Futility Closet - 104-The Harvey's Casino Bombing

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Starting point is 00:00:36 Tata, is now available everywhere books are sold and at kensingtonbooks.com. Welcome to the Futility Closet podcast, forgotten stories from the pages of history. Visit us online to sample more than 9,000 quirky curiosities, from the first pig to fly, to Ben Franklin's trick to getting a seat at the fireside. This is episode 104. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In August 1980, someone planted a 1,000-pound bomb in Harvey's Wagon Wheel Casino in western Nevada. Unless the owners came up with $3 million, within 24 hours, the bomb would go off and destroy the casino. In today's show, we'll describe the tense drama that followed and the FBI's efforts to catch the criminal behind it. We'll also consider some dubious lawn care shortcuts and puzzle over why a man would tear up a winning ticket.

Starting point is 00:01:39 Thanks to listener Tom Turriton for suggesting this one. It starts with a man named Bob Vinson who was out of cigarettes. Vinson was the graveyard shift supervisor at Harvey's Wagon Wheel Casino in Stateline, Nevada. And he was in the administrative offices on the second floor of the casino, which is on the south shore of Lake Tahoe. This was at 5.30 a.m. on August 26, 1980. When he realized he was out of cigarettes, Vinson got up from his desk and went out into the hallway where he noticed that a door that was normally closed was open, an accordion door that led to the casino's internal telephone exchange. So he put his head in there and saw that there was a large box, actually two boxes, one on top of the other. The bottom box was quite large. It was four feet high, about the size of a desk or a copy machine. Apparently it had been wheeled in

Starting point is 00:02:24 there and the wheels had then been retracted and then it had been leveled on blocks of wood using bubble levels on each corner. On top of this large box was a smaller box that bore 28 toggle switches and all but one of these were flipped in the same direction. On the floor next to all this was an envelope that was addressed to Harvey's management and inside this was a three-page letter that said this was a giant bomb, that the box was filled with 1,000 pounds of TNT, which was enough to blow up the whole casino, and in fact to severely damage Harrah's, another casino across the street.

Starting point is 00:02:55 So the letter advised cordoning off a minimum of 1,200 feet around the building and evacuating the whole area. It said that moving, tilting, gassing, or flooding the device would set it off and that wires had been attached to the screws that held it together so that trying to dismantle it would detonate it as well. Only the bomb's creator knew what the 28 toggle switches were for. The letter said this bomb can never be dismantled or disarmed without causing an explosion, not even by the creator, meaning this bomb is definitely going to go off and there's

Starting point is 00:03:24 nothing anyone can do about it. The best they could do would be to deliver $3 million in used $100 bills by helicopter to intermediaries for the extortionist, and in exchange, he'd give them information that would tell them how to make it safe to move so they could move it out, presumably into the desert somewhere where it could go off safely. But that was the best case scenario, just to get it out. If they didn't pay the three million dollars, the bomb would just go off in the casino and destroy it. The letter said there will be no extension or renegotiation. The transaction has to take place within 24 hours. Any deviation from these conditions will leave your casino in shambles. There was a lot to lose here. Harvey's Wagon Wheel was one of the first casinos built in

Starting point is 00:04:02 Stateline, which is an isolated resort town on the southeastern shore of Lake Tahoe. It was big. It was 11 stories tall and had been built 18 years earlier for $20 million, and it was quite active. Even though all this was discovered at 5.30 in the morning, if Bob Vinson had made the mistake of trying to tamper with it before he'd read the warnings in the note, 600 people would have died. So they called the local police who called the FBI and they put together a bomb team that tried to learn as much as they could about the bomb without actually tampering with it. They photographed it and x-rayed it. They dusted it for fingerprints. They scanned it for radiation and they listened to it with stethoscopes. The x-ray showed that it was very complex. They recognized some of the features

Starting point is 00:04:44 that the note had described as well as some features that it hadn't. And the material in the bottom box that nearly filled it was dense to their portable x-ray machine. The investigators couldn't be sure, but it seemed possible they were looking at the largest improvised bomb in U.S. history. So they set up a command post in a conference room on the second floor of the Sahara Tahoe, which is a few hundred yards away, and the sheriff's office began to evacuate everyone from within a half-mile radius of the building. Within two hours, the bomb was national news. Just a note here that I thought was interesting. You couldn't go to Harvey's at this point because it was completely empty. They just evacuated the whole thing, but there are other casinos on the shore of Lake Tahoe, and you could

