Original subtitles

Something I wrestle with still to this day.

Why I went along with something that crazy.

There's a big bomb scare on the south shore of Lake Tahoe.

Two men posing as computer technicians trundled a box covered with blankets

lettered IBM into a casino yesterday and left the box there.

This thing was a massive device. It is a building killer.

The whole idea was incredible.

We all knew exactly what we were supposed to do.

I kept it secret. I didn't tell anybody.

You start doing crazy things to get attention.

With the suspected bomb, a note demanding $3 million.

$3 million to tell how to disarm the bomb.

Now the search is on for the criminals who planted it. Who are we dealing with?

And why is this casino across the street the richest gambling casino in the

world?

I was betting against them ever getting that money.

It's a far -fetched game.

You would never think anybody would pull that off.

The nightmare was just beginning.

There was no way out.

Tahoe was a relatively small town.

Kind of a wide open atmosphere.

I'm not saying, you know, there were gunfights, but you didn't have to worry

about restrictions, regulations.

It was an atmosphere that was related to fun.

It takes a lot to drag people away from the gambling tables of State Line Nevada

on the shores of Lake Tahoe.

even when they're told a bomb could go off. A strange -looking device, thought

at first to be a computer, was found in Harvey's Hotel Casino, along with a list

of demands.

Officials faced two questions. Is it really a bomb?

And if it is, what do they do with it?

On August 26th of 1980, I got a call from the sheriff's office.

I arrived at... Harvey's Casino, where I was met by Captain Danny Daniels, who

was the bomb squad commander.

I was at home. My wife and daughter were going to go on a camping trip.

The phone rang, and they said that there's a device that they found at

I threw as much stuff out of the truck as I could and drove over there.

When the alarm goes off, you're called. That's what you do.

I thought, it'll be in a bag, it'll be in a suitcase, it'll be relatively easy.

And then we walked into the second floor and it was huge.

We didn't know if it was a real explosive device or not when we

at it.

I'd never seen anything so sinister in my life. It was absolutely frightening.

But the first thing that runs through your mind is that if this... container

full of explosives, you know, we're in trouble.

According to police officials here, they tell us that the bomb apparently is

near that particular window right up there, within 10 or 20 feet of it from

we've been told here.

Along with the suspected bomb, a note which said the box held 1 ,000 sticks of

dynamite, wired and extremely sensitive.

Tahoe was a thriving area with a lot of people, and there were.

thousands of vacations in that casino.

I was sound asleep at 8 .30 and they came through pounding at the doors and

said that they had a security problem. They had blocked all the streets and we

wondered what was going on. And we left everything else there and we got out of

the hotel.

One of the things I'm asked often is how much damage can an explosive do? How

many people can it kill? A thousand pounds in an open field, not going to do

much. A thousand pounds in a building.

You can devastate a portion of a city.

So getting those casinos closed and getting the people out of there was

important. Even though the hotel was evacuated, people were trying to get in.

Serious police officers weren't kidding when they kept pushing back crowds.

About a dozen buses were sent in to clear the area, and hotels along the

were boarding up. In a town where people know more than a little about odds, no

one is taking any chances.

Once the building was secured, we got everyone out of there except for the

squad.

And we started setting up, photographing the thing and trying to document as

much as we could.

So what you're trying to do is you've got a metal box of mystery.

And you want to know what's inside that metal box.

So the tools were limited. You have a stethoscope, you've got some x -rays.

You're not going to start poking around and flipping switches. That would not be

well advised.

So then we started setting up to x -ray this thing.

And we were able to identify some of the contents in the top box.

We can see wires coming from the top box going down to the bottom box.

Looking at the x -rays, ultimately we determined that this was the real thing.

Holy shit, this is real.

That's a bomb.

Demolitions experts have been working to decide just how they can best disarm

the device, which they say is definitely a bomb.

The best possible situation in working with bombs is distance.

You want to move the device.

You know, we had dealt with smaller devices and been successful.

But, you know, when I saw the size of it and the switches and everything and the

fact that there were bullseye bubbling levels on every corner.

We realized right then that we were not going to move this device.

And going through my head is the fact that I got to find out who put it there.

in wise lake tahoe this

was a felt cover

that was on one of the gaming tables inside of harvey's i found this on ebay

which is where i get a lot of my rare collectibles also collected assorted

photos and clippings this is Harvey Gross, the owner of the casino.

A one -time butcher, Harvey Gross got his start at Lake Tahoe in 1946 with a

roadside cafe where his wife did the cooking.

