The international fugitive could last only so long on $25,000. His heady October days of lobster, parasailing, and fancy hotels quickly ate away at David Ghantt’s first heist installment. In the first week of November, he realized he needed more cash, and he wanted it fast. To his extreme displeasure, he had yet to receive his one-third share of the loot.
The man who pulled off a $17 million heist was thus reduced to eating homemade grilled cheese sandwiches and pasta, saving his money in case the next sum failed to arrive in a timely fashion. He was renting an apartment with a kitchen for about $800 a month, decorating the walls with Pittsburgh Steelers paraphernalia near Cancun’s beach off Kukulkan Boulevard.
He wasn’t alone. He had met a woman named Lindsey, who was twenty-four years old and Canadian, as far as David knew. He’d met her at Christine, his favorite hangout. As far as Lindsey knew, David was a small-time drug dealer from the States, and his name was not David, it was Mike McKinney. His shadiness did not bother her. Every so often, she somehow popped up with a wad of cash herself.
The Cancun couple drank at local clubs and went scuba diving; he had purchased $3,000 worth of diving equipment and a navigational device for $900 more. She moved in with him after getting kicked out of her own place in the middle of November. They hosted parties attended by her friends, who were Ecstasy dealers, and while David never indulged in their wares, he enjoyed their company.
Lindsey had a friend who worked for a car-rental company, and one day David and his girlfriend rented a Volkswagen Beetle to go driving outside Cancun, blowing the speed limit and then some. It was hardly his most serious transgression of the year. Still, a local police officer’s siren blared behind them.
As they were stopped on the side of the road, David was confident his Michael McKinney ID would stand up to scrutiny. Nobody had given him trouble over it yet. He rolled down his window as the officer walked up to the car.
“It’s very hot today, sir,” the officer said. “I’d like a drink.”
David had heard about the police in Cancun and knew exactly what to do. Without a word, he placed sixty dollars in the ticket book the officer was holding out to him.
“Have a nice day,” the officer said. He drove away and left them to enjoy themselves, never even checking the ID.
• • •
The Cancun fling with Lindsey was only so fulfilling. From a pay phone, David called Kelly Campbell on Tuesdays using a calling card and demanded the first installment of the rest of his money. He wanted fifty grand as soon as possible, he told her.
Kelly relayed his words to Steve, who had her tell David they would send a man answering to Bruno to Cancun with cash for him. She relayed this to David, who suggested they meet at the Rainforest Café in Cancun.
Back in North Carolina, the hit man’s trip to Mexico almost ended before it began. The real Mike McKinney, a.k.a. Bruno, was not an especially good smuggler. In the men’s bathroom at Charlotte Douglas International Airport, he bundled the $10,000 given to him by Steve inside the waist of his jeans and prepared to walk through the metal detector. As he exited the bathroom, though, the money began falling down his pants! He scurried back inside, his heart stopping as he envisioned airport security swarming around him.
Luck was on his side. The money stayed above his ankles. He readjusted the cash into more manageable stacks and walked as confidently through the metal detector as he could.
When his plane landed in Cancun, McKinney booked a room at the Mex Hotel and went to the Rainforest Café for the appointment with “Scott,” who he knew was using his identification papers. He was under the impression Scott was hiding in Mexico because he shot somebody; that’s what Steve had told him.
But McKinney couldn’t find his target. He scanned the Rainforest Café, a safari-themed restaurant with a jungle motif. He was looking for a man who, he had been told, was six feet tall with red or blond hair and weighed between one hundred thirty and one hundred sixty pounds. McKinney knew little else about him, having never even seen a picture. Ghantt was actually there, but McKinney couldn’t find him. McKinney left, came back later, and still couldn’t locate his man.
Around town, he asked people who spoke English if they knew anyone named Mike. Not surprisingly, no one knew who he was talking about.
It wasn’t a total loss though. Unable to make the delivery, the aspiring hit man decided to turn his time abroad into a drunken escapade and spending spree. First, McKinney bought T-shirts and shorts, having arrived only with long-sleeved tops and pants. Then he went out drinking and meeting women, drinking and Jet Skiing, drinking and sunbathing, and then meeting more women. He visited Cancun bars like Dady Rock, where the dancing got pretty wild, and La Boom, where he enjoyed the bikini contests.
He called Steve and said he was having no luck. Steve told him to fly back to North Carolina so they could regroup. McKinney would catch a flight the next day, after one more night on the town. He would be returning to Cancun soon enough.
• • •
While McKinney was getting piss drunk, David was getting pissed off. The man with the tan from a can wanted his money. On the phone, relaying his anger that Bruno couldn’t find him at the Rainforest Café, he told Kelly to have him bring it to a room at the Villa Marlin beachfront complex of apartments and condominiums, which David had rented just for this contact. He didn’t want anybody up north to know where he was really living, in case they got arrested. Little did he know that McKinney had already flown back to the States.
A few days later McKinney returned to Cancun, again with instructions to kill, if possible. This time, he made it through the airport’s metal detector like a pro, having more skillfully bundled the $10,000 in five stacks of twenties. He knew from Steve Chambers to go to room 202 of the Villa Marlin.
