Heist Page 13

  Then there was a glitch. Tommy Grant didn’t have his traveling papers in order and needed some time. Chambers was angry. He called McKinney to delay the trip three days, until Monday, March 2, so Grant could get the certified copy of his birth certificate that he needed.

  The FBI also intercepted an electronic message to Kelly’s pager, apparently from Ghantt. The message contained the following number sequence: 227983009898143. Cross-matching that with phone numbers, the agents took the message to mean that on February 27, 1998, at three o’clock, Ghantt would call Campbell at the phone outside Nichols Food Store.

  • • •

  Agent Womble had an afternoon shift of manning the microphone in the hotel room next to McKinney’s. He could tell that McKinney was there by himself. All Womble could hear through the wall was the sound of the suspect watching TV, downing booze, and then urinating for what seemed like forever. One time, McKinney kept it going for almost the length of two commercials. Womble realized he had had finer, more dignified moments as an investigator.

  At 9:20 a.m. the next day, February 27, another agent was manning the microphone when Chambers arrived in McKinney’s room. For the next thirty-eight minutes, the two talked about plans to murder Ghantt with a gun and how they would conceal it.

  “If it fucks up,” Chambers said, “we are all in a world of shit.”

  Glad to See You

  Sure enough, Ghantt called Campbell at 3:00 p.m. on February 27. The agents heard him complain that nobody had arrived to give him money. Campbell, who had not yet heard from Chambers that the trip was delayed until March 2, said that someone would be in touch that day. Ghantt gave his phone number as 314-84, in room 101. Campbell said she would try to learn more details of the delivery for him, and Ghantt said he would call her back.

  This time, Ghantt’s call was traced quickly to the Hotel La Tortuga in Playa del Carmen. The agents finally knew exactly where he was.

  They continued to monitor the phones, listening ten minutes later when Ghantt called Campbell again. They could sense his frustration when she had no new information for him. Their concern for his life didn’t stop some agents from chuckling when Ghantt told Campbell he loved her and her response was, “I’m still gonna try to come down there.”

  • • •

  Supervisor Rick Shaffer quickly contacted Rozzi with Ghantt’s location, which Rozzi shared with his Interpol hosts. Two undercover Interpol officers—a man and a woman—checked into the Hotel La Tortuga pretending to be a married couple. After learning the hotel’s layout, they told Rozzi he would stand out, thanks to his bushy American mustache. So he found a hotel elsewhere. Playa del Carmen was packed with tourists, and hotel rooms were hard to come by. Rozzi had to settle for a dump of an inn a few blocks away that had a power outage almost immediately after he checked in.

  That day, February 27, the Interpol officers, using the FBI’s pictures, identified Ghantt sitting at the hotel pool. They didn’t arrest him on the spot, knowing they’d have to closely coordinate that with the FBI. In addition, they needed to ask Rozzi to confirm the man’s identity. Rozzi walked into the hotel and saw his man in the lobby. It was Ghantt, all right.

  In Charlotte, the FBI remained uncertain about exactly when the arrests should be made. Interpol officers continued tracking Ghantt as Rozzi waited for orders from North Carolina. Since McKinney’s trip to Mexico was being delayed until March 2, there was less immediacy, and the FBI would use the extra time to continue searching for the stolen money.

  The key to the whole operation, of course, was the Interpol officers’ ability to keep track of Ghantt. To Rozzi’s dismay, that was not a given.

  Rozzi was stationed for hours at a time around the corner from Ghantt’s hotel. There, on the street, he waited to trail Ghantt’s followers at a distance, in case they shadowed him leaving the place. On March 1, Rozzi saw the Interpol officers exiting the hotel with perplexed looks on their faces. They had lost him.

  Rozzi’s heart sank. But it turned out Ghantt was not running from them. He hadn’t known they were there, and he returned to the hotel after some very nervous hours for the officers there. Once Ghantt was back in sight, Rozzi called the FBI in North Carolina and told Shaffer they needed to act fast because the Interpol officers obviously were not well trained in surveillance. If they didn’t arrest Ghantt soon, they risked losing him.

