This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed 1997, with David Ghantt, a Loomis supervisor who stole . (I) bought jewelry, bought a van, Campbell recalled of her own spending. Ghantt stole $17 million from the Loomis vault at work. She recruited an old friend, Steve Chambers, a convicted criminal who was once an FBI informant. Afterward, outside the courthouse, her parents said the length was about what she had expected. Ghantt:I've always known that story had potential to be a comedy or a drama. So its one thing to go from up here, thought, to action, he said. Ghantt:It started out as a mental exercise and somewhere between the mental exercise and the actual event, it became serious. If we work together, we can all have plenty of pie.. David Ghantt is now 47 and living with his wife and daughter in Jacksonville, Florida. As Ghantt and seven others await hearings on charges from the October theft, authorities still have a big unanswered question: Where's most of the money? Deputies in Davidson County rushed to help a 69-year-old man they'd found unresponsive in his house following a welfare check. He was eventually approached to be a consultant for the 2016 movie Masterminds, which is based on the Loomis Fargo heist. However, he was running short of funds. The money weighed as much as a compact car and he did it all by himself. Ghantt, his former co-worker Kelly Campbell and her friends Steve and Michelle Chambers carried out the Loomis Fargo heist on Oct. 4, 1997. . The police, in turn, called the FBI since 95% of the money handled at the facility was owned by banks. They were the butt of a national joke. 3 million in cash from the Charlotte, North Carolina . AP. Then, he proceeded to load 2,800 pounds of cash into a van. In addition, six other people, some of whom had been spending large amounts of money, were arrested Monday in North Carolina in connection with the case, Perry said. Eventually, the two teamed up with a few other people and hatched plans for a heist. I actually loved reading through this post. "We had David Ghantt and Kelly Campbell tied together, and we had Steven Chambers and Eric Payne with unexplained wealth, but we didn't have a tie between them," Agent John Wydra said. On the evening of October 4, 1997, one man loaded $17.3 million in cash from the vaults of Loomis, Fargo & Co. into the back of a van. Ghantt, who by then was long out of prison, served as a consultant. The picture, which is directed by Jared Hess and written by Chris Bowman, Hubbel Palmer, and Emily Spivey, stars Zach Galifianakis, Owen Wilson, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, Leslie Jones, and MAIL. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Defense lawyer Andy Culler sought a seven-year, three-month sentence. He has been open about what he did and how he believes it changed him for the better. When Loomis Fargo employees could not open the vault the following day, they called authorities, and the investigation was started. A guard at an armored car company in the Southern U.S. organizes one of the biggest bank heists in American history. Ghantt ended up doing more than five years in prison, and Chambers did more than 11 years. David Scott Ghantt, 28, was arrested Sunday on an island off the Mexican coast, near the resort city of Cozumel, FBI spokesman William Perry said today. Fact check: Is there much truth to the new Masterminds movie? It all went down in Charlotte, North Carolina, and the man at the center of that heist, David Scott Ghantt, now lives in Jacksonville. I hope everyone has moved on. I knew it was over then, Ghantt said. All rights reserved. DePriest talked to employees at the hotel where Ghantt had stayed under the name James T. Kelley and claiming to be an oilrigger on vacation. Since Ghantt was the supervisor, he sent his co-worker home first. Despite being caught on camera wheeling the money from the vault to the getaway van, David Ghantt . Ultimately, even though the film is a slightly exaggerated version of the actual events, it is not far from reality. The next day, before Mike was able to leave the country, the FBI arrested him in his hotel room. He talks about how he informs employers about his criminal . Further stating that it was not drug money. One day, David's girlfriend Campbell was talking to an old friend named Steve Chambers. David Ghantt's fame was short-lived as he was a prime suspect from the start. "I've moved on with my life," he said Tuesday. Her husband, Steve Chambers, whom prosecutors have called the main defendant, began serving an 11-year sentence earlier this year. Ghantt: My cut was supposed to be about $5 million, but that's not what I ended up with. Your California Privacy Rights / Privacy Policy. Steve began talking about wiring money to overseas accounts, and even purchasing a nightclub. Ghantt began to complain vocally. $17.3 million . Kelly Campbell is scheduled to be sentenced in October. Consequently, they called the police. Watch Live: Closing arguments underway in double murder trial of Alex Murdaugh, Top McCarthy aide, House Oversight chair each met with Ashli Babbitt's mother, Colon cancer rates rising in younger age group, study finds, Garland testifies before Senate panel amid ongoing special counsel probes, Ex-Georgia star Jalen Carter was racing in deadly crash, arrest warrants allege, Fiery train crash in Greece kills dozens, many of them students. "So it's one thing to go from up here, thought, to action," he said. However, the irony was that the same hitman who was sent to assassinate Ghantt ended up becoming friends with him. Another