Because lets be brutally honest: Theyre not wrong, okay? real kelly campbell loomis fargo heist. Michele tells me you're in a financial bind. He didnt even really question me. At the time of the real robbery, Chambers was facing criminal charges hed written 30K worth of bad checks and was facing jail time for it. This is where it starts to unravel, Ghantt tells me with a wry laugh. About 5:30 the next morning, McKinney knocked on David's door and dropped $8,500 on the bed. David didn't even know Steve's name. Kelly Campbell, 29, a former company employee, entered guilty pleas earlier to bank larceny, money laundering and conspiracy to commit murder charges. At the end of October, Kelly was sentenced to 5 years 10 months in prison. They decorated their 6,000-square-foot stucco house with antiques, paintings and statues, including a six-foot wooden Indian that Michele had bought for $600. They heard Michele brag about her $43,000 ring. FILE - Kelly Campbell, one of the 21 people convicted for their involvement in the $17 million Loomis Fargo heist, awaits sentencing for her part in the theft at her mobile home near Mount. Ghantt simply got ready for work one morning knowing it would be his last day on the job. The FBI was also surveilling Kelly Campbell and followed her to a pay phone that she used to place calls to Mexico. This real-life crime is the core of "Untitled Armored Car Project," which stars Zach Galifianakis, Owen Wilson and Kristen Wiig. The plan to rob Loomis Fargo was spawned by Campbell and her friend Steve Chambers, during a casual bonfire at Chambers' home. When we worked together [for Loomis], we'd joke about it. October was "a blast," he said. Stay informed daily on the latest news and advice on COVID-19 from the editors at U.S. News & World Report. Mexican police, Interpol officers and an FBI agent were watching him. Our success depends on our team members, and that's why it's important for us to offer an employee benefits program that is not only extremely comprehensive but also one of the best in the industry. Its hilarious. [Kelly] told me, 'Just think about it.' She was like, Well, at least you had guts, he says. When he landed in Cancun, his first stop was Walmart. And that's OK with Ghantt, who's just a few weeks shy of his 47th birthday, out of federal prison for more than a decade, married with a 9-year-old daughter . Its kind of like that. A week later, another informant told the FBI that Eric Payne had quit his job at a printing company soon after the heist and was spending money he probably hadn't earned legally. I did every touristy thing you could possibly do while I was down there. LeVaughn Kelly Campbell (born July 23, 1980 in Atlanta, Georgia) is a former football wide receiver. As you probably know, it's loosely based on the Loomis Fargo heist in Charlotte back in the late nineties. "You" has three. Soon, the couple would be paying for something else, too: a hitman. Called Masterminds, the 2016 film stars Zach Galifianakis, Kristen Wiig and Owen Wilson. No dry runs, no rehearsals. There was a third person with them, too, a man named Eric Grant. Agents began picking up signs that David definitely had help: The abandoned Loomis van with $3.3 million in small bills still inside, and phone records showing that somebody beeped him while he stole the money, using David's own cell phone. Ghantt:It started out as a mental exercise and somewhere between the mental exercise and the actual event, it became serious. He didn't want to abandon his parents. As soon as Corey left, I pretended like I was leaving. More than 20 people ended up in the FBI's dragnet. Just under $14 million sat in an outbuilding behind his home, inside blue steel barrels. Loomis, Fargo offered a $500,000 reward for his arrest and conviction. "I wanted to be more like my mom and dad were.". Speaking of his co-defendants, Ghantt says hes not currently in contact with any of them. I wish them all a happy life and that's about it. Filming in the Asheville area starting in early July, and is. And I was thinking about just showing up there. Truth was, David wanted more than help leaving, he wanted company. The next day, he was sitting next to FBI agent Mark Rozzi on a US Airways flight to Charlotte. Exciting. Time passed, and Campbell eventually quit her job at Loomis Fargo. "But I had to know.". ". David complained it wasn't enough. Soon thereafter, he met Kelly Campbell, a co-worker at Loomis Fargo. On Oct. 5, the Loomis heist celebrates its 25th birthday. 