Hes a family man with a wife and daughter. Then, he proceeded to load 2,800 pounds of cash into a van. Of course the problem was, the money belonged to someone else. More than half of the amount came from the seizure of a luxury home purchased by husband-and-wife defendants during their post-heist spending spree. Tips had led the FBI to begin monitoring Chambers (and his wifes) activities, but it was not until the FBIrecorded a phone callfrom Ghantt in Mexico that the final connection was made. Then they returned it. "its a great readsuspenseful, often funny, just the thing for those wondering what it might feel like to have, as these hapless, small-town criminals did, literally too darn much cash lying around. " Eric Payne got out of prison in 2006 for his role in the heist and has since paid $11,357 on his $292,000 debt. LETTER TO THE EDITOR: Is this really about the needs of the poor? You cannot fine low-income people millions of dollars. Unexplained Mysteries and Strange Things,Cool Interesting stuff has been online since early 2011. He and Tammy could have one or two meals each week that he really liked, but the rest were hot dogs or Hamburger Helper. David knew this was important from having followed the recent news about a Florida man who had brazenly committed the biggest heist from an armored-car company in United States history, a loner named Philip Noel Johnson, who also had worked for Loomis. He added that money can be a motivator for anyone. The bag held his mobile phone and handgun. Only a nickel on every dollar have been collected so far. "Don't back out on us. The plan to. Steve and Michelle Chambers, who had lived in a mobile home, bought a mansion in Cramer Mountain. Michelle Chambers paid off only $27,000. His collection case closes in two years. Charlotte Observer"more than a crime story, and one that's worth reading." The bizarre true story of the criminals behind the second-largest bank heist in American history. The gang made numerous mistakes. Conversations about stealing from the company weren't rare for Loomis employees. While Ghantt trusted Chambers enough to leave his cut behind, Chambers had other plans. Investigators considered Ghantt to be the prime suspect almost from the beginning. Loomis Fargo heist: 25 years later David Scott Ghantt, his former co-worker Kelly Campbell and her friends Steve and Michelle Chambers carried out the Loomis Fargo heist on Oct. 4, 1997. The True Story of David Ghantt and the Loomis Fargo Heist - PrepScholar So we were able to figure out with all the denominations, it would require about 20 safe deposit boxes to store it all.. of violence, racism, anti-Semitism, or Loomis Fargo heist: 25 years later While David Ghantt trusted Steve Chambers enough to leave his cut behind, Chambers had other plans. CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) During one overnight shift, a bumbling conspiracy of thieves just west of Charlotte stole more than $17 million from Loomis Fargo. As beads of sweat formed under his red hair, he loaded up another cart and repeated the process. White-collar criminals are pretty good at hiding their money, she said. The money weighed as much as a compact car and he did it all by himself. He quickly found out when you have money, you just have different problems, Wydra said. The property has changed hands several times since then. That sounds like a lot of money until its compared to the $18,930,201.26 the group was ordered to pay. She was five-foot-seven, had dirty-blond hair, and had worked with him for about a year at Loomis Fargo, until she left for another job in 1996. Ghantt, his former co-worker Kelly Campbell and her friends Steve and Michelle Chambers carried out the Loomis Fargo heist on Oct. 4, 1997. Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. The bigger the amount, however, the bigger the damages to victims that likely will never be repaid: - Amy Paynes collection account was closed in 2020 with her having paid $53,000 of the $274,000 she owed. But if you did, youll never forget it. Then, keeping with the plan, Ghantt took $50,000 (the maximum that could be taken across the border by law without further authorization) with him and left for Mexico, winding up at the popularYucatan Peninsularesort ofCozumel. In all, agents arrested 24 people in the heist. OWLS director fired in wake of new board taking over, New rules will require flood history disclosure in real estate, North Carolina recreational spring flounder season canceled for 2023, Supreme Court seems ready to sink student loan forgiveness, Beach commission gets update on search for new sources of sand for beach nourishment. He waffled on the heist idea three or four times from late August to mid-September. He was the only employee unaccounted for the next morning, and videotapes recovered at the Loomis Fargo Charlotte office showed Ghantt removing cubes