Infamous America - BOMBINGS Ep. 5 | “Harvey’s Casino, Part 1: A Simple Plan”

Episode Date: February 12, 2025

In the spring of 1980, John Birges hit rock bottom. For about 10 years, he was living the good life. But then his life started to fall apart. His gambling addiction caused major problems, and he desperately needed money. His solution is to build the perfect bomb and extort the money from his favorite casino, Harvey’s Wagon Wheel Resort and Casino in Stateline, Nevada. When he delivers the bomb to the casino, the authorities have never seen anything like it. The race is on to stop the bomb and catch the bomber. Join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join   Apple users join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes, bingeable seasons and bonus episodes. Click the Black Barrel+ banner on Apple to get started with a 3-day free trial.   On YouTube, subscribe to INFAMOUS+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: hit “Join” on the Legends YouTube homepage.   For more details, please visit www.blackbarrelmedia.com. Our social media pages are: @blackbarrelmedia on Facebook and Instagram, and @bbarrelmedia on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Somewhere south of Lake Tahoe, Big John Burgess and his two helpers, Terry Hall and Bill Brown, pulled off the road and stopped at a creek to take a piss. Terry and Bill had been on a solid beer bender for at least two days, and they had stopped to buy more beer a short while ago as they drove out of Tahoe, so they needed the relief. While they stood at the creek side, a curious thing happened. Big John grabbed a homemade dolly out of the back of the white cargo van they were driving and started to smash it to pieces. As he threw the pieces into the creek, Terry and Bill inquired,

What's going on, Big John? Why don't you want to keep the dolly? An hour or so earlier, Terry and Bill had used the rolling contraption to deliver a heavy machine to Harvey's wagon wheel resort and casino. in State Line, Nevada. State line sits just inside the border of Nevada on the shores of Lake Tahoe, and Harvey's casino butts right up against the state line

between Nevada and California. In 1980, gambling was legal in Nevada, but not in California. For people who visited the resort town of South Lake Tahoe, California, all they had to do was drive two miles up the road to State Line Nevada, and they could legally gamble at a number of different cascings. Casinos. Big John Burgess lived outside Fresno in California's Central Valley, but he had been

spending a ton of time and a ton of money at Harvey's wagon wheel over the past eight years. By 1980, he was deeply in debt to the casino and the IRS, and he had a host of other problems. So, on Sunday, August 24, 1980, he had called Terry and Bill and asked them to help him make a delivery to Harvies. He offered to pay them handsomely for their time, and they agreed with no questions asked. They had been chugging beer in Fresno at the time, and they continued to drink beer on the long drive to Lake Tahoe. They drank beer continuously during the roughly 24 hours they spent in Tahoe. And if Terry was honest with himself, he had been pretty close to drunk when he had parked the heavy machine in a room on the second floor of Harvey's Casino at 5 a.m. He had removed the cloth that had been draped over the machine and was somewhat surprised to see

that the thing he thought was computer equipment was actually two boxes made out of sheet metal. Still, the delivery had gone like clockwork, and he was back outside with Bill and Big John in less than five minutes. They drove out of Tahoe with the first light of dawn, stopped to buy more beer, and then stopped a little while later to relieve themselves of some of the beer in the creek. And now, Big John was breaking apart the dolly that Terry and Bill had used to roll the heavy metal device into the casino. When they asked Big John about the curiosity, he revealed the truth of their adventure. They had just delivered a bomb, which contained nearly a thousand pounds of dynamite to Harvey's casino.

Terry Hall and Bill Brown were stunned into silence. When they crawled back into the van to finish the long drive to their homes in Fresno, they could only think of one way to respond. Drink the rest of the beer as fast as possible and pray that their involvement would not be discovered. From Black Barrel Media, this is Infamous America. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer. In this season we're telling the stories

of the LA Times bombing of 1910, the mad bomber of the 1950s, and the crazy case of the Harvey's Casino bombing in Nevada in 1980. This is episode 5, Harvey's Casino Bombing Part 1. A simple plane. Within 15 years of arriving in the United States, Big John Burgess was a millionaire who owned three businesses, three expensive cars, and one small airplane. By any financial standard, he and his wife Elizabeth had done very well for themselves, and it had not been easy. They had been handed nothing. They built their new lives in America through relentless hard work,

