Killer Show

by John Barylick

  The morning of February 20, Michael O’Connor and Dan Gormley took an important step toward owning their very own rock club. They filed articles of organization with the Rhode Island secretary of state for “The Station Club, LLC,” a limited liability company. Pretty soon they’d be in business.

  That same day, Jack Russell woke up with an idea. Notwithstanding the paucity of free space on his arms, he decided that what he really needed was another tattoo, and so set about finding the best local artist. He asked around and was told that Doors of Perception was the place to go. When Russell called the tattoo shop, the phone was answered by its owner, Skott Greene. Greene, thirty-five, had always wanted to tattoo a rock star, but when Russell sought an appointment, Greene smelled a practical joke. The caller wanted him to “bring his equipment to Russell’s tour bus” late that afternoon, but Greene was already committed to an in-shop appointment. Canceling on a customer was not how Greene had built his reputation. If this “Jack Russell” really wanted a tattoo, he could come to the shop.

  Skott Greene was a gentle bear of a man, huge, bearded, and covered with the art of his trade. Thursday night at his shop was “geek night,” when he and friends Brian O’Donnell and Richard Cabral would gather to drink soda and work on model airplanes, surrounded by Greene’s Star Wars collectibles. O’Donnell was in the shop when Greene took the call from someone claiming to be Jack Russell. He stuck around all afternoon and evening just to see if the call had been legit.

  Greene’s late-afternoon appointment was Michael Hoogasian. That Hoogasian was accompanied by his beautiful wife, Sandy, was no surprise. The two were inseparable. Hard workers both, they had saved from Mike’s job as a Coke deliveryman and Sandy’s at the Gap in Warwick Mall to impeccably furnish a small house they’d bought in Cranston. Married just sixteen months, they came to the shop to get a tattoo for Mike’s thirty-first birthday. Mike already had a couple of tattoos, but this one would be different — a flame design.

  Even though Sandy and Mike lived in Cranston, they were very familiar with West Warwick. Mike Hoogasian’s bachelor party had been held at The Station. Not only did Mike have a history with The Station, he had past exposure to Great White. In 1984 Mike, then twelve years old, attended a concert at the Providence Civic Center with his childhood friend, Derek Knight. The opening act was Great White, starring Jack Russell. Hoogasian never forgot it. So when he heard that Great White was coming to West Warwick in 2003, he immediately downloaded Jack Russell’s new solo album.

  Come nightfall, Russell still hadn’t forgotten his tattoo. But he had one thing to do before he could get it. The rocker had agreed to be interviewed by two DJs from the campus radio station of Nichols College in Dudley, Massachusetts. So, at 6:30 that night, Russell sat with Jimmy Gahan, twenty-one, and Mike Ricardi, nineteen, in the galley of his tour bus, their camcorder rolling. Gahan and Ricardi planned to air the interview on their hard-rock program, Jim and Mikey’s Power Hour, back at school. Each asked Russell a handful of questions, and the singer was expansive in his answers. Russell explained to his rapt listeners, “I don’t do this to make money. I don’t need to work right now. I do this because I love playing for people.” Speaking wistfully of the ’80s, Russell mused, “We grew up in those days, and those days were special to us. A lot of people seem to forget that. They get older. They get [gesturing with ‘air quotes’] responsible.”

  Russell told the boys that they, too, were on his guest list for the show that night. Both stepped off the bus elated.

  When Jack Russell finally strode into the Doors of Perception at 7:15 that night, it was like Jesse James walking through the swinging doors of a saloon. Heads turned and conversations stopped. It was really him. Russell turned out to be a regular guy, though, bantering with the crowd as Greene’s needle buzzed and another dark figure joined the dense ranks of Russell’s body art. Mike Hoogasian regaled Russell with his knowledge of Great White’s old songs, as well as material from Russell’s recent solo album. Russell even sang a little. Then, he invited all in the shop to The Station that night as his personal guests. “If they give you any trouble at the club, come to my bus. Come get me. You’re on my VIP list.” A phone call to Dan Biechele was all it took to put them on that lucky list.

