Fire for Hire

He had worked in this nice mid-American town for several years, I'd been told. He was firmly allied with the city's ruling Mafia clan, doing odd jobs--paper scams, mostly--such as running the bookmaking operations. He'd been suspected of heavier crimes, too, including arson. But although the police, the FBI, the Department of Justice, insurance investigators and prosecutors were sure he'd burned things, he'd never been convicted. Until recently, his official business had been running a disco, and that's where I met the man I'll call Lenny Ajax one morning just after closing.

Stale smoke, booze fumes, body odor and perfume hung in the air. It was a slick place, with fancy furnishings and high overhead, the sort of place that burns when business falls away, as this joint had a few months before. I told Ajax I just wanted information; I didn't want to put anybody in jail. He laughed. A Federal indictment for bank fraud had landed on him three weeks before. Now he sat in the gloomy vapors silhouetted by the red fire-exit sign. In his mid-30s, stocky and muscular, with dark disco-frizzed hair, he seemed like one of Hogarth's bluff and hearty villains come to life. Except that when you asked questions, Ajax' eyes narrowed so that his head looked like a bunker.

"How many fires have you set?" I asked.

"Who said I set fires?"

"I heard it, but I wouldn't tell you where, just as I wouldn't tell anyone who you are." This is called covering your ass.

"About twenty," he said.

"Tell me about some."

"The biggest was a warehouse, down by the river. Guy wanted the insurance and to get new stock, so we burned it. It was simple--just some gas in leaking jugs and a candle. He got the money."

"How about you?"

"I got some, too. I've also burned things for nothing, as a favor."

"What kind of things? For whom?"

"Houses. If a friend wants a new house or needs money, I'll burn something for him."

"Such as?"

"A restaurant. A bar. You don't have to take 'em down. Do it right and you'll cause enough damage to get the money and then you rebuild. Or get a new partner."

"Did your fires ever hurt anybody?"

"No. Killing people's dumb. You want to burn when nobody's around."

"What do you feel when you see something burning that you've set?"

"I don't see it. I'm long gone. In Vegas or somewhere."

"You don't feel anything?"

"What's to feel? It's just a piece of brick. Arson don't hurt anybody except insurance companies. And who, your average citizen, doesn't like to fuck insurance companies?"

•

The young mother lies beneath the burglar-barred window leading to the fire escape. She cradles an infant in each arm. The three are charred, stiff--fired like stoneware in the last rictus of death by flame. One baby's mouth presses his mother's blackened breast. The other child's is open, caught in mid-scream. One small tooth gleams. Six feet away, under the kitchen table's skeleton, are a boy and a girl, about 11 and 12, hiding there, they thought, and reaching for each other. Their charcoal hands now touch in last communication. Three feet farther on, three smaller children make a clump, their basted bodies fused like amber wax. Their seared skin flakes off when the fire fighters, hiding their pain in gallows humor, call them crispy critters and, averting their eyes, put the charred remains into the body bags.

Twenty-one died in that fire in Hoboken, New Jersey. They were murdered by an arsonist. At 3:30 A.M., someone splashed gasoline in a first-floor hallway and tossed a match. Someone as yet unknown. With an unknown motive. The arsonist could have been seeking revenge on some of the 12-in-a-room East Guyanese and latino tenants; it's estimated that at least half this nation's yearly 200,000-plus arson fires are set to avenge a real or imagined wrong. It could have been a pyromaniac or other twisted sort: About one in ten arsons is. Maybe the arsonist was a kid fevered by street-punk glory, or perhaps he was someone lashing out at a landlord in ghetto desperation: Vandals set 20 percent of the nation's arson fires.

But if this murderous blaze was part of arson's fastest-growing category, then the building's owner--or his hired torch--set the fire. To collect insurance.

Five tenements like that one went up in northern New Jersey within three months, killing more than 50 people. All were insured, and if national trends hold, the owners will have collected their claims, since fewer than 20 percent of the claims are rejected, arson or not. Only about two percent of arson incidents result in a conviction because, unlike other crimes, to prove arson, you must prove both the crime (the set fire) and the criminal--the arsonist as either hired agent or owner of the structure.

