Part 1 of 3:Harveys explosive 30th anniversary detailed

Tahoe Tribune

SOUTH LAKE TAHOE Ñ John Birges had all the makings of an arch-villain from a James Bond movie: He was a brilliant inventor and businessman with a fondness for betting large sums of money at the blackjack tables; he was a ruthless perfectionist who would not tolerate weakness in those around him, even his own family; he even had an authentic Hungarian accent.

And, like an over-the-top movie antagonist, he would construct an unstoppable doomsday weapon that he planned to use as the centerpiece in an overly complicated plot to extort $3 million from HarveyÕs Resort Hotel in Stateline, Nev.

The plan

No one knows exactly when Birges made the transition from retired landscape contractor and restaurant owner to criminal mastermind, but his plan began to materialize around October of 1979, when he rented a studio apartment, No. 76, at the Aspen Grove Apartments in Stateline, just a mile north of HarveyÕs.

He split his time between the Tahoe apartment and the home he shared with his girlfriend, Ella Joan Williams, at 1590 North Fowler Ave. in Clovis.

He spent much of the next six months at Tahoe gambling at HarveyÕs, where he had been known as a Òhigh rollerÓ at the blackjack tables for the past several years. He had long since gone through his retirement savings and the insurance money he had received after his Villa Basque restaurant in Fresno burned down. Toward the end of his stay at Tahoe, he had to borrow money from his 18-year-old son just to pay his rent. During this period, when his plans to get rich playing blackjack failed to work out, he developed a plan to extort money from the casino, and used his time there to observe the operations of the staff, the timing of security shift changes, and he even measured the height of the curb outside the lobby entrance, for when he would someday need to roll a bomb into the hotel.

In the winter of 1980 Birges told his sons, 18-year-old Jim and 19-year-old John Jr., about his plans to build a bomb and extort money from HarveyÕs, but they did not think he was serious.

It wasnÕt until the night of June 10, 1980, that his plans began to crystallize into reality. Birges convinced his sons to help him steal about 1,000 pounds of explosives from a construction site at the Helms Power Plant near the Wishon Reservoir in eastern Fresno County. They returned to the house in Clovis and stashed the cases of Hercules Unigel dynamite sticks in the walk-in freezer that Birges had built in his garage.

Birges spent the next two months constructing a bomb, with multiple triggering mechanisms, large enough to contain the stolen explosives. But when the device was finally complete and ready to be delivered to HarveyÕs, his sons refused to participate in bringing the bomb to the casino, thinking the plan was too dangerous.

So, on Aug. 24, 1980, John Birges called Willis ÒBillÓ Brown, a former employee at his landscaping business who had been looking for work. Brown and his son-in-law, Terry Lee Hall, drove over to BirgesÕ house in Clovis, and they agreed to help him deliver his ÒmachineÓ to HarveyÕs, with the promise that they would each receive $2,000 after Birges received the extortion payoff. They drove up to Lake Tahoe that night in the white 1975 Dodge van that Birges had borrowed from his older son, John Jr., with the bomb loaded in the back.

Road trip

When John Birges, Bill Brown, and Terry Hall arrived in South Lake Tahoe in the early morning hours of Aug. 25, 1980, they stopped at the Lake Tahoe Airport off of U.S. Highway 50. Birges got out of the van with a briefcase and walked to a pay-phone, then returned a few minutes later. As they drove into the city, the sun was starting to rise and the vanÕs engine was running poorly, so Birges decided that it was too late that day to make the delivery to HarveyÕs, and they drove back to the airport, where Birges got out again and returned to the van a few minutes later.

They then drove by HarveyÕs Resort Hotel in Stateline, where Birges showed Brown and Hall the lobby entrance where they would be delivering the Òmachine.Ó

They drove back across the state line and had breakfast at a local diner in South Lake Tahoe. Around 11 a.m., they checked in to room 8 of the Balahoe Motel, at 1313 Emerald Bay Road, just a couple blocks north of the Lake Tahoe Airport. Birges gave money to Hall for the registration, and Hall signed in with the false name ÒJoey Evetto,Ó but the motel clerk wrote down the California license plate number of the van: 1A65819.

The delivery

John Birges awoke around 2:30 a.m. on Aug. 26, 1980, and instructed Bill Brown and Terry Hall to clean up the room, remove any fingerprints they may have left, then drive the van down to the Lake Tahoe Airport and pick him up.

Birges then walked down to the Lake Tahoe Airport with his briefcase. When the van never showed up, he walked back up the hill to the motel, where he found Brown and Hall trying to start the engine, but the battery had died. They had to call a tow truck to jump-start the van.

Once the van was started, they drove to Stateline and pulled into the parking lot behind HarrahÕs, where they ÒborrowedÓ a license plate from another van and fastened it over their own using rubber bands.

They then drove back to the California side of the state line, across the street from HarveyÕs Resort Hotel, where they unloaded the ÒmachineÓ from the back of the van, using metal ramps and a rope-and-pulley system that Birges had constructed. They then tied the bomb, on a rolling cart, to the back bumper of the van, and towed it across the street to the parking lot behind HarveyÕs.

Brown and Hall pushed the cart to the lobby entrance, where the height of the rolling cart matched the height of the curb, while Birges parked the van nearby. At the curb, Brown and Hall rolled the bomb, covered by a cloth with an ÒIBMÓ logo, off the cart and into the hotel lobby, where Hall pushed the bomb into the elevator and took it up to the second floor, while Brown went back and picked up the cart, loaded it into the van, and drove the van across the street to the HarrahÕs parking lot.

