. And though she had been made night shift supervisor at Allied Security, she still felt she would never make the money she needed. Charlotte hotel chef who serves with a smile recognized as outstanding ambassador, Eritrean, Ethiopian restaurant owner was a big brother and father to many in Charlotte, Home tours: This wired-up Weddington smart home has a pool big enough for the neighborhood. But Ghantt, who served as an unpaid consultant to the movie and attended the big Los Angeles premiere earlier in the week, has no such reservations. >> PHOTOS: The Loomis Fargo heist, 25 years later Ghantt, his former co-worker Kelly Campbell and her friends Steve and Michelle Chambers, carried out the Loomis Fargo heist on Oct. 4,. He had an endearing smile, a beautiful wife and two children. Careers. Eric watched. The teller, who hadn't asked, filed a "suspicious activity report." CHARLOTTE, N.C. - Kelly Campbell, the woman who helped plan the $17 million robbery of armored-car company Loomis, Fargo was sentenced yesterday to nearly six years in prison and ordered to pay back more than $4 million. That sounds like a lot of money until its compared to the $18,930,201.26 the group was ordered to pay. After a couple of weeks, Ghantt and the rest of the heist team were ready to strike. Agents noticed it two months later when it flowed to them through official channels, along with hundreds of similar reports involving other people. When he was done, the man drove off to a nearby printing press, where the money was distributed into private vehicles amongst a handful of people. . There are multiples of thousands of these things coming every year. I would call us friends. They picked me, he says with a rueful tone. Gaston County residents remember how that worked out. ". I'll never pay it off on my paycheck." Truth was, David wanted more than help leaving, he wanted company. Posted on . Clerk of Court Frank Johns of Charlotte. Exhibit A was that Steve had no steady job but plenty of cash. You cannot fine low-income people millions of dollars. Kelly Jane Campbell, a former Loomis employee; Michael L. McKinney . In early November, Steve lured the real Mike McKinney, an ex-Marine, to North Carolina from his Illinois home. Mexican police, Interpol officers and an FBI agent were watching him. So Im like, Can you get a move on with my money? After a couple of weeks passed, I get a phone call from Kelly: Okay, Brunos coming to you, blah, blah, blah. So I get a phone call from this guy, and I tell him where to meet me. LeVaughn Kelly Campbell (born July 23, 1980 in Atlanta, Georgia) is a former football wide receiver. As it turned out, Ghantt was zipping up his scuba suit in Mexico. Should David be killed after he gave them the money? Hidden in it was a 3 1/2-carat diamond ring that cost $43,000. If they could just sit on the money until then, he said, they'd be fine. Im on the phone with Kelly [Campbell], and Im like, Hey, I really was expecting a package to arrive. Then he and Campbell drove 90 miles to Columbia, South Carolina, where Ghantt planned to purchase a ticket to Mexico so he could be out of the country before news of the robbery broke the next morning. It had been drilled into my head that if you give me a team of five good people, I can go anywhere, do anything," David explained. By March, Steve Chambers decided he needed to do something more drastic about Ghantt, making plans to send a hitman to Mexico to silence him for good. Im a very deliberate person. I wanted to make a drastic change and I went for it," Ghantt said. Because surprise! Given the presence of the surveillance tapes and a gun belonging to Ghantt, they started with Ghantts phone and pager records and discovered a pattern they attributed to an accomplice. There was a third person with them, too, a man named Eric Grant. ];David Scott Ghanntt [Misc.] real kelly campbell loomis fargo heist seeing a woodpecker after someone dies lectomano que significa. kellis@gastongazette.com 0:04 0:57 On Oct. 4, 1997, former Kings Mountain resident David Scott Ghantt finished his shift as a vault supervisor for Loomis Fargo in Charlotte. All I needed was a change of pace.". Besides her prison sentence . I didnt pick the heist team. ". "I thought he was goofing around.". It was unclear whether anyone will get that money, authorities said. You can garnish wages. But you cant get blood from a stone, Johns said. The bizarre true story of the criminals behind the second-largest bank heist in American history. Given his position at the bank, hed be the one to pull off the robbery, and he intended to be ready. Thatd probably been the best thing for me to do, really. If I hadn't done what I did the, the life I have now with my wife and child, I wouldn't have. . Kelly drove her pickup to a lot across the street from the Loomis building, on Suttle Avenue in Charlotte. I did a little research into crime statistics and the local cops. They hatched the idea half-jokingly, over a game of Uno, never dreaming they were about to make Bonnie