A Thousand Pounds of Dynamite

Table of Contents

1. Prologue

2. One

3. Two

4. Three

5. Four

6. Five

7. Six

8. Seven

9. Eight

10. Nine

11. Ten

12. Eleven

13. Twelve

14. Thirteen

15. Fourteen

16. Fifteen

17. Sixteen

18. Seventeen

19. Eighteen

20. Nineteen

21. Epilogue

22. Credits

23. Colophon

Wednesday, August 27, 1980. 12:30
a.m.

The helicopter thundered over the
darkened forest, heading west, rising into the mountains beneath an
almost full moon. Even for FBI special agent Dell Rowley, a slight
five foot nine, the narrow cargo space behind the two front seats
was a tight fit. The helmet and Kevlar vest he wore over his black
fatigues, and the weapons he carried, did not make it any more
comfortable. But the pilot was supposed to be alone, so Rowley had
to stay where he was. Besides, the copilot’s seat was occupied by
three canvas money bags, stuffed with cut-and-bound bundles of
newsprint calculated to match the weight and volume of almost $3
million in $100 bills—and $1,000 in cash, to complete the
effect.

By the ambient glow of the instrument panel, Rowley read the
second letter from the extortionists whose giant bomb currently sat
in the second-floor offices of Harvey’s Wagon Wheel Casino, 20
miles away, back in Stateline, Nevada. The bomb was silently
counting down to an explosion that the nation’s best technicians
still had no idea how to prevent. The author of the letters was
given to grandiose turns of phrase and idiosyncratic language and
had provided complex instructions for the ransom drop: a
helicopter, a lone pilot, a flight along Highway 50 into the
mountains, a signal from a strobe light, a clearing for a landing
zone, the $3 million in used bills. No weapons, no one riding
shotgun. The first note had concluded with an ironic flourish.
“Happy landing,” it read, a subtly misaligned row of letters banged
out on an electric typewriter.

But the FBI agents had no patience for such arrangements. They
knew that the money drop was the weak point in any extortion
attempt. Up in the night sky above Rowley, high enough for the wind
to carry away the telltale throb of its rotors until it was too
late, was a Huey carrying a six-man SWAT team from the bureau’s
Sacramento office. In Rowley’s hands was an MP5 submachine gun
fitted with a silencer. In his head was a simple plan.

As the skids of the Bell Ranger touched down on the
mountainside, the pilot would douse the lights and kick open the
door, and Rowley would roll unseen to the ground. He would scuttle
into the trees, switch on his night-vision goggles, and locate the
extortionists.

Then, if necessary, he would kill them.

One

Six months earlier.

Jimmy Birges walked up the steps to the front porch of his older
brother’s house in Fresno, California, and rang the doorbell. Then
he rang it again, and again. On the fifth ring, Johnny Birges
reluctantly opened the door. He was high.

John Birges Jr. was 19 years old. He liked weed, beer, girls,
and the Stones. Decades later, the brassy disco strut of “Miss You”
would still remind him of the day he finally dropped out of high
school, packed his gear and his motocross trophies, and turned his
back on the family home and the father he detested. Two months past
his 16th birthday, he’d started busing tables at Tiny’s Olive
Branch, a 24-hour diner out on Highway 99, and sleeping on couches.
Now he shared a place with two friends from school, made good money
working as a roofer, and grew a little pot on the side. He sold
some and smoked the rest.

A diligent anthropologist seeking the embodiment of a certain
kind of California lifestyle at the end of the 1970s would be
hard-pressed to find one more potent than Johnny Birges. He was
blond and tan—the result of nailing shingles six days a week in the
fierce Central Valley sun—with narrow green eyes, a wispy mustache,
and shaggy hair down to his shoulders. He moved his tools from job
to job in the back of his snub-nosed Dodge Tradesman cargo van,
which on Saturday nights he still used to take his bike to races.
The van was plain white, but Johnny had fitted it with mag wheels
and wide tires. On the driver-side door was a sticker that read,
“When the van’s A-rockin’, don’t come A-knockin’.” On the dashboard
was another: “Ass, grass or cash—nobody rides for free.” Johnny was
high every waking moment of the day. His brother couldn’t stand
him.

As smart and composed as his brother was hazy and unkempt, Jimmy
Birges was 18 but skinnier and taller than Johnny, and a student in
a high school program for gifted kids. He had grown his dark hair
long, too, but it was neatly parted in the middle, and he favored
button-down shirts and Top-Siders. He had a smooth charm, which he
would later put to use as a car salesman at Fresno Toyota. The
stoner and the straight arrow were predictably at odds. After his
brother had left home, Jimmy tried sharing an apartment with him,
but they couldn’t get along. In the end, he moved back in with his
father, in the family’s house on North Fowler Avenue in Clovis, a
quiet northeastern suburb of Fresno. The two boys had barely seen
each other in three years.

“How did you know where I live?” Johnny asked.

“I don’t want anything from you,” Jimmy said. “Big John sent me
to tell you he needs your help.”

The Birges boys were still bound together by at least one thing:
a terror of their father, a cantankerous Hungarian émigré whom they
and everyone else called Big John. Johnny hated his father but
still yearned for his approval. He waved Jimmy into the house,
where he was cooking breakfast for his girlfriend, Kelli
Cooper.

Then Jimmy told his brother what their father had in mind.

Big John was going to extort a million dollars from Harvey’s
Wagon Wheel Casino in Lake Tahoe, and he planned to do it by
building a bomb.

The two boys had a good laugh about that. Kelli laughed, too.
Another of Big John’s crazy schemes. It would never happen. Then
again, it wouldn’t be the strangest thing their father had ever
been mixed up in.

Two

Janos Birges arrived in the United States
in May 1957 a penniless 35-year-old political refugee. He was dark
and handsome then, with an intense gaze, a high forehead, and an
aquiline nose; beneath his shirt, a tattooed eagle spread its wings
across his chest. He had fled Hungary six months earlier, when
Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest, crushing the popular uprising
against the country’s Communist government.

Born in 1922 in Jászberény, an agricultural town in central
Hungary, Janos was the only child of a landowning and farming
family; he’d say later that he considered himself upper middle
class. But his father was a ferocious drinker and hated having the
boy around. He sent Janos to live with his grandparents at the age
of three, and Janos spent nine happy years with them. In 1933, they
sent him back, and several years later, at 15, Janos ran away for
good. He went to Budapest, where he was taken in by a butcher and
his family.

The stories he told his sons about what happened next are hard
to verify. He was always secretive about his past, and the boys
never asked too many questions. Knowledge is power, he often said;
the more people know about you, the weaker you are. But the account
he gave them was by no means unlikely. At first, he told Johnny, he
worked as the butcher’s apprentice, and was soon running the shop.
Then, in 1941, Hungary entered World War II on the German side and
sent troops to support the invasion of Russia. That was the year
Janos enrolled in the Royal Hungarian Air Force Military
Academy.

By the time he graduated and entered the Royal Hungarian Army
Air Force as a pilot, in 1944, the tide of the war had turned: The
Nazis had formally occupied Hungary, and the Red Army was
approaching its eastern borders. Janos was put at the controls of
an Me 109 fighter plane and sent up to fight the Russians. He liked
to tell his son that he shot down 13 Allied planes before being hit
by anti-aircraft fire over Italy and captured by Allied troops.
U.S. records show only that in 1945, a month after the Hungarian
capital fell to the Soviets, Birges was arrested by the Gestapo in
Austria. He was charged with disobeying orders but escaped; he was
arrested again in 1946, by Hungarian military authorities, but
released without charge.

Hungary was now entirely under the control of the Soviet Union.
It was around this time, Birges would later claim, that he began
working for U.S. military intelligence in Austria—though decades
later a search of the files of the U.S. Army’s 306th Counter
Intelligence Corps in Salzburg revealed no mention of a Janos
Birges. But in April 1948, he was arrested by Soviet secret police
in Hungary and charged with espionage. The trial lasted seven
minutes. He was sentenced to 25 years of hard labor and sent to a
gulag in Siberia. He spent almost eight years there, cutting down
trees to make railroad ties and twice contracting jaundice, before
he was released—at the same time as thousands of Axis prisoners of
war were repatriated from captivity in the Soviet Union—and finally
returned to Hungary.

Then, one night in 1955, he met Elizabet Nyul in
a Jászberény restaurant. A petite 27-year-old with an elfin face
and brooding eyes, she was waiting for her husband, who worked
there as a waiter. Janos invited her to dance. They danced together
twice, and he asked her to marry him.

Elizabet was the second-youngest of a dozen siblings, impulsive
and headstrong. The divorce came through quickly and, in January
1956, they were married. The early days of the marriage were a
brief period of tranquility for Birges. Less than a year later, the
Soviet Union moved to suppress the revolution in Budapest, and
Janos and Elizabet found themselves among the 200,000 refugees who
fled the Soviet crackdown, which left 2,500 Hungarians dead. Birges
later said that as soon as the uprising began, he’d joined in—he
used a jackhammer to help a friend escape from prison—but was
arrested when Soviet troops crossed the border. Released and
provided with a passport by a sympathetic Soviet officer, he and
Elizabet escaped into Austria. There, Janos worked as a
German-Hungarian interpreter for the Red Cross, until, months
later, he was granted political asylum in the United States.

At first, the new lives of John and
Elizabeth followed the steep trajectory of immigrant cliché.
According to John’s account, on arriving in New Jersey they were
given $3 by the Red Cross. His new wife wanted sunglasses, so they
spent all the money buying a pair. They made their way to
California and got work on a farm, John as a carpenter and
Elizabeth in the packing house. Later, John found work with the
metal-fabrication company PDM Steel. He spent five years there,
learning welding and pipefitting. Johnny was born in 1960, Jimmy in
1962.

Two years later, Big John put $500 into starting his own
landscaping outfit. He worked around the clock seven days a week
and never took a vacation. He dressed in work clothes or outfits
from the Salvation Army. He was non-union, and a fighter. Johnny
once saw him put two men down at once. He was five-eleven, fit and
powerful, and an imposing presence; other men were afraid of him.
He could be charming, but his sense of humor was sometimes cruel.
He was often reckless, inclined to cut corners. Years of blasting
wells and trenches out of the California hardpan had made him
pretty comfortable around dynamite.

By 1972, Big John was a millionaire, with three separate
businesses, 26 employees, and lucrative contracts with California
municipalities and golf courses. He bought three Mercedeses and,
when he lost his license after picking up one too many tickets for
speeding, his own plane, a Beechcraft. He used it to fly to job
sites and liked to pull terrifying low-altitude stunts, sometimes
with his sons on board: buzzing water-skiers on a lake to watch
them scatter or flying under a freeway overpass. Elizabeth handled
the accounts, and eventually Big John bought her a business she
could call her own, a restaurant. The Villa Basque, on North
Blackstone in Fresno, had two candlelit dining rooms with
red-and-white tablecloths and a banquet hall, and it was packed
every night with families attacking a ten-course prix fixe menu few
of them could finish.

At home, Big John was a tinkerer and a would-be inventor, always
soldering and wiring. When the family moved to a modest wood-framed
ranch house on the rural outskirts of Clovis, with 15 acres of
vineyards, he set up a large workshop out back. His ideas could be
inspired, but he often lacked the patience for details and was
unlucky with those he did perfect. The labor-saving meatball-making
gizmo he built for the Villa Basque never worked quite right; he
built his own electric irrigation timer, and developed an automated
ditchdigger for laying pipes more quickly, but was beaten to the
patents by other inventors.

And money did not make Big John and Elizabeth happy. They drank
and fought, and he suspected her of having affairs. He called her a
nymphomaniac and claimed she used the restaurant as a wellspring of
sexual encounters. She took to disappearing for days at a time; he
always brought her back. Once, they argued so furiously that she
fell to the kitchen floor and had a seizure right in front of him.
They took her away in an ambulance—said she’d had a nervous
breakdown.

Johnny and Jimmy enjoyed the trappings of a comfortable life.
Their parents bought them motorbikes, go-karts, and three-wheelers
with balloon tires. Elizabeth liked to dress them in identical
outfits. One summer she took them on a road trip across Europe. But
Big John made them work nights in the restaurant and summers for
the landscaping business. They labored at job sites up and down the
state, sleeping in trailers with Big John’s crew. The only haircuts
they were given came once a year, at the start of summer vacation,
when Big John would take a pair of clippers and shave their heads.
Their scalps would blister as they dug ditches in the searing
valley heat.

Big John also beat them relentlessly—with belts, electric
cables, boots, and coat hangers. At night he would come into their
room, pull back the covers, and whale on Johnny while Jimmy lay
mute and motionless in bed. When Jimmy was six, his father caught
him with his elbow on the table at dinner and punched out four of
his teeth to teach him better manners. Johnny hated school, and in
first or second grade he was caught jamming glue and toothpicks
into the locks so no one could open the doors. At 12, he began
drinking beer; he smoked pot for the first time two years later.
Johnny tormented his younger brother, and Jimmy would run to his
mother and father. Big John would beat Johnny some more, then turn
around and berate his younger son for telling tales—he couldn’t
stomach a stool pigeon.

When Elizabeth finally filed for divorce, in November 1973, she
moved into a travel trailer behind the house, where she could keep
an eye on her sons. By that time Big John was making plans to
retire, and he sold off the landscaping business to his foreman. He
began flying up to Lake Tahoe in his plane to gamble. Elizabeth had
a boyfriend, but the arguments and her disappearances
continued.