determination, and tenacity. For John's part, it was easy to see what. where the determination and the tenacity came from. He needed them to survive. He was born Janos Burgess in Hungary. His father was a hard drinker, and in 1937, when Yannos was 15, he ran away from home in his small town and moved to the big city of Budapest. He joined the Hungarian Air Force toward the end of World War II and may have flown planes against Russia in the final year of the war. Hungary was allied with Germany. and after the war, Russia took control of Hungary. The crackdowns started immediately

and washed over Hungary like waves for at least a decade. Yannos was arrested by the Russian secret police and sent to a prison in Siberia. He endured eight years of hard labor on the edge of the world before he was released. He had one year of something that might have resembled tranquility before the chaos started all over again. He was 33 years old,

and in that year he met a 27-year-old waitress named Elizabeth. She was already married, but she quickly got divorced and married Yannos. Then at the end of 1956, Russia launched another crackdown on Hungary. Yannos and Elizabeth fled to Austria. Six months later, in May of 1957, they were granted political asylum in the U.S. Like generations of people before them, they arrived on the American East Coast with virtually nothing but the clothes on their backs. They migrated westward to California, and like many immigrants, they changed their names. Yannos became John, and Elizabeth added an H to the

end of her name and became Elizabeth. John Burgess was a smart guy, and he had a natural ability with mechanical engineering. He spent his first five years in California working for a steel company where he learned welding and pipe fitting, two of the key components of what was to come. He and Elizabeth had two kids during that time, Johnny in 1960 and Jimmy in 1962, and the sons would also be instrumental in the events to come, though not by choice. Like most people, they were terrified of their father. John Burgess was a big man, which was why he was called Big John. He was a hard drinker like his father, and he beat his sons with belts, electrical cables, coat hangers, pretty much anything that was handy. Big John and Elizabeth fought constantly, a trend that

continued for years, even while the family grew wealthy beyond its dreams. In 1964, John started a landscaping business. He worked seven days a week and built the business into a small empire. By 1972, he owned three businesses, three cars. cars, a small airplane, and a home on 15 acres of land on the edge of Clovis, California, a community outside Fresno. One of the successful businesses was a restaurant called Villa Basque, which Elizabeth ran. The place was packed every night, and, financially speaking, the Burgess family was doing very well.

But the family relationships had been fraying for years because of Big John's behavior. In 1973, they started to unravel. The decline was steep and fast. Elizabeth started disappearing from the house, sometimes for days at a time. John was convinced she was having affairs, which sent him into a rage. In 1973, Elizabeth filed for divorce, moved out of the main house, and into a trailer behind the house. It was a strange living arrangement, and tragically one that wouldn't last very long. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the money started rolling in for Big John, he discovered a love of gambling.

By 1973, the year of the divorce, he was flying his small plane to South Lake Tahoe to gamble at the casinos that were starting to blossom in the lakeside resort town on the California-N Nevada border. John's interest in gambling would explode into a full-blown addiction after tragedy struck the family. At the end of July 1975, Elizabeth disappeared again from the family homestead in Clovis, but this time she did so without her car or her money. Her pickup was parked next to the house, with the keys still in the ignition, and her pocketbook was on the passenger seat. Three days passed before her body was found in a field behind the house. The coroner ruled her death a suicide by way of a fatal combination of alcohol and valium.

But the suspicious thing was, her stomach was flooded with whiskey, and she only drank vodka. In addition, no one ever found the whiskey bottle. After that, Big John went off the rails. Within a year of Elizabeth's death, he was spending money like never before. He was dressing differently, dating a variety of waitresses from his ex-wife's restaurant, and spending a ton of time at Harvey's Wagon Wheel Resort and Casino in Stateline, Nevada. During his frequent trips to Lake Tahoe, Harvey's wagon wheel had become his favorite spot to gamble. Lake Tahoe is one of those interesting quirks of American geography.

The state line that divides Nevada from California runs right through the middle of the lake. The eastern shore is in Nevada, and the western shore is in California. On the southern tip of the lake is the famous resort town of South Lake Tahoe, California. If you drive two miles up the road, you cross the state line into Nevada. At that spot is the town of Stateline Nevada. From 1931 to 1976, Nevada was the only state in the U.S. that allowed legalized commercial gambling. So for people who were vacationing in South Lake Tahoe, California, if they wanted to gamble, they had to drive two miles up the road to state line Nevada.

