In the end he was caught because his van was identified and because "One of his sons had revealed to his then-girlfriend that his father had placed a bomb in Harvey's."
I always wonder at how criminals that otherwise might seem movie-like masterminds are caught as a result of mundane mistakes and outright stupid moves like this. You would think if you are going to bomb a place, the first thing would be to not talk about it to anyone outside those that are directly involved. But criminals that have executed the "perfect crime" get caught driving over the speed limit, with expired license, spending money too lavishly...
I suppose he would have been caught some other way if not for this, but it almost seems like a comical trope to me. Maybe you are the best bomb maker around, but you weren't that good at the simpler things.
I see your point! I totally do. I also used to hold this belief. But then the Snowden revelations came out and it was revealed that probably 10,000 people in government were aware of a system that was sucking up all of our data for warrantless search and they had successfully kept the secret for something like 10 years (or more?).
For sure it's true that a secret can be kept by three people if two of them are dead. But there are clear cases where large groups of people have been able to keep secrets as well, or at least keep them from spilling out into public awareness.
I'd bet that for most crimes, the secret isn't kept, and there is someone else out there that knows who did it, who simply doesn't tell law enforcement. And yet most serious crimes aren't solved.
Humans have a real need to tell other people personal things, even to their own detriment. But sometimes things stay secrets even if tons of people know about them.
I think that Snowden leaks were more or less an open secret. I mean, it is about spies spying. Sure, the NSA overstepped its borders, but it is not exactly the first time (remember ECHELON), and the way it did that wasn't revolutionary. They didn't have a quantum computer, nanobots or anything like that: just competent computer security specialists and too much money to spend. Not even something significant like breaking commercial-grade crypto or anything like that, they "broke TLS" by inserting wiretaps in datacenters where data wasn't encrypted.
Snowden gave proof and technical details about what was happening. It is like showing proof that Israel has nuclear weapons. Israel doesn't talk about it, they may or may not have nuclear weapons, most people think they do, and such a revelation won't surprise anyone, but it is still a big deal, because they can't use their "deliberate ambiguity" strategy anymore.
I was working at Google when it came out, and that they were tapping our private inter-dc links was a huge update. Before I think it was something like "I guess the NSA could do that a bit, but it would be a prohibitively costly to do much" and then suddenly it was "we have to encrypt all of this as quickly as we can". There was a huge internal reprioritization.
(Speaking only for myself; I didn't work on any of this directly)
Consider that Wired reported on NSA's secret mass-wiretap of AT&T communications in 2006! This was a high-profile lawsuit (Hepting v. AT&T), which was dismissed in 2009 after new immunity legislation in 2008. That was followed by Jewel v. NSA in 2008 which seems still unresolved.
Not to mention the whistleblowing on the Trailblazer Project and New York Times reporting on the "Terrorist Surveillance Program" in 2005/2006.
I became known as a conspiracy theorist amount my friends when I told them about this. A week later the Snowden revelations came out and yet somehow I’m still the conspiracy theorist.
I went out drinking once in DC with some people who worked at the NSA in 2005 or so and they said they were hiring for people to analyze "all the traffic on the internet".
When the Snowden leaks came out it was not a surprise. Granted most people don't go out drinking with the people doing the spying, but even people who work at the NSA can't keep a secret, if it was even meant to be a secret.
An obvious counterpoint is that the conspiracy was exposed, by Snowden.
I think the lesson here is that a "conspiracy" can exist as long as all of its participants believe they are morally in the right. The people involved in the NSA dragnet believed in the cause; when a non-believer (Snowden) got involved, the gig was up.
It's easy to believe that a government agency would overstep its bounds to spy on people it (according to complex laws that well-meaning people misunderstand or disagree with) shouldn't. It's much, much less credible that a large number of US government employees conspired to, say, bomb the world trade center. A conspiracy like that would quickly enlist someone with moral qualms about it, and it just takes one to blow the whistle.
