Harvey Casino Lake Tahoe Bombing
Days after Birges Sr. And his two cronies, Willis Brown and Terry Hall, wheeled the bomb into Harvey’s second story executive offices, other casinos at Lake Tahoe and the surrounding area received bomb threats from copycats. The Harvey's Resort Hotel bombing took place on August 26–27, 1980, when several men masquerading as photocopier deliverers planted an elaborately booby trapped bomb containing 1,000 pounds (450 kg) of dynamite at Harvey's Resort Hotel (now 'Harveys') in Stateline, Nevada, United States.
| Harvey's Resort Hotel Bombing | |
|---|---|
| Location | Stateline, Nevada |
| Coordinates | 38°57′37″N119°56′31″W / 38.9602°N 119.9420°WCoordinates: 38°57′37″N119°56′31″W / 38.9602°N 119.9420°W |
| Date | August 26–27, 1980 |
| Target | Harvey's Resort Hotel |
Attack type | Bombing, attempted extortion |
| Weapons | |
| Deaths | 0 |
| Injured | 0 |
| Perpetrators | John Birges and three others |
| Motive | Extortion |
The Harvey's Resort Hotel bombing took place on August 26–27, 1980, when several men masquerading as photocopier deliverers planted an elaborately booby trappedbomb containing 1,000 pounds (450 kg) of dynamite at Harvey's Resort Hotel (now 'Harveys') in Stateline, Nevada, United States.[1] After an attempt to disarm the bomb, it exploded causing extensive damage to the hotel but no injuries or deaths. The total cost of the damage was estimated to be around $18 million.[2] John Birges Sr. was convicted of having made the bomb with a goal of extorting money from the casino after having lost $750,000 there. He died in prison in 1996, at the age of 74.
Background[edit]
John Birges Sr. was a Hungarian immigrant to Clovis, California. He flew for the German Luftwaffe during World War II. He was captured and sentenced to 25 years of hard labor in the Sovietgulag. Eight years into his sentence in the gulag, he was released during a period of mass repatriation of POWs held in the Soviet Union to their home countries, and returned to Hungary. From there, he immigrated to the U.S. and built a successful landscaping business, but his addiction to gambling led to his losing a large amount of money and prompted the bomb plot.[3] His gambling debt and experience with explosives were primary pieces of evidence linking him to the bombing.[4]
Bombing[edit]
As the mastermind behind the bomb, now-former millionaire Birges was attempting to extort $3 million ($9.3 million in 2019) from the casino, claiming he had lost $750,000 ($2.3 million in 2019) gambling there.
Harveys Resort Casino Lake Tahoe Bomb
The FBI went to the spot that they believed to be the ransom drop, but due to vague directions, Birges was waiting at a different location. No money was paid to Birges.[5]
The bomb was cleverly built and virtually tamper-proof. The ransom note stated that the bomb could not be disarmed even by the bomb builder, but if paid $3 million he would give instructions on which combination of switches would allow the bomb to be moved and remotely detonated.[5] The FBI determined that it would take four men to move it and there was no way to know if the bomb was truly disarmed or safe to move. The FBI decided that the bomb would have to be disarmed in the hotel. All guests and staff were evacuated from the hotel and the gas main was shut off.[5]
After studying the bomb for more than a day through x-rays, bomb technicians decided that, although there were warnings from the bomb maker that a shock would trigger the device, the best hope of disarming it was by separating the detonators from the dynamite. The technicians thought this could be accomplished using a shaped charge of C-4. The attempt to disarm the bomb failed as the technicians did not know that dynamite had also been placed in the top box containing the detonation circuit; the shaped charge detonated the top box explosives, which caused the rest of the bomb to detonate. The bomb destroyed much of the hotel, although no one was injured. Harrah's Casino (which was connected to Harvey's Resort via a tunnel) was also damaged by the explosion, which broke many of the casino's windows.[6][7]
The bomb, one of the largest the FBI had ever seen, was loaded with an estimated 1,000 lb (450 kg) of dynamite stolen from a construction site in Fresno, California. According to FBI experts, the Harvey's bomb remains the most complex improvised explosive device they have examined, and a replica of 'the machine', as the extortionists called it, was still used in FBI training as of 2009.[1]
Investigation[edit]
Birges was investigated as a possible suspect due to his white van being identified as being in South Tahoe at the time of the bombing.[5] Birges was eventually arrested based on a tip.[8][9] One of his sons had revealed to his then-girlfriend that his father had placed a bomb in Harvey's. After the two broke up, she was on a date with another man when they heard about a reward for information, and she informed her new boyfriend about Birges. This man then called the FBI.[6]
Harveys Casino Lake Tahoe Bombing
Birges was convicted and sentenced to life in prison without parole.[10] In 1996, at the age of 74, he died of liver cancer at the Southern Nevada Correctional Center, 16 years and a day after the bombing.
