Fire Lover

by Joseph Wambaugh

  The next day, at 9:00 A.M., the arson team got a call they’d been wanting. A witness had spotted the man in black. He was in a restaurant men’s room on Ventura Boulevard near the fire scene. The investigators immediately called LAPD asking that a police unit get to the location and detain the guy.

  Thirty minutes later the arson team arrived at the restaurant, where a pair of LAPD officers were holding the man in black. The arson team instantly noted a strong odor of smoke coming from his clothing, and while the cops watched the suspect, the arson guys went into the restaurant men’s room where they detected a stronger smell of smoke. In the toilet bowl they saw charred toilet paper. And there was a puzzling discovery. On the floor and in the sink were short pieces of hair. The hairs were all over the place, as if the man in black had been shedding. It was weird, they said.

  “I was pulling my gray hairs out,” he informed them. “Don’t you pull your gray hairs out? And I went into Thrifty’s yesterday to sample the aftershave and deodorant.”

  When they asked why his clothes smelled of smoke, he said, “Because I was burning newspapers in that old abandoned hotel down on Ventura.”

  That stopped them. Burning newspapers? For what?

  “To keep warm,” he said. “There’s no heat in an abandoned hotel, you know. And there’s no lights. No room service either.”

  And because lots of fires are set by fruit loops, the man in black was booked at North Hollywood Division Jail on a charge of 451 (c) of the penal code, “arson of an uninhabited structure.”

  For a time he was truly thought to be a spree fire setter, and he did not return to his abandoned hotel where there was absolutely no room service.

  Before the year ended, the fire setter had demonstrated that retail establishments open for business were not safe on weekends either. He struck twice within an hour on Sunday, December 30.

  The first attack occurred at National Store on North Broadway, not far from Dodger Stadium, a store that catered to many residents of nearby Chinatown. The mezzanine sustained heavy fire and smoke damage from burning pillows and polyfoam.

  Forty-nine minutes later, a few miles away on Sunset Boulevard, at Crystal Promotions, a fire erupted in the rear of the store in a display of plastic decorative products. Once again, the LAFD arrived fast enough to save the structure.

  When Desert Storm was launched, in January 1991, the workload increased for the Glendale Arson/Explosives Unit because of terrorist paranoia. Any abandoned briefcase, shopping bag, or unwanted postal package could prompt a call to the investigators. Other than that, it was a fairly uneventful month—except for the arson team almost blowing themselves up.

  They had decided to burn off a pound of homemade fireworks at their training center, and assumed that the flash powder would burn, as usual, with a bright, smoky flash. It didn’t. The blast was heard two miles away at fire department headquarters and knocked off part of the roof of the blast room. Captain Orr decided that his impulsive personality was not suited for the methodical defusing and disarming of explosives.

  Meanwhile, his first attempt at fiction writing was moving forward. On weekend mornings he began writing at 8:00 A.M. and would sometimes produce twelve pages a day. He chose the title Points of Origin because of its obvious importance in arson terminology, but also because he felt that it had significance for the two main characters, Aaron Stiles, a firefighter turned serial arsonist, and Phil Langtree, an arson investigator who is committed to hunting down the fire setter. He said that he’d originally wanted to present the two characters as similar men from similar backgrounds who had gone diverse ways only because of “psychological triggers” in Aaron’s life, but that the character of Phil Langtree was so strong and tenacious, he took the story away from the author and turned the novel into a manhunt/thriller. The moment of moral divergence was originally to have been their “points of origin.”

  Within a year, readers of that novel wished that those “triggers” had been explored by the novelist for what they may have revealed.

  On March 3, once again on a Sunday, the southern districts of Los Angeles came under attack. The first fire, at 1:32 P.M., occurred at Thrifty Drug Store in the Wilmington area. There were more than one hundred customers milling around, and people charged the exits. Employees saw a fire column three feet in diameter boil out from between two stacks of pillows and then instantly mushroom across the ceiling.

