Bringing Down the House

Three extortionists lose a $3 million gamble

A white van pulled up to the back entrance of Harvey's Resort Hotel-Casino in Stateline, Nev., about 5:30 a.m. one day last week. Out climbed two men in white coveralls who unloaded a gray, steel crate, with a small box on top, shrouded in plastic that was stamped IBM. The men carefully made their delivery to the casino's second-floor executive offices and departed.

Casino employees assumed that the containers held a new photocopying machine until someone read a three-page typewritten letter on top that said the big box contained a powerful bomb. The message demanded $3 million and a getaway helicopter in return for instructions on how to disarm the bomb and warned that any attempt to move or tinker with the box would automatically detonate it. The letter was signed: HAPPY LANDING.

Police, FBI agents, the Army's 34th Explosive Ordnance Disposal team and scientists from the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory soon arrived. All day, they gingerly examined the crate, which had twelve switches on top, and the small box with its 28 switches. They X-rayed the big crate and figured that it contained the equivalent of 1,000 sticks of dynamite; inside the small box was detonating equipment.

Just in case the bomb went off, city authorities evacuated 3,000 people from Harvey's eleven floors and from nearby houses. The windows at Harrah's, across the street from Harvey's, were boarded up. But life went on almost normally in Stateline, a community of seven casinos and 1,500 residents that is just a roll of the dice from the California border. Even at Harrah's, gamblers milled around the roulette wheels and card and dice tables.

Casino Owner Harvey Gross, 75, anted up $3 million in $100 bills and sent it by helicopter early the next morning to a rendezvous point. Once there, the chopper's pilot received new instructions from the extortionists to head for a strobe light flashing along a highway in northern California. He did so, fruitlessly hovered for half an hour looking for the signal and then flew back to Stateline.

Douglas County Sheriff Jerry Maple decided that there was no choice but to try to disarm the bomb. Though the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had offered to lend a robot with mechanical claw and television-camera eye, the authorities relied instead on a local firefighter, who attached a small explosive device to the bomb, which was supposed to either destroy the control box or detonate the crate's contents. At 3:42 p.m., authorities crossed their fingers and set off the small explosive.

Aa instant later, their fingers were in their ears. The bomb exploded with a tremendous blast, sending thick smoke billowing through the street and shooting glass and concrete as far as four blocks away. When the smoke cleared, no one was injured and Harvey's remained standing, with its first two floors gutted and nearly all of its windows blown out. FBI agents began combing their files for bombmakers in hopes of finding a lead that would take them to the extortionists In demanding $3 million, the gang it turned out, had offered even odds: authorities estimated the blast damage to the building at just that figure.

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