A Thousand Pounds of Dynamite

Wednesday, August 27, 1980. 12:30 a.m.

The helicopter thundered over the darkened forest, heading west, rising into the mountains beneath an almost full moon. Even for FBI special agent Dell Rowley, a slight five foot nine, the narrow cargo space behind the two front seats was a tight fit. The helmet and Kevlar vest he wore over his black fatigues, and the weapons he carried, did not make it any more comfortable. But the pilot was supposed to be alone, so Rowley had to stay where he was. Besides, the copilot’s seat was occupied by three canvas money bags, stuffed with cut-and-bound bundles of newsprint calculated to match the weight and volume of almost $3 million in $100 bills—and $1,000 in cash, to complete the effect.

By the ambient glow of the instrument panel, Rowley read the second letter from the extortionists whose giant bomb currently sat in the second-floor offices of Harvey’s Wagon Wheel Casino, 20 miles away, back in Stateline, Nevada. The bomb was silently counting down to an explosion that the nation’s best technicians still had no idea how to prevent. The author of the letters was given to grandiose turns of phrase and idiosyncratic language and had provided complex instructions for the ransom drop: a helicopter, a lone pilot, a flight along Highway 50 into the mountains, a signal from a strobe light, a clearing for a landing zone, the $3 million in used bills. No weapons, no one riding shotgun. The first note had concluded with an ironic flourish. “Happy landing,” it read, a subtly misaligned row of letters banged out on an electric typewriter.

But the FBI agents had no patience for such arrangements. They knew that the money drop was the weak point in any extortion attempt. Up in the night sky above Rowley, high enough for the wind to carry away the telltale throb of its rotors until it was too late, was a Huey carrying a six-man SWAT team from the bureau’s Sacramento office. In Rowley’s hands was an MP5 submachine gun fitted with a silencer. In his head was a simple plan.

As the skids of the Bell Ranger touched down on the mountainside, the pilot would douse the lights and kick open the door, and Rowley would roll unseen to the ground. He would scuttle into the trees, switch on his night-vision goggles, and locate the extortionists.

Then, if necessary, he would kill them.

One

Six months earlier.

Jimmy Birges walked up the steps to the front porch of his older brother’s house in Fresno, California, and rang the doorbell. Then he rang it again, and again. On the fifth ring, Johnny Birges reluctantly opened the door. He was high.

John Birges Jr. was 19 years old. He liked weed, beer, girls, and the Stones. Decades later, the brassy disco strut of “Miss You” would still remind him of the day he finally dropped out of high school, packed his gear and his motocross trophies, and turned his back on the family home and the father he detested. Two months past his 16th birthday, he’d started busing tables at Tiny’s Olive Branch, a 24-hour diner out on Highway 99, and sleeping on couches. Now he shared a place with two friends from school, made good money working as a roofer, and grew a little pot on the side. He sold some and smoked the rest.

A diligent anthropologist seeking the embodiment of a certain kind of California lifestyle at the end of the 1970s would be hard-pressed to find one more potent than Johnny Birges. He was blond and tan—the result of nailing shingles six days a week in the fierce Central Valley sun—with narrow green eyes, a wispy mustache, and shaggy hair down to his shoulders. He moved his tools from job to job in the back of his snub-nosed Dodge Tradesman cargo van, which on Saturday nights he still used to take his bike to races. The van was plain white, but Johnny had fitted it with mag wheels and wide tires. On the driver-side door was a sticker that read, “When the van’s A-rockin’, don’t come A-knockin’.” On the dashboard was another: “Ass, grass or cash—nobody rides for free.” Johnny was high every waking moment of the day. His brother couldn’t stand him.

As smart and composed as his brother was hazy and unkempt, Jimmy Birges was 18 but skinnier and taller than Johnny, and a student in a high school program for gifted kids. He had grown his dark hair long, too, but it was neatly parted in the middle, and he favored button-down shirts and Top-Siders. He had a smooth charm, which he would later put to use as a car salesman at Fresno Toyota. The stoner and the straight arrow were predictably at odds. After his brother had left home, Jimmy tried sharing an apartment with him, but they couldn’t get along. In the end, he moved back in with his father, in the family’s house on North Fowler Avenue in Clovis, a quiet northeastern suburb of Fresno. The two boys had barely seen each other in three years.