At the end of July 1975, Elizabeth vanished again. This time she
left behind her Mazda pickup, parked outside the kitchen door with
the keys in the ignition, her pocketbook on the passenger seat. Big
John didn’t seem to notice. Three days later, her body was found in
a field behind the house. An autopsy showed a lethal combination of
alcohol and Valium in her bloodstream; she had choked on her own
vomit. The coroner ruled it a suicide, but something never seemed
quite right about that. Her stomach was full of whiskey. Jimmy knew
that she only ever drank vodka. And they never found the
bottle.

Big John changed after Elizabeth died. Not long after the
funeral, he went around the house cutting her out of the family
photographs with a pair of scissors. He took the urn that held her
ashes and emptied it in the yard, in front of his sons. He began
spending money like never before. He started dressing well for the
first time in his life, in suits and turtlenecks. He wore a pencil
moustache, drank mai tais, and dated the waitresses at the Villa
Basque. And he began gambling more heavily in the casinos up in
Lake Tahoe. His favorite was Harvey’s Wagon Wheel in Stateline,
Nevada.

Three

Harvey’s Wagon Wheel was one of the first
casinos built in Stateline, an isolated resort town nestled among
the pines and incense-cedars at the foot of the mountains on the
southeastern shore of Lake Tahoe. Harvey Gross was a wholesale
butcher from Sacramento who first arrived in Stateline in 1937,
when the place was a handful of buildings without power, water, or
telephone lines. What it did have was recently legalized
gambling.

In 1944, Gross and his wife, Llewellyn, opened the Wagon Wheel
Saloon and Gambling Hall, a single-room casino with three slot
machines, two blackjack tables, and a six-stool lunch counter. The
Western theme—log-cabin decor, the wagon wheel and steer’s head on
the sign—was Llewellyn’s idea. The Wagon Wheel sat hard against the
Nevada border, which cut east-west across Highway 50, dividing
Stateline from the California town of South Lake Tahoe. Outside the
casino was the only 24-hour gas pump for 60 miles. Business was
strictly seasonal. In the winter, when snow fell on the pass at
Echo Summit, blocking the highway west to Sacramento, the place
would be closed for months at a time. Only after Gross went up
there and helped clear the pass himself one winter did the state
finally build a maintenance station to keep it open.

By the 1950s, the Wagon Wheel was attracting a fashionable,
wealthy crowd up from Sacramento and San Francisco every summer,
and Gross had found a local rival in Bill Harrah, who had opened
his own casino directly across the street. In 1963, Gross
redeveloped his place into the first modern high-rise hotel casino
on the South Shore, a concrete monolith with 11 stories, 197 rooms,
and his name up on the roof, curling across a giant wagon wheel and
longhorn skull in red neon.

With the renamed Harvey’s Wagon Wheel Resort and Casino, Gross
made a killing and catalyzed a gaming boom in Tahoe. But after
Llewellyn died unexpectedly, in 1964, he began to withdraw from the
garrulous front-of-house role she had created for them. He still
liked to walk the floor of the casino and oversaw the major
decisions himself. But he spent more and more time on his ranch
over the mountain in the Carson Valley or at his winter place in
Indian Wells, California.

By 1980, Bill Harrah was dead, but Harvey still faced
competition from the suits who ran an expanded Harrah’s in his
rival’s name and from the new local outposts of corporate gaming,
the Sahara Tahoe and Caesar’s. In the shadow of these sleek new
towers, Harvey’s was beginning to show its age. But Gross still had
his giant highway billboards, his multistory gaming floor, his
miniskirted cocktail waitresses delivering cheap drinks. Harvey’s
Wagon Wheel remained a multimillion-dollar enterprise: a winking,
jingling money factory by the lake.

Like all gambling towns, Stateline was a
magnet for crime, and Bill Jonkey, one of the two agents in the FBI
office in nearby Carson City, was a frequent visitor. In 1980,
Jonkey was 35 years old, a burly outdoorsman with a thick mustache
and the easy confidence of a movie cowboy. He had been in the FBI
for nine years and law enforcement for most of his life. Born and
raised in Glendale, California, he was a surfer who had traded his
longboard for a badge before he had even graduated college. As a
21-year-old officer for the Long Beach Police
Department, he patrolled downtown and the west side: the docks and
the port, the sailors and the riffraff. It was active. Very active.
Getting into fights was a good education.

Being a cop gave Jonkey a deferment from the draft, but he
volunteered all the same. Things were heating up in Vietnam, and he
hated to see a war go by and not get involved. He was on his way
into Special Forces when the recruiter learned that he’d recently
contracted hepatitis; that meant he’d have to sit it out in Long
Beach for another three years. His quarantine was almost up when he
got shot.

It was June 25, 1969, his last day in uniform; he’d been
promoted from patrolman to detective. He and his partner were just
heading out for night patrol when the call came in: a 211 silent at
the Daisy Bar—a dirtbag place, only four or five blocks away. The
guy came running out of the back with a gun in his hand, then
everyone started shooting. One round hit Jonkey in the chest,
knocked him back against the wall. Jonkey had three rounds left. He
fired them all. The guy died right there.

They gave him a medal for that. He was off duty for three and a
half months. The bullet had punctured every lobe of his right lung,
broken a rib, severed an artery, and finally lodged near his spine.
When he came around after the surgery, his wife was standing by the
bed. “Well, I guess you’ve got that out of your system, now don’t
you?” she said.

“I don’t think so,” he said. It didn’t work out too well with
that wife.

The FBI took him in 1971. At first he was assigned to the Denver
office, then Vegas, where he immediately started making plans to
get up to the resident agency in Carson City. It was a small
office, with only two agents, and most of the time you worked
alone. Jonkey’s supervisor was all the way back in Vegas. He went
to work in jeans and cowboy boots, had a horse and an acre of land.
He was a western guy; he didn’t do humidity or cities. The place
was perfect.

His jurisdiction included the gambling towns around Lake Tahoe,
which kept him pretty busy: tracking fugitives, handling some
organized crime, the odd phony check. The extortion calls came in
once or twice a year. Bomb threats, usually. Always the big
casinos: the Sahara, Caesar’s, Harvey’s. A pipe bomb, a paper bag
left between two slot machines. Or someone would call security at
Harrah’s and say they’d left devices everywhere: Check in the
trash in the men’s restroom if you don’t think I’m serious.
Some wires, no explosives: bullshit stuff. The guy would call back
and say, Did you find it? Well, there’s 20 more of those. I
want $500,000.

The feds always got them at the money drop. Jonkey and the other
agents would stake out the location in advance. Once, they drove
out to the desert and spent three days disguised as hunters—camping
gear, rifles, dead rabbits, beer—before they saw a guy come
sauntering up the track looking for the old water heater where the
money was supposed to be hidden. Another time, the drop was in a
trash can down on the Tahoe shore, miles from anywhere. At ten at
night, two men came out of the lake in diving gear. They thought
that was pretty clever. The agents got them just like they got
everyone else. They could make the plans as complicated as they
liked, but in the end they always had to come for the money.

In 1974, the FBI sent Jonkey to a two-week bomb investigator’s
course in Quantico, where he learned to read the evidence left
behind by an explosion. By the summer of 1980, he’d been out to two
or three bomb scenes. But nothing big.

Four

Big John liked Harvey’s Wagon Wheel. They
treated him the way he felt he deserved to be treated: as if he was
someone. Blackjack was his game, and pretty soon he was playing
often enough that he was regarded as a high roller. He’d come home
to Clovis waving stacks of $100 bills and bragging about how easily
he could beat the dealers. At Harvey’s they put him up for free,
gave him the best rooms, often his favorite, Suite 1017. He got to
know his way around the place, befriended the staff. In 1976, he
was invited to spend three days at Harvey Gross’s ranch in the
Carson Valley. Over there you could hunt pheasant and partridge,
walk in the hills. One of the pilots who worked for Gross even took
him on a trip up to the lake in the boss’s helicopter. When the
pilot heard Big John was a flier, he let him take the controls for
a while. Big John had never flown a helicopter before but took to
it quickly; hovering was tricky, but level flight was simple. The
pilot let him try a takeoff. It wasn’t exactly smooth, but Birges
had the machine in the air without much difficulty.

Big John began spending more and more of his time in Tahoe. The
boys were left to look after themselves back at the house in
Clovis. One day a truck pulled up with a delivery from the Nugget
grocery store: $8,000 worth of canned food, everything from
Campbell’s soup to tuna. The groceries filled the shelves in the
garage, floor to ceiling, 20 feet wide and two feet deep. Next came
meat and seafood: 2,100 pounds of beef—three whole steers—plus four
lambs, pork, lobster, ham, and 200 pounds of hot dogs. Big John
stacked all of it in the walk-in freezer at the back of the house
and told the boys they had enough food to keep them going for three
years. Then he took off to gamble in Tahoe again. He said he’d be
back in a month.

In April 1976, Big John married an 18-year-old waitress from the
Villa Basque. It lasted barely a year. In 1978, he started seeing
another woman from the restaurant, Joan Williams. Williams was a
dark-haired forty-something mother of four, a university graduate
with a degree in Spanish literature who liked to bowl and play golf
in her spare time. Separated from her husband and children, she
worked weekends at the Villa Basque. During the week, she had a job
with the Fresno County Probation Department, where she mostly
handled DUI cases and misdemeanors.

Joan’s parents didn’t much like her new boyfriend—they thought
he was a slick talker—but that didn’t stop her. Within the year,
she had moved into the house on North Fowler Avenue. It was just
them and Jimmy there now; Johnny had taken his high school
proficiency test, quit school, and moved out of the house for
good.

It was around that time that Big John first heard from Harvey
Gross’s debt collector. He came by the restaurant and told Big John
that a couple of his checks had bounced. Big John owed Gross
$1,000. He settled up quickly. That same year, the Villa Basque
burned to the ground. The police suspected it wasn’t an accident.
Big John took the insurance money—all $300,000 of it—and lost it at
blackjack. With everything else gone, he sold the house in Clovis
to Joan for a fraction of its true value to help pay off his debts.
But it wasn’t enough.

In 1979, Big John bounced another $15,000 worth of checks at
Harvey’s. That September, the debt collector came to visit him at
the house in Clovis. Big John promised he’d be up in Tahoe within a
month and that he’d pay off $1,000 of what he owed then.

But he didn’t. Instead, the next month he signed a lease on a
condo near Harvey’s and went straight back to the tables.

By then, Big John’s health was coming apart, along with the rest
of his life. He’d had stomach trouble for years and had two
separate ulcer surgeries. He drank Maalox and buttermilk like
water. In the spring of 1979, complaining of fatigue, he was
diagnosed with abdominal cancer. Later that year, he was admitted
to the hospital with acute gastrointestinal bleeding. Even that
didn’t stop him gambling. He spent two or three weeks of every
month at the Tahoe condo, trying to make back his losses at the
Harvey’s blackjack tables. But whatever edge he once felt he had
over the dealers there, it had vanished, along with his money.

At the end of the year, Big John showed up unexpectedly at
Harvey’s Wagon Wheel and demanded a room for the New Year weekend.
He had a girl with him. The manager put him in Suite 1017, his old
favorite. But before the celebrations could begin, the manager was
back, apologetically informing him that another guest needed the
suite. Big John protested, but it was no use. He and the girl spent
the last night of the 1970s in a room so small they could barely
get around the bed. “I thought you were a big shot,” she told
him.

The next morning, John Birges woke up to face the new decade. He
was nearly 58 years old, terminally ill, broke, twice divorced, and
humiliated. He had nothing left to lose.

Five

Johnny Birges didn’t hear any more about
his father’s bomb until one day in June 1980, when Jimmy called to
tell him that Big John had found the dynamite he wanted. Now all he
had to do was take it. The boys agreed to help.

The prospect of breaking and entering didn’t bother Johnny at
all. He’d been stealing for years—car stereos, van parts, a couple
of motorcycles—without ever getting caught. The extortion plot
itself was an idiotic idea, but Johnny thought it might give the
old man some hope: He had received a letter from the IRS in March
demanding $30,000 in back taxes and had begun to talk of suicide.
And besides, Johnny and Jimmy figured the plan would never come to
anything: Big John would be caught as soon as he tried to get his
bomb into the casino.

So late one Friday night, Johnny drove his Dodge van over to the
house on Fowler Avenue to pick up Jimmy and Big John. They headed
east into the mountains, toward the Helms Creek hydroelectric
construction project. A colossal underground engineering scheme to
create a new reservoir and build a pumping station in vaults
beneath a granite mountain in the Sierra Nevada, the project would
ultimately require the excavation of more than a million cubic
yards of rock and earth and the blasting of almost four miles of
tunnels, each 38 feet in diameter. It called for an extremely large
quantity of explosives.

Big John had already been up to the Helms site two or three
times by himself. Construction work was scheduled around the clock,
but he had managed to wander in past an unmanned guard shack, take
a good look at the site’s powder magazines, and walk right back out
again undetected. When the three men arrived in Johnny’s van, close
to midnight on June 6, the Helms site loomed out of the night like
a movie set, a column of white light blazing skyward amid the
darkened pines. But even before the Birgeses reached the gate, they
could see a crew nearby pouring concrete. Someone was sure to spot
them. They drove back to Clovis. Exactly one week later, they tried
again.

Turning onto the access road to the site, Johnny stopped the van
to cover the license plates with fake ones he’d made from blue and
yellow construction paper. He drove on through the front gate, then
parked in the shadows behind a mound of dirt. Next to the batch
machine—a giant concrete mixer that turned constantly—was a small
red wooden shack hung with a sign that read DANGER
EXPLOSIVES. The three men pulled on gloves.

