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A van marked IBM delivers a bomb to Harvey's casino floor

The note inside says even its builder cannot disarm it without $3 million.

Harvey's Resort Hotel in Stateline, Nevada, was packed with late-summer gamblers on August 26, 1980, when men in a white van marked "IBM" wheeled a large steel box onto the second floor, posing as copier technicians. Inside was roughly 1,000 pounds of dynamite stolen from a Fresno construction site, rigged into what the FBI called the most complex improvised explosive device it had ever examined. A ransom note soon surfaced demanding $3 million and warning that no one, not even the bomb's own builder, could safely disarm it…

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More from August 26
1920

Colby signs the paper: women's suffrage is now the law of the land

No ceremony, no witnesses, just a secretary of state's signature at his home in Washington.
1791

Fitch gets his patent, but so does everyone else claiming the steamboat

The federal Patent Commission hands identical recognition to four rival inventors on the same afternoon.
1968

Democrats open in Chicago; protesters scale a Civil War statue in Grant Park

Police pull a demonstrator down and break his arm as chants of "kill the pigs" rise over the park.
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Gunfire follows the blast at the crowded evacuation gate, and every entrance to the airfield slams shut.
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Read the full August 26 edition →Everything that happened on August 26 →
More from Cold War America
1959

Wright's spiral museum opens its doors on Fifth Avenue

The architect died in April; the building he fought sixteen years to see built opened without him in October.
1962

Kennedy goes on television: Soviet missiles sit in Cuba, and the Navy will stop every ship

The president calls it a quarantine, not a blockade, so Moscow cannot call it an act of war.
1946

A camera rides a captured Nazi rocket 65 miles up and photographs the curve of the Earth

The rocket smashed into the New Mexico desert, but the film survived.
1958

Pan Am's jet lands at Le Bourget; New York to Paris in six hours of air time

A refueling stop in Gander was the only thing slowing the Clipper America down.
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