“How did you know where I live?” Johnny asked.

“I don’t want anything from you,” Jimmy said. “Big John sent me to tell you he needs your help.”

The Birges boys were still bound together by at least one thing: a terror of their father, a cantankerous Hungarian émigré whom they and everyone else called Big John. Johnny hated his father but still yearned for his approval. He waved Jimmy into the house, where he was cooking breakfast for his girlfriend, Kelli Cooper.

Then Jimmy told his brother what their father had in mind.

Big John was going to extort a million dollars from Harvey’s Wagon Wheel Casino in Lake Tahoe, and he planned to do it by building a bomb.

The two boys had a good laugh about that. Kelli laughed, too. Another of Big John’s crazy schemes. It would never happen. Then again, it wouldn’t be the strangest thing their father had ever been mixed up in.

Two

Janos Birges arrived in the United States in May 1957 a penniless 35-year-old political refugee. He was dark and handsome then, with an intense gaze, a high forehead, and an aquiline nose; beneath his shirt, a tattooed eagle spread its wings across his chest. He had fled Hungary six months earlier, when Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest, crushing the popular uprising against the country’s Communist government.

Born in 1922 in Jászberény, an agricultural town in central Hungary, Janos was the only child of a landowning and farming family; he’d say later that he considered himself upper middle class. But his father was a ferocious drinker and hated having the boy around. He sent Janos to live with his grandparents at the age of three, and Janos spent nine happy years with them. In 1933, they sent him back, and several years later, at 15, Janos ran away for good. He went to Budapest, where he was taken in by a butcher and his family.

The stories he told his sons about what happened next are hard to verify. He was always secretive about his past, and the boys never asked too many questions. Knowledge is power, he often said; the more people know about you, the weaker you are. But the account he gave them was by no means unlikely. At first, he told Johnny, he worked as the butcher’s apprentice, and was soon running the shop. Then, in 1941, Hungary entered World War II on the German side and sent troops to support the invasion of Russia. That was the year Janos enrolled in the Royal Hungarian Air Force Military Academy.

By the time he graduated and entered the Royal Hungarian Army Air Force as a pilot, in 1944, the tide of the war had turned: The Nazis had formally occupied Hungary, and the Red Army was approaching its eastern borders. Janos was put at the controls of an Me 109 fighter plane and sent up to fight the Russians. He liked to tell his son that he shot down 13 Allied planes before being hit by anti-aircraft fire over Italy and captured by Allied troops. U.S. records show only that in 1945, a month after the Hungarian capital fell to the Soviets, Birges was arrested by the Gestapo in Austria. He was charged with disobeying orders but escaped; he was arrested again in 1946, by Hungarian military authorities, but released without charge.

Hungary was now entirely under the control of the Soviet Union. It was around this time, Birges would later claim, that he began working for U.S. military intelligence in Austria—though decades later a search of the files of the U.S. Army’s 306th Counter Intelligence Corps in Salzburg revealed no mention of a Janos Birges. But in April 1948, he was arrested by Soviet secret police in Hungary and charged with espionage. The trial lasted seven minutes. He was sentenced to 25 years of hard labor and sent to a gulag in Siberia. He spent almost eight years there, cutting down trees to make railroad ties and twice contracting jaundice, before he was released—at the same time as thousands of Axis prisoners of war were repatriated from captivity in the Soviet Union—and finally returned to Hungary.

Then, one night in 1955, he met Elizabet Nyul in a Jászberény restaurant. A petite 27-year-old with an elfin face and brooding eyes, she was waiting for her husband, who worked there as a waiter. Janos invited her to dance. They danced together twice, and he asked her to marry him.

