Insight US Harvey’s Resort Hotel
wall with a viewing window in it so that the players could watch the FBI process the crime scene for the next few weeks.
Four casinos including Harvey’s put up a bounty of $200,000 for any information that would lead investigators to catch the people that had done this. Te reward was eventually raised to $500,000 and that began to bring people out of the woodwork. Some witnesses said they had seen two men awkwardly wheeling a hand-truck in the Harvey’s parking lot just before the bomb had been discovered. Nearby had been a white Ford panel truck. So the police started looking for white trucks matching the description, while the bounty also brought in a call from a hotel. Apparently some men had stayed there the night before who had been acting suspiciously and the hotel owner had written down their license plate number. Tis discovery led the FBI to a man named Johnny Birges, who lived in Clovis near Fresno California and who couldn’t explain why he’d been in Tahoe at 5am on August 26. He said lamely that he’d been looking for spots to grow marijuana.
A second connection also led the FBI to John Birges when a man called them and said he’d dated a woman called Kelly Cooper, a former partner of Mr. Birges. She had once heard his brother tell him that their father, ‘big’ John Birges planned to build a bomb to extort a million dollars from Harvey’s. Extraordinarily, he turned out to be the guilty party. He was John Birges Snr., a 59 years old Hungarian immigrant that had made his fortune in landscaping and restaurants, but had lost almost everything in his late fifties. He was addicted to gambling, losing most of his money and his business. He had been diagnosed with abdominal cancer, which was terminal, and been divorced twice. And so with everything falling apart and thinking he had nothing to live for, he came up with this notion of extorting money from Harvey’s where he used to play a lot and was treated well when he was spending money, but had felt humiliated by the casino when he had lost his spending power. He wanted to hurt the casino to get back on top - that was his motivation.
He told his sons that he was building the bomb and so
they knew about the whole plan as it was going along. Tey explained later that they didn’t turn him in as they thought it would give their father some hope. Te IRS had recently sent him a letter demanding $3,000 in back taxes and he had begun to talk of suicide. So the sons let him go ahead with his plan - thinking that he would never actually go through with it. At the very worst they thought he would be captured trying to deliver the bomb. Tey didn’t think anything would actually come of it. However, John Birges Senior not only created a bomb, he created one of the most complicated devices the FBI had ever seen. Having fancied himself as something of an inventor, he finished building the bomb and asked his sons to deliver it to the casino for him. When they flatly refused he hired two other men, Willis Brown and Terry Hall who wheeled the bomb into the side entrance, putting an IBM cover over it to make it look like computer equipment.
Te case went to trial and Birges was sentenced to life without parole, finally dying of liver cancer in prison exactly 16 years and a day after the bombing. Te two men who delivered the bomb for him, Brown and Hall, were sentenced having not actually known it was a bomb (Birges didn’t tell them until afterwards), but neither did they go to the authorities when it became known about the bomb. So they were convicted on that count.
Harvey’s is still open today. And the bombing served as a beneficial training exercise for the FBI. Te FBI built a complicated plexiglass model of the Harvey’s bomb with all its bobby-traps and fusing mechanisms for Birges’ trial and they still use it to train explosive technicians at Quantico (the FBI training facility). Te investigative techniques and protocols used in solving the whole case would prove useful in other major bombing cases in the future (the 1993 World trade Centre bomb in New York and the bombing of the Federal Court House in Oklahoma City in 1995). FBI Special Agent Tomas Mohnal said: “Today’s IEDs use more advanced electronics and our techniques and tools for dealing with these devices are also more advanced, but you still probably couldn’t build a bomb that is tougher to defeat than Harvey’s.”
After going public on
February 15, 1994, Harveys began new projects
including a joint venture with Hard Rock America for an $80 million casino in Las
Vegas, which it later sold its interest in 1997 and then a
casino resort in Central City, Colorado. A riverboat
casino-convention center in
Council Bluffs, Iowa followed in early 1996. In 1999,
Colony Capital bought a controlling interest in Harveys Casino Resorts.
Harveys announced on April 24, 2001, that it would be acquired by Harrah's
Entertainment for $625
million. It is currently owned and operated by Caesars Entertainment.
NEWSWIRE / INTERACTIVE /
247.COM P43
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