October 15, 2025 • 41 mins
Having escaped to Mexico, David is living in luxury. Meanwhile, the gang members back home adjust to their lives as America's most wanted millionaires.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Gampsy media march lash.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
So Rory, what are the good people of planet Earth
need to know to enjoy Episode three?
Speaker 3 (00:23):
What happened last week?
Speaker 4 (00:24):
Never partner up with a pothead when you're going to
be stealing massive amounts of money that belonged to a
bank and becomes a federal crime is the main issue.
But I will say, to our surprise, we find out
that David Gant, having put all this money in a
truck and passed it off to huge morons and even
being a moro on himself, somehow has made it to Cancun,
(00:46):
Mexico to lay low for as long as possible. And
so we wonder, well, what happened to the other gaggle
of geese while he's down there in Mexico. We're about
to find out here on episode three.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
Okay, then let's get onto the episode. Here's Crimeless Hillbilly
Heist Episode three.
Speaker 5 (01:10):
It's the middle of the night at an upscale hotel
in Cancun, Mexico. David Gand has sprawled out on the bed,
still wearing his clothes and his pantyhose, money belt and
his cowboy boots stuffed with cash.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
I wake up about three or four in morning. It's
almost like I'm hungover from adrenaline.
Speaker 5 (01:37):
As David comes to he starts peeling off his clothes
to get to the money. He organizes the stack of bills.
The cash has been stuck to him for almost forty
eight hours. It's got that money stench he knew so
well from his days driving the Loomis van. But there's
a difference. This time. It's mixed with his own.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
Stench, the essholes of Dave, if you will.
Speaker 5 (02:00):
After all the stress of the heist and the escape,
suddenly everything is going easy. Yesterday his plane landed and
he breezed through Mexican customs while carrying twenty five grand
in small bills.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
And they could care less. I could have took an
elephant off that airplane with me. Told him the circus
was in town.
Speaker 5 (02:21):
He opped in a cab and the driver made him
feel right at home.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
He speaks in very good English. Hotel expensive or cheap?
I go expensive, expensive as fine.
Speaker 5 (02:34):
That's how David Gant got to this fancy hotel. Surreptitiously
paid for a two week stay in cash up front,
and smoothly tipped the concierge extra to ignore this suspicious
redheaded gringo, finally making it to his room, and now
as he's stacking the money, he realizes what he needs
to do next. As soon as the sun comes up
(03:01):
over Cancun's white sand beaches, it's time for a shopping spree.
The Kogle con Mall is just the place for a
man with a wallet full of stolen cash. It's got fountains, statues, skylights,
and luxury goods behind plexiglass, and for the first time
(03:22):
in his life, David can buy whatever he wants. His
first stop, of course, is a cowboy theme men's department.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
I'll spend most of my life in work boots, but
I love cowboy boots. I like expensive cowboy groots.
Speaker 5 (03:37):
Or at least he thinks he likes expensive cowboy boots,
he's never actually had a pair. He chooses a beautiful
pair of brown leather boots and realizes it'd be a
crime to put a cheap pair of socks in these puppies.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
I could buy was like these silk liners for your socks.
That's extravagant. Let's get two of those.
Speaker 5 (03:58):
He also needs some new gen and then the ultimate luxury.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
And this is where I discovered the joy of khaki
cargo pants. I've been faithful to them ever since. Pockets.
You gotta have them.
Speaker 5 (04:12):
In another store, David found a tailor who made silk
shirts sighs perfectly to his lanky measurements. He wisely ordered.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
Four of them, red, green, blue, and white with deer
antler buttons. I let the money just fly. It was great,
just two hundred dollars sunglasses, shirt, give me two pairs.
Speaker 5 (04:36):
Oh and to complete the look, he put on a
layer of spray TND. David's makeover is complete. Now what.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
Now?
Speaker 1 (04:46):
I've never had this problem. I've got money time.
Speaker 6 (04:52):
What do I do?
Speaker 1 (04:54):
Because usually my activity belimited to whatever was free or cheap,
And so I've got a really weird dilemma for myself.
What do I do?
Speaker 5 (05:04):
He sees an ad for horseback riding, and all of
a sudden.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
I'm riding horse through the Mexican jungle.
Speaker 5 (05:10):
A fugitive on horseback wearing two hundred dollars sunglasses and
shiny new cowboy boots. Indiana Jones looks like a jump jockey.
Compared to David Gant on his South of the Border adventure,
everything David dreamed about is finally coming true. He just
needs to wait for Kelly to arrive with the rest
of the money so they can start their new life
(05:31):
together in Paradise.
Speaker 1 (05:33):
I know that for her to leave is dangerous for
her and me. She would just draw him to me.
I'm thinking, if we can survive the first ninety one
hundred and twenty days, things will cool off.
Speaker 5 (05:49):
In excruciating weight, possibly not survivable, but there's a plan
to stay in contact. David will call a payphone at
a gas station a short drive from Kelly's house. Kelly
will be there to answer every Tuesday at one o'clock.
When the first call finally comes, Kelly sounds distressed.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
She says, you know, hey, this has created a crapstorm. Okay,
we've made a mess. This made national news. I don't
think they understood what was going to happen. I'm like, yeah,
he's stole almost twenty million dollars. What do you think
was gonna happen.
Speaker 5 (06:26):
It's easy to be so casual if you're a desperado
and a silk shirt living in a luxury hotel. But
back home in North Carolina, the smell of that coming
crap storm was strong in the Breeze from SmartLess Media,
Campsite Media, and Big Money Players in partnership with iHeart Podcasts.
(06:50):
I'm Johnny Knoxville and you're listening to crime list phill
Billy Heist. This is episode three, The Oncoming Crap Storm.
Speaker 6 (07:17):
I was a new agent and we were having lunch
and all our pages went off.
Speaker 5 (07:26):
This is former FBI agent John Wydra. He is a tall,
handsome guy. One look from him and you'll feel like
you're probably guilty of something or wish you were.
Speaker 6 (07:37):
Everybody has three lives everybody. You got your public life
that everybody knows about, you know, what you post on
Instagram or your Facebook page or whatever. Then you got
your private life that pretty much maybe only your spouse
and close family and friends know. Then you got your
secret life. That's where I spent most of my time
in everyone's secret life.
Speaker 5 (08:00):
John was an imposing guy in his youth, especially for
a guy whose specialty was accounting. He looked like if
Dolph Lungern and David Hasselhoff put on a suit two
sizes too small, strong chin, quafft hair, ready to draw
his gun or a calculator at a moment's notice. On
this fateful Sunday in the fall of nineteen ninety seven.
(08:20):
He's barely a year into his time with the bureau.
Speaker 6 (08:23):
I was thirty two. I was young, full of piss
and Benniger, you know, wanting to kick indoors chase people.
I was the moneylaundering coordinator for the State of North
Carolina at the time, and I'd worked financial crimes, any
type of financial crime, Ponzi schemes, embezzlements, things of that nature.
Speaker 5 (08:43):
When Widra got to the office, agents were saying that
someone had robbed a Loomis Fargo armored car. But he
quickly learned that this sixtinc summary of events didn't quite
capture what had happened.
Speaker 6 (08:54):
You normally think of an armored car robbery is like
coming in with guns and yanking people out at truck.
This was more like an embezzlement. But they took it
out of the money belonged to the bank, so it
was a federal crime.
Speaker 5 (09:09):
Wydra and other agents were dispatched to Loomis Fargo to
assess the crime scene and interview the employees. When they
got there, they found a red Dodge Dakota pickup truck
that belonged to the Loomis vault manager David Scott ganned.
Speaker 6 (09:24):
His wedding ring was left on the dashboard, so we
were thinking at first like this was a message he's
just moving on with his life.
Speaker 5 (09:32):
That was the first clue. But when the agents got
inside the Loomis facility, the vault was locked. David had
set the timer so it couldn't be opened. Loomis had
a locksmith working furiously trying to bypass the system, but
in the meantime, the investigators couldn't get in to see
how much money was stolen. To make matters worse, the
security tapes were missing, well two of them were missing.
Speaker 6 (09:55):
But he didn't realize that there was a third video
machine that they hid in the locked cabinet that only
executive management knew about.
Speaker 5 (10:03):
For that very reason, a very pissed off Loomis manager
plays this tape for the FBI and it's really quite
a show.
Speaker 6 (10:14):
You could see him on the camera working his ass
off to put the money in the van.
Speaker 5 (10:20):
They still don't know how much money was gone, but
based on the video, it was a slop jar full.