Elizabet was the second-youngest of a dozen siblings, impulsive and headstrong. The divorce came through quickly and, in January 1956, Elizabet and Janos were married. The early days of the marriage were a brief period of tranquility for Birges. Less than a year later, the Soviet Union moved to suppress the revolution in Budapest, and Janos and Elizabet found themselves among the 200,000 refugees who fled the Soviet crackdown, which left 2,500 Hungarians dead. Birges later said that as soon as the uprising began, he’d joined in—he used a jackhammer to help a friend escape from prison—but was arrested when Soviet troops crossed the border. Released and provided with a passport by a sympathetic Soviet officer, he and Elizabet escaped into Austria. There, Janos worked as a German-Hungarian interpreter for the Red Cross, until, months later, he was granted political asylum in the United States.

At first, the new lives of John and Elizabeth followed the steep trajectory of immigrant cliché. According to John’s account, on arriving in New Jersey they were given $3 by the Red Cross. His new wife wanted sunglasses, so they spent all the money buying a pair. They made their way to California and got work on a farm, John as a carpenter and Elizabeth in the packing house. Later, John found work with the metal-fabrication company PDM Steel. He spent five years there, learning welding and pipefitting. Johnny was born in 1960, Jimmy in 1962.

Two years later, Big John put $500 into starting his own landscaping outfit. He worked around the clock seven days a week and never took a vacation. He dressed in work clothes or outfits from the Salvation Army. He was non-union, and a fighter. Johnny once saw him put two men down at once. He was five-eleven, fit and powerful, and an imposing presence; other men were afraid of him. He could be charming, but his sense of humor was sometimes cruel. He was often reckless, inclined to cut corners. Years of blasting wells and trenches out of the California hardpan had made him pretty comfortable around dynamite.

By 1972, Big John was a millionaire, with three separate businesses, 26 employees, and lucrative contracts with California municipalities and golf courses. He bought three Mercedeses and, when he lost his license after picking up one too many tickets for speeding, his own plane, a Beechcraft. He used it to fly to job sites and liked to pull terrifying low-altitude stunts, sometimes with his sons on board: buzzing water-skiers on a lake to watch them scatter or flying under a freeway overpass. Elizabeth handled the accounts, and eventually Big John bought her a business she could call her own, a restaurant. The Villa Basque, on North Blackstone in Fresno, had two candlelit dining rooms with red-and-white tablecloths and a banquet hall, and it was packed every night with families attacking a ten-course prix fixe menu few of them could finish.

At home, Big John was a tinkerer and a would-be inventor, always soldering and wiring. When the family moved to a modest wood-framed ranch house on the rural outskirts of Clovis, with 15 acres of vineyards, he set up a large workshop out back. His ideas could be inspired, but he often lacked the patience for details and was unlucky with those he did perfect. The labor-saving meatball-making gizmo he built for the Villa Basque never worked quite right; he built his own electric irrigation timer, and developed an automated ditchdigger for laying pipes more quickly, but was beaten to the patents by other inventors.

And money did not make Big John and Elizabeth happy. They drank and fought, and he suspected her of having affairs. He called her a nymphomaniac and claimed she used the restaurant as a wellspring of sexual encounters. She took to disappearing for days at a time; he always brought her back. Once, they argued so furiously that she fell to the kitchen floor and had a seizure right in front of him. They took her away in an ambulance—said she’d had a nervous breakdown.

Johnny and Jimmy enjoyed the trappings of a comfortable life. Their parents bought them motorbikes, go-karts, and three-wheelers with balloon tires. Elizabeth liked to dress them in identical outfits. One summer she took them on a road trip across Europe. But Big John made them work nights in the restaurant and summers for the landscaping business. They labored at job sites up and down the state, sleeping in trailers with Big John’s crew. The only haircuts they were given came once a year, at the start of summer vacation, when Big John would take a pair of clippers and shave their heads. Their scalps would blister as they dug ditches in the searing valley heat.

