Heist Read online

  He didn’t expect to stay in Cancun for long. There were too many Americans, and he didn’t want to be recognized. He planned to seek citizenship elsewhere, maybe Brazil. Wherever he eventually landed, he would buy a fifty-five-foot boat and spend his days on the water. In his spare time, he would follow the heist investigation however he could. And he would find a way to send postcards to his relatives that wouldn’t reveal where he was.

  In the latter half of October, he spent his days horseback riding, driving Jet Skis, and deep-sea fishing. He soared in an ultralight plane, which made him feel like a bird. He parasailed over the Caribbean, rising higher than the highest Cancun hotel, high enough that he could have shouted a full confession and nobody would have been the wiser. His view from above included the entire Cancun strip and the endless blue sea. With $5 million or so coming his way, he could not have felt happier.

  Most days, he woke up around 10:30 a.m., downed a big breakfast, sat on the beach a bit, and only then deigned to consider how he would pass the remainder of the day. He ate wherever he pleased, paying in cash. He had a favorite restaurant, Zandunga, a Caribbean-Mexican grill that served spinach quesadillas, shrimp mounted on a coconut, and flan. Mariachi bands performed while his eyes reveled in the grandeur of the evening sky over the sea.

  He ate at Zandunga almost every other day, and the waiters came to know him by the name on his phony ID, Mike McKinney. They called him Mr. Mike and brought him bottles of Dos Equis. He befriended a waiter named Aldo, who spoke some English and helped him find an apartment on the beach. Whenever he met Americans, David generally let them introduce themselves first and then lied about where he was from.

  He believed the money coming his way would set him up comfortably for the rest of his life. And this would be wired or smuggled to him shortly, he assumed. Of course, Kelly would eventually be coming to live with him, and they would spend the rest of their lives together, going through money like lunatics and doing whatever they pleased, whether drinking all day, sailing, or just chilling out on the beach. It would be paradise. Kelly was the only person in North Carolina he had spoken with after the heist. He called her every Tuesday.

  Their actual relationship was more complicated than the one he had imagined. He told her he loved her and couldn’t wait for her to come down; that kiss in the pickup truck had whetted his appetite for more. But she told him she couldn’t get away from North Carolina just yet. The FBI had questioned her, she told him, and she was worried they thought she was involved and might be tracking her every move.

  David himself, while thoroughly excited by his new life, was increasingly certain he could never return to the United States. He wasn’t sure what his future identity would be—maybe Mike McKinney or some character name from a novel by Tom Clancy, his favorite author—but it wouldn’t be David Ghantt. David Ghantt probably could never again get a driver’s license, buy a house, install a phone, subscribe to a magazine, or use a credit card without David Ghantt getting caught.

  He felt no guilt or obligation toward Loomis Fargo and never questioned his decision to clean out the vault. As for Tammy, well, he figured that she would move on. Their marriage had been on the rocks anyway. He worked too many hours, and they hadn’t been seeing much of each other. When they did spend time together, they didn’t communicate well.

  But David’s acts of thievery and desertion had devastated his wife, who had done nothing to deserve this treatment and who didn’t know why he had left, or even that he hadn’t been forced at gunpoint. It was all a mystery to her, and she was struggling emotionally and financially. Her data-entry job couldn’t pay the bills, so she tried to refinance the loan on their pickup truck to reduce the monthly payments. But David’s name appeared on the title alongside hers, and the Division of Motor Vehicles told her she couldn’t remove his name without a court order.

  She hired a lawyer, who drew up the appropriate document: “That David Scott Ghantt has been accused and indicted in an alleged incident which took place on October 4, 1997 in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, in which a large amount of cash was taken from his…employer. That David Scott Ghantt has not been seen nor heard from since the time of the alleged incident and that he may be deceased.”

  A judge granted the order, and Tammy refinanced their loan. But the bills still were too high, and the truck was soon repossessed. She also struggled to meet their mortgage payments on the mobile home, knowing that if worst came to worst, she could move in with her parents in Gastonia. Indeed, through it all, her family kept her company. David’s mother drove down from Hendersonville to stay with her during the week. On weekends, Tammy stayed at her parents’ house, twenty minutes away.

