by Jeff Diamant
She said she knew Ghantt had a crush on her and that she had used his feelings to prod him to commit the theft, even paging him with 143 the day of the heist to encourage him. “How many chances do you get to talk someone into stealing $17 million for you?” she asked.
• • •
In yet another room, Wydra and Dick Womble were meeting resistance from Eric Payne, who denied any involvement.
“Steve Chambers is ratting you out,” Womble said. “Kelly’s in another room, and she’s ratting you out.”
Eric didn’t give in. He acknowledged knowing Steve but wouldn’t admit to helping in the Loomis Fargo theft. He also said nothing about his wife’s and sisters’ breast implants.
“Just send him to jail,” Wydra said to Womble.
“I’m already going to jail,” Payne shot back.
In the back of their minds, or even up front, the people arrested had to have known this day might come. The same was probably true for the people who accepted money from Steve to hide or store his cash. Indeed, it wasn’t just the thieves who were in trouble.
A warrant allowed the FBI to seize assets from the business trust account of attorney Jeff Guller. Agents Bart Boodee and Charlie Daly drove to Guller’s office in Gastonia the morning of the arrests. The agents identified themselves and presented the seizure warrant. Guller invited them into his office.
They asked if he had done business with anybody listed on the warrant. He said yes, that he had done two real-estate deals with Steve Chambers—one for a $635,000 house and one for a $62,000 home in Lincoln County, and that the closing for the more expensive property had involved cashier’s checks. When asked, he said he didn’t know the source of Chambers’s money for the closings. He said he had represented Chambers on worthless-check charges, that he had helped him with paperwork for his furniture store, and that he had conducted some legal work for Kelly Campbell, whose name also was on the warrant.
The agents let him know that Chambers and Campbell had been arrested in connection with the Loomis Fargo heist.
Public Defenders
At 11:00 a.m. that day, the FBI office in Charlotte hosted a packed press conference, with most of the questions fielded by U.S. Attorney Mark Calloway and William Perry of the FBI. They announced to the assembled media that they had found Ghantt in Playa del Carmen, and that he had been moving around Mexico since stealing the money five months earlier. They said he had benefited from significant help in North Carolina in planning and executing the crime, but that the FBI had already charged at least two of his cohorts with trying to kill him. Perry said the FBI had also obtained search warrants to look through the homes of various defendants in the Charlotte area, and that the reporters could obtain copies of a relevant affidavit at the federal courthouse.
For reporters, the forty-three-page affidavit was a gold mine. A quick glance made it obvious this story would be unforgettable. A $43,000 ring? A $635,000 house? A murder conspiracy? Breast implants? The details topped the TV news, both amazing and amusing almost everyone watching except for Sandra Floyd, Michele’s mother, who saw the story while in the waiting room of Carolinas Medical Center, where her mother had just gone for tests. She heard her daughter’s name mentioned and began to cry. She’d really believed the money came from gambling. The other people in the waiting room saw her crying and tried to comfort her, thinking somebody she knew had just died. As for the defendants themselves, most were scheduled to make their first court appearance at 2:00 p.m.
• • •
The FBI had seven people in custody. Most of them were led into Charlotte’s imposing federal courthouse, the Charles R. Jonas Federal Building, for an appearance before Magistrate-Judge Carl Horn.
The hearing took place in a small courtroom with deep blue carpet, laid out with two and a half rows of benches that fit only twenty spectators. About ten more people could fit standing in the aisle. On this day, reporters packed the place, easily outnumbering the defendants’ relatives.
The purpose of the initial hearing was to determine only whether the defendants, who sat one at a time at a polished wooden table just a few feet from the prosecutor’s table, could afford their own lawyers or would need court-appointed ones.
“You’re not employed and have no assets,” Judge Horn said to Kelly Campbell while reviewing her paperwork. “You do have five thousand dollars in cash, is that right?”
Kelly, wearing blue-camouflage overalls, said the judge was correct but that her money had probably been confiscated.
