A Thousand Pounds of Dynamite (Kindle Single)

A Thousand Pounds of Dynamite (Kindle Single)

An Amazon Best Book of the Year, 2014.

Read the incredible true story that is soon to become a major motion picture produced by Warner Bros. Entertainment.

The bomb appeared early one morning in an upstairs office of Harveyâ€™s Wagon Wheel Casino near Lake Tahoe, an enigmatic box covered in a bewildering array of switches. A neatly typed letter explained that the box contained 1,000 pounds of dynamite. It was the largest improvised explosive device in American historyâ€”and its creator promised to explain how to remove it safely if the casino delivered $3 million by helicopter to a remote landing site in the mountains. â€œDo not try to move, disarm, or enter the bomb,â€ the letter warned. â€œIt will explode.â€

The bomb maker was one Janos â€œBig Johnâ€ Birges, a Hungarian political refugee who had worked his way up from nothing to become a successful entrepreneur in Fresno, Californiaâ€”only to see his life unraveled in middle age by divorce, cancer, and gambling debts. By 1980, he owed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Harveyâ€™s. And he had roped his two teenage sonsâ€”who were as eager to please their father as they were terrified of himâ€”into a plot to get the money back.

But the bomb he planted in the casino that August wasnâ€™t just an extortion scheme. It was a brilliant feat of engineeringâ€”an intricate and deadly puzzle that Birges hoped would prove once and for all just how badly the world had underestimated him. In A Thousand Pounds of Dynamite, Adam Higginbotham draws from interviews with federal agents and Birgesâ€™s co-conspiratorsâ€”as well as never-before-released FBI recordsâ€”to tell the story of the race to stop one of historyâ€™s most bizarre extortion plots. By turns action-packed and darkly hilarious, A Thousand Pounds of Dynamite is an engrossing tale of genius at its most deranged.

Praise for A Thousand Pounds of Dynamite:

â€œA simple plan and a hell of a lot of explosives pay off in a galloping true crime tale that speaks in the language of â€™70s SoCal dirt-bags, dreamers and G-men. Stranger still, beneath the pyrotechnics lies a poignant story of family. Higginbothamâ€™s skills as a journalist and storyteller left me banging the plate for more.â€
â€”Charles Graeber, author of The Good Nurse

â€œOf all the spectacular crimes that plagued America at the tail end of the Me Decade, none was more bizarre or more ambitious than the plot to bomb Harveyâ€™s Wagon Wheel Casino. Adam Higginbotham brings this bonkers caper to vivid life in A Thousand Pounds of Dynamite, a tale that explores the very fine line between criminal genius and criminal insanity. Youâ€™ll devour this rollicking yarn in one sitting, then spend the next few months regaling your friends with all the astonishing details.â€
â€”Brendan I. Koerner, author of The Skies Belong to Us

Country	USA
Author	Adam Higginbotham
Binding	Kindle Edition
Creator	The Atavist
Format	Kindle eBook
IsAdultProduct	0
Label	The Atavist
Manufacturer	The Atavist
NumberOfPages	111
PublicationDate	2014-07-30
Publisher	The Atavist
ReleaseDate	2014-07-30
Studio	The Atavist

A Thousand Pounds of Dynamite (Kindle Single)

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