2006feb05. Around six years ago, one of my friends told me an amazing fantastical story about watching live TV coverage of a casino bombing. “You are pulling my leg with the pulling,” I said. Every year or so I would check “online” for any information about this supposed event, and finally little things started trickling in, including a reference to a “Inside The FBI” TV episode devoted to the bombing that I’ve never seen, and a white-washed government report (“everything went according to plan! hooray for our side!”). I just found a ginormous eight-part article on the bombing in the Reno Gazette Journal.
Introduction: Render Safe
Day 1: Special delivery for Harvey Gross
Day 2: A stern warning: “It is full of TNT"
Day 3: From hard-earned riches to blackjack tables"
Day 4: ‘We never expected them to get the bomb inside the casino’
Day 5: The payoff: ‘There will be no extension or renegotiation’
Day 6: The bungled extortion: A cold night in a forest full of bees
Day 7: In a deserted casino, bomb experts flip the Switch
Day 8: Once the charge was set, there was no going back
Finally, for dessert, bringing it all back to my friend’s original assertion: news footage of the bombing. I spent a long time deriving sneaky ways to get to the proper articles no thanks to the RGJ’s horrendous website until I ran across this site which did all the ponderous heavy lifting.
The only part of the story that confuses me is this. How exactly do two people move a bomb into a casino without knowing it’s a bomb, yet the bomb was so sensitive that it had mercury levels in it? They set it down and left and the bomb primed itself? What?