Big John crept around the back of the shack, carrying a portable
oxyacetylene torch in a backpack. He forced open a window, and he
and Johnny climbed inside. With the torch, Big John cut the
padlocks off the steel door of the powder magazine. Inside was case
after case of Hercules Unigel dynamite and blasting caps. Each case
weighed 50 pounds and measured two feet by one foot. Johnny passed
them out the window. Big John and Jimmy stacked them in the dirt.
The boys got nervous. But Big John kept wanting more.

It took an hour, and by the time they’d finished, the back of
the van was almost completely filled with dynamite. Johnny turned
the van around, and Big John used a tree branch to scuff out their
tire tracks. They pulled through the gates and headed west. No one
saw a thing.

The van rolled back into Clovis at around three in the morning.
They had stolen 18 cardboard cases filled with dynamite and
blasting caps to go with it—more than 1,000 pounds of explosives in
all. The dynamite was formed into sticks 18 inches long and two
inches around, wrapped in yellow wax paper, and stamped with the
manufacturer’s name. Used correctly, it was enough to reduce a
large building to a pile of rubble. They stacked the boxes in the
walk-in freezer, surrounded by the remains of the beef, lamb, and
lobster ordered years earlier. Then Big John padlocked it shut.

The following day, the Fresno Bee ran a brief news
story concerning the mysterious theft of $50,000 worth of dynamite
from the hydroelectric project up at Wishon Lake. “Whoever took the
explosives left no prints, tracks or clues behind,” the paper
reported. The county sheriff’s office had no suspects.

Johnny was at home when the phone rang.

“You did it, didn’t you?” Kelli said.

“What?”

“The dynamite. You stole it.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Johnny said. “What
dynamite?”

Johnny and Kelli broke up soon after that.

Six

The freezer full of dynamite gave Big
John a new sense of purpose. In the machine shop behind the house,
he did a little work each day, welding and soldering. Slowly, his
most ingenious invention began to take shape.

Two weeks after the raid on Helms Creek, Johnny went over to
Fowler Avenue to see what his father had been up to. The workshop
was well equipped but chaotic. It was scattered with the makings of
half-finished projects: irrigation line, a tower for solar panels,
and the greenhouse Joan had been trying to get Big John to build
for her. In the middle of it all, covered with a blanket, were two
rectangular boxes welded together from sections of quarter-inch
steel plate.

Even empty, the larger of the two boxes—26 inches high, 24
inches wide, and 45 inches long—was too heavy to lift. Fitted with
recessed casters and a second set of wheels with rubber tires, it
was large enough to contain nearly all the dynamite they had taken
from Helms Creek. The second box was smaller—just over a foot
square and 22.5 inches long—and was designed to be welded to the
top of the first. This would house the brain of Big John’s bomb:
the nerve center for a nest of booby traps and triggers he had
devised with the aim of thwarting even the most sophisticated
attempts to defuse it.

The bomb, Big John explained to Johnny and Jimmy, had eight
separate electromechanical fusing mechanisms. If any one of them
was triggered, it would complete a circuit between a battery and
detonators attached to the dynamite, and the bomb would
explode.

First, the two boxes were lined with aluminum foil sandwiched
between two layers of neoprene; if anyone attempted to drill
through the outside of the box, the drill bit would make an
electrical contact between the steel box and the foil, completing a
circuit and detonating the device. Second, Big John had used
spring-loaded contacts to booby-trap the screws holding the tops of
the boxes in place. Unscrew any of them and the contacts would
close, completing a circuit. Third, the lids of both boxes were
rigged with pressure switches like those used in car doors to
operate dome lights. If either lid was removed, the switches would
open, completing a circuit.

Fourth, inside the top box Big John rigged a float from a toilet
cistern. If the box was flooded with water or foam, the float would
rise, completing a circuit. Fifth, beside the float was a tilt
mechanism built from a length of PVC pipe lined with more aluminum
foil; inside hung a metal pendulum held under tension from below
with a rubber band. Big John took a circuit tester and demonstrated
to Johnny: Once this was armed, if the bomb was moved in any way,
the end of the pendulum would make contact with the foil,
completing a circuit. Sixth was a layer of foil running around the
seam connecting the two boxes; if a metal object was inserted
between the top and bottom boxes to lever them apart, this would
complete a circuit.

Finally, Big John had installed a solid-state irrigation
timer—designed for greenhouses and sprinkler systems—connected to a
six-volt battery. This could be set in time increments from 45
minutes to eight days. But once it had been activated and all the
booby traps had been armed, it would no longer be possible to get
inside the bomb to turn it off. As soon as the timer reached zero,
it would detonate the device.

Johnny realized what this meant: His father’s bomb was
impossible to disarm. Big John did not plan to provide Harvey’s
with instructions on how to turn off the device in exchange for the
ransom. Instead, what he would offer was a guide to making the
pendulum mechanism safe, so that the bomb could be moved from the
casino to another location, where it could be detonated without
incident—though even this wouldn’t be without its hazards. On the
side of the top box, Big John built a panel of 28 steel toggle
switches, neatly numbered and arranged in five rows. He told Johnny
that three—or perhaps five—of the 28 could be used to switch the
pendulum circuit on and off. Many of the others were dummies—but
some of them weren’t. Flip any one of the live switches and it
would complete a circuit. Then the device would explode
instantly.

Seven

Throughout the summer, Big John kept
working on the bomb. He wired in the firing mechanisms and
spot-welded the boxes together. He built a dolly to move it around.
Johnny gave the casing a slick finish. He covered the screws with
Bondo and gave the boxes a coat of flat gray paint. He and Jimmy
were in agreement that they wanted nothing to do with Big John’s
extortion plot. But—like Joan, who was terrified by her boyfriend’s
repeated threats to commit suicide—they were too frightened to
argue. Still, they wondered, how would he get his contraption
inside a busy casino without arousing suspicion?

Big John had already thought of that. One day in early August,
with the bomb nearly finished, he laid out the plan to Johnny and
Jimmy. They were going to disguise the bomb as a piece of new
computer equipment and deliver it to Harvey’s right through the
front door. Big John and his sons would drive it over to Tahoe in
Johnny’s van. They’d put on overalls just like the ones worn by
Harvey’s staff. The bomb would be hidden beneath a fabric cover
with “IBM” printed on the side in iron-on lettering.

At around 5:30 in the morning, they’d roll it through the lobby,
into the elevator, and up to the second floor, where they’d find
the casino’s administrative offices and the computers that
controlled the slot machines. Big John would then arm the bomb and
leave it there, along with an extortion note. While working on the
bomb, Big John had decided that a million dollars wasn’t a large
enough ransom for a plan like this. No: Three million sounded about
right.

When Jimmy asked his father how he planned to pick up the
extortion money, Big John refused to say. Jimmy had heard him
mention a helicopter, and he knew Big John had stolen two strobe
lights from airplanes parked at Lake Tahoe Airport. But he wouldn’t
be drawn out on the details. “Don’t worry,” he told Jimmy. “You’ll
see.”

Two weeks later, Big John unlocked the door of the walk-in
freezer. Outside, in the sun, he and Joan removed the sticks of
dynamite from their paper wrapping and laid them out on the ground.
The explosives reeked of turpentine; the fumes gave them both
headaches and made them nauseous. They packed the sticks tightly
into Hefty bags and put them inside the bomb casing. Eventually,
with all the dynamite in place, Big John and Jimmy rigged the
explosives with bundles of blasting caps and wired them into the
fusing circuitry. The bomb was now complete.

A week after that, Jimmy came into the kitchen to find that the
extortion note was finished, too. It was sitting there on the table
in a clean white envelope. Joan had typed it up on her electric
typewriter, the one she used for the business and creative-writing
classes she was taking at night. She told Jimmy he could read it if
he liked. But he couldn’t pick it up unless he was wearing
gloves.

On Saturday, August 23, Big John summoned his sons to help him
practice rolling the device onto the cart he’d built to move it
across the Harvey’s parking lot. Big John pulled the half-ton bomb
up with a block and tackle while Johnny guided it into position.
Then the rope snapped and the bomb rolled back. Johnny, who
couldn’t move fast enough, yelped in agony as the wheel rolled over
his left hand. Somehow nothing was broken, but it gave him a way
out. “I don’t want nothing more to do with it!” he shouted. “I’m
out!”

He climbed into his van and left. Jimmy turned to his father:
“Well,” he said, “if he’s not going to do it, I’m not going to do
it.”

On Sunday, Big John called Johnny. He asked if he could use his
son’s van again. “OK,” Johnny said. “As long as I don’t have
nothing to do with it.” Out at the house, Big John told the boys
that if they wouldn’t help with the delivery, they had to help him
with the ransom drop.

Inside the bomb, the timer was already running.

Eight

Terry Hall and Bill Brown were sitting
around the house drinking beer at around one in the afternoon when
Big John called. Bill was a redneck pipe fitter from Arkansas. He
had a hard-luck past, jailhouse tattoos, and a record to match: car
theft, drunk and disorderly, battery, reckless driving, assault
with a deadly weapon. At 59, he was a hard man running to fat, with
an ulcer, an ex-wife, and four children to support.

Terry was 24. Muscular. Swarthy. Dark hair set in a close perm.
He had a kid with Bill’s daughter Juanita, and the four of them
lived together in a house on North Jackson Avenue. Bill and Terry
were both out of work. Terry had a felony conviction for forgery
and had been in and out of trouble since he was a kid. The cops had
picked him up a few times for sniffing paint, and around 14 or 15
he used to shoot heroin pretty often, maybe do a little acid, smoke
some weed. But mostly he liked to drink. He and Bill were both hard
drinkers. They’d get loaded six days a week. Beer, usually. Once in
a while, vodka and orange juice.

Bill had worked for Big John for maybe ten or fifteen years but
hadn’t done anything for him since he sold the landscaping
business. Now, on the phone, Big John said he had a job for him,
$2,000 for a day’s work. “Who I got to kill?” Bill said.

Big John told him he wanted the two of them over at the house
right away. Bill and Terry finished their beers and got into Bill’s
’71 Matador, a great swaying boat of a car with rust spots
stippling the blue paint. When they arrived, Bill and Big John went
around the back of the house to talk. A couple of minutes later,
Bill called Terry over. Beside the garage, Bill told him that Big
John wanted them to deliver a machine to Harvey’s. He didn’t say
why, and Terry didn’t ask. Terry didn’t think there was anything
odd about it. The way Big John explained everything, it was just so
easy, like they were expected to be there. Big John gave them
directions on exactly where to take the machine and handed Bill
$50.

They left for Tahoe at dusk. Big John drove the van north up
Highway 99. He took it very carefully. They had the radio on and
cracked some beers. Big John and Bill talked, mostly about the work
they’d done together in the past. They drove all night.

When they got to Harvey’s, it was around five in the morning. It
was still dark. They walked over to the back door of the casino.
Terry went in and looked at the elevator, to check the route. But
Big John wanted to wait and get some sleep before delivering the
machine. They drove south for a few miles and found a place called
the Balahoe Motel, ten rooms set back from the highway in the
trees. They went for breakfast—Big John paid—and then checked in at
the Balahoe at around 11:15. Big John gave Terry some money and
told him to get a room.

But Terry was on parole in California for burglary and probation
for a hit-and-run. He told Big John he couldn’t register under his
own name. He wasn’t supposed to be out of the state. So he wrote
down “Joey Evetts” on the registration card. Terry’s handwriting
was small and neat, with copperplate curls. His s could
look like an o. Under the address he wrote “Van Ness
Street” and made up a number. Then the desk clerk asked him to read
her the license number off the van. She wrote it down on the
card.

They stayed in the room all day and most of the night, drinking
and watching TV. At 2:30 a.m. on Tuesday, Big John went out. He was
carrying a briefcase. He told Terry and Bill to pick him up at Lake
Tahoe Airport, a five-minute drive down the highway. They waited
until four, and then went out to the van, but it wouldn’t start.
They called on the manager’s intercom to ask for jumper cables, but
he didn’t have any. When Big John finally came walking back, he
said he’d call a tow truck. Bill and Terry put on the blue overalls
Big John gave them. The tow-truck driver arrived and got the van
started. Big John gave him a $100 bill and told him to keep the
change.

On the way to Harvey’s, they pulled over in a nearby parking lot
and took the license plate off another van. With some rubber bands,
Big John used it to cover the plate on the Dodge. They reached the
parking lot at Harvey’s at around 5 a.m. It was still dark, but the
lights on the outside of the building lit the scene right up. They
unloaded the machine and towed it across the parking lot behind the
van. Bill and Terry took it over to the front doors of Harvey’s,
under the canopy.

Terry pushed the dolly while Bill pulled. It was hard going.
From outside the double doors, Terry could see a man in a cap
sitting behind a desk. As they came in, the man got up from behind
the desk and walked away. Through the double doors, past the desk,
and then to the elevator, no more than 50 feet away. Bill helped
get the machine off the dolly and into the elevator. Then he went
back to the van. Terry went on alone.

On the second floor, out of the elevator, left and left again. A
Harvey’s employee passed Terry but paid him no attention. He pushed
the machine into a small waiting area outside the casino’s
telephone exchange and pulled the cover off. It was the first time
he had seen it. He removed his overalls and stuffed them and the
cover into a plastic Harvey’s bag that Big John had given him, just
like he had been told. Then he left, taking the stairs, and went
out the front of the building. It had taken no more than two
minutes. Afterward, Terry would be hazy on the details. He wasn’t
drunk, exactly. But he had drunk a lot of beer.

