Quickies / The Wall / Bill Gates / The Bat / The Night / The Bear / The Robbers |
Here's a few funnies that got a laugh out of me. You can find more of the same by clicking here.
How to impress a woman ? Compliment her, cuddle her, kiss her, caress her,
love her, stroke her, tease her, comfort her, protect her, hug her, hold her,
spend money on her, wine and dine her, buy things for her, listen to her, care
for her, stand by her, support her, buy flowers for her, go to the ends of the
earth for her...
How to impress a man ? Show up naked. Bring beer."
A true story from the British Daily Telegraph (God Bless its little cotton socks)
Pulling off America's second largest heist was no trouble; spending the $17 million was even easier. Leaving a trail of BMWs, jewellery and powerboats in their wake, the hillbilly hoods made no attempt to hide their new-found wealth. Edward Helmore looks at a catalogue of incompetence that ended in swift justice THIRTY miles west of Charlotte, North Carolina, lies the backwoods county of Gaston. Once the capital of the cotton industry, it's an area of trailer homes and Baptist churches that appears all but divorced from the forward rush of America, as if the deep red soil is too viscous, the air too heavy and the undergrowth too dense to permit progress. It's a region that has gained notoriety of sorts: the Freemen of Montana left here to establish their ill-fated, anti-federalist commune, it's the place from which Heaven's Gate leader Marshall Applewhite emerged to spread the gospel of surgical castration, flying saucers and mass suicide, and it's the national hotspot for small-time bank hold-ups - usually between nine and 11am on Fridays when would-be robbers need a bit of extra cash for the weekend.
But whatever Gaston County's population of militants, kooks, hustlers and opportunists dream up, it's odds-on to go awry, sometimes tragically but more often comically. 'When it gets hot they get as ill as hell round here,' observes Wayne Seigler, proprietor of Gastonia's only strip club, Leather and Lace. It was to this leaky-roof emporium of flesh that FBI agents came on Sunday, October 5, 1997, to make their first inquiries into the robbery the night before of $17,044,200, all in crisp, newly minted bills, from the vault of Loomis, Fargo ∓ Co, in Charlotte. The agency already knew who they were looking for - and their quarry was indeed one of Leather and Lace's regular customers - but he was not there that night. Despite breaking into the manager's office and removing two videotapes from the closed-circuit security system, David Scott Ghantt, a 27-year-old Gulf War veteran and a $360-a-week employee of the armoured car company, had been captured on more than a dozen other security cameras as he propped open the vault with a stick, waited for another employee to leave, then took an hour to methodically remove nearly one-and-half tons of currency, load it into a company truck and drive off. It was the start of a reckless caper that would end with the arrest of an incestuous circle of hillbillies on charges of larceny, money laundering and, in the case of the mastermind and an accomplice, charges of conspiracy to commit murder. By the time the plot had been unravelled and 21 of its hapless conspirators rounded up in March last year, the country's second-largest heist would also provide a virtual blueprint of what not to do if you suddenly - and illegally - become very rich. 'For this to have happened in Gaston County is so typical,' says Philip Lail, an agent with the Alcohol Law Enforcement Division of North Carolina, who stopped at the club to check that Seigler's lap dancers were not getting too personal with the customers. 'You always knew that if it was someone from here that had pulled it off, it was going to go wrong.' Waiting in cars outside the gates of the depository on that night were the ringleaders: Steve Chambers, a 29-year-old small-time hustler who had once tipped off the FBI about another planned Loomis heist, and Ghantt's lover Kelly Campbell, a plump, 26-year-old former employee of the same firm. After loading up the cash the convoy drove to a secluded warehouse five miles away, where two accomplices - Eric Payne and Eric Grant - waited to help unload the booty into a hired van. Meanwhile, Ghantt took $50,000 to divide with Campbell and got a lift in her car to Columbia, South Carolina, to catch a jet out of the country. The others placed as much of the cash as they could in blue 55-gallon drums - leaving $3.3 million behind for lack of room - and split for Chambers's mobile home outside Lincolnton, 20 miles to the north. There they counted the haul on the kitchen floor, put it back in the drums and covered the tops with cans of dog food. Lacking the sense to call ahead, Ghantt and Campbell arrived at Columbia to find the airport did not offer international flights. Refusing to take him further, Campbell put Ghantt on a bus to Atlanta, where he caught a flight to New Orleans and from there, with $25,000 stuffed into a pair of tights that he wore as a money belt, flew on to Mexico and checked into the Playa Del Carmen resort.
