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A Thousand Pounds of Dynamite
The bomb appeared early one morning in an upstairs office of Harvey’s Wagon Wheel Casino near Lake Tahoe, an enigmatic box covered in a bewildering array of switches. A neatly typed letter explained that the box contained 1,000 pounds of dynamite. It was the largest improvised explosive device in American history—and its creator promised to explain how to remove it safely if the casino delivered $3 million by helicopter to a remote landing site in the mountains. “Do not try to move, disarm, or enter the bomb,” the letter warned. “It will explode.”
The bomb maker was one Janos “Big John” Birges, a Hungarian political refugee who had worked his way up from nothing to become a successful entrepreneur in Fresno, California—only to see his life unraveled in middle age by divorce, cancer, and gambling debts. By 1980, he owed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Harvey’s. And he had roped his two teenage sons—who were as eager to please their father as they were terrified of him—into a plot to get the money back.
But the bomb he planted in the casino that August wasn’t just an extortion scheme. It was a brilliant feat of engineering—an intricate and deadly puzzle that Birges hoped would prove once and for all just how badly the world had underestimated him. In A Thousand Pounds of Dynamite, Adam Higginbotham draws from interviews with federal agents and Birges’s co-conspirators—as well as never-before-released FBI records—to tell the true story of the race to stop one of history’s most bizarre extortion plots. By turns action-packed and darkly hilarious, A Thousand Pounds of Dynamite is an engrossing tale of genius at its most deranged.
Praise for A Thousand Pounds of Dynamite:
“A simple plan and a hell of a lot of explosives pay off in a galloping true crime tale that speaks in the language of ’70s SoCal dirt-bags, dreamers and G-men. Stranger still, beneath the pyrotechnics lies a poignant story of family. Higginbotham’s skills as a journalist and storyteller left me banging the plate for more.”
—Charles Graeber, author of The Good Nurse
“Of all the spectacular crimes that plagued America at the tail end of the Me Decade, none was more bizarre or more ambitious than the plot to bomb Harvey’s Wagon Wheel Casino. Adam Higginbotham brings this bonkers caper to vivid life in A Thousand Pounds of Dynamite, a tale that explores the very fine line between criminal genius and criminal insanity. You’ll devour this rollicking yarn in one sitting, then spend the next few months regaling your friends with all the astonishing details.”
—Brendan I. Koerner, author of The Skies Belong to Us
The bomb maker was one Janos “Big John” Birges, a Hungarian political refugee who had worked his way up from nothing to become a successful entrepreneur in Fresno, California—only to see his life unraveled in middle age by divorce, cancer, and gambling debts. By 1980, he owed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Harvey’s. And he had roped his two teenage sons—who were as eager to please their father as they were terrified of him—into a plot to get the money back.
But the bomb he planted in the casino that August wasn’t just an extortion scheme. It was a brilliant feat of engineering—an intricate and deadly puzzle that Birges hoped would prove once and for all just how badly the world had underestimated him. In A Thousand Pounds of Dynamite, Adam Higginbotham draws from interviews with federal agents and Birges’s co-conspirators—as well as never-before-released FBI records—to tell the true story of the race to stop one of history’s most bizarre extortion plots. By turns action-packed and darkly hilarious, A Thousand Pounds of Dynamite is an engrossing tale of genius at its most deranged.
Praise for A Thousand Pounds of Dynamite:
“A simple plan and a hell of a lot of explosives pay off in a galloping true crime tale that speaks in the language of ’70s SoCal dirt-bags, dreamers and G-men. Stranger still, beneath the pyrotechnics lies a poignant story of family. Higginbotham’s skills as a journalist and storyteller left me banging the plate for more.”
—Charles Graeber, author of The Good Nurse
“Of all the spectacular crimes that plagued America at the tail end of the Me Decade, none was more bizarre or more ambitious than the plot to bomb Harvey’s Wagon Wheel Casino. Adam Higginbotham brings this bonkers caper to vivid life in A Thousand Pounds of Dynamite, a tale that explores the very fine line between criminal genius and criminal insanity. You’ll devour this rollicking yarn in one sitting, then spend the next few months regaling your friends with all the astonishing details.”
—Brendan I. Koerner, author of The Skies Belong to Us
110 pages, Kindle Edition
First published July 30, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 45 reviews
December 23, 2014
This is a story that I wasn't aware of. It's interesting that this man was able to pull off the nearly perfect crime. A fast read but very interesting.
April 27, 2020
“Word went around that gamblers were placing bets on what would happen next.”
WHAT IS THIS BOOK ABOUT?
- The true story of a man in 1980 who planted a 1,000 pound bomb in a casino in order to extort $3 million. The bomb was left with a little that said: “Do not try to move, disarm, or enter the bomb. It will explode.”
