Insight US Harvey’s Resort Hotel
pleaded with the extortionist to make contact, but no one responded. So now they had a bomb going to go off at any moment, which meant they had to try something. Te bomb team started to brainstorm ideas about how they might try to resolve the situation. Tey suggested flooding the bomb with liquid nitrogen, they could encase it in concrete, perhaps pick it up and carry it gingerly to a nearby golf course.
Finally, someone suggested using a linear-shaped charge to defeat it - another explosive precisely formed and encased in a brass-jacket, which when it goes off sends a plane of super-heated gas out in a very specific direction. Te bomb itself was a big box full of TNT, with a smaller box on top containing its ‘brain.’ So they wanted to aim this linear-shaped charge so that as it went off the super heated gas would separate one box from the other. Te hope was that it would happen in half a millisecond, which might be fast enough that if it was bobby-trapped, the charge would sever the connection before the bobby- trap could activate itself, which would defeat the bomb. Tere was no guarantee that this would work, but it was the only thing they could think of and there was no alternative. If they did nothing the bomb was going to go off anyway and destroy the casino.
Tey asked the casino owner, Harvey Gross what he wanted to do about this? He said that he didn’t mind what happened to the building, but that he was concerned that if the bomb went off it would put his employees out of work. Tere was enough TNT to destroy the building outright or to do so much damage that it would take months to rebuild. However, there was no alternative, and the bomb would detonate if they didn’t try something. So they decided to try the linear-shaped charge and aimed it to sever the connection between the two boxes. Tey surrounded the bomb with sand bags and evacuated the whole area and set it off by remote control from a parking area in a parking lot nearby.
It might have worked except for two things; the first is that the extortionist letter was wrong, it wasn’t packed with TNT, but with dynamite, which is much more sensitive. And, all the dynamite wasn’t just in the
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bottom box, the bomber had put some in the top box as well, which they hadn’t counted on. Tey found out afterwards that he’d bobby-trapped it a thousand different ways and its was fiendishly complex. So when they set off the shaped charge it detonated the dynamite in the top box, which set-off the dynamite in the bottom box and the whole thing went up. It blasted a five storey hole in one side of the hotel and scattered glass and debris across both sides of the Nevada California state line. It blew out windows in Harrahs, which was the casino across the street, because the two where attached by a tunnel. No one was killed or injured, but the hotel was forced to close for 10 months and the rebuilding cost was $18m.
While the urgency of trying to figure out what to do with the bomb had dissipated, the FBI now focused on trying to catch the culprit. Te first step was to sift the debris for evidence - though if you blow up a casino there is a lot of debris. Tere was money in casino chips and coins from tables and slot machines and it took time to sift through everything to find pieces of the bomb or other clues that might help in the investigation. It was the largest post-blast investigation ever undertaken by the FBI at the time.
Tis was also complicated by the fact that on a casino floor there were millions of dollars in negotiable instruments - money and casino chips, coins in the machines etc. All of that had to be recovered and considered while searching for evidence. Harvey’s wanted to open part of their gambling area that was not damaged during the investigation, erecting a large
In early 1992, Harveys entered a bidding war with Hilton Hotels Corporation over the right to buy Bally’s Reno, which opened on May 3, 1978, as MGM Grand Reno (now Grand Sierra Resort). Harveys announced an agreement on a $70 million deal, only to see Hilton up the ante to $73 million and assumption of Bally's debt. Several weeks later, after considering even higher bids, a federal bankruptcy court settled the matter by approving Hilton’s final $83 million offer.
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