Infamous America - BOMBINGS Ep. 6 | “Harvey’s Casino, Part 2: No Way Out”
Episode Date: February 19, 2025John Birges’s effort to collect extortion money from Harvey’s Wagon Wheel Resort and Casino does not go well. As he tries to think of another plan, the authorities attempt to disarm his bomb. The ...result is a TV spectacle that is nationwide news. The FBI begins a year-long manhunt which finally leads to the truth behind the bizarre story of the bomb that could not be disarmed. 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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The Douglas County Bomb Squad spent all day on Tuesday, August 26, 1980, studying the bomb,
and it was a maddening experience.
The bomb was sitting in a room on the second floor of Harvey's Wagon Wheel Resort and Casino
in Stateline, Nevada, the gambling hub of the Lake Tahoe area.
The bomb had been discovered by a staff member at 5.30 that morning, and the bomb squad from
Douglas County, Nevada had arrived in short order.
A three-page extortion letter had been delivered with the bomb, and it contained a number of dire warnings,
not the least of which was that the bomb could never be disarmed, not even by its creator.
The bomb squad was using every trick in the book to see if the letter was accurate, but it wasn't easy,
especially with the unfolding chaos around them.
Dozens of local law enforcement and fire department personnel were on the scene.
They evacuated the hotel and started to cordon off the ground.
the area. Hundreds of FBI agents were rushing to Harvey's Casino. Scientists and explosive experts
from across the country were hustling to the secluded resort town. By 10 a.m., the frenzy of
activity was being recorded by TV cameras. The bomb at Harvey's Casino was national news,
and it was yet another high-profile nationwide crime story that summer. In May, five gunmen had
robbed a bank in Norco, California, a small community in Riverside County about an hour outside
Los Angeles. The robbery evolved into the largest shootout with law enforcement in U.S. history
up to that time. The next month in June, a mail bomb was delivered to the president of United
Airlines. It exploded and caused serious injuries. It was the fourth attack by the mysterious figure
who would be known as the Unabomber until he was finally caught in 1996.
And now, two months after the Unabomber's fourth attack, the largest bomb anyone had ever seen
was sitting quietly in a room on the second floor of Harvey's casino.
It had been delivered at 5 a.m. by its creator, Janos Burgess, a 58-year-old Hungarian immigrant
who had changed his name to John when he and his wife had fled Russian crackdowns in his home country in 1956.
Big John, as he was known, was a hard-drinking, abusive father.
to his two sons. He had turned himself into a successful businessman and had made a ton of money
in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but then his life started to fall apart. His first wife
divorced him and then died three years later of an apparent suicide. His second wife quickly divorced
him. He developed a crippling gambling addiction, and by 1980 he owed thousands of dollars
to Harvey's casino, his favorite gambling spot, and thousands of dollars in his
unpaid taxes to the IRS.
When he was diagnosed with abdominal cancer, he felt he had nothing to lose.
He built a bomb that was packed with hundreds of pounds of dynamite,
enlisted two lackeys to help him deliver it to Harvey's casino,
and hoped to receive a $3 million payday later that night.
But after the delivery of the bomb, nothing went according to plan.
From Black Barrel Media, this is Infamous America.
I'm your host, Chris Wimmer, and this season,
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 6, Harvey's
Casino Bombing Part 2. No Way Out. All morning on Tuesday, August 26th, 1980, and throughout
the afternoon, the technicians of the Douglas County Nevada bomb squad studied Big John's device.
It was two metal boxes, a smaller one sitting on top of a larger one.
In total, the boxes stood about three feet high and weighed upwards of 1,000 pounds.
The bomb text tried everything to get a sense of the danger and complexity of the device.
They used listening devices to try to hear anything inside.
They could hear intermittent ticking, but little else.
They scanned it with a portable X-ray machine, and their insights were,
all bad. The extortion letter had referenced a couple of the six booby traps that John had built
into the bomb, but not all of them. The bomb squad guys discovered a few others, and they were starting
to get the sinking feeling that the creator had told the truth in his letter. The bomb could not
be disarmed at all. And the creator seemed to be telling the truth about another scary aspect.