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. Did you get paid? She came from a blue-collar background, a high school dropout who had grown tired of working in a mill and gotten an equivalency diploma. Steve Chambers and Kelly Campbell, who had been friends on and off since growing up together in the mid-1980s, were at a cookout, playing cards and drinking Budweiser at Steve's Lincoln County, N.C., mobile home, Kelly recalled. His collection case closes in two years. The agents tapped the phone, and it didnt take long to locate Ghantt after that. If you want me to leave, Ill leave. Then, Ghantt went into another room. His collection case, which closes in November 2026, got credit for the couples $540,000 house on Cramer Mountain in Gaston County, Butcher says. Yes, happy. Copyright 2022 TheAssociated Press. Fourteen defendants were ordered to make restitution payments to Loomis Fargo totaling almost $19 million. The Chambers, however, didnt fit in with the other members of the gated community. He took bus tours of Mayan ruins. "For the first year, they're all over you. Our Benefits. The robbery of some $17 million quickly became one of the wildest bank heists of the last quarter century. Hes going to start bringing you money. Alright. ", "I wouldn't do it. I thought, Okay, if I get out of that bubble because the cops depend on that, even the feds my chances to get away go way up.. "I'd been told all my life, money will not make you happy," Kelly said. Or purchase a subscription for unlimited access to real news you can count on. . Real-time updates and all local stories you want right in the palm of your hand. He wouldn't give me the opportunity to say anything else. And youre like, Come on parachute. In one case, the restitution for a Loomis defendant may be a moving target. 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. By March, Steve Chambers decided he needed to do something more drastic about Ghantt, making plans to send a hitman to Mexico to silence him for good. From going fishing to riding horses on the beach the whole nine yards. As for his new wife, when the two just started dating, he was nervous about letting her know about his past, but he wanted to be honest. Dependent care account. I loved it. David was excited, jabbering about their future together. Ghantt knew Chambers as Steve, but didnt find out that his last name was Chambers until the arrests were made. Some family members hid money in bank deposit boxes, other friends were asked to mule cash to the Cayman Islands. One day, Campbell was speaking to an old friend named Steve Chambers. But few could have guessed how spectacularly the heist would go wrong after the criminals initially got away with it. David said he realized then, for the first time, he might not see the millions he thought he had coming to him. Though David had no criminal experience, he felt he could offer expert advice: He'd just finished reading a book on the FBI. In early November, Steve lured the real Mike McKinney, an ex-Marine, to North Carolina from his Illinois home. (The conversation was depicted as 100 percent private on screen). Before David left for the airport, he had handed Scott an eight-inch key ring. He was also a former FBI informant who had tipped the bureau off to a planned robbery of a Loomis Fargo armored truck that never came to fruition. Ghantt was working as a vault supervisor for Loomis Fargo in Charlotte in 1997, earning about $8 an hour and tired of his humdrum life. "It probably should bother me," he said. Despite a mega-watt cast featuring Zach Galifianakis and a handful of some of Saturday Night Lives biggest current and former stars, Masterminds, the comedy about Loomis Fargo robbery completely tanked at the box office in its opening weekend, bowing in sixth place with just $6.6 million. We got to the end of the day, and he was acting like he wanted to linger. Ghantt spent a solid hour moving what ended up being 2,700 pounds of cash more than an actual ton into an unmarked company van. Gaston County residents remember how that worked out. Three weeks later, the couple purchased, in cash, a $635,000 stone mansion. Almost 19 years after Ghantt and a group of friends from Gaston County pulled off one of the largest cash heists in U.S. history, the movie "Masterminds" will play up the caper for laughs. I said, Probably, the best time would be on the weekend; theres fewer people there. When neighbors asked where they got their money, Steve said hed played in the NFL. From Mexico, David usually spoke with Kelly on the phone once a week, paying with calling cards. The bizarre true story of the criminals behind the second-largest bank heist in American history. Steve now needed a hit man. So he convinced a local hoodlum in Mexico to try to kill Ghantt. "I said, 'That's all they gave me,' " McKinney recalled. They bought a BMW roadster. Criminals dont usually get high-paying jobs after leaving prison. real kelly campbell loomis fargo heist. Then he and Campbell drove 90 miles to Columbia, South Carolina, where Ghantt planned to purchase a ticket to Mexico so he could be out of the country before news of the robbery broke the next morning. Note: No quotes were altered, although in some cases additional quotes were added to the questions as Ghantt expanded on his thoughts. Ghantt was scheduled to work a shift at the armored car company Oct. 4. David Ghantt, who pulled off the Loomis, Fargo & Co. vault robbery in 1997 and was sentenced to seven years in prison for the crime, served as a consultant for the film (in theaters Friday). He's a very likable person. On his second trip, Steve gave McKinney David's hotel address. Scary. Then FBI agent Wydra watched Steve's wife, Michele, deposit about $8,000 at a Gaston County, N.C., bank. 