By 1976, when Big John Burgess started his disastrous run at the tables, Statenline had transformed from a seasonal tourist town to a miniature version of Las Vegas. In 1944, Harvey Gross and his wife built one of the first casinos in town. It had a log cabin western theme and featured three slot machines and two blackjack tables. Over the next 10 years, as gambling and entertainment rocketed to lockdown, life in Las Vegas, the same thing happened on a smaller scale in state line. More casinos went up, and in 1963, Harvey redeveloped his old one-room log cabin casino into the first modern high-rise gambling and entertainment venue in town.

The original casino, which was called Harvey's Wagon Wheel's Saloon and Gambling Hall, was now Harvey's Wagon Wheel Resort and Casino. It was a pale yellow color. stood 11 stories high, boasted 197 rooms, and showcased every game of chance that was available at the time. Soon, Bill Hara, the biggest of the early Las Vegas Hotel impresarios, built a Harris casino directly across the street from Harvey's. It was and still is gigantic. It made Harvey's wagon wheel look like a toy or a scale model. Then, the owners of the legendary Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas built a Sahara next to Harvey's.

The parking lot for Harvey's casino separates the two hotels, and the lot would be showcased in multiple photos on a fateful day in August 1980. But in 1976, despite the bigger and newer hotels, Big John Burgess loved Harvey's. He had gambled there so often that he was considered a high roller. And, at least according to Big John, he was a big winner. He was so well known at the casino that he received an invitation from the owner, Harvey Gross, to spend a weekend at Harvey's ranch outside Carson City, Nevada. Harvey owned a helicopter, and when one of Harvey's pilots took Big John up for a quick flight,

the pilot learned that John knew how to fly airplanes. The pilot let John fly the helicopter for a little while. John learned the controls quickly, and he would be able to fly. use the experience as a key part of his plan four years in the future. Between now and then, things would really go downhill for Big John. The next four years were a montage of low lights. The year of the helicopter experience, 1976, John married an 18-year-old waitress from Harvey's casino. They got divorced one year later. In 1978, John started dating Joan Williams. She was in her 40s, was a mother of four kids and was a part-time waitress at John's Villa Basque restaurant.

That year, John's oldest boy, Johnny, quit school and moved out of the family house. It was also the same year, Big John received his first visit from a debt collector from Harvey's casino. John owed the casino $1,000, which he quickly paid off, but it was the beginning of a worsening pattern. To round out 1978, John's restaurant, Villa Basque, burned to the ground. If there were suspicions about the cause of the fire, they didn't stop John from collecting $300,000 in insurance money. The next year, 1979, John bounced $15,000 worth of checks at Harvies, and he received another visit from the debt collector.

Instead of paying back the money, he rented a condo near the casino, so that he had a reliable place to stay while he was gambling. He also learned that he had abdominal cancer, but he kept gambling and he kept losing, and his final loss at Harvey's Wagon Wheel was his pride. On New Year's Eve, 1979, Big John booked his favorite suite at Harvey's. He had a young woman with him as his date, a young woman who was not his girlfriend, Joan Williams.

Before the festivities that night, a staff member showed up at the suite and told John that he and his date needed to change rooms. The hotel needed the suite for an important guest. John and his date were forced to switch to a tiny room that was barely big enough for a bed. He was thoroughly humiliated. It was a sorry end to a bad three-year stretch, and the hits weren't done yet. In March 1980, three months after the New Year's Eve debacle, Big John Burgess received a letter from the IRS saying he owed $30,000 in back taxes. And that basically did it.

That was John's breaking point. He owed thousands of dollars to Harvey's casino. He owed thousands of dollars to the IRS. His first wife had divorced him and then died under strange circumstances. His second wife had divorced him. He had been humiliated at the casino that was taking all his money, and cancer was slowly killing him. That was when John Burgess decided to build a bomb. But not just any bomb, the perfect bomb.

