Fire Lover

by Joseph Wambaugh

A case in point was the wealthy real-estate broker who had been avoiding costly weed abatement by listing post office boxes on property deeds in order to hide his true address. One of his properties was an abandoned and derelict duplex apartment. Kids would hang out there and the property was window high with weeds.

  The fire marshal had sent five notices, but got no response. John obtained the miscreant’s home address but couldn’t catch him there, so he staked out several real-estate offices that the broker owned until he spotted the guy entering one of them. He sneaked up to the door, doing, as he described, “a low crawl.”

  John knocked at the door, calling out. “Hellooooo! Is this Dr. Beauchamp? I have a delivery for the office manager!”

  The elusive broker peeked out but couldn’t see the creeping fireman, and yelled, “You have the wrong address. I am not Dr. Beauchamp.”

  John knocked again and said, “Well, my package has this address on it and I’ve been instructed to leave it here!”

  The broker opened the door then, and said, “Look, buddy, I told you …”

  But there he was, staring into the grinning face of a fireman, and not just any fireman, as he would soon discover.

  “I think you’re the guy I’m looking for,” John said.

  “He was my target” is how John later described him.

  But even after all that, the “target” denied his true identity as owner of the property in fire-code violation, until John said, “Come on, gimme your identification and let’s get this over with.” And he stepped inside.

  The target was outraged. He ordered the fireman out. The fireman refused. He shoved the fireman. The fireman shoved back.

  John Orr later said, “If I was a real cop the confrontation would never have progressed. The dude woulda taken his licks.”

  And when the fireman picked up his radio to call for a real cop, the target said, “What’re you doing?” and snatched it away. And he shoved John again, causing the radio to clatter to the floor. They wrestled and the radio was kicked outside. They crashed into the door, and it slammed shut. The target broke free and ran for his desk, jerking open a drawer, rummaging for …

  A gun! John thought. He dove across the desk and pulled the guy’s hand out. They grappled on the desktop.

  And then, as John Orr later maintained, “For the first time in my entire life I threw a punch.”

  It turned out to be a dweeby little skittering punch, and did nothing but piss off the broker even more.

  But the broker was no Bruce Lee, and John managed to get him in a choke hold and drag him out the front door and down to the ground, where he kept the guy’s neck in the crook of his arm and grabbed the damaged radio with the other hand.

  While John was calling for help, the broker wriggled around enough to slide his mouth down and sink his fangs into the fireman’s forearm, and the fireman yelled “Yoooooowwww!” into the radio.

  But the son of a bitch wouldn’t let go! He just hung on like a fucking alligator, so John shouted his location and “Help!” into the radio, and threw only the second wimpy punch of his entire life, smacking the guy in the back of the head. And breaking his own finger.

  By and by, the nearest engine company showed up along with a bunch of cops, and nobody was shocked to see who it was sitting there on the stoop of the real-estate office, nursing his chomped arm and broken pinkie, while the real-estate broker wheezed.

  And then, to John’s surprise, out of the office walked the guy’s ten-year-old stepson. He’d been in one of the other rooms during the entire donnybrook, afraid to come out. The broker screamed that this wack-job fireman had come to his door demanding identification, and that when he momentarily refused because of the overbearing attitude, the fireman had hauled off and punched him in the chops! And the ten-year-old kid nodded yes, and swore to it.

  The broker was quite a big shot around Glendale and had friends. He threatened to sue the city for a million bucks and did. But there was some horse trading done, the city quashed the citation that John had written and the broker settled his million-dollar lawsuit out of court for five hundred bucks. John Orr was informed that he’d been lucky because some of the city bigwigs had considered filing assault charges against him!

  With everyone around him getting exhausted by his antics, John decided that there might be something wrong with his approach to citation writing, and maybe he needed to learn how real cops did it, so he asked permission to do ride-alongs with the Glendale police, and was told, yes yes, anything to prevent future punch-outs and lawsuits. So he rode several times with a Glendale cop who, John said, was “ferocious on the job.” That cop’s ferocity was irresistible and intoxicating. He almost fell in love with her.