Harvey expanded it over the next several years into Harvey's Wagon Wheel Saloon,

and in 1963, he completed an 11 -story hotel tower, which was the tallest hotel

tower at the time in Lake Tahoe.

Well, we feel that the future is tremendous up here. Ample room for

the next 20 years is tremendous.

As opposed to the stereotype of mobsters running casinos, Harvey brought

legitimacy to the casino business in Lake Tahoe.

Picture of my grandparents, Harvey and Llewellyn Gross.

Harvey Gross in his office.

Pretty chipper.

As long as you weren't making his day a bad day, you were probably okay.

But, yeah, kind of brings back a lot of memories. You know, just all the family

that was involved in this business over the years.

And there was competition.

Always was competition.

Everyone knows who the big men are here.

It's an open secret that no love is lost between the owner of Harrah's Club.

and the proprietor of Harvey's Wagon Wheel.

Bill Harrow was direct competition with my grandfather.

They were directly across the street.

They would compete toe -to -toe for customers, but we had no idea who would

something like this.

There was a lot of unknowns at the time and a lot of fear.

Harvey's Casino has been empty since an object believed to be a bomb was

delivered in a photocopier box.

An extortion note said it is a powerful, sensitive device.

This was the ransom note that was found with the bomb.

Stern warning to the management and bomb squad.

Do not move or tilt this bomb.

Don't try to flood or gas the bomb.

There is a float switch and an atmospheric pressure switch.

Both are attached to detonators.

Do not try to take it apart.

The flathead screws are also attached to triggers, and as much as one -quarter

to three -quarters of a turn will cause an explosion.

The letter said it had eight different ways for it to go off, so that put it in

a category that I certainly had never seen and that nobody had ever seen.

All the usual techniques went out the window, so that was scary.

Is there some reason to believe that they had some training in electronics

because of the sophistication of the device?

Absolutely. The bomb experts told us that this device was the most

sophisticated, homemade bombing device they have ever experienced and ever

witnessed. I also had the issue of the extortion payment.

He wanted $3 million in a helicopter.

He said, we had 24 hours to deliver that ransom.

The bomb had been delivered around 5 o 'clock in the morning of the 26th, and

that was one of the reasons we had to move this along.

And still we didn't have a motive other than a ransom.

Are we dealing with just some crank, or are we dealing with somebody that's very

serious?

Somebody that wants to cause a large loss of life?

You've got to establish the means, motive, and the opportunity.

In order to come up with a suspect

You Soviet crisis and

from our desk in Washington Frank Reynolds in straight -line, Nevada on

south shore of Lake Tahoe There is a powerful bomb in one of the major

casinos there and police and demolition experts are preparing to deal with it

Here is a report from Tom Shell I can I distinctly recall

seeing on the news that the bomb got into Harvey.

And I immediately called my brother and I said, we're screwed.

What are we going to do with it?

The authorities have appealed to the extortionists to make contact

so they can avoid a potentially disastrous explosion.

There it was on TV. Top news story of the day.

He had actually made it happen.

I know who was responsible for all of this.

because my brother and I were forced to help him.

I don't even know why I still have this album or how I wound up with it, but

it's stuck around through all the movies and all the years.

The John Burgess family.

The picture of... Is that Grandma?

That's Grandma.

of my hair.

We all kind of look like each other. Like, you look like your dad. I look

you. I got your nose.

What do you mean my nose?

This is just all articles about the court trial and the way it went. It

went on for years.

You know, I couldn't get on with my life until all this was over.

Are you guys ever in these?

Yeah, well, that's a picture of my brother, but it says my name underneath.

And then they tried a love -hate relationship between father and son.

A love -hate relationship?

I guess, yeah. Didn't y 'all just not like him?

Well, it's a weird deal. It's your parent. No matter how bad your parent

it's still your parent.

What do you know about your dad's involvement in all of that, in the

Not much.

I mean, he doesn't like to talk about it. Sometimes he will.

I don't think he, like, helped build the bomb.

Because he would have told me if he did, but did you help build the bomb?

We haven't really had an in -depth discussion on the mechanics of what I

involved in and what I wasn't involved in.

A

dad

should be, you know, your guide.

and take care and giving you an environment where you can thrive.

And he had that opportunity, a successful millionaire.

It all came crashing down for him, and he was going to get even.

If you wronged him, he extricated revenge.

He did it with people that worked for him, that worked with him, his ex -wife.