Thomas E. Kotoske, attorney in charge of the Organized Crime Strike Force in San Francisco and a fierce arson investigator, flatly says that "arson is the toughest case to prosecute." As a result, in many locales, the greenest or most lackadaisical prosecutors are assigned to arson cases, because, as one arson investigator put it, "Arson cases are hell on your won-lost record." Even fewer convictions are returned in arson-for-profit cases, in which the link between crime and criminal must be completely taut.

Unfortunately, several other factors usually make the linkage loose. Among them:

• an insurance system inviting fraud.

• undermanned, underfinanced, undertrained arson-investigation agencies.

• the difficulty of detecting arson, especially when torches use sophisticated techniques such as time devices to remove themselves from the scene of the crime, or other methods to conceal the fire's origin. (See box, page 250.)

• a public whose attitude toward arson has been, "So what? It's only property." Until Congress recently acted, arson wasn't even the same category of crime as auto theft, despite the fact that it kills about 1000 people per year.

• shrewd, resourceful criminals determined to take advantage of all such weaknesses.

Little wonder that arson for profit is, according to the insurance industry and law-enforcement officials, one of the country's hottest growth industries, a nearly risk-free crime that lets bodies and buildings fall where they may. How big is this racket? How costly? How does it work? Who's doing the burning? And what, if anything, is being done, or can be done, to stop it?

First things first. In terms of raw numbers, arson for profit is very big. Fire and police officials estimate that nearly 50,000 fires a year are set with the express purpose of collecting insurance, costing insurance companies upwards of $350,000,000.

To understand how arson for profit works, one has first to understand a bit about the current state of the fire-insurance business. It has problems. The first is that the United States' insurance industry, unlike Canada's, as yet has no computerized registry to retrieve and cross-reference data on where the fires are popping up and who owns the particular buildings. The U. S. insurance companies are currently putting together such systems at the state level and hope to hook up a comprehensive national registry in 1980. Even so, dummy real-estate ownership can render such data meaningless. Furthermore, since no reliable cross-reference system yet exists among companies, someone can insure with several companies in succession. He can deny or even admit to previous fires. One person in Kansas City who periodically collected tidy fire sums actually told an insurance investigator that his occupations were "used-car dealer, real estate, gambling, arson."

In any case, the insurance company is usually liable. That's because most states have some sort of "bad faith" insurance law, a statute designed to protect the public from shaky insurance operators by requiring a company to pay claims within a short time after they're filed (say 30 to 90 days) or face big punitive claims.

In some states, a company that fails to settle in the allotted time must pay three times the claimed loss; and in a few states, the company must pay a percentage of its total assets. A known arsonist in California received $1,500,000 in damages that way, after his insurance company refused to pay a $25,000 fire claim. Most insurance firms would rather pay than fight, especially on small claims (under $100,000, though some now will fight claims as low as $25,000). This merely encourages the arson business, as evidenced by the dramatic increase in small-claim fires, for which, as one insurance executive said, the companies "pay off like a slot machine."

The arsonist goes where the going's easiest. The consumer pays the freight. The fare is increased by another insurance-company handicap. In many states, it also constitutes bad faith for the insurer's investigators to share their intelligence with law-enforcement officers. In several states, large judgments have been granted to arsonists in civil cases--despite their conviction of arson in criminal court--on the basis that the arsonists' right to privacy, according to the Federal Privacy Act of 1974, was breached by information sharing.

Yet even those regulations pale beside the greatest current incentive to arson: the Federally mandated Fair Access to Insurance Requirements plan (FAIR). Enacted in the aftermath of the urban burns of the Sixties, notably the one in (continued on page 170)Fire for Hire(continued from page 112) Watts, it authorizes the Federal Insurance Administration to require companies to provide fire and riot insurance to inner-city landlords, the theory being that that prevents their flight to the safer suburbs. The companies must pool their coverage under FIA regulations that force them to insure almost anyone, regardless of his criminal or fire-propensity record, and at the replacement value of the structures, not the fair market value. Inflating replacement values is simple for arson rings, so, lo and behold, many inner-city properties have been combusting spontaneously with increasing frequency.

