October 15, 2025 • 38 mins
David Ghantt is stuck in a crappy job and an unhappy marriage. So when his former coworker (and crush) Kelly Campbell suggests they steal millions, David doesn't hesitate to sign up for the heist of a lifetime.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
Campsite Media, stark Lash.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Hey, they're good people.
Speaker 3 (00:18):
I'm Josh Deen, a journalist, and I'm Murray Scovel, a comedian.
We're here to shamelessly plug our new weekly show, Crimeless,
cooked up in the true crime comedy lab by the
mad geniuses at SmartLess Media, Campsite Media, and big money Players.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
It's got everything, fake hit men, terrible alibis, and of course,
gangs of angry, horny monkeys. And it's all coming your
way in December. But before we hog up your earballs,
we wanted to start things off with a palate cleanser.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
A wild eight episode romp about one of the dumbest
and most outrageous heists in US history, perpetrated by some
fine Southern goofballs.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
I actually prefer high functioning ding dongs, Josh. We call
it Crimeless Hillbilly Heist, and we got the finest narrator
of his generation to tell it to you, a man.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
So talented they named a city after him. That's right.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
I'd like to pass the mic to the patron saint
of Jackasses, the one and only Johnny Knoxville, to bring
you Crimeless Hillbilly Heist.
Speaker 4 (01:32):
It's kind of like watching a movie where the volume
is kind of muted. There was so much adrenaline, so
much sweat, so much stress, that there are bits and
pieces of it that are just fragments of memory.
Speaker 5 (01:48):
It's the evening of October fourth, nineteen ninety seven, at
a Loomis Fargo cash storage facility outside of Charlotte, North Carolina.
David Gant is the vault supervisor at this building, where
tens of millions of dollars in cash sit in a
bank vault and armored trucks arrived frequently making deliveries and
drop offs. David's the only one here this evening. He
(02:10):
just told his trainee to go home. Now David's left
to guard the money alone. He's a redhead in his
mid twenties, tall and lanky, with bright blue eyes. He's
worked at Loomis Fargo for a few years now, making
a couple bucks more than minimum wage for dangerous work,
and he's about to say fuck that. As soon as
(02:36):
David knows the training is gone, he sashays back to
the vault, where he's already left the heavy door propped open.
The trainee didn't know to check for that. David hurries
into the gray room, where as fate would have it,
the cash is already shrink wrapped and stacked onto push carts.
Each one is about two million bucks on wheels.
Speaker 4 (02:57):
I pop the seal on it, open it up, and
it's just rows of twenty dollar bules about yea thick,
hundreds of them.
Speaker 5 (03:06):
There's fifteen million dollars in the vault, maybe more a
literal ton of cash, and David is going to take
it all by himself. The facility is designed so an
armored car can pull into the building and ride up
to the vault entrance. David already has a company van
park there ready to go. He starts rushing the carts
(03:29):
into the back of the van. But even with the
carts already loaded, this is exhausting work, as loading more
than two thousand pounds into a van by yourself tends
to be the.
Speaker 4 (03:39):
Pile of steady, growing and growing. I'm sweating, you know.
Even my socks are working.
Speaker 5 (03:46):
And as if this isn't stressful enough, David's pager keeps
blowing up with messages from his very nervous accomplices waiting outside.
Speaker 4 (03:55):
They're out there panicing because I think it's gonna be
ten minutes.
Speaker 5 (04:00):
He's at it for an hour, back and forth, lugging cash,
muscles aching.
Speaker 4 (04:05):
It's the worst hour, longest hour of my life.
Speaker 5 (04:09):
But finally he's got it, all of it, well, everything
you get carried. David skillfully ejects the security tapes from
the VCRs and throws him in the van along with
the money. Then he sets a timer on the vault
door so it can't be reopened for several days, an
insider trick, creating an extra obstacle to slow down anyone
(04:30):
who tries to trace his steps. David plans to be
long gone by the time anyone can get back into
the vault. He jumps in the van and drives to
the automated gate at the back of the lot. He
hits the button to exit, and this.
Speaker 4 (04:50):
Is where I have my first real mishap of the.
Speaker 5 (04:53):
Evening, because the gate won't Openvid's trapped. He knows he
can't take back what he's done. The vault's locked, and
he's the one who took the cash out of it.
He's already a criminal, a criminal who's just pulled off
one of the largest cash heists in history, so close
(05:14):
to escape, and now the only thing between him and
freedom is basically a malfunctioning garage door opener. The thing is,
David did everything right, had it all planned out. He
was so close to paradise, so close to being a
rich man boarding a plane to somewhere exotic.
Speaker 4 (05:33):
There's lost places to explore. I could go gold mine
or looking for emeralds. I could live out romance in
the stone or in there Jones, spend the rest of
my life on a sailboat, Jimmy Buffett.
Speaker 5 (05:51):
So minor speed bump here. Surely there's another way out,
because if David Gant went straight to prison without so
much as exiting the property, it wouldn't be much of
a story, and they probably wouldn't have hired me to
tell this story. Right From Smartness Media, Campsite Media, and
(06:13):
big money players in partnership with iHeart Podcasts. I'm Johnny
Knoxville and you're listening to Crime List Bill Billy Heist,
Episode one, Money stinks. If there's one thing in life
I like is short sighted, some would say dumb criminals.
(06:37):
And let me tell you, this group of thieves ain't
the smartest outlaws in history. They ate the second smartest either.
But wow, what a story. Eight episodes of Honest to
God True Crime. We knew they were trying to kill
David Khant. Massive screw ups.
Speaker 6 (06:53):
The perfect crime is probably impossible to commit.
Speaker 5 (06:56):
Screw ups attempting to cover up the previous screw ups.
Speaker 2 (06:59):
It was the perfect storm and a sewer.
Speaker 5 (07:01):
People discovering their true selves. I have been labeled with
sociopathic tendencies, but that's also coming from over educated people
with too many degrees and dreaming big dreams.
Speaker 6 (07:14):
I remember saying I'm a rich bitch now and kind
of felt good.
Speaker 5 (07:21):
We also got folks gifting boob jobs to the relatives,
stocking wine cellars with perhaps blue ribbon, and of course
a velvet elvis painting. This was a huge story at
the time, and it's damn near turned into a legend.
Speaker 4 (07:35):
It did feel kind of like Robinhood, except for the
part where he steals from the rich and gives to
the core. I guess that kind of works, but I'm
not that generous.
Speaker 5 (07:47):
The point is this is a story about saying the
hell with all the rules and going after the life
you really want. It's about achieving the American dream, even
if you have to steal it, even if you have
to leave your old life behind. Our story takes place
(08:14):
in the nineteen nineties, a simpler time when doctors thought
that margarine was good for you. The Internet was still new,
and people carried around these little pieces of folded up
green paper to buy things. This paper was a big deal,
big enough to risk your life for. The nineties were
(08:35):
also boom times for the American economy.
Speaker 3 (08:37):
Every day America Online is making it easier for people
to live, work, and play.
Speaker 5 (08:43):
This was before the dot com bubble burst, before the
housing crash, before all kinds of things that made our
lives kind of shitty. In the three decades since, the
nineties felt like they could continue the prosperity of the
nineteen eighties. Maybe even more than that, it seemed like
just about any it could get rich. The nineties were
about big time money, fu money, making it rain in
(09:07):
a rap video money. And Charlotte, North Carolina, where our
story takes place, was along for the crazy ride.
Speaker 7 (09:14):
Charlotte being touted at this gleaming city of the New South.
Speaker 5 (09:18):
That would be Jeff Diamond, a journalist who covered our
story for The Charlotte Observer and wrote the definitive account
in his book Heist. Jeff was there for every what
in the actual hell twist in turn of this massive story.
Jeff was a young reporter when all this happened. He
was twenty four, about the same age as David Gant,
and like a lot of young reporters, Jeff made his
(09:39):
bones on the crime beat. This work often led him
to a town just outside of Charlotte called Gastonia, the
crown jewel of Gaston County.
Speaker 7 (09:50):
It was known throughout the Charlotte region for having kind
of wacky things happened.
Speaker 5 (09:55):
But Jeff felt there was a lot to like about Gastonia.
Speaker 7 (09:58):
My favorite food pilgrimage here is a theft footage type
place called the Shrimp Boat, which is actually known for
its chicken.