  “I can’t promise you he’s not going to get lost again, for good,” Rozzi said.

  Shaffer asked if they could wait a few hours. He also wanted Rozzi to see if his hosts would agree to not publicize anything about the arrest until the next day, March 2. That’s when the bureau had decided to arrest Ghantt’s cohorts in North Carolina, early that morning, shortly before McKinney and Tommy Grant were to fly to Mexico. If the news of Ghantt’s arrest emerged too soon, the North Carolina suspects could get desperate. In the meantime, the FBI began lining up its own people and some local police officers so they could bring in all the suspects in North Carolina simultaneously.

  Three hours later, as the sun was about to set on March 1, about five undercover Interpol officers approached David Scott Ghantt on a street near the Hotel La Tortuga. He was holding a laundry bag and apparently looking for a place to do a Sunday wash. Even before Ghantt noticed them, he seemed nervous, like he was scanning the streets for his killer.

  One of the officers tapped him on the back and said, “Excuse me, sir.”

  Ghantt kept walking.

  “Excuse me, sir,” the officer said. “Could we see your passport?”

  Ghantt stopped. As the officers surrounded him, he showed a picture identification with the name Michael McKinney.

  The Interpol officer who had tapped him said, “You’re not Mr. McKinney, are you, Mr. Ghantt?”

  “No, I’m not,” Ghantt said, turning his head and making eye contact for the first time with Rozzi, who was standing about five feet behind him. Ghantt seemed relieved to see an American in the crew. “Please,” Ghantt said, staring at Rozzi, “tell me you’re an FBI agent.”

  “Yes, I am,” Rozzi said.

  “I’m glad to see you,” Ghantt said.

  “I’m glad to see you, David,” Rozzi said.

  “You know, they wanted to kill me.”

  “I know,” Rozzi said. “Don’t talk about that now. We’ll have a chance to talk.”

  All Over

  With a handgun close by under a pillow, Steve Chambers was in a criminally rich man’s slumber next to Michele when, just after 6:00 a.m. on March 2, there was a loud knock at the door.

  Minutes earlier, outside his lovely house, about two dozen FBI agents and local police officers had adjusted their Kevlar bulletproof vests, rechecked their Sig Sauer, Glock, and Smith & Wesson handguns, and stealthily positioned themselves around his yard, away from the windows. Minutes before that, the agents and officers had driven a caravan of SUVs and cars up the winding road that led to 503 Stuart Ridge, passing through a neighborhood of luxury homes that the agents themselves could not afford. John Wydra, Rick Shaffer, and the other agents parked their cars a few homes away from that of Steve and Michele Chambers and silently prepared for what was next. As they approached their destination, they drew their guns.

  Hearing the knocking, Steve arose from his bed, rubbed his eyes, threw on a pair of boxers, and stumbled to the door. “Who is it?” he asked.

  A man outside said he was a Gaston County police officer and that somebody had broken into Steve’s furniture store. The police needed to talk to him.

  Steve opened his door.

  “FBI! Get down! Get down!” the agents yelled.

  Steve dropped to the floor. “What the hell’s going on?” he blurted out. Agents quickly surrounded him, handcuffed him, and placed him under arrest. He asked to speak to Phil King.

  “Be careful,” Shaffer advised the other agents preparing to occupy the home, room by
room. “There are kids in the house.”

  Pointing their guns and flashlights, Wydra and Gerry Kidd, a Charlotte-Mecklenburg sheriff’s deputy, rushed the bedroom, where Michele Chambers was huddled under the covers.

  “Hands up!” Wydra and Kidd yelled together.

  Michele obeyed, revealing that she was wearing nothing but her $43,000 diamond ring. Wydra still had his gun pointed at her. Michele, her hands in the air, realized her breasts were showing and moved to pull the covers around her.

  “Hands back up!” Kidd shouted, worried she had a weapon in the bed.

  Michele stood up, grabbed a bathrobe, and held it in front of her.