name the FBI had become very interested in is Eric Payne. The FBI became more suspicious after they interviewed Campbell for the third time. David Ghantt (Zach Galifianakis) is slowly creeping by in life driving an armored truck.His life is at a stall and he's slowly dwindling down into the trash life that was destined for him. $17.3 million in cash was robbed from the Charlotte, North Carolina, regional office vault of Loomis, Fargo & Co. on the evening of October 4, 1997. Chambers essentially put a hit on Ghantt. He walked out with $17.3 million in cash and a movie-ready story. The 2016 comedy movie, Masterminds is based on the story of the Loomis Fargo Heist. Driving away, he said he felt a mix of fear, confidence and excitement that he outsmarted the FBI. At the time . When to set your clocks for daylight saving time, A raw bar, Asian restaurant, ice cream shop and arcade debut at Concord food hall. The polices suspicions were further confirmed once they viewed the security cameras. Steve Chambers would keep the rest. Inside $3.3 million was located along with the two stolen surveillance tapes, apparently left due to the robber and his accomplices being sloppy, or in a hurry. As Campbell would later explain, If David got killed, there couldnt be any finger pointing. The man at the center of that heist was David Scott Ghantt. David Ghantt helps steal $17 million from Loomis Fargo mostly due to his love for Kelly Campbell, but the leader of the operation, Steve Chambers, wants to get rid of David for being a liability. I knew it was just a matter of time. Word trickled in to the FBI that Ghantt had a romantic interest in a former coworker, Kelly Campbell, who one day visited a Toyota dealership to purchase a minivan with twenty-dollar bills. After Ghantts release from prison, he took up a job as a construction worker. Ghantt:It baffles me to this day. 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 and happy. SEARCH. } After loading the massive cache of loot into the armored truck, Ghantt set the time lock on the vault, which locked the door for days unless the employees drilled through the lock. The FBI recovered several million dollars in a van found in Mecklenburg County, but about $14 million in cash is still missing, authorities said. It was over. Agents speculate that after the Loomis robbery in Jacksonville, many Loomis employees including Ghantt and Campbell, sat around discussing the incident. .component--type-recirculation .item:nth-child(5) { A couple by the names of Steve and Shelley Chambers also became people of interest in the investigation due to their extreme sudden increase in spending. It was nearly the perfect crime, but while Ghantt fled to Mexico to lay low, his partners lavish spendingand their own alleged plans for murderwould ultimately be the groups demise. Question: What made you, Chambers and the others think you could get away with this? He was doing what the rest of us were doing making bad decisions. Ghantt:It's a comedy. He needed more money, consequently, he called up Chambers and asked him to wire him some. Ghantt:I don't think he ever really meant to harm me. Their relationship continued after she left the company. The next morning, the vault at Loomis Fargo could not be opened, so the employees called the police. Where things stand in the Alex Murdaugh double murder trial Did you get paid? The plot revolves around Ghantt who teamed up with his former loomis co-worker Kelly Campbell. She said that he could assist Ghantt in executing a massive cash robbery of the Loomis Fargo vault in one night. #inline-recirc-item--id-91a2c54e-8c88-11e2-b06b-024c619f5c3d, #right-rail-recirc-item--id-91a2c54e-8c88-11e2-b06b-024c619f5c3d { You can reach Kevin Ellis at 704-869-1823 or Twitter.com/TheGazetteKevin. CHARLOTTE, N.C. - Kelly Campbell, the woman who helped plan the $17 million robbery of armored-car company Loomis, Fargo was sentenced yesterday to nearly six years in prison and ordered to pay back more than $4 million. Surveillance tapes and photographs showed a man who the FBI believes is Ghantt taking bags of money and putting them onto a cart in the vault at Loomis, Fargo's offices in Charlotte. If I hadn't done what I did the, the life I have now with my wife and child, I wouldn't have. 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 . After the Loomis Fargo heist, when the arrests were made, Ghantt and seven others pleaded guilty in federal court to the charges. Downtown Asheville was cast as a movie set this week, as a major motion picture production filmed in the city center on Tuesday and Wednesday. He misses Tonys Ice Cream in Gastonia, and he discusses how he tells employers about his criminal history. Well, we bring to you a bank heist so ridiculous and poorly planned, that you will think I can plan a better heist!. Yes, happy. His partners, who planned to stay behind, agreed to send him his full cut of the money after the heat from investigators had died down. But Ghantt, who served as an unpaid consultant to the movie and attended the big Los Angeles premiere earlier in the week, has no such reservations. David's crush and former co-worker, Kelly Campbell (Kristen Wiig), approaches David about robbing the very company that he works for.Despite the lack of intelligence, Ghantt somehow pulls off the heist . What the men didnt know was that the FBI was listening to their phone call. The Loomis Fargo heist happened in Charlotte, North Carolina when this bank was the target of a robbery. They soon realised that their joke was not a far-fetched idea. One of them was a former Loomis employee. And