Peter Giannini could not have known it at the time, but that choice would return to torment him in a few years. Or, as he himself put it: “Builder’s Emporium came back to bite us in the ass.”
At the time of the plea bargain, the defense had heard rumors that Michael Cabral, an arson specialist at the DA’s office, was conducting an investigation into the College Hills fire of 1990 as well as the Ole’s Home Center fire of 1984. Giannini spoke with his client about that information, but John reassured his lawyer that there was absolutely nothing to fear from such an inquiry. Nothing at all.
Just to be sure, Giannini tried phoning Michael Cabral to see if he could learn whether or not there was any possibility that the DA might seek to prosecute his client at any time, but he said that Cabral did not return his call. John’s lawyer later said that if he’d had any serious notion that the DA was going to file a state case, he would have made him sign off explicitly before pleading his client on the federal arson counts. Neither he nor John Orr was much worried about Michael Cabral’s investigation.
He took John Orr at his word.
On May 12, 1993, U.S. District Court Judge Edward Rafeedie imposed the following sentence and conditions upon John Leonard Orr for his guilty plea to three counts of arson:
He was to serve ninety-six months on each count, to be served concurrently to one another, this sentence to be served concurrently with the thirty-year sentence previously imposed on the defendant in the Eastern Judicial District.
The defendant and his lawyer were more than satisfied. The concurrent sentence meant that based on Federal Bureau of Prisons guidelines, John Orr would probably be paroled in the year 2002, when he’d be fifty-three years old with a lot of life ahead. The defendant was to serve his sentence at the Terminal Island Federal Correctional Institution in San Pedro, the southernmost area of Los Angeles.
As far as most observers were concerned, it had, indeed, been the deal of the century for John Orr.
Of all the stratagems and machinations common to the world’s most esoteric profession, the plea bargain is one of the most serpentine. Without it, American courts of law would be overwhelmed and immobilized, they say. Yet to observe it in practice is to cause the uninitiated to gape, bewildered by the strange school of fish that swims in these litigation tanks.
On March 24, 1993, John Orr had stood before Edward Rafeedie and uttered the word “Guilty” to a subjective and somewhat arbitrary choice of three arson charges that satisfied lawyers on both sides. There were no questions asked of the defendant to determine if a man insistent that he was innocent had experienced a road-to-Damascus conversion. There were no attempts to determine if the defendant would accept psychiatric help. There were no questions designed to see if there might at least be a willingness to reveal information that would prove invaluable to understanding the obsession that grips serial fire setters. There was not an attempt on ethical or moral terms to ascertain if this prominent arson investigator had ever experienced any regret for indulging the fearful compulsion to terrorize and destroy all that he had sworn to protect.
In short, there were no questions on any level—psychological, social, ethical, or moral—directed at a unique defendant at a unique time of exposure and vulnerability. The task force was waiting for such questions, longing for answers from a man who had been a respected and notable member of the fire-fighting fraternity and the law-enforcement community of investigators.
Never in crime-fighting history had there been such an opportunity to trade something of value with an organized serial arsonist, that most rare and elusive of all violent serial offenders, about whom so little is known. And this one, this very special convicted serial arsonist, was considered by lawmen to be perhaps the most organized and most proficient of any in the annals of U.S. crime. Instead, at the end of the day there was just a seven-page document written in legalese to satisfy lawyers.
There was not an attorney associated with the prosecution or defense of John Orr who did not use the word strange in describing him. But there wasn’t a bubble of common curiosity that one could discern floating to the surface of the isolated tank in which these other strange fish swim.
The defendant was not even asked a probing question to ascertain if his plea was merely a device to manipulate the sentence. His former partner, Joe Lopez, who was there in court, said that while John Orr was saying the word yes to his guilty pleas, he was shaking his head no. But no one wanted to risk sabotaging the contrivance and clouding the water in the litigation tank. John Leonard Orr, the arson catch of the century, simply stood before Judge Edward Rafeedie and uttered the word “Guilty” to a subjective choice of three charges that satisfied all of the strange fish swimming in that tank at that moment on that day.