of cash and loading it into a Loomis Fargo armored van for over an hour. Well she was a pretty happy-go-lucky person, he said. Later that year, he saw a newspaper ad for a job at Loomis Fargo. For example, Steve Chambers and his wife were living in a. (LogOut/ Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. You can seize property. Later, they also arrested Nathans older brother. shaka wear graphic tees is candy digital publicly traded ellen lawson wife of ted lawson real kelly campbell loomis fargo heist 25 Feb/23 (No Ratings Yet) There are many robberies registered in the history of America, but the Loomis Fargo Robbery is known to be the second largest robbery in the United States. Kelly Campbell, who one day visited a Toyota dealership to purchase a minivan with twenty-dollar bills. The world is full of unexplained events, strange mysteries, and mysterious legends. (LogOut/ Of course, this would all be a radical departure for him, and thoughts of his wife and parents did give him pause. Campbell left her job in the summer of 1997, but she would later use Ghantt's feelings for her to her own advantage to get him to agree to carry out the multi-million-dollar heist. Friends of Campbell had also begun spending large amounts of cash. CHARLOTTE If you didnt live in the Charlotte area 25 years ago, you might not believe it. David's vision for all of this actually derived more from books than from movies. Getting restitution, its like pulling teeth.. Who all wanted a Rambo movie which explored his time training as a green beret and his time serving in Vietnam as a prequel to first blood WATCH Antebellum 2020 FULL MOVIE. "But you can still have a cigarette.". Lacking a college degree, he found that his army skills felt meaningless in the 1990s job market. personal/abusive/condescending attacks on other users or goading People dont seem to understand human nature. Man at the center of Loomis Fargo heist 25 years ago now a 'normal guy Sure to be in demand as the book has been made into a movie, Masterminds, to be released in August.Michael Sawyer, Pine Bluff, AR. It should have been easy, but for some reason the gate didn't open for him. The figures can be astounding. 1997 Loomis Fargo Robbery - Strange Unexplained Mysteries Its in the ether. A customs inspector, asking routine questions of bus passengers, focused her attention on him when his answers reminded her of Tommy Flanagan, the pathological-liar character played by Jon Lovitz on Saturday Night Live. He couldn't understand the gap, why he wasn't more successful, why he couldn't at least match the financial stability of his father, who earned a comfortable salary driving a truck. In order to receive more evidence, the FBI decided to listen. He had approached her inside the chain-link fence that surrounded the building and said with a flirty smile, "If you give me a cigarette, I'll be your friend. He also stole both existing sets of vault keys and hurried into the manager's office, where three TV security screens and two VCRs were visible. LeVaughn Kelly Campbell (born July 23, 1980 in Atlanta, Georgia) is a former football wide receiver. David was supposed to be showing him the ropes of the job, which included cash pickups and deliveries. Inside $3.3 million was located along with the two stolen surveillance tapes, apparently left due to the robber and his accomplices being sloppy, or in a hurry. [DOWNLOAD: Free Action News Jax app for alerts as news breaks]. Loomis Fargo defendants owe as much as they stole in 1997 What that says is, We will never forgive you for what youve done.. Perry identified the other six people arrested as Steve and Michelle Chambers; Kelly Jane Campbell, a former Loomis employee; Michael L. McKinney; Thomas Nathan Grant; and Eric Haley Payne.. Heist!: The $17 Million Loomis Fargo Theft - amazon.com She was five-foot-seven, had dirty-blond hair, and had worked with him for about a year at Loomis Fargo, until she left for another job in 1996. An additional tip reached the FBI when Michelle Chambers made a large deposit at a bank. This technically made it abank robbery afederal offense. All but one took plea deals, including Ghantt, who was sentenced to seven years in prison. High around 65F. "For the first year after a crime," he told her, "they're all over you, with six to ten agents. ALSO READ: 14-year-old boy robbed at gunpoint while waiting for bus in east. It all seemed unfair. And if that gives people out there a little bit of hope, then Ive served my purpose on this earth.. "Don't double-cross us," the woman on the phone told David Ghantt. He has been a staff writer for the Star-Ledger in New Jersey since 2000. In 1994, they moved to Gastonia, North Carolina, where they had grown up, and David took a job driving a forklift. That was the thing that sticks in my mind to this day.. A former FBI agent who helped crack the case sat down