Heist

by Jeff Diamant

  Legal Trouble

  Across the Charlotte region, the defendants’ Gaston County roots added to the story’s appeal. Among the few people named in court documents who didn’t seem to fit the stereotype was Jeff Guller. Though he hadn’t been charged with anything, his name was conspicuously included in the main affidavit that was made public the previous day, and the FBI had visited his office the day of the arrests.

  In fact, at Guller’s request, agents returned to his office the following day to discuss keeping his trust fund unfrozen so he could use it for a transaction involving another client. The agents had been briefed on what Steve Chambers had told the FBI about having kept cash in Guller’s office for several weeks. If that was true, Guller himself could face criminal charges, and that type of case didn’t come around very often.

  In fact, no lawyer had ever been indicted on a federal money-laundering charge in that part of North Carolina. And Guller had a much more pedigreed background than the people who’d been arrested at this point, none of whom had ever been to a four-year college, let alone law school.

  At his office, Guller was asked by the agents if Steve Chambers had ever brought him a large stash of money. Yes, Guller told them, Steve had brought over a black suitcase full of cash before the house closing and unzipped it to show what was inside. He had spoken with Guller about using it for the closing, but Guller said doing so would necessitate him signing a form indicating its source. Steve didn’t want to do that, so they agreed that instead he would get cashier’s checks for the required amount. Steve then took the suitcase and left his office, Guller said.

  Chambers, of course, had told the FBI that he actually left the money with Guller, so Agent Bart Boodee pressed him. “Mr. Guller, was there any time when the suitcase or any other large amount of money was left with you in your office?”

  Guller said, “There might’ve been a time during that conversation when Chambers got up and left and went out to his car for ten minutes or so, and while he was out at his car, the suitcase was with me alone here in the office.” But Steve soon returned to the office, retrieved the suitcase, and left, Guller said.

  Boodee pressed him again. “Are you certain there was not a time in your dealings with Mr. Chambers that Mr. Chambers left money in your office?”

  “No,” Guller said. “Absolutely not. Never, ever on any occasion would I have done that.”

  “This is an important issue we’re talking about,” Boodee said. “It’s serious. It’s a felony to lie or intentionally provide false or fictitious information to an FBI agent… We can reexamine what you’ve said if you want to revisit it with me.”

  Guller sat quietly and then revised his story. He had not actually seen the contents of the suitcase when Steve brought it over, he said, and Steve had indeed left the cash at his office for about two weeks, before Guller eventually returned it after having removed $10,000 for himself. He said Steve had insisted he take the money, first as payment for storing the bag and then, after Guller repeatedly declined, as a Christmas gift.

  Guller also told the agents about two deals that Steve had discussed that were never consummated. He said Steve had asked him if it was possible to buy land for Kelly’s husband under a phony name, and that he replied it was not.

  Boodee had brought a tape recorder and some cassettes to Guller’s office. After Guller answered him, Boodee fast-forwarded a cassette with a wiretapped conversation in which Guller told Steve that it was indeed possible to put property in a fictitious name. It was clear the FBI was considering charging Guller with a crime.

  Guller admitted to Boodee that the tape made him sound bad. “I was bullshitting my client to make him feel good,” he said, adding that he eventually would have told Steve it was illegal. He admitted he had probably exercised bad judgment. “I should not have told him I was going to do it under an assumed name.”

  Boodee then asked about the conversation—recorded, of course—in which Guller and Steve discussed paying up to $250,000 to get Steve a pardon for his felony convictions. Guller said he hadn’t meant any of it, and that he never intended to participate in a bribe.

  Staying in Jail

  On March 5, one after another, the main players in the case appeared before Judge Carl Horn at a bond hearing, hoping to be freed from jail until their trials.

  All the defendants had well-respected court-appointed lawyers. The first one to argue before Judge Horn was Noell Tin, the attorney for David Ghantt. Tin’s goal, and that of all the attorneys, was to persuade the judge that his client would not flee or do anything illegal while free before trial—in short, that his client had reasons to stick around that outweighed the incentive to leave town. Noting Ghantt’s family ties, Tin called David’s mother, Sue Ghantt, to testify on his behalf.