Speaker 6 (10:26):
It was a little over an hour of him back
and forth and you could see him sweating and stopping
and taking a break and loading up a palette and
pushing the palette over to the van. He's a rail
He couldn't weighed more than one hundred and fifty pounds,
soaking wet.
Speaker 5 (10:43):
David was one determined fella, but determined and discerning are
two very different qualities. And there was another clue caught
on camera.
Speaker 6 (10:52):
You could see in the video he kept stopping and
looking at his pager, so he was in communication with somebody,
and we ran the records. We found out that it
was his phone calling his pager, so it didn't really
lead anywhere, but he had given his phone to somebody,
So now we're looking for David ann at least one
other person.
Speaker 5 (11:13):
Whydra and the other agents interviewed the other employees, but
they weren't very much help. David's motives were unclear. Did
he ditch the wedding ring and steal the money to
reboot his life or was he simply a stooge and
some mastermind had forced him into the crime. When agents
interviewed David's wife, Tammy, she was terrified. She had been
worrying about her husband's whereabouts ever since he hadn't come
(11:36):
home from work and had waited for news all night
long with David's parents. Tammy also had already filed the
missing persons report. She told the agents she didn't think
David would have robbed the vault unless he was forced to.
David's parents said the same thing. When the agents finally
got access to the vault, they discovered the full extent
of the crime. In a twist of fate, David had
(11:57):
robbed the vault on a weekend when it was stuff
with an unusually large amount of money. There was a
huge NASCAR race in town that weekend, a race sponsored
by Bank of America, as it turned out, and b
of A had a bunch of extra twenty dollars bills
ready to stock the ATMs, all adding a lot more
weight and value to David's hall.
Speaker 6 (12:17):
Seventeen point three million dollars. When we've calculated how much
that would weigh, it was about twenty eight hundred pounds.
Speaker 5 (12:25):
David Gant was missing, along with seventeen point three million dollars,
and the FBI hardly had any leads. But a couple
of days later, a man out in the sticks of
Mecklenburg County was mowing his lawn and saw an extremely
poorly hidden white.
Speaker 6 (12:41):
Van and you could see through the window money, and
we're like, maybe all the money's there. Maybe got cold
feet and just left. We had no idea how much
it was, but you could tell it was a lot.
It was a lot of cash sitting in the back
of the van.
Speaker 5 (12:55):
The FBI told the van back to their office to
break into it. A few of the Beefier agents used
the Steve Chambers method, pounding on the bulletproof glass with
large rocks for a few hours until they finally got
it open. Not really, the FEDS did FBI stuff to
open the van.
Speaker 6 (13:12):
All we break into it and it's only three point
three million dollars that's in the back.
Speaker 5 (13:16):
Nowhere close to all the money. But for the agents,
three million bucks just left behind wasn't the most shocking thing.
They found inside.
Speaker 6 (13:24):
Two videotapes, the keys to the vault, the keys to
other trucks, they were all in there. So now we're
starting to worry. When we find that, We're like, there's
no way he left the videotapes. He intentionally took and
left them behind, and that we know he was working
(13:45):
with somebody else. So now we're thinking if this is
the mob David's dead.
Speaker 5 (13:51):
Despite an abandoned armored truck and an empty bank vault
and a gun and the three videotapes, the FBI doesn't
have much to go on. Okay, they actually have lots
to go on, but they still don't have anything pointing
to who David was working with or being forced to
work with. But the Feds have an ace up their
(14:11):
sleeve because almost everyone in America still watches the same
five channels every night, and millions of them are about
to feast their eyeballs on the delightful parade of Holy shit,
my life could be way worse than it is America's most.
Speaker 6 (14:28):
Wanted Focusing on the facts, it is exposing America's most wanted.
Speaker 5 (14:34):
And America's most wanted is all in on the David
Gant story. The tips are about to start rolling in.
It's October eleventh, nineteen ninety seven. It's been a week
(14:54):
since David Gant emptied a bank vault with his bare hands,
and the FBI is still hoping for something that will
help them find David. The money and the person or
persons paging him during the crime tonight has the potential
to offer a big break in the case because at
nine PM, Eastern America's Most Wanted will air a segment
(15:15):
on David Gant, perpetrator of one of the largest cash
heists in American history. The FBI is expecting hundreds of
phone calls that could turn into actionable tips that will
help them track David down. They have agents manning the
America's Most Wanted phone bank and other agents positioned on
the streets of Charlotte standing by to run down any
(15:36):
clues that come in. John Widre is at the FBI
command post with the number of his colleagues, his eyes
glued to the TV. Right now, it's playoff baseball Game
three of the American League Championship, with the Baltimore Orioles
and Cleveland Indians battling for a spot in the World Series.
(15:59):
The stakes are high, but as baseball games tend to do,
this one drags on and on and on, it goes
into extra innings.
Speaker 6 (16:09):
They come across and say it Americans must want. It
won't be played on the East Coast because of the
extra innings in this playoff game, which just kind of
took the wind out of our sales. We were really
hoping for some good leads and actually got nothing out
of it.
Speaker 5 (16:23):
If anyone on the East Coast had been able to
watch the segment, they would have seen David's wife Tammy.
She's speaking directly to the camera, pleading with David to
call or come home if he can, and reminding him
that she loves him no matter what. And where is
David while his wife is begging him for a safe return?
Speaker 1 (16:46):
Bouro football? They put you on the mule and what
they do is they have the soccer ball and they've
got the Burros don't care and you're out saying you
got a broom and the Burghs just look at You're like,
I don't want to run.
Speaker 5 (17:07):
Starting the day after the theft, Steve and Michelle Chambers
knew they couldn't just keep fourteen million dollars in plastic
barrels covered in dog food. That'd be stupid. They needed
to put that money to work. So on Monday morning
after the weekend Heis, Michelle stuffed a black briefcase full
of cash and walked into her local bank. She slyly
(17:30):
approached the teller, ready to weave a complicated web of deception.
Move number one on the four D chess board asked
to tell her how much cash she could deposit without
you know, the bank having to file paperwork. The teller
fell right into Michelle's trap and just answered the question.
The limit was ten thousand dollars. Now Michelle had all
(17:52):
the information she required for phase two of her ingenious plan.
She opened the briefcase right there at the window and
counted out ninety five hundred dollars of small bills, still
in the Lumis wrappers, of course, and handed them to
the teller. Then it was onto the third and final
phase of her plan. One last final bit of reassurance
(18:15):
for the teller so that she would forget this interaction
ever happened. Don't worry, Michelle told her it ain't drug money.
With that, she left and her bank account was almost
ten thousand dollars fuller without a trace of paperwork. Well done, Michelle,
except that teller definitely filed paperwork. What's known in the
(18:38):
trade is a suspicious activity report. So the FBI has
Michelle Chambers dead to rights, soda, because there's one problem.
It's still nineteen ninety seven.
Speaker 7 (18:53):
Just because these bank tellers were filing forms about these
cash depositives did not mean that these forums were getting
to the FBI in real time. I think it took
one or two or maybe even three months often from
the time these were filled out to when the FBI
could actually use them, you know, in an actionable way.
Speaker 5 (19:12):
But the chambers aren't just working to slowly sock money
away in the bank ninety five hundred bucks at a time.
The next morning, after the hist Steve had buried another
one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in a Duffel bag
in the backyard outside of their mobile home. Michelle was
home alone. A big rainstorm hit, water's pooling everywhere. She's
(19:35):
sure the money is getting soaked. She runs into the
middle of the storm and starts frantically digging holes trying
to recover the money, but of course Steve didn't mark
the location. Michelle is hysterical. She can't find the money,
and now her yard looks like it's been attacked by gophers.
When Steve returns home, he unhursed the cash. It's sopping wet.
(19:59):
No matter.
Speaker 7 (20:00):
They decided to put the money in the dryer. Steve
told Michelle, based on something he'd heard, put poker chips
in there because it would help the money not be
stuck to each other, and it actually worked, a literal
example of money laundering.
Speaker 5 (20:14):
A big win and maybe the first smart thing they've done,
which is not an indication of things to come, because
pretty much immediately after the hist Steve and Michelle do
the most conspicuous thing possible. They upgrade from their mobile
home to a literal mansion.
Speaker 6 (20:35):
The house that.
Speaker 7 (20:36):
Steve and Michelle moved into was a beautiful, beautiful house
and impress all of their friends and all of their relatives.
It had a really nice foyer with a curved staircase.
