaches beckoned, but Rozzi had come to work. He and the Mexican officers worked with phone-company officials to try to trace Ghantt’s previous calls. Rozzi maintained that the calls should have come from a Cozumel number, because that’s where Ghantt had said he was. But the company couldn’t trace them.

  As they waited for the phone company to come through, Rozzi and the officers tried the simplest approach possible—cold searches through Cozumel to find Ghantt. They split into two groups of three officers each and asked people if they had noticed a tall, thin, redheaded white man anywhere. The officers talked to drunk people and prostitutes, to bartenders and other local residents. More than a dozen people said they might know who he was, pointing to bars or hotels that they thought he frequented, but all the leads died.

  • • •

  Back in North Carolina, the agents continued recording and listening to calls. Chambers was continuing to relay information about Ghantt from Campbell to McKinney.

  On February 25, upon learning that Chambers was supposed to visit McKinney the next morning at his room at the Hampton Inn in Gastonia, the FBI received permission to conduct microphone surveillance on the room. The agents listened to McKinney as he discussed making airline reservations to Mexico for himself and a man named Tommy Grant. Meanwhile, other agents heard Chambers tell Kelly Campbell, on the telephone, that “the guys” would be leaving the next morning and should arrive in Mexico around 6:30 p.m. Chambers then called McKinney to remind him to be on time at the airport Friday so he wouldn’t miss the flight.