the company soon calculated how much was missing--$17 million. Flying bug found at Walmart turns out to be rare Jurassic-era insect The Loomis Fargo Bank Robbery was a robbery of $17.3 million in cash from the Charlotte, North Carolina, regional office vault of Loomis, Fargo & Co. on the evening of October 4, 1997. Next, he went to the managers office and took out the tapes from two security cameras. I ride motorcycles and fish -- normal guy, Ghantt told Counts. The others, though, went no farther than Cramer Mountain. Kelly Jane Campbell, a former Loomis . Agents raided safe deposit boxes, where they recovered more than $11 million. But when he's convinced by his work crush, Kelly Campbell (Kristen Wiig) and her accomplices to join in a far-fetched plan to rob a bank vault, David soon throws everything on the line for love, money, and a . On Oct. 4, 1997, former Kings Mountain resident David Scott Ghantt finished his shift as a vault supervisor for Loomis Fargo in Charlotte. 20 years ago, on the night of October 4, 1997, David Scott Ghantt loaded $17.3 million of cash from the bank vault in Charlotte, North Carolina he was employed to supervise into a van. That movie, Masterminds was filmed in 2014. Guided by federal sentencing rules, prosecutors had requested a sentence of nine years for Michele Chambers. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Your email address will not be published. In 97 me and my wife were just barely scraping by, Ghantt recalled in Mondays episode. That time in prison was actually good for me. Besides wearing the ring, driving the BMW, and living in the new house, prosecutors say Michele Chambers helped others deposit millions of dollars in safe-deposit boxes in the area, and that she took $200,000 in cash into a Salisbury bank in November 1997 and came out with a $200,000 check. Ghantt believed the new employee would make a good replacement for his wife, but the feelings were not necessarily reciprocated. But there was just one thing the group hadnt been counting on: the massive weight of that amount of cash. It's said that Chambers approached Campbell in the summer of 1997 about executing a $17.3 million robbery (which today means $ 25.9 million) at her former job. #7 Loomis Fargo, Charlotte, North Carolina, 1997 . It was here that the money was moved from the armored car to private vehicles. Steve hires hitman Mike McKinney to kill David, but the two become friends. $17.3 million in cash was robbed from the Charlotte, North Carolina, regional office vault of Loomis, Fargo & Co. on the evening of October 4, 1997. This technically made it a bank robbery and a federal offense. On March 29 of last year, in the largest armored car heist in U.S. history, $18.8 million was taken from Loomis, Fargo in Jacksonville, Fla. An employee, Philip Noel Johnson , was arrested Aug.30 in connection with that theft, All but $186,000 was recovered. Steve and Michelle Chambers moved from a mobile home into the $635,000 house. 1998 The Associated Press. It's based on the true story of David Ghantt (Galifianikas), a vault supervisor at the Charlotte Loomis Fargo depository in Uptown Charlotte that was involved in the second largest cash robbery in history, making off with $17.4 million ($25 million today). David Ghantt, along with girlfriend Kelly Campbell, robbed $17.3 million from Loomis Fargo in 1997. Learn about careers at Cox Media Group. The plan of the Loomis Fargo heist was for Ghantt to commit an actual robbery and then flee to Mexico City, where he would stay until enough time passed to enter the United States. In fact, they got carried away and upgraded to a sudden lavish lifestyle. When Ghantt was found in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, five months after the heist, DePriest and photographer Kent Johnson raced to the airport, according to Observer records. Pocketing $50,000 for himself, that man, named David Ghantt . 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. Popular Lake Norman pub set to reopen after a major face lift. Its kind of out of sight, out of mind, she said of the reasoning. Before long, the tales of high living by Chambers and his now former wife, Michelle, led the thieves to be labeled either the "Cramer Mountain Hillbillies" or "The gang that couldn't steal straight." Ghantt, his former co-worker Kelly Campbell and her friends Steve and Michelle Chambers carried out the Loomis Fargo heist on Oct. Campbell helped plot the robbery of Loomis' Charlotte vault on Oct. "He quickly found out when you have money, you. Nathan, Steves cousin, was found in a mobile home the Chambers had abandoned. That first day in prison was scary, Ghantt said. There was a book published in 2002 as well, by author Jeff Diamant called,Heist! That was the most painful truth to come to. 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. Whisler told the judge that the couple had searched for a new house before the theft, and that Michele Chambers bought rubber bands from Wal-Mart to count the money the night of the crime. By using this website, you accept the terms of our Visitor Agreement and Privacy Policy, and understand your options regarding Ad Choices. 0:44. The phone calls began to get more intense when Steve and Eric got suspicious of a man who was running hismouth about them and the vault job over in Charlotte. He had just returned to his home in Jacksonville, Fla., when he agreed to talk about the heist, his life now and what went wrong when a group of friends who thought they could get away with stealing $17 million cash. 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