They had a grand piano in it, a huge kitchen,
a living room with a gas fireplace, a bedroom with
a fireplace. It was the type of place that you
would move into if you had lived in much smaller
(20:59):
surroundings and be like, I have made it, and everybody
who knows me from where I used to live is
going to think that I've made it.
Speaker 5 (21:06):
This is exactly what you want after a bank robbery,
all your friends talking about how much money you suddenly have.
Steve that sly fox has a few explanations ready for
his friends to kind of bs the Kelly says he's
been spouting his entire life about mob ties, gambling winnings,
you know the type. But when it came to his
(21:27):
new neighbors in the gated community, Steve had another tall
tail in his pocket. He had all this money because
he used to play professional football for the Dallas Cowboys. Okay, Steve.
Speaker 3 (21:43):
Told the people there that he was a ex Dallas
football player and he just wanted to be larger than
he was.
Speaker 5 (21:51):
Steve can't just be a retired banker or an heir
to some sausage fortune. He has to be a retired
football player. And he had to play for the Dallas
fucking Cowboys who had just won three out of the
last four Super Bowls. Here's Kathy Hooper, Kathy spelled with
a k who became neighbors with the Chambers when they
moved into the gated community.
Speaker 8 (22:14):
He just was telling everybody that he was an ex
pro football player he played for the Dallas Cowboys, and
we just assumed that he really did, you know, nobody
questioned him or anything, so because he was a big
guy and he looked like he could be a football player.
Speaker 5 (22:30):
Amazingly, Steve's ego allowed him to stumble into the perfect
alibi to give to his new posh neighbors. There was
already a professional basketball player in the neighborhood. And also Michael.
Speaker 8 (22:42):
Jordan loved playing golf at our club. He came here
a lot and played golf.
Speaker 5 (22:49):
Kathy Spelled with the K's best friend is Kathy Young.
Kathy Spelled with the Sea. Kathy with the Sea was
the mayor of Cramerton at the time.
Speaker 9 (22:58):
My job as mayor was basically to conduct monthly meetings
and do annual budgets with the town. I think most
people run for mayor to get to ride in the parade.
Speaker 5 (23:11):
And even this decorated paraded citizen of Cramerton felt that
Steve and Michelle fit the part.
Speaker 9 (23:17):
They had luxury cars BMW convertibles and she had a
big diamond ring, and they looked the part. There was
no reason to think that these people didn't have the
money to be in the neighborhood or couldn't afford the house.
Speaker 5 (23:34):
In other words, when buying your way into a luxury community,
it's important to go all in, and that's exactly what
the Chambers did. But all this is happening while Steve
is telling Kelly to lay low.
Speaker 3 (23:46):
He would tell me, don't don't take any trips, don't
be flashing money around. They'll get his car. And the
whole time, you know, he's bought a new vehicle. He
bought a furniture store.
Speaker 7 (24:02):
Wait what, he bought a furniture store, of the way
to try to launder the money.
Speaker 5 (24:06):
A furniture store he named after himself. Of course, M
and S Furniture For Michelle and Steve. I would have
preferred they went with S and M furniture, but that's
just me. With the exception of the many men who
(24:28):
wanted to sleep with Kelly Campbell, the world had been
pretty indifferent to her existence. But the day after the heist,
Kelly woke up to a different feeling, the feeling that
everyone in America was racing to find out her biggest secret.
Speaker 3 (24:48):
It was very surreal the next morning watching it on
the news and seeing how big it was and no
one that I did it, And I'm like, it's just
a really weird feeling.
Speaker 5 (25:11):
Way back the day after the robbery, after fearlessly getting
David halfway to the airport, and after checking in at
Steve's house to watch him count the money, Kelly Campbell
went back home to the trailer She shared with her
a strange husband, Spanky, and her two kids. Kelly was
the key to this whole thing happening, connecting David to
(25:31):
Steve and filling David's head with this fantasy of an
escape to Mexico. But even though she was instrumental to
the plot, Kelly really didn't have much ambition for her
share of the seventeen million bucks. Part of this was
just laying low. Unlike Stephen Michelle, she didn't want to
get caught just because she did something stupid. Everyone in
(25:52):
town knew she didn't have much money to spend.
Speaker 3 (25:54):
I didn't really go out spend a lot of money,
being off flashy and stuff, mainly for reason that they
would be looking at me because I used to work there.
Speaker 5 (26:04):
She does dutifully make her trips to the payphone every
week to talk to David and keep him on the hook.
Speaker 3 (26:09):
I was just telling him what he wanted to hear.
Speaker 5 (26:12):
Harsh while David and Steve and Michelle were on their
spending spreez, Kelly just wanted a few simple comforts.
Speaker 3 (26:21):
I did always think that money would make me happy,
because you know, then you don't have to worry about bills.
You can buy what clothes you want, you can drive
nice cars.
Speaker 5 (26:33):
In other words, she wanted a life without worry. This
meant a life away from her husband and being able
to buy things for her kids if they asked. She
was determined to keep a low profile until she could
pull that off. But she couldn't keep it entirely a secret.
Maybe she didn't want to tell her husband because she
didn't want to be with him anyway, and she certainly
wasn't going to tell her kids. But a few days
(26:56):
after the heist, she found herself riding in the car
with her mother.
Speaker 3 (27:00):
I said, did you see that Louis Fargo heist on TV?
She said yeah. I said I had something to do
with that, and I expected her to freak out, and
she's just like, Okay, it wasn't murder. So I knew
my mom wasn't gonna tell on me, So it's like,
you know, let's enjoy it while we can.
Speaker 5 (27:22):
And what she thought about Steve's behavior after the heist.
Speaker 3 (27:25):
At the time, I just, you know, wasn't really thinking properly.
Of course, I smoked weed and smoked a lot of it,
and I would just believe whatever he told me. And
I was like, well it probably makes sense because they
would look at me because I used to work there,
but they're not going to really look at him because
(27:46):
he didn't used.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
To work there.
Speaker 5 (27:51):
One day, while Kelly's home in her trailer, there's a
knock on the door. She's greeted by two FBI agents
and badges, wanting to talk to her about her friend
David Gant. She thinks she was probably high, but has
memory problems from getting so high, so she's not sure.
She tells the agents that she and David were friends,
(28:13):
but she doesn't know where he is, and, in an
inspired moment of proving she obviously has nothing to hide,
she tells the agents that she and David sometimes would
smoke weed together.
Speaker 3 (28:24):
I just figured that was the best way to throw
them off, I mean, trying not to be nervous, trying
to make them think that I didn't have nothing to
do with him.
Speaker 5 (28:33):
That's when the agents ask if she has any weed
on her right now. They don't care if she does,
they say, they just want to know if she's telling
the truth about getting high with David. Kelly says, oh, no,
I can deliver on the goods. She goes to her
bedroom and comes back with a big bag of weed.
The agents ask her if she wants to hand it over.
Speaker 3 (28:52):
Well, why would I want to give that to you?
So you and your buddy could go down the road
and smoke it.
Speaker 5 (28:57):
And then the agents ask Kelly if she'll take a
light detective test. She says she'll have to get back
to them on that one. Somehow she gets the agents
to leave, then immediately called Steve.
Speaker 3 (29:08):
I talked to Steve about it, and Steve's like, well,
I've got this attorney and she knows somebody that can
give you a lot to take their tests and see
if you pass it, and then we'll decide whether you
take one for the FBI or not. I was like, okay.
So her name was Archangela Mazzarelli, and I took the polygraph,
(29:29):
and of course she called me in. I met her
in a parking lot and she's like, you're not talking
to the FBI. She said, you feeled the polygraph. So
she showed me the results and we burn it and
that was the end of that.
Speaker 5 (29:42):
Heeding Archangela Mazzarelli's advice, Steve's attorney calls the FBI and
tells him Kelly will not be taking their polygraph. But
now Kelly's on the FBI's radar for her suspicious behavior
and for her connection to David Gant, and for obvious reasons,
Steve Chambers is on on the FBI radar. Two. One
(30:02):
of the agents who happens to be working the David
Gant case is also getting a lot of calls about
this guy who seems to have come into a lot
of cash right around the same time the Loomis heightst
hit the news.
Speaker 6 (30:13):
Remember he's a former FBI informant, and there were several
local informants calling police saying, I've known this guy his
whole life. There's no way he can afford this house.
Something's up. Steve and Michelle Chambers moved from a double
wide trailer in their own neighborhood to a mansion, and
informants all over the county are calling it and saying
(30:35):
They're not saying it's Loomis, They're just saying Steve's up
to something.
