Insight US Harvey’s Resort Hotel
had tried to tamper with it before reading the note, 600 people would have died.
Te casino called the local police, who called the FBI that put together a bomb team to learn as much as they could about the bomb without actually tampering with it. Tey photographed it and x-rayed it, dusted it for finger-prints, scanned it for radiation and they listened to it with stethoscopes. Te x-rays showed that it was very complex. Tey recognised some of the features that the note described, as well as some features that it hadn’t. Te material in the bottom box that nearly filled it was too dense for their portable x- ray machine. Te investigators couldn’t be sure, but it seemed possible that they were looking at the largest improvised bomb in US history. So they set-up a command post in a conference room on the second floor of Harrahs Tahoe, which is a few hundred metres away and the sheriffs’ office began to evacuate everyone within a half mile radius of the building. Within two hours the bomb was national news.
You couldn’t enter Harvey’s at this point, it was completely empty because they had evacuated the whole building, but the other casinos on the shore of Lake Tahoe, where you could still gamble, began to run a book as to what would happen at Harvey’s. At the time you could still visit Lake Tahoe, enter a casino and bet whether the neighbouring casino was going to blow-up.
Tis wasn’t the first bomb threat that had happened in Lake Tahoe. Bomb threats usually came in once or twice a year, especially at the big casinos. Often they were quite complex and clever, but they all had the same weakness in that at some point the extortionist had to show up and get their hands on the money, which is usually when the FBI got the drop on them. Te scenario here meant that the FBI would try to go
through with paying the demand and see if they could grab the perpetrator when he came to get his money. According to the instructions, at 11pm the FBI landed a helicopter near a payphone at the Lake Tahoe airport carrying the $3m (or actually carrying three bags full of paper that had been cut and coloured to look like money, with $1,000 of real bills on top). Behind the pilot seat was an FBI agent with a machine gun and there was a six man SWAT team in another helicopter that was flying so high overhead that it was inaudible.
It’s at this point that the plan went awry. Te pilot landed the helicopter at 11pm and waited by the payphone, at which point the phone rang and he answered it. A voice told him that he would find instructions taped under the shelf in the phone booth. Te note said to the pilot “I remind you again to strictly follow orders.” It told him to follow Highway 50 west in a straight line staying below 500 feet and after 15 minutes to start looking for a strobe light on the right. He would then have to land facing south and he would find further instructions nailed to the trunk of a tree.
Te pilot tried to follow all these instructions, but couldn’t see the strobe light. It was only later when he double checked the instructions that he realised that he’d misunderstood them. Tey had told him not to follow the Highway, but to fly to it and then beyond it in a straight line, which he hadn’t done. So he ended up miles from where he was supposed to be - which was an understandable mistake, but a really costly one, because now they had no way to get in touch with the extortionist and had no way to disable the bomb either. Te original note said that the casino had 24 hours and now they were running perilously out of time.
Te helicopter returned to Tahoe, the SWAT team stood down and the Governor via radio and television
NEWSWIRE / INTERACTIVE /
247.COM P41
In 1983, Harvey Gross died at the age of 78; however,
the company continued to operate under family management. In 1985,
Harveys sold Harvey's Inn, northeast of Stateline, which reopened as the
Lakeside Inn. The 18-storey, $74m, glass "Lake Tower" opened in 1986, the same
year the trademark "Wagon Wheel" was replaced on the 11-storey tower with the current Harveys brand.
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