At 6:00 a.m. on this mid-November morning, McKinney knocked on the door of room 202. A woman answered who didn’t speak English. It was clear his man wasn’t inside. He had the wrong room.
He called Steve, who had made a mistake; he’d meant to say room 206. He told McKinney to try again. For reasons he didn’t explain, Steve also called off the murder plan for now and told McKinney to wait until the next morning to make the delivery. That night, McKinney spent more than $1,000 of the money meant for his target.
At 5:30 a.m. the next day, McKinney knocked on the correct door. David opened it. McKinney asked, “You lookin’ for help from Charlotte?”
David let him in, and McKinney dropped $8,500 on David’s bed, all in twenties. David was furious. “That’s it? That’s it? What the fuck is this? There’s nothing else?”
“That’s all they gave me,” McKinney said.
David said he’d wanted fifty grand.
“This is what they gave me. This is what you get,” McKinney said. Before he left, he explained that he had been given the wrong room the previous day.
“Yeah, that’s par for the course,” David said with disgust as McKinney turned and left.
David was stunned. At this pace, it would take more than five hundred separate cash deliveries for him to get his $5 million. Within minutes of Bruno’s departure, he realized for the first time that he might never see his share of the stolen millions. He lay on his bed staring at the ceiling, straining to give his cohorts up north the benefit of the doubt. Maybe complications had arisen that he didn’t know about. Maybe they would send more next time.
• • •
Frustrations aside, he no longer had to watch his wallet. He was still worried about getting his money, but at least he had enough to eat out now.
A week after this first cash delivery, Bruno came to Cancun again, this time meeting David in a hotel restaurant. Under a table, Bruno slipped him a brown paper bag and left. David finished his meal, returned to his room, and opened the bag. There was only $8,500 inside. “What the hell is this?” he shouted.
He paged Kelly to let her know he would be calling. He yelled at her on the phone: “What the hell is this shit?”
Kelly asked, “Did you get your money?”
“Yeah, I did,” David said. “I got eight grand. I wanted eighty.”
Kelly said she would speak to Steve about it.
David again hoped for the best, that he would start receiving his millions if he waited just a little longer. In the meantime, he tried again to persuade Kelly to move down there sooner rather than later. He told her he loved her and wanted to see her. She told him she was worried the FBI was tracking her. It was too soon.
He demanded again that she and the others send him more money, for their benefit as well as his. He had thought about it, and they could all invest in a Jet Ski operation. He said he had already talked to a Mexican lawyer about setting up a rental business. They would need about $80,000 to begin, and then they could live off the fees.
“This company can send you all a big check every month,” he claimed.
Charlotte’s nightlife is far, far tamer than Cancun’s, but you wouldn’t have known that from following McKinney around. Between his trips to Mexico, McKinney’s evenings in North Carolina were spent little differently than his time in Cancun. He made the city’s downtown, which is actually called “uptown,” his home away from home, becoming a short-time regular at its hot spots. If the hour was late and he lacked female companionship, he sometimes headed to the Paper Doll Lounge, a strip joint in another part of the city. Most nights or mornings he returned to his hotel room in Gastonia or Charlotte, where he waited to talk to Steve about his upcoming travels to Mexico. Before each trip, they agreed that McKinney would try to kill David if the circumstance presented itself. If it didn’t, McKinney would continue to give him money and maintain his trust until killing him became feasible on some future trip.
• • •
One evening in early December, David’s view of Cancun as a safe haven came to an abrupt halt.
He was eating dinner at the Hard Rock Café, watching rock videos on a mounted screen and catching glimpses of the beach. Then, to his dismay, another customer approached his table and said he recognized him.
“Hey, man,” the stranger said, “you look like that guy from North Carolina who stole like twenty million dollars.”
Inside, David froze. “That’s cool,” he said. “But my name’s Mike.”
The stranger returned to his table, oblivious to David’s worst panic attack since he had been in Mexico. He finished his meal in a daze, paid his check, and returned to his apartment.
He got Kelly on the phone and told her what just happened. “I gotta get out of here,” he said.
She told him they would send Bruno back and think of another plan for him. Steve would arrange to have him moved to Brazil or somewhere else, she said.
Meanwhile, David began staying in his apartment all day and night, scared he’d be recognized if he ventured out. Then, a few days later, he decided to get a room at a Holiday Inn. He’d begun worrying that reward-seekers were on his trail and thought that moving from hotel to hotel could keep them at bay.
About a week before Christmas, and just after the Hard Rock Café sighting, Bruno called David at the hotel. He said he had more money and that he was going to help David move. The two met at a hotel at Calinda Beach, where Bruno told David the plan was to move him to Mexico City and then maybe to Brazil. It seemed like a smart idea to David, who knew he had to leave Cancun.
Back in his rented apartment, David explained to Lindsey that he had to go to Cozumel for a few days. He took some clothes and the Ray-Ban sunglasses with him, leaving behind the expensive scuba equipment, a CD player, pots, pans, and about $15,000 in cash that he had stocked there in case more money from the States didn’t arrive.
