{"id":940892,"date":"2026-05-06T05:49:13","date_gmt":"2026-05-06T05:49:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/940892\/"},"modified":"2026-05-06T05:49:13","modified_gmt":"2026-05-06T05:49:13","slug":"this-is-a-bomb-the-nevada-casino-heist-review-the-dark-deadly-tale-of-a-3m-extortion-scheme-television","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/940892\/","title":{"rendered":"This Is a Bomb: The Nevada Casino Heist review \u2013 the dark, deadly tale of a $3m extortion scheme | Television"},"content":{"rendered":"

On 26 August 1980, a huge metal box was delivered to Harvey\u2019s Wagon Wheel casino in Lake Tahoe, Nevada<\/a>, disguised as an IBM photocopier. An X-ray confirmed that the complex explosive inside contained 1,000lb (450kg) of dynamite. An attached ransom note demanded $3m (\u00a31.3m) within the next 24 hours. An FBI scientist, Kirk Yeager, says the fear was that this \u201cmetal box of mystery\u201d had the potential to flatten a portion of the city. \u201cI had never seen anything so sinister in my life,\u201d says Mike Rowe, the district attorney at the time. \u201cIt was absolutely frightening.\u201d<\/p>\n

Over three episodes, This Is a Bomb unpicks a messy tale of exploitation and extortion. It isn\u2019t a whodunnit, but rather a howdunnit \u2013 a sad exploration of how a father coaxed his two teenage sons into a plot that had the potential to kill and injure thousands of people.<\/p>\n

It commits to the quirky conventions beloved of more left-field US crime documentaries nowadays (see McMillions<\/a> or Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened, the latter of which was directed by Chris Smith, the exec producer of this series). <\/strong>Indeed, husband-and-wife directors Bryan Storkel and Amy Bandlien Storkel previously collaborated on The Pez Outlaw, a sideways yarn about a prolific candy smuggler. Here, there are deadpan interviews with a local historian; larger-than-life bit players (including an FBI bomb agent who wears a large straw hat throughout); and plenty of archive footage and nostalgic 80s reconstructions.<\/p>\n

However \u2013 perhaps because of the sheer bleakness of the story \u2013 it struggles to pull off that semi-comedic tone. Its subject \u2013 the late John Birges Sr, or Big John \u2013 was a one-time millionaire crippled by his gambling debts to Harvey\u2019s, who decided to extort the casino with a homemade bomb. In turn, he recruited his two sons \u2013 whom it is alleged he beat and abused \u2013 coercing them into becoming his accomplices while still in their teens (they were 19 and 20 by the time they were charged by the authorities). Home life for Jim, the surviving son, and his brother John Jr is described in hellish terms; in episode two, Jim recalls his father throwing his own wife\u2019s ashes in the bin.<\/p>\n

Laden with horrors \u2026 Jim Birges in This Is a Bomb: The Nevada Casino Heist. Photograph: BBC\/Propagate Content\/Britton Foster\/West Buttermilk<\/p>\n

The \u201chowdunnit\u201d element \u2013 devoid of surprises, laden with horrors \u2013 can, at points, feel thin. There\u2019s also the added complication of John Jr\u2019s subsequent death by suicide. An AI voice reads words extracted from his 2010 book, Bombing Harvey, and there is footage of him, too, but it feels a little icky. Jim, at least, is there to tell his side of the story \u2013 about the father who tormented his sons, and whose mysterious past in Hungary may have included a forced stint in the Luftwaffe during the second world war, and a stay in a Russian prison camp. \u201cWe were trained to say yes, so we said yes,\u201d says Jim, recalling how his father roped the boys in to fetch a load of stolen dynamite one night at 1am. Parts of the series feel like an extended therapy session for him, 45 years on. Now in his 60s, he\u2019s only just starting to come to terms with things. His wife, Holly, says: \u201cI actually see him loving himself now.\u201d<\/p>\n

This Is a Bomb is about a bomb, but mostly it\u2019s a testimony of abuse and how Birges used threats of violence at home and on a mass scale to control and hurt people. Even with a surfeit of evidence against him in the casino case, he protested his innocence, claiming that Harvey\u2019s had enlisted him to carry out an insurance job. That would have been a twist big and unexpected enough to justify all of the quirks of this series, but, alas, it wasn\u2019t true. It was a \u201cwacko TV universe\u201d detail dreamed up by Birges, says Ed Kane, then an assistant US attorney. Of course, two things can be true at once. While the bomb wasn\u2019t part of a plot between Birges and Harvey\u2019s, the blackmail threat proved a boon for the casino, thanks to a huge insurance policy that paid out from the second they reported it.<\/p>\n

Amid all the darkness, there\u2019s a comic irony to the fact that the plot to bring down Harvey\u2019s only made it bigger and better. It\u2019s probably the only thing, in fact, to smile about in a tale so thoroughly tragic.<\/p>\n

This Is a Bomb aired on BBC Two and is available on BBC iPlayer<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On 26 August 1980, a huge metal box was delivered to Harvey\u2019s Wagon Wheel casino in Lake Tahoe,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":940893,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[77,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-940892","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-uk","10":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116526066345084790","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/940892","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=940892"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/940892\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/940893"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=940892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=940892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=940892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}