Speaker 5 (10:06):
It was true, though, that the nineties boom times had
left Gastonia behind. People there felt like the whole damn
town hadn't been invited to the party. And Gastonia, of course,
was David Gant's old stomping grounds.
Speaker 4 (10:19):
People would look at Gastonia, they called it the gas House,
and that's where all the worker bees came from. All
the people blue collar. If you lived in Gastonia, they
pretty much considered you trailer park trash and if you
lived in one of the small communities between here and there,
you were much better.
Speaker 5 (10:48):
At the time. Jeff is working the crime beat. David
Gant spends his days behind the wheel of an armored
truck carrying millions of dollars at a time, a glamorous
job for a country.
Speaker 4 (10:58):
Kid'striggling with that amount of money is exciting, and then
you realize that money stinks. It smells because people hide
it and they put it in there. They put it
in their underwear, and they keeping their socks, they put
in their brazier, and oh, people treat money horribly. Even
(11:20):
brand new money has a stinch to it. After a while,
the truck gets this mix of booty, short money and
new money. This job is filled with wonderful aromas.
Speaker 5 (11:33):
David carts around a lot of other people's money, but
he has very little of his own. He makes eight
dollars and fifteen cents an hour. Technically speaking, he has
less than zero dollars because he and his wife, Tammy,
are in debt. And as David drives his route day
after day through the streets of the town he grew up,
and he can't help but think a lot about how
(11:56):
his life was supposed to work out differently. Growing up
in Gastonia, David spent a lot of time squirrel hunting
and drag racing, figuring out how to make his own fun.
Speaker 4 (12:11):
To my mindset, if you're bored, you're not creative enough,
and so we would. We would invent stuff. We made
our own wine.
Speaker 5 (12:19):
It was horrible. Another hobby was sneaking into the lakeside
properties where the rich folks kept their vacation homes and
hauling a cheap illuminum fishing boat straight past the note
trespassing signs.
Speaker 4 (12:34):
People come out on their docks and yell at us,
and that's that was just part of growing up.
Speaker 5 (12:39):
But life wasn't all homemade wine and trespassing. He'd also
go to church with his parents and have long sit
downs with his dad for what they called the man's
breakfast eggs bacon, sausage, plus coffee and good conversation over
the breakfast table. David's dad taught him about the world,
how to act, how to present himself, what to expect
(13:01):
out of life.
Speaker 4 (13:02):
You meet so and so's daughter, and if they find
you suitable, you get a good introduction. Next thing you know,
you've got a good job. You got a good wife,
you got the three point five kids, two dogs. You're
doing great.
Speaker 5 (13:16):
David's dad had survived combat in World War Two before
coming home to raise a family. He made a solid
middle class living as a trucker, and his company once
gave him a plaque for pulling a couple out of
a burning car. His mom was another strapping American individualist.
One of David's chief memories of her is when she
gashed her arm wide open on her broken fruit bowl
(13:37):
and then drove herself to the hospital. Come on, boy,
I gotta go to doctor hardcore. His parents had life
down pat They didn't need a thing from anybody.
Speaker 4 (13:50):
I wish I could be as tough as they were,
you know. That's one of my wandest wishes to make
them proud, and I struggled with that.
Speaker 5 (14:00):
David earned his high school diploma, and then he joined
the military. He served in Desert Storm as a mechanic
fixing Apache helicopters. While he was deployed, he started getting
letters from acute cashier he met at the wind Dixie
grocery store back home, a girl named Tammy. They wrote
back and forth, and soon they were trading love letters.
David married Tammy soon after finishing his tour in the army,
(14:23):
and they eventually settled back in Gestonian. He played by
the rules just like his dad had taught him, and
he expected to be rewarded with a life just like
his parents had. But while he had the girl, he
still didn't have the other pieces to the puzzle. Turns
out no civilians had an Apache helicopter for him to fix.
Speaker 4 (14:43):
The economic opportunities were kind of slim, and I was
struggling financially and I had a new wife, and I'm
thinking in the back of my head and eventually we're
going to have kids. We're not going to make it
on this, and I started really sol search being a
married man and trying to be like my dad. To me,
(15:06):
I felt like a failure. And I did some really
menial jobs that didn't pay anything, didn't mean nothing to me,
and that's where I ended up working for Wells Fargo.
Speaker 5 (15:19):
It's actually Loomis Fargo, a private company that drives the
big bank's money around.
Speaker 4 (15:24):
Being a driver Wells Fargo is getting up at the
same time every morning, putting on the same uniform every morning,
getting in the same truck with the same person every day,
What do you do the same route every day.
Speaker 5 (15:43):
That route began and ended at the Loomis Fargo facility,
a nondescript building outside of town, surrounded by a chain
link fence. Besides the vault where the money was kept,
there was also a cash room where the money was counted.
And everyone in there was making shit pay, and there
were a lot of jokes about, you know, like snatching
(16:04):
as much cash as they could.
Speaker 4 (16:06):
We would joke with them about running off to you know,
Jamaica or whatever. The management at Loomis Fargo did not
appreciate any type of dark humor in that industry.
Speaker 5 (16:21):
David did, however, have one personality trait beloved by all
bank managers.
Speaker 4 (16:26):
I'm very impulsive. It kind of brings me a weird
sense of joy to do something. Just if I see
something interest me, I might just go do it.
Speaker 5 (16:37):
But David kept his impulsive side and check. He kept
up with the grind, never missing a payment on the
mobile home he shared with Tammy. Then one day at
Loomis Fargo, he met a new employee, a woman who
broke up the monotony and threatened to set David's impulsive
side free.
Speaker 6 (16:58):
I remember one day pulling in when I was still
a driver, and David Gant comes up to the vehicle
and I opened the door. He says, I'll be your
friend if you'll give me a cigarette. I said, I
don't need any more friends, but i'll give you a cigarette.
Speaker 5 (17:14):
Kelly Jane Campbell had certain desirable qualities.
Speaker 6 (17:18):
I did know that I was good looking. I mean,
of course, I had a lot of attention from a
lot of guys.
Speaker 5 (17:24):
In other words, she's the ideal character for any Loomis
Fargo employee to imagine running off to Jamaica with.
Speaker 6 (17:31):
And then we just kind of became friends from there
and started talking and stuff. I knew he was attracted
to me.
Speaker 4 (17:37):
We chit chatted and talked, and we shared a lot
in common. We had grown up similar from similar areas,
similar backgrounds, blue collar words, lots of talk around and
that's where our friendship sort of began. And after that
it kind of grew. And I don't know how to.
Speaker 5 (18:00):
Explain it now. A polite Southern man, especially married one,
doesn't talk about this sort of thing without beating around
the bush.
Speaker 4 (18:09):
A little good look a woman, blonde hair, blue eyes,
I don't know, but she was very pretty warm, and
I was attractive tour.
Speaker 6 (18:22):
I was not physically attracted to him, but he was funny.
Speaker 5 (18:27):
He was funny oof. For all their differences, Kelly and
David did have one thing in common. They wish their
(18:48):
lives had worked out differently. They were already swimming in
regret and they were just in their twenties.
Speaker 6 (18:54):
I got married when I was eighteen. My mom tried
to talk me out of it. Is she of course,
your mom knows you better than anybody else. I got
married to Jimmy Campbell. He had had a crush on
me all through junior high. His the nickname of Spanky.
Everybody knowed him as Spanky even in school, and he
said it was because he looked like Spanky from the
(19:15):
Little Rascals when he was a kid.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
It stug.
Speaker 5 (19:19):
Spanky drove a cement truck and later operated a bulldozer
at a landfill. Kelly worked off and on while taking
care of her two kids.
Speaker 6 (19:28):
Money wasn't plentiful. We basically lived from paycheck to paycheck.
I mean, he was a hard person to get along
with sometimes.
Speaker 5 (19:39):
Kelly also had a son from before she and Spankey
were together, and Spanky and the boy did not get along.
David had his own problems, of course, and the struggles
of adult life, of bad marriages, low paying jobs drew
Kelly and David together.
Speaker 6 (19:56):
When you're not happy and you're marriage, it's just it
starts out with you know. It was just nice to
have somebody to talk to that's different, somebody you convent
to that's not in the situation.
Speaker 4 (20:06):
We talked about a lot of different things. It was
kind of like a breath of fresh air to have
somebody that you could talk across to. At least for me,
we spoke the same language.