Most criminal conspiracies succeed as evidenced by the fact that most crimes aren't solved and most criminals aren't arrested. In fact, the larger your criminal organization, the less likely you are to go to prison. If I shot a passerby on the street, witnesses would be coming out of the woodwork. Friends or family would identify me by surveillance tape or report my strange behavior. Conversely, if a gang in Baltimore kills some guy, nobody will come forward. Let's not even get started on cartels.
Instead, I think it's much more apt to say that whether or not a conspiracy will be betrayed depends a lot on what will happen to the traitor/whistleblower.
If you want to turn in an evil, murderous, criminal organization, you'd better be willing to die or flee somewhere beyond their grasp. That bravery needs to be combined with an ability to get compelling evidence to the people who need to see it.
Eventually, Snowden came out with the truth isn't it.
Also, not all of those 10k people might not be knowing what they are doing or don't care. You can cloak a lot of espionage activity with forms, sheets, memos, brainwashing and what not.
how many of those 10k people really have the awareness required to put that kind of data invasion in context and perspective? I think the reaction to large issues like climate change, tells you exactly all you need about people's ability to downplay large issues into "someone else's problem"
Wired reported on the EFF suing AT&T over NSA wiretapping telecom traffic in bulk in 2006. And there were other assorted news reports on Trailblazer, the "Total Information Awareness program", etc. from that time.
So maybe not in the widespread public awareness, but if you were Googling trying to answer the question, "Is the USA gov't eavesdropping on all communication traffic?" in 2013 pre-Snowden, then the reasonable conclusion would've been, "Yes".
The 2006 lawsuit was about AT&T cooperating with the NSA to facilitate tapping their customers, quite different from the NSA surreptitiously digging up and tapping private fiber.
> But then the Snowden revelations came out and it was revealed that probably 10,000 people in government were aware of a system that was sucking up all of our data for warrantless search and they had successfully kept the secret for something like 10 years (or more?).
Illegal domestic electronic espionage/surveillance wasn't a vast secret. It was widely known that the Feds were making every effort they could to push down that road, and the Feds had a very long history of illegal domestic espionage. Frankly, it was obvious that it was going on. A lot of people I know in tech had crossed paths with other people that knew pieces of the puzzle, that some domestic espionage programs were going on (particularly supercharged after 9/11). You'd get snippets of it in discussions. Snowden's revelations were not the first, it was the bombshell that was comprehensive (and only for a small part of what they were doing).
It wasn't yet proven, and the full extent wasn't yet known, there wasn't enough credible public evidence to demonstrate exactly what they were doing. There's a huge difference between something not being secret, and being proven, and that's what Snowden's actions helped to correct.
While it's in the not-yet-proven stage, the malevolent skeptics in particular will all sandbag any attempt to reveal it, by burying discussions under conspiracy tags and swat away any attempts to dig into what's really going on. Some skeptics do that on purpose because they have a vested interest in doing so, some do that because they're cowards (which is what is represented by the common statement: "if you don't have anything to hide, you don't have anything to fear" - it's cowardly people hiding from a moment of confrontation).
Ready for another one? They're still performing illegal domestic electronic surveillance. That too isn't some vast secret. Oh I know, but but but they're not supposed to be doing that! Golly.
>It is also why its fascinating that people will believe in conspiracy theories that supposedly involve tens / hundreds / thousands of people.
I have the same reasoning for the 9/11 truthers. Do people really believe that no one on the "inside" has come out to say it was all staged/planned/faked? Hijacking 4 planes and flying them into buildings is going to take a lot of planning. Not to mention that people claim there was no plane that hit the Pentagon. Like really? They go to all that planning and just think "let's just use a missle at the pentagon, no one will notice it wasn't a plane."
The moon landings were faked and the government chose the premier director of the era to do it. None other than Stanley Kubrick.
Kubrick was a perfectionist and stickler for details. His background as a photographer always showed through in the cinematography of his films. After extensive field testing, he chose to conduct the filming in the only way that he felt was able to adequately capture the unusual environment of the lunar surface using practical lighting techniques: he filmed all of the scenes of the mission and landing on-location.
