Creating a Crap Storm

Gampsy media march lash.

So Rory, what are the good people of planet Earth need to know to enjoy Episode three?

What happened last week?

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, Mexico to lay low for as long as possible. And so we wonder, well, what happened to the other gaggle

Okay, then let's get onto the episode. Here's Crimeless Hillbilly Heist Episode three.

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.

I wake up about three or four in morning. It's almost like I'm hungover from adrenaline.

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.

Stench, the essholes of Dave, if you will.

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.

And they could care less. I could have took an elephant off that airplane with me. Told him the circus was in town.

He opped in a cab and the driver made him feel right at home.

He speaks in very good English. Hotel expensive or cheap? I go expensive, expensive as fine.

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 over Cancun's white sand beaches, it's time for a shopping spree. The Kogle con Mall is just the place for a

I'll spend most of my life in work boots, but I love cowboy boots. I like expensive cowboy groots.

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.

I could buy was like these silk liners for your socks. That's extravagant. Let's get two of those.

He also needs some new gen and then the ultimate luxury.

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.

In another store, David found a tailor who made silk shirts sighs perfectly to his lanky measurements. He wisely ordered.

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.

Oh and to complete the look, he put on a layer of spray TND. David's makeover is complete. Now what.

Now?

I've never had this problem. I've got money time.

What do I do?

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?

He sees an ad for horseback riding, and all of a sudden.

I'm riding horse through the Mexican jungle.

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 together in Paradise.

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.

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.

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.

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. I'm Johnny Knoxville and you're listening to crime list phill Billy Heist. This is episode three, The Oncoming Crap Storm.

I was a new agent and we were having lunch and all our pages went off.

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.

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.

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. He's barely a year into his time with the bureau.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

For that very reason, a very pissed off Loomis manager plays this tape for the FBI and it's really quite a show.

You could see him on the camera working his ass off to put the money in the van.

They still don't know how much money was gone, but based on the video, it was a slop jar full.

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.

David was one determined fella, but determined and discerning are two very different qualities. And there was another clue caught on camera.

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.

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 home from work and had waited for news all night

Seventeen point three million dollars. When we've calculated how much that would weigh, it was about twenty eight hundred pounds.

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.

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.

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.

All we break into it and it's only three point three million dollars that's in the back.

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.

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 with somebody else. So now we're thinking if this is the mob David's dead.

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

Wanted Focusing on the facts, it is exposing America's most wanted.

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 since David Gant emptied a bank vault with his bare hands, and the FBI is still hoping for something that will

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.

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?

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.

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 approached the teller, ready to weave a complicated web of deception.

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.

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

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.

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.

The house that.

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 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.

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 new neighbors in the gated community, Steve had another tall tail in his pocket. He had all this money because

Told the people there that he was a ex Dallas football player and he just wanted to be larger than he was.

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.

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.

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.

Jordan loved playing golf at our club. He came here a lot and played golf.

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.

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.

And even this decorated paraded citizen of Cramerton felt that Steve and Michelle fit the part.

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.

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.

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.

Wait what, he bought a furniture store, of the way to try to launder the money.

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 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.

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.

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 Steve and filling David's head with this fantasy of an

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.

She does dutifully make her trips to the payphone every week to talk to David and keep him on the hook.

I was just telling him what he wanted to hear.

Harsh while David and Steve and Michelle were on their spending spreez, Kelly just wanted a few simple comforts.

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.

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 after the heist, she found herself riding in the car with her mother.

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.

And what she thought about Steve's behavior after the heist.

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 he didn't used.

To work there.

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.

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.

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.

Well, why would I want to give that to you? So you and your buddy could go down the road and smoke it.

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.

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, and of course she called me in. I met her in a parking lot and she's like, you're not talking

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,

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 They're not saying it's Loomis, They're just saying Steve's up to something.

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 than the nuts on a two hump camel. She's a regular at the mansion.

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.

Oh and don't forget the leopard print runner on the staircase.

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.

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 wants Kelly to do it.

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.

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.

I think that's when he asked me if I would go to Mexico and I was like, no, No, not doing that.

Steve said, that's okay, he has another idea.

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, 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.

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 business is coming for you.

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.

That's next time on crimeless hillbilly heist.

Rory.

In your opinion, and this is a tough one. What's the biggest mistake these geniuses have made so far?

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, 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

Yeah, I agree.

I think that's where almost everyone is rooting for them. Yeah, even though we know it's not going to end well.

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.

Yeah, oh absolutely, yes. I mean Michelle continues to be the I was gonna say the weeklength, but there's a few weeklenths.

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 to play for the Dallas Cowboys.

Genius playing.

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.

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.

Yes, I mean, you could have said you inherited it. Oh, my grandfather invented chocolate. No one would have been the wiser.

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.

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.

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.

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. It just seems too obvious. So no, that isn't where I would go a little on the nose, a little

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.

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.

All right.

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.

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 Lane Rose and Sierra Franco. Additional production help by Rajeev Gola.