Birges met Hall on the second floor, and helped him position the bomb in a corridor near the casinoÕs business offices. Birges then used toothpicks and glue to jam the locks on doors at either end of the corridor, to prevent someone from wandering by and accidentally triggering the bomb.

Birges left a three-page extortion note in an envelope next to the bomb, then he and Hall walked across Highway 50 and met Brown at the van behind HarrahÕs. After discarding their borrowed license plate, they drove back into California and returned home to Fresno County. Birges slept most of the way as Brown drove, because he was going to be busy the following night.

The evacuation

Shortly before 6 a.m., Robert M. Vinson, the graveyard shift slot manager at HarveyÕs, walked out of his office on the second floor of the casino and found that someone had closed the doors at either end of the hallway and filled the locks with glue. He also saw a large, metal device in the hallway with an envelope next to it.

Vinson contacted Richard Lawson and William A. Schonfeld at the security desk on the main floor of the casino. After going upstairs to examine the doors on the second floor and the metal device and envelope left in the hallway, Schonfeld had security officers secure the area and they called Simon ÒPeteÓ Caban Jr., the security supervisor, and Bud Briggs, the casino shift manager.

Caban and security officer Wayne Watt, initially thinking the envelope on the floor might be a letter bomb, poked at the letter with broom handles while taking cover behind the large metal device in the hallway.

Once they determined it was just a letter, they opened the envelope and found the extortion note, stating that the metal machine was a bomb, and that it could not be disarmed or moved without setting it off. The letter demanded $3 million in cash, delivered by helicopter, in exchange for instructions to safely disarm and move the bomb. Bob Scrafford, chief of security, was notified, along with the Douglas County SheriffÕs Office and the Tahoe-Douglas Fire Protection District.

Security shift sergeant Richard Lawson, whose father was a longtime bomb disposal expert for the El Dorado County SheriffÕs Office, implemented the emergency evacuation plan that his father had helped create for the casino, getting all guests and employees out of the hotel within 50 minutes.

Authorities respond

Fire Chief Bruce D. Kanoff and the Tahoe-Douglas Bomb Squad worked to analyze the improvised explosive device, while Douglas County sheriffÕs deputies collected fingerprints and other forensic evidence from the device.

The Douglas County SheriffÕs Office, South Lake Tahoe Police Department, Nevada Highway Patrol, California Highway Patrol, and El Dorado County SheriffÕs Office helped to set up a safe perimeter around the casino on both sides of the state line.

Special Agent William Jonkey, of the FBIÕs Carson City resident agency, soon arrived to oversee the investigation of the extortion case. Since the extortion letter demanded a ransom drop via helicopter, the FBI contacted Special Agent Joe E. Cook, a U.S. Navy veteran who had flown nearly 1,000 hours in a helicopter in Vietnam.

Cook flew an FBI helicopter from Los Angeles up to South Lake Tahoe, where he was directed to go to the Lake Tahoe Airport and await contact from the extortionists, as detailed in the extortion letter.

The payoff

After returning to his Fresno County home in the afternoon of Aug. 26, 1980, John Birges informed his girlfriend, Ella Joan Williams, and his two sons, John and Jim Birges, that he had successfully delivered the bomb to HarveyÕs, and he would need all of them to help him collect the ransom money to be delivered that night.

They drove in two cars up to El Dorado County. Birges directed Williams to drive her silver Toyota Celica to the Cameron Park Airport, west of Placerville, where she would wait for Birges to land in a helicopter and drive him back home.

Birges and his two sons drove his gold Volvo east on U.S. Highway 50 to the planned ransom drop site off of Ice House Road, north of Highway 50 between Placerville and Kyburz, where they planned to signal the helicopter to land using a strobe light, then hijack the helicopter at gunpoint, but they discovered that they had forgotten to bring an extra battery to power the light, so they drove up the highway to Kyburz, where they tried to steal a battery from an old Volkswagen parked outside a service station.

Hearing intruders outside his business late at night, the owner of the garage, Jesse James Martin, came out yelling and scared them off.

Birges and his sons drove back down Highway 50 to Placerville, where they purchased a new car battery at ColvinÕs Shell Service Station at Main and Spring streets.

They then drove back up to Ice House Road, and John Birges got out with his younger son, Jim, at a clearing in the mountains. They took with them the strobe light, battery, and three guns: a .303 British, a .22 caliber Remington, and a .357 Magnum.

After dropping off his father and younger brother on Ice House Road, John Birges Jr. drove a few miles west on Highway 50 to Pacific House, where, shortly after midnight the morning of Aug. 27, 1980, he used a pay-phone to call the Lake Tahoe Airport.

He informed the helicopter pilot that instructions for the ransom drop were in a letter taped under a table below the phone, which his father had hidden before delivering the bomb.

John Jr. then drove the Volvo south to a clearing near HamÕs Station, on Highway 88 between Kirkwood and Jackson, where he was to await the stolen helicopter that his father would be flying.

His fatherÕs plan was to force the pilot out of the helicopter, then fly it himself down to HamÕs Station. He would drop off Jim with the ransom money, and the brothers would drive back to Fresno County in the Volvo, while their father would fly the helicopter alone to the Cameron Park Airport, where Ella Joan Williams was waiting to pick him up.

Once they all got back home, John Birges planned to fly to Europe and launder the $3 million in cash, and HarveyÕs would receive the instructions on how to safely disarm and move the bomb out of the casino. Birges would be a wealthy man once again, and HarveyÕs could get back to business as usual.

What could possibly go wrong?

For the ransom note, see page A-8.

Look for the continuation of this story in MondayÕs issue of the Mountain Democrat.