Funny you should mention 'get caught driving over the speed limit'.... from another link in this thread that did happen.
Like most plans, Birges’s fell apart rather early on. One of his sons got a speeding ticket, placing him near the ransom drop point. His girlfriend drove off the road, resulting in her hospitalization.
Selection bias is a cheap canned answer, but it doesn't make any sense here. Sensational unsolved crimes make the news. The public hearing about crimes isn't conditional on those crimes being solves. Arguably some of the most enduringly notorious crimes are the ones that go unsolved.
The Zodiac Killer; never been caught. "D.B. Cooper", never caught. The presumed murder of Jimmy Hoffa, unsolved.
I happen to know somebody who was involved in the investigation of highly professional heist. The bank wanted to keep it quiet, and I can't find much other than this one article about the incident. I was gonna call it movie-worthy, but it's not, because there were no salacious details, no close calls, just in&out and no funny business.
Sure, but there is really no shortage of known unsolved crimes.
> The police does not put out press releases repeatedly with 'we got no leads'.
They do, in all the cases I listed they've asked the public for help for years. Certainly they don't do that for crimes they don't know occurred, but there is no shortage of known crimes that are very publicly unsolved.
For that matter, there are also a whole lot of missing person bulletins soliciting information from the public. Many of them might be murder victims, but it isn't known whether they are really alive or dead, let alone murdered. The public is nonetheless asked for information.
> Sure, but there is really no shortage of known unsolved crimes.
That's certainly the nice way to put it -
"If you're murdered in America, there's a 1 in 3 chance that the police won't identify your killer. To use the FBI's terminology, the national "clearance rate" for homicide today is 64.1 percent. Fifty years ago, it was more than 90 percent." ... "Criminologists estimate that at least 200,000 murders have gone unsolved since the 1960s"
Yes, police are pretty good at solving "the spouse did it" crimes, the most obvious sort. When the victims were chosen randomly, the clearance rate becomes abysmal. They're also bad at solving crimes when the victims come from the marginalized fringes of society. Jack the Ripper is a famous unsolved case of a serial killer who targeted prostitutes more than a century ago. Modern examples include the Long Island killer, the Eastbound Strangler, and plenty more.
When the existence of such a serial killer is recognized, it tends to make the news at least regionally. Sometimes they become internationally famous for many years. But to my point, the public hearing about it is not contingent on the culprit being caught. If anything, the ones who are caught fast and easy tend to make the least amount of news. You can 'juice' unsolved crimes for stories a century after the fact, but stories that follow the "husband did it and we caught him" format tend to disappear from the news after the culprit has been sentenced.
Except for when the husband didn't do it after being convicted, where it turns out the wife was having an affair with a golf pro, and someone comes in and kills them both. I bet that one would even lend itself into making a great movie.
Cast Harrison Ford as the wrongfully accused husband. Have him escape after his bus to the prison crashes, then have Tommy Lee Jones as a US Marshal chase Ford down while Ford is trying to prove his innocence.
Still shocking to me that nobody looks at the life insurance broker who knows that the spouse would be vulnerable to a sure conviction if the other spouse was found dead within the next few months after opening the policy
The Dutch police has a cold case team, yes. For cold cases ( there is even a word for it ) which have not seen progress or public attention for year, some even decades.
I think most police forces have one. A decade might mean there's new tech that can move the case forward or the criminal got caught for something else and it's just a matter of connecting the cases.
This is not always the case... the DoJ reminds me of a sales organization. Crimes are sales leads. Publicized leads are usually very close to being closed(solved).
That doesn't always work though - the crime may be something the public is aware of, and then the pressure to "close" the lead is even greater. There are numerous "big" crimes that the public has no awareness of though.
The Zodiac Killer and D. B. Cooper are notable exceptions. And there are probably a bunch more.
