Fire Lover

by Joseph Wambaugh

  “That,” John said to his partner, “is assault with a deadly weapon.”

  Because of the prior overzealous conduct of the senior arson investigator, the fire chief of Glendale had rewritten a “Code Three Response Policy” that stated:

  The arson investigators will not engage in police-type pursuits of arson suspects. If an investigator needs to chase a suspect, contact with police dispatchers will be made on the radio and responding uniformed police will effect the stop.

  The guy in the Toyota had given them the first opportunity to test the new policy. It specifically referred to arson suspects, John noted, and he grinned at his partner, and said, “This dude isn’t an arson suspect.”

  It didn’t start out as a pursuit. They just tailed the guy discreetly, and called in their location, and requested police units to assist. And they fudged a bit by saying they were following on city streets rather fast at fifty miles per hour, when actually they were doing seventy. But John was not about to back off because of a dumb-ass no-pursuit policy now that he had started broadcasting their location on the air. What, and let some cop taunt him because he wimped out? No way!

  Finally, he had to hit the red lights and siren while flying across a busy intersection, and he made a few hair-raising sliding turns and U-ees, and when they managed to box in the Toyota, they jumped out with 9mm handguns, dragged the guy from the car, and put him down in a felony prone-out until the black-and-whites arrived.

  So, Captain Orr was still nailing shoplifters and doing what he loved: police work. And Joe Lopez was learning fast what their boss already knew: asking John Orr just to chill out and cut the cop capers was like asking Islamic Jihad just to kick back and milk goats.

  Captain Marvin Casey was justifiably suspicious when the Three Amigos arrived back at his office in Bakersfield.

  “Two visits from the feds in one month?” he said. “To a country boy in Bakersfield?”

  They told him that his latent print was “promising.” That they might have a few suspects in mind, but nothing definite.

  When he asked them what he could do to help, April Carroll said, “We want to establish the chain of evidence.”

  So Marvin Casey had to gather evidence techs and everyone who had anything whatsoever to do with the collecting, storing, photographing, packaging, or delivering of the incendiary device that he’d taken into custody on January 16, 1987. And by the end of the day, the Three Amigos were satisfied by what had been said, and what had not been said: that no outsider could have touched that evidence in any way. They now could proceed without fear of embarrassment from learning otherwise.

  But of course, they never mentioned John Orr. It would always be, “And did anybody else come by that day?” As April Carroll put it, “We played Columbo.”

  But though Marvin Casey might have been a country boy, he was far from buying the Columbo act. He kept trying to pry some information out of them because he knew something was up.

  “But feds are feds,” he later said, rhetorically. “They want, but they never give. They just squirrel away all their information.”

  Perhaps that day his brother firefighter, Glen Lucero, might have felt Casey’s frustration. He later said that fire investigators were used to sharing vital information, not keeping secrets. Lucero might have empathized with Marvin Casey, who’d had the intuition and the brains and the nerve to work on the arson series of 1987 and 1989 when everyone else, even his ATF helpers, were rolling their eyes. When they were even chortling behind his back because he was only a fireman with a half-baked idea. But he had been right all along.

  This was the result of his work, his intuition, so shouldn’t it have been his to know, then and there? Among themselves the task force said that they would have arrived at the same result without Casey’s theory, that all he did really was to collect and preserve the fingerprint evidence. But they could never refute that only a colossal error by a fingerprint examiner at the Department of Justice had kept John Orr on the streets for the past two years. If John Orr proved to be their arsonist, Marvin Casey had solved the case back then. Solved it. And that could never be fairly denied.

  But feds were feds and they were not about to play you-show-me-yours-and-I’ll-show-you-mine. The Three Amigos left Casey utterly in the dark as to the true nature of their visit, and went back to Los Angeles. And Marvin Casey was not to learn of his vindication for months to come.