  It was during this time that Glendale hillsides were frequently being set on fire, especially near the affluent homes in Chevy Chase Canyon. Nobody ever caught anyone, but the arsons were forcing Chevy Chase property owners to do their part in brush and weed abatement.

  John devised a scheme where he would phone up a brush-clearance company that would work without front money, and posing as the owner, he’d make appointments for the properties to be cleared.

  He would say “Bill me, please,” giving the owner’s address or the P.O. box that he’d ferreted out.

  And it worked, but it wasn’t easy because the goddamn post office wouldn’t show him the box applications as they would for a real cop. The way he solved that problem was by dating a not-so-hot-looking letter carrier who introduced him to a postal inspector at a party, and from then on, the post office was his.

  He later portrayed how he loved tracking down these miscreants and ticketing them:

  The violators I dealt with were minor bandits, but their evasion tactics were better than some career criminals’. I found it challenging to conduct the “hunt” using any tracking abilities I had to find them and make the “kill”—writing a citation or getting the hazard eliminated—as the “trophy head.” A bit like my pursuit of women during my days as a single man.

  The zealousness of Glendale’s fire-prevention guy struck some of the firefighters as quite peculiar. John not only responded to all brush fires while on duty, but he’d even show up off duty. He said it was to study “fire-fighting tactics and fire behavior.” And why should he worry about what a bunch of guys thought, guys who spent so much firehouse time on their backs that he felt like drawing a chalk line around the whole station.

  Everyone knew that 80 percent of brush fires were set deliberately, and this was at a time when John longed for Glendale to form a real arson unit. He was doing a kind of “arson profiling,” before the profiling of serial criminals by the FBI had been given much publicity. And since almost all the brush fires were roadside starts, he said he “put himself in the arsonist’s car, and in the arsonist’s head.” He began looking at traffic patterns, searching for homes or landmarks from which a fire starter could be spotted gazing at his handiwork.

  While poring over old reports, one conclusion became inescapable: the past arson investigations were inadequate. He found places where fire setters must have parked to admire their fires, yet so-called arson cops had never thought to head for the high ground or other locations where an arsonist would likely sit and observe.

  And then he discovered his first incendiary device. It was at a small hillside brush fire, and he’d traced the fire path to a blasted chaparral bush where the damage fanned out as if from an explosion. The battalion chief had ordered his firefighters to turn off their lines so as not to interfere with John Orr’s investigation, and in the middle of the chaparral he found the remnants of a cigarette-and-matchbook delay device. They never found the arsonist, but John got an attaboy for finding the evidence.

  In April he bagged his first serial arsonist. A cluster of small nuisance fires had been set around the grounds of a convalescent facility, and it didn’t take a Miss Marple to deduce that the fire setter was probably one of the codgers who lived there. John Orr spotted the arsonist right away.
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  He noticed that the first two fire scenes could easily be seen from a certain cottage, and a biddy was peeking at him from behind her curtains. He knocked on her door and used the phantom witness gag. And she bought it, confessing to setting the fires, whereupon the loony lady was transported to a more secure mental facility and she became the first of many serial arsonists John would catch in his career. The others, he hoped, would bring a bit more glory.

  The next one came in the same week, when he did some follow-up work on a VW bus that had been stolen and torched. The ignition had been popped and hot-wired, and a witness had seen a guy with a shoulder-length shag and a hand wrapped in a bloodstained bandage. John was only supposed to collect arson evidence, but that would be like asking a bear to only take a sniff of that old honey tree. He cruised through the streets of Glendale scoping out every longhair he saw. All the dudes with hands in their pockets got the hawkish stare from the fireman in the ugly yellow truck.

