Fire Lover

by Joseph Wambaugh

  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-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 PD 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-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-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-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-robbers head games with himself when he got bored. John Leonard Orr was not easy to fathom or predict—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 “six-pak” 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 everyo
ne, 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.

  Then they had an idea. They asked the LAFD arson unit to put out a bogus request to the FIRST organization for publicity photos. Vanity carried the day, and they sent a photographer to a FIRST meeting and got a good shot of John Orr without his glasses for a six-pak. The photo spread was shown five to ten times a day to potential witnesses at every one of those arson fires in the Los Angeles basin, and beyond to the Central Coast and Central Valley of California.

  This time they didn’t ask who’d been seen in the store at the time of the fires, as the original investigators had done. This time it was: “Is one of these men a customer?” And “Have you ever seen any of these men? And not necessarily on the day of the fire, but anytime?”

  They scored their first hit when they interviewed former employees from People’s Department Store, the first arson that had been committed in the L.A. series. People’s employee Ana Ramirez looked at the photo spread and said, “Yeah, that guy there, number five. He’s a customer. He wore a khaki shirt like a service person. I saw him a couple times a few weeks before the fire. He was coming back from where you pay your bills in the store.”

  She was a middle-aged woman and she was certain. Mike Matassa said she’d be a great witness. They were off and running.

  Evelyn Gutierrez, a former employee of the gutted D&M Yardage store in Lawndale, was shown the photo spread and told them that number five was the person she’d seen in the drapery section of the store fifteen minutes before the fire broke out.

  And while all this drudge work was paying off, Mike Matassa conducted a little experiment. He made a Pillow Pyro incendiary device. And it worked.

  The task force believed that all of the call-outs and log sheets and telephone records to be secretly supplied by Battalion Chief Gray of the Glendale FD would point to one inescapable conclusion: John Orr was always out of the office on pager, always unaccounted for and alone on the dates and times of every single arson. They believed that there would never be any recorded telephone traffic on any of the records at the time of the fires that could later be used to alibi him.

  A problem occurred when a witness picked out one of the other faces from the photo lineup. The mug shot she picked happened to look like the composite they’d originally drawn with her help. They questioned her repeatedly until they finally realized that the guy she’d originally described for the composite sketch never could have started the fire. She admitted she’d only seen him at the store after the incendiary device was discovered.

  When the frustrated task-force interviewer asked, “Well then, why in the world did you choose him for the composite sketch back then?”

  They’d only asked her if she’d remembered anybody, she replied. And yes, she had. She’d remembered him, she said, because he was cute, and had a nice ass.

  8

  POINTS OF ORIGIN

  In June 1991, John Orr and his wife, Wanda, drove to Orange County to attend his daughter Lori’s high-school graduation. Also that month he wrote a cover letter to a New York literary agent who’d been referred by an author he’d met at a book signing in Beverly Hills. After phoning the agent he was invited to send his manuscript, Points of Origin.

  By July, Mike Matassa was back at work as a co-lead investigator, or “case agent” as ATF called it, with Glen Lucero as the other co-lead. And it was during these dog days of summer that Lucero could see the stark difference between a complex government investigation and one done by the locals. As Lucero put it, “The state prosecutor gets the dregs and tries to make it work. A deputy D.A. says, ‘We might convict him, let’s give it a try.’ It’s very different when you’re dealing with a government case and assistant U.S. attorneys.”

  Then another opportunity to catch him in the act presented itself. That is, if they were right, and old habits die hard. If he’d regained the nerve he had prior to March 29, before he’d heard of the task force. The California Conference of Arson Investigators was holding its summer session in Fresno from July 31 to August 2, and John Orr had signed up for it.

  This time there would be no bird dog attached to his car, nor an airplane spotter, and once again John Orr took what Mike Matassa called his “plain white wrapper,” the white Ford Crown Victoria. And once again, when he got behind the wheel and on the freeway, the speedometer needle vanished.

  On the afternoon of July 30, the surveillance caravan surrendered by the time they reached the highway known as the Grapevine. John Orr was over the hill and rocketing toward the Central Valley before anybody’s lunch had settled. The task force tried to stay in the game with Ken Croke acting as eyeball in the lead car. His G-sled was a black Lincoln Mark IV, but the Grapevine climb proved too much and it overheated. When steam came pouring out from under the hood, the G-ride pulled over, the door flew open, and Ken Croke jumped out yelling for a fireman.