Starting point is 00:05:21 gamble in them, and they began to make book on what would happen at Harvey's. Oh, wow. So you could still go to Lake Tahoe and go to a casino and bet on whether the neighboring casino was going to blow up. There's just something distinctly American about that. I guess that makes sense, yeah. This actually wasn't the first bomb threat that had happened here. Bomb threats came in once or twice a year, usually at the big casinos,

Starting point is 00:05:40 and often they were quite complex and clever, but they all had the same weakness, which is that at some point, the extortionist had to show up and get his hands on the money. And that's usually when the feds got the drop on them. That seemed to be the weak point in all of these plans. So that was the plan here. The best thing they could think of would be to try to go through with paying the demand and see if they could grab the guy when he came to get the money. So according to the instructions, at 11 p.m., the FBI landed a helicopter near a payphone at the Lake Tahoe airport carrying the $3 million, or actually carrying three bags full of paper that had been cut and colored to look like money and that had $1,000 in real

Starting point is 00:06:17 bills on top of it. Behind the pilot's seat was an FBI agent with a machine gun, and there was a six-man SWAT team in another helicopter that was so high overhead that it was inaudible. So the pilot gets out of the helicopter and goes to stand next to the payphone. The phone rang and he answered it and a voice told him that he'd find instructions taped under the shelf in the phone booth. The note said, to the pilot, I remind you again to strictly follow orders. It told him to follow Highway 50 west in a straight line staying below 500 feet, and after 15 minutes to start looking for a strobe light on the right. Then he'd have to land facing south,

Starting point is 00:06:50 and 200 feet away he'd find further instructions nailed to the trunk of a tree. He tried to follow all these instructions but couldn't see the strobe light. It was only later when he double-checked the instructions that he realized he'd misunderstood them. They had told him to fly, not to follow the highway, but to fly to it and then beyond it in a straight line, which he hadn't done. So he'd run up miles from where he was supposed to be, which is an understandable mistake, but a really costly one because now they have no way to get in touch with the extortionist, no way to disable the bomb.

Starting point is 00:07:19 And it's been, the original note said you have 24 hours to get this sorted out or the bomb's going to go off, and now they're running perilously out of time. The helicopter returned to Tahoe. The SWAT team stood down, and the governor, via radio and TV, pleaded with the extortionists to make contact again, but no one responded. Well, now they've got a bomb that's presumably going to go off at any moment, so they've got to try something, and there's no way to contact the extortionists. So the bomb team just began to brainstorm ideas about what they might try to resolve the situation. They thought they could flood the bomb with liquid nitrogen,

Starting point is 00:07:50 they could encase it in concrete, perhaps pick it up and carry it gingerly to a nearby golf course. Finally, someone suggested using what's called a linear-shaped charge to defeat it. That's basically another explosive, a precisely formed piece of plastic explosive that's encased in a brass jacket, which when it goes off, sends a plane of superheated gas out in an aimable direction. If you remember, the bomb itself is a big box full of what the note says is TNT with the brain on top of it. So they wanted to aim this linear shape charge so that when it went off, this plane of superheated gas would sever one from the other.

Starting point is 00:08:26 And the hope was that that would happen in half a millisecond, which hopefully would be fast enough that if it was booby-trapped, it would just sever the connection before the booby trap could wake up and activate itself, and that would defeat the bomb. There was no guarantee at all that this would work, but it was the only thing they could think of, and there was no alternative. If they just did nothing, then the bomb was going to go off and definitely destroy the casino. They asked the casino owner, Harvey Gross, what to do about this. He said he didn't mind what happened to the building, but he would be very distressed if the bomb went off because it would put his employees out of work. There was enough TNT in there to destroy the building outright

Starting point is 00:09:00 or to do so much damage that it would take months to rebuild. But again, there was no alternative. It seemed like the bomb was going to go off if they didn't try something. So this is what they decided to do. They set up the shape charge and aimed it so that it would sever the brain on top from the bomb underneath, surrounded this whole business with 260,000 sandbags, evacuated the whole area, and then set it off by remote control from a parking lot nearby. This actually might have worked except for two things. One is that the extortion note was wrong. The bomb wasn't packed with TNT, but with dynamite, which is more sensitive.