  Arson investigators were still arriving at the raging inferno when they received word that another Thrifty Drug Store, in nearby San Pedro, had been attacked at 2:09 P.M. The sprinkler heads above the fire had activated and extinguished a blaze that had begun in a stack of pillows.

  Two weeks after fires in the south, arsons occurred back up in North Hollywood. There were two on Tuesday, March 19. The first broke out at the Goodwill store on Laurel Canyon Boulevard, where employees spotted mattresses burning but got them outside before much damage was done.

  Twenty-one minutes later, at the House of Fabrics on Victory Boulevard, employees and customers managed to extinguish a small blaze in a display of foam-rubber pads and other synthetic products used in the construction of pillows.

  Another Pier 1 Imports store, this one on Hollywood Boulevard, was the next target, on Friday of the same week. The fire erupted at 1:02 P.M. in pine shelving stacked with pillows.

  John Orr no longer used his Chevrolet Blazer as an on-duty car. He sold it after being given a white five-year-old Ford Crown Victoria on which the police department had logged 110, 000 miles. It was a take-home car, and gas and maintenance were provided, but John spent five hundred dollars of his own money to add a few custom touches, such as a siren speaker, which, he said, put out the decibel level of “a low-flying F-16.”

  Joe Lopez asked John if he could take off on a weekday to join a bunch of firefighters on a day trip to Big Bear Lake for some skiing. His senior partner granted the request, and on the very day that Joe Lopez left town, the most terrifying arson series yet struck Los Angeles County in the communities of Lawndale, Redondo Beach, and Inglewood: five fires occurred within a two-and-a-half-hour period on March 27, 1991.

  At 11:40 on that Wednesday morning, business was relatively light at D&M Yardage on Hawthorne Boulevard in Lawndale. Employee Linda Zito saw a man, whom she later described as a white male of medium size with brown hair, roaming around the store. She approached and asked if she could help him and he asked if they carried camouflage material. When she said that they did not, he smiled and kept browsing. He left, and twenty minutes later the fire came: a column of flame appeared only eighteen inches from the floor. But in an instant it was spiraling up, all the way up to the ceiling, and she realized that the foam-backed display draperies were on fire.

  Engine Company 21 had no chance. A cascade of flame blasted out of the doors and windows and heaved up, devouring the roof. The entire building was destroyed.

  Less than two miles away, at 12:10 P.M., a customer at Stats Floral Supply was walking past a display of Styrofoam products and spotted a piece of yellow lined paper that was smoldering. She picked the paper out of the display and ran to the front of the store where an employee dumped a cup of water on the paper. Inside of the note paper was a cigarette butt, and three paper matches attached by a rubber band, just like the one recovered in Bakersfield by Captain Marvin Casey more than three years earlier.

  Half a mile from Stats Floral Supply, and twenty minutes after that arson attempt, a fire erupted at Thrifty Drug Store on Aviation Boulevard in a display of foam patio cushions. The automatic sprinklers discharged and several employees kept the flames in check until the first engine company arrived and suppressed it.

  At 1:28 P.M. in nearby Inglewood, at the J.J. Newberry store, a fire broke out in a pillow display. It was extinguished by employees, with only light smoke damage done to the premises.

  And finally, on that afternoon of fire, again in the city of Inglewood, at the Pic N Save store, a customer began yelling, and employees extinguished
a fire in a box full of stacked pillows.

  The arsonist had had a very busy day, but had only succeeded in setting the one spectacular blaze that gutted D&M Yardage, leaving just the four walls, putting several employees out of work, and closing down the business for two years.

  6

  THE FINGERPRINT

  Special Agent Michael Matassa of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms received a vibrating page that Wednesday afternoon. He had the audible page turned off because he was sitting in trial in Los Angeles Superior Court, assisting the district attorney’s office with an arson fraud that involved over a hundred witnesses. Matassa was the acting resident agent in charge until the boss of the Los Angeles office returned from sick leave.

