suspect. david, you know that i love you, that your family loves you, my family loves you. we believe that you are the victim here, david, and we stand by you 100%. while ghantt s friends and family members plead for his safe return, the stolen money is taken to steve chambers mobile home in a trailer park in nearby gastonia. imagine sitting on $14 million, and you struggle just buying your groceries, so you think having $14 million is going to be great. you still have a logistical problem of sitting on all this cash. what happens if someone breaks in? what happens if the trailer catches on fire? what happens if there s a problem at home and an ambulance comes or the police knock on the door? you can t hide this. i mean, it s stacked against the walls. chambers recruits several friends and family members to open safety deposit boxes at area banks. the new accomplices then stuff
vans can pull up into the building and alongside the vault so those outside the facility s walls can t see the money being loaded. ghantt backs up an unmarked company van near the vault entrance and opens the vehicle s back door. the idea he was going to take every last cent he could. he reasoned beforehand, it doesn t matter if you re a thief if you take $15,000 or $20 million. it is the act of theft that is going to get you in trouble, as long as there s no violence involved, your sentence is not going to be that different. for more than an hour, ghantt loads stacks of cash in the van. some of the cash is on push carts, but much of it is on the shelves and the floor. the facility security cameras capture it all, but david ghantt plans to remove the tapes before he leaves. the stacks are heavy, and david ghantt is not exactly muscular.
lying low just outside are ghantt s accomplices, kelly campbell, steve chambers, the ringleader of the plot, and chambers cousin, scott grant. once david ghantt moves the two vehicles, chambers sends a reluctant grant to the front gate. a few miles away, ghantt pulls the van into the garage of a building, where another accomplice, eric pane, works. this is the next part of their plan. where ghantt gives the van and the money to steve chambers. kelly campbell is supposed to take ghantt to the airport in her car. he gives the keys to the van to steve chambers, gets in kelly campbell s car, and leaves $17 million with a handful of strangers. now steve chambers cousin, scott, has lost track of which key on ghantt s key ring will open the doors of the van. he will have to sort through
half the keys. it was more cash than any of them could have imagined. they didn t fully understand how much cash was in the loomis facility when they took it. transferring the money from the back of the van, they were putting it into three blue barrels. steve had this idea if they got stopped for speeding or a vehicle stop of any kind, he d make it look like he was hauling off three barrels of dog foot which in retrospect to me didn t make a lot of sense because who has three barrels of dog food at midnight on a saturday night? based on a lot of time trying to work their way down the currency, when the barrels were full, they left about $3.3 million behind. when police and fbi responded to the robbery the next day, the only employee not to show up for work is vault supervisor david ghantt. authorities have been looking for 27-year-old david scott ghantt, guard and driver here, who the fbi now consider a
at 6 1 and 165 pounds, he s in no shape to quickly load the money. each cart holding about $2 million in cash takes ghantt seven to eight minutes to transfer into the unmarked van. you could tell he was struggling. imagine just moving over a ton of stone. he was sweating, he was struggling. it took him two hours to load up this truck, and you can see him, he s just wiped out. and in between he keeps getting text pages, right, messages. the messages are coming from kelly campbell, who s waiting outside with steve chambers and the rest of the crew. ghantt will not rest until he loads all the money, which takes him until 7:45. now he closes the vault and sets the vault security timer so that the door cannot be opened for more than two days. he takes the vault keys with him, as well.