  Wydra and the other agents were suspicious the robe contained a weapon. “Hands back up!” Wydra yelled.

  For law-enforcement officers, a robe is a standard security check in a bedroom arrest. Wydra and the other male agents in the room turned away from Michele while a female agent checked the robe for weapons. It was clean, and Michele put it on. Then she removed her diamond ring at the agents’ direction and placed it on the bathroom vanity. She would be allowed to dress and pack a bag for her children, she was told. The agents quickly discovered a handgun under a pillow on the bed.

  While other agents began to take inventory of the couple’s assets, Michele found the perfect moment when absolutely nobody’s eyes but her own were on the diamond ring. She palmed it; after all, it was hers, she figured. When she walked into another room to pack a bag for her children, who would have to stay with her parents while she was in custody, it hit her that she was going to jail. She put the ring inside her children’s suitcase. She also packed her Rolex and a diamond tennis bracelet.

  She then called her parents’ house. “I need you to come pick up the kids,” she told her stepfather.

  Dennis Floyd didn’t understand why.

  “Right now,” Michele said. “Bye.”

  • • •

  About the same time, five miles away in Gastonia, FBI agents poured into the Hampton Inn. From the front desk, one of them called room 403, inhabited by Michael McKinney. McKinney had fallen asleep only two and a half hours earlier. The book he was reading—The Partner by John Grisham, about a lawyer who fakes his own death and flees to Brazil with $90 million—was on his hotel night table. Groggy, he answered the telephone, figuring it was a wake-up call.

  The voice on the phone asked if he was Mike McKinney.

  He said he was.

  The voice said the FBI was there and that he should open his door. McKinney did, and agents swarmed into his room.

  Meanwhile, about five miles away in Mount Holly, agents called the mobile home of Kelly Campbell, who was still sleeping. The person on the phone told Kelly that it was the FBI, that she should open the door, and that she had better stay on the phone while doing so.

  Kelly peeked through the window blinds. Police cars were everywhere. She grabbed a robe and opened the door. Agents rushed inside. A female agent made her drop the robe, checked it for weapons, and gave it back to her. An agent asked if she knew what this was about. “It’s about the money stolen from Loomis Fargo,” Kelly said. “That’s the only thing the FBI has ever interviewed me about.”

  She put a shirt on and alerted the agents to her pistol on her nightstand. Annoyed by a female agent’s glare, Kelly mouthed off: “What are you looking at?” The agent shrugged her off and they began looking through the home.

  At the same time, twelve miles away in Belmont, agents knocked on the door of Eric Payne’s mobile home. Eric yawned and walked to the door in his boxers. He figured it was a relative, though he had no idea who or why, since it was so early. He opened the door to FBI agents, who swarmed inside.

  Eric told them he hadn’t done anything. When agents soon confronted him with $70,000 in bills just removed from his closet, he told them it was from gambling. They responded that he must be pretty good at it. Eric knew he was toast.

  • • •

  Early on, it was shaping up to be the worst day of their lives.

  Steve and Michele had made the steepest ascent up the social ladder after the heist, and their fall back down had already begun. They were taken in separate FBI vehicles to the agency’s Charlotte headquarters for interviews. When they hit Interstate 85, they were driving in the opposite direction on the same highway that the group had traveled with the stolen money the evening of the heist.

  That October night and afterward, Steve had sworn his cohorts to keep their mouths shut if they were ever arrested. Now, five months later, knowing he probably faced the longest sentence of anyone involved, Steve decided right away to do what was best for Steve—namely, to tell the FBI about everyone. It’s a paradox of criminal investigations with multiple defendants that the person facing the most serious charges often has the most to gain by confessing as soon as possible.

  If Steve told the agents about everybody and promised to testify against them if they claimed innocence, he could expect leniency at sentencing. Those were the rules. People with less guilt generally have fewer such points to play. It isn’t necessarily fair, but that’s how the system works.