Speaker 5 (30:40):
Steve does not know that all these people are riding
them out, but he gets an urge to start tying
up loose ends. And what better way to tie up
loose ends than to throw a Halloween party at your
brand new mansion. This will not draw any unwanted attention.
Kelly attends the party just looking for a place to
hang out with friends, have some drinks, and get higher
(31:02):
than the nuts on a two hump camel. She's a
regular at the mansion.
Speaker 3 (31:06):
In the basement, there was a velvet Elvis painting, and
I'm pretty sure he had one of those tapestries that
people hang on the wall, like where the dogs are
either playing billiards or poker. I'm pretty sure there was
one of those down there too. It seems like I
remember a suit of armor.
Speaker 5 (31:30):
Oh and don't forget the leopard print runner on the staircase.
Speaker 3 (31:34):
Because it wasn't there when they bought the house. That
was something that Michelle had chose. Which isn't that in Scarface?
Isn't that in Scarface where she has the steps redone
in leopard print or zebra print or something. I'm telling you,
I think you watched too many gangster movies.
Speaker 5 (31:54):
Kelly has been quite comfortable letting Steve handle the heist business.
He's still hanging on to all her money and she's
fine with that for now, especially with the FBI hanging around.
But there's a piece of business on Steve's mind lately.
That makes Kelly really uncomfortable. He's brought it up a
few times. He wants to have David killed and he
(32:15):
wants Kelly to do it.
Speaker 3 (32:17):
Steve even came to me one time and said, you know,
you could kill somebody with a syringe full of bleach
and I was like what He said, Yeah, you gotta
do is stick bleach and they'll you know, it kills him.
I said, okay.
Speaker 5 (32:32):
Decades later, America will learn that injecting bleach doesn't kill you.
It's a new possible way to cure COVID. It is
not anyway. Steve just wants David dead, and he thinks
Kelly should be the one to do it because David
trusts her she could get close to him. He brings
the idea up again at the party.
Speaker 3 (32:51):
I think that's when he asked me if I would
go to Mexico and I was like, no, No, not
doing that.
Speaker 5 (32:58):
Steve said, that's okay, he has another idea.
Speaker 3 (33:01):
That's when he told me, well, I know this guy
can get to go down there and I'll get in
to make friends with him, make a couple drops, and
then I'll have him get rid of againd So even
though that's not what I would have wanted to have happened,
I was just like, Okay, I'll go along with that, because,
(33:24):
like I said, out sight, out of mind, if I
didn't have to be a part of it, it didn't
bother me that bad.
Speaker 5 (33:32):
Ah young love, Poor David, the love of his life,
just signed his death warrant in the shadow of a
velvet Elvis painting. And as you know, once Steve Chambers
wants you dead, it's over one snap of his chubby
little fingers and the most ruthless trained killer in the
(33:54):
business is coming for you.
Speaker 10 (33:58):
I prefer the the hit man or the harder gun
compared to assassin, because to me, the hit man or
gun for her sounds more like the hill billy redneck
version of the assassin.
Speaker 5 (34:18):
That's next time on crimeless hillbilly heist.
Speaker 9 (34:40):
Rory.
Speaker 2 (34:41):
In your opinion, and this is a tough one. What's
the biggest mistake these geniuses have made so far?
Speaker 4 (34:47):
I mean doing it at all. Their biggest mistake is
having dreams and fantasies of living alternate lives. But that's
all of us, so I do give them credit. These
are people that wanted something else and they decided to
do it. We're not talking about murder, we're not talking
about stealing money from a family that needs it. Obviously,
(35:09):
this amount is insane. So I got to say, while
they have made a lot of mistakes, overall, I still
kind of cheer for the fact that these people just
wanted to see what it's like to be millionaires. I
kind of think we all want to know that, and
here's some people that decided to go find out and
it's remarkable.
Speaker 6 (35:29):
Yeah, I agree.
Speaker 2 (35:30):
I think that's where almost everyone is rooting for them. Yeah,
even though we know it's not going to end well.
Speaker 4 (35:36):
Yes, Now, just to give you a better, a more
specific answer, that's the umbrella of my emotions. Underneath that
umbrella as we get to know these characters a little better.
For instance, in this episode, Steve and Michelle in particular,
just how they how they don't even lay low with
this massive amount of cash, as shown to us by
(35:59):
Michelle trying to deposit ten thousand dollars into a bank
and has not even taken the cash out of the
loomis fargo wrapping yet, while for sure being on camera
at a teller, while for sure asking all of the
questions that would make any teller go yep, noted this
person's probably a criminal.
Speaker 2 (36:22):
Yeah, oh absolutely, yes. I mean Michelle continues to be
the I was gonna say the weeklength, but there's a
few weeklenths.
Speaker 4 (36:30):
Well that's the thing. You can't even know who's like,
you know, it's not going to be a successful heist
when David Gant is by far the smartest person in
the group. And I'd have to say, my favorite part
of this episode, and it's kind of something I wish
I could do, is if anyone asked how I came
into a large sum of money, just say I used
(36:50):
to play for the Dallas Cowboys.
Speaker 2 (36:52):
Genius playing.
Speaker 4 (36:55):
Here's what I actually kind of like about it, because
when I first heard that, I was like, that's absurd.
But then I was like, well, it is nineteen ninety seven.
There aren't all these outlets to look that up. So
the more I thought about it, the more I really
respected that as a lie.
Speaker 2 (37:16):
I might have just puted a slightly less popular team
like I used to play for the Saint Louis Rams,
or like I think we're still around in the nineties.
Speaker 4 (37:25):
Yes, I mean, you could have said you inherited it. Oh,
my grandfather invented chocolate. No one would have been the wiser.
Speaker 2 (37:35):
It is one of the dumber lives you could tell,
because yes, you're right, it wasn't like the internet. There
was the Internet, but it wasn't the internet we know today.
It's still like worst case scenario if somebody could go,
I'm short to the library, and I'm sure there's a
book that listed the NFL rosters for every year.
Speaker 4 (37:49):
I also love how telling that is of his like
inner child, like he deep down in his psyche, always
thought maybe he would lay for the Dallas Cow.
Speaker 2 (38:03):
My final question is have you ever been to Cancun?
And is that where you would flee if you were
running away from a robbery.
Speaker 4 (38:10):
I would not. It just seems too accessible. I don't know.
My thinking is, oh, this person would flee to Mexico
because that's just what they would think you're supposed to do.
And then the most accessible, the most accessible city in
Mexico is Camcon. That so David Gann is probably in CanCon.
(38:31):
It just seems too obvious. So no, that isn't where
I would go a little on the nose, a little
on the nose. And also delighted by the fact that
no one in Mexico cared at all that this guy
they didn't know, they didn't know he had, you know,
money wrapped around his body. Granted, this is ninety seven
surveillance is a little bit different, but also the fact
(38:52):
that no one cared. He paid for two weeks up
front with cash tips, so no one would say anything.
I just love the Mexico's like, we don't care. You
guys come down here all the time to launder money,
so we don't care.
Speaker 2 (39:04):
Yeah, and that says everyone is ridiculous and paying for
things in cash and can't coon. I think my problem
with Cantcon is I just sort of hated it. It's
full of the worst Americans. But yeah, these probably are
David's people, so maybe maybe it was a wise choice, you.
Speaker 4 (39:17):
Know, maybe maybe you blend a little better. You're right,
it's very touristy, especially with Americans, So yeah, you're right,
that's a good point.
Speaker 6 (39:23):
All right.
Speaker 2 (39:23):
Well, next week we pick up the adventures of David
Gann and all of his accomplices back home on episode
four of Crimeless Hillbilly Heist. We'll see you next week.
Speaker 5 (39:46):
Crime Less Bill Billy 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 Elkinton and Stuart Bailey. Written by Michael
Kenyon Meyer with Liz Elkington and Stuart Bailey, Produced by
(40:06):
Lane Rose and Sierra Franco. Additional production help by Rajeev Gola.
The series was sound designed and mixed by ewin Le Tremwen,
fact checking by Gray Lanta 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
(40:30):
are Jack O'Brien, Lindsay Hoffman, and Matt Appadeca. Campsite Media's
executive producers are Josh Deen, Vanessa Grigoriatis, Adam hoff and
Matt Cher. Executive producers are Liz Elkington and Stuart Bailey.
From SmartLess Media, the producers are Will Arnett, Jason Bateman,
Sean Hayes, and Richard Corson. Bernie Kaminski is the head
(40:53):
of production. The associate producer is Mattie McCann. If you've
enjoyed Crimeless Hillbilly Yes, please rate and review the show
wherever you get your podcasts.
