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Overview
The inspiration behind the major motion picture Masterminds starring Zach Galifianakis, Owen Wilson, Kristen Wiig, and Jason Sudeikis!
The bizarre true story of the criminals behind the second-largest bank heist in American history.
One night in a small North Carolina town, a down-on-his-luck guard at Loomis Fargo manages to steal $17 million—literally more than one ton of cash. 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.
There's just one hitch: Ghantt has entrusted the money to an oddball crew of accomplices who had wooed him into committing this massive theft in the first place—and who, he soon learns, are trying to take him out. Now one of the most wanted men in America with the FBI hot on his heels, Ghantt must figure out how to get his money, get away from a hit man, and get even.
In this outrageously entertaining book, Jeff Diamant, the Charlotte Observer's lead reporter on the case, offers the definitive inside account of this astonishing
true story that has captivated American audiences on the news and now on the big screen in the major motion picture, Masterminds.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781492625179 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Sourcebooks |
| Publication date: | 08/04/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 788 KB |
About the Author
Jeff Diamant was a reporter for the Charlotte Observer when the heist took place. He is a graduate of Yale and has worked for the Connecticut Post, the Associated Press, and the Palm Beach Post. He has been a staff writer for the Star-Ledger in New Jersey since 2000.
Read an Excerpt
Heist
The Oddball Crew Behind the $17 Million Loomis Fargo Theft
By Jeff Diamant
Sourcebooks, Inc.
Copyright © 2015 Jeff DiamantAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4926-2517-9
CHAPTER 1
Inside the Vault
"Don't double-cross us," the woman on the phone told David Ghantt. "Don't back out on us. Steve's a serious guy."
David didn't appreciate her tone. Who was she to be pressuring him? Steve was a serious guy? It was David who was hours away from committing the most daring act of his life, and she was going off about Steve being a serious guy?
He angrily hung up the phone at Loomis, Fargo & Co., his soon-to-be former employer in Charlotte, North Carolina. It was 2:00 p.m. on October 4, 1997, and tension was building between two planners of what would rank high among the largest heists in United States history.
The woman on the phone was Kelly Jane Campbell, and David had a mad crush on her. She had attitude. Spunk. A parrot tattoo on her right ankle. 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. But they'd stayed in touch, and now they were poised to attempt a crime like almost no other.
After hanging up on her, David returned to work. The only other employee with him on this day was a trainee. David was supposed to be showing him the ropes of the job, which included cash pickups and deliveries. Loomis Fargo, the nation's largest privately held armored- car company, used vans to transport hundreds of millions of dollars a day belonging to banks and other businesses, stocking automated teller machines and storing money in the Loomis vault between deliveries.
The trainee didn't yet know how the place worked, a fact David planned to use to his advantage. At 2:20 p.m., the phone rang; it was Kelly again. "Everything's gonna be all right," she told him. The plan was still on, but David remained steamed. "Just remind Steve," he said, "that I might be trouble my own self." Getting that off his chest calmed him some, and the conversation returned to the plan.
David said he needed Kelly to drive to Loomis before the theft that night to remove a duffel bag from his parked pickup truck. The bag held his mobile phone and handgun. He added that he would be able to send the trainee home at about 6:00 p.m. and would then need about an hour to load the money from carts, shelves, and the floor into a Loomis company van.
"Do you know how much there's gonna be?" she asked.
"About fourteen or fifteen million dollars," he said.
When they hung up, she called his pager and left the code 1-4-3, beeper-speak for "I love you," based on the number of letters in each word.
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 friend was Steve Chambers, and Kelly said he knew his way around the world of crime. David and Steve had never met, but Steve had already secured somebody else's birth certificate and social security card for him and given it to Kelly to pass along. David and Kelly had driven to Rock Hill, South Carolina, and used the documents to obtain a fake ID that David would also rely on after the theft.
The reason David didn't know Steve's last name was so they couldn't identify each other to the police or FBI, should cops or G-men ever enter the picture. 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. In Reservoir Dogs, released just five years earlier, the pawns in a robbery knew each other only by assigned colors: Mr. Pink, Mr. Blue, Mr. Orange, Mr. Blonde.
The actual crime itself required none of Hollywood's imagination. David would simply empty the vault and deliver the money to the others. The loot would later be divided among David, Kelly, and Steve. David's share would be sent to Mexico, where he planned to hide and where he expected Kelly to join him.
David's vision for all of this actually derived more from books than from movies. As a child, he had preferred reading to playing sports, and he would say, as an adult, that although he couldn't have told you "who was on first," he knew as a kid who the Egyptian god of the dead was. As an adult, he preferred Shakespeare, Tom Clancy, and any book he could find about the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
In fact, he had recently finished a book about the FBI and felt it provided insight into the agency's investigative techniques, insight he thought could help the little gang succeed. This was several years before the advent of smartphones and the post-9/11 increase in federal surveillance of electronic communications, and public knowledge about this tracking was less widespread. David told Kelly they would have to control themselves and not spend the money too quickly, because the FBI could electronically trace a suspect's recent spending activity through bank papers, credit card records, and land transactions.
