Pod Insights Infamous America BOMBINGS Ep. 6 | “Harvey’s Casino, Part 2: No Way Out” About this episode John 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.
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 Insurance isn't one size fits all. And shopping for it shouldn't feel like squeezing into something that just doesn't fit. That's why drivers have enjoyed Progressive's Name Your Price tool for years. With the Name Your Price tool, you tell them what you want to pay, and they show you options that fit your budget. Enough hunting for discounts, trying to calculate rates, and tinkering with coverages. Maybe you're picking out your very first policy, or maybe you're just looking for something that works better for you and your family. Either way, they make it simple to see your options. No guesswork, no surprises. Ready to see how easy and fun shopping for car insurance can be? Visit progressive.com and give the Name Your Price tool a try. Take the stress out of shopping and find coverage that fits your life.
0:46 Speaker 00 On your terms. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law.
1:05 Speaker 01 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 State Line, 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.
1:46 Speaker 01 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 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.
2:28 Speaker 01 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 US 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.
3:11 Speaker 01 It had been delivered at 5:00 AM 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
3:56 Speaker 01 to Harvey's Casino, his favorite gambling spot, and thousands of dollars in 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.
4:34 Speaker 01 From Black Barrel Media, this is Infamous America. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer. In this season, we're telling the stories of the L.A. 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.
5:01 Speaker 01 All morning on Tuesday, August 26, 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 techs 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.
5:42 Speaker 01 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 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.
6:27 Speaker 01 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.
6:38 Speaker 01 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 nine 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.
7:22 Speaker 01 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 11:00 PM. Then, 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 copilot's seat. In it, there were stacks that looked like money. On the top of each stack was a $100 bill.
8:05 Speaker 01 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 Dell Rowley. He was kitted 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.
8:49 Speaker 01 The plan had come together remarkably fast, but the helicopters were running late. There was virtually no chance they would touchdown at the Lake Tahoe Airport at 11:00 PM. 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.
9:14 Speaker 01 I have the good fortune to work from home, and because I do, I end up wearing the same shirts over and over again. I spend all day at the computer researching and writing podcast episodes, so I just grab shirts that are comfortable and easy. But the lineup needs refreshing, because that College World Series t-shirt from 2010, with the writing that's so faded you can't even read it, isn't going to last much longer. I added Flow Neck Breeze and Crew Neck Organic Cotton shirts from Quince to my dependable everyday rotation. Quince works directly with ethical factories to cut out the middlemen, so everything at Quince is 50 to 80% less than similar brands. You get luxury quality without the luxury
9:54 Speaker 01 price tag. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers, or go to quince.com/infamousamerica. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com/infamousamerica.
10:20 Speaker 01 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.
11:04 Speaker 01 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 5:00 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.
11:46 Speaker 01 Now, on Tuesday afternoon, while lawmen were rushing to Harvey's Casino and the bomb squad was studying Big John's device, John gathered his sons and his girlfriend Joan for the money drop.
12:01 Speaker 01 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. 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 11:00 p.m. to receive further instructions. That meant Big John's team needed to be in place by 11:00, so they were gonna have to hurry.
12:46 Speaker 01 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 a 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,
13:30 Speaker 01 where Jimmy would take the money and get into the car with Johnny.
13:35 Speaker 01 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, three million dollars 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.
14:07 Speaker 01 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,
14:50 Speaker 01 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.
15:33 Speaker 01 Meanwhile, Big John, Jimmy, and Johnny waited in their clearings all night. Finally, at 4:00 or 5:00 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 waiting. 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 6:00 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.
16:18 Speaker 01 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.
16:32 Speaker 01 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.
17:05 Speaker 01 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 nonstop 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.
17:42 Speaker 01 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 3:00 PM, the head of the bomb squad walked into Harvey's with the explosive charge.
18:27 Speaker 01 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 gonna stop in about 45 minutes so Jimmy could call the Douglas County 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
19:07 Speaker 01 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 gonna get one shot at this, and he hadn't slept in more 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 PM.
19:51 Speaker 01 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.
20:11 Speaker 01 On the street outside Harvey's, 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 PM, 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.
20:52 Speaker 01 The explosive charge detonated Big John's bomb, and nearly 1,000 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 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
21:37 Speaker 01 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 shock wave 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 Ione, 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.
22:20 Speaker 01 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 Ione to Placerville, he and Big John learned there wouldn't be an 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 and her car and took them back down to the family home outside Fresno.
23:04 Speaker 01 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 Number 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 Ballahoe Motel where Big John, Terry, and Bill had stayed the night before delivering
23:49 Speaker 01 the device. The clerk said a couple guys, Terry and Bill, had been a pain in the ass at about 4:00 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.
24:21 Speaker 01 While the FBI waited for the California DMV to find the right record, the Wheel Bomb 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.
25:04 Speaker 01 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."
25:49 Speaker 01 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.
26:34 Speaker 01 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.
26:54 Speaker 01 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
27:34 Speaker 01 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.
28:18 Speaker 01 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.
28:58 Speaker 01 On May 13th, 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 DiPieri 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 accused him of stealing the dynamite,
29:43 Speaker 01 and he denied it. After they broke up, Kelly dated Danny DiPieri 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. Agents 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,
30:29 Speaker 01 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. The agents saw all the tools and some of the components that had 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 Jonkey, who had been on the case since the beginning,
31:10 Speaker 01 testified before a grand jury and secured warrants for Big John Burgess, Johnny Burgess, and Jimmy Burgess. On August 14th, 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.
31:36 Speaker 01 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 15th, 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.
32:21 Speaker 01 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.
33:04 Speaker 01 After the second trial, as Big John was being prepped for life in federal prison, Johnny and Jimmy never saw their father again.
33:16 Speaker 01 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 Jonkey couldn't believe it. Bill Brown was around 69 years old at the time, and Terry Hall was around 34.
33:58 Speaker 01 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 has a wife and three children. Johnny struggled.
34:42 Speaker 01 He endured another tragedy just a year after his father went to prison, when his fiancee died in a car accident.
34:50 Speaker 01 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 bomb, but it didn't sell very well. Today, he's in his mid-60s and still lives in California.
35:29 Speaker 01 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 America.
36:06 Speaker 01 Members of our Black Barrel Plus program don't have to wait week to week for new episodes. They receive the entire season to binge all at once with no commercials, and they also receive exclusive bonus episodes. Sign up now through the link in the show notes or on our website, blackbarrelmedia.com. Memberships are just $5 per month. Original music by Rob Valier. I'm your writer, host, and producer, Chris Wimmer. Find us at our website, blackbarrelmedia.com, or on our social media channels. We're Black Barrel Media on Facebook and Instagram, and B Barrel Media on Twitter. And you can stream all our episodes on YouTube. Just search for Infamous America Podcast. Thanks for listening.
Previous BOMBINGS Ep. 5 | “Harvey’s Casino, Part 1: A Simple Plan” Next LUCKY LUCIANO Ep. 1 | “Five Points Gangster” Page updated November 4, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated