Arson for Hate and Profit

A crime that has spread like wildfire

In the chill, predawn darkness one day last week, 80 Massachusetts state policemen fanned out through Boston and its suburbs, ringing doorbells, rousing residents and hauling off to jail 22 surprised and discomfited citizens. Among those indicted: six attorneys, eleven real estate operators, four public insurance adjusters, one police officer and a retired fire chief. By week's end a total of 26 men had been arraigned in Suffolk County superior court on charges as varied as fraud, bribery and murder. But all of them were alleged to have committed one crime: arson. They were accused of contracting with landlords, financially troubled shopkeepers, warehouse owners and others to burn down their buildings for the insurance, with the arsonists taking a percentage of the claim.

Boston police had been investigating 95 suspicious fires that occurred between 1973 and 1976, including one that led last year to a Pulitzer-prizewinning photograph of a woman and little girl plummeting from a collapsed fire escape (the woman died, but the child survived). Last week the police came up with enough evidence to bring arson indictments on 35 of the fires that destroyed property worth $6 million and killed three people. Massachusetts Attorney General Francis X. Bellotti denounced the torch ring as "a conspiracy to burn down Suffolk County for profit." Added Stephen Delinsky, head of the state criminal bureau: "This is just the tip of the iceberg."

Whether for profit or for revenge, arson has become one of the most deadly, costly, and, for law enforcement officials, maddening crimes in the country. Deliberatley started fires now exceed 100,000 a year, up 400% since 1967. Last year there were 6,776 reported arsons in New York City alone. In Chicago, arson has tripled in less than three years, and in crime-plagued Detroit it is up 12% over last year alone. But the most shocking statistics come from San Francisco, which has experienced a 700% increase in arson in five years. Says Lieut. James Mahoney, chief investigator for the San Francisco Fire Department: "Arson is the cheapest crime in the world to commit. All you need is a box of matches."

Cheap to commit, perhaps, but staggeringly expensive for society to endure. Officials blame arson for more than 1,000 deaths and 10,000 injuries a year. Insurance companies estimate that in 1976 arson cost $2 billion in claims. As a result, fire insurance premiums have risen sharply in the past five years. Adding other, related costs such as business failures, loss of jobs and tenant relocation, Walter D. Swift, vice president of the American Insurance Association estimates last year's total arson price tag in the U.S. to be between $10 billion and $15 billion.

"Arson is a barometer of urban decay," says New York City Deputy Chief Fire Marshal John Barracato, "and most city fathers are ashamed to admit they have this problem." But the ruinous dimensions cannot be hidden. In New York City's South Bronx, where Jimmy Carter took an impromptu walking tour earlier this month, there have been more than 7,000 fires in the past two years. "The destruction is reminiscent of the bombed-out cities in Europe," says Bronx District Attorney Mario Merola, who was a navigator in World War II. Chicago's Humboldt Park area has some 400 charred, abandoned buildings. In Detroit, 10,000 houses stand vacant, victims of fire. "The city is burning down," said an anguished Lieut. Robert McClary, head of Detroit's fire-fraud squad.

An estimated 40% of arson nationwide is economically motivated, as in the Boston cases that led to last week's roundup. Blazes are set by quasi-professional "torches" hired by landlords, real estate brokers, store owners, or welfare tenants who want to be relocated. The purpose, as New York Columnist Jimmy Breslin has put it, is to "build vacant lots for money." Charging up to $3,500 or a cut of the insurance money, the torch frequently mixes a brew of acid and sophisticated oxidizing agents to ignite a chemical fire that is all but impossible to trace.

In ghetto areas like the South Bronx and Humboldt Park, landlords often see arson as a way of profitably liquidating otherwise unprofitable assets. The usual strategy: drive out tenants by cutting off the heat or water; make sure the fire insurance is paid up; call in a torch. In effect, says Barracato, the landlord or businessman "literally sells his building back to the insurance company because there is nobody else who will buy it." Barracato's office is currently investigating a case in which a Brooklyn building insured for $200,000 went up in flames six minutes before its insurance policy expired.