It seems statistically unavoidable that there are always going to be some big cases that go unsolved. It'll probably become less and less common - especially since it seems inevitable that nearly all DNA will eventually be traceable via genetic genealogy databases - but some crimes just won't result in any DNA or other significant evidence being left.
Eventually, the sons of "Big John" caved in to the FBI in interrogation. While the tip of the former girlfriend made the whole family prime suspects in the first place, they did not have anything on them until the sons decided to talk (and get immunity for their involvement in exchange).
However, the two sons only decided to talk after the police made each one believe that the other was ratting him out. Classic interrogation technique that I've seen in countless procedural tv shows and movies.
The kind of decision-making that leads one to owing a shit-ton of money to a casino, and then deciding that the best solution is to bomb said casino, seems incompatible with covering your tracks well.
>I always wonder at how criminals that otherwise might seem movie-like masterminds are caught as a result of mundane mistakes and outright stupid moves like this.
I think the same when you watch TV shows like Dateline. Yet the clearance rate for homicides in the US is below 60%. And I doubt that 40% are all master minds.
I had the misfortune of seeing this first hand. I caught an employee who embezzled $19,000 from my company red handed. The police refused to help even after I reported it until I called the mayor's office and complained.
I assume you mean because LE is splitting resources and also dealing with drug cases. I think it wouldn't be unrealistic to have the drug cases fund themselves through seizures. I wonder how bad of an ROI our LE gets on drug investigations.
Drug prohibition also drives up murder rates massively. For your typical turf war murder, even the victims' side has little incentive to talk to the cops.
I would say that wasn't a slip-up, like getting a parking ticket or something. Several newspapers published his manifesto at his insistence, and his brother recognized his writing style.
If you're confused by the description of two boxes and the picture of the single box, the picture is of the smaller box that was on top. The box on the bottom held the dynamite. From googling around a bit it wasn't exactly 1,000lbs of dynamite. It was 18 cases of Hercules Unigel dynamite, each case about 40lbs, so 720lbs.
Interestingly, the ransom note made the same factual error, calling the explosive TNT instead of dynamite. "If exploded this bomb contains enough TNT to severely damage Harrahs across the street. This should give you some idea of the amount of TNT contained within this box. It is full of TNT."
That's part of why they tried decapitating the device with a shaped charge. TNT isn't as easy to set off as dynamite is. According to a different account I read, if it had, as advertised, been TNT (and there weren't a few loose sticks in the top), that plan would have had a decent chance of working.
This is so close to the plot of the movie Juggernaut[1], and occurred only 4 years after the movie's release -- I can't help but wonder if the bomber was inspired by the plot. That movie had bombs (on a ship, not a casino) with multiple triggering mechanisms: some behind flathead screws, movement switches, photoelectric detectors/triggers. So similar. A really good movie, by the way.
Thanks! When I saw the photo, I was immediately reminded of this article, which was posted here about one year ago (I think?), but I hadn't bookmarked it...
I'm confused by this game - did the original panel have lights? I was hoping this was a logical model of the original bomb, but switching #5 seems to set it off. The article says that #5 was known to be dummy.
> Fourth, inside the top box Big John rigged a float from a toilet cistern. If the box was flooded with water or foam, the float would rise, completing a circuit.
The "accelerometer" was another device:
> Fifth, beside the float was a tilt mechanism built from a length of PVC pipe lined with more aluminum foil; inside hung a metal pendulum held under tension from below with a rubber band. [...] Once this was armed, if the bomb was moved in any way, the end of the pendulum would make contact with the foil, completing a circuit.
Fair point, but the other part of the game theory equation is deterrence - by paying the ransom, you might encourage others to copy the crime, even if many of them get eventually caught.
Super interesting. How is it that we don't hear about such cat-and-mouse games anymore? Do they not happen or are they not talked about? It seems like it's a thing of the past, but why?