The larger of the two boxes was probably packed with dynamite. Much of the insolmite, much of the
inside of the box was so dense that the X-ray machine couldn't see through it, and that was a bad
sign. By 3 o'clock in the afternoon, the National Guard was in state-line Nevada and was fixing a
quarter-mile perimeter around Harvey's casino. The cordon would be needed because it was becoming
increasingly clear to the FBI that the story of the bomb was only going to end one way. The bomber
said he would send instructions for how to disable the motion sensor booby trap so the bomb
could be moved after he received the money, but no one trusted him. By about 9 o'clock that night,
after the bomb squad studied the device for more than 12 hours, the FBI recommended to casino
owner Harvey Gross that the bomb stay right where it was. As bad as it sounded, it was better
to have the bomb blow up in an empty building than to risk the lives of the bomb squad guys to
try to move it, even after it was supposedly safe to do so. When Harvey processed the
idea of allowing a bomb to explode in the casino he had operated for more than 30 years,
he reluctantly agreed with the FBI's assessment. And then he added, there's no way I'm paying
these sons of bitches any money. And with that, the FBI was full speed ahead with its plan
to take down the bomber during the money exchange. The bomber's letter said the $3 million needed
to be flown by helicopter to the Lake Tahoe Airport at exactly 11 p.m. Then, the
the pilot would receive further instructions.
The FBI was sending a helicopter all right, but it was also sending a couple surprises.
As the helicopter flew through the night toward the airport, a bag sat on the co-pilot's seat.
In it, there were stacks that looked like money.
On the top of each stack was a $100 bill.
The rest of each stack was newspaper that had been cut to the right size.
All told, there was only $1,000 in the bag that looked like it contained.
3 million. Behind the two front seats sat FBI SWAT team leader Del Rowley. He was
kidded up in black fatigues, a helmet, a Kevlar vest, and night vision goggles. In his
hands, he held an MP5 submachine gun that was fitted with a suppressor. His
mission was to jump out of the helicopter when it landed and take down the bomber. And he
would not be alone. Flying high over the helicopter with Rowley and the money was another
helicopter. That one carried a six-man SWAT team from the FBI's office in Sacramento.
The plan had come together remarkably fast, but the helicopters were running late. There was
virtually no chance they would touch down at the Lake Tahoe Airport at 11 p.m. But that was okay,
because, though the FBI didn't know it, the bomber was also running late. The evening had been a
comedy of errors for Big John Burgess and his family. Big John Burgess made a deal
with his sons, Johnny and Jimmy. They, like most people, lived in terror of their father. They had helped
in small ways with the construction of the bomb, mostly out of fear, and because they didn't think
Big John was really going to go through with his crazy plan. Even after they were forced to help him
steal dynamite two months earlier, they still didn't believe he was actually going to do it. But by the
end of August, it was clear that Big John was going to go through with his extortion plan. And the
boys drew a line. They refused to help him deliver the bomb to Harvey's casino. Johnny allowed
his van to be used for the delivery, but he wouldn't go along himself. Big John accepted their
decision, and he enlisted a couple out-of-work guys who were also scared to death of him. But Big John
always got his way in the end. He told Johnny and Jimmy, if they didn't help with the delivery,
they had to help with the money exchange. Big John's two delivery men, Terry Hall,
and Bill Brown had placed the bomb in Harvey's Casino at 5 a.m. on Tuesday, August 26th.
Terry and Bill had no idea what they had just done. Big John had only said he needed help
delivering a machine to Harvey's casino, and he promised them a big payday. On the long drive
back to their homes in Fresno, California, Big John had revealed the truth. Now, on Tuesday afternoon,
while lawmen were rushing to Harvey's casino and the bomb squad was stuck.
studying Big John's device, John gathered his sons and his girlfriend Joan for the money drop.
John and his sons loaded the gear into Big John's car, big canvas bags for the money,
ski masks, three guns, and two strobe lights that he had stolen from the Lake Tahoe Airport.
The guys piled into John's car and Joan got into her own car.
They started the drive up to Lake Tahoe in the early evening, which was cutting it close.
was cutting it close. It was at least a five-hour trip from the family home outside Fresno
to Lake Tahoe, and the extortion letter, typed by Joan, stated that the FBI helicopter
with the money needed to be at the Tahoe airport at exactly 11 p.m. to receive further instructions.
That meant Big John's team needed to be in place by 11, so they were going to have to hurry.