  Deputy District Attorney Michael Cabral was prosecuting the owner of a furniture store on a charge of torching his own property for insurance, thus triggering the assistance of ATF with what otherwise would have been an L.A. Fire Department investigation. Mike Matassa liked working with Cabral and other deputy DA’s on arson cases, because the U.S. Attorney’s Office was notoriously hard to persuade when it came to filing criminal cases, and arson was among the most difficult of crimes to prove. State prosecutors were more apt to file the case and try to make it work without obsessing over a remote possibility of an acquittal.

  When Mike Matassa left the courtroom to answer the page, he was asked to call the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, who wanted ATF to assist with a commercial-structure fire in the L.A. suburb of Lawndale. He was told that the damage to D&M Yardage was obviously over one million dollars and could involve arson fraud, either scenario justifying ATF involvement. Matassa hung up and asked his office to send someone to Lawndale for a courtesy call.

  It has always been remarkable that American law enforcement does as decent a job as it does, in spite of the Balkanization of the profession. The U.S. fear of a national police force has resulted in thousands of autonomous police agencies staffed by people who jealously guard their turf, their sources, and every scrap of information both vital and trivial. Many times the networking that takes place is appallingly fragmented and informal.

  The vast-government-conspiracy theories floated in hundreds of books and films have never failed to produce howls of laughter when mentioned at law-enforcement gatherings, especially in the aftermath of JFK, when the vast government conspiracy included the FBI, CIA, and all the other three-letter agencies staffed by bureaucrats who are mostly loathed and distrusted by street cops. Those with an alliterative flair call them grandstanding government geeks in penny loafers, or bumbling back-stabbing bureaucrats who wouldn’t conspire to peek inside a girlfriend’s underwear without the approval of a U.S. attorney and a search warrant.

  But what really brings down the station house is when, in order to make the JFK conspiracy work, all the revisionists had to include the Dallas Police Department. And that does it every time. Cops get to knee slapping and falling out of their chairs over the thought of it. Because everyone who’s ever worn a badge knows that the moment a cop gets a real secret, the drums start beating and the asphalt jungle wireless starts humming, and the first leggy news chick with tits out to here will be blabbing the secret on the news at ten even before the cop wives get to tell it to the gang at the office and the girls at the gym.

  All of this helps to explain why Matassa’s arson team, when they arrived in Lawndale on the afternoon of March 27, hadn’t yet connected the D&M Yardage arson to anything that had recently preceded it in other parts of the Los Angeles basin. Information was negligible, because everyone paid attention to his own little patch of turf and not the other guy’s.

  One of the arson investigators, Glen Lucero of the Los Angeles Fire Department, took a look at what was left of D&M Yardage and reported, “There’s nothing left but four walls and a trash heap.”

  Lucero was forty-two years old and had been with the LAFD since 1973. Before that he’d served with the U.S. Air Force in Vietnam as a firefighter, and also in Air Rescue, where their job was to save downed pilots and to be prepared to get into hooded silver fire-fighting outfits, ready to suppress aircraft fires. He was a solidly built, good-humored Mexican-American who had been sent to the LAPD detective school and the LAPD homicide school in order to learn crime investigation.

  His partner that afternoon was ATF Special Agent Ken Croke, an Irish-American from Boston who had relatives in the auld sod and considerable pride that a Dublin athletic stadium was called Croke Field. He’d played offensive guard in college, still pumped iron, and was very large. Everyone called the rookie agent “a musclebound party animal.”

  ATF and LAFD had a “memorandum of understanding,” meaning that ATF assisted the city of L.A. with large commercial building fires, especially if it might entail arson for profit or arson by organized crime. ATF also responded to other state and local agencies if they had a church fire or an abortion-clinic fire, and they assisted at multiple-jurisdictional fires when an ATF umbrella was needed. Glen Lucero found it useful to have a fed with him, even one as inexperienced as Ken Croke. It impressed civilians, and even some of the cops from the smaller police departments. “The federal mystique,” Lucero called it.