with Channel 9 Reporter Glenn Counts to talk about the clues that led to solving the crime, and how the group got caught. They also found several stacks of money with Loomis bands still attached throughout all the homes searched. Butcher says the federal courts in the Western District of North Carolina have never handled a case quite like Loomis. All of the co-defendants were arrested the next day, about six months after the heist. In 2017, for example, Paul Burks of Lexington was ordered to pay $244 million to the victims of his worldwide Ponzi scheme, Zeek Rewards. Chambers would then occasionally wire Ghantt money and see to his basic financial needs; when the heat was off, Ghantt was to re-enter the U.S. and the money would be split up among all of the co-conspirators. The Star-Ledger, 06/15/2015On October 4, 1997, an amateurish gang robbed Loomis, Fargo & Co. in Charlotte, NC of $17 million, the second largest heist in U.S. history. He and his wife, Michele, moved from theirmobile homeinLincoln Countyto a luxury house in the wealthy Cramer Mountain section ofCramerton. Campbell was another employee at Loomis Fargo and she and Ghantt quickly struck up a relationship, one that Campbell denies was ever romantic though FBI evidence says otherwise, and one that continued after she left the company. The principals here are David Ghantt, a driver for Loomis, Fargo and Co.; Kelly Campbell, the woman Ghantt had a crush on, and who convinced him to commit the crime; and Steve and Michele Chambers. 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. A couple by the names of Steve and Shelley Chambers also became people of interest in the investigation due to their extreme sudden increase in spending. More calls between the two men, and also between Steve and Kelly Campbell, made it clear that the group was starting to turn on David Ghantt. Campbell, a former Loomis employee and one of the original masterminds of the caper, has paid off less than $21,000 of the $4,701,694.18 she was docked. My knee-jerk reaction was to be angry, and then the sarcastic ass side of me started laughing about it, Ghantt said. I think if you remember some of her early photographic opportunities, shall we put it that way, she was sort of laughing, not seeming to take it seriously.. Campbell led Ghantt to think she loved him and they would flee to Mexico together, but she actually wanted to make a better life for herself in the U.S. With the plan in place, Ghantt sent a newly hired employee he had been assigned to train home early (reportedly, at 6 p.m.) and then proceeded to load a little more than $17.3 million in cash (approximately $11 million of which was in$20 bills) into the back of a company van. Uh-oh, it looks like your Internet Explorer is out of date. He wanted to leave his wife for her, and Kelly, who also was married, let him think she wanted the same. David would simply empty the vault and deliver the money to the others. Guller was the attorney for Steven Chambers, who came up with the original idea for the Loomis theft. So they went to Mexico and arrested Ghantt in order to protect him. 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. Growing up, David's family went to Disney World, sent him to religious school, and shopped at places he couldn't afford as a self-supporting adult. 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. As an adult, he preferred Shakespeare, Tom Clancy, and any book he could find about the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The van used to move the money was later located a few miles from the warehouse. You cannot fine low-income people millions of dollars. Her case closes in 2025. Fact check: Is there much truth to the new 'Masterminds' movie? In preparation for what lay ahead, David had backed an unmarked company Ford Econoline van near the vault entrance and opened the van's back door. Despite being caught on camera wheeling the money from the vault to the getaway van, David Ghantt makes off to Mexico before the FBI can blink. she asked. Kelly had approached David with the idea in the summer, knowing he had a crush on her and winning him over with the promise that a shady friend of hers with Mafia ties would help them. The government does not run debtors prisons, says U.S. Probably very egotistical of me, I thought, Yeah, sure, I can beat them, theyre college smart and thats about it, Ghantt said. There was a book published in 2002 as well, by author Jeff Diamant called,Heist! Getting that off his chest calmed him some, and the conversation returned to the plan. And Kelly thought he was funny. To be brutally honest, it was that morning, Ghantt replied. All of the primary players got fined millions of dollars --for example, Kelly Campbell was hit with more than $4 million, an amount that she will never come close to paying. Still facing possible unknowns of other people involved, the FBI needed to gather more information without the suspects getting suspicious of them. They involve Loomis armored car driver David Scott Ghantt. Twenty people were convicted of roles big and small in the massive 1997 armored-car warehouse heist in west Charlotte. 