The first stop was the Cameron Park Airport outside Sacramento. Joan
parked her car and would wait there for the rest of the night until it was time to pick up Big
John if all went well. The plan was this. Big John, Johnny and Jimmy would drive up to the
El Dorado National Forest outside Tahoe. Johnny would drop Big John and Jimmy at a clearing
in the woods that Big John had selected. Then Johnny would drive to a second clearing. When Big
John heard the FBI helicopter approaching, he would turn on a strobe light as the signal
for the chopper to land in the clearing.
He and Jimmy would overpower the pilot and hop in the helicopter.
Big John would fly them to the second clearing,
where Jimmy would take the money and get into the car with Johnny.
The boys would drive back to Fresno,
while Big John flew the FBI helicopter to the Cameron Park Airport outside Sacramento.
There, he would ditch the aircraft and jump into the car with Joan.
They would all rendezvous at the family house outside Fresno,
$3 million richer.
Then Big John and Joan would head to Europe with the money and live the high life.
Very little of that actually happened.
What did happen was this.
When Big John, Johnny, and Jimmy were deep in the El Dorado National Forest,
Big John realized they forgot a crucial item,
the battery that was supposed to power the strobe light.
They had to backtrack to the small city of Placerville
before they found a gas station that was open
and would sell them a car battery to use as a power source for the strobe light.
By the time Johnny dropped Big John and Jimmy at the clearing
and hurried to the nearest payphone, it was close to midnight.
The FBI helicopter should have landed at the Tahoe Airport an hour ago,
and the pilot should be waiting for a call at exactly 10 minutes after midnight.
In reality, the FBI chopper was running late,
and it had just landed when the pilot,
heard a payphone near the tarmac start ringing.
The pilot answered, and Johnny told him there were instructions taped under a shelf in the payphone
booth.
The pilot grabbed the instructions, and Johnny headed for the second clearing.
That was when the complicated plan fell apart.
The pilot tried to follow the instructions, but the dark landscape made it nearly impossible.
The pilot ended up flying circles over the wrong area, miles away from Big John's clearing.
And because Big John never heard the helicopter, he never turned on the strobe light.
Eventually, the FBI gave up on the money drop and flew back to Tahoe.
Meanwhile, Big John, Jimmy, and Johnny waited in their clearings all night.
Finally, at 4 or 5 a.m., Johnny decided something must have gone wrong.
He drove down to Sacramento and met Joan.
They drove both cars back up toward the clearing where Big John and Jimmy were still waited.
Johnny drove too fast, and as Joan tried to keep up, she skidded off the road and crashed her car.
She was bleeding from the nose and the head when she climbed in with Johnny, and they continued up the road.
At about 6 a.m., they found Big John and Jimmy walking down the road toward them.
Big John and Jimmy crawled into the car, and they all drove Joan to a hospital in Placerville.
From there, with the sun rising, the bomber and his sons started the three-hour drive back to Fresno
with no sleep, no money, and no idea what had gone wrong.
At 9.30 a.m. on Wednesday, August 27, 1980, shortly before the Burgess Boys arrived in Fresno,
the decision-makers in state-line Nevada convened a meeting at the Sahara Hotel.
The Sahara was next to Harvey's. Harvey's parking lot separated the two properties.
and the Sahara had given office space to the FBI and other emergency personnel.
Law enforcement agents, explosives experts, and bomb squad technicians gathered in the meeting room
that acted as a command post.
The money exchange had failed.
As a consequence, they had not received instructions for disabling the motion sensor booby trap
so they could move the bomb to a safe location for detonation.
Despite 24 hours of non-stop study, they still didn't know the,
inner workings of the bomb. The men in the room threw out lots of options for how to defeat the
bomb or move it, but none of them seemed viable. Then a civilian consultant to the Navy, Leonard
Wolfson, proposed a radical idea, fight fire with fire, use explosives to defeat the explosives.
Wolfson suggested they place a plastic explosive charge near the smaller of the two boxes
that formed the bomb.
When they detonated the plastic explosive,
it would cut through the box in a fraction of a millisecond
and sever the connections between the triggers and the dynamite.
Essentially, the plastic explosive
would cut the head off the body and render the body useless.
At noon, the group took a vote.
They unanimously agreed to try Leonard Wolfson's plan.
It took three hours to fabricate the parts
and transport the explosive to state line Nevada.