"For the first year after a crime," he told her, "they're all over you, with six to ten agents. But after a year, they cut it down to two agents. And after two years, the case is just a file. If we can sit on the money for a year, maybe two, it could work."
That was taking the long view. A more immediate need was securing help to move the stolen money to safety the night of the crime. 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.
Johnson had stolen $18.8 million earlier in the year, on March 19, 1997, only to be caught five months later, in late August, while crossing into Texas from Mexico to retrieve some of the money, which he'd hidden in a shed in mountainous western North Carolina. 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.
Asked the purpose of his visit, Johnson had replied, "To visit friends."
The guard asked, "To visit friends?"
Johnson said, "Yeah, that's it. To visit friends."
In David's eyes, Johnson's big mistake was that he did it alone. Learning from this error, David planned to leave the stolen money behind with his coconspirators while he fled to Mexico. He would then have the bulk of his share sent south of the border. If it didn't work out, he could return to the United States later with a new identity.
David placed their odds of success at 85 percent, a confidence inspired by faith not just in his planning but also in his feelings for Kelly. He wanted to leave his wife for her, and Kelly, who also was married, let him think she wanted the same. The stated plan was for her to move to Mexico to be with him after the theft. They hadn't slept together or even fooled around much, but he was ready to commit. 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.
At that point, Kelly and David had known each other for two years. They had met in December 1995 on one of her first days at Loomis. 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."
"I don't need any more friends," she'd shot back. "But you can still have a cigarette."
David got a kick out of her. They could talk about anything, even topics he couldn't discuss with his wife. NASCAR. Four-wheeling. How he felt shorted by life. How he and his wife had trouble communicating. And Kelly thought he was funny.
Except for the kiss in the pickup truck a few weeks before the heist, Kelly had kept things platonic. She'd left Loomis in November 1996 to take a job elsewhere as a security guard. Afterward, she and David would talk just occasionally on the phone. Their most important conversation occurred one afternoon in August 1997 after Kelly paged him at work. After discussing his job, his marriage, and his everyday struggles, they joked about Loomis and about how easy it would be to steal from the place.
Conversations about stealing from the company weren't rare for Loomis employees. For people earning $8.15 an hour — David's salary — the jokes came naturally. But this time on the phone, Kelly wasn't joking.
"Just think about it," she said. "What would it take to make you do it?"
Over the next two weeks, David thought about it. Living with his wife, Tammy, in a mobile home, he had longed for the middle-class lifestyle of his childhood that had come to seem luxurious, a pipe dream for him now. 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. In his youth, his mother had taken him to Sears and JCPenney, but as a man he shopped at Walmart, and while he knew there was nothing wrong with that, he wished he could afford more.
He even had to watch what he bought at the grocery store. He and Tammy could have one or two meals each week that he really liked, but the rest were hot dogs or Hamburger Helper. He was on a budget for clothes, even for work boots; he had recently needed to check seven stores before finding a pair in his price range. The Charlotte area's economy was booming all around him, and he felt passed over.
It all seemed unfair. He was a hard worker, smart enough, and had graduated from high school. He had joined the army and earned an honorable discharge, but because of defense-industry cutbacks he hadn't been able to find a good job for himself. Lacking a college degree, he found that his army skills felt meaningless in the 1990s job market.
He had since held one low-paying job after another. After marrying Tammy in 1992, he worked fueling airplanes at the airport in Hilton Head, South Carolina. In 1994, they moved to Gastonia, North Carolina, where they had grown up, and David took a job driving a forklift. Later that year, he saw a newspaper ad for a job at Loomis Fargo. He put on his best pair of jeans, a button-down shirt, and his nicest cowboy boots. The supervisor liked him and gave him the job.
In Gastonia, David would run into high-school classmates who had never struck him as especially smart. Yet their lives seemed far easier and better than his. 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.
If the American Dream involved being better off as adults than your parents were, David was experiencing a version of the American Nightmare. The unfairness gnawed at him, stirred by Kelly's questions. He deserved better. Stealing from Loomis Fargo could make him rich, if he got away with it. He could even be famous, perhaps joining the ranks of legendary master thieves.
Of course, this would all be a radical departure for him, and thoughts of his wife and parents did give him pause. He knew it would mean leaving Tammy. He knew his mother would be traumatized, shocked, and appalled. Growing up, David had been a nice kid, a decent student who was at worst a minor troublemaker and prankster.
About the worst he had done as a teenager was stealing a construction company's Porta-Jon with a friend, tying it to the back of a pickup truck, and driving around for about fifteen minutes. Then they returned it. Another time, the day after a Christmas in the late 1980s, David and some friends planted all the discarded Christmas trees from the area in one neighbor's front yard. If a prank seemed dangerous, David backed out. When some friends stole a stop sign from a busy intersection, David made them put it back.
