Harvey’s Casino Bomb
fbi.gov
fbi.gov
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 about it to anyone outside those that are directly involved. But criminals that have executed the "perfect crime" get caught driving over the speed limit, with expired license, spending money too lavishly...
I suppose he would have been caught some other way if not for this, but it almost seems like a comical trope to me. Maybe you are the best bomb maker around, but you weren't that good at the simpler things.
I think the same when you watch TV shows like Dateline. Yet the clearance rate for homicides in the US is below 60%. And I doubt that 40% are all master minds.
The idea of a detective as per cop movies are romanticised, a lot of them are doing bare minimum and are as dumb as the criminals.
The war on drugs helped a lot with this.
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.
For sure it's true that a secret can be kept by three people if two of them are dead. But there are clear cases where large groups of people have been able to keep secrets as well, or at least keep them from spilling out into public awareness.
I'd bet that for most crimes, the secret isn't kept, and there is someone else out there that knows who did it, who simply doesn't tell law enforcement. And yet most serious crimes aren't solved.
Humans have a real need to tell other people personal things, even to their own detriment. But sometimes things stay secrets even if tons of people know about them.
Also, not all of those 10k people might not be knowing what they are doing or don't care. You can cloak a lot of espionage activity with forms, sheets, memos, brainwashing and what not.
Illegal domestic electronic espionage/surveillance wasn't a vast secret. It was widely known that the Feds were making every effort they could to push down that road, and the Feds had a very long history of illegal domestic espionage. Frankly, it was obvious that it was going on. A lot of people I know in tech had crossed paths with other people that knew pieces of the puzzle, that some domestic espionage programs were going on (particularly supercharged after 9/11). You'd get snippets of it in discussions. Snowden's revelations were not the first, it was the bombshell that was comprehensive (and only for a small part of what they were doing).
It wasn't yet proven, and the full extent wasn't yet known, there wasn't enough credible public evidence to demonstrate exactly what they were doing. There's a huge difference between something not being secret, and being proven, and that's what Snowden's actions helped to correct.
While it's in the not-yet-proven stage, the malevolent skeptics in particular will all sandbag any attempt to reveal it, by burying discussions under conspiracy tags and swat away any attempts to dig into what's really going on. Some skeptics do that on purpose because they have a vested interest in doing so, some do that because they're cowards (which is what is represented by the common statement: "if you don't have anything to hide, you don't have anything to fear" - it's cowardly people hiding from a moment of confrontation).
Ready for another one? They're still performing illegal domestic electronic surveillance. That too isn't some vast secret. Oh I know, but but but they're not supposed to be doing that! Golly.
A lot of people in the intelligence community were aware but few had all the details or would care to look
Snowden gave proof and technical details about what was happening. It is like showing proof that Israel has nuclear weapons. Israel doesn't talk about it, they may or may not have nuclear weapons, most people think they do, and such a revelation won't surprise anyone, but it is still a big deal, because they can't use their "deliberate ambiguity" strategy anymore.
Not to mention the whistleblowing on the Trailblazer Project and New York Times reporting on the "Terrorist Surveillance Program" in 2005/2006.
When the Snowden leaks came out it was not a surprise. Granted most people don't go out drinking with the people doing the spying, but even people who work at the NSA can't keep a secret, if it was even meant to be a secret.
(Speaking only for myself; I didn't work on any of this directly)
So maybe not in the widespread public awareness, but if you were Googling trying to answer the question, "Is the USA gov't eavesdropping on all communication traffic?" in 2013 pre-Snowden, then the reasonable conclusion would've been, "Yes".
The 2006 lawsuit was about AT&T cooperating with the NSA to facilitate tapping their customers, quite different from the NSA surreptitiously digging up and tapping private fiber.
I think the lesson here is that a "conspiracy" can exist as long as all of its participants believe they are morally in the right. The people involved in the NSA dragnet believed in the cause; when a non-believer (Snowden) got involved, the gig was up.
It's easy to believe that a government agency would overstep its bounds to spy on people it (according to complex laws that well-meaning people misunderstand or disagree with) shouldn't. It's much, much less credible that a large number of US government employees conspired to, say, bomb the world trade center. A conspiracy like that would quickly enlist someone with moral qualms about it, and it just takes one to blow the whistle.
Most criminal conspiracies succeed as evidenced by the fact that most crimes aren't solved and most criminals aren't arrested. In fact, the larger your criminal organization, the less likely you are to go to prison. If I shot a passerby on the street, witnesses would be coming out of the woodwork. Friends or family would identify me by surveillance tape or report my strange behavior. Conversely, if a gang in Baltimore kills some guy, nobody will come forward. Let's not even get started on cartels.
Instead, I think it's much more apt to say that whether or not a conspiracy will be betrayed depends a lot on what will happen to the traitor/whistleblower.