They called him “The Bulldog.” When John Orr began serving his sentence in the U.S. penitentiary at Terminal Island, Mike Cabral had been with the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office for seven years, specializing in arson prosecution for three of those. He was a career prosecutor in every sense of the word, having been a law clerk in that office for two years prior to becoming a member of the bar.
Cabral was raised in Fremont, California, and had attended Chico State College and San Jose State College before moving south. Both sides of his family were of the Portuguese working class, and he’d graduated from Southwestern University School of Law in Los Angeles, a workingman’s law school, fulfilling an ambition he’d had since the age of thirteen.
In August of 1993, he celebrated his thirty-fourth birthday with his wife, Margie, and his three children. In order to provide the best housing his salary could afford, Cabral lived in Moreno Valley, sixty-five miles east of Los Angeles, and in order to avoid the freeway traffic, he arrived in his compact car at his office by 5:30 A.M. He worked an average of nine and a half hours a day, unless trial work bled into the peak traffic hours, and then he’d just stay and work some more until the freeway unclogged.
The prematurely balding young prosecutor was built like a refrigerator, the side-by-side, double-door model. Five feet eight inches tall, he admitted to wearing a size 50 suit, but was quick to say, “It’s all in the shoulders.”
His courtroom style reflected his look: never eloquent, but polite, seemingly relaxed but inwardly intense. His kind of prosecutor could be effective with downtown jurors, people not high enough on the social ladder to have avoided jury duty in the first place. Mike Cabral looked like someone who couldn’t have avoided jury duty either, a working-class guy whom an inner-city juror might intuitively trust. He fared well against glib and smooth lawyers who dress to impress and wouldn’t be caught dead in an off-the-rack garment-district special.
From his earliest assignment with the Major Frauds Unit, Cabral had liked doing arson cases, and he’d attended a one-week course ambiguously called Advanced Arson for Profit for Prosecutors at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Institute in Georgia. Cabral also had been invited to attend a car-fire-arson session at the Glendale Training Academy by the host, Captain John Orr.
Cabral’s District Attorney’s Arson Task Force, as it was called, had officially been up and running since February 1992. Cabral had set it up in a conference room on the eighteenth floor of the Criminal Courts building but eventually was given space in the Hall of Justice, the old court and jail facility that was soon to be shut down permanently. Most Americans had seen that ancient block of granite in films and TV shows. Nothing in Los Angeles looked so foreboding and grim. It had housed many notorious criminals, including Charles Manson and his followers.
Cabral’s task-force “headquarters” was a room barely large enough for a conference table and six chairs. There was one phone, a few maps on the wall, and boxes full of evidence and reports, including ten thousand photos and more than one hundred thousand pages of discovery that would be provided to the defense if the task force could get a case together.
Cabral’s investigators were Walt Scheuerell, a sergeant with the Los Angeles County Sheriff�
��s Department Arson/Explosives Detail; Rich Edwards, the deputy sheriff who’d monitored the Teletrac at the Warner Brothers Studios fire; Tom Campuzano, the L.A. Fire Department arson investigator who’d also worked with the Pillow Pyro Task Force; and Bill Donley and Chris Loop, of the Glendale Police Department. A short while after the task force was formed, they were joined by Steve Patterson, the arson investigator from the Burbank Fire Department who had called John Orr for assistance with the Warner Brothers fire.
Everyone except Cabral wore very casual clothes: polo shirts, T-shirts, jeans, and tennis shoes. This task force was not working under the same pressure as the last one, since their quarry was in prison and no longer a danger to the public, but they had other pressures. If they were going to go to trial they had to stay ahead of the statute of limitations that was running out on the Kennington, Hilldale, and San Augustine fires. Ole’s Home Center—if indeed they could ever prove it was an arson—posed no time problem, since there is no statute of limitations on murder.
After John Orr’s conviction in Fresno and his guilty plea, Mike Matassa had phoned Mike Cabral to kid him by saying, “We served you a softball, now hit it over the fence.”