There was never any good outcome dealing with Big John.

You know, I was 18 at the time.

Came home from work one day and my dad said, I got to talk to you. And he was

broke and lost all his money.

He just said, I'm going to build a bomb and bomb Harvey's and get my money back.

It was like a joke.

You would never think anybody, let alone your father talking to you, would even

have a plan to make that succeed.

He says, I've got to keep it a secret, so I need you and your brother to help

with this.

And you need to call your brother and ask him.

My name is Kelly Cooper.

And I was John Jr.'s girlfriend.

I was only 14 when I met him at Little Okie's, which is a motocross place.

You know, John and Jim and all the guys would be racing motorcycles, and all of

us girls would be yelling and having a good time.

I would say it was love at first sight for both of us, I think.

John Jr.

was not a good influence on me.

He dropped out of school and had his own place.

He drove a van, which is also a parent's nightmare.

You can think about that.

And, well, you know, crazy things happen in vans.

But then Jim was kind of known as the goody -two -shoe kind of guy.

I've known Jimmy since 1973.

He's like my adopted little brother.

He was just a naturally gifted rider.

He had the potential to be really good.

I got sponsored in my motocross racing and was doing well there. I was a little

bit better than my brother, and it was a big issue.

You know, he talked about his brother some, but they were completely different

worlds. Little John did drugs, that kind of stuff, and Jimmy was not that way at

all.

I skimmed through that book.

I probably didn't read all of it because with my brothers and my relationship,

it was always a lot of fighting.

I think that is one of the best places to get his voice since he's no longer

here.

And so I was in a rendezvous place about an hour away from my brother and my

dad. So when the sun came up, I decided to just go back and see what happened.

So on the way back, I stopped.

I will

try

to recreate, to the best of my memory,

what would consume three and a half years of my life.

I was in the kitchen fixing breakfast for me and Kelly on a Saturday morning,

sitting on the porch with the brother I'd avoided since the day I moved out of

Big John's house three years before.

When Jim came to his apartment that first day, he walked in, I was there.

told John Jr.

what their dad's big plan was.

Jim said, He says he's going to blow up Harvey's Casino.

I said, you'll go to prison for the rest of your life. Are you kidding?

For your dad, who you don't even like.

Yes, it was definitely a shock.

The man who couldn't wait to throw me out of his house.

Now wants my help?

My dad was born in Hungary.

And as Kitsy told us, he was a double agent for the CIA.

He said that when the Nazis invaded Hungary, he was forced to join the

Luftwaffe and was trained as a pilot.

He scored 13 kills before his plane was shot down, and he found himself in a

Russian prison camp.

Which I find plausible because he did have all the prison tattoos from the

Gulag. Kids, what we had heard is that his wife or a group of people used a

and blew up the prison wall to get him out of prison.

I mean, it was a great story to hear as a kid, but it also made you like, oh, my

gosh, this guy's kind of spooky.

So you hear your dad telling you these stories, you automatically believe it,

but I couldn't tell you one way or another for sure.

He managed to find his way to America with his wife, Elizabeth.

And Clovis, California, became their home.

They found jobs. They learned the language. They had two sons.

Within a few years, Big John had his own landscaping business.

I think by 1966, he was one of the biggest contractors in California.

It was a multi -million dollar company then, in the 60s. And then they bought a

restaurant.

My parents were living the American dream.

My mother was the bookkeeper, and he did the work.

From the outside, they were a success story in Fresno.

But nobody knew how bad it was for the kids, the boys.

His problems, in my mind, started to...

manifest when we started having marital problems with my mom. He started

drinking and at some point we started gambling.

When Big John went to Harvey's, he was a very high roller.

He was doing $10 ,000 a hand playing two hands.

In blackjack.

In rolling that kind of money, he attracted a lot of attention from casino

management, from Harvey.

He was really treated like royalty.

I mean, to him, it was intoxicating.

And he wound up just being there all the time.

Big John became Harvey's friend as he spent into the millions inside Harvey's

Casino. And he became addicted to his status as much as he was addicted to the

gambling. And he just kept losing.

He lost more than he won at the tables until he found himself deeply in debt.

He lost his landscaping business and his restaurant due to his addiction at the

blackjack table.

He borrowed more and more money from Harvey in order to feed his addiction.

It got to a point where he was losing and not paying the market.

And he was no longer welcome there.

His obsession had cost him almost everything he owned.

He was so deranged that he actually thought The only way that he would lose

would be somebody had to cheat him.