She was right. FBI agents and federal marshals, armed with search warrants, were examining everything in the defendants’ homes and seizing everything they thought had been bought with heist proceeds.
The most bizarre scene occurred at the Chambers home, where marshals were removing furniture, paintings, a grand piano, and other luxuries before a stunned audience of neighbors, who had no idea they lived so close to the heist’s beneficiaries. The neighbors watched a steady stream from the house over the course of the day—the velvet Elvis, a Confederate throw blanket, a large oil painting of dogs in military clothes, the piano, two bronze statues of nude men, a white porcelain statue of three nude women, a sculpture of a headless man, a ceramic white elephant, a brass pineapple, gold-framed oil paintings of zebras, Dallas Cowboys team plaques, naked-woman bookends, a statue of a fat chef, and a trumpet. Through a first-floor window of the house, an agent could be seen feeding stacks of money into a bill-counting machine. Other agents removed guns found in the home—a Mossberg 12-gauge shotgun, a Beretta handgun, and an Interarms .38—along with fifty-four pieces of jewelry.
Two miles away at the furniture store, agents were seizing the inventory. Mike Staley came by and explained that he was owed about $50,000 on the business. But he lacked a written contract and knew almost immediately that he would see none of that money. He was right.
In the courtroom, Steve told Judge Horn that all he now owned were eight acres and a double-wide trailer in Lincoln County, where his cousin Nathan Grant was living.
Without missing a beat, Horn turned to federal prosecutor David Keesler and asked, “Is there any intent to seize that property?”
Keesler said it was already seized. Horn looked back at Steve and joked, “You just became eligible for a court-appointed lawyer. Congratulations.”
The courtroom crowd was still too shocked by and unfamiliar with the events unfolding to be amused by the irony of the rich man’s need for a court-appointed attorney. The judge also kept Kelly, Steve and Michele, Eric Payne, Mike McKinney, and Nathan Grant in jail, assigning all of them court-appointed lawyers. Their bond hearings were scheduled for March 5, three days later.
On their way back to jail, the defendants walked outside the courthouse into a transfer van. Kelly and Michele were escorted separately from the male defendants. As news cameras stationed near the van clicked away, Kelly struck an unforgettable pose, waving at the photographers with her cuffed hands and acting as if it were time for a mock close-up. Behind her, Michele grinned. Photos of the goofy moment would be splattered across the next day’s newspapers.
The eighth suspect arrested, Scott Grant, had peacefully turned himself in to FBI agents waiting at his home early in the afternoon. He had heard the news and figured they were looking for him. He drove to his mobile home, got out of his car, and said, “Here I am.”
An agent asked, “Who are you?”
“Scott Grant.”
“You’re the man we’re looking for.”
Sixteen hundred miles west, this was a far less eventful day for Jody and Jennifer Calloway. More than three months after taking money from Steve’s storage facility, the Calloways remained in Colorado. They had recently augmented their vehicle collection with a used Corvette and a Ford Mustang.
Their move stayed beneath the radar of the FBI and the defendants, most of whom did not know them. Jody was operating a small
business called Rocky Mountain Woodworking with a man named Joseph Hamilton. Jody was the principal financier, giving his partner more than $50,000. He didn’t tell him where it came from.
Flying Home
David Ghantt had a seat on US Airways flight 1514 from Cancun to Charlotte, which took off while his codefendants made their first court appearances. He ate a turkey sandwich. Mark Rozzi, who had paid Ghantt’s bill at the Hotel La Tortuga on behalf of the FBI, sat next to him. As they soared above Florida in the early afternoon of March 2, 1998, Ghantt realized it was the first time he had been in the United States since the heist. He didn’t know exactly what awaited him when he landed, other than prison. He thought his parents and Tammy would be initially thrilled to see him, though he wasn’t sure how they’d feel afterward.
It was rare for a fugitive to be so happy being taken into custody. The evening of his arrest on the streets of Playa del Carmen, the cops had taken him back to the Hotel La Tortuga, where two of them had spent the night to keep an eye on him. He was neither surprised nor upset that they made him sleep handcuffed to the bed.