  Now that the task force believed they had the identity of the Pillow Pyro, the M.O. reports they were collecting were turning into a paper avalanche. It was time to inform John Orr’s superiors at the Glendale Fire Department. They needed his telephone log, and anything else they could secretly gather as they began cementing a case that a jackhammer couldn’t chip.

  Within days their list of need-to-knows had grown alarmingly. There were at least two dozen in the know, and not just ATF and LAFD superiors at the highest level. Word had leaked to everyone in the ATF Los Angeles office, and had been whispered around LAFD headquarters, not to mention the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department. That was most worrisome of all, because everyone knew what happens when street cops get a “secret” of this magnitude. Mike Matassa predicted that by June there would probably be enough government employees with knowledge that John Orr of the Glendale Fire Department was the Pillow Pyro to form a militia large enough to overthrow Castro.

  A secret meeting was held at the U.S. Attorney’s Office with Battalion Chief Christopher Gray, John Orr’s immediate superior. Predictably, the disclosure hit him like a stun gun, but he quickly moved from denial to acceptance. They informed Gray that they might be working for a long time before making an arrest, and they described the magnitude of the fire reports they were revisiting. Without alerting John Orr, they had to get a recent mug shot for a photo spread to show witnesses, and they told the chief they’d have to subpoena telephone records from the Orr home and would need call-out sheets as well as phone records from the Glendale Fire Department.

  When they were all finished, and the thunderstruck battalion chief could get his thoughts in order, he informed them that Captain Orr was not only a writer of articles for trade publications, but that he had written a novel about fire fighting. Chief Gray said that John had given him the first couple of chapters to read, but all Gray could remember about the story was that it was full of filthy dialogue. Chief Gray, a devout Christian, was decidedly unimpressed with his arson sleuth’s literary style but thought they should know about the novel.

  Nobody at the meeting could think of how John Orr’s fiction efforts could assist the task force, but they thanked the chief and swore him to secrecy about their investigation, and that was about it. They promised to keep him apprised of any developments, and warned that even with this devastating news, he must not betray his feelings. It must remain business as usual back at his fire department.

  Before leaving, Chief Gray did verify a piece of news they’d already heard. John Orr was scheduled to go to San Luis Obispo at the end of the month, to the California Specialized Training Institute, where he was taking a course on peace-officer safety. The session was to begin on April 29 and end May 3.

  The task force shot some sidelong glances, because this was more than they could have wished. He might just try for another fire series after leaving the conference, just as he’d done twice before.

  On April 23, John received a phone call from Mike Matassa of ATF, whom he knew from having his assistance on a couple of Glendale cases. Moreover, Matassa had attended a training session on firearms identification hosted by the Glendale Arson/Explosives Unit, so they were well acquainted.

  In that phone call, Matassa first asked if he could send two of his ATF agents to a Fire Investigation 2A class that Glendale was hosting. John told him about the new laser technology on postfire flammable-liquid burn patterns that they’d be demonstrating, and that he could squeeze in the two ATF agents as a favor. Then Matassa switched the subject to the Pillow Pyro case and said he sure hoped that o
ne of the local arson investigators might come up with something, and if John happened to remember anything, to please call.

  Then Matassa said, “The guy’s good, John. Real good. We got nothing on him, just that delay device from the Redondo Beach fire that Campy told you guys about.”

  And John said, “No, I’ve never encountered anything quite like this.”

  “Be sure to call if you think of anything,” Matassa said to him. “Anything at all.”

  “Sure will,” John said.

  But before he could hang up, Mike Matassa added, “By the way, you going up to San Luis Obispo for the CSTI seminar?”

  “Yeah, I’m going,” John replied.

  “Taking your wife?” Mike Matassa asked. “I was thinking about taking mine.”

  “Maybe,” John said. “Haven’t worked it out yet.”

  “Our boss won’t let us take our G-rides,” Matassa said. “How about you? Allowed to take your company car or do you have to take your own?”

  “I can take the city car but I’m not sure yet.”

  Mike Matassa said, “Well, be sure to call if you come up with something for us on our guy.”