Outside, the sun had come up. Terry went around the corner
toward a stoplight between Harvey’s and Harrah’s. He was standing
there waiting for the light to change when Big John came up behind
him. They walked together across the Harvey’s parking lot, got in
the van, and drove away toward California. It was only a couple of
minutes before they made a stop at a bait shop. Terry bought some
more beer. Then they stopped at a creek to take a piss. While Bill
and Terry were relieving themselves, Big John took the dolly out of
the back of the van and threw the pieces into the creek.

Bill and Terry looked at Big John. Bill asked him why he was
getting rid of it. Big John told them they’d just delivered a bomb.
Nobody was going to get hurt. He’d left a note telling them to get
everybody out.

Back in the van, Bill and Terry just sat there looking stunned.
Terry couldn’t think of anything to say. The plan sounded hopeless.
He figured all he could do was sit back and hope he didn’t get
arrested.

On the way back to Fresno, Bill and Terry started drinking
pretty good.

Nine

It was about 5:30 a.m. on Tuesday when
Bob Vinson, who supervised the graveyard shift at Harvey’s,
realized he was out of cigarettes. He was on his way down from his
second-floor office to the gift shop to buy a pack when he noticed
something odd. The accordion door leading through to the room that
housed the casino’s internal telephone exchange was half open. It
was usually closed, and he hadn’t seen anyone else around. He was
curious. He stepped around the door and looked inside.

There was a big gray metal object sitting there, right outside
the phone exchange. It hadn’t been there 20 minutes earlier. It was
on metal legs. The legs were all balanced on pieces of plywood.
They were pressing into the thick orange carpet. Whatever it was,
it was heavy, and he was pretty sure it didn’t belong there.

Vinson’s first thought was to call security. But then he noticed
that the door leading out to the elevator was closed. That wasn’t
right, either. When he opened the door and felt the knob on the
other side, his palm came away glistening with something sticky.
Vinson and the building maintenance supervisor examined the door
lock. It smelled of glue, and the keyhole had been jammed with
pieces of wood—matches or toothpicks or something. Vinson told the
maintenance supervisor to keep an eye on the machine and went
downstairs to get security.

The security supervisor that morning was Simon Caban, a big man
who had been a helicopter door gunner in Vietnam. By the time Caban
arrived on the second floor, a few janitors and security guards had
gathered around the phone exchange; calls had already gone out to
the Douglas County Sheriff’s Department and the fire department.
When he saw the strange machine, but especially the envelope lying
on the carpet next to it, he was alarmed. He’d just taken a
training course on letter bombs. “Everybody step back,” he
said.

Caban and a sheriff’s deputy grabbed a pair of the janitors’
broomsticks and, taking cover behind the big gray box, used them to
poke at the suspect envelope. It was lying face up. It wasn’t
sealed. It didn’t look dangerous. Inside were three pages of type.
Caban picked up the one with the least amount of writing on it. The
deputy grabbed the other two. They started reading at the same
time.

Caban didn’t have his glasses with him and found it hard to
focus on the page. He was leaning on the box. The deputy was
squatting on the floor at his feet. Caban was about to tell the
deputy to give him the rest of the letter when he pointed up at the
box. “That’s a bomb,” he said. Slowly, Caban lifted his weight off
the contraption and backed away.

Bill Jonkey was still at home when the
sheriff’s dispatcher called. He hit the top of Spooner Summit just
after sunrise, and as the highway dropped over the crest of the
Carson Range, the eastern shore of the lake was still cool in the
shadows. The deputies met him in the parking lot at Harvey’s, where
the evacuation had already started. The hotel was full to capacity
with vacationers in town for Labor Day weekend, and as Jonkey went
up to the second floor, guests were milling around in the parking
lot—elderly couples still in their pajamas, kids without
shoes—waiting for buses to drive them over to the high school. On
the casino floor, Harvey’s security guards were emptying the cage
of the $2 million or $3 million in cash held there and figuring out
how to lock the doors of a building that had been open 24 hours a
day for 17 years.

Jonkey met Danny Danihel, captain of the Douglas County fire
department’s bomb squad, outside the phone exchange. Danihel, a
former explosive ordnance disposal specialist in the U.S. Army who
had served in Vietnam, was supposed to be off for three days
starting that morning. He was packing for a camping trip with his
family when he got the call.

The fire department team was still bringing equipment up from
the parking lot when Jonkey arrived. Jonkey’s first thought was how
well made the bomb was. The welding, the seams, the paint job—the
thing was beautiful. None of the bomb-squad guys had seen anything
like it. And there didn’t seem to be any way into it. Then they
showed Jonkey the letter.

“Stern warning to the management and bomb squad,” it began.

Do not move or tilt this bomb, because the mechanism controlling
the detonators will set it off at a movement of less than .01 of
the open end Ricter scale. Don’t try to flood or gas the bomb.
There is a float switch and an atmospheric pressure switch set at
26.00-33.00. Both are attached to detonators. Do not try to take it
apart. The flathead screws are also attached to triggers…

Do not move or tilt this bomb, because the
mechanism controlling the detonators will set it off at a movement
of less than .01 of the open end Ricter scale. Don’t try to flood
or gas the bomb. There is a float switch and an atmospheric
pressure switch set at 26.00-33.00. Both are attached to
detonators. Do not try to take it apart. The flathead screws are
also attached to triggers…

WARNING:

WARNING:

I repeat do not try to move, disarm, or enter the bomb. It will
explode.

I repeat do not try to move, disarm, or
enter the bomb. It will explode.

This mixture of stentorian threats and technical minutiae
continued for three pages. The bomb was filled with 1,000 pounds of
TNT, the letter explained, enough to not just obliterate Harvey’s
but also to severely damage Harrah’s across the street. It was
equipped with three separate timers. The letter advised cordoning
off a minimum of 1,200 feet around the building and evacuating the
area. “This bomb can never be dismantled or disarmed without
causing an explosion,” it said. “Not even by the creator.”

The letter’s author was demanding $3 million in used $100 bills,
delivered by helicopter to intermediaries, with further details to
follow. In exchange, instructions would be provided for how to
disconnect two of the automatic timers so the device could be moved
to a location where it would explode harmlessly. Once the ransom
was paid, five sets of the instructions would be sent by general
delivery to the Kingsbury Post Office in Stateline. There was a
tight deadline: “There will be no extension or renegotiation. The
transaction has to take place within 24 hours.”

The note concluded with a message for the helicopter pilot
making the ransom drop. “We don’t want any trouble but we won’t run
away if you bring it,” it said. “Happy landing.”

The letter, like the device itself, was unlike anything Jonkey
had seen before. Some of the claims were ridiculous; that stuff
about the “Ricter scale” was obviously bullshit. And when Danihel’s
bomb squad took measurements of the device, they concluded that it
wasn’t quite big enough to contain 1,000 pounds of TNT. But when
Danihel began shooting X-rays of the box, Jonkey saw evidence of a
chilling complexity within.

There were wires connected to the 28 toggle switches and to the
screws, just as the letter said. There were also triggers that
weren’t mentioned in the note: a possible collapsing circuit, a
relay and the outline of pressure-release switches, triggers with
what looked like crude metal paddles on the lids of the boxes. And
whatever was in the bottom box, there was so much of it that it
almost filled the space inside, and it was so dense that Danihel’s
portable X-ray machine couldn’t penetrate it. Nobody would go to
all the trouble of building a device of such sophistication just to
give it a payload of kitty litter. Jonkey and Danihel couldn’t be
certain, but it seemed entirely possible that they were looking at
the largest improvised bomb in U.S. history.

Ten

Jonkey set up a command post in a
conference room on the second floor of the Sahara Tahoe, a few
hundred yards away across Harvey’s parking lot. By 8 a.m., the
hotel had brought up 20 or 30 telephones, desks and copy
machines—everything he needed to coordinate the operation. Jonkey
sent detectives from the South Lake Tahoe Police Department off to
locate witnesses, to find out how these guys got the thing into the
casino. The Douglas County sheriff’s office handled the perimeter,
setting up a cordon and assisting with the evacuation of Harvey’s.
More FBI agents arrived from Reno. It would be their job to try to
identify the suspects and handle the potential extortion
payment.

At around 8:15 a.m., Jonkey called his boss, Joe Yablonsky. The
head of the FBI’s Las Vegas division, Yablonsky had come from a
successful run as an undercover man, mixing with mobsters in New
York and Florida. He wore yawning open-necked shirts, amber
sunglasses, heavy gold rings, and a medallion. He never met a TV
camera he didn’t like. Behind his back, his men called him Broadway
Joe. He was not Jonkey’s kind of guy.

“Boss, I’ve got this extortion going up here,” Jonkey told him.
“Stateline, Nevada.”

“Oh, OK. Good,” Yablonsky said. “You got a handle?”

“It’s a huge bomb. They’re asking for $3 million. I’m
gonna need some help up here.”

“Well, I can probably send you up…” Yablonsky paused. “Three
guys.”

“Well, that would be helpful. Is that all?”

“Yeah, that’s all I can spare. We got a lot of things going on
down here.”

Within two hours, word of the bomb had spread across the
country. Rubbernecking crowds filled the Sahara parking lot. News
trucks from Reno gathered along Highway 50. Explosives experts were
on their way into Tahoe from specialist facilities throughout the
United States: an Army EOD squad from the nearby depot in Herlong,
California; scientists from the Naval Surface Warfare Center in
Indian Head, Maryland, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
in Northern California; and the Nuclear Emergency Support Team,
recently created by the Department of Energy to respond to
incidents of nuclear terrorism. At ten, Jonkey’s phone rang. “What
the hell are you doing up there, Bill?” Yablonsky said. “I’m
watching television. This is on every major news network. This is
huge.”

“Well, boss, that’s what I tried to tell you.”

“You need some people up there!”

“Yeah. Sacramento division has been in touch with me, and
they’re sending up about 60 guys.”

“You’ll have 65 more by tomorrow morning,” Yablonsky told him
and promptly got on a plane to Tahoe.

By three in the afternoon on Tuesday, the Nevada National Guard
was enforcing a quarter-mile cordon around Harvey’s. Highway 50 was
blocked in both directions. Inside the deserted hotel, Danny
Danihel and his men were alone with the bomb. On the casino floor,
the ranks of slot machines silently winked their lights. Hands of
cards, stacks of chips, and cash lay abandoned on the tables. The
food in the buffet was congealing.

The bomb team examined the device every way they could. They
photographed it and dusted it for fingerprints, X-rayed it and
scraped it for paint samples. They scanned it for radiation with a
Geiger counter. And, using electronic listening devices and
stethoscopes, they strained again and again to hear any sound
coming from inside it.

At first the task was almost impossible. The humming of the
air-conditioning, the Muzak piped into every room of the
building—even the offices—was just too loud, and the bomb
technicians didn’t know how to turn it off. They couldn’t hear a
damned thing. But late that night, it was quiet enough that, for
the first time, they were able to pick up something coming from the
lower box: an intermittent whirring noise. You had to listen for a
minute to hear it, but it was definitely there. Somewhere inside
the bomb, something was happening.

At around nine or ten that night, Jonkey and Herb Hawkins, his
supervisor from the Vegas FBI office, went to see Harvey Gross up
in the temporary office he’d been given at the Sahara Tahoe. They
needed him to make a decision about the ransom.

Gross asked them what they thought. They told him that according
to the letter, if he paid $3 million, the instructions on moving
the device would arrive via general delivery at the post office.
They didn’t need to explain that that could be a long time coming.
And who would risk moving the thing, based on what the extortionist
had told them? It would take a minimum of four men. All of them
would be killed if something went wrong. No, they told Gross, it
was impossible to move. The best place to have it explode was right
where it was.

Once he understood all that, Harvey Gross made his decision.
“There’s no way I’m paying these sons of bitches any money,” he
said.

Eleven

Big John arrived back at the house in
Clovis late on Tuesday afternoon and told his boys to get ready for
the payoff. Johnny and Jimmy tried to back out again, but Big John
got angry. He told them they had to do it. Eventually, they gave
in.

Big John ran through the list of equipment they’d need: the two
strobe lights he’d stolen from Lake Tahoe Airport, two large green
canvas bags for the money, ski masks and jackets, a .357 revolver,
a .22 and a .303 rifle, a box of ammunition for the .303, and a
12-volt motorcycle battery Jimmy had brought from work, which would
power one of the strobes. They loaded the gear into the back of Big
John’s gold Volvo.

Big John and Joan took her car, a little Toyota Celica
hatchback. The boys followed in the Volvo. It was early evening.
They stayed together, driving north on Highway 99 and then east
onto 50. They dropped Joan and her car off near Cameron Park
Airport, outside Sacramento. Then the boys went on with their
father in the Volvo. Johnny drove. From the back seat, Big John
gave directions and finally revealed the rest of the plan.

Following Highway 50 as it wound up into the wooded crags of
Eldorado National Forest, they were headed for a remote clearing
high in the mountains above Lake Tahoe. There, at 4,000 feet,
Johnny would drop his father and brother. Big John and Jimmy would
take the guns, one of the strobes, and the bags, and settle in to
wait for the sound of a helicopter sent from Harvey’s, less than 50
miles away. When they heard the aircraft approaching, they would
turn on the strobe. This would be the signal for the pilot to
land.

When the pilot touched down, Big John and Jimmy would overpower
him at gunpoint. Big John would take the controls and fly Jimmy and
the money to a second clearing he had found, near Ham’s Station, 40
miles away on the other side of the valley, where Johnny would be
waiting with the Volvo. Jimmy and the money would go with Johnny,
while Big John landed the helicopter at Cameron Park Airport, where
Joan would pick him up. The four would then rendezvous back in
Clovis. Then Big John and Joan would escape to Europe to launder
the cash.