At 3 p.m., the head of the bomb squad walked into Harvey's with the explosive charge.
At the same time, the bomb tech was entering the casino, Big John and his younger son Jimmy were driving north from Fresno.
They were headed three hours up the road to Placerville to collect Joan Williams from the hospital.
Big John was planning to organize a second attempt at the money exchange,
and he and Jimmy were going to stop in about 45 minutes so Jimmy could call the Douglas County Shepard,
Sheriff's Office in Nevada to begin the process. At Harvey's, the bomb tech placed the explosive
charge near the bomb, as instructed by the scientists who had worked out the details. The charge had to
be positioned at a precise distance and a precise angle from John's bomb so that it could deliver
a targeted strike to knock out the brain of the device. The bomb tech checked and rechecked his
setup. They were only going to get one shot at this, and he hadn't slept in more than.
than 30 hours. Outside the casino, a deputy sheriff blared an announcement over the PA system in
his patrol car. National Guard troops manned the perimeter around the casino. Hundreds of law enforcement
personnel were stationed in the area. Excited crowds filled the streets to watch the show, and TV
reporters eagerly awaited a spectacle. The deputy said this was their 15-minute warning, before
something may or may not happen. It was about 3.30 p.
On Highway 88, Big John and Jimmy were about halfway between Stockton, California, and Placerville.
They were approaching the small town of Ione, which was founded during the gold rush of 1849.
When they made it to town, Jimmy would make the call.
On the street outside Harvys, the head of the bomb squad walked to a fire department truck
to make his final preparation.
The deputy sheriff called out the final warning to the crowd.
At that point, the excited chatter stopped.
Hundreds of people fell silent.
The bomb tech received the go-ahead order over his radio,
and he said, fire in the hole to those nearby.
At 3.46 p.m., he touched two wires to the battery of the truck.
The wires were connected to the explosive charge he had placed near Big John's bomb,
and a second later, a thunderous roar filled the space that the silence had occupied a moment earlier.
The explosive charge detonated Big John's bomb, and nearly a thousand pounds of dynamite exploded.
A wall of brown dust five stories high surged out of Harvey's casino.
Shattered concrete, plaster, steel, glass, and wood blasted out of the building and rained down on anyone who was inside the perimeter.
The concussion knocked people to the pavement.
The bomb tech and another man from the fire department dove to the ground as doved.
Debris crashed onto the roof of the truck.
In the casino, the explosion tore a hole through the center of the hotel,
from the basement all the way up to the fifth floor.
Some of the floors collapsed down on top of each other
in a pulsating rumble of crunching concrete and screeching metal.
Dust and smoke billowed out of the gaping wound in the building
and coated everything on the street.
When the initial shockwave passed, the crowd cheered and clapped.
Some of them already wore t-shirts that read,
I was bombed at Harvey's.
Others undoubtedly won money, as true to form,
people gambled on the outcome of the operation.
At the same time, about 100 miles away in Iown, California,
Jimmy Burgess called the Douglas County Sheriff's Department from a payphone,
with no idea that his father's bomb had just cratered half of Harvey's casino.
Jimmy Burgess told the Sheriff's Department he would call back in an hour,
if they wanted to try another money exchange.
During the 45-minute drive from my own to Placerville,
he and Big John learned there wouldn't be in exchange.
They heard about the explosion on the radio.
According to Jimmy, Big John said,
well, I don't have anything to live for now.
When they arrived at the hospital in Placerville,
they saw a news report on TV in the waiting room.
Big John cheered up a little bit
when he saw the sheer volume of destruction.
He had lost his payday, but his creation had worked. Big John and Jimmy collected Joan in her car and took them back down to the family home outside Fresno.
Almost immediately after the literal and figurative dust settled, two things happened.
Big John started planning the construction of a second device, and the FBI created Major Case No. 28, titled Wheel Bomb.
The FBI had been able to lift fingerprints from the bomb,
but it would take time to find a match if they found one at all.
Eyewitnesses came forward and said they saw two men pushing a cart
across the Harvey's parking lot early Tuesday morning,
but none of the witnesses could agree on the descriptions of the two men.
The only promising lead in the first week of the investigation
came from a clerk at the Balaho Motel,
where Big John, Terry, and Bill had stayed the night.
before delivering the device.
The clerk said a couple guys, Terry and Bill,
had been a pain in the ass at about 4 a.m.