Two days later, the FBI found the getaway van and the cash the robbers had left behind but Ghantt, already featured on America's Most Wanted, had vanished. It did not take long for clues to emerge. That same day Michelle 'Shelly' Chambers walked into a Gastonia bank, deposited $5,000 into her account and began asking too many questions about the limitations for cash deposits, which triggered a suspicious activity report. (Although the limit is $10,000, the teller filed one anyway.) In little more than a month, various informants soon began to report to the FBI that certain individuals who were never known to have more than small change were now spending with abandon. 'They always plan the crime but they never plan what to do afterwards,' says Joel Barlow, senior investigator for AMSEC, the firm hired by Loomis, Fargo ∓ Co, and Lloyd's of London, the insurers, to recover the money. 'That's where they failed. I see it all the time.' In one jump the Chambers moved from their trailer to an exclusive $635,000 mansion set within the manicured lawns and golf course on Cramer Mountain, a move, says Lail, laden with the symbolism of social aspiration. 'Round here, Steve Chambers was considered a punk, a low-class criminal. But everybody in Gaston county is in awe of Cramer Mountain; it's prestigious. Moving there was his way of thumbing his nose at people.'
Intoxicated by their illicit fortune, the couple then proceeded to apply the white trash aesthetic to amassing the trappings of privilege and wealth. Shelly - who aspired to interior decoration - tore away the Italian silk stair-runner and replaced it with faux leopardskin. They filled the 20-bedroom residence with elephant figurines (Steve said they would bring luck), a velveteen portrait of Elvis, a large oil painting of a dog in military uniform, a statue of a fat chef and bronzes of two nude men. Kelly and Shelly embarked on a course of cosmetic surgery, including breast implants and liposuction, and filled their wardrobes with designer clothes.
The couple splashed out on new cars, including a BMW Z-3 roadster for Shelly that triggered a report to the IRS. Steve bought a $10,000 billiard table on a shopping spree in New York, $20,000 worth of Cuban cigars (which were ruined when he neglected to put water in the humidor), a Las Vegas-style card table complete with $50,000 in chips and a baby grand piano that no one could play. He indulged Shelly's predilection for jewellery, showering her with more than 50 items, including a $43,000 diamond ring and a $5,000 Rolex. Then they bought a nearby furniture shop, put their friends on the pay-roll and fired the existing manager when he tired of the business, saying, 'When the team is losing the owner fires the coach.' The coach then reported the deal to the FBI. The cellar at their mountain-top home that had once held fine French vintages was now filled with cheap Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and half-gallon cartons of Franzia wine; the neat hedges around the property were replaced with a high fence. By way of explaining his fortune to revellers at frequent house parties, Chambers would say he had got lucky at the casinos in Atlantic City; to curious neighbours, he would say he was a retired football star or that his grandfather had left him a fortune. 'The sheer gaudiness and expenditure at such a rapid rate was amazing. It was really difficult to do your job without laughing,' says Steve Gladden, of the US Marshal Service, which were called in to auction off the house and its contents. 'Why didn't they go somewhere? Why didn't they hide it for a while? Why did they make such extravagant purchases right away? I guess they really thought they would get away with it.'
But nothing could prepare people for the gang's hilarious public exploits. On nights out at redneck bars in and around Gastonia, Steve hired stretch limos, tipping the chauffeur $20 every time he opened the door. One drunken evening at Cricket's pool hall, Steve got mad at Shelly for dirty dancing with another man, started a fight and the group was ejected. By way of revenge, he decided to buy the place and offered the owner, Donna Lyles, $250,000 in cash. 'He didn't want it mentioned to the IRS,' she recalls. 'I told him that was ludicrous.' But negotiations continued as Chambers dreamt of changing the bar's name to the Big House, of outfitting the staff in striped chaingang suits, and of erecting a billboard on the highway that would read: 'Come to the Big House: if you can't do the time, don't do the crime.' If flaunting the cash came easily, laundering it posed considerable problems. By the end of October, the couple's accounts, which had never held more than a few hundred dollars, had swelled suspiciously to $49,500. Then, on November 4, Shelly walked into a branch of the Wachovia bank with a briefcase containing $200,000 in $100, $20 and $10 bills, and tried to buy a bank cheque made out to herself. The bank declined, but not before she had flashed the cash still wrapped in Loomis bands. Nor were the Chambers's accomplices being discreet.