Big John also beat them relentlessly—with belts, electric cables, boots, and coat hangers. At night he would come into their room, pull back the covers, and whale on Johnny while Jimmy lay mute and motionless in bed. When Jimmy was six, his father caught him with his elbow on the table at dinner and punched out four of his teeth to teach him better manners. Johnny hated school, and in first or second grade he was caught jamming glue and toothpicks into the locks so no one could open the doors. At 12, he began drinking beer; he smoked pot for the first time two years later. Johnny tormented his younger brother, and Jimmy would run to his mother and father. Big John would beat Johnny some more, then turn around and berate his younger son for telling tales—he couldn’t stomach a stool pigeon.

When Elizabeth finally filed for divorce, in November 1973, she moved into a travel trailer behind the house, where she could keep an eye on her sons. By that time Big John was making plans to retire, and he sold off the landscaping business to his foreman. He began flying up to Lake Tahoe in his plane to gamble. Elizabeth had a boyfriend, but the arguments and her disappearances continued.

At the end of July 1975, Elizabeth vanished again. This time she left behind her Mazda pickup, parked outside the kitchen door with the keys in the ignition, her pocketbook on the passenger seat. Big John didn’t seem to notice. Three days later, her body was found in a field behind the house. An autopsy showed a lethal combination of alcohol and Valium in her bloodstream; she had choked on her own vomit. The coroner ruled it a suicide, but something never seemed quite right about that. Her stomach was full of whiskey. Jimmy knew that she only ever drank vodka. And they never found the bottle.

Big John changed after Elizabeth died. Not long after the funeral, he went around the house cutting her out of the family photographs with a pair of scissors. He took the urn that held her ashes and emptied it in the yard, in front of his sons. He began spending money like never before. He started dressing well for the first time in his life, in suits and turtlenecks. He wore a pencil moustache, drank mai tais, and dated the waitresses at the Villa Basque. And he began gambling more heavily in the casinos up in Lake Tahoe. His favorite was Harvey’s Wagon Wheel in Stateline, Nevada. Three

Harvey’s Wagon Wheel was one of the first casinos built in Stateline, an isolated resort town nestled among the pines and incense-cedars at the foot of the mountains on the southeastern shore of Lake Tahoe. Harvey Gross was a wholesale butcher from Sacramento who first arrived in Stateline in 1937, when the place was a handful of buildings without power, water, or telephone lines. What it did have was recently legalized gambling.

In 1944, Gross and his wife, Llewellyn, opened the Wagon Wheel Saloon and Gambling Hall, a single-room casino with three slot machines, two blackjack tables, and a six-stool lunch counter. The Western theme—log-cabin decor, the wagon wheel and steer’s head on the sign—was Llewellyn’s idea. The Wagon Wheel sat hard against the Nevada border, which cut east-west across Highway 50, dividing Stateline from the California town of South Lake Tahoe. Outside the casino was the only 24-hour gas pump for 60 miles. Business was strictly seasonal. In the winter, when snow fell on the pass at Echo Summit, blocking the highway west to Sacramento, the place would be closed for months at a time. Only after Gross went up there and helped clear the pass himself one winter did the state finally build a maintenance station to keep it open.

By the 1950s, the Wagon Wheel was attracting a fashionable, wealthy crowd up from Sacramento and San Francisco every summer, and Gross had found a local rival in Bill Harrah, who had opened his own casino directly across the street. In 1963, Gross redeveloped his place into the first modern high-rise hotel casino on the South Shore, a concrete monolith with 11 stories, 197 rooms, and his name up on the roof, curling across a giant wagon wheel and longhorn skull in red neon.

With the renamed Harvey’s Wagon Wheel Resort and Casino, Gross made a killing and catalyzed a gaming boom in Tahoe. But after Llewellyn died unexpectedly, in 1964, he began to withdraw from the garrulous front-of-house role she had created for them. He still liked to walk the floor of the casino and oversaw the major decisions himself. But he spent more and more time on his ranch over the mountain in the Carson Valley or at his winter place in Indian Wells, California.