He needed money, and he knew one place that had a lot of it. He would build a bomb, deliver it to Harvey's casino, and force Harvey Gross to pay millions of dollars in ransom money to keep his casino from blowing up. Like the bombers of the Los Angeles Times in 1910, Big John started with the dynamite. 50 miles east of John's home near Fresno, the state of California was halfway through a massive hydroelectric construction project. The project was going to create a new reservoir and a new pumping station to provide electricity to California's Central Valley. During seven years of construction, the project needed literal tons of dynamite. Big John drove out to the sprawling construction site multiple times in the spring of 1980. On at least one trip, he strolled right in and examined the red wooden shack that was marked

danger, explosives. In June 1980, John recruited his two sons to help him steal the dynamite. Johnny, Jimmy, and John's girlfriend Joan were all aware of Big John's plan to make a bomb and extort money from Harvey's casino. To one degree or another, they didn't think he would go through with it, or they thought he would get caught long before he succeeded. But the plan became real on June 6, 1980. Big John instructed Johnny to drive over to the family home. Johnny was 19 years old, and he'd been living on his own for three years. He drank a lot of beer, smoked a lot of weed, worked as a roofer, and lived in a house with two friends.

He was dating a girl named Kelly Cooper, who would play a small but pivotal role in the story. Johnny drove his white cargo van from his house in Fresno to the family home in Clovis. He picked up Big John and Jimmy, and they drove out to the construction site. But that night, the construction crew was laying concrete near the explosive shack. The Burgess Boys aborted the mission and returned one week later. On June 13th, they successfully saw the ship. stole 18 cases of dynamite and the blasting caps to go with them. It was more than a thousand pounds of explosives in total.

The next day, the Fresno B newspaper ran a short story about the theft, which mentioned the sheriff's department had no clues and no suspects. But one person outside the family knew exactly who to suspect. Johnny's girlfriend, Kelly Cooper, saw the article and immediately called Johnny. She said she knew. he stole the dynamite. He played dumb and pretended to have no idea what she was talking about. She hung up the phone, and they broke up shortly thereafter. After the successful dynamite raid, Big John stored the explosives in a freezer at the family home and spent the rest of the summer

in his workshop building his masterpiece. The final product was brilliant in its simplicity and also artwork in its complexity. On the outside, it was just two gray, sheet metal boxes, a smaller one sitting on top of a larger one. The larger one, the base, was a little more than two feet tall. It was crammed with wires and dynamite and booby traps. The smaller one was about a foot tall, and it was the brain of the device. On one side, there were 28 metal switches, like small light switches that you could flip up and down. Some of the switches were functional and would detonate the bomb when flipped. Some were dummies and did nothing at all.

A couple would disarm one of the six booby traps in the device, but only one. And that was the core of John's mad scientist plan. Once the systems were armed, there was no way to disarm them or to diffuse the bomb. It was going to explode no matter what. The only option was to disable one specific booby trap so that the device could be moved to a safe location,

for detonation. When the design was complete, he explained the six booby traps to his sons. Number one, the outer layer of both boxes was sheet metal. Inside both boxes, each wall of the box was lined with aluminum foil that was pressed between two layers of synthetic rubber. If anyone attempted to drill through the outer layer of either box, the metal drill bit would contact the aluminum foil. The connection would complete a circuit and the bomb would explode. Number two, the sheet metal walls of both boxes were held together with screws. Inside the boxes, the ends of the screws were connected to spring-loaded traps. If any of the screws were removed, the traps would complete a circuit and the bomb would explode.

Number three, the lids of both boxes were fitted with pressure switches. If either lid was removed, the switches would pop open and complete a circuit, and the bomb would explode. Number four, inside the smaller box, Big John had rigged a float from a toilet. When you flush a toilet, water fills the tank behind the bowl. As the water rises, so does the hollow rubber ball on the end of the float. When the float reaches a certain level, it signals the water to stop rising. It was the same principle with John's bomb. If someone tried to flood the smaller box with water or foam, the float would rise.

When it reached a certain level, it would complete a circuit and the bomb would explode. Number five, Big John installed a do-it-yourself motion sensor. In the smaller box, there was a piece of hard plastic PVC pipe. The pipe was lined with foil. A metal pendulum dangled down through the center of the pipe. It was suspended from the top by a rubber ball. band. If the bomb was moved, the pendulum would swing to one side, hit the foil, and complete a circuit, and the bomb would explode. That booby trap was the only fail-safe. A few of the 28 switches

on the panel of the smaller box were connected to the motion sensor. If one of those switches was flipped, it would deactivate the motion sensor so that the bomb could be moved before detonation. Number six, the smaller box sat on top of the large, box and was connected to it in a way that is not entirely clear. Big John lined the seam between the two boxes with aluminum foil. If someone tried to pry the two boxes apart with a metal object like a crowbar, the metal object would come in contact with the foil and complete a circuit, and the bomb would explode. Lastly, in the smaller box next to the float booby trap and the motion sensor booby trap, there was the timer. Big John used.