  When Mike Matassa found out what had happened to the eyeball he got a frantic radio message from the rookie Boston agent asking, “What’ll I do, Mike? What’ll I do?”

  With John Orr out of sight, and for all they knew, somewhere just south of Seattle, and this surveillance turning to shit even faster than the last one, Mike Matassa said, in the accent of Ken Croke’s hometown: “Just call Triple A, Ken. Put it on your Veezer card.”

  Glen Lucero, who was hanging back in another G-sled, could not be the eyeball because John Orr knew him, so he floored it and picked up Ken Croke. Though they topped out at one hundred miles per hour all the way, they would not catch up with the surveillance caravan until they all arrived in Fresno.

  Matassa’s boss, Larry Cornelison, had been assigned to attend the CCAI seminar in order to monitor the activities of their suspect, and he was already there when John Orr arrived at the Holiday Inn. He watched his man check in, make a stop at the bar, and go to his room.

  The next day, Cornelison was also with John Orr for the morning session, and for lunch at the hotel with several other CCAI committee members. Those who knew were giving one another and John Orr quick nervous glances like patrons in a Pussycat theater, but at 2:30 P.M. Captain Orr left the seminar and did not return. Cornelison notified the surveillance teams by radio.

  At 3:00 P.M. the ATF resident agent in charge, William Vizzard, who was participating in the surveillance, was parked in the vicinity of the Fresno Convention Center when he saw dark smoke rising. He drove to the location and saw that a trash container by the convention center was on fire. He put it out with a fire extinguisher from his car. In the trash receptacle were pieces of foam among cigarette butts and other debris.

  The fire could have meant nothing at all, but Mike Matassa asked, “Is this guy fucking with our heads, or what?”

  At 8:48 A.M. on August 2, Mike Matassa watched through binoculars as John Orr checked out of his hotel, loaded his bags into the trunk of his car, and closed the trunk. But before getting in for the drive home, he got down on the ground and looked under the car.

  The trip home was uneventful and, of course, fast.

  Task-force members found themselves wondering how their colleague John Orr was different from them. Mike Matassa was in some ways quite unlike John Orr. Matassa, four years younger, had ethnic roots with recent forebears and was a product of the Northeast. He wore his father’s
gold crucifix on a chain around his neck. John Orr was from western America, the white-bread variety among whom ethnicity is unknown or so far back nobody cares. And his family had no religious affiliation. Unlike Orr, Matassa was childless, but his marriage worked. John Orr’s fourth marriage was in jeopardy; his affair with Chris had reached the point where he was listed on her daughter’s emergency-call card at school. The child even called him Dad.

  One thing that the two men had in common was that early in their adult lives their first career choice had been the Los Angeles Police Department, which had rejected John Orr and had seemed an impossible dream to young Mike Matassa. They had both settled for other investigative work, and both had done well.

  Neither had ever gotten past a preference for street police work. Matassa liked to point out that ATF agents were more like the cops who policed the streets of L.A. than they were like the other feds so distrusted by street cops. And he said that ATF would do the down-and-dirty police work that needed to be done, and was proud that back when he was a new agent he’d assisted the LAPD in making a case that helped convict the Wah Ching gang members who’d shot two LAPD officers in a botched jewelry-store robbery.

  And of course, John Orr’s love of street police work was legendary in the city of Glendale, if distressful to his bosses. It set him apart from both his fellow firefighters and the street cops he tried to emulate while hungering for their respect. In the end, Matassa, and Glen Lucero as well, belonged to things larger than themselves, but John Orr had never quite belonged anywhere. Everything he did and everything he wrote indicated that. Whereas Lucero believed that his position as a fireman turned crime investigator gave him the best of both worlds, John Orr, with the identical background, saw himself as a “bastard child” belonging to neither world, appreciated by no one.

  Meanwhile, Captain John Orr was getting very anxious about his novel. He sent his 104,000-word manuscript and a check for three hundred dollars to the Writer’s Digest Criticism Service, hoping to learn how he could make it acceptable for publication.