and in much of the country the dweep freeze continues. how cold is it? this satellite picture shows almost 80% of the great lakes are frozen over. that s the most ice coverage in close to one decade. now back to our msnbc special. it s 6:45 p.m., october 4th, 1997, charlotte, north carolina. the loomis fargo & company. this armored car facility houses millions of dollars, and right now, just one employee, vault supervisor, david ghantt. david started working at the loomis fargo in 1994 and the job immediately put him into very close contact with massive amounts of money. he would be putting it into trucks, taking it out of trucks.
he will have to sort through dozens of keys to find the right one. then they went to trying to break into the vehicle using stones and sticks and whatever else they could find on the property, but it s an armored van. you re not going to break into this thing. it s bulletproof glass, and even if you got in, init was kind a locked cage. unless they had a blow torch, they weren t getting in that truck. meanwhile, campbell drives ghantt to the airport in columbia, south carolina, where ghantt believes he will board a flight to mexico. they drove through the parking lot, they realized everything in the airport seemed a little dark. the airport was closed. david was enraged about this. he thought, i m putting myself at a considerable risk here by stealing this money, at the very least my accomplices could do was buy me an airline ticket. david got on a bus to atlanta, where he was able to get a ticket to new orleans, then he was able to get a ticket to mexico.
we would be delivering it to banks. there was no aspect of the money handling that he was not part of. at the end of the work day, a company trainee leaves, while ghantt stays behind. his wife is expecting him for dinner, but he calls and tells her he will be home late. left alone with millions of dollars in cash, ghantt is trying to work up the nerve to follow through with a plan that will forever change his life. each day, area banks transfer funds to other banks through here. the loomis fargo & company s armored cars act as a conduit for the currency. sometimes millions at a time. you d have vans pulling up all day and dropping money off, taking money back to go to banks. again, these were typically unmarked vans. you re talking about a place where tens of millions of dollars would move through on a daily basis. to loomis fargo, it s just product, just inventory.
and $800,000. federal agents want to know why david ghantt would risk everything to steal so much money. all because of an unfulfilled love affair with kelly campbell. they got their answer after ghantt is arrested. during his flight from mexico to the united states. the question was, what was it about kelly, and i posed it to david, and he looked at me, and he said, you re not going to believe this, but all it took was just one kiss. and i kind of looked at him. he said, no, really, i ve only kissed that woman one time, and then he hung his head down low and he said, turns out to be a pretty expensive kiss, don t you think? at that point, i couldn t help but smile, because he was exactly right. not only was that a $17 million kiss, but something that was going to cost him the next decade of his life locked up in
to be ghantt s undoing. ghantt might be the one committing the actual robbery, but steve chambers is the ring leader behind the operation. there s a lot in this tale that owes to hollywood depiction of crime. steve chambers was a fan of the movie reservoir dogs where the thieves don t know each other s names. the reason for that, when the police come to get them later on, they won t be able to identify each other. it was saturday and david worked that day with a trainee who obviously was new to the company and did not know the ropes. david was actually relying on this. he figured he would tell the employee when it was okay to leave. in fact, david actually at the end of the shift left the door of the vault ajar. normally it would have been closed. the trainee didn t know to ask about this. the vault is a fortified gray room. it is rectangular in shape. shelves and file cabinets line its walls with push carts used to transport bales of shrink-wrapped money.