Things started to go wrong almost immediately. The three men
were already high in the mountains, on the serpentine stretch of
blacktop between Placerville and Kyburz, when Big John realized
they had left the battery back in Clovis. When they reached Kyburz,
a handful of wooden buildings scattered down the incline between
the highway and the American River, it was around 11 p.m.

The door at the one-pump gas station was locked and the night
bell was taped over. Big John pushed on it anyway. Nothing. He
tried it again. Just the sound of water bubbling through the rocks
in the river below. He walked over to a wrecked VW parked in front
of the gas station; maybe there was a battery in there. He started
rummaging around beneath the hood. Inside the station, a couple of
dogs began barking. Then their owner, a skinny old man, burst
through the door, shouting and cursing and waving a pistol. Big
John and the boys dived into the Volvo and fled.

Now Big John was desperate. They turned the Volvo around and
headed back the way they had come, toward Placerville, 30 miles
down the mountain. At the Placerville Shell station, they found an
attendant named Ken Dooley. “I want a battery,” Big John told
him.

“For what car?”

“It doesn’t matter. Any kind of battery.”

Working the night shift behind a pane of bulletproof glass,
Dooley was used to trouble. He was also diligent about his work. He
didn’t want to sell this man with the heavy accent just
any kind of battery. He wanted to sell him one that would
fit his car: Was it a Volvo? Maybe it was an Audi? He wasn’t sure
he had that kind. He’d have to check in the back. Big John insisted
he didn’t care. He just wanted a battery, quickly. Finally, the kid
sold him a 12-volt Easycare 40 for $45, in cash.

Big John got back in the car, and he and his sons set off up the
mountain once again. Along the river, back through Kyburz. Johnny
took a sharp left onto Ice House Road. The Volvo rattled over a
cattle guard. The road climbed fast for two or three miles, narrow
and switchbacked, hugging the side of the mountain. The turnoff to
the drop point was marked with a fluorescent orange cross
spray-painted on a tree. It was late. By the time Johnny finally
left his father and brother in the clearing with the strobe, the
battery, and the guns and took off again in the Volvo, it was
approaching midnight. There wasn’t much time.

Five more minutes down the highway, Johnny pulled off onto a
short gravel frontage road. He saw a restaurant with a neon
cocktail glass glowing overhead and a phone booth outside. He
dialed the number Big John had given him. It rang once, twice.

Twelve

The Bell Ranger was running on fumes when
FBI agent Joe Cook touched down on the runway at Lake Tahoe
airport. The extortion note was very specific: Land at 23:00 hours,
wait under the light by the gate in the chain-link fence; further
instructions would arrive via taxi or the pay phone near the fence
at exactly 00:10.

But Cook was late. Getting hold of a helicopter to deliver a
multimillion-dollar ransom to potentially armed extortionists had
proved difficult, even for the FBI. The local agencies had all
refused to help. In the end, Cook had flown up that night from the
FBI office in Los Angeles, navigating for 400 miles using a Texaco
road map. When he landed, he radioed the tower for a gas truck and
walked to the fence. The phone rang almost immediately. Cook
answered on the second ring. It was eight minutes past
midnight.

“Hello,” said a young man with a Southern accent.

“Hello.”

“Who’s this?”

“Who’s this?”

“OK. Your instructions are under the table in front of you,” the
caller said. His Southern accent had vanished. “You have three
minutes.”

Cook felt something taped to the underside of the phone booth: a
thin sheet of aluminum and, under that, an envelope.

“To the Pilot,” the note said. “I remind you again to strictly
follow orders.” Cook hurried back to the helicopter. He handed the
piece of paper to Dell Rowley, hunched out of sight behind the
seats with his submachine gun. As Cook prepared for takeoff, Rowley
read him the instructions: Follow Highway 50 west in a straight
line. Stay below 500 feet. After 15 minutes, start looking for a
strobe light on your right. Land facing south. Two hundred feet
away, you’ll find further instructions nailed to the trunk of a
tree. Cook took the helicopter up and flew along the highway,
following the curves as it wound through the forest. When he
reached the 15-minute mark, he began circling.

Rowley’s orders were simple: Protect the pilot. Rowley was a
SWAT team leader who had come to the FBI after serving in the U.S.
Army and then the Border Patrol down in El Paso, Texas. He was an
excellent shot, and he wasn’t going to take any chances. If he saw
someone raise a weapon, he wouldn’t give him the chance to
fire.

Down in the moonlit clearing, a breeze sighed in the treetops.
Big John and Jimmy listened for the chop of rotor blades. Once, Big
John thought he heard something, took the cables, and turned the
strobe on for half a minute. But it wasn’t a helicopter. No one
came. It was cold; the ski jackets weren’t warm enough. Big John
emptied gunpowder from some shells and started a fire. Miles away,
in entirely the wrong place, Joe Cook scanned the darkened
landscape for more than an hour. He circled wider and wider.
Nothing. Eventually, he and Rowley gave up and flew back to Tahoe
with the three bags of scrap paper and the thousand dollars. The
SWAT team stood down.

On the other side of the valley, Johnny
waited for four or five hours in the dark. He kept the car window
open, listening for the sound of his father and brother flying in
with the money. Finally, he decided something must have gone wrong.
He drove the Volvo back to where Joan was waiting, in Cameron Park.
She was sitting in her car beside the airport fence, on the right
side of the road. She’d heard the governor on the radio. He said
there had been some confusion. It sounded like they still intended
to pay the ransom.

Johnny drove back up the mountain to find Big John. Joan was
close behind him in her Celica. On a right-hand hairpin at the
bottom of Ice House Road, Johnny took the bend too fast. In his
rear-view mirror, he watched Joan skid across the road and slam
into the embankment. The car was wrecked. Johnny went back and
found Joan bleeding from her nose and head. Together, they drove up
the road a short distance in the Volvo. Jimmy and Big John were
walking down toward him. It was around 6 a.m. on Wednesday, August
27, 1980. It was light out. They were empty-handed.

Johnny, Jimmy, Big John, and Joan picked up the guns from the
drop site, then drove Joan down to the hospital in Placerville.
Johnny took her in; he told the receptionist he had just been
driving by and saw that she’d crashed. Then the three men took the
Volvo down the street to the public phone at a Beacon gas station.
Big John told Johnny to call the Douglas County sheriff’s office:
Tell them to flip switch number five on the bomb and await further
instructions. Five was a dummy switch, Big John said. But it would
buy them some more time.

It was almost seven when they began the three-hour drive back to
Fresno. Jimmy was asleep in the passenger seat, Big John passed out
in the back. Johnny was already late for work with the roofing
company. As the landscape flattened out and the two-lane highway
split into freeway, he put his foot down: 40, 50, 65 miles an hour.
Then he saw lights in his rear-view mirror.

Officer Jim Bergenholtz of the California Highway Patrol was a
stickler for details. He had paced Johnny for two miles before
finally pulling him over. After he issued him a speeding ticket, he
took careful note of the number of men he saw in the gold Volvo and
exactly where they were sitting.

Thirteen

For the first 24 hours, Danny Danihel had
felt pretty comfortable with the bomb. A device that big could
easily bring the entire building down, but he knew that no sensible
extortionist would blow up his target before he’d gotten his money.
Since the midnight deadline had come and gone, the situation was
different. Now the thing could go off at any moment.

And despite his listening devices and photographs and the
patchwork of X-rays stitched together across the wall of the
command post across the street, Danihel had no real idea what was
inside the device. By Wednesday morning, he still had dozens of
questions: When did the timer start running? How accurate was it?
How reliable were the batteries? How good was this guy’s wiring?
Was he really an expert or just some nut job who wanted people to
think he was?

By the time word came over about flipping switch five, neither
Danihel nor the other two members of the bomb squad, Carl Paulson
and Larry Chapman, had slept since Monday night. Over in the Sahara
Tahoe, explosives experts were poring over the X-rays, trying to
figure out how to defeat the device. Danihel built a rig to flip
switch five remotely, but the experts advised against acting on the
call. The description of the 28 toggle switches on the box had been
all over the TV and newspapers. Hoax claims and crank calls were
coming in all the time. It was probably meaningless.

At 9:30 a.m. on Wednesday, the experts gathered in the Sahara
command post for a roundtable meeting. They threw out every idea
they could come up with. Flood the bomb with liquid nitrogen.
Encase it in concrete. Pick it up and carry it to a nearby golf
course. Finally, Leonard Wolfson, a civilian consultant to the
Navy, suggested using more explosives to defeat the bomb, with a
linear shaped charge. A precisely formed piece of plastic explosive
encased in a brass jacket, it would create two explosive planes of
hot gas collapsing on one another to form a fine jet: a pyrotechnic
cutting tool. This could disable the bomb by severing the fusing
mechanisms the technicians could see in the top box from the
explosives they believed filled the lower box. Wolfson explained
that the time between the detonation of the charge and the gas jet
striking the box would be half a millisecond. If the bomb contained
only low-voltage circuitry, it would be decapitated before the
electrical impulses from the battery could reach the detonators and
trigger the dynamite. It was risky, but it was the best idea they
had.

At noon, the men around the table took a vote. It was unanimous:
They would follow Wolfson’s plan. Using a computer terminal set up
in the Sahara to communicate with Lawrence Livermore, Wolfson began
making calculations. A defense contractor down in Las Vegas
machined the brass components for the shaped charge, which were
then flown up to Tahoe by helicopter.

At 3:10 p.m., Danihel walked up to the bomb carrying the shaped
charge taped to a two-by-four. He had been awake for 30 hours. He
was very tired and very scared.

Standing beside the bomb, he positioned the charge against a
stack of Tahoe phone books and a Formica-topped table at the
precise angle dictated by the scientists at Lawrence Livermore. He
checked the angles using a tape measure and a piece of string. He
primed the charge and checked the detonators. He checked the
continuity of the firing leads with a galvanometer. He had only one
shot. He didn’t want to have to come back up on this thing. He made
the connection to the firing leads. Then he checked everything
again.

At that moment back in Fresno, Johnny
Birges was just leaving work. Big John and Jimmy were on the road
again, making the long trip up from Clovis to Placerville in
Jimmy’s pickup, on their way to collect Joan from the hospital. As
they headed north on Highway 88, Big John told Jimmy that it was
time for another phone call.

Despite what he had claimed in the extortion note, the
irrigation timer in the bomb would run for at least three more days
before detonating the explosives. Big John wanted the governor to
make good on his promise of a second attempt at the ransom
exchange. The highway through the Gold Country plains toward
Placerville was remote and deserted. As they approached the old
mining town of Ione, Big John told Jimmy to pull over at the pay
phone outside Antonio’s Italian Restaurant. It was a little after
3:30 in the afternoon.

In Stateline, the sheriff’s office
announced a 15-minute warning. Crowds of gawking tourists and
reporters craned their necks from behind the barricades. Some of
them were already wearing “I Was Bombed at Harvey’s” T-shirts. Word
went around that gamblers were placing bets on what would happen
next.

Danny Danihel walked down the frozen escalator, past the
blinking slots, and out into the afternoon sun. Around the corner
he met up with Carl Paulson, who was waiting beside his truck
outside Harvey’s Pancake Parlor. The empty street rang with the
sound of a deputy calling out a final warning over the PA of his
patrol car. Then silence, save for the clicking of the stop lights
on Stateline Avenue. Danihel’s radio crackled with the final OK.
Under the hood of Paulson’s truck, he touched one of the two
strands of firing lead against the truck battery. “Fire in the
hole,” he said. He touched the second strand to the battery. It was
3:46 p.m.

“Holy shit,” Danihel said. But nobody heard him over the roar of
the explosion.

Fourteen

Danihel and Paulsen scrambled beneath the
truck. Fragments of concrete and pieces of plaster rained from the
sky. On the roof of the Sahara Tahoe, Bill Jonkey sheltered behind
a shallow parapet. Fragments of wood, metal, and glass sprayed out
from both sides of Harvey’s as Big John’s bomb vaporized in a flash
of superheated expanding gases. A pressure wave radiating outward
at more than 14,000 feet per second tore through the second floor,
bursting through doorways, flattening walls, and shattering
windows. A curtain of brown smoke fell across the facade. A cloud
of white dust blossomed from the second floor, enveloping the
building and rolling across the parking lot. Behind the barricades,
a ragged whoop went up from the crowd.

Danihel and Paulson lay on the warm asphalt, waiting for the
patter of debris falling on the roof of the truck to subside. From
within the building came sounds of rending and crashing as floors
and ceilings collapsed. When they finally stood, the damage wrought
by nearly 1,000 pounds of dynamite was clear. A jagged five-story
hole yawned in the middle of the casino. “We lost it,” Danihel
said. “The whole thing went up.”

Five minutes later, Wilma Hoppe, answering phones at the Douglas
County Sheriff substation just north of Stateline in Zephyr Cove,
received an operator-assisted call from a pay phone in Ione,
California. The operator’s voice said, “A dollar seventy-five.
There must be some confusion.” Then another voice came on the line.
Hoppe thought it sounded like a white man of around 30.

“If you still want the exchange, I’ll call back in one hour,” he
said. Then he hung up.

Big John and Jimmy were back on Highway
88, headed for Placerville, when they heard the news on the radio.
“Well, I don’t have anything to live for now,” Big John said.

Half an hour later, they arrived at the hospital to collect
Joan. She had a Band-Aid across her nose. They watched as footage
of the explosion replayed on a TV in the waiting room. The sight of
what he had done—the white dust and the brown smoke, the hurtling
debris, the gaping hole in the facade of the casino—briefly lifted
Big John’s spirits. “It worked pretty good,” he said.