Speaker 5 (20:19):
This continued on for about a year, David nurturing a
serious crush Kelly eh enjoying a friendly ear, willing to listen.
But then Kelly left Lumis Fargo for another job. She
and David stayed in touch a bit, but neither of
their circumstances really changed much. David was still married to Tammy,
(20:39):
still in debt, still feeling like a failure, while Kelly
kept moving along with her own life, marriage troubles, financial woes,
and then Kelly started hanging out with another guy she
kept in the friend zone over the years, a guy
named Steve Chambers. For all the so called unwanted attention
Kelly got from guy She tended to get along with
(21:02):
them better than women.
Speaker 6 (21:03):
It's sad to say, but a female stab you in
the back a lot quicker than male will.
Speaker 5 (21:08):
So Steve declined to talk to us for the story.
By the way, we contacted his lawyer and followed up,
but never heard back. He and his then wife Michelle
are the only main players from this gang of yahoos
you won't hear from directly.
Speaker 6 (21:23):
Steve. He could talk good talk. After high school, there
was a lot of years where we didn't see each other,
and then when he started coming back around, he said
that he had these connections with people, and he always
fancied the movie Godfather, and I think that's where a
lot of his persona came from. He liked to talk
(21:47):
bigger than what he really was. I think he had
a very good imagination.
Speaker 5 (21:55):
Steve did give a brief interview to Jeff Diamont back
in the day.
Speaker 2 (21:59):
Steve had to go.
Speaker 7 (22:00):
He he was kind of a burly guy. He often
borrowed language from gangster movies like Goodfellas. He also had
a history of various petty crimes that had maybe familiarized
him with certain ways of operating.
Speaker 5 (22:12):
In other words, Steve wasn't all talk when it came
to his criminal persona. Although he was a bit of
a professional squealer.
Speaker 7 (22:19):
He was somebody who would call the FBI about crimes
that had not yet happened, but which he knew were
being planned, and the reason he knew they were being
planned with because he was helping plan them.
Speaker 5 (22:29):
As part of his made man persona. Steve liked to
entertain people in his trailer. He'd serve steaks, pass out drinks,
and generally talk bullshit. One day, Kelly went over to
Steve's house for beers in a game of Uno, which
would turn out to be the most consequential game of
Uno in history. At first, Kelly didn't think much of
(22:50):
it when Steve made a bold proposal.
Speaker 6 (22:53):
Steve started talking about, have you ever.
Speaker 5 (22:56):
Thought about doing something big, like real big at Loomis Fargo?
Speaker 6 (23:02):
And I'm like, well, I don't. First, he says, and
I'm sure he's seen it in a movie somewhere. He says, well,
what do you think about You take a hangarnaid and
put it on the window and they'll run out of
the vehicle and then you can rob it, and I'm like, no,
that wouldn't work. I said, it's armor. I don't even know.
That's too dangerous. So he just, you know, we start
(23:23):
throwing around ideas about how you could rob a.
Speaker 5 (23:27):
Truck, just your run of the mill uno chit chat.
Speaker 6 (23:30):
Most of his were outlandish like that. But then when
he found out that David Gant was attracted to me,
and he's like.
Speaker 5 (23:36):
Well, do you still talk to him?
Speaker 6 (23:38):
I said, yeah, I still talk to him sometimes. He's like, well,
you think about he would rob the place? I said,
m maybe I could probably talk him into it. He
does work in the vault.
Speaker 5 (23:56):
Since Kelly left Loomis Fargo, David had been promoted to
work in the vault, but all his problems were still
hanging around.
Speaker 4 (24:03):
My job beating me up. Now it's not just morning,
it's beating me to death because I'm getting up at
three point thirty four o'clock in the morning, driving from
King's Mountain to Charlotte, opening up And when I say
opening up, far Ago, I'm the first guy to put
on body armor, going with a shotgun and a flashlight.
(24:24):
Cut the lights all on, check every room all the
way to the back. Make sure there's no bad people,
and that's mildly stressful because if you do run into
a bad guy, it's you and him.
Speaker 5 (24:37):
David was working such long hours that he barely had
time to keep his work pants clean. A new manager
gave him crap about it one day, and David snapped.
Speaker 4 (24:46):
He said something about you need to respect me. I said,
respect is earned, not given, and then I went on
a little rant. I said the only thing that is
given is sympathy, and if you want sympathy, look between
shit and syphilis in the dictionary and walked off.
Speaker 5 (25:06):
I thought I was fired, but fired he was not.
He kept working long hours and then going home to
Tammy so they could argue.
Speaker 4 (25:14):
Our problem with money was we just didn't have enough
of it. It's like a brick would drop on you
every day because you understand the credit card company's charging
you well, I'm good at math twenty four percent interest
every month, that little clock is running, and my brain's
(25:36):
keeping tally of the math.
Speaker 5 (25:38):
David realized with minimum payments they were barely keeping up
with anyway. It would take thirty years to pay that
debt off.
Speaker 4 (25:46):
And one day that just slapped me in the face.
I'm like, we're never going to get out from under this,
never ever. And it put me into like a today
I understand it, and me into a depression. And it
really affected my marriage, even though I hid it well,
and I probably didn't treat Tammy as good as I
(26:10):
should have. I didn't give her the attention that she needed.
I didn't give her the emotional support she probably needed.
I was there physically, but mentally and spiritually I wasn't there.
My brain had already checked out.
Speaker 5 (26:26):
And then one day out of the blue, David's old crush,
Kelly calls. She has an idea something. She and her
pals Steve of just been kicking around.
Speaker 4 (26:37):
She calls me up and we're still chit chatting. She goes,
what do you think about Robin Wells Fargo? And I
thought about it for a second. I said, if you
pick the right day, pick the right time, it'd be easy.
She said, think about it and get back with me.
Speaker 5 (26:59):
David didn't have to think about it for too long.
Speaker 4 (27:01):
I was mentally drowning, and so when my co worker
approached me about Robin Wills Fargo, it was like somebody
thumia loading a lifeline something. And you know, my impulsiveness
my desire to just get the sea of pressure off
of me.
Speaker 5 (27:21):
I said, yeah, the heist was still just a notion.
Each figure the other might just be joking about running
off with the money, just like all the employees at
Fargo used to do. But David took the lifeline and
ran with it. He started planning, a skill he was
taught in the military.
Speaker 4 (27:37):
I had a drill shart to tell me, we don't
even take a pooh. He didn't users word pooh, but
he said, we don't even take a pooh without a plan, words.
Speaker 2 (27:47):
To live by.
Speaker 5 (27:48):
He didn't know whether Kelly was actually in or out,
but that didn't stop him from thinking it all through.
The best time to rob the place would be one
of his weekend shifts, when there were fewer employees around
but still a fair bit of money in the vault.
He started to keep track of the money to see
exactly how much might be sitting around, and what he
(28:08):
observed was pretty crazy. There was always more than ten
million dollars in cash just sitting there, all stacked up,
sometimes fifteen millions, sometimes even more. They were basically begging
someone to take it. The next time she and David talked,
Kelly was impressed by what she was hearing, well as
impressed as Kelly can get.
Speaker 6 (28:30):
There was not a lot of extensive planning that went
into it. I mean, it was just, you know, how
much planning do you really need for somebody that works
in the ball to load the money in the truck
and drive away.
Speaker 5 (28:43):
As things developed, David realized he wasn't just doing all
this to pay off his credit card debt. He was
planning an entirely new life with Kelly.
Speaker 4 (28:57):
She'd call or she'd call me on my pager and
we'd meet, chit chat. You know, it felt very cleaned
this time, because we're both sneaking and we're plotting against
the big corporation. It's all cloak and dagger. It's kind
of fun, and my impulsive brain is just eating it up.
Speaker 5 (29:16):
They'd meet in the grass field behind the shooting range,
a place David used to go four wheeling with his
buddies when he was in high school. It was hard
to say whether the plan would ever really come together,
but as the weeks went on, it started feeling more
and more real to David, like this is possible. He
read books about the FBI and learned that the number
(29:37):
of agents on a case went down after one year,
and it became a cold case after two. He thought
that if they could lay low long enough, this crazy
thing just might work. About a month before the highst
Kelly went so far as to give him a kiss,
just a little peck, but in a way it was
what turned this theoretical plan into a reality.