In the morning, as David was processed to leave the country, the Mexican authorities told him that because he had lived there with a fake ID—that of Mike McKinney—he was barred from returning to Mexico for one year. They had to be kidding, he thought. There was no way he’d be traveling anywhere for years to come.
David and Mark Rozzi had boarded the plane first and made their ways to the back row. David agreed to waive his Miranda rights, meaning Rozzi could interview him for the investigation. But before Rozzi started, his curiosity got the best of him. “What was up with you and Kelly Campbell?” he asked.
Ghantt looked down, and Rozzi noticed his eyes moisten. “I was in love with her,” he said.
Still curious, Rozzi asked how far things had gone.
“I only kissed her,” Ghantt said. “I only kissed her one time. Pretty expensive fuckin’ kiss, wasn’t it?”
Rozzi began his formal interview, almost whispering his questions so other passengers couldn’t eavesdrop. Where had David stayed in Mexico? Whom had he talked to? How had he gotten involved in this in the first place? While writing Ghantt’s answers down in a notebook, Rozzi noticed that flight attendants were watching them in amazement. News of the heist arrests had broken that morning, and some of them had heard about it while in Charlotte before flying to Cancun. Meanwhile, nearby passengers were suspending their own conversations to try to listen in and were quietly whispering things like “Holy shit! That’s the guy!”
Ghantt told Rozzi how he had stolen the money, how he had worked with Kelly Campbell to plan the heist, and how he had grown suspicious his accomplices were working to kill him.
Rozzi told him the FBI believed Kelly Campbell was involved in the murder plot, and that he had with him tapes of the recorded conversations, just in case David had decided not to cooperate. Rozzi offered to play some for him.
David wasn’t in the mood. He stared at the floor, realizing now, without needing to hear the tapes, that he had been duped more than he previously suspected. He was anxious to tell Rozzi everything, anxious to make sure the FBI knew that in the scheme of things, he was somewhat of a victim here. After all, he had feared for his life only one day earlier.
And Rozzi was anxious to write down everything David said, to ask every possible question. He didn’t know that back in North Carolina, the other defendants were rolling over like bowling pins.
Rozzi informed Ghantt that the FBI had contacted his relatives and that they might be waiting for his flight. When the plane landed at 5:00 p.m., Rozzi and Ghantt were the last to get off. The other passengers, reaching for their items in the overhead bins, couldn’t help glancing again at David before leaving. When all the other passengers were off, the FBI’s Rick Shaffer came to the plane door to escort David.
David looked around but couldn’t find his relatives. On the ground, before David entered an FBI car, Rozzi introduced Agent Duda to him. “Nice to meet you, David,” Duda said. “I gotta ask you one thing. What was going on between you and Kelly Campbell?”
At this point in the investigation, the question didn’t matter much. If it seemed out of left field, well, the agents working the case had wondered about David’s motivation for leaving his wife and had followed his conversations with Campbell, most notably the unreturned “I love you.”
Ghantt looked stunned. He had stolen $17 million and almost been killed, and all they cared about was whether he’d had sex with Kelly Campbell? This was the first question of two agents? He asked Rozzi, “Is he joking? Are you guys kidding me?”
• • •
Actually, life could’ve been worse for David Ghantt. Despite stealing $17 million, he was charged only with bank larceny and money laundering. And though those crimes technically had a combined maximum sentence of thirty years, he likely would be imprisoned less than a decade if he pleaded guilty, as he lacked a prior record.
Ghantt had nothing to fear in jail; instead, he found himself treated like a minor celebrity, even a hero. He had taken the money and run, and his guts drew respect from the other inmates.
David’s mother came to see him that first night in jail. He quickly saw that his mother still loved him, still supported him. Sue Ghantt didn’t yell at her son for abandoning his family. “You’re my son,” she said. “I love you.” She told him how close she and Tammy had grown through the previous five months.