  It was while they were there peering at the trash heap that used to be a thriving retail store that they heard about the attempted arson in nearby Redondo Beach at Stats Floral Supply, where an incendiary device had been discovered. Then they heard about Thrifty Drug Store, also in Redondo Beach, and after looking at the time of alarms called into dispatch, they thought they just might have a serial arsonist at work here.

  Glen Lucero started recalling similar fires back in December, in pillows and bedding, up in the San Fernando Valley on Ventura Boulevard. The investigators on those fires hadn’t given much thought to a time-delay device, but kept asking witnesses, “Who’d you see at the time of the fire?” Which had made everybody chase a lot of wild geese. But now, recalling a sheet of yellow lined paper and a cigarette and matches and rubber band, things started to jell, and Lucero began thinking about a pyro. Not some spree fire setter, but a real pyro with an uncontrollable need to set fires.

  “The kind of guy,” he said, “who starts out as a kid pulling wings off insects and setting cats’ tails on fire, and then just branches out.”

  Michael Matassa had been with ATF for eight years, and before that he had served three years with the U.S. Marshal’s Office in Los Angeles. Raised in Old Forge, Pennsylvania, he was the son of an Italian-American shoemaker. His maternal grandparents were from the Ukraine and Poland, so he was not an atypical Pennsylvania ethnic mix, and he grew up poor like everyone else he knew.

  After graduating from Penn State in 1975 with a degree in criminal justice, Matassa had tried for five years to get a cop job. Like John Orr, he wanted to join the LAPD in that era before Rodney King and O.J. Simpson, back when the LAPD was the premier police agency in America. But when he’d inquired he was told that it would probably be a waste of plane fare; there were 10, 000 applicants for only 150 job openings.

  While working as an insurance adjuster in Williamsport, he tried for the Pennsylvania State Police. His brother Tony was a decorated state trooper who had been wounded by gunfire, and his cousin was a state police homicide investigator, and his next-door neighbor was a state police captain. Matassa took the state police exam twice, scored ninety-four out of a possible one hundred, but failed twice. A score of seventy passed for the right ethnic minorities, but nobody marched with signs for Italians, Poles, or Ukrainians. He then tried for the U.S. Marshal’s Office and made it.

  Matassa was sent to the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, called “Flet-C,” in Glynco, Georgia, where all feds except the FBI attend their training academies. He married an Irish firecracker, Linda Thomas, and they both quit their jobs, trading a twenty-six-thousand-dollar joint income for ten thousand dollars annually. Throwing everything into their Suburban, including a little mutt and a tabby cat, they drove across country to California, where they lea
rned to live on hot dogs, hamburgers, and Chef Boyardee.

  His training officer back in those U.S. marshal days had been the case agent on the hunt for fugitive Christopher Boyce, of The Falcon and the Snowman fame. While Boyce was in prison he’d seen a Clint Eastwood movie, made a papier mâché dummy, and escaped from prison through a manhole cover and drainage ditch. Matassa had to do a little surveillance on some of Boyce’s mercenary friends, following them around the streets while they watched for reflections in store windows. Matassa called them a bunch of militia fruitcakes. Boyce got caught and went back to prison for life.

  Mike Matassa liked the fugitive hunts best. It was a blast, he said, kicking down doors. All the hook-’em-and-book-’em street-cop stuff, he loved it. But he hated serving subpoenas, and court duty absolutely sucked, so he switched over to ATF, and was sent back to the ATF academy at Flet-C for another eight weeks. He returned again to L.A. as an ATF special agent.

  Matassa had done well at ATF and was the acting supervisor when he received the page on March 27, 1991. He was thirty-seven years old then, with sandy hair, expressive dark eyes, and a long face that could look melancholy when he was not. If the lighting was right one could see a jagged scar over his right eye, between the lid and the brow. People who knew how he got it loved to make him explain to those who didn’t. Did it happen in a violent arrest? From a knife maybe? Or a broken bottle?

  Until he finally had to admit that yes, it was a broken bottle. He had fallen out of his crib, bottle and all, and the old-style glass baby bottle had broken in his face. And every time he’d be forced to explain, somebody would say, “And how old were you, Mike? Fifteen?”