  Steve had this in mind when, at about 8:00 a.m., he found himself in an interview room at the FBI’s offices in downtown Charlotte with agents Ray Duda and Bob Drdak, and with David Sousa of the IRS. The agents advised him of his Miranda rights, and Steve waived them, agreeing to be interviewed. Then he told them almost everything that popped into his mind about the previous five months.

  It was Kelly Campbell, Steve said, who had approached him with the heist idea, saying she knew someone who worked at Loomis who might help them. He talked about getting Eric Payne and Scott Grant to assist, and of getting Mike McKinney to try and murder David Ghantt in Mexico. The most recent plan, he said, was for McKinney and Steve’s cousin Nathan to fly to Mexico that very morning. Nathan knew nothing about the murder plot but would give Ghantt money while McKinney watched the delivery. McKinney would then trail Ghantt afterward.

  Steve also told the feds about buying the BMW, Kelly’s minivan, and Michele’s $43,000 ring. He talked about getting the $200,000 cashier’s check at First Union with the help of Mike and Kim Goodman. He mentioned his furniture store purchase and the possible nightclub deal. He talked about how he had paid Nathan Grant to keep the stolen money in storage facilities, until more than $1 million was stolen around Thanksgiving. The agents didn’t know whether to believe him on that one, wondering if he had really hidden that money somewhere in case the law caught up with him.

  Steve also named all the people he had paid to store money in safe-deposit boxes: Michele’s parents, his own parents, Calvin Hodge, David Craig, and others. He said he never revealed the source of the money to any of these people but told them it came from bookmaking or gambling. The same information gap was true concerning his lawyer, Jeff Guller, who, he told the FBI, had managed his house purchase and received $10,000 to hold more than $400,000 of Steve’s cash at his law office. Guller had also assisted him with other yet-to-be-completed transactions, Steve said.

  None of these people had helped plan the heist. All had agreed to help Steve with various tasks—most of them for cash in return—and now, at his first opportunity, he was telling the FBI about their involvement.

  • • •

  In a separate room, Michele sat with agents John Wydra and Lucie VonderHaar. “I don’t have anything to say,” Michele said. “I’m not talking.”

  On a dry-erase board near her was an FBI chronology, in blue Magic Marker, of her and Steve’s activities after the heist. She stuck to her guns.

  Wydra played bad cop. After Michele’s continued refusals to talk, Wydra stormed out of the interview room, quickly returned with a folder, and slammed it down on the table in front of her.

  “You know what this is? These are pictures of you, Michele. I know you’re involved in this.”

  Michele woul
dn’t admit to anything.

  Wydra left the room again. When he came back moments later he had a VHS tape.

  “We got you on videotape,” he said. “Making bank deposits.”

  Michele resisted for several hours. Nothing worked on her.

  “Michele, we know everything,” Wydra said. “They’re all in there. They’re all talking. And they’re all pointing the finger at you.”

  Michele still wouldn’t confess to a single thing. After conferring, the agents decided to have Steve talk to her. They brought him in and left them alone. Steve was crying, the sight of which terrified Michele.

  “I’m working it out,” he told her. “Just tell them what you know.”

  At this moment, Michele realized she couldn’t count on Steve’s protection anymore. When he left, she began telling the agents about the house purchase and the furniture store, and revealed that she remembered counting more than $14 million at their home the night of the crime.

  She told the agents she had not known, at first, that the money came from Loomis Fargo. When Wydra accused her of lying, she maintained she thought her husband had received it in return for holding money for “some friends up north.” After the media coverage of the heist, she had started to wonder, but she preferred not to know for certain, so she never asked, she said.

  • • •

  In a different room, FBI agents Rick Schwein and Thomas Widman were interrogating Kelly Campbell. She too was obstinate at first, until they showed her a surveillance picture of herself talking on the phone at Nichols Food Store.

  “Well, this is what happened,” Kelly said. She told them about the plan, identifying Steve Chambers as the driving force. She said she had fed him information about David Ghantt’s location in Mexico, and that there was a murder plot that Chambers and his supposed hit man obviously could not pull off. “Them SOBs have been going down since October and could not get close enough to kill him. I could’ve gone down there and done it myself,” she said to the agents.