  Still, it was emotional torture for her. Each night she wondered if David was dead, and if authorities had checked the Catawba River near where the Loomis van had been found. Maybe he was being held hostage somewhere by someone who stayed out of the camera shot while David moved the money. Why else wouldn’t he have called her?

  Of course, the possibility that he was alive and well didn’t offer her much comfort either. Through it all, Tammy prayed. She prayed for David’s safety, that he would come back so they could resume their lives. She prayed with David’s mother, a religious woman, and she prayed by herself wherever she was. All she wanted was for him to be home.

  She wanted to fix him breakfast and clean for him. Their mobile home had never been so tidy as since he left because she was cleaning it so much. She remembered how they first met, as teenage coworkers at the Winn-Dixie supermarket in Gastonia. She had been working the cash register one day and needed somebody to bag groceries. An eager redhead had approached.

  “David Ghantt at your service, ma’am.”

  “You came to my rescue,” she told him.

  He liked that she thought of him as her rescuer. They began dating. He would wait outside the store for her shift to end and drive her home. After three months, she ended it. It was just one of those things, she told him. She dated other men, though she often thought back to David.

  They rekindled their romance through letters while David was in the army overseas, and he proposed over the phone. He made it official after he was discharged, giving her a diamond ring, then getting on his knees and closing his eyes to ask if she would marry him.

  They married on June 20, 1992, at Lakeview Church in the small town of McAdenville. The wedding albums had happy, funny pictures of that day, one of David with two letters taped to each shoe—PL on his right sole and EH on his left. His sisters had put them there as a joke, hoping his shoes would spell out HELP when he knelt during the service, but they had misplaced the letters. In another wedding picture, David was pretending to escape through a church window. That one wasn’t funny anymore.

  After their wedding, the Ghantts lived in several places—in Hilton Head, South Carolina; Gastonia; and Kings Mountain. Tammy was content with her life, especially after they bought the mobile home in Kings Mountain. She would come home and see David asleep on the couch, with their cat, Rascals, snuggled on his chest.

  They would go on picnics in the area, take weekend drives into the mountains ninety minutes away, and visit David’s parents in Hendersonville. They talked about having children in a few years, when Tammy turned thirty. They dreamed that she would open a tanning salon, he would open a hunting ground, and they would have a financially stable family.

  • • •

  Meanwhile, David’s mind surged with excitement over the growing legend of David Ghantt, master thief. People would talk about him for years, even decades, he fantasized. And when they did, it would be with admiration, with envy, with intrigue. He would be thought of with the great ones, men like D. B. Cooper, Albert Spaggiari, and Willie Sutton. They would be notable company.

  David lacked the daring of Cooper, who on November 24, 1971, had jumped out of a Boeing 727 jet with $200,000 that wasn’t his, somewhere between Portland, Oregon,
and Seattle, Washington. Earlier that day, with the plane bound for Seattle, Cooper had threatened to blow it up unless authorities arranged to secure him the cash in twenty-dollar bills and parachutes upon landing. He got what he wanted, and after Cooper let the thirty-five passengers go free, he had the plane take off again, directing the pilot to fly toward Mexico City. He jumped out somewhere over the Pacific Northwest, using a rear door.

  The crew members didn’t know exactly where he jumped because they were in the cockpit, unable to see the back of the plane. Less than $6,000 of the marked bills given to Cooper ever showed up—$5,880 was found in Washington State. Many suspected Cooper died either on impact or soon thereafter. Still, his daring act would inspire decades of admiration most recently reflected in the annual D. B. Cooper Day event that draws hundreds to the Ariel Store and Tavern in Washington State, around where he is thought to have landed. Cooper was a legend.

  The same was true of Albert Spaggiari, who in July 1976 stole more than $8 million in money and valuables from the Société Générale bank in Nice, France. On a bulletin board facing the door of the main vault, his gang wrote, “Sans armes, sans haine, et sans violence”—“Without weapons, without hatred, and without violence,” showing concern for their reputation.

  Spaggiari’s notoriety stemmed from both his detailed planning—for several weeks, at night, his men dug a tunnel from a nearby sewer to access the vault—and his unusual flair. Spaggiari would write a book about the theft titled Fric-Frac, recounting that his crew set up a special dining area near the vault to nourish themselves with “liver pâté, fancy sausage, smoked ham, crates of fruit,” and wine during their long weekend pilfering safe-deposit boxes inside the bank.

  Spaggiari was arrested months later but escaped custody by jumping from a second-story magistrate’s office during an interrogation. Authorities watched him being driven away on a motorcycle and never saw him alive again.

  David lacked the style of Spaggiari. But his take was nearly twice the Frenchman’s. He also was far ahead of the legendary Willie Sutton, the best-known bank robber in the United States, who, when asked why he robbed banks, was said to have replied, “That’s where the money is.”

  From the 1920s through the 1950s, Sutton robbed dozens of banks, usually disguised as either a police officer or a deliveryman. In total, he stole more than $2 million. He was polite with his victims, soothing them with a calm voice while he committed his crimes. But his cohorts occasionally betrayed him to police. He did multiple turns in prison, spending about half his adult life behind bars. In 1969, he became a free man and found work as a security consultant.

  By a multiple of almost nine, David had exceeded Willie Sutton’s cash grabs in one act of boldness. Maybe, David hoped, others would talk about him with admiration. Maybe he would be known for his guts, for his brains, for his cagey mind.

  The guts part seemed a certainty. Unlike the other thieves and robbers, David had pulled an inside job. He knew he would be a suspect right away. Inside jobs at banks and armored-car companies were not rare, but they were usually for much smaller amounts.

  Bigger robberies had occurred abroad. In 1976, robbers stole an estimated $20 million to $50 million from safe-deposit boxes in Beirut at the British Bank of the Middle East. In Italy in 1984, five robbers with guns stole $21.8 million from Brink’s Securmark in Rome.

  Close to Home

  Tammy Ghantt’s prayers weren’t being answered, but only ten miles away, Steve and Michele Chambers seemed on the verge of getting everything they wanted.

  In his mobile home the night of the heist, Steve had told his cohorts to maintain their regular spending habits to avoid attracting attention. But the advice apparently didn’t apply to him. Even before the heist, he and Michele had itched to move up, though not out of the general area. In mid-October, they planned their move into a $635,000 house in Gaston County, located in the gated community of Cramer Mountain.

  With millions of dollars, Steve and Michele obviously could’ve gone anywhere they wanted and as far from the crime scene as possible. But in a move that seemed baffling, they decided to stay close to home. Their new home was actually closer to the scene of the crime than their old one.

  Their move to Gaston County, a twenty-minute drive from their mobile home in Lincoln County, seemed an odd choice. Gaston County was the heart of North Carolina’s remaining mill industry, hardly a destination place for the nouveau riche. And in the Charlotte area, Gaston’s blue-collar sensibilities provided fodder for laughs at comedy clubs, where telling a performer you lived in Gaston meant a joke at your expense.

  In the early 1900s, Gaston’s textile industry had been so dominant that the county’s economy was slow to diversify in later decades when textile plants faded and the rest of the area’s economy modernized. Charlotte became a banking capital, while Gaston County stayed a center of mill culture. In 1995, more than one-third of the county’s workers held jobs in manufacturing, twice the national average. Charlotte promoted itself as the latest glimmering city of the New South, and people there often derided Gaston residents as rednecks or lintheads, an epithet named for the white lint that stuck to mill workers’ clothes and hair and followed them out of the mill.

  Gaston’s relatively slow economic pace gave many of its residents a certain wariness about the city just over the Catawba River. The Charlotteans were hardly insulted. Many avoided Gaston County except to drive through it, heading west on Interstate 85 into the scenic mountains of Asheville. Besides, they could learn all they cared to about Gaston from the news, which always seemed full of crime from the county.

