1969-1975

A bomb exploded on the Casino d’Istanbul’s roof, injuring several people, on the night of Saturday, May 1, 1971. It happened during a banquet hosted by the Dayton, Ohio-based National Cash Register Company and attended by 1,400 Europeans and Americans.

Just the month before, 11 provinces in Turkey had been put under martial law due to a renewed wave of terror, marked by kidnappings for ransom and bank robberies.

Two months earlier, in March, the country’s army demanded a new government be put in place to hopefully end the labor strikes, street protests, bombings, robberies, kidnappings and political assassinations that had been occurring during the prior few years. Much of this continual extremist violence had targeted Americans and their property.

From Arkansas To Istanbul

In fact, the Casino d’Istanbul was owned and operated primarily by Americans, specifically people who most recently had run illegal gambling in Hot Springs, Arkansas. When Governor Winthrop Rockefeller eradicated gaming there in 1967, this group sought to debut the first casino in Turkey. Investment Opportunities Incorporated outlaid 95 percent of the $315 million project cost (about $1.9 billion today). The Bank of Tourism in Turkey covered the remaining 5 percent and was to receive a percentage of the casino’s future profits.

The United States-based entity obtained the required Turkish gambling permit and acquired, from his heirs, the lavish, Istanbul summer palace of the late Said Halim Pasha, who’d served as the Prime Minister of Ottoman Sultan Mehmed Resat between 1913 and 1917. (He’d been assassinated in Rome in 1921.) Built in 1878 and boasting an exterior blend of French and Egyptian architecture in an empire style, the mansion sat on the Straits of Bosporus, the waterway between the Black and Aegean Seas, where Europe and the Middle East meet.

The Hot Springs group converted the mansion into Casino d’Istanbul, a place where foreign guests could dine, dance and play games of chance (Turkish citizens weren’t allowed to gamble, and patrons had to show their passport for entry). The casino, open from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. at least initially, offered roulette, blackjack, baccarat, chemin de fer, craps and slots. On opening night, September 20, 1969, most of the guests held Lebanese passports.

“For years, [Casino d’Istanbul] was operated using former spa city casino employees, flying both the profit and the last shift home to Hot Springs every 30 days,” wrote Robert Raines in Hot Springs: From Capone to Costello. The casino was shuttered in 1975 due to the looming “threat of Turkish government intervention.”

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1970-1971

In the summer of 1970, a package and suitcase found in a Sparks Nugget Motor Lodge room in Northern Nevada with a note affixed saying to please deliver the items to Nugget owner John Ascuaga’s office. A $20 bill was attached as a tip.

A few days later, Nugget manager Gil Padroli opened the package. It contained a bomb — an explosives-filled cardboard tube attached to a timing mechanism and battery! (Police discovered, though, it wasn’t wired to detonate.)

A handwritten message with the device demanded a total of $1 million from the Sparks Nugget, Harolds Club and Harrah’s Club. The casinos were to exactly follow two outlined steps to deliver the cash. First, they were to mail $100,000 to two different California post office boxes. The money had to arrive within four days (Wednesday, June 24). If it wasn’t, wired bombs like the one in the package would be planted in their casinos.

Padroli, however, hadn’t even opened the package left for Ascuaga until the day after the deadline. But no bombs exploded or were found. Police, however, sent a portion of the $200,000 to the mailboxes and posted surveillance teams at each. Nothing happened.

A similar extortion case would take place in Southern Nevada two years later, in which a different perpetrator demanded 21 Las Vegas hotel-casinos pay a total of $2 million or get bombed one by one.

Instructions, Part Two

The second step was for the casinos to place another $200,000 in the trunk of a car parked on a rural street south of downtown Reno. If this wasn’t done by 10 p.m. Tuesday, June 30, then 84 bombs in various places would detonate. In the trunk would be the location of 40 explosive devices along with final directions for where to leave the remaining $600,000. At that site, a note would indicate where the remaining 44 bombs were placed.

That day, about 60 law enforcement officers, many disguised as campers and hunters, staked out the area around the drop site. But by 11:20 p.m., when the police chief aborted the operation, no one had shown to retrieve the money.

Pursuit Of Suspects

Having worked the case for days, the police identified some suspects:

• One was arrested on an unrelated charge in California soon after the package had been left at the Nugget.

• Police booked the primary suspect, a second California man, Eugene Raymond Dill, a 32-year-old contractor, and charged him with extortion.

• Three months later, Frank Richard Gunn, a friend of Dill, also was apprehended in Seattle and charged with being an accessory after the fact.

The district attorney’s office, however, only pursued charges against Dill, who pleaded innocent, and the case went to trial in March 1971. A latent fingerprint examiner testified that Dill’s fingerprints were found on the sample bomb. When the prosecution called Gunn as a witness, he pleaded the Fifth Amendment. The judge, however, threatened him with contempt of court charges, forcing him to testify, during which he denied any knowledge of the crime.

After four hours of deliberation, the jury decided Dill was innocent.

A month later, Frank Gunn billed the Washoe County Board of Commissioners for $45,000 in damages as compensation for a false arrest in the bomb extortion case. Commissioners denied the request.