THE PLAN
- Big John was going to extort a million dollars from Harvey’s Wagon Wheel Casino in Lake Tahoe, and he planned to do it by building a bomb.
BIG JOHN (THE MASTERMIND)
- Janos Birges arrived in the United States in May 1957 a penniless 35-year-old political refugee.
- Knowledge is power, he often said; the more people know about you, the weaker you are.
- Years of blasting wells and trenches out of the California hardpan had made him pretty comfortable around dynamite.
- At home, Big John was a tinkerer and a would-be inventor, always soldering and wiring.
JOHN’S WIFE DIED ‘MYSTERIOUSLY’
- At the end of July 1975, Elizabeth vanished again. This time she left behind her Mazda pickup, parked outside the kitchen door with the keys in the ignition, her pocketbook on the passenger seat. Big John didn’t seem to notice. Three days later, her body was found in a field behind the house. An autopsy showed a lethal combination of alcohol and Valium in her bloodstream; she had choked on her own vomit. The coroner ruled it a suicide, but something never seemed quite right about that.
- He took the urn that held her ashes and emptied it in the yard, in front of his sons.
JOHN LOVED TO GAMBLE
- And he began gambling more heavily in the casinos up in Lake Tahoe. His favorite was Harvey’s Wagon Wheel in Stateline, Nevada.
BOMB THREATS TO CASINOS ARE APPARENTLY NOT UNCOMMON
- Bomb threats, usually. Always the big casinos: the Sahara, Caesar’s, Harvey’s.
- Some wires, no explosives: bullshit stuff...The feds always got them at the money drop.
- They could make the plans as complicated as they liked, but in the end they always had to come for the money.
BIG JOHN HIT ROCK BOTTOM
- The next morning, John Birges woke up to face the new decade. He was nearly 58 years old, terminally ill, broke, twice divorced, and humiliated. He had nothing left to lose.
THEY STOLE DYNAMITE FROM AN EXCAVATION SITE
- They had stolen 18 cardboard cases filled with dynamite and blasting caps to go with it—more than 1,000 pounds of explosives in all.
HOW THE BOMB WORKED
- The bomb, Big John explained to Johnny and Jimmy, had eight separate electromechanical fusing mechanisms. If any one of them was triggered, it would complete a circuit between a battery and detonators attached to the dynamite, and the bomb would explode.
- His father’s bomb was impossible to disarm. Big John did not plan to provide Harvey’s with instructions on how to turn off the device in exchange for the ransom. Instead, what he would offer was a guide to making the pendulum mechanism safe, so that the bomb could be moved from the casino to another location, where it could be detonated without incident
PLANTING THE BOMB
- At around 5:30 in the morning, they’d roll it through the lobby, into the elevator, and up to the second floor, where they’d find the casino’s administrative offices and the computers that controlled the slot machines. Big John would then arm the bomb and leave it there, along with an extortion note. While working on the bomb, Big John had decided that a million dollars wasn’t a large enough ransom for a plan like this. No: Three million sounded about right.
HE DIDN’T MENTION IT WAS A BOMB TO THE GUYS WHO HELPED HIM MOVE
- While Bill and Terry were relieving themselves, Big John took the dolly out of the back of the van and threw the pieces into the creek. Bill and Terry looked at Big John. Bill asked him why he was getting rid of it. Big John told them they’d just delivered a bomb.
THAT IS A TERRIBLE PLAN...
- Following Highway 50 as it wound up into the wooded crags of Eldorado National Forest, they were headed for a remote clearing high in the mountains above Lake Tahoe. There, at 4,000 feet, Johnny would drop his father and brother. Big John and Jimmy would take the guns, one of the strobes, and the bags, and settle in to wait for the sound of a helicopter sent from Harvey’s, less than 50 miles away. When they heard the aircraft approaching, they would turn on the strobe. This would be the signal for the pilot to land.
- When the pilot touched down, Big John and Jimmy would overpower him at gunpoint. Big John would take the controls and fly Jimmy and the money to a second clearing he had found, near Ham’s Station, 40 miles away on the other side of the valley, where Johnny would be waiting with the Volvo. Jimmy and the money would go with Johnny, while Big John landed the helicopter at Cameron Park Airport, where Joan would pick him up. The four would then rendezvous back in Clovis. Then Big John and Joan would escape to Europe to launder the cash.
COPS CAN’T FIND THE MONEY DROP LOCATION
- Miles away, in entirely the wrong place, Joe Cook scanned the darkened landscape for more than an hour. He circled wider and wider. Nothing.