Speaker 6 (30:01):
We'd go out there in the woods and sit on
the tailgate and drink and talk, and we never really
got physical with each other. I think there was maybe
the only one or two kisses. I insinuated that we
were going to be an item. The plan was for
(30:22):
once he got into Mexico and everything settled a little bit,
then I would come into Mexico and David Gant and
I was going to start a life together and be happy.
I guess, of course, never really had any intention of
leaving my family and going down there, but it made
it really easy to talk him into doing what he did.
(30:44):
I guess some people were just more easily persuaded than others.
Speaker 5 (30:48):
Meanwhile, Kelly convinced David that Steve was an important part
of the plan. She said he had mafia ties, and
he could launder the money, and he could get David
a fake id on this particular item he delivered. Steve
procured a birth certificate from a buddy, and David got
a brand new identity. Steve also put together a crack
(31:09):
Hei screw, a veritable who's who of who's available, some
to help move the literal tons of money, others with
no discernible role other than to make Steve look more
like the boss. Keeping up with his crime movie inspiration,
Steve took the idea from Reservoir Dogs, you know, where
all the patsy's involved in the job only knew each
(31:30):
other by color coded names, and.
Speaker 6 (31:32):
Not mister Purple some guy at some other job as
mister Purple, you're miss the pink.
Speaker 5 (31:38):
David was never supposed to meet Steve, so they couldn't
identify each other to the police. Through all this, Kelly
pretty much just kicked back and watch it all happen.
And yet she was the crucial piece of the whole thing,
maybe even more important than David, who worked in the vault.
Speaker 7 (31:54):
Without Kelly, this would not have happened. He was the
person who connected Steve to David.
Speaker 5 (32:00):
David got his shift schedule, he took the final step
in his planning and picked the day for the heist.
Speaker 4 (32:06):
I was keeping track of it, and I thought, Okay,
this next coming weekend is fourth I'm working.
Speaker 2 (32:15):
I want to do it.
Speaker 4 (32:15):
Then get your people ready. We're doing it. And I
don't think they really believed I would do it, And
there were moments when I didn't think I would do it.
It's kind of hard to explain how my pride got
involved that once I said we're going to do this,
there was no more backing out.
Speaker 5 (32:35):
David Gant was about to take the biggest leap of
his life, but it meant leaving his old life behind.
All this time, he had kept this whole thing a
secret from Tammy, his wife of five years, and his parents,
the people he was so determined to live up to
that it was driving him crazy. He'd have to say
goodbye to his own name and to every person he
(32:58):
ever knew, refriend every familiar face, every childhood lake and
forest and mountain, every previous day of his life. David
had to make a choice. Either he stays and lets
his soul get ground to dirt by his job, by
the shitty food he can afford on his salary, by
his depression, or he can leave it all abandoned his
(33:21):
family in the dead of night and become an outlaw.
Speaker 4 (33:26):
I'm either on the path of destruction physically or spiritually.
And I said, let's go with the money.
Speaker 5 (33:33):
But you know what they say about money and problems.
Speaker 2 (33:37):
That was dumb.
Speaker 4 (33:39):
People do not follow my example. That was one of
the huge mistakes. It was either a Hell's angel or
Ben Franklin said three can keep a secret if two
are dead, and I wish I'd known that.
Speaker 5 (33:50):
Then did we really know how to go about it?
Speaker 2 (33:53):
I don't think so. You know the dangers, but you
do it anyway.
Speaker 5 (33:57):
It's definitely a fucking mentality.
Speaker 6 (33:59):
So where Sarah like, God, what do we do? What
do we do?
Speaker 4 (34:01):
And you hear all the news, the Diamond Ring, the
new Boobs, the Ridiculous House BMW. But they had re
upholstered knows jobs.
Speaker 5 (34:13):
That's coming up on this season of Crimeless Hillbilly Heist.
Speaker 2 (34:27):
Hey, folks, it's Josh Gen again.
Speaker 3 (34:29):
Rory Scoville and I are going to take a few
minutes here to digest what just happened there.
Speaker 2 (34:34):
It's a public service we like to.
Speaker 3 (34:35):
Do, oh boy, because no one pays attention anymore. You're
all on your phones, that's right. My immediate takeaway is
that I absolutely love David Gant. Yes, I worked on
the series, so I'm aware of what's coming for him,
but I still feel so nervous for the guy.
Speaker 2 (34:50):
He just wants Kelly to love him and to party
a little. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:53):
If I got to say, my main takeaway from just
this first episode of getting to know him, it's that
you're unhappy with your life and you want to make
a change and do something else. I almost don't even
see him as a criminal. I don't even hear criminality
in his voice, even though he committed a major crime.
This sounds so weird to say committed a massive theft.
(35:15):
I almost don't even blame him. I'm like, ah, wait,
you stole from the banks. We the people have been
stolen from so many times. I almost see this guy's
living out the fantasy we all kind of have.
Speaker 2 (35:26):
Totally.
Speaker 3 (35:27):
Like I said, I know how this ends, but I'm
still rooting for him because he's so likable.
Speaker 2 (35:31):
I agree.
Speaker 3 (35:32):
So give me your honest assessment of the plan, like
as a as a master plan to steal money, how
do you feel like they're.
Speaker 1 (35:39):
Doing There were moments where I thought, oh, David Gampt
is not that he doesn't seem to be as dumb.
It does seem like he did think of certain things.
He just didn't think of certain things all the way through.
It seemed like David gant on his own with his
military style thinking. Maybe had he drawn the whole plan
up and didn't just decide that he was going to
(36:00):
him up with morons, it maybe would have had a
different outcome, or he maybe could have been on the
lamb a little longer.
Speaker 2 (36:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (36:08):
The problem is that I think Steve thinks he's actually
a brilliant criminal.
Speaker 1 (36:13):
I know, but it is not actually, Yeah, and like
hasn't thought about for someone who is so obsessed with
criminality in the mafia and scarface and all of this
type of stuff, it just seems like has no education
from watching all that stuff to even know the basic
details of you know, how to hide the money, how
to escape, how to pull off this heist. It was like, literally,
(36:34):
let's all sit side by side in a parking lot
across the street and wait.
Speaker 2 (36:40):
I feel like we've all known as Steve.
Speaker 3 (36:42):
He's the guy who like talks confidently about something he
knows actually nothing about.
Speaker 2 (36:46):
Right.
Speaker 1 (36:46):
Yeah, but I also got to say in Steve's Behalf,
there's a lot of people who have dreams and they
don't follow through with them. Steve, Steve was never going
to get up on following his dream.
Speaker 3 (36:56):
Fly High, Steve. Will they get away with it? I
actually know, but I'll never tell. If only we could
listen to episode two, Oh wait we can?
Speaker 2 (37:05):
Oh my God Magic.
Speaker 5 (37:19):
Crimeless. Hillbilly Heist is a production of SmartLess Media, Campside
Media and Big Money Players in partnership with iHeart Podcasts.
Bill Billy Heist is narrated by me Johnny Knoxville and
created by Liz Elkington and Stuart Bailey. Written by Michael
Kenyon Meyer with Liz Elkington and Stuart Bailey, Produced by
(37:39):
Lane Rose and Sierra Franco. Additional production help by Rajeev Gola.
The series was sound designed and mixed by Ewin l Tremwen,
fact checking by Gray Lanto and a special thanks for
our operations team Doug Slaywyn Ashley Warren, Sabina Mara and
Destiny Dingle, iHeart Podcasts and Big Money Players. Executive producers
(38:03):
are Jack O'Brien, Lindsay Hoffman and Matt Appadaca. Campsite Media's
executive producers are Josh Steen, Vanessa Grigoriatis, Adam Hoff, and
Matt Cher. Executive producers are Liz Elkeaton and Stuart Bailey
from SmartLess Media. The producers are Will Arnett, Jason Bateman,
Sean Hayes, and Richard Corson. Bernie Kaminski is the head
(38:25):
of production. The associate producer is Mattie McCann.
Speaker 2 (38:30):
If you've enjoyed
Speaker 5 (38:31):
Crimeless Hillbilly Hies, please rate and review the show wherever
you get your podcasts.
Campsite Media, stark Lash.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Hey, they're good people.
Speaker 3 (00:18):
I'm Josh Deen, a journalist, and I'm Murray Scovel, a comedian.