So he was going to build that bomb and get the $3 million that he felt was

stolen from him.

We're headed to my childhood home.

Where the infamous bomb was constructed.

I haven't even seen pictures of it, so I have no idea what it looks like.

I mean, you didn't help build the bomb, right? Or did you?

No, I didn't.

I wouldn't know what to build.

But the day it came to fill it full of dynamite, we helped him do that.

You know, Jim's lived here for his whole life.

and he's never taken the kids by. Maybe they've done a drive -by, but they don't

know a lot about the story because it just takes them back to places that are

uncomfortable for him.

Going over the past with my kids, they have no idea. We never talked about it,

ever.

But my youngest daughter, Hope, is the one who's most curious about it.

So I'm trying to...

to open up more, to have her wind up different than me.

Well, I used to live here. Years ago, I grew up here.

You are a virgin.

Yes. No shit.

Is there any chance that we can come in and look around?

My husband's got all kinds of stuff in there.

Yeah, there you go.

Wow.

That car is so cool.

I remember when he built this shop.

He built the poles and welded them all together.

This was all self -taught.

This is where he...

He built a bomb.

In here. In here.

In that era and time, obedience to your parents was a lot different than

what it is now.

I mean, if you talk back, you got beat.

So it's like, it's just a different world now.

I don't want to sound like this is something that I was enthusiastic about

wanted to do. It was something that we were trained to say yes, so we said yes.

And so it just started evolving from that point forward, mainly with trying

procure the dynamite.

And it's not easy to find 1 ,000 pounds of dynamite.

In the High Sierra, a new season begins.

and construction continues on a massive undertaking, the Helms Pump Storage

Project.

At that time, Granite Construction Company was in the beginning stages of

constructing the Helms hydroelectric plant.

Tony, who was a friend that stopped by to visit Jim, had just started working

Granite Construction, and in the conversation, Tony had unknowingly

Big John, all the information he needed to know about the existence and the

location of the dynamite.

And that next day, my brother came over, and Big John described the plan he

concocted.

I couldn't help thinking how nice Big John could be when he wanted something.

It was one or two in the morning, late night.

We drove my brother's van up there.

There was a little bit of activity a few hundred yards away.

The job site was working 24 hours, so we waited until it calmed down a little

bit.

My dad had decided that he's going to use this backpack torch.

I thought it was kind of risky, being you're torching a lock off a dynamite

locker, but... Got in the locker and proceeded

to empty the contents of the locker into the van.

I was in such fear, thinking at any moment...

It's going to blow up.

So it was just terrifying the whole time.

The Fresno Bee ran an article telling of the dynamite theft.

I went, oh my gosh, they did it. They did it.

I remember saying that to myself, they did it. I didn't tell anybody.

Big John took about four months.

to fabricate and complete the bomb.

I heard from Big John again. He said, ready for your help, can you come to the

house tomorrow?

Showed me some drawings he had made.

The whole idea was incredible.

A very unique aspect of this device, that someone is cogitating and saying,

right, what can the police do to try to take this thing out?

Big John said, what could we use to prevent it from being flooded or foamed

short out the wiring?

We stood there, silently concentrating on the problem.

Suddenly my dad's eyes widened.

So what we have here is our reproduction of wheel bomb.

And in the FBI, we have a unit that does nothing but create courtroom exhibits.

In case you were thinking of flooding this, you know, this toilet float.

And you can see in the very center, there's a piece of plastic, white

As it rises, it comes up into this tube.

And when those two screws make contact, you complete a switch, and the bomb goes

off.

The motion detector was my idea.

Back in the 1980s, automotive alarms were really simple. If you shook the

it would go off. And so we kind of made a homemade version of that.

At the very center of this device, you can see what we call a trembler. You can

see this ball -bearing move in there, and when it makes contact, it could set

off the bomb.

I bet John's eyes lit up. I could see that he was noticeably impressed.

As this went along, I mean, I thought exactly I was doing it.

It had a seven -day irrigation timer.

Pressure switches on the top lid, and the bomb was double -walled, so if you

attempted to drill through it, it would complete the circuit and detonate.

At that moment, I felt a connection with my father that, until this night, had

never existed.

And I found myself unexpectedly caught up in the thrill of the adventure.

I mean, it was all very simple, but that was the genius of it.

As the bomb got closer to completion, he got his girlfriend Joan, a parole

officer, to make a gray cover for this thing.

homemade cut -out letters that said IBM on it.

And she helped him write the letters because his broken English could give

that he was a foreigner.

