After that vibrating page concerning the major fire in Lawndale, Michael Matassa would soon have occasion to remember another major fire at a commercial building over seven years earlier. As a rookie ATF agent he’d been called to the fire location because of the magnitude of the blaze and the multiple fatalities. Matassa had driven the bomb truck, a mobile crime lab. But before they could even assess the situation and decide whether or not to notify their National Response Team, they’d been given word that the fire at Ole’s Home Center in South Pasadena had been called an accident by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.
That horrific disaster had almost faded from memory, but within a matter of months, it would come back to him.
Prior to the five-fire spree on Wednesday, March 27, there had been something known as the Los Angeles Arson Task Force, an ostentatious military term for two L.A. Fire Department arson investigators assigned one block away from LAFD headquarters on Los Angeles Street. The job of the LAFD investigators was to coordinate with ATF on major city fires, particularly if they involved fraud or organized crime. In addition to Glen Lucero, the other LAFD employee was Mike Camello, a big guy with chiseled good looks and hair so coiffed it’d stay in place till Christ came back. He had worked as an extra on a movie, and he was rumored to be a member of SAG, so everyone called him “Hollywood Mike.” The firemen found some of the feds to be a bit tight-jawed compared to the loosey-goosey gang in the firehouse, so they just kept “rolling turds” at them, as Lucero put it, and took the ATF guys to happy hour after work, and pretty soon all the feds acted pretty much like firemen and stopped worrying about getting the secret handshake wrong, or whatever the hell it was that feds worried about.
Another ATF special agent had joined Lucero and Ken Croke on the new investigation: April Carroll was an attractive blonde with good analytical skills, but she’d never worked an arson case. She’d joined ATF right out of college, where she’d played field hockey. She was more ambitious than a junior senator, and would run, not walk, wherever she went. The fortyish arson sleuths like Glen Lucero could barely keep up with her, and Mike Matassa, still the acting supervisor, said that Lucero should bring a skateboard to work when teamed with April. Matassa called Lucero, Croke, and Carroll the Three Amigos.
The day after the fire spree, Lucero and Croke went to the Redondo Beach Police Department to see the incendiary device found at Stats Floral, and they began examining reports of similar fires in recent months. Glen Lucero proved that John Orr wasn’t the only arson sleuth in the L.A. area with a literary flair. He coined a moniker for the new task force now concentrating on a certain type of fire, in a certain type of commercial establishment, ignited in a certain type of combustible merchandise, possibly using the same delay device. They called themselves the Pillow Pyro Task Force.
On Friday, March 29, there was a meeting of the Fire Investigators Regional Strike Team, known by the acronym FIRST, in West Covina. It was an organization of smaller foothill cities—Pasadena, South Pasadena, Burbank, Monrovia, and Glendale—cities that did not have a staff of arson investigators but had formed FIRST in order to exchange information and help one another. The meetings were often attended by large agencies such as LAFD, L.A. County Fire Department, or LASD.
LAFD investigator Tom Campuzano had drawn up a list of seventeen fires that had occurred in recent months, all of which and more were being investigated by the Pillow Pyro gang. The fires had all taken place midday in retail establishments open for business, and the flyer described the signature device: a cigarette, three matches, a rubber band, and notebook paper.
Campuzano addressed the FIRST meeting that day and expressed the task force’s opinion about the delay device being unusual in that such devices usually consisted of a cigarette and a book of matches. The arsonist had obviously included a piece of notebook paper in order to supply enough heat and flame to get the foam products melting and the flowing liquid ignited. The FIRST members were given a brief description of each fire, and Campuzano passed out a flyer to each member, but no one offered any information.
After the meeting, as Tom Campuzano was leaving, he was stopped in the parking lot by Scott Baker, an investigator from the state Fire Marshal’s Office in the Central Valley.
Baker said, “Campy, I didn’t want to say anything in there, but we had an arson series like yours back in 1987, and another one on the Central Coast in ’89.”
“And why didn’t you want to mention it in there?” Campuzano asked.
Baker replied, “Because Marv Casey of the Bakersfield Fire Department had a theory that a firefighter might be involved, and Casey has a good fingerprint from one of the fires.”
After Baker told him the story about Casey’s hunch, Campuzano thanked him for the information and returned to his office.
When Mike Matassa was informed about the tip and who relayed it, he was impressed. He appreciated arson sleuths who came from a cop background, and Scott Baker was one of them. Matassa had attended a training session with Baker, who was, he said, “the arson and gun guy up there in the boonies. He carries about five guns including a hideout piece, and a Ninja knife, and whatever else he can tote and still walk without clanking.”
Matassa liked that kind of arson cop, and thought his tip should be followed up.
One of those present at that FIRST meeting was the organization’s treasurer, who was also one of the FIRST founders. He was the prime mover behind the very successful FIRST training sessions that brought fire investigators from all over the Southern California region, and he had listened while Campuzano talked about the Pillow Pyro.
After Campuzano had finished that afternoon, the treasurer of FIRST continued with business, discussing reimbursements to various members for postage, giving a report of finances, and arranging the monthly raffle.
The treasurer could barely tolerate Tom Campuzano of the Los Angeles Fire Department, and he later wrote: “LAFD’s ‘elite’ prima donna investigators had always irritated me, and consistently bore a condescending attitude towards smaller agencies, so I avoided them except when required to mingle.”
The treasurer of FIRST did not add that the Los Angeles Fire Department had washed him out of their fire academy, the third significant rejection of his life. First his mother’s, who’d left him and whom he didn’t see for nearly three years. Then came the LAPD, when they’d found him psychologically unsuitable. And finally, the LAFD, who’d accepted him, only to later find him physically unsuitable. The third rejection was cumulatively the most difficult, and had for a time left him “paralyzed” by grief and depression and outrage.
When the LAFD investigator had gone, and the treasurer of FIRST had the floor again, he put on an interesting fifteen-minute slide show detailing an arson arrest he and his partner had made of a young Glendale police explorer who had parental rejection issues, a fascination with authority symbols, and a compulsive need for attention, power, and control.
On Monday, April Fool’s Day, the Pillow Pyro Task Force convened a group of about twenty investigators, mostly from ATF and LAFD, but also from other local agencies, to talk about the recent series of retail-store fires. The list they had compiled since the previous Wednesday had now grown to twenty-nine.
They met at task-force “headquarters,” which was just a windowless room in the center of the Federal Building, across from Parker Center, the main headquarters of the LAPD. Both buildings were prime examples of the Gdansk school of design visited upon Los Angeles from the 1950s through two decades, a blight of concrete boxes the color of bacon grease, that had to pay homage to “art” by planting an ugly mosaic or sculpture vaguely resembling human beings smack dab in front, in order to assure all who entered that this bureaucracy cared about humanity. They all favored nuthouse-green interiors that graffiti artists sometimes improved with spray cans.
Everyone listened to what the task force had to say about the Pillow Pyro’s series of assaults, and then they went back to their own investigative worlds
. The Three Amigos sat in their headquarters with Mike Matassa and decided that the next move was for Glen Lucero, Ken Croke, and April Carroll to leave L.A. and head up country where folks don’t look like Iggy Pop. They were going where everybody looked like Johnny Cash. The Pillow Pyro Task Force was sent to Bakersfield to meet Captain Marvin G. Casey.
Meanwhile, Special Agent Howard Sanders of ATF had the job of personally delivering another flyer to all local arson sleuths, spreading the word about the Pillow Pyro, and soliciting leads. One of the stops made by Sanders was at the Glendale Fire Department to see Captain John Orr and his partner, Joe Lopez.
Sanders talked briefly with the Glendale arson team about the incendiary delay device and the M.O. of the Pillow Pyro, and he gave them the new flyer. Sanders reported that the Glendale arson team had nothing to offer about the delay device or anything else, and he left after a few minutes. But John later said he’d informed Sanders that Glendale had brush-fire experience with a cigarette-and-match delay device that had been weighed down by a coin and tossed from a moving car, and he told Sanders that his suspect could have graduated to retail stores.
