There is a small city with only 200,000 people in Nevada, don't look at the small population, but its fame is not small. It is famous because it is the only famous casino in the state after Las Vegas.
It is really "the mountain is not high, there are immortals are named, the city is not big, and there is gambling and the spirit".
However, what really made it famous in the world was a bomb extortion case that occurred here in the 80s.
At 6.30 a.m. on August 26, 1980, Ryan, a hotel security guard, went to his dormitory to get a cigarette, and found that the door of the telephone exchange on the second floor of the casino was half open, and he couldn't help but wonder, because the door of this room was usually locked, afraid that outsiders would enter casually and what accidents would happen.
So Ryan stepped forward, intending to close the door, but when he reached out to close it, a letter fell from the door, and it read:
I placed two boxes in my room, one containing 1,000 pounds of high explosives, enough to blow up the hotel and raz the buildings within a hundred meters of it to the ground. The other box is the mechanism for detonating explosives.
With the slightest movement, the bomb will detonate, and you will not try to remove the mechanism, there are 28 buttons on the panel, the password to eliminate the bomb detonation system is also 28 digits, enter a wrong number, the bomb will explode immediately.
In addition, you may wish to tell you that you will not want to use other methods to invalidate the explosives, and the bombs will explode immediately.
There's only one way to be safe, and that's when the Owner of the Harvis Hotel comes up with $3 million in cash. And transported by helicopter to Lake Tahoe Airport, there can only be one pilot on board. The time is 11 p.m. today.
In order to prevent you from playing tricks, after landing, the pilot can only wait at the fence outside the airport I designated, and do as I say.
Once the transaction is successful, I will naturally let you enter the password to decode and crack the bomb detonation system.
If it takes more than 24 hours, I will lose patience, and you will wait to collect the corpse.
Ryan at first thought it was a prank, but he opened the door and looked at it, there were really two large tin boxes in the corner, and he was shocked, and immediately dialed the phone of the general manager of the hotel, where the general manager dared to be sloppy, and immediately called the police.
Ten minutes later, firefighters, police and FBI agents rushed to the scene.
They found that the two boxes were really heavy, because the pulleys under the boxes made two deep marks on the cement floor.
The officers in charge of the police station evacuated all the personnel of the hotel and the surrounding buildings within 200 meters as soon as they were on the verge of a great enemy.
In just two hours, news of the bombs at the Harvis Hotel quickly spread across the country, and NSA bomb disposal experts rushed to the scene, and news trucks from local television stations flocked to track down the incident.
The experts first scanned the two boxes with an X-ray machine, but the boxes were made of metal, and the inside was not so clear to see, and they could only faintly see that the dense lines were all.
Experts therefore judged that what the blackmail letter said was true, and that the two boxes were really a giant bomb.
Bomb experts have thought hard and can't find a cure to crack the detonation system, so they don't recommend trying to crack the bomb because it would be risky.
The head of the Nevada State Police Department weighed it up and decided that the best way to do it now was to accede to the gangsters' demands and pay them $3 million.
Who pays for the money? Of course the owner of the Harvis Hotel.
After two hours of painstaking persuasion, the owner of the hotel, Gross, was unwilling to make concessions to the gangsters.
Gross already gritted his teeth in hatred for the gangsters, because the first Monday in September was Labor Day in the United States, and it was the time when the traffic was large and the daily gold was being extorted by people, which brought huge losses to the hotel.
But the news has spread throughout the country like wings, and even if this money is paid, everyone will no longer patronize their hotels in a short period of time, and the losses will not be more than millions.
The angry Gross said fiercely, "I just burn the banknotes, and I won't give a penny to the bastards." He also asked the police: "Is it possible that taxpayers feed you to eat idle meals?" If something goes wrong, it will only compromise with the criminals? ”
The local police chief was embarrassed, the hotel owner did not cooperate, did not let the municipal government pay this money, not only was he not qualified to propose it, but the mayor did not have this authority, and there was no such expenditure in the budget, which needed to be approved by the parliament. This time cost is too long, things can not be resolved, the situation has entered a dead end.
At this time, bomb disposal experts from all over the country had to study the bomb again, and after two hours of research, their heads were enlarged, and they still shook their heads.
Because the internal structure of this bomb is super complex and impeccable, well-informed bomb disposal experts are also amazed by the design of the system, and an detonation system has designed 9 different principles of detonation devices from the inside to the outside.
According to the experience of experts, it takes 24 hours to crack a digital detonation device. If you do the math, if you crack all 9 kinds of detonators, it will take at least a week.
What is even more embarrassing is that in addition to the data system, the detonation system also has the original battery and detonator, and the middle is aluminum foil to connect. The cleverness of this is that they must be drilled through the iron sheet to remove them, but when the hole is punched, it is inevitable that it will come into contact with the iron and aluminum foil, so that a circuit power supply will be formed and the bomb will be detonated.
If you remove the screws on the iron box and remove the iron shell, you can easily remove the detonator and battery. However, X-ray photos show that the gangsters have carefully designed a spring device under the screw, similar to the trigger principle of a pistol, once the screw is unscrewed, the spring will pop out, the circuit will be in the detonation position, and the bomb will explode.
Even if everyone does not move it, the criminal can detonate it at any time, with very terrible consequences.
In the end, experts unanimously concluded that the bomb had no solution, and for at least 24 hours, the bomb's mechanical and data devices could not be cracked.
The clock ticked, getting closer and closer to the 24-hour deadline given by the criminals.