  As Mike and Sandy drove home to change for the concert, Mike excitedly called his boyhood friend, Derek Knight, with whom he had seen Great White almost twenty years before. “Come on, Derek, I can invite anybody I want. He put us on his guest list.” Knight was tempted, but thought better of it. It was past nine, and his young family was tucked in for the night. Knight had gotten “responsible.”

  About ten minutes after nine, Mike O’Connor arrived at the nightclub that would soon belong to him. He eyed the huge Budweiser banners over the front door and on the railing of the club’s front steps. Sponsorship would be something he’d have to learn about. Tracy King, working front door security, welcomed him as he passed through the double white doors, up the gently sloping corridor to the ticket desk staffed by Andrea Mancini. Her long blond hair and dazzling smile were disarming, but O’Connor never let on that he would soon be her boss. Andrea confirmed that he was a guest of the house, then waved him past her husband, Steven, who was checking IDs. O’Connor spoke briefly with Jeff Derderian, who was busy running the place — at the door, behind the bar, in the back office. Derderian pointed out the emcee for the night’s show, Mike Gonsalves, a DJ with rock station WHJY who went by the moniker “Dr. Metal.”

  O’Connor was surprised that the crowd was close to his age — thirty to forty-five years old. The band opening for Great White, Trip, was onstage, so he retreated from that noisy area to the less crowded horseshoe bar, where he bought a drink and watched the operation. Eventually, O’Connor’s gaze was drawn to the bar’s two cash registers. Their constant ringing was more music to his ears than anything coming from the stage.

  By 10:25 Mike O’Connor had seen enough. He didn’t need to hear Great White, so he walked out the front door, through the packed parking lot, and got in his car to drive home, buzzing at the prospect of owning a cash cow. On his way out of The Station’s parking lot, he noticed a news van from Channel 12 TV turning toward the club — and then he remembered that Jeff Derderian was a reporter for that station.

  Jason Lund, twenty-six, was in the thick of The Station crowd pressed to the front of the stage, anxiously awaiting Great White’s appearance. His wife was expecting their third child, and he hadn’t felt right going to the show alone. But she had persuaded him to go and have a good time with his friends. When his cell phone rang, Lund barely heard it over The Station’s din, so he elbowed his way to the men’s room to talk. It was his wife. She was having contractions. He’d better get home. Lund immediately left to join her, but by the time he got home, the contractions had diminished to a false labor. “Too bad,” he thought.

  As of 10:30, all the people on Jack Russell’s guest list had arrived at The Station: the housekeepers from the Fairfield Inn, the construction crew from Denny’s, the two college DJs, and everyone from the Doors of Perception tattoo parlor. But at 10:55 Patty Sanetti left to go home. Her job required her to activate a computer program at 11 p.m., “but she’d be back,” she assured her husband and niece. She’d miss the beginning of Great White’s set, but what could she do?

  Everyone else on the guest list remained at the club, in a state of high anticipation. Right up until 11 p.m., when Great White struck the opening chords of “Desert Moon,” each would consider it to be the very luckiest of days.

  CHAPTER 7

  YOURS, IN FIRE SAFETY …

  AS THE HOUR APPROACHED FOR GREAT WHITE to go on, Mike and Sandy Hoogasian huddled together facing the stage, feeling the crush and the excitement of the crowd. They tried to take in the whole scene, but the sheer number of bodies, shoulder to shoulder and back to belly, made appreciation of anyone beyond a six-foot radius impossible. Mike thought back to his bachelor party at The Station two years earlier, when his firefighte
r brother-in-law had asked him, “You hang out in this firetrap?” and wondered about the room’s legal occupancy. Every other restaurant or club he’d been in had a sign prominently displaying the maximum occupancy. But Hoogasian saw none here.

  Perhaps the reason no maximum occupancy was posted at The Station was that legal capacity there was a fluid concept, depending upon when the calculation was performed and who performed it. The last person to undertake that calculus, Denis Larocque, did so as part of the club’s transfer of ownership from Howard Julian to the Derderians. To call Larocque’s methodology creative would be putting a most benign gloss on it.