  Steve certainly didn’t care about Gaston’s reputation. He liked the area, had family around, and wanted to show the people he had grown up with, who knew him as a small-time operator, that now he was a big shot. The house purchase indicated he planned to live there for a long time, assuming the police never got hold of him.

  • • •

  On a mid-October afternoon, Michele showed up at her parents’ house in Mount Holly. “I have a surprise,” she told her mom. “I wanna show you something, where I’m gonna be moving.” Michele drove her mother and sister to Cramer Mountain, stopping at its security gate.

  Michele was moving into a place with a security gate? Seems like one of her crazy escapades, her mother figured. Michele couldn’t possibly afford a house there. But Michele parked in front of a swanky one, at 503 Stuart Ridge, and led them inside. Her mom, Sandra Floyd, was stunned. Alone with Michele in a bedroom, she said to her daughter, “I can’t afford something like this. You tell me how you can.”

  Michele told her mother that she and Steve had saved up gambling winnings by keeping expenses low in their mobile home. Sandra replied that didn’t seem like it would be enough. But Michele said the interior designers who owned the place had helped them with a great financing deal.

  Sandra Floyd didn’t know how to answer that. Not the type to delve too deeply into other people’s finances, even her daughter’s, she refrained from asking the terms of the mortgage or the amount of the down payment. She assumed Michele and Steve had paid around $100,000 down and secured a reasonable, affordable mortgage. That they might have acquired their money illegally was too unpleasant to seriously consider.

  • • •

  Just because they made their new life close to home didn’t mean Steve and Michele had relinquished travel. They didn’t fly, because Steve hated planes, but on October 24, three weeks after the heist, they took a train to New York with Eric Payne and his wife, Amy. Steve came prepared, hauling $400,000 in cash, having gotten his cousin Nathan to remove it from a storage locker for him. Steve didn’t know that Nathan also swiped $6,000 for himself.

  Eric Payne had been making good use of the money that Steve paid him the night of the theft. Since then, Steve had given him about $200,000 more. On October 11, he rented a new Cadillac. He kept the car for nine days. Now, he was consid
ering replacing his two-year-old pickup truck and also buying a motorcycle, a Harley-Davidson.

  Eric and Steve didn’t discuss the heist much on the trip. They went shopping with their wives in Manhattan, traveling in a white limousine that Steve paid $1,000 to rent. After Michele bought a brown Armani suit for $2,700 at Bloomingdale’s, the limousine shuttled them to FAO Schwarz, the toy store on Fifth Avenue. They walked wide-eyed through the merchandise, with Michele going gaga over the Barbie display. She bought an antique Barbie for herself and remote-control cars for her children.

  Then they were driven to New Jersey, south on the Garden State Parkway to Atlantic City. Steve tipped the limo driver $1,000 when they arrived. At the casino, Michele, a poker fiend, spelled out her strategy for her friends, insisting she wouldn’t be one of those people who gave her winnings back to the casino. This strategy entailed actually winning something first, which she managed to do. Then she put her money where her mouth was, walking away with a $10,000 gain.

  Of course, for the Chamberses these days, an extra ten grand wasn’t a big deal. Steve had $400,000 with him. The first night, he lost $12,000 playing blackjack, a game for which his great poker face was worthless. But the next night he won big and drank so much Budweiser that when he accidentally bumped into a man on the boardwalk, he handed him a few thousand dollars.

  Overall, the rich got richer. Steve came away winning $60,000, paid out largely in hundred-dollar bills. Their eleven-hour train trip home felt like a victory lap.

  Steve and Michele’s house closing was scheduled for October 27, right after their return. The couple arrived at the office of their attorney, Jeff Guller, about 2:00 p.m. that day. Steve brought $53,000 worth of money orders and two black bags packed with $430,000 in cash, all in twenties. Sitting across the table from Guller, Steve unzipped one of the bags to show him it was full of money.