Soon thereafter, he met Kelly Campbell, a co-worker at Loomis Fargo. I would call us friends. "I'm glad I've grown out of that.". Alert: Obviously, spoilers abound. Ghantt was scheduled to work a shift at the armored car company Oct. 4. Loomis officials--forced to break into their own vault because David had taken the keys with him--calculated that he had stolen $17,044,000, making the second biggest heist in U.S. history, following the $18.8 million theft of an armored car by another Loomis Fargo employee just six months earlier. They tried to break the van's bulletproof windows. Loomis, Fargo offered a $500,000 reward after the theft. Should David be killed after he gave them the money? Heres your money. Then he turns around and leaves., The problem was, it was nowhere near the amount Ghantt had expected: Im looking at it, and theres maybe $8,000. Copyright 2022 TheAssociated Press. David had grabbed $50,000 cash, but could figure out only how to carry $25,000 with him on the plane. . It was his goodbye. Careers. Question: Any contact with Steve Chambers or any of the others involved with the heist? At 6-1 and 220 pounds, Steve was stocky and imposing, a fast talker with a brown goatee. Hes well thought-out. Inside were, along with other personal items, his keys and wedding ring. Chambers went from a mobile home in Lincoln County to a mansion in Cramerton. After a Gulf War stint in the Army, David got married in 1992. Now that Kelly believes she has found Jesus, she has become more analytical about her past. "I've learned that I'm a fortunate man," he said. Criminals dont usually get high-paying jobs after leaving prison. We got to the end of the day, and he was acting like he wanted to linger. An officer rang the doorbell. Or that it was an inheritance. By then Id figured out that Bruno was up to no good, and that Id probably never seen any more of my money. "I said, 'That's all they gave me,' " McKinney recalled. Ghantt was apprehended in Mexico and returned to the United States in custody. That led to better jobs, like the one at Loomis. He flip-flopped on the heist idea three or four times. David was sentenced to 7 1/2 years. Theres less security. Hes going to start bringing you money. Alright. Besides her prison sentence, Campbell must undergo mental health and drug treatment and spend two years in a supervised release program. The Loomis Fargo Bank Robbery was the $17.3 million cash robbery of the Charlotte, North Carolina, regional office vault of Loomis Fargo & Company on the evening of October 4, 1997, by armored car driver and vault supervisor David Scott Ghantt. I mean, cause greed is a funny animal. Purchases included a pool table, jewelry (including a $43,000 diamond ring), a minivan, $20,000 worth of cigars, and the 7,000-square-foot home on the side of Cramer Mountain. White-collar criminals are pretty good at hiding their money, she said. They loaded the wine cellar with Pabst Blue Ribbon, and Steve hung a velvet portrait of Elvis Presley in the basement. 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. Ive never taken offense to anything like that, he tells me. Then FBI agent Wydra watched Steve's wife, Michele, deposit about $8,000 at a Gaston County, N.C., bank. "I work construction. Its really just a matter of timing, more than anything. And she says, How much do you think wed get out of there? I said, Ten to 15 million. But I didnt really know.. . A report by the General Accounting Office found that as of budget year 2016, $110 billion in restitution ordered by the federal courts was outstanding and that more than 90% of the amount had been classified as uncollectible.. They picked me, he says with a rueful tone. Thats pretty standard in restitution matters. . At first, David Ghantt said, "I didn't take her seriously. Or that hed gotten lucky gambling. >> 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,. Exciting. The last time he called me, he said, Hey Ghantt, I just saw a big Loomis Fargo truck. 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. Why fans love it. He hated the sweet smell of the green ink, and the $8.15-an-hour salary. Kelly relayed his message to Steve. "You" has three. So yeah, Im kind of proud of it.. "I" has one letter. Here's what Floyd recalls: After two games of pool, Steve told him, "You know, we do a lot of gambling. In real life: True. Thats nearly $11 million less than former Kings Mountain resident David Ghantt (played by Galifianakis in the film) helped steal from the vault where he worked in Charlotte back in October 1997. Gaston County residents remember how that worked out. Kelly said she had reason to believe Steve might be able to pull off a heist. 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. Question: Do you ever think you could have been killed? 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. He's a very likable person. Loomis, Fargo offered a $500,000 reward for his arrest and conviction. Until, that is, he decided to hell with it he was going to pull-off the second largest heist in U.S. history. I don't blame him.". Ghantt:It's kid-friendly, it's family-friendly (the movie is rated PG-13). 2022 marks the 25th anniversary of the year that everything happened 1997. In March 1997, after Loomis Fargo & Company has been robbed of $18.8 million in Jacksonville by company security guard Philip Noel Johnson, Steve Eugene Chambers and Kelly Campbell, a former employee of Loomis, decides to rob the company. He pocketed the money and told Chambers and Campbell to send him his cut in Mexico. 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. ];David Scott Ghanntt [Misc.] In December, agents got the tie-in they were looking for: Kelly Campbell had bought a $30,000 Toyota minivan with cash and registered it to one of Steve Chambers's aliases. With the help of Aldo, a Mexican waiter he had befriended, David found a beach apartment in Cancun. Paying the money back has taken a lot longer, and time is running out for the U.S. government to collect. Thatd be the time to do it, Ghantt recalls. As you probably know, it's loosely based on the Loomis Fargo heist in Charlotte back in the late nineties. Ghantt pulled out $50,000 from the back of the unmarked Loomis Fargo van. Anybody who gets caught up in the system is getting chewed up by it, the now-retired Gronquist told the Observer. I loved it. . There was a third person with them, too, a man named Eric Grant. So yeah, Ghantt continues, I took a bus from there to Atlanta, and then I hopped a cab from the bus station to the airport in Atlanta., Back in North Carolina, his accomplices were working as fast as they could to hide the $17 million. . She'd heard his stories of other successful schemes, like getting refunds on phony tax returns, or operating a loan shark business. If you go from a mobile home to a mansion, that's going to attract attention. 