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. He figured Tammy wouldn't go for it, and though his marriage had been troubled, he wasn't certain he wanted to leave her. . In real life: True. >> 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,. CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) _ A woman who helped plan the $17 million robbery of armored car company Loomis, Fargo & Co. was sentenced Tuesday to nearly six years in prison and ordered to pay back more than $4 million. Chambers went from a mobile home in Lincoln County to a mansion in Cramerton. Will Vin Sant Leave You Jacked or Scammed? Kelly Campbell, 29, a former company employee, entered guilty pleas earlier to bank larceny, money laundering and conspiracy to commit murder charges. I can take it.". But McKinney never stopped trying to kill Ghantt although, initally, McKinney thought Chambers had paid for the hit over a drug deal gone bad, Diamant said. "A lot of people out there had it worse than me, but . At 6 that morning, FBI supervisor Rick Shaffer led 12 agents and several Gaston County police officers up a winding road on Cramer Mountain to Steve's home. Keep supporting great journalism by turning off your ad blocker. Kelly, she says now, was thinking about how happy she would be to send this man far away from her. I told the lead investigator I was glad to see him.. The first weekday after the heist, Michele Chambers, co-conspirator Steve's wife, walked into a NationsBank branch with a briefcase containing $5,000. And it turned Steve into he thought he was Don Corleone all of a sudden.. Him and I still talk every now and then. I hit the local library the thing that we used to do before Google, Ghantt says with a small laugh. Though he never found the right moment to carry out the hit, McKinney did find time to make a friend--a shady character named Robert, to whom he revealed more than was prudent. how to match 8 hypercubes in bejeweled. (John D. Simmons/The Charlotte Observer via AP) The Associated Press, BY MICHAEL GORDON, The Charlotte Observer. ". The robbery was committed by Loomis vault supervisor David Scott Ghantt, his married girlfriend Kelly Campbell (a former Loomis co-worker), Steven Eugene Chambers (a one-time FBI informant), his wife Michelle Chambers, Michael Gobbies, and four other co-conspirators. They soon realized David had stolen more money than would fit in their 55-gallon barrels. Jim Gronquist, Campbells defense attorney during the Loomis case, says the financial penalties levied against his client and her co-defendants are grossly excessive and unjust, particularly since most of the stolen Loomis money was actually recovered. Question: How much of 'Masterminds' is true? Then, on a mid-September day, as he reviewed a credit card bill, David did some math. They didn't know it, but they were leaving $3.3 million behind. "We kept going, '1-4-3, 1-4-3,' " recalled Vic O'Korn, assistant special agent in charge of Charlotte's FBI office. First, they loaded the cash into blue 55-gallon barrels, and then they moved the barrels into a rental van. I had a four-hour layover there, and then from New Orleans to Cancun.. Twenty-five years ago, a small group of rural North Carolinian amateur bank robbers pulled off the second-largest heist in American history. About the same time, Kelly and McKinney received phone calls from agents who told them to open their doors. Or that hed gotten lucky gambling. Truth be told, Ghantt had something of a crush on Campbell, and so, he told her exactly how hed pull off such a heist. Question: You went to Mexico. Tags: Associated Press, courts, crime, North Carolina. Steve bought a truck, a Rolex and a motorboat. Soon thereafter, he met Kelly Campbell, a co-worker at Loomis Fargo. We need to set up some way for me to get my money. She said, We got it all worked out. Meanwhile, back in North Carolina, Ghantts wife woke up to find her husband missing. "I was thinking, 'They aren't paying me enough,' " McKinney recalled. "She said, 'What would it take to convince you to do it?' They hatched the idea half-jokingly, over a game of Uno, never dreaming they were about to make Bonnie and Clyde look like bottom feeders. Everything came crashing down on an early March morning in 1998. I was burned out and just didn't know it. Heres what happened on Sunday nights episode. He has no contact with any of those convicted with him in the crime, including his former wife, and doesn't plan to see the movie, he said. These (Loomis) guys, not so much.. 