Starting point is 00:09:33 And all the dynamite wasn't just in the bottom box. He put some in the top box as well, which they hadn't counted on. So... Oh, so the extortionist probably did this on purpose to mislead them? They found out afterward he'd booby-trapped it in a thousand ways. It was a really fiendishly complex— I mean, they had to try something that seemed a reasonable thing to try, but it just didn't work. So when they set off the shape charge, that set off the dynamite in the top box, which set off the dynamite in the bottom box, and the whole thing went up.

Starting point is 00:09:59 It blasted a five-story hole in one side of the hotel and scattered glass and debris across both sides of the Nevada-California state line. It actually broke windows, a lot of them, in Harrah's, which is this other casino across the street because the two were attached by a tunnel. That's how strong the blast was. The good news is that no one was killed or injured, but the hotel was forced to close for 10 months and rebuilding it cost $18 million.

Starting point is 00:10:22 Well, now at least the urgency of trying to figure out what to do about the bomb is behind them for better or worse and so the fbi could focus on trying to get the culprit and the first step there was immediately to begin sifting the debris for evidence and it turns out if you blow up a casino there's a lot of debris there's money and casino chips and coins from the slot machines and it took a long time to sift through all this stuff looking for pieces of the bomb or for other clues that might help them in the investigation. This was the largest post-blast investigation

Starting point is 00:10:48 ever undertaken by the FBI at the time. See, I'm thinking the guy must have spent a lot of time and money building this thing. Yeah. And then he didn't end up getting his money. I mean, he planned everything out so carefully, but he didn't have a fail-safe for what if the pilot misunderstands

Starting point is 00:11:05 the directions and can't find the strobe light. Yeah. And that's all it takes is just one guy misreads one note. And this whole plan, which had apparently taken months and months to devise, just fell apart. Four casinos, including Harvey's, put up a bounty of $200,000 for any money that would lead investigators to catch the people who had done this. The reward was eventually raised to half a million dollars, and that began to bring people out of the woodwork. Some witnesses said they had seen two men awkwardly wheeling a hand truck in the Harvey's parking lot just before the bomb had been discovered, and nearby was a white Ford panel truck that was waiting nearby. So the police were

Starting point is 00:11:41 on the lookout for a white truck and men who matched this description. Also, the bounty brought in a call from a hotel. Apparently, some men had stayed there the night before who the owner thought had been acting suspiciously, and he did the presence of mind to write down their license plate number. That led the FBI to a man named Johnny Burgess who lived in Clovis near Fresno, California, and who couldn't explain why he'd been in Tahoe at 5 a.m. on August 26th. He said he'd been looking for spots to grow marijuana, but you wouldn't do that at 5 in the morning in Lake Tahoe. That's the best you could think. Second connection, another one also to John Burgess, a man called the FBI and said that he dated a woman named Kelly Cooper who had once dated John Burgess. And she said she had once heard his

Starting point is 00:12:25 brother tell him that their father, Big John Burgess, planned to build a bomb to extort a million dollars from Harvey's Wagon Wheel Casino in Lake Tahoe. And he turned out to be the guilty party. His name was John Burgess, a 59-year-old Hungarian immigrant who had made his fortune in landscaping and restaurants, but had sort of fallen apart in his late 50s. He was addicted to gambling and lost an awful lot of his money. His businesses kind of went south, and he'd been diagnosed with abdominal cancer, which was terminal, and he'd been divorced twice. So everything was falling apart for him. He thought he had nothing to live for and came up with this notion of extorting money

Starting point is 00:13:02 from Harvey's, where he used to do a lot of gambling. He was treated quite well when he was spending a lot of money when he was on top and they treated him quite lavishly, but that had sort of fallen apart and he felt kind of humiliated at his treatment there in recent months when he'd been going there and they didn't treat him as well. So he hoped to extort $3 million from them to get back on top. That was a motivation for all of this. He told his sons that he was building the bomb. They knew about the whole plan as it was going along, and they didn't turn him in because they thought it would give their father some hope. The IRS had recently sent him a letter demanding $30,000 in back taxes, and he'd begun to talk of suicide. So they thought, well, let's let him go

Starting point is 00:13:35 ahead with this crazy plan. He'll never actually go through with it. At the very worst, they'll catch him when he tries to deliver the bomb. They didn't think anything would actually come of it. But he actually did devise this whole complicated, sophisticated bomb. He fancied himself something of an inventor and apparently was quite good at dealing with this sort of thing. Finished building the bomb, asked his sons to deliver it to the casino for him, and they just flatly refused. So he hired two other men, Willis Brown and Terry Hall, to wheel the bomb into a side entrance that morning. They just put a cover over it that said IBM, so it looked like a piece of computer equipment. So they all went to trial. Burgess was sentenced to life without parole, and he died of liver cancer in prison exactly 16 years and a