and Clyde look like bottom feeders. Or does it sit in an offshore account, waiting for a prison sentence to end? ". At 6 that morning, FBI supervisor Rick Shaffer led 12 agents and several Gaston County police officers up a winding road on Cramer Mountain to Steve's home. Chambers went from a mobile home in Lincoln County to a mansion in Cramerton. Not Ghantt. Michele told her mother she and Steve had been saving gambling winnings for the down payment. In the meantime, the FBI was closing in looking to bust a total of 21 suspected accomplices. It was his goodbye. Despite a mega-watt cast featuring Zach Galifianakis and a handful of some of Saturday Night Lives biggest current and former stars, Masterminds, the comedy about Loomis Fargo robbery completely tanked at the box office in its opening weekend, bowing in sixth place with just $6.6 million. Except the person he offered $150,000 to mule $2.5 million down to Ghantt in Mexico turned him down and instead went to the FBI. "A lot of people out there had it worse than me, but . He couldn't talk.". In Campbells case, Gronquist says his client was buried in court-ordered debt despite the fact that she took responsibility for what she had done and cooperated with prosecutors and the FBI. Only a nickel on every dollar have been collected so far. Or that it was an inheritance. and "I'm rich!". And that's OK with Ghantt, who's just a few weeks shy of his 47th birthday, out of federal prison for more than a decade, married with a 9-year-old daughter . She declined to take a lie-detector test. As with Kelly, the worst blotch on 29-year-old Eric's record until now was a driving-while-intoxicated conviction. Inside the Mazda, Steve told Scott Grant to get out and help David. Were others involved? Its hilarious. She laughed for like 45 minutes. David was sentenced to 7 1/2 years. That October, the Chamberses' bank accounts ballooned. This meant a bump in pay, up to $8.15 an hour. Question: Are you surprised that Hollywood took this on as a movie? I hit the local library the thing that we used to do before Google, Ghantt says with a small laugh. One day, the two employees were in the break room and got to talking about the news of the day a massive bank heist that just occurred in Florida by someone at their company. When he walked onto the plane, he was wearing big, tall cowboy boots, where hed stuffed a majority of the smuggled cash. Kelly called David at Loomis; he told her he'd be ready for them with the cash at 6:30 or 7 p.m. Alone in the building, David was trying to finish loading cash from the vault into an unmarked white Ford Econoline van belonging to Loomis. She was a wife and mother with two children. Steve, who had sworn Kelly, Eric and Scott to secrecy the night of the theft, named them all to the FBI. I mean, cause greed is a funny animal. Turns out, most of the thieves and their accomplices have been about as effective coming up with their court-ordered restitution as they were hiding their original crimes. In real life: False. They cursed. But as soon as he drove off, I went right back in and opened the vault. Loomis has received $978,983.79, according to Sally Butcher, an assistant clerk in the federal courts of the Western District of North Carolina who specializes in criminal debt. They tried to break the van's bulletproof windows. We got to the end of the day, and he was acting like he wanted to linger. Ghantt was scheduled to work a shift at the armored car company Oct. 4. Then another. Until, that is, he decided to hell with it he was going to pull-off the second largest heist in U.S. history. When Ghantt was on the plane home from Mexico with the FBI, he admitted to the agents that while Campbell had been integral to why hed done it and that he did indeed have a crush on her it was never his true motivation. He kept looking over his shoulder. Ghantt:I hate to say it, but I had six years of sitting in a box to think about my life. Steve told Scott to ignore the remaining stacks, which were mostly ones and fives. On the radio, the "John Boy and Billy" show played the song "Take the Money and Run. But he tried to keep his face averted, so David wouldn't be able to ID him. Time passed, and Campbell eventually quit her job at Loomis Fargo. I don't blame him.". Down in Jacksonville, a Loomis Fargo employee took $18 million from an armored van he was driving. By then Id figured out that Bruno was up to no good, and that Id probably never seen any more of my money. In February 1998, the FBI tapped their phones and listened to Steve discuss depositing $2.5 million in the Cayman Islands. "For the first year, they're all over you. But as he later recalled to the media, as soon as he stepped through those big-box doors, he realized he was flush with cash, and he didnt need to shop at Walmart ever again. "We're not the type that questions everything people tell us," Floyd said. Campbell was released from federal custody in 2004 after serving five years, meaning her collection case will age out in December 2024. Inside