THE BANDITS WRECK THEIR CAR
- Johnny took the bend too fast. In his rear-view mirror, he watched Joan skid across the road and slam into the embankment. The car was wrecked.
- Johnny, Jimmy, Big John, and Joan picked up the guns from the drop site, then drove Joan down to the hospital in Placerville.
THEN THEY GET A SPEEDING TICKET
- Johnny was already late for work with the roofing company. As the landscape flattened out and the two-lane highway split into freeway, he put his foot down: 40, 50, 65 miles an hour. Then he saw lights in his rear-view mirror.
FEDS TRY TO USE A BOMB TO DISARM THE BOMB
- Finally, Leonard Wolfson, a civilian consultant to the Navy, suggested using more explosives to defeat the bomb, with a linear shaped charge.
- This could disable the bomb by severing the fusing mechanisms the technicians could see in the top box from the explosives they believed filled the lower box.
THE BOMB DID NOT BECOME DISARMED...
- When they finally stood, the damage wrought by nearly 1,000 pounds of dynamite was clear. A jagged five-story hole yawned in the middle of the casino. “We lost it,” Danihel said. “The whole thing went up.”
- The explosion had torn a giant spherical hole through the middle of the hotel. Where the bomb had once sat on the second floor, a hole 60 feet in diameter gaped in the foot-thick concrete.
- The concussion of the linear shaped charge had set off the pendulum mechanism in the bomb, which had then detonated as designed.
PARDON OUR MESS
- Late on Friday afternoon, two days after the explosion, enough debris had been cleared from around the hotel for Harvey’s to reopen part of the casino for gambling.
- They set up sifting tables outside the casino. Each one was hung with two bags: one for evidence, the other for any of the million dollars in cash and chips left on the felt when the bomb went off.
THE NOOSE TIGHTENS
- He said he knew who had bombed Harvey’s. He’d dated a girl who had told him all about it before it ever happened. Her name was Kelli Cooper. After that, things started moving quickly. The agents took Danny out to the Holiday Inn by the Fresno Air Terminal and hypnotized him.
BIG JOHN HAS ANOTHER BRIGHT IDEA
- Big John had started talking about putting a second bomb in Harvey’s almost as soon as the dust from the first one had settled.
- They drove a few miles out into the blank farmland at the edge of town, near Ferenc’s turkey ranch. There, beside two large trees, Big John had already dug a hole. It was big enough for the whole haul of dynamite, around 700 pounds in all.
CHANGE OF PLANS
- Then Big John got into some kind of fight with Ferenc and his wife. They wouldn’t pay him for the work he’d done;
- By then, the FBI agents were all over Johnny, but Big John didn’t care. He was angry. He dug up the dynamite. He rigged a little of it under the wooden bridge Ferenc had over there. The bridge was the only way he had to get in or out of the farm. Johnny heard the explosion all the way across town.
THE BOYS ENDED UP RATTING ON THEIR DAD
- If the boys called their bluff—if they simply asked for a lawyer and stuck to their alibis—the district attorney would never be able to make the case against Big John.
- “Did you tell them?” asked Jimmy. “Yes,” said Johnny.
- That was the end of it. After that, you couldn’t shut them up.
A FOOL FOR A CLIENT
- Big John never did come clean. For four years he went through lawyer after lawyer until, finally, he defended himself.
- Big John cross-examined his sons, speaking to them like strangers.
HAHA
- When he saw the strange machine, but especially the envelope lying on the carpet next to it, he was alarmed. He’d just taken a training course on letter bombs. “Everybody step back,” he said. Caban and a sheriff’s deputy grabbed a pair of the janitors’ broomsticks and, taking cover behind the big gray box, used them to poke at the suspect envelope.
- the hurtling debris, the gaping hole in the facade of the casino—briefly lifted Big John’s spirits. “It worked pretty good,” he said.
- On September 17, Joe Yablonsky held another press conference and finally released composite pictures of two of the men they were looking for. They were both white. One was said to be five feet seven inches, about 20 years old, with sandy blond hair and a mustache. The other had short dark hair and protruding ears. “A hayseed,” Yablonsky said. “A goober type.”
- Of course he got paranoid. The pot didn’t help. One day he took mushrooms, more than he should have, and tripped so hard that he saw a devil and an angel right there in the room with him.
- When Chris Ronay took the stand, Big John pointed out errors in his model of the bomb.
SOME OF THE FBI INVESTIGATORS WENT ONTO OTHER INFAMOUS BOMBS
- Chris Ronay and Jonkey went on to be involved in the FBI’s investigations of later bombings, including Lockerbie, Oklahoma City, and the first World Trade Center attack in 1993, but they never encountered another case like the one at Harvey’s Wagon Wheel. The plexiglass model of the bomb is still used to train the bureau’s explosives technicians in Quantico.