Starting point is 00:14:13 day after the bombing. The two men who delivered the bomb for him, Brown and Hall, were also sentenced. They actually didn't know it was a bomb they were delivering. He didn't tell them until afterward, but they didn't go to the authorities after that. So they were convicted on that account. It seems like such a shame if he was that clever. It seems like he had to have been that clever. He was very proud of that. And apparently, you've got to say, it apparently was an amazing bomb. But I guess I'm saying it's a shame that he didn't use his mental abilities for some other purpose. More constructive purpose. Yeah, that's true.

Starting point is 00:14:48 So that's basically the story of the Harvey's bombing. Harvey's is still open. You can visit it today. The good news is that no one was injured in all of this dramatic adventure. And it actually served in the long run as a beneficial training exercise for the FBI. The FBI built this complicated plexiglass model of the Harvey's bomb with all its booby traps and fusing mechanisms for Burgess's trial, and they still use that to train explosive technicians in Quantico. And the investigative techniques and protocols that were

Starting point is 00:15:15 used in solving the whole case proved useful, sadly, in other big bombing cases in the future, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing in New York and the bombing of the federal courthouse in Oklahoma City in 1995. FBI Special Agent Thomas Monall said, Today's IEDs use more advanced electronics. Our techniques and tools for dealing with these devices are also more advanced, but you still probably couldn't build a bomb much tougher to defeat than Harvey's. Our podcast really depends on the support of our listeners. We do accept advertising, but it unfortunately doesn't begin to cover the big commitment of time that it takes to make the show. So if you like Futility Closet and want to help us out so that we can keep celebrating the quirky and the curious, please check out our Patreon campaign at patreon.com slash futilitycloset. If you pledge at least a dollar an episode, you'll get access to our

Starting point is 00:16:14 activity feed, where you'll find outtakes and extralateral thinking puzzles and learn what's going on behind the scenes of the show, as well as what Sasha, our show mascot, has been doing lately. You can also help us out by making a donation at the website or by helping spread the word about us. We can always use help with that. Thanks so much to everyone who helps support the show. We have some listener updates on some lateral thinking puzzles from previous episodes. These are all from episodes that came out two or more weeks ago, but if you're very behind and don't want to have any puzzles spoiled for you, you might want to skip ahead a few minutes.

Starting point is 00:16:53 In episode 99, we had a puzzle about sabotaging coal supplies with disguised bombs during the Civil War. Drew Lambert wrote to say, war. Drew Lambert wrote to say, I was browsing imager.com today and came across this post showing a purported hidden cache of German saboteur materials. How surprised I was to see a coal bomb as described in your recent lateral thinking puzzle about civil war sabotage. And the photo series Drew is referring to says, here's an interesting finding from a Latvian forest, five hermetic containers intended for German saboteurs who acted in the time of World War II in the rear of Red Army. For 70 years, the containers were reliably protected from moisture, so the contents are preserved even better than it could be at a

Starting point is 00:17:35 warehouse. And one of the images is of what looks like a lump of coal with the caption, explosives disguised to look like coal. They were thrown onto coal piles at railway stations, then they got into a locomotive furnace and incapacitated it. The idea actually dates back to the Civil War. That sounds kind of primitive for World War II, but it's very effective. It's a very good idea. Even if the enemy knows that you're doing it,

Starting point is 00:17:58 they can't stop and inspect every lump of coal, and they need to use it for fuel. Yeah. Unfortunately, this doesn't say whether these were ever actually used. I mean, I'd be really curious if anybody knows, did this ever actually work? And we'll have a link in the show notes

Starting point is 00:18:13 to the photos if anybody wants to see that. Stephanie Gerton wrote in and said, I love your podcast and I especially love trying out your logic puzzles on my husband. While considering the puzzle about the exploding coal in the Civil War, he toldapons of the Navy Seals that says, All sorts of things were made and packaged in regular CHICOM and Russian packaging. B-40 rounds, mortar rounds, grenades, even small arms ammunition filled with explosives instead of propellant powder. And Stephanie says,