were, along with other personal items, his keys and wedding ring. They didn't know it, but they were leaving $3.3 million behind. When we worked together [for Loomis], we'd joke about it. In real life: False. Looking for Kelly Loomis? Our Benefits. The FBI, in fact, obtained the evidence they needed to bring down the major players, including Chambers, after catching them talking about the murder plot on the telephone via wiretap. They discussed it further, and Campbell asked him when they should do it. His mobile home was nicely furnished, on eight acres with a stream in the back. The robbery of some $17 million quickly became one of the wildest bank heists of the last quarter century. Health savings account and flexible spending account. Federal prosecutors would ultimately charge 21 defendants in the case, including the Floyds, who were charged with (and pleaded guilty to) money laundering. Ghantt and one other employee were the last to leave. Thomas Grant, who served three years in prison for bank larceny, paid off restitution of $70,000; brother Eric Grant paid all of his $26,000; as did David Craig, $40,000; and Dennis and Sandra Floyd; $27,000. Kelly would only discover later that leading up to the heist, Steve had been writing bad checks, $17,000 worth, for which he would later be convicted. White-collar criminals are pretty good at hiding their money, she said. I really enjoyed the little scuba diving trip. David said he realized then, for the first time, he might not see the millions he thought he had coming to him. Two more defendants in the $17 million Loomis Fargo & Co. robbery last year have agreed to plead guilty, and a third person entered a formal plea in court. Steve told me to tell [David] whatever was necessary to keep him happy.". Why did this Charlotte engineer leave her job? Before long, the tales of high living by Chambers and his now former wife, Michelle, led the thieves to be labeled either the "Cramer Mountain Hillbillies" or "The gang that couldn't steal straight." This real-life crime is the core of "Untitled Armored Car Project," which stars Zach Galifianakis, Owen Wilson and Kristen Wiig. Each week, Michele deposited thousands of dollars in cash. Thanksgiving and Christmas were difficult. He placed stacks of currency on a cart and wheeled it to the van about 15 feet away, inside the building. The Chambers, however, didnt fit in with the other members of the gated community. At the time of the real robbery, Chambers was facing criminal charges hed written 30K worth of bad checks and was facing jail time for it. . I said, It comes down to picking the right day, and the right time of the month, and all that good stuff. I even told her, It wouldnt be all that difficult. Now two NC men face prison. Before David left for the airport, he had handed Scott an eight-inch key ring. Question: What made you, Chambers and the others think you could get away with this? I flew from Atlanta to New Orleans. Ghantt ultimately agreed to the plan, largely, due to a mountain of credit-card debt and in hopes of changing his life for the better. Ghantt was the vault manager and was surrounded. Will Vin Sant Leave You Jacked or Scammed? Chambers and Campbell were waiting for him in the Loomis Fargo parking lot, both in separate vehicles. Loomis Fargo Defendants Owe as Much as They Stole in 1997, FILE - Kelly Campbell, one of the 21 people convicted for their involvement in the $17 million Loomis Fargo heist, awaits sentencing for her part in the theft at her mobile home near Mount Holly, N.C. on Aug 16, 1999. Ghantt fled to Mexico. Chambers, now 32, didn't grant an interview for this article, but last year, in response to written questions, he said the biggest lesson he learned was: "Family is more important and valuable than money. ", "I said, 'If you drive a truck, you're always in a financial bind. She could spend time with her children and parents. It didnt take the local police long to put the pieces together. Down in Jacksonville, a Loomis Fargo employee took $18 million from an armored van he was driving. Kelly says she underestimated the value of her life before the heist. He was also a former FBI informant who had tipped the bureau off to a planned robbery of a Loomis Fargo armored truck that never came to fruition. He partied, met women, drank, skied and hung out at the beach. The Unexpectedly Sweet Story Behind Those Viral Semi-Truck Pregnancy Photos. We need to set up some way for me to get my money. She said, We got it all worked out. Or that hed gotten lucky gambling. They placed a bust of Caesar in the dining room. It wasn't known whether anyone would receive it. Federal law stops government collection efforts 20 years after a defendant leaves prison. In real life: False. Question: You were a consultant? David quickly realized he was the intended victim. Guller was the attorney for Steven Chambers, who came up with the original idea for the Loomis theft. So I was glad it was over. Kelly drove David to the airport. Ghantt went on to