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Casino de Monte-Carlo – La Salle Schmitt

1880

British and French patrons crowded the Casino de Monte-Carlo, games were in full operation and large sums of money sat on the tables. It was a typical Saturday night in spring at the Monaco institution. 

Around 11 p.m., a tremendous explosion wracked one of the gambling rooms, throwing people to the floor, extinguishing most of the lights and smashing the windows, chandeliers, clocks and mirrors. Many people fainted. Others sustained cuts and scratches on their hands and faces from falling, broken glass.

“A wild panic took possession of the crowd. A scene of blind, chaotic confusion and turmoil followed,” reported Ohio’s Van Wert Bulletin (April 30, 1880).

In the rush to flee the terror, the frantic mob knocked down and trampled people.

One eyewitness described the pandemonium as:

“A number of women were sprawling in hysterics; a few others had really fainted and looked ghastly through their powder; chairs were overturned, metal was bent into contortions and mirrors were in fragments; there were bleeding croupiers carrying away the bank in hot haste; Frenchwomen gesticulating and screaming, and Englishwomen pale and excited. Altogether I never saw a scene to compare with it in bustle, terror and confusion, even on the stage” (The Daily Star—Ohio, June 30, 1880).

What Had Happened

Later, when the damage was assessed, it was discovered that numerous people suffered serious injuries, but no one died.

The cause of the blast was a dynamite cartridge that some thieves placed under a mantel clock to create a disturbance significant enough to allow them to rob the casino successfully. The crooks stole the gold and bank notes lying on the game tables, 150,000 francs’ worth (about $592,500 today).

Four men, presumably the criminals, mugged a guest, according to one account. If the perpetrators had intended to plunder the safe, too, they failed.

“Had the explosive charge been somewhat larger, the consequences would have been most disastrous,” according to London, England’s Magnet (May 3, 1880).  

During the commotion, many of the floor employees stayed put.

“They went on dealing, playing, raking in the stakes, twirling the roulette wheel, and keeping a careful eye on the treasures in the centre of each table,” noted London’s Daily News (April 27, 1880).

Just how bold was the crime for the time period?

“There have been many plots and tricks devised to rob the Monte Carlo gaming establishment, but in audacity and success this last one eclipses any of its predecessors,” reported the Van Wert Bulletin (April 30, 1880).

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1972

A 71-year-old, wheelchair-bound, California grandmother, Susan Ellyn Reid, who had a long rap sheet and various aliases, entered Harrahs Club in Reno, Nevada in July carrying a box.

She gave casino personnel a typed note that demanded $100,000 and indicated she was holding a bomb. It revealed kidnappers were holding her grandson hostage, so she had no choice but to execute the extortion.

The entire situation, however, was a hoax. The explosive she carried actually was a non-diary creamer bottle stuffed with cornflakes! A judge sentenced her to probation provided she reside in a nursing home.

1980

Thirty-five years ago, on August 27, an intricate bomb blasted a chasm that spanned six of the 11 floors of Harvey’s Resort Hotel. The explosion hadn’t been intentional but, rather, the result of the best idea experts could conceive of to disarm the instrument.

“To this day it remains the most bewildering improvised explosive device the FBI has ever encountered,” wrote Jim Sloan in Render Safe: The Untold Story of the Harvey’s Bombing.

The big, intricate bomb

The concept was to sever the detonators in the top metal box from the roughly 900 pounds of dynamite in the second case underneath by using a charge of C4 set off remotely, rendering the weapon ineffective. Fortunately, the premises and those nearby in Stateline, Nevada had been evacuated beforehand, and no fatalities occurred.

During the 34 hours the bomb had sat on the hotel’s second floor and numerous x-rays, tests and discussions about it had taken place, the FBI had sought to deliver the $3 million ransom (really only $1,000 and bundles of newspaper) and capture the extortionist at the drop. The attempt had been a bust, though, as the helicopter pilot, instructed to fly to a remote part of the Lake Tahoe wilderness and land where he saw a strobe light, couldn’t spot it. A second try had been planned, but the explosion had pre-empted it.

Harvey’s reopened nine months later, after owner Harvey Gross made $18 million worth of repairs and security enhancements to it.

Despite a $200,000 then $500,000 reward for information about the crime, it took about a year for the FBI to identify and arrest the perpetrators.

“Big John” Birges

The mastermind was a 58-year-old retired business owner, János “Big John” Birges, who’d demanded his two sons, John, 19, and James, 18, help him carry out his scheme.

“The Birges boys were still bound together by at least one thing: a terror of their father,” wrote Adam Higginbotham in his Atavist Magazine article

Money Was Motive

Birges, Sr. had needed money, as he’d gambled away his savings, owed $15,000 ($43,000 today) to Harvey’s (his favorite casino that he’d frequented often) and lacked any more assets to sell. Previously, to cover casino debts, allegedly he’d burned down his restaurant for the insurance money and had sold his home. Twice divorced, he’d been unhappy, ill with severe abdominal bleeding and snubbed recently at Harvey’s, when he and a female companion were asked to leave a VIP suite to free it up for a person of higher standing.

The elder Birges was sentenced to life in federal prison. In 1996, after serving 11 years, he died from liver cancer. His sons received immunity for their cooperation and for testifying against their father at trial.

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Photos from FBI files