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. These weren't the hardest of criminals, and though there was logic to not knowing each other's names, they had derived some of their methods from Hollywood depictions of crime. For the defendants in the Loomis Fargo heist, its allure was irresistible. Ghantt met up with the other members of the plot and offloaded the cash. Learning from this error, David planned to leave the stolen money behind with his coconspirators while he fled to Mexico. Records show the government has garnished his Social Security checks. White-collar criminals are pretty good at hiding their money, she said. I made a joke once that was the hardest Id ever worked for Wells Fargo -- yeah, its a lot of work, Ghantt said. In August 1997, Campbell informed Ghantt about an old high school friend of hers named Steve Chambers, who could assist Ghantt to execute a massive cash robbery of the Loomis Fargo vault in one night. These (Loomis) guys, not so much.. uncanny, eerie, unnatural, preternatural, supernatural, unearthly, other-worldly, unreal, ghostly, mysterious, mystifying, strange, abnormal, unusual. Thats pretty standard in restitution matters. The towns booming construction industry attracts workers from around the country. The biggest restitution numbers for victims of financial crimes generally involve Ponzi schemes or sweepstakes fraud, not cash thefts. Jim Gronquist was Campbells defense attorney. The woman on the phone was Kelly Jane Campbell, and David had a mad crush on her. The movie was called Masterminds and stars Zach Galifianakis, Kristen Wiig and Owen Wilson. One number is working in Campbells favor. Channel 9 speaks with the man at the center of Loomis Fargo heist 25 It, too, has changed hands several times. All but one of the 24 defendants pleaded guilty, and the one who didnt take the deal was convicted. Their only intimate physical contact had been kissing on a mid-September night when they had driven her pickup truck to a field behind a shooting range in Gaston County to discuss their plans and the theft's chance of success. Fourteen defendants were ordered to make restitution payments to Loomis Fargo totaling almost $19 million. Soon thereafter, he met Kelly Campbell, a co-worker at Loomis Fargo. Campbell, a former Loomis employee and one of the original masterminds of the caper, has paid off less than $21,000 of the $4,701,694.18 she was docked. The trainee didn't yet know how the place worked, a fact David planned to use to his advantage. They also purchased expensive cars, jewelry and a breast enhancement or two. contact us to submit an unexplained mystery article, or to join the team on the email address below. Since then, there have been numerous articles, books, documentaries and even a movie about this gang -- the gang that couldnt shoot straight. The 2016 comedy movie, Masterminds is based on the story of the Loomis Fargo Heist. And with Loomis, were looking at only one case. Campbell, a mother of two, was in the process of divorcing I was relieved emotionally because I knew there was a good chance my luck might run out, Ghantt said. He hired a hitman to take Ghantt out, tying up the ultimate loose end. Curiously, Payne had recently paid of his Visa in one payment and had been driving around new and rented vehicles for the past weeks. (John D. Simmons/The Charlotte Observer via AP). But they'd stayed in touch, and now they were poised to attempt a crime like almost no other. The Loomis defendants face no additional legal jeopardy for not paying off their debts. "What would it take to convince you to do it?" David Scott Ghantt, his former co-worker Kelly Campbell and her friends Steve and Michelle Chambers carried out the Loomis Fargo heist on Oct. 4, 1997. By this time, agents knew where he was and had a general idea who the other players were, so they went to every bank in town to see if any of them rented a safe deposit box. Theres no way to get it back, Butcher told The Charlotte Observer. Ghantt studied how to rob his employer and advised the others not to spend the money lavishly. Sure enough, she called a few days later, around September 16. "So he stays behind and moving over two thousand pounds of . These cookies do not store any personal information. That first day in prison was scary, Ghantt said. We are happy to work with other website publishers. David said he needed Kelly to drive to Loomis before the theft that night to remove a duffel bag from his parked pickup truck. - 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. In David's eyes, Johnson's big mistake was that he did it alone.