explain that he left for his flight to Mexico with about $25,000, and that two or three deliveries of extra money was made to him by the man Chambers would pay to kill him. No hard feelings. Ghantt:It started out as a mental exercise and somewhere between the mental exercise and the actual event, it became serious. For reasons that remain obscure, Robert spilled the beans to David. One day, the two employees were in the break room and got to talking about the news of the day a massive bank heist that just occurred in Florida by someone at their company. She could visit friends. These days, the 52-year-old husband and father lives in Jacksonville, Florida, where he works at a heavy equipment rental agency. I thought, Okay, if I get out of that bubble because the cops depend on that, even the feds my chances to get away go way up.. Paying the money back has taken a lot longer, and time is running out for the U.S. government to collect. When neighbors asked where they got their money, Steve said hed played in the NFL. "I" has one letter. And robbing a truck was dangerous. First, in January, he tried to get someone to take some millions down to Mexico. Steve was sentenced to 11 years 3 months in prison. We got this guy named Bruno. . Come for the Chumbawamba, and stay for the return of the Mack. That was pretty awesome., It felt like a dream vacation until he started running out of money. But former Kings Mountain resident David Scott Ghantt can. The theft at the time the second-largest cash robbery in U.S. history has been the brunt of mocking movies and books, mostly on how the thieves, who had little money to begin with, could not control their spending habits once they did. Without really intending to, Kelly recalls, she turned the conversation to the possibility of a heist. There were times when I drank really heavily.". Or as he tells me, How many people in the United States havent thought about robbing a bank? Yes, happy. It's one of the biggest jokes at the place. Two days after theyd robbed the Loomis Fargo truck the very same day the police found the abandoned van in the woods Steve and Michelle Chambers walked into a bank and deposited their cut of the stolen money into their account. Ive never taken offense to anything like that, he tells me. But what did that mean? ". Steve solicited two others to help move cash during the theft. About the same time, Kelly and McKinney received phone calls from agents who told them to open their doors. Basically, he needed a score to make his problems go away. "As soon as you start, you realize there's no going back," David recalled. I loved it. For his part, Ghantt was now officially on his way to Mexico, his future stretched out before him. Everybody seemed stunned. The barrels were Steves idea, Ghantt says. Then FBI agent Wydra watched Steve's wife, Michele, deposit about $8,000 at a Gaston County, N.C., bank. He covers culture, politics, race, and other perplexing mysteries for MEL. Ghantt was working a late shift, and just after 6:30 p.m., his coworkers were packing up and heading for home. . That time in prison was actually good for me. He played high school football at Mays High School in Atlanta, and college football at Georgia Tech . I couldn't understand why I hadn't been more successful," David said. The next week, they heard Steve plan to send Mike McKinney to Mexico to kill David Ghantt. They also left behind a life-changing fortune in small bills $3.3 million in fives and ones that they overlooked and the two videotapes that Ghantt had pulled from the security cameras at the bank. Chambers never held Campbell hostage by locking her in a shed on his property. More than 20 people ended up in the FBI's dragnet. The case resurfaced in the federal courts on Thursday, Sept. 1, when the U.S. Attorneys Office in Charlotte posted a public reminder in the case file of Loomis defendant Kelly Campbell that she had fallen behind in her restitution. It was late in 1996. From Mexico, David usually spoke with Kelly on the phone once a week, paying with calling cards. You can reach Kevin Ellis at 704-869-1823 or Twitter.com/TheGazetteKevin. But it was the rural, Southern backgrounds of many of the key players, along with the many botched twists and bungled turns, that led the media to dub it the hillbilly heist.. This story was originally published October 3, 2016, 9:12 PM. Was that really what it was about? When he landed in Cancun, his first stop was Walmart. The robbery was committed by Loomis vault supervisor David Scott Ghantt, his married girlfriend Kelly Campbell (a former Loomis co-worker), Steven Eugene Chambers (a one-time FBI informant), his wife Michelle Chambers, Michael Gobbies, and four other co-conspirators. . Reach our Customer Contact Center by calling 877.877.0560 from 6:30 AM to 11:30 PM CT every day or by completing the provided form. Loomis, Fargo offered a $500,000 reward after the theft. On Oct. 7, 1997, two FBI agents arrived at Kelly Campbell's home after two Loomis employees had told agents she