Then he and Bruno took a forty-five-minute cab ride south on Route 307, a four-lane highway, to the tamer resort area of Playa del Carmen, a former fishing town that had grown popular when Cancun became a tourist destination in the 1970s. On the cab ride, David asked in a quiet, shaky voice if Bruno knew who he was. Bruno said no, and that he couldn’t care less.
Once in Playa del Carmen, they took a ferry to the resort island of Cozumel, known worldwide for its fantastic diving. Booking a room at the plush, four-star Presidente Hotel, where rates started at about $310 a night, they went inside, sat on the balcony, and poured themselves drinks.
“I used to be a truck driver,” David told Bruno. “I’m doing pretty good for myself, huh?”
McKinney nodded. As far as he knew, David was just an ordinary schlub on the run from a shooting in the States that no one had ever heard of.
But then David then proceeded to tell him how exactly he’d wound up in Mexico. “I hit it for fourteen million dollars,” David said.
As David told the story, McKinney noticed his voice filling with confidence. McKinney was simultaneously impressed with David and terrified for himself. This wasn’t some nondescript drug-related shooting he’d been dealing with. It was a candidate for Crime of the Year, which meant it had FBI written all over it. Until this conversation, McKinney had figured this little job presented little danger to his freedom. And while he hadn’t previously heard of the Loomis Fargo heist, after hearing David describe it, he realized there was a pretty good chance that everybody involved would get caught. And he thought to himself that Steve wasn’t paying him enough.
McKinney hid his thoughts, and their discussion turned to how Americans on the lam could make a living in Mexico. David brought up the Jet Ski business. With a $75,000 to $80,000 investment, they could buy eight to ten Jet Skis, he said, and rent them out for eighty or ninety dollars an hour. There would be no need to ever return to America. It was just small talk, of course. David and McKinney weren’t going into business together. They were both in Mexico for different reasons, and only one of them figured he had to stay.
McKinney then forgot who was paying his salary and told David that his cohorts were spending the money wildly in North Carolina, moving into a fancy new home and buying high-end vehicles. David wasn’t surprised, but the details infuriated him. As the team member who actually stole the money, he believed he merited a standard of living at least as high as the others, and here he was relying on their bumbling attempts to get him $10,000 at a time.
As for McKinney, he didn’t abandon the effort. He figured that maybe, just maybe, he could arrange for someone else to do the deed. Then McKinney could get his $250,000 from Steve and be on his merry way. He had recently hooked up with a local hoodlum named Robert, who worked a menial job in Cancun’s tourism industry. He had asked Robert if he knew anyone who would kill for money. Robert said he could help.
Bruno said he was going to fly to Mexico City himself to find a place there for David to stay temporarily before the move to Brazil. Meanwhile, he said, David should return to Cancun and call Robert, who would get David a plane ticket to Mexico City. David had no idea he was in serious danger.
• • •
Luckily for David, he still had his Pittsburgh Steelers jersey. His love for the team may have saved his life.
At McKinney’s word, David arranged to meet Robert at Señor Frog’s in Playa del Carmen, a waterfront bar where tourists sip tropical drinks in eighteen-inch glasses. Robert, a six-foot-three, three-hundred-pound brute, was immediately drawn to David’s football jersey, which had the name and number of running back Jerome Bettis.
“Man, where the hell did you get that jersey?” he asked. “I been looking all over for something like that!”
They talked sports over Dos Equis, chips, and salsa. David gave Robert about $200 worth of pesos to buy him a one-way ticket to Mexico City, and Robert gave David a cell phone.
The next day, Robert called David to say he had bad news. The money had been stolen. “Come to Cancun to see me again,” he said. “I’ll put you up. I need to talk to you anyway.”
David took a cab to Cancun and wound up meeting Robert’s family. Then Robert took him aside.
“Man, I feel bad about what’s gonna happen to you,” he said. He explained that Bruno had tried to get one of Robert’s henchmen to kill David. “What’d you do?” Robert asked.
“I’m a bank robber,” David said.
“Man, you’re in a bad way,” Robert said. He said he liked David, a fellow Steelers fan, and felt guilty about being a player in a plot to kill him. He told David that Bruno was trying to lure him to an isolated place somewhere, maybe even in a jungle.
David was flabbergasted, and it showed on his face.
“What you really oughta do,” Robert said, “is go right back to these people with a gun and kill them.”
The suggestion didn’t really help. How could David kill anyone? True, he had been in the army, but his job had been repairing helicopters.
“Keep your distance from Bruno,” Robert told him. It was starting to make sense to David why the money was coming down in dribs and drabs. He felt he owed Robert for saving his life. He gave him $3,000 out of gratitude. In return, Robert set David up with a fake Mexican ID and birth certificate.
David wondered who else was in on this. He didn’t suspect Kelly, thinking she was just a middle person. It was probably her friend Steve, who seemed to control all the money, at least according to what Bruno had said on the hotel balcony.
David called Kelly and asked if she still had the .45-caliber gun he’d left with her the night of the crime. He figured that with Steve around, she might need it.
And he figured he wouldn’t see his share of the money without a fight.