  “I just want you to know,” David’s mother told the judge, “we have a very fine son. He’s always been honest and trustworthy and dependable [and] loving and kind. He has not ever been violent.”

  It was heartbreaking to watch. David’s mother, in her fifties with curly, graying hair and glasses, was a woman who loved her son unconditionally, who knew deep down that he had a good heart and wouldn’t hurt a fly.

  “It appears he may have made a mistake,” she continued, “but we love him, and we support him, and we care for him. And I don’t think you would regret letting him out in our care. We would appreciate it very much.”

  Tin told the judge that Ghantt, if freed on bond, could live with a relative in Gastonia or with his parents in Hendersonville. “There is only one other thing I can say to Your Honor, which is that my client is presumed innocent. There is a temptation to presume we know exactly what happened at this point, [but] the statutory and constitutional law is simple. He is treated simply as a man who is presumed innocent. He’s never been arrested in his life. And those kinds of people ordinarily get bond in federal court. And sometimes, someone goes out of the country for reasons other than flight from law enforcement.”

  The prosecutor saw things differently. First of all, said Assistant U.S. Attorney David Keesler, between $6.6 million and $8 million remained missing. Ghantt might know its location and, if freed, run away with it. He already had abused a position of trust at Loomis Fargo, using his access to money to commit the crime, Keesler reminded the judge.

  “I mention this because this is a case about greed,” Keesler said, “and it’s a case about what some people will do for money. None of these defendants ought to be allowed out when that sort of money is still out there, and we don’t know where it is.”

  The weight of the evidence was overwhelming, Keesler said. “Mr. Ghantt is on videotape removing money from the Loomis facility. Seventeen-plus million dollars of money.”

  Judge Horn, to no one’s surprise, decided to keep Ghantt locked up, noting he would have a better chance at bail if the missing money was found.

  When it was Kelly Campbell’s turn, Horn started by mentioning the evidence that showed she helped mastermind the heist, that she smoked lots of marijuana, and that she knew about the murder plot. Ghantt, sitting next to her in the courtroom, stared at her with pain in his eyes, shaking his head.

  Keesler stood up. “She was the link,” he said, “between David Scott Ghantt, who was then employed at Loomis, and Mr. Chambers and the rest of these folks.” She helped Ghantt get his phony ID to leave the country, and she had admitted her role to the FBI, Keesler said.

  When Kelly’s lawyer, James Gronquist, asked her family to stand, three rows of people—her pastor; her parents; her husband, Jimmy; and her two children—complied.

  Her mother, Colleen Elmore, testified on her behalf, saying that Kelly, if freed, could live with her and work for her brother’s construction business until her trial. “I know this is bad, and my daughter has to pay for what she’s done, but I’m just asking you to let her go home until she goes to trial and be with her kids, because they may not see
her until they’re half-grown. I promise you I will handcuff her to my wrist if I have to, to see that she don’t go nowhere. It’s not right for them li’l young’uns not to get to be with their mama.”

  Judge Horn kept Kelly in jail, though he seemed sympathetic. “This is a very sad situation,” he said, “when you have children and families hurt by very poor choices that other family members make. I have never seen a defendant who, once they’ve been caught, doesn’t wish that they had made a different choice earlier.”

  While the judge reviewed Eric Payne’s paperwork, prosecutors noted he was part of the heist itself and was later caught on a wiretap talking about trying to intimidate Steve’s old friend, who Payne thought was spreading rumors about their involvement in the heist.

  Payne’s lawyer, Chris Connelly, said his client was not a risk to flee and should be released from jail until his trial. “If he wanted to flee, he could have fled a long time ago and possibly not been apprehended,” Connelly said. “But he stayed right here where he was, worked the same job, lived with his family, tried to get a better job, tried to pay off his trailer, tried to buy the land underneath it.”