Gampsy media march lash.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
So Rory, what are the good people of planet Earth
need to know to enjoy Episode three?
Speaker 3 (00:23):
What happened last week?
Speaker 4 (00:24):
Never partner up with a pothead when you're going to
be stealing massive amounts of money that belonged to a
bank and becomes a federal crime is the main issue.
But I will say, to our surprise, we find out
that David Gant, having put all this money in a
truck and passed it off to huge morons and even
being a moro on himself, somehow has made it to Cancun,
(00:46):
Mexico to lay low for as long as possible. And
so we wonder, well, what happened to the other gaggle
of geese while he's down there in Mexico. We're about
to find out here on episode three.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
Okay, then let's get onto the episode. Here's Crimeless Hillbilly
Heist Episode three.
Speaker 5 (01:10):
It's the middle of the night at an upscale hotel
in Cancun, Mexico. David Gand has sprawled out on the bed,
still wearing his clothes and his pantyhose, money belt and
his cowboy boots stuffed with cash.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
I wake up about three or four in morning. It's
almost like I'm hungover from adrenaline.
Speaker 5 (01:37):
As David comes to he starts peeling off his clothes
to get to the money. He organizes the stack of bills.
The cash has been stuck to him for almost forty
eight hours. It's got that money stench he knew so
well from his days driving the Loomis van. But there's
a difference. This time. It's mixed with his own.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
Stench, the essholes of Dave, if you will.
Speaker 5 (02:00):
After all the stress of the heist and the escape,
suddenly everything is going easy. Yesterday his plane landed and
he breezed through Mexican customs while carrying twenty five grand
in small bills.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
And they could care less. I could have took an
elephant off that airplane with me. Told him the circus
was in town.
Speaker 5 (02:21):
He opped in a cab and the driver made him
feel right at home.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
He speaks in very good English. Hotel expensive or cheap?
I go expensive, expensive as fine.
Speaker 5 (02:34):
That's how David Gant got to this fancy hotel. Surreptitiously
paid for a two week stay in cash up front,
and smoothly tipped the concierge extra to ignore this suspicious
redheaded gringo, finally making it to his room, and now
as he's stacking the money, he realizes what he needs
to do next. As soon as the sun comes up
(03:01):
over Cancun's white sand beaches, it's time for a shopping spree.
The Kogle con Mall is just the place for a
man with a wallet full of stolen cash. It's got fountains, statues, skylights,
and luxury goods behind plexiglass, and for the first time
(03:22):
in his life, David can buy whatever he wants. His
first stop, of course, is a cowboy theme men's department.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
I'll spend most of my life in work boots, but
I love cowboy boots. I like expensive cowboy groots.
Speaker 5 (03:37):
Or at least he thinks he likes expensive cowboy boots,
he's never actually had a pair. He chooses a beautiful
pair of brown leather boots and realizes it'd be a
crime to put a cheap pair of socks in these puppies.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
I could buy was like these silk liners for your socks.
That's extravagant. Let's get two of those.
Speaker 5 (03:58):
He also needs some new gen and then the ultimate luxury.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
And this is where I discovered the joy of khaki
cargo pants. I've been faithful to them ever since. Pockets.
You gotta have them.
Speaker 5 (04:12):
In another store, David found a tailor who made silk
shirts sighs perfectly to his lanky measurements. He wisely ordered.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
Four of them, red, green, blue, and white with deer
antler buttons. I let the money just fly. It was great,
just two hundred dollars sunglasses, shirt, give me two pairs.
Speaker 5 (04:36):
Oh and to complete the look, he put on a
layer of spray TND. David's makeover is complete. Now what.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
Now?
Speaker 1 (04:46):
I've never had this problem. I've got money time.
Speaker 6 (04:52):
What do I do?
Speaker 1 (04:54):
Because usually my activity belimited to whatever was free or cheap,
And so I've got a really weird dilemma for myself.
What do I do?
Speaker 5 (05:04):
He sees an ad for horseback riding, and all of
a sudden.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
I'm riding horse through the Mexican jungle.
Speaker 5 (05:10):
A fugitive on horseback wearing two hundred dollars sunglasses and
shiny new cowboy boots. Indiana Jones looks like a jump jockey.
Compared to David Gant on his South of the Border adventure,
everything David dreamed about is finally coming true. He just
needs to wait for Kelly to arrive with the rest
of the money so they can start their new life
(05:31):
together in Paradise.
Speaker 1 (05:33):
I know that for her to leave is dangerous for
her and me. She would just draw him to me.
I'm thinking, if we can survive the first ninety one
hundred and twenty days, things will cool off.
Speaker 5 (05:49):
In excruciating weight, possibly not survivable, but there's a plan
to stay in contact. David will call a payphone at
a gas station a short drive from Kelly's house. Kelly
will be there to answer every Tuesday at one o'clock.
When the first call finally comes, Kelly sounds distressed.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
She says, you know, hey, this has created a crapstorm. Okay,
we've made a mess. This made national news. I don't
think they understood what was going to happen. I'm like, yeah,
he's stole almost twenty million dollars. What do you think
was gonna happen.
Speaker 5 (06:26):
It's easy to be so casual if you're a desperado
and a silk shirt living in a luxury hotel. But
back home in North Carolina, the smell of that coming
crap storm was strong in the Breeze from SmartLess Media,
Campsite Media, and Big Money Players in partnership with iHeart Podcasts.
(06:50):
I'm Johnny Knoxville and you're listening to crime list phill
Billy Heist. This is episode three, The Oncoming Crap Storm.
Speaker 6 (07:17):
I was a new agent and we were having lunch
and all our pages went off.
Speaker 5 (07:26):
This is former FBI agent John Wydra. He is a tall,
handsome guy. One look from him and you'll feel like
you're probably guilty of something or wish you were.
Speaker 6 (07:37):
Everybody has three lives everybody. You got your public life
that everybody knows about, you know, what you post on
Instagram or your Facebook page or whatever. Then you got
your private life that pretty much maybe only your spouse
and close family and friends know. Then you got your
secret life. That's where I spent most of my time
in everyone's secret life.
Speaker 5 (08:00):
John was an imposing guy in his youth, especially for
a guy whose specialty was accounting. He looked like if
Dolph Lungern and David Hasselhoff put on a suit two
sizes too small, strong chin, quafft hair, ready to draw
his gun or a calculator at a moment's notice. On
this fateful Sunday in the fall of nineteen ninety seven.
(08:20):
He's barely a year into his time with the bureau.
Speaker 6 (08:23):
I was thirty two. I was young, full of piss
and Benniger, you know, wanting to kick indoors chase people.
I was the moneylaundering coordinator for the State of North
Carolina at the time, and I'd worked financial crimes, any
type of financial crime, Ponzi schemes, embezzlements, things of that nature.
Speaker 5 (08:43):
When Widra got to the office, agents were saying that
someone had robbed a Loomis Fargo armored car. But he
quickly learned that this sixtinc summary of events didn't quite
capture what had happened.
Speaker 6 (08:54):
You normally think of an armored car robbery is like
coming in with guns and yanking people out at truck.
This was more like an embezzlement. But they took it
out of the money belonged to the bank, so it
was a federal crime.
Speaker 5 (09:09):
Wydra and other agents were dispatched to Loomis Fargo to
assess the crime scene and interview the employees. When they
got there, they found a red Dodge Dakota pickup truck
that belonged to the Loomis vault manager David Scott ganned.
Speaker 6 (09:24):
His wedding ring was left on the dashboard, so we
were thinking at first like this was a message he's
just moving on with his life.
Speaker 5 (09:32):
That was the first clue. But when the agents got
inside the Loomis facility, the vault was locked. David had
set the timer so it couldn't be opened. Loomis had
a locksmith working furiously trying to bypass the system, but
in the meantime, the investigators couldn't get in to see
how much money was stolen. To make matters worse, the
security tapes were missing, well two of them were missing.
Speaker 6 (09:55):
But he didn't realize that there was a third video
machine that they hid in the locked cabinet that only
executive management knew about.
Speaker 5 (10:03):
For that very reason, a very pissed off Loomis manager
plays this tape for the FBI and it's really quite
a show.
Speaker 6 (10:14):
You could see him on the camera working his ass
off to put the money in the van.
Speaker 5 (10:20):
They still don't know how much money was gone, but
based on the video, it was a slop jar full.
