On 26 August 1980, a huge metal box was delivered to Harvey’s Wagon Wheel casino in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, 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 (£1.3m) within the next 24 hours. An FBI scientist, Kirk Yeager, says the fear was that this “metal box of mystery” had the potential to flatten a portion of the city. “I had never seen anything so sinister in my life,” says Mike Rowe, the district attorney at the time. “It was absolutely frightening.”
Over three episodes, This Is a Bomb unpicks a messy tale of exploitation and extortion. It isn’t a whodunnit, but rather a howdunnit – 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.
It commits to the quirky conventions beloved of more left-field US crime documentaries nowadays (see McMillions or Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened, the latter of which was directed by Chris Smith, the exec producer of this series). 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.
However – perhaps because of the sheer bleakness of the story – it struggles to pull off that semi-comedic tone. Its subject – the late John Birges Sr, or Big John – was a one-time millionaire crippled by his gambling debts to Harvey’s, who decided to extort the casino with a homemade bomb. In turn, he recruited his two sons – whom it is alleged he beat and abused – 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’s ashes in the bin.
The “howdunnit” element – devoid of surprises, laden with horrors – can, at points, feel thin. There’s also the added complication of John Jr’s 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 – 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. “We were trained to say yes, so we said yes,” 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’s only just starting to come to terms with things. His wife, Holly, says: “I actually see him loving himself now.”
This Is a Bomb is about a bomb, but mostly it’s 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’s 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’t true. It was a “wacko TV universe” 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’t part of a plot between Birges and Harvey’s, the blackmail threat proved a boon for the casino, thanks to a huge insurance policy that paid out from the second they reported it.
Amid all the darkness, there’s a comic irony to the fact that the plot to bring down Harvey’s only made it bigger and better. It’s probably the only thing, in fact, to smile about in a tale so thoroughly tragic.