John wrote about this encounter with the ATF agent by drawing a comparison to the old Andy Griffith TV show: “Sanders seemed more like a computer programmer than a cop, and had little interest in my Mayberry experiences, treating me like I was only a step above Barney Fife.”
The only good thing John Orr had to say about ATF came later: “Though none of these special agents had any firefighting knowledge, and extremely limited fire scene experience, they did have the foresight to add an experienced LAFD arson investigator to their ranks to assist with the Pillow Pyro Task Force.”
It was an attaboy for Glen Lucero, who never got a chance to hear of it at the time. He might have been pleased, coming as it did from a fellow firefighter.
Marvin Casey remembers the Three Amigos when they arrived at his office in Bakersfield as being like “kids in a candy store” when he regaled them with his strange theory that an arson investigator from L.A. had set the series of fires in the Central Valley in 1987 and on the Central Coast in 1989. Maybe that’s the way he read their reaction, but it’s not how the Three Amigos remembered it.
Glen Lucero said, “Marv Casey never stopped expounding on his idea, and we thought it was interesting, but he’d already worked it to death and there was no match with those ten L.A. area investigators who’d attended those two conferences during those years. So we were polite listeners, but definitely not excited.”
After lunch, when the Three Amigos headed back to Los Angeles, they had no reason to believe they’d ever see Marvin Casey again. But they were wrong.
When Glen Lucero, Ken Croke, and April Carroll had returned from Bakersfield with the fingerprint photo, it didn’t provoke any excitement or even much interest. After all, it had been run through the automated systems at the state and national levels in 1987 and in 1989. The owner of the print had no criminal record. And as for the Casey theory, the ten arson investigators who had attended those conferences had been specifically cleared by a Department of Justice fingerprint specialist, so really, the fingerprint was of limited use unless the Pillow Pyro had been arrested for something since 1989.
And that was the reason that Mike Matassa said, “So, let’s run it through again. Maybe he got busted in the last couple of years for stealing pillows or whatever else he does to get himself off.”
Glen Lucero took the photo and negative of Marvin Casey’s fingerprint evidence to the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department laboratory, where it was again reworked by fingerprint specialists. First, the latent print was enlarged photographically. Then tracing paper was placed over the enlarged photo, and the ridge structure was traced by hand, after which the tracing was reduced back down to its normal fingerprint size. Then it was put on a scanner that is linked to the fingerprint computer input terminal. It was a computer that scanned the print and gave a numerical score indicating how well the computer “liked” the print as a match to something already existing in the computer files.
The difference between this scanning system and the one that had initially scanned Marvin Casey’s evidence was that the database in the Los Angeles Hall of Justice computer contained, in addition to criminal fingerprint cards, the fingerprints of all county law-enforcement officers and of anyone who had ever applied for a law-enforcement job—such as an applicant who had tried to join the Los Angeles Police Department twenty years earlier. And the computer “liked” that old LAPD applicant very much indeed. That 1971 fingerprint card was right across the street from the task force—at LAPD headquarters in Parker Center, where they could just stroll over and pick it up.
On April 17, 1991, Ron George, of the sheriff’s laboratory, called the Pillow Pyro Task Force, spoke to an ATF agent, and said, “You oughtta tell your arson investigators to keep their mitts off the evidence. It was touched by John Orr. Left ring finger.”
The agent thanked him, hung up, and informed Glen Lucero and April Carroll, who ran over to the sheriff’s lab and had a meeting with a fingerprint specialist. They thought there had to be an explanation for this.
Mike Matassa, who was upstairs in the boss’s office, got a frantic call later that afternoon from Glen Lucero, who said, “You better get down here right now!”
When Matassa asked what happened, Glen Lucero said, “I’ll tell you when you get here!”
