Nevada Lore Series: The Extortion Bombing of Harvey's Lake Tahoe Resort

On Aug. 26, 1980 inside Harvey’s Resort at Stateline, graveyard supervisor Bob Vinson was making his rounds, and on his way to the gift shop to buy a pack of cigarettes, he noticed the door to the telephone exchange room was ajar.

Curious, he poked his head inside and noticed something that wasn’t meant to be there: a huge meal box, with a smaller box on top, balanced on pieces of plywood and metal wheels.

The security supervisor, Simon Caban, was called down to investigate, and calls were made to the sheriff’s office. They noticed an envelope on the carpet beside the box, and as Caban had just taken a letter bomb training course, he told everyone to leave the room immediately.

Together with a sheriff’s deputy and a pair of broomsticks, they poked the envelope. It didn’t explode, and so they removed the letter from within.

Caban leaned against the box, reading one page of the letter while the deputy read the other.

The deputy pointed at the box and told Caban it was a bomb.

Hotel guests, employees and casino visitors were evacuated. The FBI rolled in. Security guards emptied the cage of millions of dollars for safe keeping.

According to the letter, any attempt to disarm the bomb, move it or take it apart would result in its detonation. It contained 1,000 pounds of dynamite and more triggers than anyone could imagine. The FBI had never seen anything like it before, and were slightly impressed with its complexity.

The bomber explained there was no way to disarm the bomb, even by the bomb-maker himself. However, if the casino agreed to pay $3 million ($8.9 million today) in used, unmarked $100 bills, a series of combinations of switches would be revealed to allow the bomb to be removed and detonated remotely somewhere else.

The bomber gave “instructions for delivery” in his ransom letter, but the instructions were vague and confusing. The FBI showed up to the spot they thought would be the drop off location, but the bomber was nowhere to be found, and the drop was never made.

The not-so-practical bomber was a then-millionaire by the name of John Birges, who claimed he had lost $750,000 ($2.2 million today) gambling at Harvey’s and wanted reparations.

John Birges, Sr. was a Hungarian immigrant who had flown for the German Luftwaffe during World War II. During the war, he was captured by Soviets and sentenced to 25 years of hard labor in a gulag.

However, eight years later, he was released and returned to Hungary.

In 1957, he came to America and by 1971 he had built a highly successful landscaping business in California; however, he also developed a serious gambling addiction.

So, instead of simply getting help with his addiction, he decided instead to extort the casino with an elaborate, massive bomb — at the time, the largest the FBI had ever encountered.

On inspecting the bomb, the FBI took x-rays of the bomb and determined it would take multiple men to move it, and there was no way to know if the bomb had truly been disarmed. So, they decided they would have to disarm the bomb in the hotel.

Guests and staff were evacuated from the hotel, and the gas was shut off, just to be safe.

The FBI bomb technicians decided that separating the detonators from the dynamite would be the best plan of action, using a shaped charge of C-4.

However, unbeknownst to the technicians, dynamite had also been placed in the top box containing the detonation circuit.

The C-4 was detonated, leading to a disastrous domino affect. The detonation caused the dynamite in the top box to explode, which caused the rest of the bomb to detonate.

Crowds of employees, reporters, tourists and locals crowded around behind barricades to see what would happen. Some were wearing “I Was Bombed at Harvey’s” t-shirts. Bookies were taking bets through the crowd on what the result would be.

A deputy called out through the PA of his car that they were going to detonate.

At 3:46 p.m., a firing lead was touched against a car battery by bomb squad leader Danny Danihel, and the explosion rang out across South Lake Tahoe amidst cheers from the spectators.

The majority of Harvey’s was destroyed, along with Harrah’s suffering damages next door, but there were no injuries. A massive five-story hole was blasted through the middle of the hotel, causing walls and ceilings and floors to mesh into one catastrophic debris pile.

The Harvey’s bomb remains the most complex improvised explosive device the FBI has examined, and a replica of the bomb is still used in FBI bomb training.

Birges was a potential suspect, as his van had been seen in South Lake Tahoe at the time of the bombing, along with the fact that he had access to dynamite as a landscaper, and a serious gambling problem.

One of Birges’s sons let slip to a girlfriend that his father had planted the bomb in Harvey’s. The two broke up, and on a date with another man, they heard that the FBI was offering a reward for information. She told her date what Birges’s son had confided in her, and the man called the FBI.

When he was arrested, along with five others in connection to the plot, he was busy constructing a new bomb either to hit Harvey’s a second time, or a San Fransisco bank.

His two sons, James and John, Jr., became chief witnesses in Birges’s trial, who agreed to testify against their father and other suspects in exchange for receiving probation.

Birges’s girlfriend, Ella Joan Williams, was convicted along with Birges for the plot, and was sentenced to seven years in prison. However, during her appeal, the conviction was overturned and her state charges trial ended in a mistrial.

A retrial was scheduled, but in May 1985 she pled guilty to being an accessory and was recommended for parole from prosecutors.

Birges was sentenced to life in prison without parole, and in 1996 at the age of 74, he died of liver cancer at the Southern Nevada Correctional Center, sixteen years and a day after the bombing.

— The Nevada Lore Series focuses on the legends of Nevada and the surrounding areas that help build our culture, from ancient Washoe stories, to Old West ghostly visions, to modern day urban legends.

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