  He did a lot of paper shuffling and snooping through police reports until he found a report of a longhair living in a vacant apartment house who had accidentally started a fire while attempting to keep warm. John sped over there and found the guy, who, sure enough, had a bandaged hand. But the hand carried a brick in it. The wacko was hammered or stoned or both, and threatened to bash the fireman’s fucking head in. But after his recent experiences, John didn’t draw the gun he was forbidden to carry. Instead, he keyed his mike and called for real cops while he tried to persuade the guy that he was a friend, and didn’t everybody like firemen?

  Cops arrived and the ding was charged with auto theft, burglary, and two counts of arson; ergo, John could say that he was the only employee of Glendale, cop or fireman, who had ever busted two serial arsonists in one week. The fire marshal told him that there would soon be a selection process for the newly created job of arson investigator, and that he had the edge. By then, seven firefighters had applied for the job, two of them former cops.

  But the other firefighters said, well, maybe the fire marshal bought into all the super sleuthing, but what had John Orr caught? A poor old loony tune from a rest home and a certifiable head case who was probably just trying to roast some wienies he’d boosted from a 7-Eleven store.

  When you came right down to it, it was something like shooting skunks.

  Meanwhile, he was still busy womanizing, having given up on his second marriage. He’d been dating a divorcée from Sears who had three kids. He won her heart while on a camping trip to a cabin that she owned in the Angeles National Forest. But in July, his professional life took a dive when he tried to issue a citation to a property owner who’d neglected to clear his property even after several visits by an engine company.

  The property was in an upmarket neighborhood, and though the grounds could have used a flatbed full of stoop laborers, the house was big, beautiful, and impressive. When the lady of the house answered the knock she may as well have been gawking at Bigfoot. “I know who you are!” she cried. “I know what you did to the real-estate broker!”

  When he tried to get her to calm down and accept a citation, she refused, saying, “I’m calling my husband right now!”

  “You can’t refuse,” he told her. “Your name’s on the tax roll with his.”

  With that, she slammed the door in his face. He called for backup, and a police unit got dispatched. In a few minutes that ferocious female cop pulled up in her black-and-white, heard his story, and said, “What’s the problem? So write the bitch up and if she refuses the ticket, she goes to the slam.”

  However, as he later reported, “The lady of the house called her husband who called the mayor who called the fire chief who called the fire marshal, saying, ‘Get out there and find out what Orr’s up to this time.’”

  Later that day, John was called into the office of the fire marshal, who said, “John, the guy’s on the planning commission. You gotta be more careful with these people.”

  “These people? These people?” John sputtered.

  And then he launched into a tirade about these people who were no better than ordinary citizens like himself. And he demanded to know if this was how it would be if they formed the arson unit. Was this how he’d have to treat criminals if they had money and influence and lived in a big goddamned house?

  “Cool down, John,” the fire marshal advised.

  So he cooled down and requested a couple of days off, dropped his citation book on the desk, and left the office with red and watery eyes.

  He went camping with the only person he was truly comfortable with, himself, and tried to analyze his recent controversies. Sure, at times he’d been a bit undiplomatic and pissed off some people, but in the end, he believed he was fundamentally right. So he cleared the campsite and headed home to visit the girlfriend from Sears and get some feedback.

  The next day he drove to work and dropped a note on the fire marshal’s desk that read: “Please remove my name from consideration for the arson investigator position. I am no longer interested.”

  He decided to go back to being an ordinary firefighter. More than ever he thought of himself as an “eccentric,” and he wouldn’t have it any other way. So if they didn’t understand and appreciate what he could do, fuck ’em all.

  During his self-imposed exile there seemed to be increased arson activity in Glendale, including foothill brush fires and a series of car fires. Then, toward the end of the year, the fire chief prepared to select an arson investigator from the seven applicants, and that included John Orr’s camping friend, Don Yeager, whom John considered argumentative, aggressive, condescending, and inflexible. In short, coplike.