used a timer from an irrigation system. It could be set to a time as short as 45 minutes or as long as eight days. Either way, when it was set, there was no way to turn it off. When the timer reached zero, the bomb was going to explode, and there was nothing that Big John or anyone else could do about it. That was why one FBI agent who worked on the case was likely speaking for everyone when he said they had never seen anything like it. By mid-August, 1980, the bomb was done. Big John and his younger son, Jimmy, had loaded the dynamite into the device.

John had set all the wiring and the booby traps. Johnny had coated and painted the outside of the big box. They built a dolly to roll the bomb from place to place because it stood more than three feet high and weighed roughly 1,000 pounds. John's girlfriend, Joan, type of the bomb. an exhaustive three-page ransom letter on her electric typewriter. And then, Big John set the timer. Johnny and Jimmy had participated in small parts of the construction because they lived in fear of their

father, but they steadfastly refused to participate in the delivery of the bomb. The most that Johnny would do was allow his father to use his white cargo van for the 10-hour round trip to Harvey's casino. On the afternoon of Sunday, August 24, 1980, Big John called his two henchmen, Terry Hall and Bill Brown. Like everyone, Terry and Bill were terrified of Big John, and their fear ran deeper than anyone realized at the time. Bill was a 59-year-old lifelong criminal. He had worked for Big John's landscaping business for a long time, but he had been mostly out of work since John had sold the business. Bill was in poor health, had little money, and had an ex-wife and four kids to support. Terry was also a lifelong criminal, even though he was only 24 years old.

He was out of work, like Bill, and he enjoyed a variety of drugs. At Bill's age, he wasn't into the drug scene, but he and Terry guzzled beer like breweries were about to stop making it. When Big John Burgess called them that Sunday afternoon, while they were swilling beer, he offered them $2,000 for one day's work. They couldn't say no. Saying no to Big John wasn't really an option anyway, but the money was a nice bonus. Terry and Bill finished their beers

and drove to Big John's house. Big John had explained that he wanted their help with delivering a machine to Harvey's Wagon Wheel Resort and Casino in Stateline, Nevada, on the shores of Lake Tahoe. The machine was already in the back of a white cargo van, and it was draped with a cloth that read IBM. Terry and Bill didn't ask any questions, and they just assumed they were helping John deliver a piece of computer equipment.

John made it sound like Harvey's was expecting them, so whatever the full story was, it sounded like an easy task and a simple plan. They left Clovis, California at sunset, and drove all night while drinking beer. They arrived in Tahoe at about dawn and scouted Harvey's casino at about 5 a.m. on Monday, August 25th.

They walked through the building and checked the delivery route. By that point, Big John was exhausted and he wanted to get some sleep before the big day. They checked into the Bala Ho Motel and spent the rest of Monday resting, drinking beer, and watching TV.

The next day was the Big Day, Tuesday, August 26th. There were some minor glitches in the pre-dawn hours, but the trio still made it to Harvey's at 5 a.m., right on time for Big John's schedule. The three men unloaded the bomb from the van, and then Terry and Bill rolled it into the casino. Big John stayed with the van while Terry and Bill pushed the heavy device on its dolly to the elevator. The pair wore overalls to look like

delivery men or workmen, and their simple disguises drew no attention. Bill returned to the van, and Terry, the younger and stronger of the two, took the bomb to the same. second floor. The second floor was mostly offices, and Terry parked the bomb just inside the door of the room that handled the hotel's telephone system. Terry removed the cloth IBM cover and got his first look at the heavy metal boxes that he didn't know were a bomb. He stripped off his overalls, stuffed them into a bag with the IBM cloth, and took the stairs back down to the ground floor. He strolled outside, hopped in the van with Big John and Bill, and they started the drive back to California. The whole job took less than five minutes and was as easy as Big John had promised.