Right before they checked out and got into their white cargo van.
They had registered under a fake name,
but they had given the correct license plate number of the van.
The FBI sent the number to the California Department of Motor Vehicles,
but the DMV was going to have to check the records by hand to find a match,
and that was going to take time.
While the FBI waited for the California DMV to find the right record, the wheelbomb task force
honed in on a few men whom they thought were the bombers.
After days of 24-hour surveillance, the task force was ready to move in and arrest five suspects.
At the last minute, the agents realized the suspects were not the bombers, and they called off
the raid.
They were back to square one.
A $200,000 reward had not enticed anyone to come.
forward with credible information, and those first action-packed days of the investigation
stretched into weeks of frustration. Meanwhile, Big John Burgess was planning another bomb.
Around the same time, FBI agents were realizing their five suspects were not the right guys,
Big John was stealing more dynamite. He absconded with 700 pounds of explosives from a site
about an hour north of his house.
He forced Jimmy to help him bury it
near a turkey farm that was owned by his first wife's brother.
It wasn't long after that,
that Big John received his first visit from the FBI.
The DMV search had finally delivered a name
and an address associated with the white cargo van.
When the FBI agent showed up at Big John's house
in early October, 1980,
about six weeks after the explosion,
big John said,
you don't want me, you want my son Johnny.
The agent drove to Johnny's house
and left a business card wedged in the front door
while Johnny was at work.
When Johnny got home and saw the card,
he convened an emergency meeting with Big John and Jimmy.
Johnny had sold the van right after the bomb delivery,
and he needed a story for why the van was up in the Tahoe area.
The Burgess Boys concocted a story
whereby Johnny had driven to the forests of Northern California to scout for a place to grow marijuana.
During the scouting mission, the van's battery died.
Johnny was forced to abandon it and hitchhike all the way back to Fresno.
A couple days later, he returned and collected his van.
That was the story, and now they just had to stick to it.
Big John assured them the FBI had no real evidence.
As long as they told the same story, there was no way the FBI could prove
it was a lie. They tested that theory a couple weeks later when the FBI came calling.
At the end of October, two months after the bombing, the FBI visited Big John, Johnny, and Jimmy.
They all told the same basic lie. There were some deviations and gaps in their versions,
but the stories were close enough. The FBI grilled Johnny, and they didn't believe a word of what he
said. They believed he was lying to cover for the person or persons who had
used his van to deliver the bomb. The problem for the FBI was Big John was right. They had no evidence.
They were confident that Johnny was full of crap, but they couldn't prove it. So they added him to their
list of suspects and continued the wheel bomb investigation that was quickly becoming one of the largest
and most expensive in FBI history. As the calendar turned from October to November,
the investigation produced no actionable results.
By December, hundreds of agents had spent thousands of man-hours
and hundreds of thousands of dollars pursuing the bombers,
and they had nothing.
On December 1st, the FBI dramatically scaled back the wheel bomb investigation.
Most of the agents went on to other things.
In January, 1981, the six FBI agents who stayed on the case
went back to pressing Johnny Burgess to see if he would break.
The FBI served Johnny with a subpoena that required him to testify before a grand jury.
He did, and he stuck to his lie, and at least to some degree, it worked.
The grand jury either believed him or thought there was not enough evidence to indict him for a crime,
so they didn't, and Johnny was free to go.
The investigation dragged on for another four months with no real progress.
By April 1981, it had bottomed out.
The reward for information rose to $500,000.
That would be $1.7 million today, and still it did nothing, or so the agents thought at the time.
On May 13, Harvey's Wagon Wheel Resort and Casino held its grand reopening ceremony,
even though it had never really closed.
Two days after the explosion, while investigators were still sifting through the rubble,
gamblers went right back to the tables in the rooms that had not been affected by the blast.
In May 1981, the FBI finally received the call it had been waiting for.
A young man named Danny D. Pieri said he knew who the bombers were.
Danny had dated a girl named Kelly Cooper.
Kelly had been dating Johnny Burgess when Johnny helped his father steal the dynamite one year earlier.
Johnny and Kelly broke up shortly thereafter when she had been dating Johnny Burgess when she was.
accused him of stealing the dynamite and he denied it.
After they broke up, Kelly dated Danny D.Pierry for a time, and she told him about the bomb
before it was delivered at the end of August 1980.
