https://magazine.atavist.com/a-thousand-pounds-of-dynamite/
Thanks! When I saw the photo, I was immediately reminded of this article, which was posted here about one year ago (I think?), but I hadn't bookmarked it...
Harvey’s Casino Bomb
51–60 of 134 posts
Re: Harvey’s Casino Bomb
#52Is that a toilet bowl float in the picture? Perhaps that was functioning as the mechanism's accelerometer?
From https://magazine.atavist.com/a-thousand-pounds-of-dynamite/:
> Fourth, inside the top box Big John rigged a float from a toilet cistern. If the box was flooded with water or foam, the float would rise, completing a circuit.
The "accelerometer" was another device:
> Fifth, beside the float was a tilt mechanism built from a length of PVC pipe lined with more aluminum foil; inside hung a metal pendulum held under tension from below with a rubber band. [...] Once this was armed, if the bomb was moved in any way, the end of the pendulum would make contact with the foil, completing a circuit.
Re: Harvey’s Casino Bomb
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
As always, with any crime, the more people involved, the greater the possibility that human factors will sabotage the operation. The perfect crime has one perpetrator. It is also why its fascinating that people will believe in conspiracy theories that supposedly involve tens / hundreds / thousands of people. Theories that we faked the moon landing always intrigue me. Or that the earth is flat.
I see your point! I totally do. I also used to hold this belief. But then the Snowden revelations came out and it was revealed that probably 10,000 people in government were aware of a system that was sucking up all of our data for warrantless search and they had successfully kept the secret for something like 10 years (or more?). For sure it's true that a secret can be kept by three people if two of them are dead. B…
That’s like a call center agent telling you a policy is for “security” and not knowing the actual policy or the legal rationale or the supporting law
A lot of people in the intelligence community were aware but few had all the details or would care to look
Re: Harvey’s Casino Bomb
#54Re: Harvey’s Casino Bomb
#55Super interesting. How is it that we don't hear about such cat-and-mouse games anymore? Do they not happen or are they not talked about? It seems like it's a thing of the past, but why?
Bit of a stretch, but I think it can be attributed to the overall reduction in crime since the early 90s, most likely brought upon by the elimination of lead in gasoline.
What parent commenter is talking about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis
It is very much a hypothesis, but it certainly could be true.
Re: Harvey’s Casino Bomb
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The best crimes do not look like crimes. Sure, but there is really no shortage of known unsolved crimes. > The police does not put out press releases repeatedly with 'we got no leads'. They do, in all the cases I listed they've asked the public for help for years. Certainly they don't do that for crimes they don't know occurred, but there is no shortage of known crimes that are very publicly unsolved. For that matt…
> Sure, but there is really no shortage of known unsolved crimes. That's certainly the nice way to put it - "If you're murdered in America, there's a 1 in 3 chance that the police won't identify your killer. To use the FBI's terminology, the national "clearance rate" for homicide today is 64.1 percent. Fifty years ago, it was more than 90 percent." ... "Criminologists estimate that at least 200,000 murders have gone…
Clearance rate for rape: 34.5% (65.5% unsolved)
Source: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
Re: Harvey’s Casino Bomb
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, police are pretty good at solving "the spouse did it" crimes, the most obvious sort. When the victims were chosen randomly, the clearance rate becomes abysmal. They're also bad at solving crimes when the victims come from the marginalized fringes of society. Jack the Ripper is a famous unsolved case of a serial killer who targeted prostitutes more than a century ago. Modern examples include the Long Island kille…
Still shocking to me that nobody looks at the life insurance broker who knows that the spouse would be vulnerable to a sure conviction if the other spouse was found dead within the next few months after opening the policy
What is the broker’s motive?
Re: Harvey’s Casino Bomb
#58In the end he was caught because his van was identified and because "One of his sons had revealed to his then-girlfriend that his father had placed a bomb in Harvey's." I always wonder at how criminals that otherwise might seem movie-like masterminds are caught as a result of mundane mistakes and outright stupid moves like this. You would think if you are going to bomb a place, the first thing would be to not talk ab…
As always, with any crime, the more people involved, the greater the possibility that human factors will sabotage the operation. The perfect crime has one perpetrator. It is also why its fascinating that people will believe in conspiracy theories that supposedly involve tens / hundreds / thousands of people. Theories that we faked the moon landing always intrigue me. Or that the earth is flat.
>It is also why its fascinating that people will believe in conspiracy theories that supposedly involve tens / hundreds / thousands of people.
I have the same reasoning for the 9/11 truthers. Do people really believe that no one on the "inside" has come out to say it was all staged/planned/faked? Hijacking 4 planes and flying them into buildings is going to take a lot of planning. Not to mention that people claim there was no plane that hit the Pentagon. Like really? They go to all that planning and just think "let's just use a missle at the pentagon, no one will notice it wasn't a plane."
Re: Harvey’s Casino Bomb
#59In the end he was caught because his van was identified and because "One of his sons had revealed to his then-girlfriend that his father had placed a bomb in Harvey's." I always wonder at how criminals that otherwise might seem movie-like masterminds are caught as a result of mundane mistakes and outright stupid moves like this. You would think if you are going to bomb a place, the first thing would be to not talk ab…
Funny you should mention 'get caught driving over the speed limit'.... from another link in this thread that did happen.
Like most plans, Birges’s fell apart rather early on. One of his sons got a speeding ticket, placing him near the ransom drop point. His girlfriend drove off the road, resulting in her hospitalization.
https://hackaday.com/2015/09/21/this-is-what-a-real-bomb-loo...
Re: Harvey’s Casino Bomb
#60Here is a great long form about it https://www.damninteresting.com/the-zero-armed-bandit/
And they have a fun interactive game you can play to defuse the bomb too! https://www.damninteresting.com/interactive/zab/