Fire Lover (14 page)

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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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 learned 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 mache 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
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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?"

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 Sheriffs 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
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Pasadena, South Pasadena, Burbank, Monrovia, and Glendale
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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."