Fire Lover (17 page)

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 Jose 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 Luis 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."

He'd say, "Don't see it. Gimme another."

They'd say, "A water tank" or "The bus station."

He'd say, "Don't see it."

Just as Matassa was getting used to the aircraft it banked suddenly and Mike Matassa completely lost the eyeball, but the ground teams picked up for him and followed their target to the vicinity of a car wash.

John Orr drove into a parking lot next to an auto dealership, and for some reason he stopped. He got out and walked around to the rear of his car.

Glen Lucero reported, "I saw him do a double take!"

And Ben Franklin was right: for want of a nail the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe the horse was lost; for want of some baling wire, a surveillance was lost.

The antenna had dropped and was hanging down low, in plain view. When John squatted to take a closer look, all hell broke loose.

The guys from the dope and gun groups started jabbering on the radios all at once. Things like "Surveillance is blown!" And "Let's pop him now!" And "Let's do a felony stop!"

But April Carroll yelled, "Hold your positions! Hold your positions!"

And while the whole scene went from Technicolor to bad dream black-and
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white, John peeled out, tires smoking, and drove straight to the San Luis Obispo Police Department, where he jumped out of his car and ran inside the station, leaving everyone in the task force absolutely stunned and baffled.

April Carroll and Ken Croke waited outside the police station, and because neither of them were known by John, they got ready to sprint inside the second something happened.

And it did. John came running out, jumped in his car, and sped away with most of the task force not knowing what in the hell was going on.

April Carroll got on the radio and said, "Hang back! We'll go in the P. D. and see what happened!"

And as they exited the car, Ken Croke, in all the excitement, closed the door and locked Glen Lucero's keys inside with the engine running.

Croke and Carroll badged the stunned desk officer and spoke with a police lieutenant, hastily explaining what was going down. They were told the astonishing story that when John Orr had run inside he'd identified himself and informed the cops that he might have a bomb strapped under his car! But instead of calling for a bomb
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disposal squad, or doing something reasonable, Captain Orr had simply asked for directions to their Explosives Ordinance Disposal range.

The police lieutenant had complied, but asked if it wouldn't make just a wee bit more sense to call for a bomb technician rather than drive the car further, thus running the risk of hitting a chuck hole or running over a chipmunk or something, triggering a device which might blow him clear into the next fucking county? But John Orr had said no, he was kind of a bomb expert himself, and he'd be fine since he'd already driven it this far.

The EOD range was two miles out of town, and if he'd driven like a NASCAR racer before, now he drove like the Dukes of Hazzard. Mike Matassa eyeballed him kicking up a dust storm as he bounced along that dirt road to the range, not at all like a man who thought there was an explosive device attached to his car. And pretty soon he skidded to a stop in front of a uniformed cop who was himself the size of a bomb truck.

While all this was happening, ATF fingers were being pointed at the tactical
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operations officer, and the longhairs were yelling, "Have you ever heard of duct tape?" And the T. O. guy was yelling, "I put it on right!" And others were hollering that they'd been tanked by a guy who couldn't put a decal on a license plate, and Mike Matassa was yelling, "We ain't leaving here without that twenty-five-hundred
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dollar bird dog!"

During the short time that it took John Orr to get to the bomb technician, April Carroll, the police lieutenant at the station, and Mike Matassa up in the sky had cooked up a story which they relayed by phone to the bomb sergeant.

The sergeant crawled under John Orr's car, removed the device, and told him, Look! It's just a harmless, obsolete, inert, helpless old bogus bomb that couldn't hurt a ladybug. Or words to that effect. The cop then told Captain Orr that he'd keep the thing and check it out further with the training institute, and put a stop to their childish shenanigans.

But if he'd really bought the story, as the sergeant thought he had, one might wonder why John Orr took a camera from his car and shot some pictures of the device. Close-up pictures.

That afternoon, John returned to his hotel, attended the rest of the training sessions, and awaited his wife, Wanda, who arrived by train that evening. They checked out of the Embassy Suites two days after the conference ended, having used the extra time to tour and relax. They arrived back at their home in Eagle Rock at 3:30 p. M. on May 5, followed all the way by the surveillance caravan of losers.

Two days later, the bomb sergeant from the San Luis Obispo Police Department received a phone call from Captain Orr asking if he'd had a chance to examine the bogus bomb, and the sergeant said sure he had, and just as he thought, it was an empty box, the CSTI gang's idea of a sick joke. John thanked him and hung up, after which, the bomb sergeant immediately called the task force saying he was pretty certain that John Orr had bought the story.

The Pillow Pyro Task Force generally agreed. They believed they could continue with their investigation, and Mike Matassa didn't disagree. But when he got pensive, that jagged scar over his right eyelid grew more prominent, and in one of those moments, he said: "That arrogant prick. He's on to us!"

Still, they behaved as though he wasn't. Ken Croke tried surveilling him from his house, and it was disastrous. John would be driving along a Glendale avenue, nice as you please, and suddenly he'd slide across three lanes of traffic, jerk a hard left turn into a wrong-way alley, pull out onto another street, and repeat the exercise!

Or, he'd be moseying along a residential street in his city car, just out for a drive, and he'd turn onto another street, but suddenly he'd spin a U-ee and stop at the end of a cul-de-sac. Any G-sled turning onto that street would be burned. But Croke already had enough experience with John not to be burned, and the only way to assure that was to abandon any further attempts to tail him.

Still, from all they were learning, he had always driven like that. So they couldn't say for sure if he was looking for a surveillance or just liked to play cops-and
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robbers head games with himself when he got bored. John Leonard Orr was not easy to fathom or predict
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unless one paid attention to the profilers at the FBI academy who'd written about the violent serial offender's compelling need for excitement.

They had some heart-to-hearts, the Three Amigos did, while back at task-force headquarters. They still had the two choices: either pop him now and settle for the one sure count of arson in Marv Casey's Bakersfield fire, as well as trying to link in the others from the Central Coast and Central Valley; or wait and do it right by seeking out witnesses from every store he'd torched or attempted to torch and showing them a "sixpak" photo spread, building a monumental case brick by brick.

If they waited and did all that, and if he truly had bought the bomb-hoax story, he might feel safe enough to begin a new arson series somewhere in the Los Angeles basin. But if the Pillow Pyro struck again and maybe killed someone in a fire, where would that leave the government as far as liability was concerned? And where would that leave them as far as their careers were concerned?

The U. S. Attorney's Office, ATF supervisors, and others mulled it over, and it was decided to let the fish run with the hook. A reason that they could afford to take the risk was that since Tom Campuzano of the L. A. Fire Department had first walked into that FIRST meeting on March 29 with the Pillow Pyro flyer, there had not been a single arson attempt at a retail store in all of Los Angeles County. Their conclusion was that knowledge of the existence of the task force had been enough to keep the matches out of John Orr's hands, and would continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

But Mike Matassa's doubts, which he kept squirreled away from everyone, suddenly jumped out of his pocket and landed on the desk in front of him, like a series of tiny, brightly burning fires. And he wondered: Is John Orr really too scared to strike again? Or does it just enhance the thrill?

By June there were only Two Amigos. April Carroll had been transferred prior to being promoted. Mike Matassa was told he'd soon be relieved of his supervisory duties and allowed to be a street hump once again. Glen Lucero was checking fire reports every day, but there was absolutely no activity that could be linked to the Pillow Pyro.

They still needed a recent mug shot of him in order to create a good photo spread to show employees from the retail-store fire series. His Department of Motor Vehicles photo didn't look like him, and they were trying to think of a way to get it done.