- When I met him recently, he said that if he saw Big John’s bomb again today, he still wouldn’t know how to defuse it. His team never saw the inside of the box, and to this day he can’t be certain exactly what was in it.
*** *** *** *** ***
BONUS
- How the bomb worked: https://youtu.be/LYZcw0l9uDg
- FBI account of the casino bombing case: https://youtu.be/clWUhbxBh8Q
- Hacker page with an article about the bomb (and a pic of a see-through model of the bomb the FBI still uses to teach): https://hackaday.com/2015/09/21/this-...
WHAT IS THIS BOOK ABOUT?
- The true story of a man in 1980 who planted a 1,000 pound bomb in a casino in order to extort $3 million. The bomb was left with a little that said: “Do not try to move, disarm, or enter the bomb. It will explode.”
THE PLAN
- Big John was going to extort a million dollars from Harvey’s Wagon Wheel Casino in Lake Tahoe, and he planned to do it by building a bomb.
BIG JOHN (THE MASTERMIND)
- Janos Birges arrived in the United States in May 1957 a penniless 35-year-old political refugee.
- Knowledge is power, he often said; the more people know about you, the weaker you are.
- Years of blasting wells and trenches out of the California hardpan had made him pretty comfortable around dynamite.
- At home, Big John was a tinkerer and a would-be inventor, always soldering and wiring.
JOHN’S WIFE DIED ‘MYSTERIOUSLY’
- At the end of July 1975, Elizabeth vanished again. This time she left behind her Mazda pickup, parked outside the kitchen door with the keys in the ignition, her pocketbook on the passenger seat. Big John didn’t seem to notice. Three days later, her body was found in a field behind the house. An autopsy showed a lethal combination of alcohol and Valium in her bloodstream; she had choked on her own vomit. The coroner ruled it a suicide, but something never seemed quite right about that.
- He took the urn that held her ashes and emptied it in the yard, in front of his sons.
JOHN LOVED TO GAMBLE
- And he began gambling more heavily in the casinos up in Lake Tahoe. His favorite was Harvey’s Wagon Wheel in Stateline, Nevada.
BOMB THREATS TO CASINOS ARE APPARENTLY NOT UNCOMMON
- Bomb threats, usually. Always the big casinos: the Sahara, Caesar’s, Harvey’s.
- Some wires, no explosives: bullshit stuff...The feds always got them at the money drop.
- They could make the plans as complicated as they liked, but in the end they always had to come for the money.
BIG JOHN HIT ROCK BOTTOM
- The next morning, John Birges woke up to face the new decade. He was nearly 58 years old, terminally ill, broke, twice divorced, and humiliated. He had nothing left to lose.
THEY STOLE DYNAMITE FROM AN EXCAVATION SITE
- They had stolen 18 cardboard cases filled with dynamite and blasting caps to go with it—more than 1,000 pounds of explosives in all.
HOW THE BOMB WORKED
- The bomb, Big John explained to Johnny and Jimmy, had eight separate electromechanical fusing mechanisms. If any one of them was triggered, it would complete a circuit between a battery and detonators attached to the dynamite, and the bomb would explode.
- His father’s bomb was impossible to disarm. Big John did not plan to provide Harvey’s with instructions on how to turn off the device in exchange for the ransom. Instead, what he would offer was a guide to making the pendulum mechanism safe, so that the bomb could be moved from the casino to another location, where it could be detonated without incident
PLANTING THE BOMB
- At around 5:30 in the morning, they’d roll it through the lobby, into the elevator, and up to the second floor, where they’d find the casino’s administrative offices and the computers that controlled the slot machines. Big John would then arm the bomb and leave it there, along with an extortion note. While working on the bomb, Big John had decided that a million dollars wasn’t a large enough ransom for a plan like this. No: Three million sounded about right.
HE DIDN’T MENTION IT WAS A BOMB TO THE GUYS WHO HELPED HIM MOVE
- While Bill and Terry were relieving themselves, Big John took the dolly out of the back of the van and threw the pieces into the creek. Bill and Terry looked at Big John. Bill asked him why he was getting rid of it. Big John told them they’d just delivered a bomb.
THAT IS A TERRIBLE PLAN...
- Following Highway 50 as it wound up into the wooded crags of Eldorado National Forest, they were headed for a remote clearing high in the mountains above Lake Tahoe. There, at 4,000 feet, Johnny would drop his father and brother. Big John and Jimmy would take the guns, one of the strobes, and the bags, and settle in to wait for the sound of a helicopter sent from Harvey’s, less than 50 miles away. When they heard the aircraft approaching, they would turn on the strobe. This would be the signal for the pilot to land.