  When Matassa hung up, he looked around and said, “Nothing. He told me nothing. I still don’t know which car he’s taking.”

  They were planning an elaborate surveillance to follow John Orr on his trip to and from the San Luis Obispo conference. ATF had brought in undercover agents from their gun groups and dope groups, guys with long hair and beards, people that John Orr could not possibly have come in contact with during his arson investigations.

  Six surveillance cars and a fixed-wing aircraft were ready, but the task force had a dilemma. What they needed was a court order allowing them to attach an electronic tracking device, or “bird dog,” to Captain Orr’s car for the times when it would be impossible to maintain visual surveillance, even by aircraft. And to get the court order they needed a specific description of the vehicle on which the device would be attached. And since they didn’t know if he’d take the city car or his own, they had to wait and see.

  John Orr was scheduled to drive away from his Eagle Rock home on Sunday morning, April 28, 1991. The “eyeball” surveillance car at the point position relayed by radio that John would be taking his city vehicle, the big Crown Vic, when at 10:30 A.M. he walked out of his wife Wanda’s little house in Eagle Rock and loaded travel bags into the trunk.

  The fun began almost at once. By the time John got on the freeway he simply buried the speedometer needle off the dial. The eyeball car had to back off or be burned.

  The fixed-wing aircraft, waiting at the Burbank airport and ready to taxi, was informed that the Ford was approaching the city, but John roared past Burbank before they got off the runway. They said he blew by Disney Studios so fast his draft sucked the shorts off Mickey Mouse.

  The surveillance cars simply couldn’t do any of their fancy loops, passbys, and handoffs from one eyeball to another. All they could do was a straight line, balls-out road race all the way to San Luis Obispo.

  And while all this daredevil motoring was going on, Ken Croke was rushing to a magistrate after just filling in the last lines of his affidavit with the description and license number of the car John was driving. The federal judge signed the order at her home, and then Ken Croke was back on the road with the impossible task of trying to catch the rocketing caravan of G-sleds “surveilling” Captain John Orr.

  As one ATF agent said in utter frustration, “That Crown Vic’s topping a hundred! I gotta do a buck-ten to even have a chance!”

  They had no chance for a customary surveillance. Meanwhile, they had a problem in their aircraft. One of the new ATF agents, a guy from New York assigned as a spotter, got airsick right out of the airport. The pilot had to return, put the plane down on the tarmac, and let the kid run into the hangar to barf. When the young agent came back he was green around the gills, but game. And off they went, the pilot thinking maybe they should’ve had a Learjet to keep up with this guy.

  The amazing thing is, his driving didn’t seem to attract any California Highway Patrol units. Everybody who knew John Orr always said how ordinary he looked, the kind of guy nobody ever notices. The kind that blends into whatever background there is and just disappears. The surveillance guys started thinking that maybe he had some way of doing the same thing in his car. Maybe this dude could make himself invisible!

  He checked into the Embassy Suites in San Luis Obispo early that afternoon, and the surveillance units were placed strategically to monitor his movements. During regular workdays, “the arson nerds”—Mike Matassa and the Three Amigos—had to dress like police detectives in business attire they bought cheap in L.A.’s garment district. But the undercover guys were definitely California casual, in tees, tanks, and Levi’s 501s.

  Until he blew out his knee, Ken Croke had been a college football player, and he was still a side of beef, going about 255 pounds. He and Hollywood Mike Camello often played flag football in the Hollywood League with other piano movers from LAPD, LAFD, and ATF, and Croke swore that their version of flag football was tougher than what he’d played in college. To pass the time he played catch football, and the longhairs tossed Frisbees while scoping out coed joggers from the Cal Poly campus, dreaming of kinky sex and Jell-O fights in frat houses while using government film to shoot pictures of the sweaty chicks.

  They were detailed to work twelve hours on and twelve off. Glen Lucero and April Carroll had the night shift, from 7:00 P.M. to 7:00 A.M., and the first evening was utterly boring, broken up by pizza runs. But after the observers put their quarry to bed, certain that he was tucked in for the night, two of the ATF tac-team guys went to work.