But Cabral knew that this softball was a dancing knuckler that maybe nobody could hit, particularly in regard to the Ole’s “accidental” fire, where the insurance companies had shelled out four million dollars to the families of victims and their lawyers. It was a wound that nobody was eager to reopen, including the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department, which had called it an accident and was now facing inquiries from its own people, Scheuerell and Edwards, who were trying to prove it was not.
From the beginning there was a feeling of competition between this task force, who’d felt nearly excluded on the periphery at John Orr’s arrest, and the Pillow Pyro gang. And Cabral confessed to having been upset with the U.S. attorneys who’d allowed John Orr to plea bargain on the L.A. arson series. He thought that guilty verdicts on most or all of those would have been enormously important with his own attempts to convict solely on circumstantial evidence and modus operandi. But after Cabral had heard from the U.S. Attorney’s Office that a concurrent sentence was probably in the cards whether or not they’d gone to trial, Cabral called their decision “justifiable.”
And when John Orr and his lawyer chose the Builder’s Emporium arson attempt for the plea bargain—a fire where a “signature” incendiary device had been found, a hardware store that was exactly like Ole’s—Deputy District Attorney Mike Cabral was more than content with the plea bargain.
“They pled right into my case,” he said of John Orr and his lawyer. “Right into the Ole’s fire. And it’ll burn them.”
There was an inescapable fact confronting the District Attorney’s Arson Task Force. They were not looking at months of work, they were looking at years of work. The Ole’s fire alone presented staggering problems. Ole’s corporation had been bought out by another hardware retailer and that one was no longer in business either. Finding all of the former-employee witnesses was nearly impossible.
Trying to legally reconstruct Ole’s was daunting. The building that had housed Ole’s Home Center had formerly been a Thrifty Drug Store that had shared the space with a food market. Escrow information didn’t even exist anymore, but they had to secure blueprints from the original building as well as from the major remodeling for the drugstore chain, especially concerning work that had been done when they’d installed a dropped, T-bar ceiling. That meant that they must find the people who’d actually done the work.
Mike Cabral had to thoroughly study this attic in order to prove that a fire originally called an “undetermined fire” probably originating from faulty wiring in the attic could not have happened that way. The task force had to demonstrate that the Ole’s conflagration, which had moved so fast that people could not outrun it, was not consistent with any sort of attic fire that had dropped smoldering material down into the main store.
One of the less arduous jobs, but still enough to keep an investigative team busy for a year or so, was the need to look at incidents of brush fires, potato-chip fires, and arson fires in retail establishments during business hours over the ten-year period preceding John Orr’s arrest. They found only seventy-eight in retail stores in all of California, and they believed that most of those had been set by John Orr.
Of the brush fires, they determined that in the foothill communities of Glendale, Pasadena, and La Crescenta—as well as portions of Los Angeles near John Orr’s home—there had been hundreds during the period they were studying. Rich Edwards had personally done some work on those arsons before John Orr’s arrest, and at one point had been trying to put together a kind of arson task force called “Firestorm.” He’d had the idea to install pole cameras to see if he could get photos of the areas where the fires occurred repeatedly, hoping to snap a photo of a suspect.
Edwards recalled that while his first pole camera was being installed, Captain John Orr just happened to be cruising by and spoke with the deputy sheriff who was monitoring the installation. There were no more fires in that area, but multiple fires broke out on the same day in other canyon locations where there were no cameras.
Mike Cabral’s task force came to believe that John Orr was responsible for the vast majority of all the arsons they were studying, and by way of unverifiable proof, they pointed to the astounding statistic that showed a 90 percent drop in brush-fire activity since his arrest. In the county foothill area, brush fires had averaged sixty-seven a year clear back to 1981. After his arrest the average had dropped to one per year.
For the career law-enforcement people on the task force, like LASD’s Scheuerell and Edwards, their next assignment was an eye-opener. Mike Cabral instructed them to interview all of the Glendale firefighters who’d worked with John Orr at any time in their careers. The lawmen reported that they’d had no idea how close and insulated was this fire-fighting band of brothers.