Joan said they still had to report the accident to the Highway
Patrol. They drove up to Ice House Road to get her car. A tow truck
was waiting; Joan had locked the keys inside, and Big John had to
force the window open. They followed the tow truck back down
Highway 50. It was really quiet all the way back to Clovis. Nobody
said anything about the bomb.

When the charge went off, Chris Ronay was
standing next to Carl Paulson’s truck, right there on Stateline
Avenue. He was still in his suit and tie. He had come straight from
the FBI Explosives Operations Center in Washington, where he worked
as a bomb analyst. That afternoon, the local agents had pulled him
off the plane before it had even reached the gate at Sacramento
Airport and flown him to Tahoe by helicopter.

Ronay heard two explosions in close succession: a hiccup and
then a boom. The concussion knocked him to the ground. Beside him
the state fire marshal shouted “C’mon!” and took off running toward
the hotel lobby entrance. Ronay followed. Plaster dust was still
drifting in the air.

The explosion had torn a giant spherical hole through the middle
of the hotel. Where the bomb had once sat on the second floor, a
hole 60 feet in diameter gaped in the foot-thick concrete. There
was a matching hole 50 feet across in the floor above and another
30 feet across in the floor above that. The void reached up to the
fifth floor and all the way down into the basement. Around it, webs
of twisted rebar were tangled with broken drywall, bedclothes, and
pieces of metal window frame. Toilets teetered on the edges of
newly calved precipices. TV sets dangled by their cables over the
abyss. Water poured from broken pipes, soaking everything. From
somewhere deep inside the darkened carcass of the building came the
distant sound of whirring machinery, still drawing power from an
auxiliary generator no one had thought to shut off.

Ronay looked down at the dust carpeting the parking lot. His job
was just beginning.

Fifteen

Once Highway 50 reopened, the
investigation—a Bureau Special, Major Case No. 28, designated
Wheelbomb—began in earnest. Fifty agents from the FBI’s Sacramento
and Las Vegas divisions were now installed in Stateline and devoted
full-time to the hunt for the Harvey’s bombers. Bill Jonkey was
made the case agent for Nevada, charged with coordinating the
investigation on his side of the line until the culprits were
found. Joe Yablonsky held a press conference announcing that the
bureau was setting up a national information hotline. Tips started
pouring in from around the world, hundreds of possible suspects and
dozens of suspicious vehicles. A bellman at Harvey’s described two
white men pushing the bomb on a cart across the lobby at around
5:45 a.m. on Tuesday. A blackjack dealer recalled seeing a man
standing with the device by the elevator at around the same time.
Several other witnesses said they had seen a white van in the
parking lot of the hotel that morning, though nobody could recall a
license plate.

Late on Friday afternoon, two days after the explosion, enough
debris had been cleared from around the hotel for Harvey’s to
reopen part of the casino for gambling. The old Lake Room was small
and shopworn, but the symbolism was important—and so was the money.
Yablonsky gave another press conference there, on a red-curtained
stage behind the bar. He admitted to the press that the FBI had not
yet developed a significant lead and had no detailed descriptions
of the suspects. He announced a reward for information:
$175,000—soon raised to $200,000—put together by Harvey Gross and
the management of three other casinos in Stateline. It was the
largest bounty Yablonsky had ever heard of in a criminal case.

By Monday, Yablonsky was still waiting in vain for a solid lead.
“There is not anything I can say I’m panting over,” he told
reporters. Agents had recovered fingerprints from the bomb and were
checking them against their records. More eyewitnesses came
forward, including a musician and two friends who had been crossing
the street from Harrah’s at 5:30 a.m. on Tuesday and had gotten a
good look at the two men wheeling the cart across the Harvey’s
parking lot. But none of the witnesses could agree on what the
suspects looked like.

Among the hundreds of tips the bureau had received was a call
from Gerald Diminico, the manager of the Balahoe Motel on Emerald
Bay Road near the airport. He said that two men driving a white van
had checked in there the day before the bomb was discovered. They
had made a nuisance of themselves asking for jumper cables at four
in the morning and checked out soon afterward.

In Fresno, FBI agents checked over the details from the
registration card at the Balahoe Motel: Joey Evetto, of 4423 Van
Ness, Fresno; a white Dodge van, license plate 1A65819. The Fresno
Police Department could find no record of that name in their files
or those of the sheriff’s office, and there was no 4423 Van Ness in
the city. A call to the California DMV from an agent in Sacramento
revealed that no license had ever been issued to a Joey Evetto. It
did, however, return a hit on the license plate. The department had
an application for a title transfer on file, but the clerks would
have to search the transfer applications by hand. It would take
some time.

In front of Harvey’s, Bill Jonkey and Chris Ronay worked on the
crime scene with a team of 50 men. They searched the mountain of
rubble one shovelful at a time, looking for pieces of the bomb.
They set up sifting tables outside the casino. Each one was hung
with two bags: one for evidence, the other for any of the million
dollars in cash and chips left on the felt when the bomb went off.
Harvey Gross put one of his guys with a shotgun beside each sifting
station, just in case.

Within ten days of the bombing, the FBI team in Stateline had
its first break. Based on the composite pictures and some telephone
tips, the agents had assembled a short list of prime suspects. The
focus of the Wheelbomb investigation now settled on five electronic
engineers employed at two aircraft factories: the Gates Lear plant
in Tucson, Arizona, and the Lear Avia plant in Stead, near Reno.
They resembled the men in the composite pictures. They were new to
the area, they had a van, and they had been in Tahoe at the time
the device was delivered to Harvey’s. At least one of them had
recently shaved his mustache and obtained a new work ID. They had
access to strobe lights and had technical and aviation experience.
The FBI put them under 24-hour surveillance, including wiretaps on
their phones. What the agents heard on the wire only confirmed
their suspicions.

Finally, confident that they had the bombers, 20 agents drove up
to Reno from Stateline to confront the suspects with the evidence.
Yablonsky expected arrests and was ready to give a triumphant
announcement to the press. The interview team was led by Bill
O’Reilly, a stocky Angeleno with a mustache and an afro, who had
come to the FBI from the LAPD bomb squad. As the bureau’s case
agent coordinating the Wheelbomb investigation in California,
O’Reilly was Bill Jonkey’s counterpart on the other side of the
state line.

Once O’Reilly and his team arrived in Stead, the agents divided
into pairs to take each of the suspects to separate rooms at the
plant for interrogation. Five minutes in, O’Reilly and another
agent, Carl Larsen, stepped out to take a break. Something about
this felt very wrong. They glanced down the hallway at one another
and shook their heads.

They had the same sinking feeling: Shit. These weren’t the
guys.

On September 17, Joe Yablonsky held
another press conference and finally released composite pictures of
two of the men they were looking for. They were both white. One was
said to be five feet seven inches, about 20 years old, with sandy
blond hair and a mustache. The other had short dark hair and
protruding ears. “A hayseed,” Yablonsky said. “A goober type.”

Two weeks later, there had still been no takers for the reward.
“Under normal conditions, a person would sell his mother down the
river for $200,000,” Yablonsky told the press in Stateline. The
bombers must be part of a particularly tight-knit group, he
figured—perhaps a family. It was the only logical explanation.

Jonkey and Ronay were still sifting through the debris in the
Harvey’s parking lot. Their team recovered casters, twisted
fragments of the leveling bolts, and hundreds of pieces of mangled
steel plate, the biggest no more than two inches across, folded and
deformed by the force of the explosion. Every day, they sent
packages of what they’d gathered back to the FBI explosives lab in
Washington. Blast damage experts surveyed the wreckage, measured
evidence of the overpressure wave and scorching. They proved what
Jonkey and Ronay already suspected: The concussion of the linear
shaped charge had set off the pendulum mechanism in the bomb, which
had then detonated as designed.

But the forensics provided them with no clearer picture of the
bomb makers. The world was not short of suspicious characters with
a grievance, access to explosives, and a use for $3 million in
cash; the investigators now had a list of several hundred suspects.
They considered the IRA, Iranian students, the Mafia. They
interviewed two boys on vacation in Tahoe whose neighbors had heard
them shout “We did it!” when the bomb went off. They hypnotized
witnesses to try to recover details from their subconscious,
including one who had seen a Toyota pickup stopped on Highway 50 at
the time the “flip switch five” call was made. They interviewed
Harvey Gross a dozen times, asking for the names of anyone with a
grudge strong enough to warrant destroying his life’s work. But
Harvey was 76 years old. They could ask all they liked. He just
couldn’t remember.

In the meantime, the FBI office in Sacramento had heard back
from the California DMV. The van they had been asking about, the
one that had been spotted at the Balahoe Motel, was a white 1975
Dodge Tradesman registered to one John Birges, doing business under
the name of the Villa Basque Restaurant in Fresno. The registration
renewal had been held up because of unpaid parking tickets. The DMV
provided a copy of a driver’s license in the name of John Waldo
Birges, with the address 5265 North Fowler Avenue, Clovis,
California.

One day in October, a Fresno FBI agent came to the door of Big
John’s house asking about the van. Not me, Big John told him: You
want my son.

Sixteen

In the weeks after the bombing, Johnny
had gone back to his routine. Monday to Saturday with General
Roofing, 6 a.m. to 3 p.m. High all the time. A few days after the
failure of the ransom handoff, he sold his van, trading it in at
Fresno Toyota for a brand new 4x4. Other than that, he acted
normally. He didn’t feel that bad about what had happened. Nobody
got hurt. Nobody got killed. And in spite of everything that had
gone wrong already, he still had faith in his father. Big John knew
what he was doing.

But when Johnny came home from work one day to find an FBI
agent’s business card wedged into the jamb of his front door, he
freaked out. He had sold the van, but he had no alibi to explain
why it might have been seen in South Tahoe while the bomb was being
delivered. Johnny, Jimmy, and Big John got together in the kitchen
on Fowler Avenue that night. They came up with a story.

Johnny would tell the FBI that he’d gone up to the mountains
around Placerville by himself, early on the morning of Sunday,
August 24, two days before the bomb was delivered. He was looking
for a place to grow marijuana. He drove south to Highway 88 and
turned off onto a gravel road near Ham’s Station. He arrived at
nine or ten in the morning, parked the van, and walked around for a
few hours looking for a good, secluded place to cultivate pot. When
he got back to the van it was early evening and the battery was
dead; he’d left the stereo on. He’d had to ditch the van and
hitchhike back to Fresno. When he got home, he called his brother
and arranged to use his pickup to get to work on Monday and
Tuesday. Then, in the middle of the night on Tuesday, he and Jimmy
drove over to Ham’s Station, where they jump-started the van and
drove it back to Fresno.

Big John assured Johnny that the investigators had no evidence.
All he had to do was stick to his story and he’d be fine. So when
the federal agents came around again, one afternoon after work in
late October, that’s exactly what Johnny did. No, he said, he’d
never been to South Lake Tahoe. He hadn’t let anyone borrow the
van. He had no idea how it could have been spotted outside the
motel on Emerald Road early Tuesday. No, he’d never heard of Joe
Evetto. No, when he came back to jump-start the van, he didn’t
think it had been moved or tampered with—although, now that they
mentioned it, one of the door locks was open, and maybe some of
those tapes in the snack tray had been moved around a bit.

When he’d finished, the agents told him his story was ridiculous
and unbelievable. He was clearly lying to protect whomever he had
allowed to use the van. They asked him to take a polygraph. It was
entirely voluntary; they just wanted to eliminate him from the
investigation. He said he’d think about it. They said they’d be
back. They added John Waldo Birges to their list of suspects.

By the beginning of November, the
Wheelbomb operation had ballooned into one of the largest and most
expensive criminal investigations the FBI had ever conducted—and it
still hadn’t produced any results. The investigators hadn’t even
figured out where the bomb makers had gotten their dynamite. At the
end of the month, a teletype went out from the Las Vegas division
to the FBI director’s office and eight other agency offices around
the country, offering a blunt and bleak summary: “Investigation in
this case still has not realized even the slightest information
which would lead to the perpetrators of this crime, despite
thousands of interviews and review of over 123,000 records.”

On December 1, the Wheelbomb investigation was scaled back
sharply. The command post was relocated to Jonkey’s small office in
Carson City, reducing the bureau’s presence in Stateline to a
single room with one telephone line in Harvey’s Inn, the motel
Gross had built down the street from the main casino. Back in
Fresno, the local agents still believed Johnny’s alibi was riddled
with inconsistencies, but they had no way of proving that he wasn’t
telling the truth. They interviewed Jimmy twice, but he gave them
the same elaborate explanation about the marijuana patch and the
dead battery. He, too, told them he had mixed feelings about taking
a polygraph test. Big John also backed up Johnny’s story and said
he had never borrowed the van himself, nor could he ever recall it
being parked at his house.

Special Agent Norm Lane couldn’t help liking Big John. Fresno
was a bad town, and Lane and the other agents in the bureau’s
office there spent most of their time going after bank robbers and
gang bangers from the Aryan Nation or the Mexican Mafia. But this
guy was something different: clever, funny, charismatic—always had
a little smile on his face, an air about him that suggested he
thought he was smarter than you. Big John told Lane his whole life
story. He said that Johnny used marijuana; that was partly why he
threw him out of the house. He said that Johnny certainly didn’t
have anything to do with the Harvey’s bombing.

He said that he himself had been a regular at Harvey’s and had
become friendly with the staff and with Harvey Gross. He admitted
that he had been a heavy gambler at times but said that over the
years his winnings and losses had pretty much balanced out. The
last time he had been up in Tahoe was back in July sometime. He’d
slept in his car, in a sleeping bag. He said he’d heard about the
bombing, either on TV or in the Fresno newspaper. He said he
thought organized crime was behind it.