A couple minutes later, they stopped at a bait shop to buy beer, because the long trip obviously needed roadies. A little while later, they stopped at a creek to relieve themselves. That was when Big John revealed the truth. They had just delivered a bomb to Harvey's wagon wheel. Terry Hall and Bill Brown chugged a beer during the long drive back to Fresno. While they did, a slow-moving tidal wave of insanity was rising out of the second floor of Harvey's casino. At roughly 5.30 a.m., 30 minutes after Terry deposited the bomb, Bob Vinson walked out of his office on the second floor of the casino.

He was on his way to the gift shop to buy cigarettes when he noticed that the door to the telephone room was partially open. The door was usually closed, so Bob peeked inside the room to see if everything was okay. He saw a strange metal contraption, which was clearly heavy because it was pressing hard into the carpet. Bob alerted the security team, who alerted the Douglas County Sheriff's Department and Fire Department. Within minutes, deputies, firemen, and hotel staff were gathered around the strange metal object. Lying next to it was an unsealed envelope, which Terry had either placed there or had inadvertently swept off of the device when he removed the cover. Either way, the casino security supervisor was suspicious of the envelope. He had just finished a training course on letter bombs, likely because of four explosions that had occurred in the past two.

years. Someone had mailed bombs to Northwestern University and the University of Illinois. A bomb had exploded in the luggage compartment of an American Airlines flight. And just two months earlier, in June 1980, a bomb had been mailed to the President of United Airlines. The bombs would later be viewed as the first in a long series by Ted Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber. On the second floor of Harvey's casino, the security supervisor carefully opened the envelope and started reading the typed letter that had been written by Big John's girlfriend. The supervisor was leaning on the device when he realized the situation. He announced, that's a bomb, and he slowly moved away from the heavy metal boxes.

Law enforcement started evacuating the hotel. Sleepy guests in their night clothes started filtering into the parking lot between Harvey's casino and the Sahara next door. FBI agents and bomb squad technicians raced to the casino. Security guards emptied millions of dollars in cash from the cages and tried to figure out what to do with it. Sheriff's deputies roped off a perimeter around the building. South Lake Tahoe police detectives started questioning people to see if anyone had witnessed anything related to the device. An army explosive ordinance disposal team was on the way from a nearby by base, and scientists from both coasts were flying to Nevada.

By 10 a.m., about the time Big John and his helpers were pulling into Fresno, the chaos at Harvey's Casino was on television. Every major news network had reporters and camera operators on the scene. They filmed the emergency responders as they arrived, and the enormous crowds that were gathering on the streets of Stateline Nevada. Everyone knew the frenzy had something to do with a bomb in Harvey's casino, but few people knew the severity of the situation. One of those who did was FBI agent Bill Junkie. He was one of the lead investigators on the case, and he was one of the guys who was running the show on the ground. Junkie had called his boss in Las Vegas two hours earlier, and the boss clearly hadn't understood the size of the problem. When the

boss saw the first live images on TV, he called Jockey back. The boss was a lot of the show. The boss was sending 65 agents by morning. The Sacramento office had already sent 60. The size of the situation was unprecedented, because the size and the mysterious nature of the bomb were also unprecedented. And beyond those two very scary things, the FBI was on the clock. Like the bomb itself, the extortion letter that had been left with the bomb was unlike anything anyone had ever seen. The bomber wanted $3 million, and had provided a complicated list of instructions for the money exchange. The first big step in the process was supposed to happen that night at 11 p.m., a little more than 12 hours after Bill Junkie's boss saw the casino on TV. And the extortion letter, which was like a ransom note without a kidnapping, emphasized yet another thing that no one had ever seen before.

The first paragraph explained several different ways the bomb could explode, and the second paragraph said, This bomb can never be dismantled or disarmed without causing an explosion, not even by the creator. In exchange for the ransom money, the bomber was not offering to diffuse the device. He was only offering instructions for how to disable one of the booby traps so the device could be safely moved to an isolated location. It was the biggest bomb anyone had ever seen. It was likely that it was one of the biggest homemade bombs in American history. And if the bomber was telling the truth, there was no way to stop it. The bomb squad couldn't move it, couldn't disarm it,

and had no way of knowing when it might explode on its own. The FBI had only one hope, to catch the bomber during the money exchange and pray for a miracle. Next time on Infamous America, the money exchange doesn't go the way. anyone wants. The FBI races to come up with a backup plan. Big John's bomb makes history, and he would have gotten away with it too, if not for those meddling kids. That's next week on the crazy conclusion to the Harvey's casino bombing story here on Infamous America.

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