- When the pilot touched down, Big John and Jimmy would overpower him at gunpoint. Big John would take the controls and fly Jimmy and the money to a second clearing he had found, near Ham’s Station, 40 miles away on the other side of the valley, where Johnny would be waiting with the Volvo. Jimmy and the money would go with Johnny, while Big John landed the helicopter at Cameron Park Airport, where Joan would pick him up. The four would then rendezvous back in Clovis. Then Big John and Joan would escape to Europe to launder the cash.
COPS CAN’T FIND THE MONEY DROP LOCATION
- Miles away, in entirely the wrong place, Joe Cook scanned the darkened landscape for more than an hour. He circled wider and wider. Nothing.
THE BANDITS WRECK THEIR CAR
- Johnny took the bend too fast. In his rear-view mirror, he watched Joan skid across the road and slam into the embankment. The car was wrecked.
- Johnny, Jimmy, Big John, and Joan picked up the guns from the drop site, then drove Joan down to the hospital in Placerville.
THEN THEY GET A SPEEDING TICKET
- Johnny was already late for work with the roofing company. As the landscape flattened out and the two-lane highway split into freeway, he put his foot down: 40, 50, 65 miles an hour. Then he saw lights in his rear-view mirror.
FEDS TRY TO USE A BOMB TO DISARM THE BOMB
- Finally, Leonard Wolfson, a civilian consultant to the Navy, suggested using more explosives to defeat the bomb, with a linear shaped charge.
- This could disable the bomb by severing the fusing mechanisms the technicians could see in the top box from the explosives they believed filled the lower box.
THE BOMB DID NOT BECOME DISARMED...
- When they finally stood, the damage wrought by nearly 1,000 pounds of dynamite was clear. A jagged five-story hole yawned in the middle of the casino. “We lost it,” Danihel said. “The whole thing went up.”
- The explosion had torn a giant spherical hole through the middle of the hotel. Where the bomb had once sat on the second floor, a hole 60 feet in diameter gaped in the foot-thick concrete.
- The concussion of the linear shaped charge had set off the pendulum mechanism in the bomb, which had then detonated as designed.
PARDON OUR MESS
- Late on Friday afternoon, two days after the explosion, enough debris had been cleared from around the hotel for Harvey’s to reopen part of the casino for gambling.
- They set up sifting tables outside the casino. Each one was hung with two bags: one for evidence, the other for any of the million dollars in cash and chips left on the felt when the bomb went off.
THE NOOSE TIGHTENS
- He said he knew who had bombed Harvey’s. He’d dated a girl who had told him all about it before it ever happened. Her name was Kelli Cooper. After that, things started moving quickly. The agents took Danny out to the Holiday Inn by the Fresno Air Terminal and hypnotized him.
BIG JOHN HAS ANOTHER BRIGHT IDEA
- Big John had started talking about putting a second bomb in Harvey’s almost as soon as the dust from the first one had settled.
- They drove a few miles out into the blank farmland at the edge of town, near Ferenc’s turkey ranch. There, beside two large trees, Big John had already dug a hole. It was big enough for the whole haul of dynamite, around 700 pounds in all.
CHANGE OF PLANS
- Then Big John got into some kind of fight with Ferenc and his wife. They wouldn’t pay him for the work he’d done;
- By then, the FBI agents were all over Johnny, but Big John didn’t care. He was angry. He dug up the dynamite. He rigged a little of it under the wooden bridge Ferenc had over there. The bridge was the only way he had to get in or out of the farm. Johnny heard the explosion all the way across town.
THE BOYS ENDED UP RATTING ON THEIR DAD
- If the boys called their bluff—if they simply asked for a lawyer and stuck to their alibis—the district attorney would never be able to make the case against Big John.
- “Did you tell them?” asked Jimmy. “Yes,” said Johnny.
- That was the end of it. After that, you couldn’t shut them up.
A FOOL FOR A CLIENT
- Big John never did come clean. For four years he went through lawyer after lawyer until, finally, he defended himself.
- Big John cross-examined his sons, speaking to them like strangers.
HAHA
- When he saw the strange machine, but especially the envelope lying on the carpet next to it, he was alarmed. He’d just taken a training course on letter bombs. “Everybody step back,” he said. Caban and a sheriff’s deputy grabbed a pair of the janitors’ broomsticks and, taking cover behind the big gray box, used them to poke at the suspect envelope.
- the hurtling debris, the gaping hole in the facade of the casino—briefly lifted Big John’s spirits. “It worked pretty good,” he said.
- On September 17, Joe Yablonsky held another press conference and finally released composite pictures of two of the men they were looking for. They were both white. One was said to be five feet seven inches, about 20 years old, with sandy blond hair and a mustache. The other had short dark hair and protruding ears. “A hayseed,” Yablonsky said. “A goober type.”