  The “bird dog” looked like a black cigar box, and at 2:30 A.M. the mobile tracking device was strapped to the chassis of John’s car with the antenna hanging just enough to clear the rear bumper but still be unobtrusive. In a surveillance van was the bird dog’s monitor, resembling a radar screen with lines around it. A direction finder would cause beeps as the target’s car got closer. Beeping at the center of the monitor meant that van and target were bumper to bumper, so the bird dog still required a human eyeball to work in conjunction with it. They wanted him no closer than a hundred yards from the direction finder.

  Sunday was even more boring than Saturday. It was exhausting to just sit, and it was stifling in the surveillance van, where the unlucky ones inside had to start stripping off clothing. The luckier task-force members were in the hotel room directly across the hall from John Orr.

  On Monday, April 29, John attended the training session, but after it was over he got in his car and took a drive to the Thrifty Drug Store on Madonna Road. And the pucker factor was very much in evidence in the cars bearing the Three Amigos, who were only too aware of the Thrifty Drug Stores fires in Wilmington, San Pedro, and Redondo Beach.

  Following him into the store at 6:25 P.M. was ATF’s José Canseco look-alike, Sal Noriega, who saw his man at the checkout. John Orr put something in his shirt pocket and the checker offered him a receipt but it was waved away. Noriega saw the checker drop the receipt under the counter, followed John outside, and saw him open and close the trunk of his car, then get in and drive off.

  After they surveilled John back to the Embassy Suites, Noriega and his partner sped to the drugstore, identified themselves to the checker, and asked if he remembered the customer.

  The young checker recalled an “older” man wearing glasses, a red plaid shirt, and blue jeans, and remembered that he’d bought two boxes of Marlboro Light cigarettes. When Noriega told the checker that he’d seen him drop something under the counter, the checker produced the trash basket. On top was a dated receipt for two box packs of Marlboro Lights, purchased at 6:27 P.M.

  The purchase produced quite a flurry of excitement among the task-force members, especially the Three Amigos, who knew that John Orr did not smoke.

  On May 1, the acting group supervisor, Mike Matassa, showed up in San Lui
s Obispo, pretty well convinced that before this exercise was over they would catch their man in the act of trying to burn down a retail store, probably on his return trip to Los Angeles. Matassa wanted to be there when they popped the Pillow Pyro.

  Nothing happened during the next day of training. John went to CSTI, then back to the Embassy Suites; so on the second evening, Mike Matassa took Ken Croke to a Pismo Beach steak house. Ken Croke, a GS-5, “as low as you can get,” as he put it, was making sixteen thousand dollars a year, and could just about qualify for food stamps given the cost of living in L.A. The twenty-five-year-old agent figured the price of this meal would send him to a loan shark.

  In the restaurant they spotted John Madden, the colorful football announcer and former Oakland Raiders coach. Croke was wide, but Madden was wider. Croke consumed a twenty-two-ounce baseball cut, and then the ATF agents watched in awe as Madden devoured two baseball cuts, enough cholesterol to put the whole task force in the cardiac ward. One of the waitresses did her thing by standing on a chair and filling water glasses from five feet up without spilling a drop. It was the only excitement they’d experienced during the entire surveillance.

  Still, they believed something would happen on the way home. That’s what they were all waiting for.

  When John Orr left his room on the morning of May 3, the task force knew two things from their spies: he had never taken a smoke break at the conference, and there were no cigarette butts left in his room. So he hadn’t bought those Marlboros because he’d suddenly taken up the habit. The agents were strung so tight they were humming.

  When their quarry took a break from the convention site at 1:30 P.M. that afternoon, Mike Matassa was the eyeball in the aircraft, but he couldn’t see anything.

  He’d say to the ground people, “Gimme a landmark.”

  They’d say “McDonald’s” or “Burger King.”