  In Rhode Island, local fire inspections are carried out by a member of each town’s fire department who has been appointed a deputy state fire marshal. In West Warwick in the late 1990s that responsibility fell to Denis Larocque. Larocque was responsible for enforcing the state fire code, which specified, among other things, how legal occupancies were to be calculated for restaurants and nightclubs. Having lived his entire life in West Warwick, Larocque was more than familiar with every street and building in town.

  Larocque had graduated from West Warwick High School, where he played on the Wizards football team. His father, a son of French Canadian mill workers, toiled for years as a second-shift grinder at Electric Boat Shipyard in Groton, Connecticut. Young Denis would not follow in those footsteps. Rather, when he was twenty-one, Larocque joined West Warwick’s close-knit fire department, where he rose steadily through the ranks. He married a local girl, had three children, and settled in the Arctic Hill neighborhood, just blocks from where he’d been raised — only this time, Larocque lived in the neighborhood’s largest house, with a pool in the backyard. In addition to his home, he owned a dozen apartments in town, an industrial park unit in nearby Warwick, and an undeveloped house lot in a desirable cul-de-sac. By all accounts, Larocque balanced personal ambition with public service, coaching youth sports and supporting children’s activities. His friends and co-workers called him Rocky.

  The job of fire code inspector in West Warwick has never been regarded as particularly desirable. The fire marshal is responsible for inspecting clubs like The Station whenever a liquor license is renewed or transferred. He examines other licensed businesses like gas stations for code violations and inspects all houses being sold, to make sure they have working smoke detectors. He investigates and reports on the cause of every fire in town. And every time a new building or subdivision is proposed, he has to approve the plans. Hardly as exciting as actually fighting fires, the position of fire marshal is heavy in red tape and unlikely to endear its holder to local businesspeople.

  In 1998, when the West Warwick fire marshal’s position came open, Larocque was already one of five battalion chiefs in the department and eligible for retirement. Although the job paid the same as his old position, $42,216, he decided to take it. Once appointed, Larocque brought a new vigor to fire code enforcement that was not exactly welcomed by business owners. Bull-necked and stocky, with a fireman’s trademark mustache, the new fire marshal immediately made his presence known, roaming the town in his official van and busting businessmen for the kind of minor violations that went unchallenged by his predecessor. A few years into his tenure, however, Larocque’s inspection reports document his recommending liquor license renewals at some favored establishments, despite persistent violations. One was the Portuguese American Social and Athletic Club, a run-down bar with function rooms used for political gatherings; another, Evelyn’s Villa, was a restaurant owned by a former town councilman.

  In December of 1999 his work took him to The Station. The police had received numerous complaints from the club’s neighbors about noise and overcrowding, and in response, Police Chief Peter Brousseau asked Gerald Tellier, the acting fire chief, to have Larocque review the club’s capacity.

  Larocque’s capacity calculations at the Station site were not without precedent. In 1969, the building at 211 Cowesett Avenue was a restaurant called the Red Fox Inn. Its maximum capacity, set by the town fire marshal and echoed by its building inspector, was fifty. In 1981, Ray Villanova opened his Italian restaurant, P. Brillo & Sons, there, and the town fire inspector rated the building, essentially unchanged in size, at 161 occupants. Come 1991, a new tenant opened a sports bar, Crackerjacks, on the site, and the then fire marshal upped the capacity to 225.

  Later would come Larocque’s turn to balance the public’s right to safety against a business’s desire for profits. The Rhode Island state fire code mandates that places of public assembly provide a specified number of square feet per occupant, depending upon how that space is used. If there are tables and chairs, the number of square feet is higher (and, hence, fewer people permitted); if the area is clear of obstructions, less space is required for each occupant. With code book in hand, Larocque set about measuring each room in the club.

