Harvey Casino Lake Tahoe Bombing

On the morning of Aug. 26, 1980, an employee of Harvey’s Wagon Wheel Casino in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, discovered two stacked metallic grey boxes on the casino’s second floor. Unbeknownst to the employee, the boxes had just been delivered to the building by two men posing as delivery guys for IBM. One of them was John Birges, a Hungarian immigrant with a colorful past that included a stint as a Luftwaffe fighter pilot during World War II and eight years in a Siberian gulag.

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For instance, Ron Pierini who is now sheriff of Douglas County was the captain of the Lake Tahoe substation at the time. While Harvey Gross is no longer alive, plenty of his descendants reside on the South Shore. A bit of the book talks about his anxiety in knowing a 1,000-pound bomb was sitting inside his hotel-casino. SOUTH LAKE TAHOE -Thursday marks the 35th anniversary of the Harvey's Resort Casino bombing in South Lake Tahoe in 1980. Before the explosion, many in South Lake Tahoe recall the evacuations. Harvey Gross’s hotel/casino is still in operation in Lake Tahoe, though after his death in 1983 it was gobbled up by an entertainment conglomerate. Today it is known as simply “Harveys”, its wagon wheel allusion⁠⁠—and its apostrophe⁠⁠—long ago amputated. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has arrested five persons in the Fresno, Calif., area in connection with the planting of a bomb at Harvey's Resort Hotel-Casino in Nevada a year ago, Federal. Terry Lee Hall registered at the Balahoe Motel on Emerald Bay Road just north of the Lake Tahoe Airport Aug. 25, 1980, the day before the bomb was delivered to Harvey’s Resort Hotel. He signed in under the fake name “Joey Evetto,” but the motel manager wrote down the license plate number of the Dodge van he was in. Photo courtesy of FBI.

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and a variety of triggering mechanisms that made it virtually undefeatable.Photo via FBI

Harveys Casino Lake Tahoe Bombing

In 1980, Birges was living in Fresno, California. He had made millions of dollars in America, but by that point he had lost nearly all of it to gambling — at Harvey’s. The boxes he left in the casino were accompanied by a three-page letter that began: “Do not move or tilt this bomb, because the mechanism controlling the detonators in it will set it off at a movement of less than .01 of the open end Ricter scale.” It was a ransom note.

Harvey Lake Tahoe Casino Bombing

The demand: $3 million or the bomb explodes. The FBI decided to go with a third option: Try to disarm the bomb. Later, agents would claim the bomb was “undefeatable.” To this day, it’s regarded as the most complex improvised explosive device the FBI has ever encountered on U.S. soil. The boxes were packed with nearly 1,000 pounds of dynamite, every ounce of which ripped through the hotel when agents tried to disarm it with C4. Fortunately, because the casino had been emptied, not a single person was harmed.

Harveys Resort Casino Lake Tahoe Bomb

Birges was eventually arrested and died in prison in 1996.