- Of course he got paranoid. The pot didn’t help. One day he took mushrooms, more than he should have, and tripped so hard that he saw a devil and an angel right there in the room with him.
- When Chris Ronay took the stand, Big John pointed out errors in his model of the bomb.
SOME OF THE FBI INVESTIGATORS WENT ONTO OTHER INFAMOUS BOMBS
- Chris Ronay and Jonkey went on to be involved in the FBI’s investigations of later bombings, including Lockerbie, Oklahoma City, and the first World Trade Center attack in 1993, but they never encountered another case like the one at Harvey’s Wagon Wheel. The plexiglass model of the bomb is still used to train the bureau’s explosives technicians in Quantico.
- When I met him recently, he said that if he saw Big John’s bomb again today, he still wouldn’t know how to defuse it. His team never saw the inside of the box, and to this day he can’t be certain exactly what was in it.
*** *** *** *** ***
BONUS
- How the bomb worked: https://youtu.be/LYZcw0l9uDg
- FBI account of the casino bombing case: https://youtu.be/clWUhbxBh8Q
- Hacker page with an article about the bomb (and a pic of a see-through model of the bomb the FBI still uses to teach): https://hackaday.com/2015/09/21/this-...
May 8, 2019
Incredible true bombing story
Two reliable sources of riveting nonfiction, The Atavist and writer Adam Higginbotham, deliver the goods with this tale of the Harvey casino & hotel bombing in 1981. The popular blurb term, “unputdownable,” certainly applies this work!
Two reliable sources of riveting nonfiction, The Atavist and writer Adam Higginbotham, deliver the goods with this tale of the Harvey casino & hotel bombing in 1981. The popular blurb term, “unputdownable,” certainly applies this work!
September 1, 2014
"A Fantastic Account of One of The Largest Bombings In The U.S."
The events in this story were reconstructed using documents from the criminal investigation and court proceedings, interviews, news reports, etc. FBI special agent Dell Rowley is dressed in black fatigues, Kevlar vest, and helmet. He's squatting behind the pilot's seat of a Bell Ranger helicopter. In the co-pilot's seat are three canvas money bags, containing cut and bound newsprint to match the weight of $3 million. This was hopefully to be delivered to extortionists who had placed an unusual, very large bomb on the second floor of Harvey's Wagon Wheel Casino in Stateline, Nevada, which took place back on August 27, 1980. Unfortunately, the delivery is not made, and through attempts to deactivate it as safely as possible, it does go off causing severe damage to the casino. However there were no people harmed or killed. This is a true account of the real events and the long investigation which finally brought down the guilty parties. It is extremely well written and documented, by author Adam Higginbotham, who has a long career history of writing in magazine and newspapers in London, contributing editor at The Sunday Telegragh, and also writing for GQ, Men's Journal, The New Yorker, and Wired. It's a fast, intriguing read, finely honed. Highly recommend. I only wish that photographs could have been inserted as well.
The events in this story were reconstructed using documents from the criminal investigation and court proceedings, interviews, news reports, etc. FBI special agent Dell Rowley is dressed in black fatigues, Kevlar vest, and helmet. He's squatting behind the pilot's seat of a Bell Ranger helicopter. In the co-pilot's seat are three canvas money bags, containing cut and bound newsprint to match the weight of $3 million. This was hopefully to be delivered to extortionists who had placed an unusual, very large bomb on the second floor of Harvey's Wagon Wheel Casino in Stateline, Nevada, which took place back on August 27, 1980. Unfortunately, the delivery is not made, and through attempts to deactivate it as safely as possible, it does go off causing severe damage to the casino. However there were no people harmed or killed. This is a true account of the real events and the long investigation which finally brought down the guilty parties. It is extremely well written and documented, by author Adam Higginbotham, who has a long career history of writing in magazine and newspapers in London, contributing editor at The Sunday Telegragh, and also writing for GQ, Men's Journal, The New Yorker, and Wired. It's a fast, intriguing read, finely honed. Highly recommend. I only wish that photographs could have been inserted as well.
October 5, 2024
Interesting account of a bomb extortion that occurred in 1980 at a casino in South Lake Tahoe. The actual bomb fabrication was so ingenious! But alas, hubris! Always the downfall.
A Thousand Pounds of Dynamite rounds out my reading of all of Higginbotham's published works - he's a new auto-read author for me! But I am glad he lets other people narrate his other books... Higginbotham narrated this one himself and had such uneven pacing and volume, I found it really distracting.