Starting point is 00:18:57 This left the Viet Cong leery of trusting their own ammunition, and the SEALs considered it more effective even than removing or destroying the caches outright. That's clever. You know, I wouldn't have thought of doing that. Yeah, but it's like a similar theme. Like we did the explosive rats and, you know, we've got this exploding coal and now we have these exploding ammunitions. Apparently it's been tried in several wars. I guess it's a very good idea. And Stephanie was also able to confirm the puzzle solution from episode 98 about spray painting grass for the 1996 Olympics. I had said that I couldn't verify whether or not that had ever actually happened. And she says, I can offer some confirmation of your story the painting efforts and joking that next the organizers would want people to paint the leaves of the trees along the Olympic whitewater kayaking and canoeing courses as well. And also on the topic of spray painting for Olympics, Maris Milgravas wrote to us from Latvia and sent a link to a video of preparations for the 2014

Starting point is 00:20:01 Sochi Olympics. Maris says, apparently most expensive Olympics in history of world wasn't prepared in time, so they used some shortcuts. And the video is of people in a truck spraying green, basically just expanses of plain dirt, I guess, so it would look like grass. Morris also sent a link to an article in the Telegraph

Starting point is 00:20:23 about a practice in China of spraying yellowed grass with a green dye so that the grass will look healthier and lusher. And the article suggests that this practice has been going on for several years now in China and that there's a long history of similar projects undertaken by the Communist Party, such as digging up whole fields of crops and replanting them along a route taken by Chairman Mao so that he would see better conditions than were actually there, or more recently, putting fake sheep on ravaged grasslands or painting entire mountains green to hide the damages of mining. You'd have to be kind of nearsighted to fall for that. Yeah, I don't know. But anyway, they apparently did spray paint grass green for the Olympics, so that's been verified. Our puzzle from episode 101 was about people unable to log into a computer system while standing up. A listener had based that on a post in the Reddit group Tales from Tech Support,

Starting point is 00:21:17 and Mark Donner wrote to say, I can tell you from personal experience that this did indeed happen, though the location and timing reported in the Reddit post are not accurate. The actual incident occurred at IBM's Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, sometime between 1978 and 1981. The context was that when one wanted to print sensitive information, one was required to go to the data center where the printers were located and release your print job manually. the data center where the printers were located and release your print job manually. There was a 3277 terminal sitting on a small table near the printer so that you could log on and release the print job. While there was a chair at this table, most people simply did this standing up since the transaction was extremely quick. The 3277 terminal had a wonderful keyboard that was a dream to use.

Starting point is 00:22:00 It also featured removable key caps so that the same hardware could be used for multiple languages. All of the keys were blank and were personalized by snapping a thin plastic shell marked with the appropriate letter down onto the key core. Anyway, what happened is the MNN keycaps had been swapped so that anyone typing a password containing either of those letters while standing at the keyboard was likely to get the password wrong, but get it correct when touch typing their password while sitting at the keyboard. As I recall, the diagnosis of this problem took a number of days with the serious systems people scratching their heads about it in puzzlement and trying many different experiments. Not bad. So that's basically the same as the puzzle, only the location and timing were a little bit different, but it's basically the M and the N keys got switched. Yeah, and I'm glad he wrote in because I thought the least plausible part of that puzzle

Starting point is 00:22:48 was the idea that you'd be able to switch two of the keys, but I hadn't thought about removable keycaps. That makes perfect sense. That does make perfect sense, yeah. And I guess they don't know whether somebody did it deliberately or accidentally, or I guess that's not known. Or whether this has happened more than once,

Starting point is 00:23:05 whether this is the one incident. Oh, that's true, too. Or whether this has happened more than once. That's true, too. Whether this is the one incident. Oh, that's true, too. Or whether this has happened multiple times. I hope not. And lastly, Bob Persing wrote, Long-time fan, first-time correspondent. Thanks very much for making such an interesting show.

Starting point is 00:23:18 Your lateral thinking puzzle in episode 102 about the man who rented three cars for moving day reminded me of my opposite situation. In 1998, I was supposed to move to an apartment in Center City, Philadelphia. Unfortunately, the movie In Her Shoes was being filmed in my new neighborhood, and the city had allowed the production company to park their trailers for several blocks around. This wouldn't have been a problem, except the shoot went several weeks longer than expected. So I had to call the moving company and say,

Starting point is 00:23:45 I need to postpone my move because Cameron Diaz is camped out in front of my new house and she won't leave. So thanks so much to everyone who writes in to us. If you have any questions or comments, please send them to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. And if anyone has ever managed to mispronounce your name ever at any time, please do me a favor and tell me in your email how

Starting point is 00:24:07 you like it pronounced. It's Greg's turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. I'm going to give him an odd sounding situation and he has to figure out what's going on asking only yes or no questions this puzzle comes from listener matt sergeant okay a man pawns his watch for 200 he takes the money to a race track and puts it all on the fifth horse in the second race to win the race begins with a within a furlong horse number five is well ahead of the pack the horse increases his lead and appears certain to cross the finish line first.