By 1980, Bill Harrah was dead, but Harvey still faced competition from the suits who ran an expanded Harrah’s in his rival’s name and from the new local outposts of corporate gaming, the Sahara Tahoe and Caesar’s. In the shadow of these sleek new towers, Harvey’s was beginning to show its age. But Gross still had his giant highway billboards, his multistory gaming floor, his miniskirted cocktail waitresses delivering cheap drinks. Harvey’s Wagon Wheel remained a multimillion-dollar enterprise: a winking, jingling money factory by the lake.

Like all gambling towns, Stateline was a magnet for crime, and Bill Jonkey, one of the two agents in the FBI office in nearby Carson City, was a frequent visitor. In 1980, Jonkey was 35 years old, a burly outdoorsman with a thick mustache and the easy confidence of a movie cowboy. He had been in the FBI for nine years and law enforcement for most of his life. Born and raised in Glendale, California, he was a surfer who had traded his longboard for a badge before he had even graduated college. As a 21–year-old officer for the Long Beach Police Department, he patrolled downtown and the west side: the docks and the port, the sailors and the riffraff. It was active. Very active. Getting into fights was a good education.

Being a cop gave Jonkey a deferment from the draft, but he volunteered all the same. Things were heating up in Vietnam, and he hated to see a war go by and not get involved. He was on his way into Special Forces when the recruiter learned that he’d recently contracted hepatitis; that meant he’d have to sit it out in Long Beach for another three years. His quarantine was almost up when he got shot.

It was June 25, 1969, his last day in uniform; he’d been promoted from patrolman to detective. He and his partner were just heading out for night patrol when the call came in: a 211 silent at the Daisy Bar—a dirtbag place, only four or five blocks away. The guy came running out of the back with a gun in his hand, then everyone started shooting. One round hit Jonkey in the chest, knocked him back against the wall. Jonkey had three rounds left. He fired them all. The guy died right there.

They gave him a medal for that. He was off duty for three and a half months. The bullet had punctured every lobe of his right lung, broken a rib, severed an artery, and finally lodged near his spine. When he came around after the surgery, his wife was standing by the bed. “Well, I guess you’ve got that out of your system, now don’t you?” she said.

“I don’t think so,” he said. It didn’t work out too well with that wife.

The FBI took him in 1971. At first he was assigned to the Denver office, then Vegas, where he immediately started making plans to get up to the resident agency in Carson City. It was a small office, with only two agents, and most of the time you worked alone. Jonkey’s supervisor was all the way back in Vegas. He went to work in jeans and cowboy boots, had a horse and an acre of land. He was a western guy; he didn’t do humidity or cities. The place was perfect.

His jurisdiction included the gambling towns around Lake Tahoe, which kept him pretty busy: tracking fugitives, handling some organized crime, the odd phony check. The extortion calls came in once or twice a year. Bomb threats, usually. Always the big casinos: the Sahara, Caesar’s, Harvey’s. A pipe bomb, a paper bag left between two slot machines. Or someone would call security at Harrah’s and say they’d left devices everywhere: Check in the trash in the men’s restroom if you don’t think I’m serious. Some wires, no explosives: bullshit stuff. The guy would call back and say, Did you find it? Well, there’s 20 more of those. I want $500,000.

The feds always got them at the money drop. Jonkey and the other agents would stake out the location in advance. Once, they drove out to the desert and spent three days disguised as hunters—camping gear, rifles, dead rabbits, beer—before they saw a guy come sauntering up the track looking for the old water heater where the money was supposed to be hidden. Another time, the drop was in a trash can down on the Tahoe shore, miles from anywhere. At ten at night, two men came out of the lake in diving gear. They thought that was pretty clever. The agents got them just like they got everyone else. They could make the plans as complicated as they liked, but in the end they always had to come for the money.

In 1974, the FBI sent Jonkey to a two-week bomb investigator’s course in Quantico, where he learned to read the evidence left behind by an explosion. By the summer of 1980, he’d been out to two or three bomb scenes. But nothing big.