We're here to shamelessly plug our new weekly show, Crimeless,
cooked up in the true crime comedy lab by the
mad geniuses at SmartLess Media, Campsite Media, and big money Players.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
It's got everything, fake hit men, terrible alibis, and of course,
gangs of angry, horny monkeys. And it's all coming your
way in December. But before we hog up your earballs,
we wanted to start things off with a palate cleanser.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
A wild eight episode romp about one of the dumbest
and most outrageous heists in US history, perpetrated by some
fine Southern goofballs.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
I actually prefer high functioning ding dongs, Josh. We call
it Crimeless Hillbilly Heist, and we got the finest narrator
of his generation to tell it to you, a man.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
So talented they named a city after him. That's right.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
I'd like to pass the mic to the patron saint
of Jackasses, the one and only Johnny Knoxville, to bring
you Crimeless Hillbilly Heist.
Speaker 4 (01:32):
It's kind of like watching a movie where the volume
is kind of muted. There was so much adrenaline, so
much sweat, so much stress, that there are bits and
pieces of it that are just fragments of memory.
Speaker 5 (01:48):
It's the evening of October fourth, nineteen ninety seven, at
a Loomis Fargo cash storage facility outside of Charlotte, North Carolina.
David Gant is the vault supervisor at this building, where
tens of millions of dollars in cash sit in a
bank vault and armored trucks arrived frequently making deliveries and
drop offs. David's the only one here this evening. He
(02:10):
just told his trainee to go home. Now David's left
to guard the money alone. He's a redhead in his
mid twenties, tall and lanky, with bright blue eyes. He's
worked at Loomis Fargo for a few years now, making
a couple bucks more than minimum wage for dangerous work,
and he's about to say fuck that. As soon as
(02:36):
David knows the training is gone, he sashays back to
the vault, where he's already left the heavy door propped open.
The trainee didn't know to check for that. David hurries
into the gray room, where as fate would have it,
the cash is already shrink wrapped and stacked onto push carts.
Each one is about two million bucks on wheels.
Speaker 4 (02:57):
I pop the seal on it, open it up, and
it's just rows of twenty dollar bules about yea thick,
hundreds of them.
Speaker 5 (03:06):
There's fifteen million dollars in the vault, maybe more a
literal ton of cash, and David is going to take
it all by himself. The facility is designed so an
armored car can pull into the building and ride up
to the vault entrance. David already has a company van
park there ready to go. He starts rushing the carts
(03:29):
into the back of the van. But even with the
carts already loaded, this is exhausting work, as loading more
than two thousand pounds into a van by yourself tends
to be the.
Speaker 4 (03:39):
Pile of steady, growing and growing. I'm sweating, you know.
Even my socks are working.
Speaker 5 (03:46):
And as if this isn't stressful enough, David's pager keeps
blowing up with messages from his very nervous accomplices waiting outside.
Speaker 4 (03:55):
They're out there panicing because I think it's gonna be
ten minutes.
Speaker 5 (04:00):
He's at it for an hour, back and forth, lugging cash,
muscles aching.
Speaker 4 (04:05):
It's the worst hour, longest hour of my life.
Speaker 5 (04:09):
But finally he's got it, all of it, well, everything
you get carried. David skillfully ejects the security tapes from
the VCRs and throws him in the van along with
the money. Then he sets a timer on the vault
door so it can't be reopened for several days, an
insider trick, creating an extra obstacle to slow down anyone
(04:30):
who tries to trace his steps. David plans to be
long gone by the time anyone can get back into
the vault. He jumps in the van and drives to
the automated gate at the back of the lot. He
hits the button to exit, and this.
Speaker 4 (04:50):
Is where I have my first real mishap of the.
Speaker 5 (04:53):
Evening, because the gate won't Openvid's trapped. He knows he
can't take back what he's done. The vault's locked, and
he's the one who took the cash out of it.
He's already a criminal, a criminal who's just pulled off
one of the largest cash heists in history, so close
(05:14):
to escape, and now the only thing between him and
freedom is basically a malfunctioning garage door opener. The thing is,
David did everything right, had it all planned out. He
was so close to paradise, so close to being a
rich man boarding a plane to somewhere exotic.
Speaker 4 (05:33):
There's lost places to explore. I could go gold mine
or looking for emeralds. I could live out romance in
the stone or in there Jones, spend the rest of
my life on a sailboat, Jimmy Buffett.
Speaker 5 (05:51):
So minor speed bump here. Surely there's another way out,
because if David Gant went straight to prison without so
much as exiting the property, it wouldn't be much of
a story, and they probably wouldn't have hired me to
tell this story. Right From Smartness Media, Campsite Media, and
(06:13):
big money players in partnership with iHeart Podcasts. I'm Johnny
Knoxville and you're listening to Crime List Bill Billy Heist,
Episode one, Money stinks. If there's one thing in life
I like is short sighted, some would say dumb criminals.
(06:37):
And let me tell you, this group of thieves ain't
the smartest outlaws in history. They ate the second smartest either.
But wow, what a story. Eight episodes of Honest to
God True Crime. We knew they were trying to kill
David Khant. Massive screw ups.
Speaker 6 (06:53):
The perfect crime is probably impossible to commit.
Speaker 5 (06:56):
Screw ups attempting to cover up the previous screw ups.
Speaker 2 (06:59):
It was the perfect storm and a sewer.
Speaker 5 (07:01):
People discovering their true selves. I have been labeled with
sociopathic tendencies, but that's also coming from over educated people
with too many degrees and dreaming big dreams.
Speaker 6 (07:14):
I remember saying I'm a rich bitch now and kind
of felt good.
Speaker 5 (07:21):
We also got folks gifting boob jobs to the relatives,
stocking wine cellars with perhaps blue ribbon, and of course
a velvet elvis painting. This was a huge story at
the time, and it's damn near turned into a legend.
Speaker 4 (07:35):
It did feel kind of like Robinhood, except for the
part where he steals from the rich and gives to
the core. I guess that kind of works, but I'm
not that generous.
Speaker 5 (07:47):
The point is this is a story about saying the
hell with all the rules and going after the life
you really want. It's about achieving the American dream, even
if you have to steal it, even if you have
to leave your old life behind. Our story takes place
(08:14):
in the nineteen nineties, a simpler time when doctors thought
that margarine was good for you. The Internet was still new,
and people carried around these little pieces of folded up
green paper to buy things. This paper was a big deal,
big enough to risk your life for. The nineties were
(08:35):
also boom times for the American economy.
Speaker 3 (08:37):
Every day America Online is making it easier for people
to live, work, and play.
Speaker 5 (08:43):
This was before the dot com bubble burst, before the
housing crash, before all kinds of things that made our
lives kind of shitty. In the three decades since, the
nineties felt like they could continue the prosperity of the
nineteen eighties. Maybe even more than that, it seemed like
just about any it could get rich. The nineties were
about big time money, fu money, making it rain in
(09:07):
a rap video money. And Charlotte, North Carolina, where our
story takes place, was along for the crazy ride.
Speaker 7 (09:14):
Charlotte being touted at this gleaming city of the New South.
Speaker 5 (09:18):
That would be Jeff Diamond, a journalist who covered our
story for The Charlotte Observer and wrote the definitive account
in his book Heist. Jeff was there for every what
in the actual hell twist in turn of this massive story.
Jeff was a young reporter when all this happened. He
was twenty four, about the same age as David Gant,
and like a lot of young reporters, Jeff made his
(09:39):
bones on the crime beat. This work often led him
to a town just outside of Charlotte called Gastonia, the
crown jewel of Gaston County.
Speaker 7 (09:50):
It was known throughout the Charlotte region for having kind
of wacky things happened.
Speaker 5 (09:55):
But Jeff felt there was a lot to like about Gastonia.
Speaker 7 (09:58):
My favorite food pilgrimage here is a theft footage type
place called the Shrimp Boat, which is actually known for
its chicken.
Speaker 5 (10:06):
It was true, though, that the nineties boom times had
left Gastonia behind. People there felt like the whole damn
town hadn't been invited to the party. And Gastonia, of course,
was David Gant's old stomping grounds.
Speaker 4 (10:19):
People would look at Gastonia, they called it the gas House,
and that's where all the worker bees came from. All
the people blue collar. If you lived in Gastonia, they
pretty much considered you trailer park trash and if you
lived in one of the small communities between here and there,
you were much better.