A Thousand Pounds of Dynamite rounds out my reading of all of Higginbotham's published works - he's a new auto-read author for me! But I am glad he lets other people narrate his other books... Higginbotham narrated this one himself and had such uneven pacing and volume, I found it really distracting.
December 20, 2014
This is a fascinating true story of a Hungarian refugee who tries to blow up the Harvey's Wagon Wheel Casino in South Lake Tahoe in the early 80's. Big John Birges convinces his two sons to help him with the extortion through bombing plot. This is being made into a movie by Bradley Cooper. I would cast John Goodman as Big John and Sam Rockwell as one of the sons. The FBI said that this bomb was the most complex bomb ever made in American history. This is from a kIndle Single.This often less than 100 page stories always seem to be rich storytelling.
September 3, 2014
Amazing true story that makes Ocean's Eleven seem plausible! Early 80s Fresno, CA a gambler and clearly disturbed individual tries extorting a casino in Tahoe by planting a bomb that cannot be disarmed and threatening to blow up the casino unless he gets three million dollars. Read the rest - hard to believe. I found this book through Atavist which is a great source of interesting reading.
April 19, 2019
An 82-page account of a memorable extortion case from 1980, originally from ATAVIST, a "digital-only publication devoted to longform narrative journalism." I commend the author for not stretching this out to a full-length book.
September 10, 2014
A++++ would read again six or seven times, really well written and interesting and gripping and somehow made what should have been a much too long short piece into a much too short long piece (what).
August 16, 2014
The guy was stupid, crazy, smart. Great read about a lunatic that tried to blow up a Casino in the 80's. Highly recommend!
August 23, 2014
Ok short story.Not worth $1.99
September 2, 2014
Completely fascinating.
October 22, 2014
Another I-Can't-Believe-This-Actually-Happened report from The Atavist. You've got my attention.
June 9, 2019
When I was buying Higginbotham’s audiobook on Chernobyl, I saw there was a short (just about 2.5 hours) audio by the same author. The author reads the story, which was originally a longform article for The Atavist (which I’d not heard of before). Then Audible had a sale and I picked it up at 50% off – about $3.00. A Thousand Pounds of Dynamite tells the true story of Big John Burgis, who tried to extort $US 3 million from a casino in Lake Tahoe in 1980. He stole a thousand pounds of dynamite and made a bomb in his shed, delivered it to the casino and threatened to blow everything up if the money wasn’t delivered to him. The story is extraordinary and all the more interesting because I’d never heard of it before. I gather that folks in Lake Tahoe still remember it and that current FBI trainers use the case as a teaching tool but the story hasn’t really sunk into the collective consciousness.
Mr. Higginbotham is not a narrator, he’s a journalist. He’s English and makes no attempt at the US/US-Hungarian accents used by the real-life cast. The audio is short and factual and very entertaining. I listened as Higginbotham read me his article, rather than performed it and it worked on that level. Don’t go in expecting a traditional narrative performance, but if you’re interested in true crime, this audiobook is really fascinating.
Read the rest: https://www.kaetrinsmusings.com/2019/...
Mr. Higginbotham is not a narrator, he’s a journalist. He’s English and makes no attempt at the US/US-Hungarian accents used by the real-life cast. The audio is short and factual and very entertaining. I listened as Higginbotham read me his article, rather than performed it and it worked on that level. Don’t go in expecting a traditional narrative performance, but if you’re interested in true crime, this audiobook is really fascinating.
Read the rest: https://www.kaetrinsmusings.com/2019/...
June 22, 2024
I'm intrigued by Higginbotham's new book on the Challenger disaster, so I thought I'd try one of his earlier and shorter true-crime books. This one describes how a dude made a bomb, put it into a casino, and attempted to extort money. Why did he do it? Did he succeed? Did the bomb, you know, go off?
This was a punchy, intriguing read. I listened to the audio narrated by the author, and it was great.
Because the crime happened back in 1980, before the Internet and cell phones and such, it was fascinating to learn how this dysfunctional man got the dynamite, rigged the bomb, placed it, and communicated with authorities...back in the Stone Age.
But even MORE interesting are the family dysfunction and interpersonal dynamics at play here. Nobody does this kind of thing JUST for the money. Nor does a person do it alone, with no accomplices or stooges. The WHY behind the crime was most interesting for me.
I do not like grotesque true crime, where children are abused and people are graphically dismembered. This was a great read for someone like me who enjoys exploring the psyche and motives behind crime, but who can't stomach graphic violence.
This was a punchy, intriguing read. I listened to the audio narrated by the author, and it was great.
Because the crime happened back in 1980, before the Internet and cell phones and such, it was fascinating to learn how this dysfunctional man got the dynamite, rigged the bomb, placed it, and communicated with authorities...back in the Stone Age.