By the beginning of the new year, four months after the bombing,
only Bill O’Reilly, Bill Jonkey, Jonkey’s supervisor Herb Hawkins,
and three other agents working out of the resident agency in Carson
City were still assigned to the investigation full-time. By then
the bureau had compiled a list of 486 individual suspects worldwide
and eliminated 233 of them. If they were lucky, the names of the
men they were looking for were somewhere among the remaining
253.

Seventeen

In January 1981, the FBI agents in
Fresno, still trying to eliminate Johnny Birges from their
investigation, served him with a subpoena. He was called to testify
before a grand jury in Reno. Once again, Big John told him to just
stick to his story. Everything would be fine.

Johnny went alone. It was a five-hour drive up from Fresno,
through the mountains and the forest. There was still snow on the
road. When he arrived at the federal courthouse in Reno, he was
surprised to find that there wasn’t a judge. It was just a regular
room with some chairs and some ordinary-looking citizens in it. The
whole thing took an hour, maybe an hour and a half. The assistant
U.S. Attorney asked Johnny about the van and the Balahoe Motel. The
jurors listened to him, watched his face. Johnny felt pretty
nonchalant. He didn’t think they could prove he was lying. Still,
on the long drive home he began to wonder what he had gotten
himself into.

Four months later, the Wheelbomb investigation was staggering to
a standstill. The investigators had no suspects and were running
out of leads. One group of FBI agents, hunting a former Harvey’s
employee who they’d heard held a grudge against his old boss, were
chasing him fruitlessly from one port to another along Mexico’s
Pacific coast. In the Fresno office, the agents were trying to
locate Johnny’s old roommate, in the hope of having him verify or
disprove the story Birges had told the grand jury. But they still
hadn’t found him.

On May 13, 1981, Harvey’s Wagon Wheel held a ribbon-cutting
ceremony and formally reopened for business, after repairs and
security improvements totaling some $18 million. By then, the
reward offered for information on the bombers had swollen to
$500,000. Half a million dollars—enough to set someone up for life.
Harvey and the other gaming kingpins in Stateline were determined
to make sure whoever had destroyed his hotel didn’t get away with
it.

It was a month before the call finally came in. At first the kid
was scared shitless that they were going to kill him or something.
He called the FBI’s Fresno office a couple of times but wouldn’t
give his name. Eventually, in early June, he agreed to meet a
Fresno FBI agent face-to-face. His name was Danny DiPierri. He was
the night foreman at the Glacier Brothers’ candy and tobacco
warehouse in town. He said he knew who had bombed Harvey’s. He’d
dated a girl who had told him all about it before it ever happened.
Her name was Kelli Cooper.

After that, things started moving quickly. The agents took Danny
out to the Holiday Inn by the Fresno Air Terminal and hypnotized
him. They wired him and put him on the phone with Kelli. They gave
him envelopes stuffed with $100 bills; he couldn’t believe his
luck. A full background investigation began into John Birges Sr. By
late June, the Wheelbomb team in Carson City knew a great deal
about Big John, and none of it was good. They’d heard about his
gambling debts. They’d heard he had once been a high roller at
Harvey’s and a guest at Gross’s ranch. They’d heard he lost half a
million dollars. They’d heard about how he’d been moved out of that
suite on New Year’s Eve, how he’d felt belittled and humiliated in
front of his girlfriend. They’d heard that he’d torched his own
restaurant for the insurance money.

Agents from Fresno were sent out to locate the new owner of
Johnny’s van. Chris Ronay and his team flew back from Washington to
conduct a microscopic examination of the Dodge, searching for old
fingerprints, paint chips from the bomb, and explosive residue.
Agents from the Sacramento office went to question personnel at the
Helms Creek hydroelectric project about the theft of explosives
reported the previous year. By the end of the month, one agent had
found a witness placing Big John at the scene of Joan’s accident on
Ice House Road. Another had tracked down Officer Jim Bergenholtz of
the California Highway Patrol and his meticulously kept notebook.
By early July, 44 agents were back on the case full-time. The
Birgeses were designated prime suspects.

Johnny and Jimmy had known something was
up for weeks. All summer, agents followed the boys everywhere they
went, from morning until midnight. They followed them to work and
home again. If Jimmy went on a date, they waited until he had
picked the girl up from her house, then they went in and braced her
parents. They put a pen register on Johnny’s phone, which logged
every number he called, then paid a visit to everyone on the list.
Sometimes the agents just sat outside his house, waiting. Johnny
had nicknames for them all: Hair Bear, he called O’Reilly; the lone
woman, Sherry Harris, with her auburn hair, was known as Grapehead.
They even had a name for him: Kickback. They all knew he liked to
get high. Sometimes, Johnny wouldn’t see them watching him at all,
but they’d call him later and tell him where he’d been and what
he’d been wearing, who he’d seen and what he’d been doing: Up
at the lake with that girl, Johnny? Nice.

Of course he got paranoid. The pot didn’t help. One day he took
mushrooms, more than he should have, and tripped so hard that he
saw a devil and an angel right there in the room with him. He knew
then that he had to make it all stop. He got into the pickup and
drove over to Fowler Avenue. He pleaded with Big John to leave, to
get out of the country before it was too late. But Big John wasn’t
going anywhere. He knew they didn’t have a damned thing on him.

Throughout July, Bill Jonkey visited Big John almost every day.
He’d go out to the house on Fowler Avenue with one of the agents
from the Fresno office—Norm Lane or Tom Oswald. Jonkey just wanted
to get Big John talking—sometimes about how his sons were doing,
sometimes about nothing much at all. Sometimes he wouldn’t even
mention Harvey’s. Other times he’d take along some of those glossy
color eight-by-tens he had of the bomb before the explosion, feet
pressing down into the bright orange carpet outside the telephone
exchange.

Sometimes Big John would yell and scream at them through the
locked door. Maybe he’d heard that they’d been talking to his
neighbors; that could really get him going. Then he’d start yelling
about Jonkey and Lane, about the FBI, about all the motherfucking
cops out there. They knew Big John kept a loaded .22 rifle beside
that door. Jonkey would stand outside in his polo shirt and jeans,
turned away just so, his sidearm out of sight behind his right leg.
Then sometimes the door would open abruptly and there he’d be, Big
John, ready to talk again. He couldn’t help himself. Jonkey would
discretely holster his gun and they’d start in.

“What the hell do you want to talk to me about today?”

“Well, Mr. Birges, can you help us?” Polite. Plaintive, even.
“Here’s a picture. Why would a guy put switches on the front like
that? And what do you think you could have used to cover up the
screw holes in there?”

“Well… can I keep this?”

“No, Mr. Birges, you can’t keep it, but you can look at it.”

“Well, there probably were screw holes. You can use Bondo or
something.…”

He wanted to ask them questions. He was interested in the
payoff—what had gone wrong? And the explosion—why had they blown it
up themselves? He wanted badly to show them how clever he was, how
much he knew about everything. About electronics. About
fabrication. About bombs.

By that time, the bureau’s investigators knew more about Big
John than he could ever have imagined. They knew about Elizabeth’s
strange death, about his experience with explosives, his temper,
and his recklessness. They knew about the flying stunts; the FAA
had taken his pilot’s license away. And they’d been out to the
turkey farm his brother-in-law Ferenc Schmidt had, on the outskirts
of Fresno.

Ferenc, who was married to Elizabeth’s younger sister, Jolan,
was only too happy to help the FBI. He and Big John had never liked
one another. Ferenc had thousands of birds out there in three
open-sided sheds, each 100 yards long, tin roofs with dozens of
automatic feeders beneath them: giant galvanized drums with a
mechanism to drop feed into the trays a little at a time. Jonkey
was especially interested in the feeders. They were Big John’s
work. After Harvey’s cut off his credit, Big John hadn’t had
anything to do, and Ferenc had agreed to give him a few hundred
dollars for some work. Big John had built an electric bird-feeding
mechanism and a pigpen for him from scratch. The feeding system was
operated by electrical pressure plates. When the turkeys ate all
the feed in a tray, the release of the weight closed a switch and
more food tumbled out.

The mechanism wasn’t sophisticated, but it was clever, built
from plexiglass and black neoprene, with a big brass paddle to make
a contact. Jonkey and Chris Ronay agreed that they had both seen
this kind of technology before: the ghostly shadows inside the box
outside the telephone exchange.

Still, they had not yet found a single piece of conclusive
evidence placing Big John or the boys at the scene of the
explosion. Examining the registration card from the Balahoe Motel
for prints, scouring Johnny’s van for explosive residue, reading
the Birgeses’ mail, comparing stationery from Joan’s desk at the
Fresno County probation office to the paper used for the extortion
note—it all came to nothing. They had tracked down a steel supplier
in Fresno that stocked all the materials necessary to build the
bomb and who counted Big John among his customers. But Big John
always paid in cash, and the supplier kept no receipts. The
switches at the turkey farm and the ones Jonkey had seen in the
X-rays at Harvey’s shared an unusual mechanical signature, nothing
more.

The agents’ best hope of finding the evidence they needed was to
prove that Big John might be planning something new. Then they
could legally put a wiretap on the house on Fowler Avenue and
listen in to everything that happened there. But although they had
the paperwork for microphone surveillance ready to go, they could
find no one who could conclusively state that Big John was
discussing plans for another bomb.

And yet: He was.

Eighteen

Big John had started talking about
putting a second bomb in Harvey’s almost as soon as the dust from
the first one had settled. The day after the explosion, he had
called Bill Brown and Terry Hall again and told them to come over
to the house. They didn’t want to—they were afraid of what might
happen—but they went anyway. When Big John started to tell them
what he had in mind, Terry just stopped listening. He had a wife
and a son; he didn’t want anything to do with this. Then Big John
said that if they told anyone about what they’d done, he’d have
them killed.

After they left, Bill told Terry that Big John meant what he
said. He remembered what had happened to Big John’s wife. One
minute she was fine. The next she was lying in a field, dead. It
was best if they never talked about what had happened ever
again.

A little less than a month after the explosion, Jimmy Birges was
asleep on the couch when a noise woke him in the middle of the
night. It was around 4 a.m. Big John had just come home. He’d taken
Jimmy’s new pickup an hour north to Wishon. He said he’d stolen
another dozen cases of dynamite and put them in the freezer.

A few days later, Jimmy was in the garage and Big John brought a
stick of it out to show him. It was red jelly wrapped in white
plastic, crimped at the ends. Big John asked him if he’d help him
move it somewhere else. Big John put the dynamite in the back of
Elizabeth’s old pickup. Jimmy followed in his Toyota. They drove a
few miles out into the blank farmland at the edge of town, near
Ferenc’s turkey ranch. There, beside two large trees, Big John had
already dug a hole. It was big enough for the whole haul of
dynamite, around 700 pounds in all.

Throughout the winter and spring of 1981, as Johnny testified
before the grand jury in Reno and the FBI agents in Carson City and
Fresno searched desperately for any scrap of incriminating evidence
against the Birges family, the dynamite sat there, buried at the
bottom of a flood control ditch. Then Big John got into some kind
of fight with Ferenc and his wife. They wouldn’t pay him for the
work he’d done; they told him his turkey feeders were no good and
the gate on the pigpen opened the wrong way. By then, the FBI
agents were all over Johnny, but Big John didn’t care. He was
angry. He dug up the dynamite. He rigged a little of it under the
wooden bridge Ferenc had over there. The bridge was the only way he
had to get in or out of the farm. Johnny heard the explosion all
the way across town.

Big John carefully clipped every story printed in the Fresno
Bee about the theft of the dynamite and the bombing at
Harvey’s. After the Harvey’s explosion, he went back to Tahoe with
Joan and dropped by the casino. He might have been casing the
place—or he might just have been playing the tables again. Because
he also had another target in mind. Early in the summer of 1981, he
went over to San Francisco to have a look at the Bank of America
building, the monolithic high-rise on California Street. He told
Jimmy that maybe he could get a bomb in there.

Whether he chose the bank or the casino, he’d figured out a way
of making it easier. The new device would be remote controlled and
would drive itself in. At the beginning of August, Big John went to
an electrical supply store north of Fresno and bought 20 switches.
This time, he told Jimmy, Harvey Gross wouldn’t pay three million.
He’d pay five.

On August 12, 1981, a typically infernal
summer afternoon in the Central Valley, Bill Jonkey knocked on
Johnny Birges’s door. He asked him yet again to explain his
whereabouts on August 26 and 27 the year before. Again, Johnny told
his story, but this time Jonkey poked holes in it, and Johnny
struggled to fill them. Yes, he said, he had taken an unusually
roundabout route home that day, because he didn’t know there was a
shorter one. Yes, he had gotten a speeding ticket on the way back,
and there were two other men in the car with him. They were
hitchhikers. Both were young, white men of average build; no, he
probably couldn’t identify them if he saw them again.

That same day, Norm Lane and agent Carl Curtis visited Big John
in Clovis. They asked him where he had been those same nights the
year before. He wasn’t sure, he said, but he was probably right
here at home. Then why, the agents asked, had several witnesses
seen him on the afternoon of August 27, at the scene of a car
accident on Ice House Road, up in the Eldorado National Forest?

Ah, now he remembered—that must have been the day he and his son
went up there to collect Joan from the hospital, he told them.
She’d wrecked her car. She called and asked them to pick her up.
What was she doing up there? Well, she’d driven up to South Tahoe
to go gambling the night before. But when she got there she found
some of the casinos were roped off. There was a bomb scare or
something. So she’d driven to Reno instead. She’d been studying
astrology, and a reading of her stars had determined that it was an
auspicious night for gambling.