David told his mom that he assumed Tammy hated him now. Sue Ghantt told him to call her, and he did that evening. This was the first time David and Tammy had spoken to each other in five months, and not unexpectedly the conversation was tense. She had been expecting the call, having talked to Sue. David told her that while he was scared to talk to her, he still cared about her and loved her. She still loved him too, though she wasn’t feeling great about him at the moment.
“I thought I’d never see you again,” she said.
“I thought I’d never see you again either,” he said.
Her first questions were simple. Why did he do this to her? And if he still loved her, why didn’t he call while he was away?
He explained that he wanted to protect her, that he didn’t want to get her involved, that he figured the FBI would consider her an accessory if they talked. She seemed to believe this. But then she asked about the other woman. Tammy had heard in the news about his so-called relationship with Kelly Campbell.
She was just a friend, David said. Not much more.
Tammy asked him if he had sex with her.
“No,” David said. “And that’s the truth.”
That made her feel much better, at least for now. Still, after they hung up, she began to cry.
The M&M’s Contest
The federal courthouse had already closed when David Ghantt’s plane landed late in the afternoon of March 2, the day everyone else was arrested, so his first court appearance was the following morning. Wearing an orange jail uniform, he walked into Magistrate-Judge Carl Horn’s courtroom. Seeing Tammy, his parents, and his sisters there, he stared at them on his way to the defendant’s table. His eyes brushed over Tammy. It was the first time he had seen her face in five months. She was in the first row, and she seemed glad he was alive, but she also looked stunned and hurt.
David told Judge Horn that he had no cash and was assigned a court-appointed lawyer.
As he walked out of the courtroom, David stared a few seconds at his family and whispered to his mother and sister, “I love you.” Then he stared at Tammy. She stared back. No words were spoken.
That morning’s main headline in the Charlotte Observer read simply, “Eight Jailed in Huge Heist.” Another front-page headline asked, “Is This the Gang That Couldn’t Think Straight?” over an article by columnist Tommy Tomlinson that read, in part, “There is no polite way to say this: These folks are not exactly the brightest bul
bs in the chandelier,” having indulged so soon after the theft in “five months of high rolling that would make Richie Rich blush.”
An Observer reporter named Joe DePriest, dispatched by his editor to Ghantt’s temporary home in Playa del Carmen, the Hotel La Tortuga, provided fodder for weeks of amusement back home with an article about Ghantt’s life on the run.
“He was a peculiar norteamericano in a Caribbean town known for its oddballs,” the story began, before quoting a hotel staff member who said Ghantt spent most of his time there alone in his room eating M&M’s, listening to the Eagles, smoking Marlboro Lights, and reading comic books. If he went out, she said, it was to Burger King for meals and a nearby bar, Capitan Tutix, for tequila. Sometimes he just sat by the hotel pool, which was next to his room.
More than any other single piece of original reporting on the heist, this story set the tone for what followed. Here was a man who, it appeared, had stolen $17 million yet wanted nothing more out of life than candy, cigarettes, cheap liquor, and the Eagles for background music. A Charlotte radio station, WLNK, announced a call-in contest for a weeklong trip to Playa del Carmen. The winner would stay at the Hotel La Tortuga and receive the following: a supply of M&M’s, Eagles CDs, comic books, $1,000 in a phony bank wrapper, and a Wonderbra, in honor of the heist-financed breast implants, which had been mentioned in the affidavit.
On another radio program, the John Boy & Billy Big Show, a recurring character named Marvin Webster drew laughs with this take on the news: “The dude that actually stole the money, he’s down in some crappy hotel room with a big stack of comic books, a copy of Hotel California, and he’s living off M&M’s in the minibar, layin’ low, waiting for the high sign. Meanwhile, his friends back home are running around like the Home Shopping Club on crack! Did you see some of the stuff they bought? Chevy Tahoe, BMW Z3, bunch of motorcycles.
“Yeah, no way this could’ve attracted any attention. They bought two or three computers, a $10,000 pool table, a $40,000 diamond ring. One guy bought his wife some new boobs… These dudes pull the crime of the century [and] would’ve gotten away with it except they couldn’t walk into the 7-Eleven without buying $1,500 worth of beef jerky!”