  Judge Horn kept him in jail.

  The next-to-last defendant up for bond was Michele Chambers. Whisler called her one of the prime beneficiaries of the heist, mentioning her trip to a bank and asking how much she could deposit without the bank having to file paperwork.

  Her lawyer, Andy Culler, acknowledged her spending habits of the last five months but argued to Judge Horn that, in the scheme of things, Michele was just “a young woman who is doing what she is told, rather than necessarily planning and directing activities.”

  Michele’s mother took the stand. Sandra Floyd told the judge that Michele had struggled before she met Steve Chambers because her first husband didn’t pay enough to support their children. She said Michele could stay at her house if freed.

  Keesler was geared to pounce. He asked Sandra Floyd if she was surprised that Michele and Steve could buy their furniture store and their big house a few months back.

  “I was never really told exactly where or how they made their money,” Sandra Floyd said, adding that Michele had told her it came from gambling.

  Judge Horn asked her, “Did your daughter show you her forty-three-thousand-dollar ring?”

  “I saw several rings she wore,” Floyd said.

  “Did they look like they were worth a hundred thousand dollars to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you think that that came from gambling earnings? Financing?”

  “I know that they were a gift from her husband for Christmas.”

  Horn kept Michele in jail.

  As they left the courtroom in shackles, heading back to jail, Ghantt and Kelly found themselves standing next to each other in a courthouse tunnel. David just looked at her.

  “I’m sorry,” Kelly said. “It wasn’t me. It was Steve.”

  “Yeah, right,” David said. He turned away, avoiding all eye contact as they walked toward the van that returned them to their cells.

  Steve tried to sell him a different story. While his own bond hearing wasn’t until the following week, he approached David in jail and blamed Kelly for the murder plot. “When she got that money, she just went nuts,” he said.

  David said nothing. He looked away and turned toward several non-heist inmates, who he saw were staring at them in amazement.

  • • •

  David’s relationship with Tammy had warmed since his first day back. Now, he was talking with her every night from jail. He felt she was there for him, and Tammy felt like a wife again. The tension in their phone calls had slowly eased, and it seemed that Tammy still wanted to make their marriage work.

  Inmates were not allowed to accept incoming calls, so David phoned her collect at night, making her laugh by identifying himself to the operator as “M&M’s”—he had heard about the radio contest—or Rascals, their cat.

  Tammy sent him a picture of her and beamed when he said he put it on the mirror in his cell to “pretty up the place.” He said he had really missed her on Valentine’s Day, while he was alone in Mexico. He told her that he didn’t deserve her, that he knew the uncertainty had traumatized her.

  But she was still angry at him. He had completely abandoned her to pursue a wild dream, and if it had succeeded, she’d have never heard from him again. The only way she could make sense of it was by rationalizing that this had been needed to help them improve what had apparently bothered him about their marriage. She still treasured her old, pre-heist memories of him and kept the key to their mobile home, which had been foreclosed on three months earlier when she couldn’t make the payments.

  They talked about what they would do when he left prison—probably sometime around 2006 or 2007, he figured. Maybe she would open a tanning salon. He would open a tree-trimming service, maybe a towing company. And they would go live somewhere else, probably in a different state, somewhere where people had never heard the name David Scott Ghantt.

  Of Brain Size and Bust Size

  The investigation wasn’t over. In the hours and days after the arrests, federal agents drove around Gaston and Lincoln Counties, west of Charlotte, to banks and storage facilities and the defendants’ homes, looking for stolen cash and the vehicles, jewelry, and electronics that had been bought with other heist proceeds. These searches bore fruit, often in the form of six-figure sums of cash.

