Fire Lover (2002)

by Wambaugh, Joseph

  "I do find that you are a danger to the community and that you are someone who must be incarcerated, and there must be an example made in this case. ... It is the judgment of this Court, Mr. Orr, that as to counts three, four, and five, you are hereby committed to the Bureau of Prisons to be imprisoned for a term of ten years as to each count, each count to run consecutively with the other. I'm sentencing you pursuant to eighteen U. S. C. section four-two-oh-five-a for a total of thirty years. You shall pay restitution in the amount of two hundred twenty-five thousand nine hundred seventy-one dollars to the victims in this case as will be specified by the probation officer."

  Many observers expressed the wish that when the judge was proclaiming his belief in the jury and the jury system, he would've enlightened them as to how the defendant could have been acquitted of two counts and convicted of three, after both sides stipulated that the same fire setter had committed all five arsons. Some said that the verdict validated those who had been calling for a new system composed of professional jurors.

  Douglas McCann asked for bail, which was denied. The defense counsel then said of an appeal, "Let the Court know I will be filing the notice for him, and I will no longer be on the case after that. It will be a pro per notice."

  John Orr later wrote, "There was bitterness on Doug's part. We'd been through a lot and he thought I was disloyal. He wanted to be part of the L. A. case, but I fired him."

  Douglas McCann had expressed revulsion at the joy he saw in the faces of task-force members who were there in court for John Orr's sentencing: Glen Lucero, Mike Camello, Tom Campuzano, firefighters all, they were there. Mike Matassa was there representing ATF, along with Special Agent Chuck Gaylan of Fresno, who had helped Marvin Casey secure the ten fingerprint cards examined by Richard Kinney at the Department of Justice.

  There had been another man there in court during the defense's case, perhaps unnoticed by John Orr and his lawyer. He was very interested in the defense strategy and in government mistakes like the one made by the fingerprint expert. This man was considering ways that he could deal with a law-enforcement error even more egregious. He was hoping one day to prove to a jury of twelve Los Angeles citizens that a catastrophic fire long ago, deemed an accident, was actually an arson. A fire that had killed four human beings, including a small child.

  Deputy District Attorney Michael J. Cabral was there contemplating prosecution that could put John Leonard Orr on death row and take away his life.

  Chapter 14

  STRANGE FISH

  The convicted arsonist had experienced severe depression after his sentencing. "Utter devastation," he called it. However, the federal facility to which he was sent, Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles, was about as comfortable as such places get. There were pool tables and other recreational facilities, the food was okay, and it wasn't overcrowded. He'd been there for a short time just after his arrest, and some of the inmates he'd met then were still present to welcome him back.

  The only frightening moment came not from an inmate but from a barber, a student barber in the prison barber shop. The prisoner had been told that his beard would have to go, and he had to face a shaky kid with a straight razor who had never shaved a beard and couldn't grow one. The senior barber saved bloodletting by doing the job himself.

  Inmate Orr had to spend some time in the hole after his arrival. As a former law-enforcement officer, he was required to sign a waiver before they'd release him into the general population, and he was quick to sign. He figured if he hadn't gotten his throat cut in the barber shop, he might as well risk it in the yard.

  Since he was so near home, he received plenty of visitors, and because it was such a good facility, his depression gradually began to abate. His appeal gave him hope. His primary concern had to be in choosing a lawyer to represent him in the coming indictment for the Los Angeles arsons. If his appeal failed he couldn't afford another conviction, not if he hoped to be paroled in his first year of eligibility-the year 2002.

  It had been with trepidation that Assistant U. S. Attorneys Stefan Stein and Walter Brown submitted their brief to the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit-"the infamous Ninth Circuit," as it was called by law-enforcement officers who believed that it was packed with liberals and had a defense bias in criminal matters.

  Stein and Brown were at last appealing the decision of District Judge Edward Rafeedie for excluding John Orr's novel and his letters to publishers and agents, because the prejudicial effect outweighed their probative value.

  There were three Ninth Circuit judges sitting on the panel when Stefan Stein stood before them with an opening he'd rehearsed aloud until even Mike Matassa could've delivered it. He wanted to point out, in effect, that the purpose of evidence is to prejudice a jury. One of the judges on the panel was Steven Trott, a former member of the Highwaymen, the sixties singers who'd had a couple of big hits, including "Michael Row the Boat Ashore."

  As Stefan Stein stood before the appellate panel, preparing to row his own boat, Judge Trott said, "Sit down, counsel."

  They didn't want argument. Their decision read:

  We respectfully hold that the district court abused its discretion in excluding this evidence. . . . The manuscript and letters are highly probative of modus operandi and thus the identity of the arsonist. . . . Therefore, having carefully evaluated all of these factors, we hold that the evidence . . . was properly admissible because it was so highly relevant to proof of modus operandi and identity. REVERSED.