They set up interview teams and divided the workload into groups. Rich Edwards found the experience fascinating, especially the emotional swings in the men he interviewed. It varied, he said, from those who offered complete cooperation to the others still in denial that their former colleague could have committed the offenses for which he’d been convicted.
Some of the firefighters evinced shame and anger, and would point their fingers at the cops and say, “You better be right, by God!”
Edwards reported that during one interview a veteran fire captain said, “This man you’re describing isn’t the John Orr I know. And if he set the Ole’s fire and killed those people, then he needs help. He’s a sick man if he did it, and a sick man shouldn’t be in jail. And I’d still work with him today!”
Rich Edwards later said, “I thanked him for his candor after I picked my chin up off the table.”
Edwards’s investigation led him to believe that some of those brush fires were fashioned so that if they had been attacked properly by an engine company they could have been handled. But if the firefighters were out grocery shopping, and didn’t get to the scene in a timely manner, the fire would turn out to be significant. Edwards was convinced that John Orr had set some of them so that Glendale wouldn’t lose an engine for budgetary reasons.
And then there were brush fires set when he was associated with a brush-clearance company. “If you didn’t clear your brush as ordered,” Edwards said, “you’d get a fire. John’s a very complex person.”
The D.A.’s task force also discovered some possible offenses they hadn’t been looking for, such as embezzlement of FIRST funds. It turned out that the funds taken in from the FIRST-sponsored classes at the Glendale Training Center were supposed to go to FIRST and the city on a sixty–forty split. John Orr, the treasurer, had signatory authority, and they suspected he’d diverted some of the money to buy Vegas World gift certificates on a FIRST credit card that nobody else knew existed.
As soon as John heard rumors that Mike Cabral’s task force was investigating those
activities, he phoned Cabral.
“I resent being called a thief!” he informed the prosecutor.
The alleged embezzlement amounted to no more than two thousand dollars, and Mike Cabral, who was trying to build a case of capital murder, said, “John, I think I can promise that I’ll never charge you with theft.”
When he’d arrived in 1993 at Terminal Island Federal Correctional Institution, John was given a perfunctory interview by a twenty-something psychiatric intern who asked the same question he’d been asked over the years by older shrinks during preemployment interviews.
With her glasses slipping from her nose and her pen pointed at heaven, she said, “Please describe your early family life for me.”
He gave the response he’d always given to the more experienced practitioners of her art: “Ozzie and Harriet.”
A bit taken aback, the young woman studied the new inmate and said, “Are you referring to Ozzy Osbourne?”
John later described a feeling of utter despair. His future was being directed by some kid who’d confused Ozzie and Harriet with brain-bashing rockers in Jivaro war paint who bite the heads off bats!
John Orr was only forty-four years old, but he felt old, older than fire.
15
MARY DUGGAN
Terminal Island was not such a bad place as prisons go, and federal prisons at their worst were better than the hell-on-earth that is the state prison system. The cons who had done hard time in state institutions such as Folsom or San Quentin referred to facilities like Terminal Island as “Club Fed.” There were no walls, just a fifteen-foot chain-link fence topped with razor wire. The prisoners could even see the luxury liner Queen Mary and watch power boats and Jet Skiers roaring by.
John Orr tried to avoid the chow hall, where inmates smoked, littered, and spit, prisoners who were usually sick from some virus or another. When he could afford it he preferred to live on soup and canned items from the commissary. He’d wangled the job of prison librarian, which carried a bit of prestige and comfort, and he was settling in, hoping that something would come of the appeal that had been filed by the Office of the Federal Defender. An argument on appeal was that the jury in Fresno had been allowed to hear about a series of fires in retail stores, and about “lists” of incidents beyond what were expected to be allowed as “uncharged acts.” The federal defender believed this to be “impermissible bootstrapping.” John considered it to be just plain confusing, but he was not a man to give up easily, and he had some confidence in his appeal. It would take time, but he had plenty of that.
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