by Jeff Diamant
Five days later, Osborne returned to the home with John Wydra in tow and had Kathy Grigg read back her statement to double-check its veracity. She told them it was true.
At this point, the word of Kathy Grigg offered the main direct evidence against her son, but circumstantial evidence was growing. Records showed the Calloways lived in a $212,000 home, a considerable improvement from their North Carolina accommodations. Employment tax records showed Jody Calloway had earned $608 during the second quarter of 1998 and $731 during the fourth quarter of 1999. Jennifer Calloway hadn’t made much more. Yet according to Department of Motor Vehicle records, they owned five vehicles—a 1998 Ford Explorer, a 1996 Chevy Tahoe, a 1985 Ford Mustang, a 1977 Harley-Davidson, and a 1990 Chris-Craft powerboat. The money to fund those had to be coming from somewhere.
On August 31, 2000, the FBI secretly videotaped a meeting between Amy and Jody, half-siblings, in a Colorado hotel room. Amy told him their mother had told her about his theft from the locker. He angrily denied everything. He even told her he suspected the FBI was watching him as he spoke to her. He also said their mother was crazy. Amy spoke right past him, telling him to return the money and think of the family.
“I don’t know nothin’ about this bullshit!” Jody yelled. “You need to stop insinuating that I do!”
Jody didn’t provide them a smoking-gun confession, but the FBI felt confident enough about the accumulating evidence—not to mention his anger at his half sister in the hotel room—that Wydra arrested him later in the day. In court, a federal magistrate ordered him kept in custody in Englewood, Colorado, without bond. He was subsequently taken to jail in Charlotte, where evidence was building further against both him and his wife, Jennifer.
On October 2, 2000, Brian Whisler argued in court that Calloway should be kept in jail without bond. He cited the move to Colorado, Calloway’s failure to list most of his vehicles on a financial disclosure form after his arrest, and his alleged propensity toward violence. Calloway had been recently charged with felony menacing in Colorado for an alleged road-rage incident involving a gun.
Jody’s attorney, Chuck Morgan, contended that the government’s evidence was flimsy, and that the couple’s Colorado lifestyle came from hard work and savings.
Judge McKnight decided to free Jody Calloway on $150,000 bond, putting him under house arrest in Littleton, Colorado. He ordered Jody to get a job.
Meanwhile, back in Charlotte, a federal grand jury met in November and indicted Jody Calloway for money laundering, his wife for possession of stolen property and money laundering, and his mother for possession of stolen property—the $28,000 she said Calloway had given her.
The FBI also secured warrants for the Calloways’ home and vehicles, and on March 5 they seized boxes of paperwork from the home, including closing documents, titles to their vehicles, tax returns for 2000, and pay stubs from the electronic company where Jody had worked. A week later Wydra tried to seize money from the Calloways’ bank account, only to learn that Jennifer Calloway had emptied it of $52,000 earlier in the day. As pressure on them increased, she realized she should turn that money over to the government, and did so on May 8, 2001.
• • •
The trial of Jody and Jennifer Calloway began on August 20. On the first day, government witness Steve Chambers recounted paying Nathan Grant and Amy Grigg, then Nathan’s fiancée, $70,000 in return for their help hiding millions of dollars at Lincoln Self Storage. Only the three of them had keys to the locker, Steve testified. He recalled their shock in December 1997 to learn that the key didn’t work and that the money was missing.
The next day, the government was in for an unpleasant surprise. Kathy Grigg, its star witness, directly contradicted everything she had told Amsec and the FBI on their visit to her home the previous August. Her words baffled the federal prosecutors, who had offered her immunity for truthful testimony. Confronted with the written statement she had signed thirteen months earlier, she insisted to prosecutors that her son never told her he stole the money and never gave her $28,000.
In Kathy’s words, when Amsec officials came to her house, “I was frightened and scared, so I told them it was true.” She described her medical problems, which included high blood pressure and depression, and said she was sedated during the Amsec interview, having just returned from her doctor.
“I wasn’t aware of what I was writing when I wrote it,” she said.
That afternoon, as court was closing down, Jody Calloway glared at Joseph Hamilton, who was scheduled to testify the next day. Hamilton, Jody’s business partner in Colorado, was also Jennifer Calloway’s brother-in-law. Jody’s glare frightened Hamilton enough that he wondered what would happen if Jody were free. He knew what he had to do.
On the next day, his surprise testimony against Calloway virtually guaranteed the trial’s outcome. In a confession while jurors were outside the courtroom, Hamilton told the judge that in 1998, Jody Calloway had shown him somewhere between $1 million and $1.5 million in cash that had been hidden in a Littleton storage facility. He said Jody had told him that the money came from a heist, that he had taken it from a storage facility in North Carolina, and that “if I [Hamilton] ever thought about saying anything to anyone that ‘your family and yourself are dead,’” Hamilton testified.
“Did you think he was serious?” the prosecutor asked.