  The fire chief called John in and asked him to reconsider applying. He was told that the new position would mean that the man selected would be a real investigator with peace-officer authority, able to carry a firearm full-time.

  It took John about a nanosecond to reconsider. Within a week he took a psychological exam that once again included the MMPI self-inventory, but this time he passed it. And he was selected to be the Glendale Fire Department’s first arson investigator. Don Yeager told him he hadn’t really wanted the job anyway, not liking the eight-to-five hours.

  John was teamed up with Glendale police detective Dennis Wilson, and they were the arson team. No more fire prevention, no more fighting fires, this was The Big Show.

  Lots of good things happened in the early 1980s. John’s fire department, one of the lowest paid in the L.A. basin, became one of the highest paid after the members hooked up with organized labor. And now that he was an arson sleuth he started picking up cop habits, like parking on the wrong side of the street when there was plenty of room to do it legally.

  He said, “To a cop it’s a form of marking territory. To show that this is my turf.”

  But he wasn’t a cop, and he wrote of his feelings:

  There was never total approval. An arson investigator wasn’t totally a firefighter or totally a cop. We were bastard children, especially to real cops. But I had news for them. I wasn’t a wanna-be. I was a cop whether they wanted to believe it or accept it. Full-time arson investigators in the state of California are defined, in penal code section 830.37, as law-enforcement officers.

  So the real cops could just get over it. He wore an ankle holster and a Walther PPKS .380 semiautomatic, and his little investigative unit was considered low maintenance and brought in several thousand bucks a year in restitution. But he didn’t catch any of the arsonists setting those brush fires.

  John and his senior partner, Dennis Wilson, were given a tiny office in the old headquarters fire station, but had to scrounge their own desks, typewriter, and file box. Their car was a Ford with a red spotlight, a radio, and eighty thousand hard miles on it. Wilson was a big, fifteen-year Glendale cop with graying hair and a macho cop mustache. The detective was, according to his partner, gruff, irritable, and nonverbal, a family man and a recreational bowler. He intimidated John with his “standard-issue cop attitude.”


  This was in evidence on one of their first assignments. Glendale police personnel were required to pack a gun at all times, but no fireman, not even the brand-new arson investigator, was allowed to pack while riding in a fire truck. But after a call-out, John climbed aboard a five-ton GMC to drive it to a suspicious fire explosion, and Dennis Wilson made his partner take off the .357 Magnum and stow it in the trunk of the arson car, which Wilson drove to the blaze. That was the first humiliation.

  John decided to tie the knot in April with number three. He figured that maybe the third time was the charm. He felt that her daughters got along well with his, and they’d all get together for Ozzie-and-Harriet weekends.

  John thought he saw felons everywhere, and sometimes he did. While on a weekend jaunt to a swap meet in Santa Clarita with fellow firefighter Don Yeager, they parked Yeager’s Chevy Blazer by a busy highway while they moseyed among open-air stalls. When John happened to glance toward the Blazer he saw somebody sitting inside and it wasn’t Yeager, who was talking to some chick at one of the stalls.

  Next thing you know, John Orr and a car thief were out there on the highway, in asphalt-melting one-hundred-degree heat, thrashing around and grappling for choke holds. A California Highway Patrol unit happened to be cruising the other way on the highway, spotted the donnybrook, spun a U-ee, and, in that moment, while John was sweating, breathless, scared of being pancaked by a passing eighteen-wheeler, what did he think of when he saw the CHiP running toward him, gun drawn?

  “I theorized it wouldn’t carry much weight to shout, ‘I’m a fireman, don’t shoot.’ Knowing cop attitudes toward wanna-bes, it might lead him to the wrong conclusion.”

  So, using cop jargon for “grand theft auto,” he yelled, “I’m a cop! This guy’s a GTA suspect!”

  The traffic cop couldn’t possibly have cared if the citizen fighting the dirtbag was a fireman, a cop, or a plum picker from Modesto, yet John Orr was obsessing about cop attitudes toward wanna-bes.