Insight US Harvey’s Resort Hotel
Breaking Bad: the bombing of Harvey’s Hotel Casino Resort
Harvey's was originally opened in 1944 and operated by Sacramento meat wholesaler Harvey Gross and his wife Llewellyn. They opened the first high rise tower and an 11-story, 197-room hotel in 1963.
On August 27, 1980, an explosion from a 1,000 pound bomb left a crater five stories deep in Harvey’s Resort Hotel, Nevada, when it was accidentally detonated by the FBI. Te bomb was placed by John Birges, a heavily in-debt Fresno landscaper who had lost at least $1 million at casinos in Stateline and was hoping to extort another $3 million from the bomb threat. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, where he died from liver cancer in 1996
Bob Vinson was the graveyard shift supervisor at Harvey’s Casino in Stateline Nevada, located on the south shore of Lake Tahoe. It was 5:30am August 26, 1980, when he realised he was out of cigarettes. Leaving the administrative offices on the second floor of the casino, Bob Vinson got up from his desk and went out into the hallway, where he noticed a door that was normally closed was open. It was an accordion door that led to the casino’s internal telephone exchange.
Putting his head inside he saw there were two large boxes, stacked one on top of the other inside the room. Te bottom box was four feet high about the size of a desk, which had been wheeled in there and levelled on blocks of wood; on top of this large box was a smaller one that bore 28 toggle switches, and all but one of these were flipped in the same direction. On the floor was an envelope addressed to Harvey’s management, inside which was a three page letter that said this was a giant bomb and that the box was filled with 1,000 pounds of TNT, enough to blow up the whole casino and severely damage Harrahs across the street.
Te letter advised cordoning off a minimum of 1,200 feet around the building and evacuating the whole area. It said that moving, tilting, gassing or flooding the device would set it off and that wires had been
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attached to the screws that held it together so that trying to dismantle it would detonate it as well. Only the bomb’s creator knew what the 28 toggle switches were for. Te letter said “this bomb can never be dismantled or disarmed without causing an explosion - not even by the creator.” Meaning the bomb was definitely going to go off and there was nothing anyone could do about it. Te best they could do was deliver $3m in used $100 bills by helicopter to intermediaries working on behalf of the extortionist in exchange for information in which he’d explain how to make it safe to move the bomb somewhere it could safely go off - presumably into the desert - but that was the best case scenario.
If they did not pay the $3m the bomb would just go off in the casino and destroy it. Te letter said there would be no extension or re-negotiation and that the transaction had to take place within 24 hours. Any deviation from these conditions would leave the casino “in shambles.”
Tere was a lot to lose, Harvey’s Wagon Wheel Casino was one of the first casinos built in Stateline, which is an isolated resort town on the shore of Lake Tahoe. It was big at 11 storeys tall and had been built 18 years earlier for US$20m, and was quite active. Even when the bomb was discovered at 5:30am - if Bob Vinson
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