Eric Payne, who took a three-week holiday from his job at a printing firm the day after the heist, traded his old pick-up for a $35,000 Chevy Tahoe, paying $9,900 (all in $20 denominations) - again tripping a suspicious activity report. When he returned to work he became unaccountably generous, insisting on buying pizza for everyone on the night shift, so that co-workers began calling him Loomis for what they thought was a joke. Kelly Campbell paid cash for a $30,000 mini-van and took a holiday to Kissimmee, Florida; Payne's wife, Amy, who also went under the surgeon's knife, bought her husband a new Harley-Davidson and a powerboat.Near dawn on March 2, the spree came to a close. The reason it took so long for the FBI to make their move was because they believed that the case on their hands might easily involve a murder, since Ghantt had not been seen or heard of since the night of the heist. But by late February 1998, wiretaps revealed his whereabouts and law-enforcement agents showed up at Cramer Mountain to arrest Steve, Shelly and Kelly; the others were arrested at trailer homes across the county. Nearly two dozen safe-deposit boxes in the area were found to contain three-quarters of the missing money. Twelve others - including Steve and Shelly's parents, who professed to know nothing of the source of their children's wealth - pleaded guilty to money laundering. At the same time Mexican officials picked up David Ghantt, who had tired of his five-month holiday and seemed relieved to be going home - even to a cell in the Mecklenberg county jail.For Ghantt, the story of the Loomis heist was also one of betrayal. Even before the robbery and his flight to Mexico, Campbell and Chambers had decided that he was not going to get his third of the haul as agreed. Moreover, as he spent his days smoking cigarettes, eating M∓Ms and scuba diving, Ghantt had no idea that Campbell (who he hoped would join him in Mexico) and an increasingly paranoid Chambers, as well as Michael McKinney - a friend of Chambers who had ferried Ghantt $10,000 on four separate occasions and whose ID he had used to enter Mexico - were plotting to kill him. His military training, he would later explain, had drilled into him that trust and teamwork win, and he misguidedly applied that to be the case among thieves.
By late February 1998, informants and FBI wiretaps had revealed that on the pretext of bringing Ghantt more cash McKinney would make the hit using a smuggled rifle or by injecting the victim with bleach. Recriminations and regret followed: the Chambers family blamed their daughter-in-law for the mess, Amy cried as she left court after being sentenced to a year in a work-release facility, and nearly everyone effusively expressed sorrow for their actions to the judge. But some habits are hard to break: Shelly Chambers, who, along with Kelly Campbell, had been released on bail pending sentencing (they each got six years in prison) was re-arrested in March this year and accused of breaking seven conditions of her bond, including drinking excessively, concealing from investigators another $43,000 diamond ring and a Rolex watch in her children's suitcase, 'associating with people involved in unlawful conduct' - her new boyfriend Eric Guthiel - and threatening to flee the country.
An anonymous caller notified the police that after a night of heavy drinking at the Graduate Pub in Gastonia, Shelly 'was seen in the parking-lot waving a handgun around'. It emerged that the Chambers had enlisted an improbable cast of relatives who had never been in trouble with the law to open safe-deposit boxes or launder cash for them. Outside the courtroom (where Steve Chambers was sentenced to 11 years and four months imprisonment) the sheer comedy of how bad an idea this was became plain as day. The moment the doors were thrown open, half a dozen members of the certifiably bovine Chambers clan attempted to squeeze through at once, creating a log-jam that had to be prized apart by startled court officials. Inside the court, Chambers - who declined to be interviewed for this article - flashed the thumbs- up signals to his family in the gallery. Robert 'Big Daddy'Chambers, Steve's father and a dump-truck driver, said only that his son must have thought up and executed the robbery on the spur of the moment. Even the prosecutors seemed hesitant to press for the maximum sentence to be imposed - in part, it seemed, because the Loomis heist had been so inept that it was more of an inconvenience to the FBI than a serious threat to law and order. Over time, suggests Philip Vail, the Loomis heisters - known locally as 'the gang that couldn't steal straight' - have become more than just another embarrassing joke signalling the ineptitude of Gaston County's rednecks; they have entered local folklore as characters of doomed heroism. 'It's comical,' he says, 'but a lot of people who live in the lowlife style round here are still thinking, "Hey, they may have only had it for a while, but at least they had it." ' Siegal disagrees. 'If you're gonna be a thief, you'd better be a smart thief,' he cautions. 'They had to be the dumbest crooks in the world.' But they may yet have the last laugh - according to court records, more than $2 million remains unaccounted for.