Starting point is 00:24:46 But before that happens, the man takes his betting ticket, tears it up, and throws it to the ground. He then calls his wife on the phone and says, Honey, we can now afford to take that vacation you wanted. What happened? I like the puzzle. Is this true?

Starting point is 00:25:03 It's partially based on something that Matt saw happen. Really? Partially, yeah. Wow. Okay. A man pawns his watch and basically goes to the track and bets on a horse and then tears up the ticket. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:25:13 Even though- When it becomes clear that the horse is likely to win. Yeah. It appears certain to cross the finish line first, but before it actually even does that, the man tears up his ticket. Okay. Just to be super clear, by win, we mean win the race, mean arrive at the finish line before the other horses?

Starting point is 00:25:27 Yes, come in, right, go across the finish line before the other horses do. And this is a conventional horse race, what I'm thinking of as a horse race. Okay. Yes. Do I need to know anything about his watch or its value, anything like that? Is there anything unusual about the pawn shop? No. So he pawns his watch, meaning he gives them his watch in return for some cash.

Starting point is 00:25:43 You said $200. Yeah. With the understanding that if he comes back later, he can buy the watch back. Sure. Okay. Goes to the track, and you said puts $200 on this horse? Yes. Do we need to know anything about this particular horse? No. It's just a horse in a horse race?

Starting point is 00:25:57 It's a horse in a horse race. Okay. So he obviously didn't bet on the horse to win. Is that true? He did bet on the horse to win. He bet on a horse to win. Is that true? He did bet on the horse to win. He bet on a horse to win. Yes. Bet $200 on a horse to win, meaning, and did the horse win the race? The horse went across the finish line before the other horses.

Starting point is 00:26:16 What an artful way to say that. Did the horse win the race? I guess you would say it didn't. Because you're going to force me to answer. Okay. Um, I guess you would say it didn't. Uh, all right. Because you're going to force me to answer. Okay. So, say that again. So the horse did technically win the race?

Starting point is 00:26:36 I just want a piece. Well, the horse crossed the finish line ahead of the other horses. Okay. I'll come back to that. But what I'm trying to get at is he bet on the horse to win. Yes. Did he then win his bet? No. No, but he tore up the ticket in any case.

Starting point is 00:26:50 Would he have won the bet if he hadn't torn up the ticket? No. Even though the horse crossed the finish line before the other horses? Right. But he did. Okay, he calls his wife and tells her they can afford this vacation. Is that because he's he thinks they've come into some money because of the result of the horse race

Starting point is 00:27:09 i'm gonna say no to the way that whole question was worded he calls his wife and tells her we've come into some money yes as a result of something that happened today yes okay but not as a direct result of the outcome of the horse race is that true not as a direct result of the outcome of the horse race. Is that true? Not as a direct result of the outcome of the horse race. Is there more than one horse race? No. Well, yeah, there might be, but not in this puzzle.

Starting point is 00:27:34 Not important. It doesn't matter. Yeah. Okay. So what was your answer to that last one? They did come into some money, but not as a result of the outcome of the horse race. He expects them to come into some money, but not as a direct outcome of the result of this horse race. Okay.

Starting point is 00:27:49 There's a bunch of different trees I can bark up here. Let's look at the horse race. You say the horse he had bet on, which is an ordinary horse in an ordinary horse race, looked as though it was about to win the race, seemed to win the race at the point where he tore up the ticket. Yes. The horse appeared certain to cross the finish line first. I'm sticking with that wording. Was the jockey on the horse?

Starting point is 00:28:11 Does that matter? No. Wow. Okay. All right. That's really clever that you jumped to that. Well, there's just so many. If all you know is that there's a lateral solution, there's about 90 ways to do this.