In the end, Nevada Police Chief Hudston made the difficult decision to pay the criminals cash, which was the safest way. In any case, there can be no explosions in their own jurisdictions.
But the FBI people didn't agree to do this: No, our people are also involved, and if we finally compromise with the criminals, we will be the last to lose people.
They also said that the hotel and the surrounding people were evacuated, and the worst result was nothing more than blowing up the hotel, it didn't matter, you can't admit it to the criminal, you can't afford to lose the person.
So everyone made a compromise decision, using only 5,000 yuan of real money, the rest are all fake money, and catch the criminal by the way.
The FBI could only send Special Agent Cooper from Los Angeles, 650 kilometers, on the most dangerous mission that no one would want to perform, to deliver ransom to the gangsters.
At 23:30 that night, Cooper flew to Lake Tahoe Airport in a plane where he and his colleagues pretended to obey the criminals' instructions and hid weapons in the back seat of the plane.
But the gangsters are also very cunning and will not be easily deceived, and when Cooper is about to land, the criminal tells him during the phone call, asking him to fly west along Route 50 and land again after 15 minutes when he sees the ground strobe lights.
After 15 minutes of flight at the direction of the gangsters, Cooper did not see the strobe lights on the ground, so he had to return to Lake Tahoe Airport the same way.
The gangsters did not repent, but forgot to bring strobe lights in a panic, so they had to go to the supermarket to buy temporarily.
In fact, there were also problems with the navigation on The Cooper plane, and the direction was a little off.
The yin and yang were wrong, and the two sides did not meet.
The Nevada state police, fearing that the gangsters believe that the police have lost their trust and continue to sabotage in other places, publish news through the media, saying that they hope to continue consultations with criminals.
At 6 a.m. on August 27, 24 hours had passed, and all the hearts of the people had raised their throats.
At this time, the police station's phone suddenly rang, asking them to "turn off switch 4 on the bomb and the first timed detonation device will be eliminated."
The gangsters are ferocious and cunning, he does not get a penny of income, does not expose his whereabouts, will not suddenly conscience to find out, help the police.
The police analyzed it for half a day, and they were not naïve enough to believe the gangsters, so they did not do what he said.
The reason why the gangster made this call was actually his delaying tactic, trying to buy time to deal with the police, confuse the police's thinking, and achieve the purpose of extortion.
At this time, the police also lost patience, if they continue to wait, it is equivalent to letting the gangsters lead the nose and lose face in front of the american people.
Instead of waiting for the gangsters to detonate the bomb, it is better to take the initiative to detonate it with a timing device, which sounds good.
Just when the police were about to act, the bomb disposal experts came up with a method of "attacking the poison with poison", that is, using a bomb to destroy the sensor and line of the bomb installed by the gangster in an instant, the speed can be as fast as 1 millisecond, and the bomb sensor designed by the gangster has a trigger time of 6 milliseconds, so that the gangster's bomb will not explode.
At exactly 14:00 on the afternoon of the 27th, the FBI detonated its own bomb, and with a loud noise, the Harvis Hotel was blown out of a large hole of 50 square meters, and the smoke in the hotel was filled with smoke and glass shards flew everywhere.
This shows that the plan of the bomb disposal experts was a failure, and the bombs were designed too cleverly.
However, because people within a radius of 200 meters were evacuated, no one was injured, and the damage was reduced to a minimum, and the police and the FBI tried their best. But public opinion has made accusations against the police and the FBI, because they are doing things in full view of the public, but the criminals have not been arrested, and they have to continue to work hard to track down the criminals nationwide.
Gross, the owner of the Harveys Hotel, also had a lingering feeling, afraid of the return of criminals, and then beat his idea, and after painful thoughts, decided to break the money and avoid disaster, and offered 500,000 US dollars to reward the criminals.
The owner of an auto repair shop told the police that his wife, Lisa, had written down the man's license plate number on the morning of the crime when she heard someone using a walkie-talkie to direct someone to plant a bomb.
The owner of the repair shop did not provide clues to the police at that time, thinking that more was better than less.
The FBI immediately began a quiet investigation, and after obtaining the relevant evidence, it arrested the suspect and found the bomb being assembled in its basement.
According to the suspect, if it were not for the arrest, a bank in San Francisco would have become the next unlucky egg.
John Burgess, 58, is a veteran gambler with a father who must have a son, and two sons, John and Jim, who are not in business, hope to get rich overnight, and do not come out of the casino, and are regular customers of the Harveys Hotel.
As a result, the father and son not only did not get rich, but also lost all their money and were in debt of $750,000.
In desperation, they wanted to take a risk and blackmail the owner of the Harveys Hotel with a bomb, anyway, he made a lot of money, and it was all ill-gotten gains.
In order to assemble the bomb, John put his gambler in charge of purchasing the tools and materials needed to make the bomb, and went to the library to check the materials himself, and it took 4 months to create this black technology bomb that caused headaches for bomb disposal experts.
On March 7, 1985, four years after the crime, John was convicted of 8 of the 9 charges and sentenced to life imprisonment without parole; The offenders involved are also punished by law.
Because John made the bomb seamlessly and impeccably, the FBI later copied a model of the bomb on a one-to-one scale based on the photos of the time, and used it as a teaching tool to train bomb disposal personnel in this classic case.
If John's father and son had applied this wisdom to the right place, they would have been able to accomplish something remarkable, but unfortunately they would not have taken the right path and ended up in prison.