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. Kelly drove David to the airport. "It wasn't me, it was Steve," she says she told him. Like David, Kelly was frustrated with her marriage. Once I start something, Im going to the end., As for how he felt in the moment, he says, Imagine me and you went on an airplane. Then another. He grabbed the tapes from two VCRs that connected to 16 security cameras. Key benefit components include: Health insurance plans. 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. Meanwhile, Steve was keeping a close eye on Kelly. "I was unhappy with my life. "I was trying to figure out a way to [leave my husband] and take care of my kids without having to depend on him or any other man," Kelly said. 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. 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. Tickle Me Kaczynski: How the Inventor of the Ultimate Elmo Toy Became a Unabomber Suspect, A Highly Questionable Cultural History of Richard Geres Ass Gerbil. First, in January, he tried to get someone to take some millions down to Mexico. In real life: False. It changes you. In real life: False. Charlotte Magazine even ran a feature story about the Loomis Fargo heist with the title, White Trash Crime. The headlines, however, never bothered Ghantt. The others sat in their cars across the street and watched him struggle to open the heavy gate. . Charlotte hotel chef who serves with a smile recognized as outstanding ambassador, Eritrean, Ethiopian restaurant owner was a big brother and father to many in Charlotte, Home tours: This wired-up Weddington smart home has a pool big enough for the neighborhood. It wouldn't work, Kelly told him. Burks was also ordered to serve 15 years in prison, limiting his ability to balance his books. And I think that makes it all the more funny, because it really offends my co-defendants. 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. Chambers, now 32, didn't grant an interview for this article, but last year, in response to written questions, he said the biggest lesson he learned was: "Family is more important and valuable than money. But I thought this is me being hard-headed Im going to ride this thing to the ground. And so thats what I did.. When Ghantt was on the plane home from Mexico with the FBI, he admitted to the agents that while Campbell had been integral to why hed done it and that he did indeed have a crush on her it was never his true motivation. A version of this story originally appeared on CharlotteObserver.com. A few of the Loomis restitution cases have already been closed either because the amount was paid in full or because the 20-year clock wound down. As with Kelly, the worst blotch on 29-year-old Eric's record until now was a driving-while-intoxicated conviction. Just head on out. And so, he did. "Love" has four. At 6-1 and 220 pounds, Steve was stocky and imposing, a fast talker with a brown goatee. In the dark, Scott inserted one key into the back door slot. After a couple of weeks, Ghantt and the rest of the heist team were ready to strike. I told them, Take it, box it up, and youll be able to ship it to me in Mexico. Back in the 1990s, you couldve probably boxed up a hot pink elephant and shipped it to Mexico; no one wouldve ever noticed. Dental plans . Meanwhile, outside Reynolds & Reynolds, Steve, Scott and Eric needed to move 2,748 pounds of cash, quickly, from the Loomis van into the Budget van. Ghantt was working a late shift, and just after 6:30 p.m., his coworkers were packing up and heading for home. A woman by the name of Kelly Campbell had worked there in 1996, and she and Ghantt had become friends in that time. But because David's relationship with his Loomis bosses had been rocky, he says, he doesn't feel sorry about what he did to the company. It had been drilled into my head that if you give me a team of five good people, I can go anywhere, do anything," David explained. On March 1, David Ghantt left his hotel to do some laundry. In that time, I realized most of my problems were because of me. Theres no way to get it back, Butcher told The Charlotte Observer. He hated his job, with its 12-hour shifts. 1-4-3 is 'I love you.' There are multiples of thousands of these things coming every year. Steve told me to tell [David] whatever was necessary to keep him happy.". To say nothing of their art purchases like the aforementioned velvet Elvis portrait and a painting of a bulldog dressed as General George S. Patton. On his way out, he grabbed the surveillance video, hoping to cover his tracks. My love for my family is by far the most important thing in my life. The Columbia airport had no available flights. Some received probation for money laundering, many others did hard time. Loomis Armored Shreveport, LA, 1124 Forum Dr, Shreveport, LA, USA Shreveport, LA, USA Req #1990. Looking for Kelly Loomis?