Speaker 6 (10:26):
It was a little over an hour of him back
and forth and you could see him sweating and stopping
and taking a break and loading up a palette and
pushing the palette over to the van. He's a rail
He couldn't weighed more than one hundred and fifty pounds,
soaking wet.
Speaker 5 (10:43):
David was one determined fella, but determined and discerning are
two very different qualities. And there was another clue caught
on camera.
Speaker 6 (10:52):
You could see in the video he kept stopping and
looking at his pager, so he was in communication with somebody,
and we ran the records. We found out that it
was his phone calling his pager, so it didn't really
lead anywhere, but he had given his phone to somebody,
So now we're looking for David ann at least one
other person.
Speaker 5 (11:13):
Whydra and the other agents interviewed the other employees, but
they weren't very much help. David's motives were unclear. Did
he ditch the wedding ring and steal the money to
reboot his life or was he simply a stooge and
some mastermind had forced him into the crime. When agents
interviewed David's wife, Tammy, she was terrified. She had been
worrying about her husband's whereabouts ever since he hadn't come
(11:36):
home from work and had waited for news all night
long with David's parents. Tammy also had already filed the
missing persons report. She told the agents she didn't think
David would have robbed the vault unless he was forced to.
David's parents said the same thing. When the agents finally
got access to the vault, they discovered the full extent
of the crime. In a twist of fate, David had
(11:57):
robbed the vault on a weekend when it was stuff
with an unusually large amount of money. There was a
huge NASCAR race in town that weekend, a race sponsored
by Bank of America, as it turned out, and b
of A had a bunch of extra twenty dollars bills
ready to stock the ATMs, all adding a lot more
weight and value to David's hall.
Speaker 6 (12:17):
Seventeen point three million dollars. When we've calculated how much
that would weigh, it was about twenty eight hundred pounds.
Speaker 5 (12:25):
David Gant was missing, along with seventeen point three million dollars,
and the FBI hardly had any leads. But a couple
of days later, a man out in the sticks of
Mecklenburg County was mowing his lawn and saw an extremely
poorly hidden white.
Speaker 6 (12:41):
Van and you could see through the window money, and
we're like, maybe all the money's there. Maybe got cold
feet and just left. We had no idea how much
it was, but you could tell it was a lot.
It was a lot of cash sitting in the back
of the van.
Speaker 5 (12:55):
The FBI told the van back to their office to
break into it. A few of the Beefier agents used
the Steve Chambers method, pounding on the bulletproof glass with
large rocks for a few hours until they finally got
it open. Not really, the FEDS did FBI stuff to
open the van.
Speaker 6 (13:12):
All we break into it and it's only three point
three million dollars that's in the back.
Speaker 5 (13:16):
Nowhere close to all the money. But for the agents,
three million bucks just left behind wasn't the most shocking thing.
They found inside.
Speaker 6 (13:24):
Two videotapes, the keys to the vault, the keys to
other trucks, they were all in there. So now we're
starting to worry. When we find that, We're like, there's
no way he left the videotapes. He intentionally took and
left them behind, and that we know he was working
(13:45):
with somebody else. So now we're thinking if this is
the mob David's dead.
Speaker 5 (13:51):
Despite an abandoned armored truck and an empty bank vault
and a gun and the three videotapes, the FBI doesn't
have much to go on. Okay, they actually have lots
to go on, but they still don't have anything pointing
to who David was working with or being forced to
work with. But the Feds have an ace up their
(14:11):
sleeve because almost everyone in America still watches the same
five channels every night, and millions of them are about
to feast their eyeballs on the delightful parade of Holy shit,
my life could be way worse than it is America's most.
Speaker 6 (14:28):
Wanted Focusing on the facts, it is exposing America's most wanted.
Speaker 5 (14:34):
And America's most wanted is all in on the David
Gant story. The tips are about to start rolling in.
It's October eleventh, nineteen ninety seven. It's been a week
(14:54):
since David Gant emptied a bank vault with his bare hands,
and the FBI is still hoping for something that will
help them find David. The money and the person or
persons paging him during the crime tonight has the potential
to offer a big break in the case because at
nine PM, Eastern America's Most Wanted will air a segment
(15:15):
on David Gant, perpetrator of one of the largest cash
heists in American history. The FBI is expecting hundreds of
phone calls that could turn into actionable tips that will
help them track David down. They have agents manning the
America's Most Wanted phone bank and other agents positioned on
the streets of Charlotte standing by to run down any
(15:36):
clues that come in. John Widre is at the FBI
command post with the number of his colleagues, his eyes
glued to the TV. Right now, it's playoff baseball Game
three of the American League Championship, with the Baltimore Orioles
and Cleveland Indians battling for a spot in the World Series.
(15:59):
The stakes are high, but as baseball games tend to do,
this one drags on and on and on, it goes
into extra innings.
Speaker 6 (16:09):
They come across and say it Americans must want. It
won't be played on the East Coast because of the
extra innings in this playoff game, which just kind of
took the wind out of our sales. We were really
hoping for some good leads and actually got nothing out
of it.
Speaker 5 (16:23):
If anyone on the East Coast had been able to
watch the segment, they would have seen David's wife Tammy.
She's speaking directly to the camera, pleading with David to
call or come home if he can, and reminding him
that she loves him no matter what. And where is
David while his wife is begging him for a safe return?
Speaker 1 (16:46):
Bouro football? They put you on the mule and what
they do is they have the soccer ball and they've
got the Burros don't care and you're out saying you
got a broom and the Burghs just look at You're like,
I don't want to run.
Speaker 5 (17:07):
Starting the day after the theft, Steve and Michelle Chambers
knew they couldn't just keep fourteen million dollars in plastic
barrels covered in dog food. That'd be stupid. They needed
to put that money to work. So on Monday morning
after the weekend Heis, Michelle stuffed a black briefcase full
of cash and walked into her local bank. She slyly
(17:30):
approached the teller, ready to weave a complicated web of deception.
Move number one on the four D chess board asked
to tell her how much cash she could deposit without
you know, the bank having to file paperwork. The teller
fell right into Michelle's trap and just answered the question.
The limit was ten thousand dollars. Now Michelle had all
(17:52):
the information she required for phase two of her ingenious plan.
She opened the briefcase right there at the window and
counted out ninety five hundred dollars of small bills, still
in the Lumis wrappers, of course, and handed them to
the teller. Then it was onto the third and final
phase of her plan. One last final bit of reassurance
(18:15):
for the teller so that she would forget this interaction
ever happened. Don't worry, Michelle told her it ain't drug money.
With that, she left and her bank account was almost
ten thousand dollars fuller without a trace of paperwork. Well done, Michelle,
except that teller definitely filed paperwork. What's known in the
(18:38):
trade is a suspicious activity report. So the FBI has
Michelle Chambers dead to rights, soda, because there's one problem.
It's still nineteen ninety seven.
Speaker 7 (18:53):
Just because these bank tellers were filing forms about these
cash depositives did not mean that these forums were getting
to the FBI in real time. I think it took
one or two or maybe even three months often from
the time these were filled out to when the FBI
could actually use them, you know, in an actionable way.
Speaker 5 (19:12):
But the chambers aren't just working to slowly sock money
away in the bank ninety five hundred bucks at a time.
The next morning, after the hist Steve had buried another
one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in a Duffel bag
in the backyard outside of their mobile home. Michelle was
home alone. A big rainstorm hit, water's pooling everywhere. She's
(19:35):
sure the money is getting soaked. She runs into the
middle of the storm and starts frantically digging holes trying
to recover the money, but of course Steve didn't mark
the location. Michelle is hysterical. She can't find the money,
and now her yard looks like it's been attacked by gophers.
When Steve returns home, he unhursed the cash. It's sopping wet.
(19:59):
No matter.
Speaker 7 (20:00):
They decided to put the money in the dryer. Steve
told Michelle, based on something he'd heard, put poker chips
in there because it would help the money not be
stuck to each other, and it actually worked, a literal
example of money laundering.
Speaker 5 (20:14):
A big win and maybe the first smart thing they've done,
which is not an indication of things to come, because
pretty much immediately after the hist Steve and Michelle do
the most conspicuous thing possible. They upgrade from their mobile
home to a literal mansion.
Speaker 6 (20:35):
The house that.
Speaker 7 (20:36):
Steve and Michelle moved into was a beautiful, beautiful house
and impress all of their friends and all of their relatives.
It had a really nice foyer with a curved staircase.
They had a grand piano in it, a huge kitchen,
a living room with a gas fireplace, a bedroom with
a fireplace. It was the type of place that you
would move into if you had lived in much smaller
(20:59):
surroundings and be like, I have made it, and everybody
who knows me from where I used to live is
going to think that I've made it.