But even MORE interesting are the family dysfunction and interpersonal dynamics at play here. Nobody does this kind of thing JUST for the money. Nor does a person do it alone, with no accomplices or stooges. The WHY behind the crime was most interesting for me.
I do not like grotesque true crime, where children are abused and people are graphically dismembered. This was a great read for someone like me who enjoys exploring the psyche and motives behind crime, but who can't stomach graphic violence.
January 15, 2026
5⭐️
What a crazy story that I’ve never heard about. This is a short read about the largest manmade bomb in US history that was used to extort money from a Harvey’s Wagon Wheel casino in Tahoe. Craziest thing about this story is that Big John did not seem like the kind of guy to design a bomb of this size that would stump the some of the best EOD professionals in the US.
He definitely would’ve escaped capture if it weren’t for forcing his sons to be involved, which is insane.
I loved this story!
What a crazy story that I’ve never heard about. This is a short read about the largest manmade bomb in US history that was used to extort money from a Harvey’s Wagon Wheel casino in Tahoe. Craziest thing about this story is that Big John did not seem like the kind of guy to design a bomb of this size that would stump the some of the best EOD professionals in the US.
He definitely would’ve escaped capture if it weren’t for forcing his sons to be involved, which is insane.
I loved this story!
April 2, 2020
A short fun book from the author of Chernobyl. A man places 1,000 lbs of dynamite in a Lake Tahoe casino and asks for $3 mil to disable the bomb. After being interviewed by the FBI he decides to make another bomb and ask for $5 mil. The criminal is apprehended in the end. Not that interesting a story but well told. But, I think it is of most interest to us Californians since it took place in our backyard.
Read
December 31, 2025In 1980, a man with a grudge built a highly-sophisticated bomb to blow up a casino he owed money to unless he was paid a $3 million ransom. Higginbotham is one of my new favorite authors because he is able to weave together each story into one compelling narrative.
This was a podcast episode, but the full text is still available on The Atavist.
https://magazine.atavist.com/2014/a-t...
This was a podcast episode, but the full text is still available on The Atavist.
https://magazine.atavist.com/2014/a-t...
July 21, 2019
Entertaining short read but protagonist remains distant
Interesting story of a true bomb-extortion attempt in 1980 which went awry. Hard work on the part of authorities, due to the absence of evidence, and the resoluteness of the accomplices. The criminal was not a straight talker so this account doesn't get under his skin, and the motivation and thought process remains distant.
Interesting story of a true bomb-extortion attempt in 1980 which went awry. Hard work on the part of authorities, due to the absence of evidence, and the resoluteness of the accomplices. The criminal was not a straight talker so this account doesn't get under his skin, and the motivation and thought process remains distant.
January 26, 2020
Exciting Story
It’s difficult to believe that this bombing occurred in the first place and that the perpetrators almost got away with. The book was written with no unnecessary details, is fast-paced and a quick, easy and interesting read. If you enjoy true crime give this a shot.
It’s difficult to believe that this bombing occurred in the first place and that the perpetrators almost got away with. The book was written with no unnecessary details, is fast-paced and a quick, easy and interesting read. If you enjoy true crime give this a shot.
July 15, 2024
Definitely a longer narrative hidden somewhere within this with a lot more (and much needed) flourishment. Disappointed that there was a second bomb that was only 700 pounds, but we can't all be perfect.
December 6, 2024
3.75/5 ⭐️
Adam Higginbotham could write about a serial garden gnome thief and I’d read it. I love the way he orders events in a way that feels like it’s being told by someone who is there. Lucky for me this is an interesting story about a bomber with a gambling problem.
Adam Higginbotham could write about a serial garden gnome thief and I’d read it. I love the way he orders events in a way that feels like it’s being told by someone who is there. Lucky for me this is an interesting story about a bomber with a gambling problem.
January 8, 2025
A quick listen that almost felt like a podcast. (It was 2.5 drives to or from work)... I had no idea about this and I'm all about adventures with stolen dynamite. Adam Higgininbotham I think is one of my new favorite authors.
January 11, 2025
This was an interesting retelling of a true crime story. The author does a good job laying out the facts and timeline involved in the crime. The pacing is appropriate and the actions ate detailed in a way to keep the reader involved throughout.
May 25, 2019
I had no idea this happened. Great story but I took one star off because it had too much about his family history which I don’t care about
July 18, 2019
A quick, fun read about a strange and fascinating casino bombing extortion attempt.
March 11, 2021
Between the length and the format, this felt like a true crime podcast in all the best ways, with an explosive twist.
May 14, 2022
Intresting.
May 25, 2024
Great read. Quick and short - can read in one sitting.
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