  It meant that Stefan Stein could look forward to trial. After having had his case "yanked away," as he put it-after having "his world turned upside down" when John Orr went to Fresno-after all that, he was finally going to trial in Los Angeles. His colleague Walt Brown would not be there for it, having gone on to another assignment, but Brown had been replaced by another bright and energetic young prosecutor, Debra Yang.

  The Pillow Pyro Task Force was kept as busy as ever after the Fresno trial was concluded, for now it was time to prep the L. A. witnesses and get them ready. Mike Matassa had been promoted to resident agent in charge of the Riverside office of ATF, and had to split his time between there and assisting with Pillow Pyro business. And there was a lot of business to do, even through the holiday season and into the new year of 1993.

  The assistant U. S. attorneys had decided to take eight counts of arson to the federal grand jury: three from the Central Coast fires of 1989, the rest from the Los Angeles series. The three on the Central Coast were those that took place on the same street in Atascadero on March 9, 1989, during a three-hour spree: Pacific Home Improvement Center, Cornet Variety, and Coast to Coast Hardware.

  The remaining five counts named the fires at People's Department Store in Los Angeles; Builder's Emporium in North Hollywood; D&M Yardage in Lawndale; and Stats Floral Supply and Thrifty Drug and Discount Store, both in Redondo Beach.

  Stefan Stein and Debra Yang had studied the transcript from the Fresno trial and had their own strategy planned, with some improvements. They were preparing the witnesses for what would surely be a media event even bigger than it had been in Fresno, because John Orr was a local figure in both the fire-fighting and law-enforcement societies.

  There were stories and TV coverage about the coming trial. People magazine ran a story on John Orr with a photo of him in court. On the opposite page was one of him in action at the scene of a building fire.

  His wife Wanda told People: "He's never been anything but a kind, loving and trustworthy person."

  Peter Giannini came highly recommended to John Orr by several people familiar with Los Angeles criminal defenders. He was a forty-five-year-old trial lawyer with nineteen years of legal experience. But lawyers like Giannini did not come cheap, and Wanda had to mortgage her home to pay his sixty-thousand-dollar fee. The defense lawyer spent more than a month examining the eight counts of arson facing his client, then came to him and warned, "If we fall even on one count it could double your sentence. Right now
you're facing ten years behind bars."

  The matter seemed straightforward to Giannini. His client would plea to the three arson counts in Atascadero, which had no significant damage involved, thus no civil liability for restitution.

  The defendant's version of the plea bargain differs from that of his attorney. John Orr maintained that he'd paid his lawyer and wanted to go to trial to make him earn it. He claimed that when the lawyer broached the idea of a plea bargain that might not increase his time served by one day, John Orr said, "Fuck that! I'm not taking a plea bargain!"

  The defendant remembers his lawyer saying, "I see no chance of a successful appeal on the Fresno case. Take the deal instead of rolling the dice with the jury. It's the plea bargain of the century."

  As it happens, it might have been just about impossible to find a lawyer who would have disagreed with the logic at that time. Even John Orr later admitted that pleading guilty to a few counts of arson had started to seem sensible. He told his wife: "I'd do ten years for a crime I didn't commit before I'd see you lose your house for attorney fees or for expenses."

  He reported that for those reasons, he would take the deal even though he was an innocent man and the victim of a government frame-up.

  Four days before trial was to commence, Peter Giannini contacted the U. S. Attorney's Office to speak about a plea bargain. Stefan Stein was astounded. It was one of those moments when one doesn't know whether to laugh or cry. He probably wanted to cry after all the hard work, after the disappointment of having his case yanked away and sent to Fresno, and after his successful appeal to the Ninth Circuit.

  But there were other considerations. The task force was happy when they heard about the offer. The man who accused them of conspiracy, of a government frame-up, would now plead guilty. It was their vindication.

  And if they turned down the plea, went to trial, and convicted him of more counts, what was Judge Rafeedie likely to do when it came to the imposition of sentence? The U. S. Attorney's Office believed that whether the defendant pled guilty or was convicted at trial, the sentence would most likely run concurrent with the sentence he was serving. In other words, his actual prison time would not be increased by one day, so why go through a fruitless and expensive exercise?

  It made sense to Stefan Stein, who'd sweated for weeks over a beautiful opening statement that made the task force proud. It made sense, yes, but he'd done so damn much work.

  The U. S. Attorney's Office made its decision within twenty-four hours. They would accept a plea bargain to three counts of arson with certain conditions attached. Stefan Stein wanted the defendant to plea to at least one count of arson in his own backyard, which meant one from the Los Angeles series.

  Stein was impressed by John Orr's attorney, although he didn't know much about this trial lawyer who mostly practiced in state courts. Stein found Giannini to be open and reasonable, and Stein was willing to accommodate the defense in choosing one count of arson from the L. A. series that wouldn't involve restitution. The defense chose Builder's Emporium in North Hollywood, where an incendiary device had been found, but only sixty dollars in damage had been done.

  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 D. A.'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 D. A. 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 D. A. 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.