Speaker 5 (21:06):
This is exactly what you want after a bank robbery,
all your friends talking about how much money you suddenly have.
Steve that sly fox has a few explanations ready for
his friends to kind of bs the Kelly says he's
been spouting his entire life about mob ties, gambling winnings,
you know the type. But when it came to his
(21:27):
new neighbors in the gated community, Steve had another tall
tail in his pocket. He had all this money because
he used to play professional football for the Dallas Cowboys. Okay, Steve.
Speaker 3 (21:43):
Told the people there that he was a ex Dallas
football player and he just wanted to be larger than
he was.
Speaker 5 (21:51):
Steve can't just be a retired banker or an heir
to some sausage fortune. He has to be a retired
football player. And he had to play for the Dallas
fucking Cowboys who had just won three out of the
last four Super Bowls. Here's Kathy Hooper, Kathy spelled with
a k who became neighbors with the Chambers when they
moved into the gated community.
Speaker 8 (22:14):
He just was telling everybody that he was an ex
pro football player he played for the Dallas Cowboys, and
we just assumed that he really did, you know, nobody
questioned him or anything, so because he was a big
guy and he looked like he could be a football player.
Speaker 5 (22:30):
Amazingly, Steve's ego allowed him to stumble into the perfect
alibi to give to his new posh neighbors. There was
already a professional basketball player in the neighborhood. And also Michael.
Speaker 8 (22:42):
Jordan loved playing golf at our club. He came here
a lot and played golf.
Speaker 5 (22:49):
Kathy Spelled with the K's best friend is Kathy Young.
Kathy Spelled with the Sea. Kathy with the Sea was
the mayor of Cramerton at the time.
Speaker 9 (22:58):
My job as mayor was basically to conduct monthly meetings
and do annual budgets with the town. I think most
people run for mayor to get to ride in the parade.
Speaker 5 (23:11):
And even this decorated paraded citizen of Cramerton felt that
Steve and Michelle fit the part.
Speaker 9 (23:17):
They had luxury cars BMW convertibles and she had a
big diamond ring, and they looked the part. There was
no reason to think that these people didn't have the
money to be in the neighborhood or couldn't afford the house.
Speaker 5 (23:34):
In other words, when buying your way into a luxury community,
it's important to go all in, and that's exactly what
the Chambers did. But all this is happening while Steve
is telling Kelly to lay low.
Speaker 3 (23:46):
He would tell me, don't don't take any trips, don't
be flashing money around. They'll get his car. And the
whole time, you know, he's bought a new vehicle. He
bought a furniture store.
Speaker 7 (24:02):
Wait what, he bought a furniture store, of the way
to try to launder the money.
Speaker 5 (24:06):
A furniture store he named after himself. Of course, M
and S Furniture For Michelle and Steve. I would have
preferred they went with S and M furniture, but that's
just me. With the exception of the many men who
(24:28):
wanted to sleep with Kelly Campbell, the world had been
pretty indifferent to her existence. But the day after the heist,
Kelly woke up to a different feeling, the feeling that
everyone in America was racing to find out her biggest secret.
Speaker 3 (24:48):
It was very surreal the next morning watching it on
the news and seeing how big it was and no
one that I did it, And I'm like, it's just
a really weird feeling.
Speaker 5 (25:11):
Way back the day after the robbery, after fearlessly getting
David halfway to the airport, and after checking in at
Steve's house to watch him count the money, Kelly Campbell
went back home to the trailer She shared with her
a strange husband, Spanky, and her two kids. Kelly was
the key to this whole thing happening, connecting David to
(25:31):
Steve and filling David's head with this fantasy of an
escape to Mexico. But even though she was instrumental to
the plot, Kelly really didn't have much ambition for her
share of the seventeen million bucks. Part of this was
just laying low. Unlike Stephen Michelle, she didn't want to
get caught just because she did something stupid. Everyone in
(25:52):
town knew she didn't have much money to spend.
Speaker 3 (25:54):
I didn't really go out spend a lot of money,
being off flashy and stuff, mainly for reason that they
would be looking at me because I used to work there.
Speaker 5 (26:04):
She does dutifully make her trips to the payphone every
week to talk to David and keep him on the hook.
Speaker 3 (26:09):
I was just telling him what he wanted to hear.
Speaker 5 (26:12):
Harsh while David and Steve and Michelle were on their
spending spreez, Kelly just wanted a few simple comforts.
Speaker 3 (26:21):
I did always think that money would make me happy,
because you know, then you don't have to worry about bills.
You can buy what clothes you want, you can drive
nice cars.
Speaker 5 (26:33):
In other words, she wanted a life without worry. This
meant a life away from her husband and being able
to buy things for her kids if they asked. She
was determined to keep a low profile until she could
pull that off. But she couldn't keep it entirely a secret.
Maybe she didn't want to tell her husband because she
didn't want to be with him anyway, and she certainly
wasn't going to tell her kids. But a few days
(26:56):
after the heist, she found herself riding in the car
with her mother.
Speaker 3 (27:00):
I said, did you see that Louis Fargo heist on TV?
She said yeah. I said I had something to do
with that, and I expected her to freak out, and
she's just like, Okay, it wasn't murder. So I knew
my mom wasn't gonna tell on me, So it's like,
you know, let's enjoy it while we can.
Speaker 5 (27:22):
And what she thought about Steve's behavior after the heist.
Speaker 3 (27:25):
At the time, I just, you know, wasn't really thinking properly.
Of course, I smoked weed and smoked a lot of it,
and I would just believe whatever he told me. And
I was like, well it probably makes sense because they
would look at me because I used to work there,
but they're not going to really look at him because
(27:46):
he didn't used.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
To work there.
Speaker 5 (27:51):
One day, while Kelly's home in her trailer, there's a
knock on the door. She's greeted by two FBI agents
and badges, wanting to talk to her about her friend
David Gant. She thinks she was probably high, but has
memory problems from getting so high, so she's not sure.
She tells the agents that she and David were friends,
(28:13):
but she doesn't know where he is, and, in an
inspired moment of proving she obviously has nothing to hide,
she tells the agents that she and David sometimes would
smoke weed together.
Speaker 3 (28:24):
I just figured that was the best way to throw
them off, I mean, trying not to be nervous, trying
to make them think that I didn't have nothing to
do with him.
Speaker 5 (28:33):
That's when the agents ask if she has any weed
on her right now. They don't care if she does,
they say, they just want to know if she's telling
the truth about getting high with David. Kelly says, oh, no,
I can deliver on the goods. She goes to her
bedroom and comes back with a big bag of weed.
The agents ask her if she wants to hand it over.
Speaker 3 (28:52):
Well, why would I want to give that to you?
So you and your buddy could go down the road
and smoke it.
Speaker 5 (28:57):
And then the agents ask Kelly if she'll take a
light detective test. She says she'll have to get back
to them on that one. Somehow she gets the agents
to leave, then immediately called Steve.
Speaker 3 (29:08):
I talked to Steve about it, and Steve's like, well,
I've got this attorney and she knows somebody that can
give you a lot to take their tests and see
if you pass it, and then we'll decide whether you
take one for the FBI or not. I was like, okay.
So her name was Archangela Mazzarelli, and I took the polygraph,
(29:29):
and of course she called me in. I met her
in a parking lot and she's like, you're not talking
to the FBI. She said, you feeled the polygraph. So
she showed me the results and we burn it and
that was the end of that.
Speaker 5 (29:42):
Heeding Archangela Mazzarelli's advice, Steve's attorney calls the FBI and
tells him Kelly will not be taking their polygraph. But
now Kelly's on the FBI's radar for her suspicious behavior
and for her connection to David Gant, and for obvious reasons,
Steve Chambers is on on the FBI radar. Two. One
(30:02):
of the agents who happens to be working the David
Gant case is also getting a lot of calls about
this guy who seems to have come into a lot
of cash right around the same time the Loomis heightst
hit the news.
Speaker 6 (30:13):
Remember he's a former FBI informant, and there were several
local informants calling police saying, I've known this guy his
whole life. There's no way he can afford this house.
Something's up. Steve and Michelle Chambers moved from a double
wide trailer in their own neighborhood to a mansion, and
informants all over the county are calling it and saying
(30:35):
They're not saying it's Loomis, They're just saying Steve's up
to something.