I'm sure she knew things about the law or things of police procedure or

investigative procedures.

I couldn't understand how a Fresno County probation officer could

an extortion attempt.

She must have been under the same spell as Jim and me.

So the farther along it went, we still just kept on...

rationalizing it that this isn't going to happen, this is going to happen.

The thoughts whirled through my head. What the hell am I doing?

I'm helping a man who is definitely insane.

It's like a whirlpool. You get stuck in and you can't get out.

My dad's idea of discipline was just physical abuse.

You know, physically beating you.

And it was just a common occurrence.

I lost teeth when he punched me in the mouth for having my elbow on the table.

Beat with a belt, beat with a stick, beat with a shovel.

And his idea, it made you tough. You know, tough for the world.

Yeah, John Jr.

and Jim, they do the motocross racing together, but other than that, they

hang out with one another or anything like that.

My brother and me didn't have a close relationship ever, and that was by

For my father, it was like raising two pit bulls.

You know, they might have been from the same litter, but they're trained to

fight each other.

But I think the bomb.

in a weird way, brought them together because they knew what they were doing

absolutely wrong.

The more your reality is becoming, me and my brother were trying to figure out

an exit strategy on this.

This bomb is going to either kill me, kill everybody, kill somebody, or I'm

going to get caught rolling the thing in the front door.

We ended up going through a trial loading of the bomb into the van.

The steel was quarter -inch plate, probably weighed, you know, 1 ,200, 1

pounds at least.

Jim held one wheel while I held the other, making sure they stayed in place.

Before I knew what was happening, my fingers were under the wheel of the

Big John said nothing.

He was too busy calculating what had gone wrong.

It hit me.

I had found a legitimate exit out of this debacle.

And at that point, my brother, he says, F this?

Jim finally spoke up. I won't do it if John won't.

He says, if I can get somebody else to push it in, will you pick up the money?

Will you commit to doing the ransom?

Sure, I'll pick up the money with you.

My brother goes, sure.

It's never going to happen anyway.

We're in the clear.

Well, we found out later that after we backed out, Big John hired two guys who

used to work at his landscape business.

And he promised them 100 grand apiece to roll this thing in the front.

Whether he told them that was a bomb or not, I got no clue.

I mean, they went along with it, no problem.

They were dressed up in all the one suits with the zip -up, and they had

little names on them just like they would be.

I guess they just looked the part.

This thing was so heavy, the carpet there was making it very difficult to

it. They called security to help them physically push this thing into the

elevator. Wait, security helped push it? Yeah, they had to call security to help

them push it.

I mean, it's the heave -ho thing, you know.

Then they took it up to the second floor where all the offices were.

Big John began to feel the exhilaration of what would be one of the most

impressive hands ever dealt him.

This was his moment.

The loss of his businesses, all the money being gone, was for a moment

completely forgotten.

He knew there would be panic and mass evacuations.

Harvey would have no choice but to pay the $3 million.

He felt alive again, his pride reborn.

At that time there were three news channels, and it was on all of them.

a report from Tom Schell.

not just national news, but worldwide as well.

As the evacuation progressed, authorities said they had not heard from

extortionists since they found a three -page note that demands a $3 million

payment in exchange for instructions on how to disarm the bomb.

The authorities have appealed to the extortionists to make contact

so they can avoid a potentially disastrous explosion.

I was in shock.

Never at any time did I think my father could pull this off.

He had actually made it happen.

At that point, you know, we still didn't have enough information on what was

going on inside that device.

And he has alluded to a time frame. You know, if I don't receive my money in 24

hours, then, you know, don't contact me. We won't contact you. It's going to,

you know, blow up.

That's our time limit. It's 24 hours. Because he's not going to blow it up

before he gets his money.

So he has to give us 24 hours. But after that, it's anybody's guess.

We knew that he wanted $3 million and a helicopter.

And our best shot was to catch these people at the time they picked up the

money. That was the weak part. They had to appear or send somebody.

We had done this over the years many times.

Never once did the criminal get the money and get away with it.

On hindsight, in looking at this, I probably should have put the bomb in

the plan to get the money was such a harebrained scheme that you're more

to get caught there or die.

A time of tension and danger is moving toward a conclusion.

Has there been any communication between yourself and the person who said that?

No, there hasn't.

It was time for me to keep my word.

There is a possibility of an explosion in the state line area.

Detonating that thing is the absolute last choice.

The nightmare was just beginning, and there was no way out.