“Yes,” Hamilton said. He said Jennifer had called him after her husband’s arrest, asking him to hide the money. So Hamilton had gone to the storage locker and tried to bury the cash where he hunted in the Rocky Mountains. Then, while Jody Calloway was out on bail and freed from house arrest, he and Hamilton dug up most of the money. Hamilton added that he had kept $68,000 buried, and that he realized he was getting himself in trouble by saying that. But he said he was more afraid of what could happen to him if the Calloways were acquitted. He had even finalized his will. “I felt that if they went back to Colorado, my wife, my two boys, and my baby were in danger,” he said.
It got worse for the Calloways when Jennifer’s sister, Jill Shelly, testified that the previous night over dinner the couple had asked her what she would say on the witness stand. The Calloways, she said, asked her to lie in court and testify she had paid them $700 a month in rent while living in an Arizona condo they owned; her rent money presumably would explain some of the extra cash the Calloways had on hand. But Shelly had never paid them actual rent—only money for utilities, fees, and taxes. After Shelly told her husband about the conversation, he called the authorities.
“He told me the truth was the best possible way,” she said. “This is very hard.”
Judge Richard Voorhees had heard enough. The Calloways’ bonds were revoked, and they were handcuffed and led to jail.
The next day’s testimony focused on their lives in Colorado. Their old landlord testified that when Jody Calloway moved to Littleton from North Carolina in January 1998, he paid the rent six months in advance. Another man said he received $4,500 in cash and a $4,000 cashier’s check for a boat he sold Jennifer four months later.
Other testimony revealed that the Calloways later bought a house for $212,000, putting $50,000 down in October 1998. And while they had one vehicle while living in North Carolina, in Colorado they had five. Also, that they had written virtually identical resignation letters to their respective employers attributing their move to the other spouse being transferred. Neither was actually transferred, their former supervisors said in court.
• • •
In the meantime, FBI agents used Joseph Hamilton’s testimony as a map to find more of the missing money. Over the weekend, they discovered $68,000 buried in a tin ammunition container on a mountain near Denver, Colorado, and $10,000 in the ceiling of Hamilton’s workshop in Littleton. Agents flew the money to Charlotte so prosecutors would have it in court on the next day of testimony.
As it turned out, it wasn’t necessary. Over
the weekend, the Calloways and their lawyers concluded that the defendants should plead guilty. On Monday, August 27, 2001, with a bag containing $78,000 sitting on the prosecutor’s table ready to be used as evidence, they submitted guilty pleas to money laundering and receiving stolen property, still managing to anger authorities when they said they didn’t know the location of the remaining, unspent portion of their loot.
Kathy Grigg continued to maintain she wasn’t guilty of possession of stolen property involving the disputed $28,000. The prosecutor charged her with perjury. She agreed to plead guilty in return for the prosecutors’ dismissal of the larceny charge. But then she told a Charlotte Observer reporter, Aileen Soper, that she was actually innocent. When prosecutors read the newspaper story, they asked a judge to reverse her guilty plea. She went to trial for perjury and lost.
Jody Calloway was sentenced to six and a half years in prison, a heavier punishment than what most of the defendants had received in the earlier rounds of arrests. Jennifer was sentenced to four and a half years, and Kathy Grigg to two years. Their closest personal connections to the original theft, Nathan and Amy Grant, had already completed their sentences by the time the Calloways and Kathy Grigg would start theirs.
At his sentencing hearing on February 3, 2003, Jody Calloway said he thought the money had been from either drug deals or organized crime, and that he had pleaded guilty only because he’d been “under intense pressure.” He contended the government was responsible for his situation.
“If these people had come to us in the beginning, besides hunting me and my wife down like we were rabid dogs in the street, we would not have arrived at this point… This perpetual case, it’s unreal, and I can’t believe I’m in this position.”
Epilogue
There was something about David Ghantt that made it hard not to like him.
He had several strikes against him, of course. He was awful to his wife. He abandoned his entire family without so much as a note. He stole a ton of money from his employer, abused a position of trust in the process, and wasn’t sorry about it.
And yet, after everything, he emerges as a somewhat sympathetic character in the story just told. Part of this is easy to explain. His accomplices were working to kill him. He spent just a sliver of the amount he stole. The woman he loved didn’t love him back. And he’d been stuck in a job he hated.
Without excusing his actions, it’s easy for us to imagine experiencing a less dramatic version of what he went through. Most people have had a boss or two who they loathed. Most people have loved someone who didn’t love them back and maybe made bad choices as a result. Most people have had their trust betrayed. For David Ghantt, all these life events happened at the same time, converging in a most remarkable fashion.
And was he bitter about it? No. While interviewed in prison, he exuded the vibe of someone who’d lost a huge bet but had affirmatively decided to be a good sport about it, because he knew the odds had been long in the first place and that what he did was wrong. And he made no bones about his excitement that people will read about him for decades to come.
“It was kind of an ego thing,” he told me. “I knew [that] when I did this, I would be famous. I knew it would create a big stir. The thought of that, I think, drives a lot of crimes. People want the fifteen minutes of fame. I doubt my place in the history books will be that big, but people will know me for a while.”
He was candid, as well, about his lack of remorse. He said he felt bad about upsetting his wife and family but not about the act itself or the bad publicity it caused Loomis Fargo, which he felt had worked him too hard for too little money. “I’m not gonna be like the other people, crying and weeping about how sorry they are. That’s fake… What’s the point? I made a choice, a decision. It was a calculated risk. I guess that makes me a bastard of sorts.”