  Hours after they arrested Steve and Michele Chambers on March 2, agents found $565,602 in a cardboard box in an office desk drawer at 503 Stuart Ridge. In the same room, in a plastic bag, they found keys for safe-deposit boxes in banks across the area. The next day, they found $897,000 inside one safe-deposit box and $470,000 in another. Two days later, they found $360,000 in a box that was cosigned by Steve Chambers and David Craig, and $454,000 in a box that was cosigned by Calvin Hodge and Michele Chambers. Also that week, in a facility rented by Steve Chambers and Calvin Hodge, agents located a blue barrel containing dry dog food over a piece of cloth. Underneath the cloth was $770,000.

  More large sums were found in other safe-deposit boxes, the signatories being Steve, his aliases, and other friends and relatives.

  In total, that week, agents located $9.8 million. Combined with the $3.3 million found in the Loomis van on October 6, 1997, two days after the heist, they now had recovered $12.9 million from the $17 million that was originally stolen. Brian Whisler, the assistant U.S. attorney at Steve’s bond hearing on March 10, told Judge Horn that about $4.15 million remained missing, and that Steve shouldn’t be released until it was found.

  Chris Fialko, the court-appointed lawyer for Steve, didn’t even bother to argue his client’s case. In fact, he’d tried to cancel the hearing, knowing from the results of previous proceedings that his client’s odds of success were almost nil, and that Horn would deny bond. He was right. Steve was led back to jail.

  • • •

  Steve’s friends and relatives who opened and cosigned for access to the safe-deposit boxes that held his money were now firmly within the FBI’s cross hairs. On March 12, a grand jury returned a forty-nine-count indictment setting formal charges not only against the eight current defendants but also against nine other people, all of them relatives or friends of the first eight.

  The new set of defendants included Michele’s parents, Steve’s parents, Nathan Grant’s fiancée, Eric Payne’s wife, David Craig, Calvin Hodge, and Calvin Hodge’s father. All were charged with money laundering for helping to hide the money. Each was freed on bond.

  Among themselves, the prosecutors debated whether money-laundering charges, which had a twenty-year maximum sentence, were appropriate. Traditionally, money-laundering crimes involve schemes to turn stolen “dirty” money into “clean” money by running it through a seemingly legitimate business. But federal courts allow prosecutors to file a money-launderin
g charge when a specific act—for example, obtaining safe-deposit boxes in banks to hide dirty money—was performed with money that the defendant knew, or should have known, was illegally obtained. The crimes in question could seem more like concealment of stolen property than money laundering. But the harsher penalty for money laundering allowed prosecutors to pressure defendants to plead guilty.

  None of these “money-stuffers,” as the FBI called the defendants who hid cash for Steve in safe-deposit boxes, had been involved in the heist itself, and Steve apparently hadn’t told any of them the money came from Loomis Fargo. Sandra and Dennis Floyd, for example, thought they were stowing Steve’s gambling winnings. They had received $40,000 from Steve and Michele and used $13,000 of it for a pickup truck and $3,000 for a one-carat diamond ring.

  • • •

  The nine new defendants may have been shocked by their arrests, but at least they were free until their next court hearings. Meanwhile, all original eight defendants remained behind bars through March 20, when Nathan Grant formally pleaded guilty and was released on bond until his sentencing hearing. Nathan entered a guilty plea to one count of money laundering, implicating himself in the storage of $400,000 in a safe-deposit box.

  Prosecutors had more on him—for example, they knew Steve Chambers had paid him $70,000 to stash money just after the heist—but they agreed not to press other charges as part of the deal. His fiancée, Amy Grigg, charged the prior week with money laundering, sat in the first row of the courtroom watching the father of her child virtually ensure himself a prison sentence.

  Nathan, a twenty-one-year-old mill worker, wouldn’t know his fate right away. In federal court, sentences are usually imposed a few months after conviction. The judge freed him on bond, deeming him a safe bet to return to court for sentencing. He didn’t return to the mobile home where Steve had let him live after the heist; federal marshals had seized that. Nathan moved in with his mother. Days later, after his brother Scott pleaded guilty to bank larceny and money laundering, the judge freed him on bond too, letting him live with their mother as well, as long as they agreed not to talk with each other about the crime.