The information reignited the wheel bomb investigation.
Agents dove deep into Big John's background.
They learned about his debts to Harvey's Casino and his long list of problems in general.
started around the clock surveillance of Johnny and Jimmy. They went to Big John's house almost
every day just to chat and hopefully unnerve him. Sometimes Big John was nice to them. Sometimes
he yelled at them and told them to leave. Finally, in mid-August, 1981, he made his fateful mistake,
which didn't really feel like a mistake at the time, but it was. In his arrogance, he gave two
agents a tour of the workshop where he had built the bomb.
Agents saw all the tools and some of the components that have been used in the device.
But Big John was always building new things in his workshop.
He could easily justify the tools and the materials as things he needed for other projects.
But with Big John's history at Harvey's Casino and the stuff in the workshop and a growing list of small pieces of evidence against Johnny,
the FBI thought it had enough to earn an indictment from a grand jury.
Agent Bill Junkie, who had been on the case since the beginning, testified before a grand jury
and secured warrants for Big John Burgess, Johnny Burgess, and Jimmy Burgess.
On August 14, 1981, agents arrested Jimmy and Johnny.
The young men, who were 18 and 20 years old, respectively, held strong for three hours.
Then they broke.
As scared as Johnny and Jimmy were of their father, they were more.
scared for each other. Neither wanted to see the other suffer for the sins of their father.
In the end, they explained everything, the whole story from start to finish. The next day,
August 15, 1981, almost exactly one year after the bombing, the FBI arrested Big John Burgess.
And if the story did not yet qualify as a saga, then the next four years would put it over the top.
Johnny and Jimmy reluctantly agreed to testify against their father in exchange for a promise of immunity.
The reality of the commitment proved to be far more awkward than anyone could have guessed at the time.
Big John spent four years stalling and hiring and firing lawyers.
When the case finally went to trial, there were two proceedings, a federal trial and a state trial.
By that time, Big John was representing himself in court and acting as his own
lawyer, which meant that he had to question his own sons when they testified against him.
Big John cross-examined Johnny and Jimmy, and they held up under questioning.
Big John admitted to building the bomb. His pride wouldn't allow him to deny it, but he said he
was forced to build it by an organized crime group. No one believed him, and Big John Burgess was
found guilty in both trials. After the second trial, as Big John was
being prepped for life in federal prison, Johnny and Jimmy never saw their father again.
The sons received immunity from prosecution, as promised, and they never spent a day in jail.
Big John's girlfriend, Joan, was found guilty of conspiracy and started to serve a seven-year
sentence, but her conviction was overturned on appeal.
Terry Hall and Bill Brown, the men who delivered the bomb to Harvey's casino, were arrested
and convicted for their roles in the plan.
They remained so terrified of Big John that they refused to give information against him,
and they accepted their seven-year prison sentences.
FBI agent Bill Junkie couldn't believe it.
Bill Brown was around 69 years old at the time, and Terry Hall was around 34.
Big John would never be a free man again, but Terry and Bill were still so scared of him
that they hadn't tried to collect the reward money, and they would rather go to prison than turn
against him.
Big John Burgess spent 11 years in federal prison in California before he succumbed to cancer.
He passed away on August 27, 1996, exactly 16 years to the day after his bomb exploded in Harvey's casino.
Johnny and Jimmy stayed in California, though they had different experiences after their father went to prison.
Jimmy was able to settle down in Fresno. He's in his early 60s now, and he is a wife and three children.
Johnny struggled.
He endured another tragedy just a year after his father went to prison when his fiancé died in a car accident.
It was difficult to start a career while he shared the same name with his infamous father,
and he bounced around California trying different jobs over the years.
In 2008, he spent most of the year in county jail after being arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol.
He used some of the time to write a book about his experience with his father's boss.
but it didn't sell very well. Today he's in his mid-60s and still lives in California.
Next time on Infamous America, we're going to start a series of stories that we've been
holding since the beginning. It's time to start telling the tales of infamous mobsters like
Lucky Luciano, Al Capone, Bugsy Siegel, and more. And we're going to start with the boss
of bosses, the godfather of Godfathers, Lucky Luciano. His story begins next time on Infamous
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Blackbarrelmedia.com. Memberships are just $5 per month. Original music by Rob Valier.
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