References[edit]
- ^ ab'A Byte Out of History: The Case of the Harvey's Casino Bomb FBI'. U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation. August 26, 2009. Archived from the original on August 9, 2016. Retrieved July 27, 2016.
- ^Hoffman, Ryan (August 21, 2020). '40 years ago, Tahoe casino bombing was biggest in U.S. history'. The Record Courier.
- ^'Federal Grand Jury Indicts 6 in Bombing of Casino at Tahoe'. The New York Times. Associated Press. August 19, 1981. Archived from the original on September 14, 2017. Retrieved December 19, 2017.
- ^Esposito, Richard; Gerstein, Ted (March 6, 2007). Bomb Squad: a year inside the nation's most exclusive police unit. Hyperion. p. 178. ISBN978-1-4013-0152-1. Archived from the original on June 26, 2014. Retrieved August 25, 2011.
- ^ abcdHigginbotham, Adam (2014). 'A Thousand Pounds of Dynamite'. The Atavist Magazine. Archived from the original on October 9, 2015. Retrieved May 26, 2015.
- ^ abVogel, Ed (August 27, 2005). 'Casino explosion nearly forgotten'. Las Vegas Review-Journal. Archived from the original on October 28, 2012. Retrieved August 25, 2011.
- ^Fabio, Adam. 'This is What A Real Bomb Looks Like'. Archived from the original on February 19, 2016. Retrieved February 8, 2016.
- ^King, Wayne (August 18, 1981). 'F.B.I. Says Casino Bombing Figure Considered Coast Bank Extortion'. The New York Times. Archived from the original on May 24, 2015. Retrieved December 19, 2017.
- ^Special to the New York Times (August 17, 1981). 'Arrests Reported in Casino Bombing'. The New York Times. Archived from the original on September 14, 2017. Retrieved December 19, 2017.
- ^'Conviction in Casino Bombing'. The New York Times. October 23, 1982. Archived from the original on September 14, 2017. Retrieved December 19, 2017.
Further reading[edit]
- Birges, John, Jr.; Arnold, Nina J. (2010). Bombing Harvey. New York: Vantage Press. ISBN978-0533163809. Archived from the original on 2016-03-05. Retrieved 2020-01-10.
- Sloan, Jim (2011). Render Safe: The Untold Story of the Harvey's Bombing.
On the morning of Aug. 26, 1980, an employee of Harvey’s Wagon Wheel Casino in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, discovered two stacked metallic grey boxes on the casino’s second floor. Unbeknownst to the employee, the boxes had just been delivered to the building by two men posing as delivery guys for IBM. One of them was John Birges, a Hungarian immigrant with a colorful past that included a stint as a Luftwaffe fighter pilot during World War II and eight years in a Siberian gulag.
and a variety of triggering mechanisms that made it virtually undefeatable.Photo via FBI
In 1980, Birges was living in Fresno, California. He had made millions of dollars in America, but by that point he had lost nearly all of it to gambling — at Harvey’s. The boxes he left in the casino were accompanied by a three-page letter that began: “Do not move or tilt this bomb, because the mechanism controlling the detonators in it will set it off at a movement of less than .01 of the open end Ricter scale.” It was a ransom note.
The demand: $3 million or the bomb explodes. The FBI decided to go with a third option: Try to disarm the bomb. Later, agents would claim the bomb was “undefeatable.” To this day, it’s regarded as the most complex improvised explosive device the FBI has ever encountered on U.S. soil. The boxes were packed with nearly 1,000 pounds of dynamite, every ounce of which ripped through the hotel when agents tried to disarm it with C4. Fortunately, because the casino had been emptied, not a single person was harmed.
Birges was eventually arrested and died in prison in 1996.