He said his time on the run was the most exciting period of his life. And he clearly appreciated that some of his experiences would read well; he enjoyed telling me about listening to the radio while driving to work in his truck on the morning of the crime. “They were playing ‘Take the Money and Run,’” he said. “I shit you not.”
While David’s tale offered the most compelling personal narrative of any of the thieves, the prolonged public intrigue over the Loomis Fargo heist owes more, perhaps, to fascination over a simple question: could they still have gotten away with it if they’d been more careful?
In some ways, the answer seems obvious. To get away with it, they could have spent less or moved far away so they’d have been more difficult to track down. Had the Chamberses been willing to leave the area, rather than immediately buying a $635,000 home that was even nearer to the scene of the crime than was their previous abode, maybe they could have thrown their money around without raising the alarms that eventually led informants in the Charlotte area to contact the FBI. And if they’d needed to stay in the Charlotte area, they could have waited longer (much longer) to change residences and refrained from showing bags of cash to people they didn’t know very well. They made plenty of mistakes.
Still, even without mistakes, the cards were stacked against this group from the very beginning, mainly due to the relationship between David and Kelly and the fact that other Loomis employees believed that they’d dated. This was key information for the FBI, the only clue that David had a possible accomplice, and it ensured that Kelly Campbell’s every move would be scrutinized. Even had she fled without a trace, the FBI would’ve monitored her relatives in case she decided to contact them. Clearly, given her connection to David, there was no way she could have enjoyed her share of the money while living in Gaston County without being discovered.
As for David, while he may have known a few things about the FBI from books, it hadn’t occurred to him that agents would do the thorough job they did of investigating him, including pumping his past and current coworkers for information. Had he realized that before the heist, maybe he would have reconsidered Kelly’s invite and rejected the whole idea, recruited somebody else on his own, or taken a more manageable load and driven out west.
Steve Chambers too could have sat on the money or at least spent it less quickly and recklessly than he did. But even had he been more cautious, the FBI would’ve still been watching Kelly, and Steve would’ve had to keep his distance from her, both in person and over the phone, which—given the critical role Kelly played in getting David Ghantt to commit the crime for them and given their tight preexisting network—would have been difficult to do.
And while pulling this off by himself would’ve been extremely difficult for David Ghantt, as he’d correctly surmised, the addition of other people began proving burdensome almost immediately after the actual theft. Only weeks later, he was already concerned he might not receive his share of the money, and he soon began to fear for his life. And he wasn’t the only one nervous about the future. Kelly Campbell, from the first week, knew the FBI suspected her as an accomplice due to her friendship with Ghantt. And Steve Chambers, up until his arrest, was constantly worried about managing and hiding the $14 million he controlled, increasingly so after November when Jody Calloway made off with the stash from a storage locker.
The irony is that although they succeeded in stealing the money and managed to hold onto it for a bit, none of them seemed to enjoy their stolen riches except in short spurts and through occasional major purchases. All three of them knew, virtually every step of the way, that they weren’t in the clear.
Steve Chambers never let me interview him in person, but in 1998 he agreed to answer a small list of general questions for the Charlotte Observer that I had submitted to his lawyer in writing. Among other things, I wanted to know what it felt like for him to live in Cramer Mountain. I expected to hear how much fun and luxurious it had been for him, but here’s how he answered: “It was not exciting. It was too complicated and wasn’t worth it at all. I wish it hadn’t happened.”
If
there was indeed a truly glorious moment for them, it was the evening of October 4, 1997, when it all began. Soon enough, their antics would guarantee them a place in the annals of Dumb Crook History, but for a few hours on that first night, their prospects were full of promise, with little hint of the great anxieties that would dominate the next five months. And the one person who seemed to truly relish this was David Ghantt.
For a few moments, the life he hated finally seemed fixed in his rearview mirror, and what stood ahead, he was sure, was pure bliss, the type most men would never experience because they didn’t have what it takes. He had become like the characters in the books he loved so much.
His confidence knew no bounds that evening, in both his abilities and his judgment. In Kelly Campbell he had a partner he loved, a partner he trusted, a partner who had assembled a team that was taking them over the top. He was so sure everything would work out, he had so much faith in teamwork, that he thought nothing of handing off virtually everything he’d stolen to a group of people he’d never even met, and letting Kelly drive him to an airport in South Carolina.
There were glitches that evening—the airport turned out to be closed and there was the near fiasco with the key ring—but they were overcome, and by evening’s end there was $14 million—fourteen million dollars!—in their possession. They had managed to commit one of the largest heists in U.S. history.
When David Ghantt finally boarded the bus for Atlanta en route to Mexico, loaded down with twenty-five grand—more money than he’d ever had in his life—he was exuberant over what he’d just done, wondering what was next, a thief escaping into the night, already in over his head.
Acknowledgments
I want to thank the people involved in the theft and its aftermath who trusted me with their stories. I hope they, and the others, feel this book treats them fairly. I also want to thank the investigators and prosecutors who shared their experiences.