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. On March 1, David Ghantt left his hotel to do some laundry. Question: Are you happy that Wilkesboro-nativeZach Galifianakis plays you in the movie? The name she gave the pup is apropos. He placed stacks of currency on a cart and wheeled it to the van about 15 feet away, inside the building. Twenty-five years ago, a small group of rural North Carolinian amateur bank robbers pulled off the second-largest heist in American history. Ghantt was in fact hiding out in Mexico using McKinneys I.D., which had been sold to Chambers months earlier. As soon as Corey left, I pretended like I was leaving. About 5:30 the next morning, McKinney knocked on David's door and dropped $8,500 on the bed. . 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. First, in January, he tried to get someone to take some millions down to Mexico. . He had even scheduled a follow-up appointment at the dentist. Note: No quotes were altered, although in some cases additional quotes were added to the questions as Ghantt expanded on his thoughts. They cursed. Kelly had recently left a job driving an armored-car for Loomis, Fargo & Co. "He's the one who brought it up first," said Kelly, a year after her arrest. 1997 Harley-Davidson Road King motorcycle for sale at auction of items bought after Loomis, Fargo armored car facility heist by Steven Chambers, wife Michele, Kelly Jane Campbell & David Scott Ghanntt (Photo by Will And Deni McIntyre/Getty Images) On Oct. 5, the Loomis heist celebrates its 25th birthday. I had a four-hour layover there, and then from New Orleans to Cancun.. Kelly had no problem fanning the flames of their old flirtation. Theres no management around. 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. That's the kind of movie they wanted to make. Zach always plays that bumbling kind of lunatic, but hes not, Ghantt says. . As he and Kelly met in a field behind a shooting range to refine the plan, she allowed him to believe she was falling for him. No regrets. In that time, I realized most of my problems were because of me. She was a wife and mother with two children. Chambers and Campbell were waiting for him in the Loomis Fargo parking lot, both in separate vehicles. At first, I just blended in with the tourists and picked up a few translation books, Ghantt explains. On Feb. 27, agents listened in on a call from David to Kelly and learned David's location in Mexico. Michele received the best gift of the night. More than 20 people ended up in the FBI's dragnet. Posted on . . And when everybody else voted to kill me, she voted with them, he explains. Loomis Armored Shreveport, LA, 1124 Forum Dr, Shreveport, LA, USA Shreveport, LA, USA Req #1990. They put up mauve wallpaper. So he convinced a local hoodlum in Mexico to try to kill Ghantt. 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. Cool, I say. Sweat soaked David's uniform. And I said, Hey, man, I got this. Her only brush with the law had been a DUI arrest. I couldn't understand why I hadn't been more successful," David said. Ghantt:It's a comedy. Thanksgiving and Christmas were difficult. This time, David told McKinney the truth. I said, Probably, the best time would be on the weekend; theres fewer people there. Some of the biggest numbers remaining on the Loomis collection board, as is the case with Campbell, belong to those who played the biggest role in the crime: David Ghantt, the Loomis employee who loaded all that money 2,800 pounds in all into the back of a company van before escaping to Mexico, has paid just under $50,000 of the $3.81 million he was assessed. Or is the loot buried in somebody's yard? I really enjoyed the little scuba diving trip. She tried to apologize for the murder plot. . "But I had to know.". 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. There, Scott and Eric paced the floor as Steve tried to calm them down. From going fishing to riding horses on the beach the whole nine yards. "It probably should bother me," he said. Why do we feel its so necessary to treat people like this, to say, OK, well just ruin the rest of your life because you made a bad decision., Punishment should not last a lifetime. So the last third of the movie is almost entirely fiction. She could spend time with her children and parents. 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. Steve and Michele invited everyone back for a Christmas party, where they gave Michele's stepfather a special gift--the pickup truck he'd always wanted. . In real life: False. Together, they drove in a convoy to an industrial warehouse eight miles away, where Eric Payne, a fourth accomplice was. He was doing what the rest of us were doing making bad decisions. The government does not run debtors prisons, says U.S. All rights reserved. Then another. Truth be told, Ghantt had something of a crush on Campbell, and so, he told her exactly how hed pull off such a heist. . I wish them all a happy life and that's about it. Going south, nobody really looks at what youre shipping. At the Halloween party, though, Kelly gave in to Steve, and agreed it had to be done. He took bus tours of Mayan ruins. It wasnt a big hit, but Ghantt, who was played by Galifianakis, gives it a rave review. Her marriage--at which she was making another ambivalent effort after multiple separations--and even the jobs she'd been able to get with a diploma couldn't come close to providing the kind of life she dreamed about, the life she felt she deserved: a house in the country, a swimming pool, and enough cash so she didn't need to rely on men.