7
BIRD DOG
Never was the difference between fireman and cop displayed more clearly than it was following the astounding revelation of April 17. Glen Lucero, who knew John Orr and lived near his neighborhood, felt depressed. John was a personable guy with a big smile and a little laugh who’d invited the Luceros to a Christmas party at his home. Glen’s wife, Martha, was shy around strangers, so they hadn’t gone, but Lucero had appreciated the invitation.
John Orr produced interesting seminars with good speakers, was a respected member of the fire-fighting brotherhood and a fellow arson investigator, a man ostensibly dedicated to catching the people who set fires. Glen Lucero said that he couldn’t see any way to come out a winner on this one.
Every member of that fraternity who needed to hear about John Orr—and it would include Lucero’s superiors at the L.A. Fire Department—expressed similar sentiments. It was shocking and sickening. None of them wanted to believe it. Some of them refused to believe it. The task force was urged to go very slowly. There just might be a legitimate reason why Captain John Orr’s left ring fingerprint had ended up on that scrap of paper.
Far-fetched scenarios were quietly floated. Maybe he’d been driving through Bakersfield at the time of the fire and stopped to assist the firefighters. Maybe Casey had just failed to mention that. Or maybe he’d stopped in Bakersfield for lunch and left his legal pad on a table at Burger King, and the real pyro happened to pick it up. And they all wondered why the DOJ fingerprint specialist hadn’t been able to match the latent print with John Orr’s fingerprint card back in 1989. How did that screw-up happen?
That’s the way it was viewed by investigators and their superiors who came from a fire-fighting background. Those who came from the cop ranks, well, they saw it differently. They were so excited they were drooling. But for the sake of their firefighter cousins, they had to look pious, and they had to cluck and mouth sanctimonious things like, “This is a somber moment. This is one of ours. This is a family member gone bad. A hush and a pall has settled over the task force.” And so forth.
When really they were thinking: This is awesome! This is a career case! This is so high profile I might end up on 60 Minutes! Maybe even Geraldo! This is fucking fan-tas-tic!
Nobody working in emergency services can ever hope for stock options, or performance bonuses, or incentive pay, or golden parachutes, as in many other walks of life. And most other citizens don’t have to end up in one of those How-the-fuck-did-I-get-in-this? situations where their violent death or even their murder is a real possibility. But there
is a payoff that the firefighter does get from the public which the cop does not: love. John Orr himself said it many times: everybody loves a fireman.
So perhaps the arson sleuths from the fire-fighting ranks could never hope to fathom the cop investigators who don’t have a payoff, cops who were keeping repressed with the greatest effort a burning question: When they make the movie, I wonder who they’ll get to play me?
Mike Matassa was itching to return to the ranks and get involved now that things had taken this dizzying twist. “I wanted to go back to being a street hump real bad” is how he put it.
Glen Lucero sensed how thrilled the cops were, but he couldn’t share it. “It was exciting,” he said, “but there was this dark cloud over it. I kept thinking, why couldn’t it have involved a volunteer fireman?”
There was now much to do before they could think about making an arrest, and this is where a federal investigation differs starkly from a state case. The U.S. Attorney’s Office had come on board and U.S. attorneys want more. In a case destined to be as high profile as this one, they wanted still more. There was a lot of work to do before John Orr could be arrested.
The Three Amigos were ordered to make a fast second trip to Bakersfield to see Marvin Casey.
It was a lovely spring day in Glendale and John Orr was up to his old tricks: police work. He and Joe Lopez were cruising in the arson car, even though that big Crown Vic didn’t exactly look undercover cool. In fact, it carried more antennas than a Radio Shack catalog. They were out of their city, cruising in nearby La Crescenta, but telling John Orr to stay in his bailiwick was like telling a salmon to just hang out downstream.
Suddenly, they spotted a guy leaving a drugstore with an employee chasing him. The young store clerk yelled “Stop!” But the guy jumped in a beat-up Toyota, pulled out, and aimed the car toward the kid, who had to jump out of the way.
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