[crime] The Zero-Armed Bandit … the forgotten story from 1980 of an attempt to blackmail a casino using a large sophisticated bomb …
Contrary to the claims in his extortion letter, John Birges’s machine did not contain any TNT at all. The ambiguous cylinders that the bomb squad saw in their foggy X-ray photographs turned out to be a material of entirely different chemical composition. They were tubes containing a combination of gelatin and nitroglycerin, a product known as dynamite. Just shy of one half of one ton of the stuff.
The sides of Harvey’s Wagon Wheel Casino’s eleven-story tower erupted in billowing geysers of atomized concrete. Distant rubberneckers, some of them already wearing T-shirts with sentiments such as “I got bombed at Tahoe,” whooped and cheered in schadenfreude celebration as meteors of glass, pulverized wood, and miscellaneous building shrapnel arced into the sky. Neighboring buildings shuddered and windows shattered. Pebbles of concrete fell like a light hail, and within minutes bits of papery detritus were flittering from the sky like filthy confetti. Harvey Gross declined to speak with anyone in the press regarding the incident, but his colleagues would later say there were tears in his eyes as he looked upon the bedraggled building.’
Casino Bomb Blackmail 1980!
This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 8th, 2015 at 1:06 pm and is filed under Crime.
« Evening Standard Billboard Flashback: The Olympic 2012 Bid Win and 7/7 as Breaking News Coronation Street Says Goodbye To Deirdre Barlow »