Speaker 5 (10:48):
At the time. Jeff is working the crime beat. David
Gant spends his days behind the wheel of an armored
truck carrying millions of dollars at a time, a glamorous
job for a country.
Speaker 4 (10:58):
Kid'striggling with that amount of money is exciting, and then
you realize that money stinks. It smells because people hide
it and they put it in there. They put it
in their underwear, and they keeping their socks, they put
in their brazier, and oh, people treat money horribly. Even
(11:20):
brand new money has a stinch to it. After a while,
the truck gets this mix of booty, short money and
new money. This job is filled with wonderful aromas.
Speaker 5 (11:33):
David carts around a lot of other people's money, but
he has very little of his own. He makes eight
dollars and fifteen cents an hour. Technically speaking, he has
less than zero dollars because he and his wife, Tammy,
are in debt. And as David drives his route day
after day through the streets of the town he grew up,
and he can't help but think a lot about how
(11:56):
his life was supposed to work out differently. Growing up
in Gastonia, David spent a lot of time squirrel hunting
and drag racing, figuring out how to make his own fun.
Speaker 4 (12:11):
To my mindset, if you're bored, you're not creative enough,
and so we would. We would invent stuff. We made
our own wine.
Speaker 5 (12:19):
It was horrible. Another hobby was sneaking into the lakeside
properties where the rich folks kept their vacation homes and
hauling a cheap illuminum fishing boat straight past the note
trespassing signs.
Speaker 4 (12:34):
People come out on their docks and yell at us,
and that's that was just part of growing up.
Speaker 5 (12:39):
But life wasn't all homemade wine and trespassing. He'd also
go to church with his parents and have long sit
downs with his dad for what they called the man's
breakfast eggs bacon, sausage, plus coffee and good conversation over
the breakfast table. David's dad taught him about the world,
how to act, how to present himself, what to expect
(13:01):
out of life.
Speaker 4 (13:02):
You meet so and so's daughter, and if they find
you suitable, you get a good introduction. Next thing you know,
you've got a good job. You got a good wife,
you got the three point five kids, two dogs. You're
doing great.
Speaker 5 (13:16):
David's dad had survived combat in World War Two before
coming home to raise a family. He made a solid
middle class living as a trucker, and his company once
gave him a plaque for pulling a couple out of
a burning car. His mom was another strapping American individualist.
One of David's chief memories of her is when she
gashed her arm wide open on her broken fruit bowl
(13:37):
and then drove herself to the hospital. Come on, boy,
I gotta go to doctor hardcore. His parents had life
down pat They didn't need a thing from anybody.
Speaker 4 (13:50):
I wish I could be as tough as they were,
you know. That's one of my wandest wishes to make
them proud, and I struggled with that.
Speaker 5 (14:00):
David earned his high school diploma, and then he joined
the military. He served in Desert Storm as a mechanic
fixing Apache helicopters. While he was deployed, he started getting
letters from acute cashier he met at the wind Dixie
grocery store back home, a girl named Tammy. They wrote
back and forth, and soon they were trading love letters.
David married Tammy soon after finishing his tour in the army,
(14:23):
and they eventually settled back in Gestonian. He played by
the rules just like his dad had taught him, and
he expected to be rewarded with a life just like
his parents had. But while he had the girl, he
still didn't have the other pieces to the puzzle. Turns
out no civilians had an Apache helicopter for him to fix.
Speaker 4 (14:43):
The economic opportunities were kind of slim, and I was
struggling financially and I had a new wife, and I'm
thinking in the back of my head and eventually we're
going to have kids. We're not going to make it
on this, and I started really sol search being a
married man and trying to be like my dad. To me,
(15:06):
I felt like a failure. And I did some really
menial jobs that didn't pay anything, didn't mean nothing to me,
and that's where I ended up working for Wells Fargo.
Speaker 5 (15:19):
It's actually Loomis Fargo, a private company that drives the
big bank's money around.
Speaker 4 (15:24):
Being a driver Wells Fargo is getting up at the
same time every morning, putting on the same uniform every morning,
getting in the same truck with the same person every day,
What do you do the same route every day.
Speaker 5 (15:43):
That route began and ended at the Loomis Fargo facility,
a nondescript building outside of town, surrounded by a chain
link fence. Besides the vault where the money was kept,
there was also a cash room where the money was counted.
And everyone in there was making shit pay, and there
were a lot of jokes about, you know, like snatching
(16:04):
as much cash as they could.
Speaker 4 (16:06):
We would joke with them about running off to you know,
Jamaica or whatever. The management at Loomis Fargo did not
appreciate any type of dark humor in that industry.
Speaker 5 (16:21):
David did, however, have one personality trait beloved by all
bank managers.
Speaker 4 (16:26):
I'm very impulsive. It kind of brings me a weird
sense of joy to do something. Just if I see
something interest me, I might just go do it.
Speaker 5 (16:37):
But David kept his impulsive side and check. He kept
up with the grind, never missing a payment on the
mobile home he shared with Tammy. Then one day at
Loomis Fargo, he met a new employee, a woman who
broke up the monotony and threatened to set David's impulsive
side free.
Speaker 6 (16:58):
I remember one day pulling in when I was still
a driver, and David Gant comes up to the vehicle
and I opened the door. He says, I'll be your
friend if you'll give me a cigarette. I said, I
don't need any more friends, but i'll give you a cigarette.
Speaker 5 (17:14):
Kelly Jane Campbell had certain desirable qualities.
Speaker 6 (17:18):
I did know that I was good looking. I mean,
of course, I had a lot of attention from a
lot of guys.
Speaker 5 (17:24):
In other words, she's the ideal character for any Loomis
Fargo employee to imagine running off to Jamaica with.
Speaker 6 (17:31):
And then we just kind of became friends from there
and started talking and stuff. I knew he was attracted
to me.
Speaker 4 (17:37):
We chit chatted and talked, and we shared a lot
in common. We had grown up similar from similar areas,
similar backgrounds, blue collar words, lots of talk around and
that's where our friendship sort of began. And after that
it kind of grew. And I don't know how to.
Speaker 5 (18:00):
Explain it now. A polite Southern man, especially married one,
doesn't talk about this sort of thing without beating around
the bush.
Speaker 4 (18:09):
A little good look a woman, blonde hair, blue eyes,
I don't know, but she was very pretty warm, and
I was attractive tour.
Speaker 6 (18:22):
I was not physically attracted to him, but he was funny.
Speaker 5 (18:27):
He was funny oof. For all their differences, Kelly and
David did have one thing in common. They wish their
(18:48):
lives had worked out differently. They were already swimming in
regret and they were just in their twenties.
Speaker 6 (18:54):
I got married when I was eighteen. My mom tried
to talk me out of it. Is she of course,
your mom knows you better than anybody else. I got
married to Jimmy Campbell. He had had a crush on
me all through junior high. His the nickname of Spanky.
Everybody knowed him as Spanky even in school, and he
said it was because he looked like Spanky from the
(19:15):
Little Rascals when he was a kid.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
It stug.
Speaker 5 (19:19):
Spanky drove a cement truck and later operated a bulldozer
at a landfill. Kelly worked off and on while taking
care of her two kids.
Speaker 6 (19:28):
Money wasn't plentiful. We basically lived from paycheck to paycheck.
I mean, he was a hard person to get along
with sometimes.
Speaker 5 (19:39):
Kelly also had a son from before she and Spankey
were together, and Spanky and the boy did not get along.
David had his own problems, of course, and the struggles
of adult life, of bad marriages, low paying jobs drew
Kelly and David together.
Speaker 6 (19:56):
When you're not happy and you're marriage, it's just it
starts out with you know. It was just nice to
have somebody to talk to that's different, somebody you convent
to that's not in the situation.
Speaker 4 (20:06):
We talked about a lot of different things. It was
kind of like a breath of fresh air to have
somebody that you could talk across to. At least for me,
we spoke the same language.
Speaker 5 (20:19):
This continued on for about a year, David nurturing a
serious crush Kelly eh enjoying a friendly ear, willing to listen.