Big John readily admitted that he’d been up to Harvey’s a lot
himself over the years. In fact, he said, he still owed the casino
$15,000. He’d probably lost about $700,000 since he started playing
the tables there. The agents suggested that would provide ample
motive for wanting to extort money from Harvey’s by, say, planting
a giant bomb in the hotel.

Big John said that he would never do such a thing. He’d once
made a lot of money in the landscaping business. But then he’d
discovered that his wife was not only having an affair but paying
the man for his services, at a rate of $946 a session. It was then
that he’d realized that money wasn’t a source of happiness. He
decided to get rid of all the money he had—by gambling at Harvey’s.
Now that he’d succeeded, money no longer had any meaning for him.
He was much happier.

The agents said they knew that he had all of the welding,
electronics, and explosives skills necessary to build a bomb like
the one that blew up Harvey’s. They’d been told he had a lot of
dynamite. Big John said he was flattered that the FBI believed he
could pull off such a crime. He said that they were probably right;
he was skillful enough to build such a complex device. But he
certainly didn’t have the courage you’d need. He showed them a
letter from his 81-year-old mother in Hungary. She wrote that she’d
like him to visit her one last time before she died. He said he
wasn’t quite ready to make the trip yet, but when he was about to
leave the country, of course he would notify the Fresno office of
the FBI.

Big John gave Lane and Curtis a tour of the new greenhouse he’d
built. Before they left, the agents had one last question. Had he
ever had occasion to drive a white Dodge van, one that had once
been owned by his son Johnny? Yes, Big John said. A few times. But
that would have been years back.

The next day, Lane and Curtis dropped in on Big John again, this
time with Bill Jonkey. They gave him a form to sign to consent to a
search of the house. Big John said he couldn’t sign, because the
house was technically Joan’s. But he was more than happy to show
them around the workshop. On the way to the garage, he pointed out
a big walk-in freezer. He said he used it for food storage. In the
workshop, the agents noticed cans of gray spray paint and a small
can of White Knight Auto Body Repair Putty. They saw a piece of
sheet metal of about the same thickness as the piece found taped
beneath the phone booth at Lake Tahoe Airport. They saw a drill
press, an arc welder, and an oxy-acetylene welding-tank set. And
they saw a homemade cart with casters for wheels and a T-handle
made of welded angle iron.

Big John told the agents that he could never have used his
workshop to build a bomb like the one in Harvey’s. It was just too
exposed; the neighbors would see everything. No, he said, a
sensible technician would need an entirely secret location known
only to the individual building the bomb—whoever he was.

Nineteen

Later on the same day Big John gave him a
tour of his workshop, Bill Jonkey put on a jacket and tie and drove
over to Reno. The Wheelbomb team was almost out of options, but
they had one remaining card to play: It was time to get a warrant
for Johnny Birges’s arrest.

At the federal courthouse, Jonkey told the grand jury that
everything Johnny had told them eight months earlier had been a
lie. Here’s what really happened, he said: Johnny was up in the
mountains the day the bomb went off; the traffic citation proved as
much. He was there with his father. Birges senior’s girlfriend had
been in an accident nearby; there were witnesses placing them both
at the scene. That afternoon, the jury returned its decision. John
Waldo Birges was indicted for perjury. Jonkey was back in Fresno
that night with a warrant.

The next day, Jonkey and Carl Larsen drove over to Johnny’s
house. They found him hiding in the bathroom, holding the door shut
from inside, and pulled him out at gunpoint. “This is the big time
now, Johnny,” Jonkey said. “We’ve got a federal warrant for your
arrest.” They cuffed him and put him in the car.

Jimmy came over to the Fresno FBI office on O Street
voluntarily; the investigators had nothing on him. Inside, the boys
were taken to separate rooms for questioning. They both held tight
to their story. The agents were tense. If the boys called their
bluff—if they simply asked for a lawyer and stuck to their
alibis—the district attorney would never be able to make the case
against Big John. Everyone, even Johnny, would walk. In the
interrogation rooms on the fourth floor, hours passed. Jonkey,
Larsen, and a third agent went to work on Johnny. They showed him
the warrant, told him he’d be going to prison. Larsen worked the
mother angle: She didn’t raise you to be a liar. She wanted you
to be better than this.

That did it. Johnny didn’t want to be the only one going to
jail. He knew if he didn’t talk, someone else would. He said he’d
tell them everything. But first he wanted to speak to his kid
brother.

Jimmy had been stonewalling his interrogators for three hours by
then. Wouldn’t say anything. But then he saw Johnny coming down the
hall. The agents had set the scene perfectly: Johnny was shuffling
in cuffs and ankle chains. Jimmy turned to one of the FBI men. “We
are not going to jail for our father,” he said.

He said he wanted to talk to Johnny.

“Did you tell them?” asked Jimmy.

“Yes,” said Johnny.

Jimmy came back to the table with tears in his eyes. He said he
was ready to tell the truth. Bill O’Reilly read him his Miranda
rights.

That was the end of it. After that, you couldn’t shut them
up.

Around three o’clock in the afternoon on
Saturday, August 15, Big John and Joan left the house on Fowler
Avenue in the gold Volvo. They hadn’t heard from Jimmy since he’d
left for work at the Toyota showroom the previous morning. That
meant trouble. They’d driven only a few hundred yards down the
block when they were cut off by a pair of unmarked sedans with whip
antennas. Four FBI agents, including Norm Lane and Carl Curtis,
pulled them out of the Volvo and cuffed them at gunpoint.

Down in an interview room on O Street, Big John refused to say
anything before he’d talked to a lawyer. He asked to speak to
Jimmy. When his younger son came in, he told Big John that the FBI
knew everything. The agents even knew about Bill Brown and Terry
Hall. Big John was furious. It was all down to Johnny, he said. He
had shot off his mouth once too often. If it hadn’t been for
Johnny, the government would never have found out. If it hadn’t
been for Johnny, they wouldn’t have been able to prove anything in
4,000 years.

Joe Yablonsky held a press conference the next day. The FBI kept
the boys in protective custody for a while after that, put them up
in the Fresno Hilton, told them to order what they liked. Johnny
had a blast. It was like an adventure. Later, O’Reilly took them on
a road trip through California so they could show the agents each
of the locations used in the botched ransom drop. On September 9,
1981, Johnny turned 21. The FBI agents gave him a card and signed
it with the nicknames he had given them.

There were two trials in the end: a
federal proceeding in Las Vegas and a state trial in Minden, just a
few miles from the ranch where Harvey Gross’s pilot had shown Big
John how to fly a helicopter. The boys were phenomenal; they had
great memories. Back in Washington, Chris Ronay and the explosives
lab built a replica of the bomb in a plexiglass box to use in
court. It took three men almost a month to finish it.

Big John never did come clean. For four years he went through
lawyer after lawyer until, finally, he defended himself. He told
the prosecutors he’d built the bomb; they were never going to take
that away from him. But he said he’d been made to do it. Organized
crime: a mysterious hood named Charlie, who told him that if he
blew up Harvey’s, his debts would be forgiven—and if he didn’t do
it, they’d cripple him for life.

Big John cross-examined his sons, speaking to them like
strangers. He suggested Jimmy put him up to it, because he needed
money for college. He said the bomb was never supposed to hurt
anybody. When Chris Ronay took the stand, Big John pointed out
errors in his model of the bomb. He took a car headlamp out of a
briefcase and told him they could have used one to drain the
battery and make the bomb safe. He suggested Danny Danihel, the
leader of the Douglas County fire department bomb squad, had
deliberately blown the whole thing up.

The state’s prosecutor didn’t buy a word of it. “Everything is
covered, but it doesn’t make sense,” he told the jury. “He didn’t
care what happened to whom or to what. He was getting even, and he
was going to get money if it all worked right, and he didn’t
particularly care about anyone else, the employees, the guests, the
players. They could all have been blown up for all he cared.”

On March 7, 1985, the jury filed into the state courthouse in
Minden and announced that they had found Janos Birges guilty on
eight of nine counts, including extortion, making a bomb threat,
unlawful possession of an explosive device, and interstate
transportation of an explosive device. The judge sentenced him to
life in prison. In return for giving evidence against their father,
John Waldo and James Birges pled guilty and were granted complete
immunity. They never served a day behind bars for their involvement
in the bombing.

Bill Brown and Terry Hall had remained so terrified of their
former employer that even the prospect of a half-million-dollar
reward wasn’t temptation enough to get them to talk. Bill Jonkey
was amazed. They got seven years each. Ella Joan Williams was found
guilty of conspiracy and sentenced to seven years in prison, but
her conviction was later overturned on appeal.

They locked Big John up in the federal penitentiary in Lompoc,
California. After the second trial, the boys never saw him again.
But before his final conviction, Jimmy wrote his father a
three-page letter. In it, he apologized for what he and his brother
had done and asked for his forgiveness. He explained that he had no
work and no money. He said that now he and Johnny would have to do
whatever they could to stay out of jail. “Dear Big John,” he
wrote.

You are the smartest and most remarkable person in the world. I
respect you more than anything and I will try to be worthy of you.…
I often lie awake at night thinking of what I have done to you. I
cry often at the thought of what I did. I wish we could have been a
happy family from the start. I am glad that you brought me up the
way you did because it made me realize how hard life was early on.…
I will love you always. Your son, Jimmy.

You are the smartest and most remarkable
person in the world. I respect you more than anything and I will
try to be worthy of you.… I often lie awake at night thinking of
what I have done to you. I cry often at the thought of what I did.
I wish we could have been a happy family from the start. I am glad
that you brought me up the way you did because it made me realize
how hard life was early on.… I will love you always. Your son,
Jimmy.

Epilogue

Janos Birges finally succumbed to liver
cancer in the medical facility at the Federal Correctional Center
in Jean, Nevada, on August 27, 1996, almost 16 years to the day
after the device he had built exploded in Harvey’s casino. He was
74.

Bill Brown and Terry Hall were released from federal prison in
1986. They both eventually returned to Fresno, where Brown died in
1994. Hall, not yet 50, followed him in 2005.

Bill Jonkey stayed in touch with the Birges boys for a few years
after Big John went to prison. He thought they were basically good
kids. Chris Ronay and Jonkey went on to be involved in the FBI’s
investigations of later bombings, including Lockerbie, Oklahoma
City, and the first World Trade Center attack in 1993, but they
never encountered another case like the one at Harvey’s Wagon
Wheel. The plexiglass model of the bomb is still used to train the
bureau’s explosives technicians in Quantico.

Jonkey retired from the bureau in 2000 but sometimes still
lectures on what happened at Harvey’s. When I met him recently, he
said that if he saw Big John’s bomb again today, he still wouldn’t
know how to defuse it. His team never saw the inside of the box,
and to this day he can’t be certain exactly what was in it. There
were things in there that the boys may not have known about. And he
could never be certain that Big John was telling the truth.

Jimmy Birges never left Fresno. He settled down, eventually
started a welding and fabrication business, had three children and
began coaching Little League. He did pretty well for himself, well
enough to start racing cars in his spare time. Things didn’t work
out so smoothly for Johnny. Having the same name as his father made
life difficult. People didn’t want the son of a bomber working on
their roofs. He moved to Bakersfield and started his own
contracting business. He made a lot of money, but he also acquired
a cocaine habit.

In 1986, his fiancée was driving back from Avila Beach one day
and fell asleep at the wheel. The car left the road, and she was
killed instantly. Her death seemed to sap Johnny of all motivation;
he moved to Santa Barbara with nothing but a box of clothes, his
truck, and a little coke. He drifted for a while, started surfing,
and eventually opened his own board-shaping shop down the coast in
Ventura. But he was a short-tempered drunk and a fighter, and he’d
end up in jail for a few months at a time.

In 2008, after one DUI too many, he was sentenced to 240 days in
the Ventura County Jail, where he got into a fight in the yard and
ended up with a broken jaw. He used the rest of his time inside to
write a book about the bombing. He changed a few things around,
embellished the story here and there, and ended up publishing it
himself, as a novel. When he called his publishers a year later,
they told him they hadn’t sold a single copy.

Credits

A Thousand
Pounds of Dynamite, by Adam Higginbotham, is Issue No. 39 of
The Atavist, published July 2014.

For more of our titles, please
visit www.atavist.com.

We welcome feedback at
letters@atavist.com.

Author: Adam
Higginbotham

Adam Higginbotham began his career in magazines and newspapers
in London, where he was the editor-in-chief of The
Face and a contributing editor at
The Sunday Telegraph. Based in New York for the last ten
years, he has written for GQ, Men's
Journal, The New Yorker, and Wired.

Editor: Charles Homans

Designer: Gray
Beltran

Producer: Megan
Detrie

Fact Checker: Riley Blanton

Copy Editor: Sean
Cooper

Animation: Damien
Scogin

Images: Courtesy
John Waldo Birges, Chris Ronay, Bill Jonkey, Federal Bureau of
Investigation

Cover Photos:
Courtesy Bill Jonkey

Video: Courtesy
KOLO-TV

A Note on
Sources:

The events in this story were reconstructed using documents from
the criminal investigation and court proceedings, interviews and
written recollections of those involved, news reports, video, and
photographs, and visits to the locations where the events took
place. Direct quotes were taken either from official documents or
from recollections of at least one of the individuals involved.

Thanks to: Jim Birges, John Birges, Danny Danihel, Dan DiPierri,
Sherry Hancock, Bill Jonkey, Ed Kane, Dave Knowlton, Carl Larsen,
Norm Lane, Bill O’Reilly, Chris Ronay, Dell Rowley, and Jolan
Schmidt.

© 2014 Atavist Inc.

Learn More at Creatavist.com