  On December 30, 1999, he wrote to Police Chief Brousseau explaining his conclusions. Larocque’s letter stated that “in the club’s present layout” the permitted occupancy was 258; however, “this business is allowed to increase this number to 317 by removing tables and chairs from three lounge areas and providing only standing room in those areas.” The calculation allowed seven square feet per standing-room patron.

  Larocque signed this letter, as he signed all his official correspondence, “Yours in Fire Safety, Denis Larocque, Fire Marshal.”

  Just over two months later, when the Derderians were purchasing the club from Howard Julian, Michael Derderian asked Larocque to further sharpen his pencil and see if he could increase the club’s capacity to 400 for big concerts. Larocque accomplished this and more, raising the building’s limit to 404 occupants “when all tables and chairs are removed from all areas,” so long as a uniformed firefighter was privately hired by the club for all such events. (Nowhere does the fire code allow for relaxation of its limits when firefighters are present.) This time his calculation allowed only five square feet per person by designating the entire building as standing room. This was the physical equivalent of fitting 404 people onto half the surface of a high-school basketball court.

  The fire code relied upon by Larocque defines “standing room” as “only that part of the building directly accessible to doors for hasty exit,” such as a restaurant lobby or a ticket line where customers stand only temporarily. According to William F. Howe, the chief of inspections for the Rhode Island State Fire Marshal’s Office, the code does not permit an entire building to be classified as standing room.

  And, yet, that’s where Sandy and Michael Hoogasian found themselves, waiting for Great White to go on — in a sea of standing-room revelers so thick that movement was nearly impossible. They, and everyone else with a sightline to the stage, would have to remain where they were until the show finished.

  Some Station patrons, uncomfortable with the density of the crowd on the dance floor, managed to position themselves along the club’s south wall, on a raised area normally occupied by tables and chairs. Kimberly and Stephanie Napolitano, thirty-year-old twins from North Providence, were among those on the platform with their backs pressed against the wall. They couldn’t help but notice a strange substance covering that wall from wainscoting to ceiling — corrugated egg-crate-type plastic foam, spray-painted black with flecks of glitter thrown into the paint. The foam ran the length of the south wall, then spread over the entire proscenium arch of the west stage wall, lining the drummer’s alcove and continuing to the right of the stage, across an inward-swinging door with a sign that read: KEEP DOOR CLOSED AT ALL TIMES. The stuff even ran up one sloped ceiling pitch above the dance floor — nine hundred square feet in all. This unusual material was the single dominant feature of the performance space — seemingly impossible to be overlooked. And yet it was.

  The state fire code requires decorative and acoustical materials on nightclub walls to be flame resistant. It forbids materials “of a highly flammable character” and specifies that the fire inspector conduct a simple “match fla
me test” on a sample if he has any doubt about a material’s flammability. Under that test protocol, flame may not spread more than four inches up a vertically held eight-inch strip for twelve seconds after a match is applied to its lower edge. Also, “materials which drip flaming particles shall be rejected if they continue to burn after they reach the floor.”

  Had the match flame test been applied to the kind of foam behind the Napolitano twins, flame would have consumed the entire eight-inch strip in four seconds, leaving nothing but a burning puddle of a napalm-like substance beneath it.

  An earlier attempt at sound insulation did, however, catch the attention of Denis Larocque. In March 2000, when the Derderians were purchasing the club, the fire inspector insisted on removal of a black curtain covering the walls of the drummer’s alcove; this, because the club lacked proof of its flame resistance.

  The Derderians installed the gray egg-crate foam in July 2000. The first West Warwick fire inspection thereafter was performed by John Pieczarek, the department’s director of communications, in November 2000. It was done in conjunction with the club’s annual liquor license renewal. Pieczarek’s report makes no mention of the foam covering the entire west end of the club; however, he noted that the door to the right of the stage (which at that time was surrounded by foam) “needed repair.”

  A year later, in November 2001, Larocque himself performed the annual inspection at The Station. Again, he cited the stage door — this time, because it swung inward. Again, club employees removed it for the compliance check — then put it back. And again, the report made no mention of the foam covering the entire west end of the club.