If you want to turn in an evil, murderous, criminal organization, you'd better be willing to die or flee somewhere beyond their grasp. That bravery needs to be combined with an ability to get compelling evidence to the people who need to see it.
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."
Kubrick was a perfectionist and stickler for details. His background as a photographer always showed through in the cinematography of his films. After extensive field testing, he chose to conduct the filming in the only way that he felt was able to adequately capture the unusual environment of the lunar surface using practical lighting techniques: he filmed all of the scenes of the mission and landing on-location.
The Zodiac Killer; never been caught. "D.B. Cooper", never caught. The presumed murder of Jimmy Hoffa, unsolved.
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 matter, there are also a whole lot of missing person bulletins soliciting information from the public. Many of them might be murder victims, but it isn't known whether they are really alive or dead, let alone murdered. The public is nonetheless asked for information.
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 unsolved since the 1960s"
https://www.npr.org/2015/03/30/395069137/open-cases-why-one-...
When the existence of such a serial killer is recognized, it tends to make the news at least regionally. Sometimes they become internationally famous for many years. But to my point, the public hearing about it is not contingent on the culprit being caught. If anything, the ones who are caught fast and easy tend to make the least amount of news. You can 'juice' unsolved crimes for stories a century after the fact, but stories that follow the "husband did it and we caught him" format tend to disappear from the news after the culprit has been sentenced.
Might just make for a blockbuster movie.
fbi says there are over 2,000 serial killers free in the US
we dont know nearly enough of them to know motivations or even assume thats a prerequisite
Source: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19980804&slug...
That doesn't always work though - the crime may be something the public is aware of, and then the pressure to "close" the lead is even greater. There are numerous "big" crimes that the public has no awareness of though.
If the case is high profile enough, they will _always_ find someone to find guilty.
It seems statistically unavoidable that there are always going to be some big cases that go unsolved. It'll probably become less and less common - especially since it seems inevitable that nearly all DNA will eventually be traceable via genetic genealogy databases - but some crimes just won't result in any DNA or other significant evidence being left.
Or to make the crime legal by paying politicians
Unsolved Mysteries type shows and news stories would be all over that sort of thing.
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...
Eventually, the sons of "Big John" caved in to the FBI in interrogation. While the tip of the former girlfriend made the whole family prime suspects in the first place, they did not have anything on them until the sons decided to talk (and get immunity for their involvement in exchange).
However, the two sons only decided to talk after the police made each one believe that the other was ratting him out. Classic interrogation technique that I've seen in countless procedural tv shows and movies.
It’s in our nature to tell others who we are and everything we do. It’s why we have social media. It’s our nature.
"Two can keep a secret if one is dead"
A tech-oriented rundown of the device: https://hackaday.com/2015/09/21/this-is-what-a-real-bomb-loo... (some factual errors, for example, there was no TNT in the device. Just dynamite. But a good overview of the anti-tamper pieces)
(You can read the full thing at https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/news/stories/2009/august/a...)
That's part of why they tried decapitating the device with a shaped charge. TNT isn't as easy to set off as dynamite is. According to a different account I read, if it had, as advertised, been TNT (and there weren't a few loose sticks in the top), that plan would have had a decent chance of working.
> 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.
They would've caught the guy eventually, so they may have been able to recover some of the ransom.
In this casino story they already had a 6-person SWAT team flying high enough not to be detected, above the helicopter doing the planned cash drop. While the solo helicopter pilot was a special agent armed with an MP5 and night vision, and a bag with fake $3 million of bills and every intention to catch or shoot the guy picking up. All of this was organized while the timer of the bomb was ticking down.
Given the low odds, it's boils down to an over-complicated suicide mission, with high risk of it not working out. Nor any point even if does. With the financial system also under a ton of surveillance and the involvement of his family and even one of their girlfriends.
It's no wonder that this sort of thing has become a rarity even for the clever ones like this guy.
It is very much a hypothesis, but it certainly could be true.
Additionally, they sandbagged the device before exploding it, so I would assume they re-constructed the device after the explosion.
Given that the detonator was housed in a thick steel shell, there would be minimal heat damage due to the explosion.
I always think of this very thing. BTK, for example, was caught because of metadata found in a Word document he mailed into the police on a floppy disk.
It's a great story.
Below is a video on how these type of explosions works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCYAr5jEXHo
Completely unhinged tourists. Hotel explodes and people cheer cause they probably won money.
[1] https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/news/stories/2009/august/a...
The only other viable outcome I can see is if they gave the extortionists the money and caught them later — and they certainly would have caught them. But there is no guarantee the same scenario would not have unfolded with the bomb going off. And having given in to the demands of the extortionist probably would have inspired a wave of similar crimes.