But then Kelly left Lumis Fargo for another job. She
and David stayed in touch a bit, but neither of
their circumstances really changed much. David was still married to Tammy,
(20:39):
still in debt, still feeling like a failure, while Kelly
kept moving along with her own life, marriage troubles, financial woes,
and then Kelly started hanging out with another guy she
kept in the friend zone over the years, a guy
named Steve Chambers. For all the so called unwanted attention
Kelly got from guy She tended to get along with
(21:02):
them better than women.
Speaker 6 (21:03):
It's sad to say, but a female stab you in
the back a lot quicker than male will.
Speaker 5 (21:08):
So Steve declined to talk to us for the story.
By the way, we contacted his lawyer and followed up,
but never heard back. He and his then wife Michelle
are the only main players from this gang of yahoos
you won't hear from directly.
Speaker 6 (21:23):
Steve. He could talk good talk. After high school, there
was a lot of years where we didn't see each other,
and then when he started coming back around, he said
that he had these connections with people, and he always
fancied the movie Godfather, and I think that's where a
lot of his persona came from. He liked to talk
(21:47):
bigger than what he really was. I think he had
a very good imagination.
Speaker 5 (21:55):
Steve did give a brief interview to Jeff Diamont back
in the day.
Speaker 2 (21:59):
Steve had to go.
Speaker 7 (22:00):
He he was kind of a burly guy. He often
borrowed language from gangster movies like Goodfellas. He also had
a history of various petty crimes that had maybe familiarized
him with certain ways of operating.
Speaker 5 (22:12):
In other words, Steve wasn't all talk when it came
to his criminal persona. Although he was a bit of
a professional squealer.
Speaker 7 (22:19):
He was somebody who would call the FBI about crimes
that had not yet happened, but which he knew were
being planned, and the reason he knew they were being
planned with because he was helping plan them.
Speaker 5 (22:29):
As part of his made man persona. Steve liked to
entertain people in his trailer. He'd serve steaks, pass out drinks,
and generally talk bullshit. One day, Kelly went over to
Steve's house for beers in a game of Uno, which
would turn out to be the most consequential game of
Uno in history. At first, Kelly didn't think much of
(22:50):
it when Steve made a bold proposal.
Speaker 6 (22:53):
Steve started talking about, have you ever.
Speaker 5 (22:56):
Thought about doing something big, like real big at Loomis Fargo?
Speaker 6 (23:02):
And I'm like, well, I don't. First, he says, and
I'm sure he's seen it in a movie somewhere. He says, well,
what do you think about You take a hangarnaid and
put it on the window and they'll run out of
the vehicle and then you can rob it, and I'm like, no,
that wouldn't work. I said, it's armor. I don't even know.
That's too dangerous. So he just, you know, we start
(23:23):
throwing around ideas about how you could rob a.
Speaker 5 (23:27):
Truck, just your run of the mill uno chit chat.
Speaker 6 (23:30):
Most of his were outlandish like that. But then when
he found out that David Gant was attracted to me,
and he's like.
Speaker 5 (23:36):
Well, do you still talk to him?
Speaker 6 (23:38):
I said, yeah, I still talk to him sometimes. He's like, well,
you think about he would rob the place? I said,
m maybe I could probably talk him into it. He
does work in the vault.
Speaker 5 (23:56):
Since Kelly left Loomis Fargo, David had been promoted to
work in the vault, but all his problems were still
hanging around.
Speaker 4 (24:03):
My job beating me up. Now it's not just morning,
it's beating me to death because I'm getting up at
three point thirty four o'clock in the morning, driving from
King's Mountain to Charlotte, opening up And when I say
opening up, far Ago, I'm the first guy to put
on body armor, going with a shotgun and a flashlight.
(24:24):
Cut the lights all on, check every room all the
way to the back. Make sure there's no bad people,
and that's mildly stressful because if you do run into
a bad guy, it's you and him.
Speaker 5 (24:37):
David was working such long hours that he barely had
time to keep his work pants clean. A new manager
gave him crap about it one day, and David snapped.
Speaker 4 (24:46):
He said something about you need to respect me. I said,
respect is earned, not given, and then I went on
a little rant. I said the only thing that is
given is sympathy, and if you want sympathy, look between
shit and syphilis in the dictionary and walked off.
Speaker 5 (25:06):
I thought I was fired, but fired he was not.
He kept working long hours and then going home to
Tammy so they could argue.
Speaker 4 (25:14):
Our problem with money was we just didn't have enough
of it. It's like a brick would drop on you
every day because you understand the credit card company's charging
you well, I'm good at math twenty four percent interest
every month, that little clock is running, and my brain's
(25:36):
keeping tally of the math.
Speaker 5 (25:38):
David realized with minimum payments they were barely keeping up
with anyway. It would take thirty years to pay that
debt off.
Speaker 4 (25:46):
And one day that just slapped me in the face.
I'm like, we're never going to get out from under this,
never ever. And it put me into like a today
I understand it, and me into a depression. And it
really affected my marriage, even though I hid it well,
and I probably didn't treat Tammy as good as I
(26:10):
should have. I didn't give her the attention that she needed.
I didn't give her the emotional support she probably needed.
I was there physically, but mentally and spiritually I wasn't there.
My brain had already checked out.
Speaker 5 (26:26):
And then one day out of the blue, David's old crush,
Kelly calls. She has an idea something. She and her
pals Steve of just been kicking around.
Speaker 4 (26:37):
She calls me up and we're still chit chatting. She goes,
what do you think about Robin Wells Fargo? And I
thought about it for a second. I said, if you
pick the right day, pick the right time, it'd be easy.
She said, think about it and get back with me.
Speaker 5 (26:59):
David didn't have to think about it for too long.
Speaker 4 (27:01):
I was mentally drowning, and so when my co worker
approached me about Robin Wills Fargo, it was like somebody
thumia loading a lifeline something. And you know, my impulsiveness
my desire to just get the sea of pressure off
of me.
Speaker 5 (27:21):
I said, yeah, the heist was still just a notion.
Each figure the other might just be joking about running
off with the money, just like all the employees at
Fargo used to do. But David took the lifeline and
ran with it. He started planning, a skill he was
taught in the military.
Speaker 4 (27:37):
I had a drill shart to tell me, we don't
even take a pooh. He didn't users word pooh, but
he said, we don't even take a pooh without a plan, words.
Speaker 2 (27:47):
To live by.
Speaker 5 (27:48):
He didn't know whether Kelly was actually in or out,
but that didn't stop him from thinking it all through.
The best time to rob the place would be one
of his weekend shifts, when there were fewer employees around
but still a fair bit of money in the vault.
He started to keep track of the money to see
exactly how much might be sitting around, and what he
(28:08):
observed was pretty crazy. There was always more than ten
million dollars in cash just sitting there, all stacked up,
sometimes fifteen millions, sometimes even more. They were basically begging
someone to take it. The next time she and David talked,
Kelly was impressed by what she was hearing, well as
impressed as Kelly can get.
Speaker 6 (28:30):
There was not a lot of extensive planning that went
into it. I mean, it was just, you know, how
much planning do you really need for somebody that works
in the ball to load the money in the truck
and drive away.
Speaker 5 (28:43):
As things developed, David realized he wasn't just doing all
this to pay off his credit card debt. He was
planning an entirely new life with Kelly.
Speaker 4 (28:57):
She'd call or she'd call me on my pager and
we'd meet, chit chat. You know, it felt very cleaned
this time, because we're both sneaking and we're plotting against
the big corporation. It's all cloak and dagger. It's kind
of fun, and my impulsive brain is just eating it up.
Speaker 5 (29:16):
They'd meet in the grass field behind the shooting range,
a place David used to go four wheeling with his
buddies when he was in high school. It was hard
to say whether the plan would ever really come together,
but as the weeks went on, it started feeling more
and more real to David, like this is possible. He
read books about the FBI and learned that the number
(29:37):
of agents on a case went down after one year,
and it became a cold case after two. He thought
that if they could lay low long enough, this crazy
thing just might work. About a month before the highst
Kelly went so far as to give him a kiss,
just a little peck, but in a way it was
what turned this theoretical plan into a reality.
Speaker 6 (30:01):
We'd go out there in the woods and sit on
the tailgate and drink and talk, and we never really
got physical with each other. I think there was maybe
the only one or two kisses. I insinuated that we
were going to be an item. The plan was for
(30:22):
once he got into Mexico and everything settled a little bit,
then I would come into Mexico and David Gant and
I was going to start a life together and be happy.