Because it doesn’t usually work out. Most of the time if you’re asking for physical cash to be transferred you’re going to get caught especially today given the miniaturization of electronics for trackers or beacons. It’s just too easy to follow whatever truck is being used to move the money and large amounts of money is quite bulky. You could maybe see some come back because of cryptocurrency and like the other reply said you could say that ransomware attacks is the modern day equivalent of this kind of extortion.
Exactly, mostly cellphones and high-tech surveillance has made the FBI's job much easier. That and today when everything is labelled 'terrorism' they get some friendly help from the intel community. Where in that case even hiding in a bunker in Pakistan next to a military base is only saving you a number of years.
In this casino story they already had a 6-person SWAT team flying high enough not to be detected, above the helicopter doing the planned cash drop. While the solo helicopter pilot was a special agent armed with an MP5 and night vision, and a bag with fake $3 million of bills and every intention to catch or shoot the guy picking up. All of this was organized while the timer of the bomb was ticking down.
Given the low odds, it's boils down to an over-complicated suicide mission, with high risk of it not working out. Nor any point even if does. With the financial system also under a ton of surveillance and the involvement of his family and even one of their girlfriends.
It's no wonder that this sort of thing has become a rarity even for the clever ones like this guy.
Ransomware is also a better sort of arbitrage against the legal system. If you somehow got caught and prosecuted you didn't do a violent crime, so that has to probably help you somewhat. Of course you did do a federal crime so you have to serve 85% of your time no matter what.
I think we gotta take a step back and find something with some data; I offered pulled-from-my-ass conjecture and you countered with anecdotes. We gotta actually find a study or something of how much time people actually serve.
Bit of a stretch, but I think it can be attributed to the overall reduction in crime since the early 90s, most likely brought upon by the elimination of lead in gasoline.
Given that the bomb exploded, how do they know what was inside the detonator? I guess the culprit had some technical drawings in his possession when he was arrested?
> I always wonder at how criminals that otherwise might seem movie-like masterminds are caught as a result of mundane mistakes and outright stupid moves like this.
I always think of this very thing. BTK, for example, was caught because of metadata found in a Word document he mailed into the police on a floppy disk.
They used a shaped charge to knock off the detonators from the larger payload. Basically used a smaller, targeted explosion to disable a larger explosion.
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>Tourists at neighboring casinos bet on when the bomb would go off, or if it would go off. After the bomb detonated, crowds cheered and reveled from a safe distance.
Completely unhinged tourists. Hotel explodes and people cheer cause they probably won money.
This wasn't Vegas, this was Tahoe. My grandparents owned a home there not long after this happened, and I remember there being a lot of talk about it. But when this happened I was just a kid. This also wasn't long after Mount St. Helen blew up. My parents and I lived in Carson City at the time. I remember the ash falling. At first I thought it was snow! There was no ash from the Harvey's explosion though. It wasn't that big :p
The schadenfreude is killing me. Im sure many working class people lost their jobs. A hotel was demolished causing substantial monetary loss for its owners and investors. The FBI had egg on their face.
It wasn't demolished. The structural integrity was not damaged, $18M was spent on repairs, and it reopened about 10 months later. Given the owner's attitude towards his staff, it seems likely they would all have been re-hired if they were still looking for work.
The only other viable outcome I can see is if they gave the extortionists the money and caught them later — and they certainly would have caught them. But there is no guarantee the same scenario would not have unfolded with the bomb going off. And having given in to the demands of the extortionist probably would have inspired a wave of similar crimes.
I meant in a tongue and cheek kind of way. I was thinking it was funny. Apparently HN is full of people that interpret text literally and cannot infer nuance whatsoever.
I always wonder at how criminals that otherwise might seem movie-like masterminds are caught as a result of mundane mistakes and outright stupid moves like this. You would think if you are going to bomb a place, the first thing would be to not talk about it to anyone outside those that are directly involved. But criminals that have executed the "perfect crime" get caught driving over the speed limit, with expired license, spending money too lavishly...
I suppose he would have been caught some other way if not for this, but it almost seems like a comical trope to me. Maybe you are the best bomb maker around, but you weren't that good at the simpler things.