Starting point is 00:28:24 Okay. Was the jockey on the horse when it left the gate? Yes. If all you know is that there's a lateral solution, there's about 90 ways to do this. Okay. Was the jockey on the horse when it left the gate? Yes. So something happened to the jockey on the way around the track? Yes. And is that – okay. So did the jockey fall off the horse?

Starting point is 00:28:36 Yes. Okay. Jockey falls off the horse. Did he tear out the ticket at that point after he saw the jockey fall off the horse? Yeah. Yes, he did? Yeah. Sometime after he saw the jockey fall off the horse. As a result – in other words, if the jockey just finished the way he normally would, he wouldn't have torn up the ticket. Yeah. Yes, he did? Yeah. Sometime after he saw the jockey fall off the horse. As a result, in other words, if the jockey just finished the way he normally would, he

Starting point is 00:28:48 wouldn't have torn up the ticket? Right. Okay. So the jockey falls off the horse. Yes. But the horse finishes anyway. Yeah. Winning the race?

Starting point is 00:28:56 No. So the horse only wins the race if the jockey's on it? Yes. I didn't know that's how it worked. Yeah. Matt says it has to carry the same weight throughout the whole race. Oh, of course. You can't change the weight.

Starting point is 00:29:07 Otherwise you'd jump off right away. Yeah, I know. Train the horse to go and jump off and yeah. Get a big advantage. Okay. So the jockey falls off the horse. The horse finishes anyway but doesn't win the race. Right.

Starting point is 00:29:19 Because he's disqualified for not having the jockey on him anymore. But that still leaves the puzzle of why he tears up the ticket when he realizes that the horse can't win the race at this point. Right, right. But then why does he call his wife on the phone and says that they can now afford to take their vacation? So that's the last piece. So that's why you say he doesn't expect to come into the money as a result of the outcome of the horse race. Right. Because the horse didn't win the race, technically.

Starting point is 00:29:40 Right, right. So he's out $200 for pawning his watch. Yeah, for buying the ticket, right. And got nothing for the, for the, out of the race. So he's just out

Starting point is 00:29:49 net 200 bucks and yet thinks he's come into. Thinks he's going to come into some money, yeah. Was he related to the jockey?

Starting point is 00:29:57 No. Is the jockey dead? No. Does it matter? It actually does matter. The jockey is not dead. Okay. When you say related. Well,. The jockey is not dead. Okay.

Starting point is 00:30:06 When you say related. Well, if the jockey was his brother and he was in his will and realized that he was going to inherit a lot of money. What we call a relation. Yes. Right. No, they're not related. Sorry. Just wanted to make sure I understood. But he expects to come in.

Starting point is 00:30:19 Does he expect to come into some money because he saw the jockey fall off the horse? Yes. Does it have to do with insurance? No. Is his occupation important? Yes. The better's occupation?

Starting point is 00:30:33 Yeah. Does he have a legal profession? Is he a criminal in any way? No. He expects to come into some money because a jockey fell off a horse.

Starting point is 00:30:42 Yes. Is he an attorney? No. How do you make money off a fallen jockey? So it's nothing to do with legal action or the jockey's injuries? It has something to do with the jockey's injuries. Is he a doctor of some kind? Yes, yes.

Starting point is 00:31:00 Okay, so he's going to help fix up the injured jockey. He's the jockey's doctor, yes. And like I said, Matt said this is partially based on something he actually saw happen, which I guess is he must have seen a rider fall off, the jockey fall off the horse partway through and thought that would make a great lateral thinking puzzle. So thank you, Matt. That's very interesting about the horses. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:31:20 I didn't, it's such an educational. But I guess it makes sense if you think about it, because you're right. Otherwise, you just train a horse to go without a jockey and then jump off it on purpose. And if anybody else has a puzzle that you want to send in for us to use, you can send it to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. That's another episode for us. If you like Futility Closet and want to help support it, please check out our Patreon campaign at patreon.com slash futilitycloset. We also really appreciate help in spreading the word about the show and ratings and reviews in iTunes and other directories. If you're looking for more quirky entertainment, check out our books on Amazon or visit the website at futilitycloset.com, where you can sample more than 9,000 recipient carowitches.

Starting point is 00:32:04 At the website, you can also see the show notes for the podcast and listen to previous episodes. Just click podcast in the sidebar. If you have any questions or comments about the show, you can reach us by email at podcast at futilitycloset.com Our music was written and produced by Doug Ross.

Starting point is 00:32:20 Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.

Futility Closet - 104-The Harvey's Casino Bombing

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