I guess, of course, never really had any intention of
leaving my family and going down there, but it made
it really easy to talk him into doing what he did.
(30:44):
I guess some people were just more easily persuaded than others.
Speaker 5 (30:48):
Meanwhile, Kelly convinced David that Steve was an important part
of the plan. She said he had mafia ties, and
he could launder the money, and he could get David
a fake id on this particular item he delivered. Steve
procured a birth certificate from a buddy, and David got
a brand new identity. Steve also put together a crack
(31:09):
Hei screw, a veritable who's who of who's available, some
to help move the literal tons of money, others with
no discernible role other than to make Steve look more
like the boss. Keeping up with his crime movie inspiration,
Steve took the idea from Reservoir Dogs, you know, where
all the patsy's involved in the job only knew each
(31:30):
other by color coded names, and.
Speaker 6 (31:32):
Not mister Purple some guy at some other job as
mister Purple, you're miss the pink.
Speaker 5 (31:38):
David was never supposed to meet Steve, so they couldn't
identify each other to the police. Through all this, Kelly
pretty much just kicked back and watch it all happen.
And yet she was the crucial piece of the whole thing,
maybe even more important than David, who worked in the vault.
Speaker 7 (31:54):
Without Kelly, this would not have happened. He was the
person who connected Steve to David.
Speaker 5 (32:00):
David got his shift schedule, he took the final step
in his planning and picked the day for the heist.
Speaker 4 (32:06):
I was keeping track of it, and I thought, Okay,
this next coming weekend is fourth I'm working.
Speaker 2 (32:15):
I want to do it.
Speaker 4 (32:15):
Then get your people ready. We're doing it. And I
don't think they really believed I would do it, And
there were moments when I didn't think I would do it.
It's kind of hard to explain how my pride got
involved that once I said we're going to do this,
there was no more backing out.
Speaker 5 (32:35):
David Gant was about to take the biggest leap of
his life, but it meant leaving his old life behind.
All this time, he had kept this whole thing a
secret from Tammy, his wife of five years, and his parents,
the people he was so determined to live up to
that it was driving him crazy. He'd have to say
goodbye to his own name and to every person he
(32:58):
ever knew, refriend every familiar face, every childhood lake and
forest and mountain, every previous day of his life. David
had to make a choice. Either he stays and lets
his soul get ground to dirt by his job, by
the shitty food he can afford on his salary, by
his depression, or he can leave it all abandoned his
(33:21):
family in the dead of night and become an outlaw.
Speaker 4 (33:26):
I'm either on the path of destruction physically or spiritually.
And I said, let's go with the money.
Speaker 5 (33:33):
But you know what they say about money and problems.
Speaker 2 (33:37):
That was dumb.
Speaker 4 (33:39):
People do not follow my example. That was one of
the huge mistakes. It was either a Hell's angel or
Ben Franklin said three can keep a secret if two
are dead, and I wish I'd known that.
Speaker 5 (33:50):
Then did we really know how to go about it?
Speaker 2 (33:53):
I don't think so. You know the dangers, but you
do it anyway.
Speaker 5 (33:57):
It's definitely a fucking mentality.
Speaker 6 (33:59):
So where Sarah like, God, what do we do? What
do we do?
Speaker 4 (34:01):
And you hear all the news, the Diamond Ring, the
new Boobs, the Ridiculous House BMW. But they had re
upholstered knows jobs.
Speaker 5 (34:13):
That's coming up on this season of Crimeless Hillbilly Heist.
Speaker 2 (34:27):
Hey, folks, it's Josh Gen again.
Speaker 3 (34:29):
Rory Scoville and I are going to take a few
minutes here to digest what just happened there.
Speaker 2 (34:34):
It's a public service we like to.
Speaker 3 (34:35):
Do, oh boy, because no one pays attention anymore. You're
all on your phones, that's right. My immediate takeaway is
that I absolutely love David Gant. Yes, I worked on
the series, so I'm aware of what's coming for him,
but I still feel so nervous for the guy.
Speaker 2 (34:50):
He just wants Kelly to love him and to party
a little. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:53):
If I got to say, my main takeaway from just
this first episode of getting to know him, it's that
you're unhappy with your life and you want to make
a change and do something else. I almost don't even
see him as a criminal. I don't even hear criminality
in his voice, even though he committed a major crime.
This sounds so weird to say committed a massive theft.
(35:15):
I almost don't even blame him. I'm like, ah, wait,
you stole from the banks. We the people have been
stolen from so many times. I almost see this guy's
living out the fantasy we all kind of have.
Speaker 2 (35:26):
Totally.
Speaker 3 (35:27):
Like I said, I know how this ends, but I'm
still rooting for him because he's so likable.
Speaker 2 (35:31):
I agree.
Speaker 3 (35:32):
So give me your honest assessment of the plan, like
as a as a master plan to steal money, how
do you feel like they're.
Speaker 1 (35:39):
Doing There were moments where I thought, oh, David Gampt
is not that he doesn't seem to be as dumb.
It does seem like he did think of certain things.
He just didn't think of certain things all the way through.
It seemed like David gant on his own with his
military style thinking. Maybe had he drawn the whole plan
up and didn't just decide that he was going to
(36:00):
him up with morons, it maybe would have had a
different outcome, or he maybe could have been on the
lamb a little longer.
Speaker 2 (36:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (36:08):
The problem is that I think Steve thinks he's actually
a brilliant criminal.
Speaker 1 (36:13):
I know, but it is not actually, Yeah, and like
hasn't thought about for someone who is so obsessed with
criminality in the mafia and scarface and all of this
type of stuff, it just seems like has no education
from watching all that stuff to even know the basic
details of you know, how to hide the money, how
to escape, how to pull off this heist. It was like, literally,
(36:34):
let's all sit side by side in a parking lot
across the street and wait.
Speaker 2 (36:40):
I feel like we've all known as Steve.
Speaker 3 (36:42):
He's the guy who like talks confidently about something he
knows actually nothing about.
Speaker 2 (36:46):
Right.
Speaker 1 (36:46):
Yeah, but I also got to say in Steve's Behalf,
there's a lot of people who have dreams and they
don't follow through with them. Steve, Steve was never going
to get up on following his dream.
Speaker 3 (36:56):
Fly High, Steve. Will they get away with it? I
actually know, but I'll never tell. If only we could
listen to episode two, Oh wait we can?
Speaker 2 (37:05):
Oh my God Magic.
Speaker 5 (37:19):
Crimeless. Hillbilly Heist is a production of SmartLess Media, Campside
Media and Big Money Players in partnership with iHeart Podcasts.
Bill Billy Heist is narrated by me Johnny Knoxville and
created by Liz Elkington and Stuart Bailey. Written by Michael
Kenyon Meyer with Liz Elkington and Stuart Bailey, Produced by
(37:39):
Lane Rose and Sierra Franco. Additional production help by Rajeev Gola.
The series was sound designed and mixed by Ewin l Tremwen,
fact checking by Gray Lanto and a special thanks for
our operations team Doug Slaywyn Ashley Warren, Sabina Mara and
Destiny Dingle, iHeart Podcasts and Big Money Players. Executive producers
(38:03):
are Jack O'Brien, Lindsay Hoffman and Matt Appadaca. Campsite Media's
executive producers are Josh Steen, Vanessa Grigoriatis, Adam Hoff, and
Matt Cher. Executive producers are Liz Elkeaton and Stuart Bailey
from SmartLess Media. The producers are Will Arnett, Jason Bateman,
Sean Hayes, and Richard Corson. Bernie Kaminski is the head
(38:25):
of production. The associate producer is Mattie McCann.
Speaker 2 (38:30):
If you've enjoyed
Speaker 5 (38:31):
Crimeless Hillbilly Hies, please rate and review the show wherever
you get your podcasts.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
CrimeLess: Hillbilly Heist
It’s 1996 in rural North Carolina, and an oddball crew makes history when they pull off America’s third largest cash heist. But it’s all downhill from there. Join host Johnny Knoxville as he unspools a wild and woolly tale about a group of regular ‘ol folks who risked it all for a chance at a better life. CrimeLess: Hillbilly Heist answers the question: what would you do with 17.3 million dollars? The answer includes diamond rings, mansions, velvet Elvis paintings, plus a run for the border, murder-for-hire-plots, and FBI busts.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com