Jim Birges tells a story that sounds like a Hollywood script. It isn't fiction. It's real. But if all goes as planned, the tale will be told on the silver screen.

It is a story about two brothers whose father walked away after their mother died. And yet, for reasons neither of them can explain, they agree to help him build a bomb to extort $3 million from a Lake Tahoe casino. Jim Birges was only a teenager in 1980 when he, his older brother, John Jr., and their father, John Birges of Clovis, put the plan into motion.

Their father was an unlucky gambler. Most of the money Birges made through his Clovis landscaping business he lost in a half-decade losing streak at the end of the 1970s that left him hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to Harveys Resort Hotel.

"Our father decided to place a bomb in the casino. He would tell them how to safely move it once they paid the money," Jim Birges recalls.

The scheme came to an explosive end in August 1980. How it came to be is the stuff of movie dreams.

The players

Hungary native John Birges flew in the German Luftwaffe during World War II. He was captured and, like many prisoners of the Russians, was sentenced to 25 years in a gulag. Jim Birges says his father escaped from the prison in 1954, nine years into his sentence, by using a bomb.

John Birges and his wife, Elizabeth, lived in Hungary until they came to the United States in 1957 and moved to Clovis in 1969.

Birges started a landscaping business that grew to be one of the biggest in the western United States. It is hard to travel around Fresno without trodding across land that at one time Birges tended: Woodward Park, the Federal Building, Palm Lakes golf course, Fresno High School, Clovis High School and most of Highway 99.

Tragedy hit the family in 1975. Jim Birges says his father became an emotional wreck when his wife committed suicide that year. Jim Birges was only 12.

Oldest son John Birges Jr. left home shortly afterward. He was 16. Since then, he has banged around the state, working a variety of jobs, including construction work. Today, he designs and builds surfboards in Santa Barbara.

Jim Birges, the youngest son, was a high school athlete and motorcycle enthusiast in the 1970s. Life was tough for the Clovis High School grad after his mother's death.

"My father was gone all the time after that. He lived in Tahoe, was playing blackjack and losing all his money," Jim Birges says. "I had to get myself up and get to school."

They weren't exactly a Norman Rockwell family. But the father's bomb project did bring them back together -- at least for a time.

The plan

Nothing prepared Jim Birges for the news his father dropped on him in the summer of 1980.

"When my father said he was going to build a bomb, I never thought he could get the dynamite. So we agreed to go along with the plan," says Jim Birges, who recounts the story with the practiced air of a man who has told this story countless times to authorities.

They did get the dynamite. They stole 2,000 pounds of explosives from a construction site for a hydroelectric project in Shaver Lake.

Without flinching at the memory of living in a world where a barbecue grill and a mound of 2,000 pounds of dynamite shared the same green space, Jim Birges recalls how they built a bomb in the backyard of their Clovis home.

That was only the first step, however.

"Our dad wanted us to deliver the dynamite to the casino. That's when we said we were done," he says. Part of the nerve to make such a stand against their father came when, during a practice run by the brothers to load the dynamite into the van, the rope broke and the bomb rolled over the fingers of John Birges Jr.