and David had once dated. You have to remember that it's Hollywood and they'll take what was a minor event and they'll blow it up and make it as funny as they can.". He appeared happily matched with his high-spirited wife, Michele, and the two children from her first marriage. Steve led the planning. Ghantt simply got ready for work one morning knowing it would be his last day on the job. Key benefit components include: Health insurance plans. Dependent care account. The first weekday after the heist, Michele Chambers, co-conspirator Steve's wife, walked into a NationsBank branch with a briefcase containing $5,000. Ghantt ended up doing more than five years in prison, Chambers did more than 11 years. In real life: False. I pay (restitution to) thousands of people, but its in drips and drabs.. He was an old friend from East Gaston High School, tough and sure of himself. Meanwhile, outside Reynolds & Reynolds, Steve, Scott and Eric needed to move 2,748 pounds of cash, quickly, from the Loomis van into the Budget van. Kelly was lying. Thats one of my personality flaws. She was the group's only contact with David, and she was smoking marijuana "like other people smoke cigarettes," she said. When Chambers and the two Erics were done loading the stolen millions into barrels, they abandoned the van in the woods. Twice a week over the next 12 months, we will take you back to the winter of sheep cloning and the summer of Con Air. He hadnt checked ahead of time if the airport had any available flights, let alone if it would even be open. Then Steve pushed Scott inside, and he began throwing plastic-wrapped bundles of tens, twenties, fifties and hundreds to Eric and Steve, who placed them in three blue 55-gallon barrels. Husband and wife Steven and Michelle Chambers, whose conspicuous consumption of a luxury home, a BMW convertible, breast implants and a $600 wooden Indian, among other purchases, helped the FBI solve the crime, were assessed $3.81 million and $4.8 million, respectively. My love for my family is by far the most important thing in my life. The plan called for David to leave the vault door ajar, then maneuver a few minutes alone at the end of his shift, long enough to loot the cash, then pass it to Kelly and Steve. Things started to go south the night of the robbery. What made her abandon an ordinary existence to commit this spectacular, doomed crime? It was one of those things everyone (at Loomis Fargo) joked about, but in time, it became serious. He flip-flopped on the heist idea three or four times. I just had to call you., Today, Ghantt cant look back on the whole ordeal without some degree of pride. These (Loomis) guys, not so much.. Ghantt:It's a comedy. Few who were living in the area at the time can forget the "Velvet Elvis" painting Chambers had hanging in his mansion or the tales of cosmetic surgery, BMW convertibles and other signs of excess. In Florida, a Loomis Fargo employee had pulled a gun on his coworkers and gotten away with $18 million, a move that FBI agents theorize Ghantt, Campbell and other employees all sat around talking about - and what they would do with that amount of money - for a while. Ghantt:It baffles me to this day. You might as well go all the way now.". Twenty people were convicted of roles big and small in the massive 1997 armored-car warehouse heist in west Charlotte. According to Butcher, Campbells last official payment came in June 2021 when the government appears to have seized a tax refund of $81.24. On his way out, he grabbed the surveillance video, hoping to cover his tracks. She tried to apologize for the murder plot. Did you get paid? . So I guess I have no regrets. That led to better jobs, like the one at Loomis. Campbell and her husband had always been just scraping by, however in the weeks following the robbery, the two seemed to have more money than they've ever had. A week later, another informant told the FBI that Eric Payne had quit his job at a printing company soon after the heist and was spending money he probably hadn't earned legally. She didn't plan to move to Mexico. Sandra Floyd, Michele Chambers's mother, remembers the first time she saw the house. He took bus tours of Mayan ruins. . In one case, the restitution for a Loomis defendant may be a moving target. The initials on the money wrapper belonged to a Loomis employee who hadn't worked there since before the heist. When I call Ghantt to discuss his involvement in the Loomis Fargo heist, he confesses that hes feeling a bit tired from a day of honest labor. Burks was also ordered to serve 15 years in prison, limiting his ability to balance his books. Everything came crashing down on an early March morning in 1998. Scott, 26, had a larceny conviction as a teenager, but he'd since cleaned up his act and now had a steady job, a daughter and a girlfriend. Scary. The plan was to split the money three ways: Chambers, Campbell and Ghantt would each walk away with what Ghantt estimated to be $5 million a piece the kind of money that changes lives forever.