Speaker 5 (30:40):
Steve does not know that all these people are riding
them out, but he gets an urge to start tying
up loose ends. And what better way to tie up
loose ends than to throw a Halloween party at your
brand new mansion. This will not draw any unwanted attention.
Kelly attends the party just looking for a place to
hang out with friends, have some drinks, and get higher
(31:02):
than the nuts on a two hump camel. She's a
regular at the mansion.
Speaker 3 (31:06):
In the basement, there was a velvet Elvis painting, and
I'm pretty sure he had one of those tapestries that
people hang on the wall, like where the dogs are
either playing billiards or poker. I'm pretty sure there was
one of those down there too. It seems like I
remember a suit of armor.
Speaker 5 (31:30):
Oh and don't forget the leopard print runner on the staircase.
Speaker 3 (31:34):
Because it wasn't there when they bought the house. That
was something that Michelle had chose. Which isn't that in Scarface?
Isn't that in Scarface where she has the steps redone
in leopard print or zebra print or something. I'm telling you,
I think you watched too many gangster movies.
Speaker 5 (31:54):
Kelly has been quite comfortable letting Steve handle the heist business.
He's still hanging on to all her money and she's
fine with that for now, especially with the FBI hanging around.
But there's a piece of business on Steve's mind lately.
That makes Kelly really uncomfortable. He's brought it up a
few times. He wants to have David killed and he
(32:15):
wants Kelly to do it.
Speaker 3 (32:17):
Steve even came to me one time and said, you know,
you could kill somebody with a syringe full of bleach
and I was like what He said, Yeah, you gotta
do is stick bleach and they'll you know, it kills him.
I said, okay.
Speaker 5 (32:32):
Decades later, America will learn that injecting bleach doesn't kill you.
It's a new possible way to cure COVID. It is
not anyway. Steve just wants David dead, and he thinks
Kelly should be the one to do it because David
trusts her she could get close to him. He brings
the idea up again at the party.
Speaker 3 (32:51):
I think that's when he asked me if I would
go to Mexico and I was like, no, No, not
doing that.
Speaker 5 (32:58):
Steve said, that's okay, he has another idea.
Speaker 3 (33:01):
That's when he told me, well, I know this guy
can get to go down there and I'll get in
to make friends with him, make a couple drops, and
then I'll have him get rid of againd So even
though that's not what I would have wanted to have happened,
I was just like, Okay, I'll go along with that, because,
(33:24):
like I said, out sight, out of mind, if I
didn't have to be a part of it, it didn't
bother me that bad.
Speaker 5 (33:32):
Ah young love, Poor David, the love of his life,
just signed his death warrant in the shadow of a
velvet Elvis painting. And as you know, once Steve Chambers
wants you dead, it's over one snap of his chubby
little fingers and the most ruthless trained killer in the
(33:54):
business is coming for you.
Speaker 10 (33:58):
I prefer the the hit man or the harder gun
compared to assassin, because to me, the hit man or
gun for her sounds more like the hill billy redneck
version of the assassin.
Speaker 5 (34:18):
That's next time on crimeless hillbilly heist.
Speaker 9 (34:40):
Rory.
Speaker 2 (34:41):
In your opinion, and this is a tough one. What's
the biggest mistake these geniuses have made so far?
Speaker 4 (34:47):
I mean doing it at all. Their biggest mistake is
having dreams and fantasies of living alternate lives. But that's
all of us, so I do give them credit. These
are people that wanted something else and they decided to
do it. We're not talking about murder, we're not talking
about stealing money from a family that needs it. Obviously,
(35:09):
this amount is insane. So I got to say, while
they have made a lot of mistakes, overall, I still
kind of cheer for the fact that these people just
wanted to see what it's like to be millionaires. I
kind of think we all want to know that, and
here's some people that decided to go find out and
it's remarkable.
Speaker 6 (35:29):
Yeah, I agree.
Speaker 2 (35:30):
I think that's where almost everyone is rooting for them. Yeah,
even though we know it's not going to end well.
Speaker 4 (35:36):
Yes, Now, just to give you a better, a more
specific answer, that's the umbrella of my emotions. Underneath that
umbrella as we get to know these characters a little better.
For instance, in this episode, Steve and Michelle in particular,
just how they how they don't even lay low with
this massive amount of cash, as shown to us by
(35:59):
Michelle trying to deposit ten thousand dollars into a bank
and has not even taken the cash out of the
loomis fargo wrapping yet, while for sure being on camera
at a teller, while for sure asking all of the
questions that would make any teller go yep, noted this
person's probably a criminal.
Speaker 2 (36:22):
Yeah, oh absolutely, yes. I mean Michelle continues to be
the I was gonna say the weeklength, but there's a
few weeklenths.
Speaker 4 (36:30):
Well that's the thing. You can't even know who's like,
you know, it's not going to be a successful heist
when David Gant is by far the smartest person in
the group. And I'd have to say, my favorite part
of this episode, and it's kind of something I wish
I could do, is if anyone asked how I came
into a large sum of money, just say I used
(36:50):
to play for the Dallas Cowboys.
Speaker 2 (36:52):
Genius playing.
Speaker 4 (36:55):
Here's what I actually kind of like about it, because
when I first heard that, I was like, that's absurd.
But then I was like, well, it is nineteen ninety seven.
There aren't all these outlets to look that up. So
the more I thought about it, the more I really
respected that as a lie.
Speaker 2 (37:16):
I might have just puted a slightly less popular team
like I used to play for the Saint Louis Rams,
or like I think we're still around in the nineties.
Speaker 4 (37:25):
Yes, I mean, you could have said you inherited it. Oh,
my grandfather invented chocolate. No one would have been the wiser.
Speaker 2 (37:35):
It is one of the dumber lives you could tell,
because yes, you're right, it wasn't like the internet. There
was the Internet, but it wasn't the internet we know today.
It's still like worst case scenario if somebody could go,
I'm short to the library, and I'm sure there's a
book that listed the NFL rosters for every year.
Speaker 4 (37:49):
I also love how telling that is of his like
inner child, like he deep down in his psyche, always
thought maybe he would lay for the Dallas Cow.
Speaker 2 (38:03):
My final question is have you ever been to Cancun?
And is that where you would flee if you were
running away from a robbery.
Speaker 4 (38:10):
I would not. It just seems too accessible. I don't know.
My thinking is, oh, this person would flee to Mexico
because that's just what they would think you're supposed to do.
And then the most accessible, the most accessible city in
Mexico is Camcon. That so David Gann is probably in CanCon.
(38:31):
It just seems too obvious. So no, that isn't where
I would go a little on the nose, a little
on the nose. And also delighted by the fact that
no one in Mexico cared at all that this guy
they didn't know, they didn't know he had, you know,
money wrapped around his body. Granted, this is ninety seven
surveillance is a little bit different, but also the fact
(38:52):
that no one cared. He paid for two weeks up
front with cash tips, so no one would say anything.
I just love the Mexico's like, we don't care. You
guys come down here all the time to launder money,
so we don't care.
Speaker 2 (39:04):
Yeah, and that says everyone is ridiculous and paying for
things in cash and can't coon. I think my problem
with Cantcon is I just sort of hated it. It's
full of the worst Americans. But yeah, these probably are
David's people, so maybe maybe it was a wise choice, you.
Speaker 4 (39:17):
Know, maybe maybe you blend a little better. You're right,
it's very touristy, especially with Americans, So yeah, you're right,
that's a good point.
Speaker 6 (39:23):
All right.
Speaker 2 (39:23):
Well, next week we pick up the adventures of David
Gann and all of his accomplices back home on episode
four of Crimeless Hillbilly Heist. We'll see you next week.
Speaker 5 (39:46):
Crime Less Bill Billy 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 Elkinton and Stuart Bailey. Written by Michael
Kenyon Meyer with Liz Elkington and Stuart Bailey, Produced by
(40:06):
Lane Rose and Sierra Franco. Additional production help by Rajeev Gola.
The series was sound designed and mixed by ewin Le Tremwen,
fact checking by Gray Lanta 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
(40:30):
are Jack O'Brien, Lindsay Hoffman, and Matt Appadeca. Campsite Media's
executive producers are Josh Deen, Vanessa Grigoriatis, Adam hoff and
Matt Cher. Executive producers are Liz Elkington and Stuart Bailey.
From SmartLess Media, the producers are Will Arnett, Jason Bateman,
Sean Hayes, and Richard Corson. Bernie Kaminski is the head
(40:53):
of production. The associate producer is Mattie McCann. If you've
enjoyed Crimeless Hillbilly Yes, please rate and review the show
wherever you get your podcasts.
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