But with Kelly's new idea on the table, several dark realities converged on him. He hated his job and his bosses, he'd lost hope in his marriage, he wasn't going to advance at Loomis, and he couldn't afford to quit to enroll in college. He realized his life wouldn't improve unless he did something drastic.
He waffled on the heist idea three or four times from late August to mid-September. Then one day, while reviewing his and Tammy's credit card bill, he did some quick math and realized that even if they met the minimum monthly payments, the bill would take thirty years to pay. Thirty years! And they could barely afford the minimum payments, given the power bills, phone bills, car insurance bills, and home payments they had to meet. He decided at that moment that if Kelly called again, he would go for it.
Sure enough, she called a few days later, around September 16. "What would it take to convince you to do it?" she asked again.
"I'll need help moving the money, getting a new ID, and leaving the country," he told her.
"Are you serious?" She sounded incredulous.
He said he was.
"I've got a friend," she said, "who can hook you up with a new ID."
* * *
The October 4 shift was lasting longer than expected, due to delays involving pickups and deliveries. As it neared its end, David stealthily left the vault door ajar. The trainee didn't know to check to make sure it was closed.
David and the trainee left the warehouse. In the parking lot, David sat in his pickup truck smoking a cigarette and waving good-bye as the trainee drove home. At about 6:40 p.m., he went back inside.
The walk-in vault was a fortified gray room, more wide than long, with shelves, cabinets, desks, and multiple pushcarts stocked with shrink-wrapped cash. The building was configured so vans could drive inside and pull up next to the vault. That way, outsiders couldn't see money being loaded. 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.
Moving the money into the van quickly proved an onerous task. Though much of the cash was already stacked on pushcarts in the vault, other stacks were on shelves or the floor, and they were heavy. David was thin — six-foot-one, one hundred sixty-five pounds — and heaving the stacks onto the cart, pushing the cart toward the vault door, and then emptying its contents into the van was exhausting.
And once he started, he didn't stop with one cartful. As beads of sweat formed under his red hair, he loaded up another cart and repeated the process. Seven p.m. came and went, and so did 7:20. Kelly called, using David's own cell phone, to ask where he was already, because she and the others were waiting outside for him.
"I'm busy," he said. "I don't have time to mess with you. I gotta go."
He knew they were nervous outside waiting for him, but he also knew he wouldn't stop stealing until he had taken everything. There was no reason to leave anything, he felt. In the grand scheme of things, the prison sentence for stealing $20 million wouldn't be much worse than for stealing just $500,000 — maybe a few extra years behind bars. It wasn't how much you stole that mattered most; it was that you had stolen in the first place.
Each cart, holding about $2 million, was taking David seven or eight minutes to stack, push, and empty into the van, and there were about eight cartloads' worth in the vault. He stayed at it until the vault was empty.
Now, at 7:45 p.m., with all the money finally inside the van, his aching muscles could take a breather. But he wasn't finished. He shut the empty vault and set its timer so the vault could not be opened for two or three days. 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. He realized his bosses would know he had worked that day and that he was missing, but maybe without a video they would think he'd been held at gunpoint and taken hostage, or even better, that he'd been killed. He ejected the two VCR tapes that he knew had recorded him stealing the money, took them, and prepared to leave.
He called Kelly to say he was coming and hopped into the driver's seat of the loaded Loomis van. The plan was to exit through the building's electronic back gate, which consisted of horizontal metal plates that opened at the touch of a button. It should have been easy, but for some reason the gate didn't open for him.
His eyes widened and he stopped breathing as he realized that something as mundane as a malfunctioning gate might ruin their entire plan. He'd already done enough, he realized, to get himself fired and arrested, even if the gate prevented him from moving the money outside the building. He tried again to make the back gate rise, to no avail.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Heist by Jeff Diamant. Copyright © 2015 Jeff Diamant. Excerpted by permission of Sourcebooks, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Front Cover,Title Page,
Copyright,
Author's Note,
Inside the Vault,
Teamwork,
The Key to Success,
Creative Money Laundering,
Caught on Video,
How Baseball Hindered the FBI,
Nerves,
Fun on the Run,
Close to Home,
Staying Close to Home,
Tercel to BMW,
Dead Man in Mexico?,
Stolen Stolen Money,
Christmas Bear,
A Careful David,
Coming Together,
Getting Close to Him,
Taking Care of Business,
Final Touches,
Glad to See You,
All Over,
Public Defenders,
Flying Home,
The M&M's Contest,
Legal Trouble,
Staying in Jail,
Of Brain Size and Bust Size,
A Revealing Trial,
Selling Elvis,
Regrets,
Out West,
Epilogue,
Acknowledgments,
About the Author,
Back Cover,