Usually deadlier than the professional torch is the psychopathic amateur who burns once for strictly personal reasons such as jealousy or revenge. A federal study puts 55% of adult arsonists in the burn-for-hate category. In New York, a jealous suitor and two friends have been charged with setting a fire last year in a Puerto Rican social club in the South Bronx. Twenty-five party-goers died in the blaze. The alleged motive: the man's girl friend had attended the party against his wishes. Says Donald Mershon, manager of the Metropolitan Chicago Loss Bureau, which handles property insurance claims for more than 100 firms: "Kids used to throw rocks or settle an argument with their fists. Now they simply burn a house down. Arson is being used as a weapon."

In ghetto areas around the country, arson is often a means of feeding drug habits. Unable to afford the tools to remove valuable brass plumbing, sinks, bathtubs and refrigerators in abandoned buildings, junkies pour inflammable liquid around the rooms, set a blaze and wait for firemen to chop up the floors, exposing the loot. Then the "mango hunters," as New York cops call them for their practice of reaping a harvest of stolen goods, move in, drag ou the fire-resistant fixtures and sell them --a bathtub is worth $25 on the open market, a wash basin $15. Some areas of New York are being burned systematical!) block by block as frightened resident; move out, slumlords make no move to protect their all but empty--and insured --buildings, and the torches move in.

Whatever the motive for arson, the result is fright and despair among inner-city residents. Says Dorothy Maeda, chairman of Humboldt Park's arson committee: "It's a terrifying feeling never knowing when you go to sleep at night whether a fire bomb will come through the window." Along Boston's once elegant Symphony Road, where fire has gutted 29 of the 74 apartment buildings in the past four years, tenants live in constant fear of flames. "Everybody around here is jumpy," says local resident Sadie Ellis. "Whenever I hear sirens I turn the radio down to see if they're coming here."

Arson is one of the easiest crimes to commit and the hardest to prevent--and prosecute. District Attorneys must prove the fire was set intentionally.

Understaffed fire departments are usually too busy fighting fires to prevent them. But in response to the epidemic of arson, cities around the country are hiring more fire marshals. Largely under pressure from community leaders in Brooklyn, Mayor Abraham Beame recently authorized the New York City Fire Department to increase its force of investigators from 77 to 152--but that is still barely half the number of marshals experts believe New York needs to cope with its arson problem.

San Francisco's seven-man fire investigation squad had not been increased since it was founded in 1940. In July, however, the squad took on an eighth man, and two weeks ago the city formed a "combined services arson task force," adding the District Attorney, his assistant and an investigator from the D.A.'s office, plus a police inspector, to the fire department's arson team.

The insurance industry has begun to train its own arson investigators. With the aid of the federal Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, insurance companies and city officials plan to create arson information banks to help apprehend torches. Unfortunately, catching arsonists requires enterprising detective work--and luck. The U.S. Attorney for western Pennsylvania, Blair Griffith, for example, has won 20 arson convictions based on the federal crime of mail fraud. Griffith relied on an arsonist turned informant: Merrill H. Klein, 53, a self-styled "business consultant" who worked as a "broker" for landlords eager to torch their property. After pleading guilty in 1974 to helping burn down a hotel in Bedford, Pa., Klein agreed to testify for the Government in three other arson cases he was also connected with, hoping his five-year sentence would not be increased (it wasn't).

Last week's mass arrest in Boston also depended partly on the grand jury testimony of a suspected torch who turned state's evidence, pointing the finger at local landlords and corrupt city officials. Until then, private investigators for insurance companies had been sniffing around the remains of burned-out houses, working the streets and doing undercover work in Boston bars with an eye out for well-known torches. With evidence of a conspiracy growing, 15 teams of city and state police joined the private eyes, and finally, after 16 months of probing suspicious fires in the Boston area coupled with the talkative torch's testimony, they rounded up 100 more witnesses and paraded them before a second grand jury in September.

But the initial breakthrough in the investigation was the result of mobilized anger on the part of residents in one of the burned-out sections. After appealing to local politicians and city agencies to investigate the wave of fires that had been destroying their neighborhood since 1973--and getting little action--a group of Symphony Road residents went to State Attorney General Bellotti with their own evidence that landlords and others were deliberately torching buildings in their community. Armed with these documented complaints, Bellotti ordered the state's criminal bureau to begin the probe that led to last week's indictments against what officials charge is the largest known arson ring in the U.S. One lesson of the Boston arrests is that in order to fight back against organized arson, the victims themselves may have to get organized and join forces with beleaguered --and all too often insufficiently interested--city officials.

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