Since 1968, total arson fires in the U. S. have more than doubled, and property damage has quadrupled, with a significant proportion of the damage coming in the downtrodden, crime-riddled FAIR-plan neighborhoods.

The FIA maintained in 1978 that no more than ten percent of its FAIR-plan claims were arson for profit. Those figures contrast sharply with those of insurance companies and law-enforcement officials. Regardless, in areas where the people must bear poverty, overcrowding and unemployment, they must also bear more than their share of arson, because one arm of the Federal Government is ipso facto encouraging it, while other Federal arms, in task forces, are frantically trying to put out the burn-and-earn racket.

•

Arson task forces are the only real weapons against arson for profit. True, a local arson unit often catches a one-time burner who incinerates his house to collect his homeowner's insurance and head off the debt collectors. But sometimes an arson scam is so grand and convoluted that it takes the full resources of local and Federal officials even to begin to trace a white-collar offense that ends with blackened buildings and money in the bank.

Take as an example a case on the East Coast, where arson for profit has increased so dramatically that it threatens to overtake vengeance as a motive. A man in the Philadelphia area had a nice toy factory covering a square block, a factory packed with new merchandise. An unlucky man, this manufacturer had had a terrible fire a while before--a $3,500,000 blaze that ruined all the nice toys he had contracted to sell to a large retail chain that, most unfortunately, was about to collapse like czarist bonds. But all that was past and forgotten by his insurers. Now this toymaker had another fire, this one for $2,500,000 in insurance. It came just after he had had hints that a sale to a leading discount-store chain was about to fall through. The fire was set in an elaborate manner with timer, transformer, coil and other gear to trigger the traditional fire "accelerant," gasoline. Naturally, the fire, smoke and water ruined the toys, and the insurance claim was filed. But the fancy arson set, found by investigators, brought heat to bear on the case and brought in the Philadelphia arson task force of the U. S. Treasury Department's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

Until 1970, the ATF concentrated on busting moonshiners and enforcing laws governing interstate transportation of firearms. But in 1970, as arson began booming, the Explosives Control Act included an expanded interpretation of explosive devices, so that the ATF could extend its investigations into other areas. By 1978, with arson indistinguishable from wildfire, the ATF had 23 regional arson task forces operating and two national emergency teams training, usually in combination with the U. S. Attorneys and the FBI. As they explored arson-for-profit fires, they quickly learned to focus their limited manpower on cases in which they could bring the greatest investigatory pressure.

For instance, our toyman, like many "respectable" arson hirers, had obviously contacted people who knew how to set fires. (In cities riddled by the Cosa Nostra, that can be as simple as prowling the right bar. A big fire is usually brokered by a middleman, who checks out the potential customer, clears the deal with a don and, when the businessman agrees to a fee to be paid up front--often 25 cents on the insurance dollar claimed--contacts the torches.)

Arson investigators were virtually certain that the set used to burn the toy facility was identical to one used in Miami, as well as to one used in an abortive arson staged in Suffolk County, New York.

But a better example of a single arson case leading to a larger, more complex crime scheme can be found in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, where three men were apprehended with their gear near a pizza parlor they apparently intended to burn. The three--I'll call them Bellini, Salerno and Locarno--may become key figures in the ATF's attempt to crack an immense Mafia arson ring operating in the Northeast that the ATF thinks is either directly or indirectly involved in 90 percent of the arson for profit in that area of the country. The clue to the big picture was the Pottstown pizza parlor.

More than a score of pizza parlors and several restaurants have been burned in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York and Delaware in the past two years, and investigators believe those burnings are evidence of a gang war between two old-line Sicilian families: the heirs of the late superdon Carlo Gambino (notably, Giuseppe and Emmanuel "Manny" Gambino) and Carmine Galante, recently returned from a long dope-trafficking prison term. Galante has apparently resolved to regain the pizza fiefdom lost to the Gambinos when his associate Joseph "Joe Bananas" Bonanno was kidnaped and exiled by rival bosses in 1965.

The way those gentleman slice it, there's more at stake than a pepperoni to go. According to investigative writer Jonathan Kwitny, author of Vicious Circles, the Gambinos have been importing aliens, many of them Sicilians, setting them up in pizza parlors at loan shark's rates and, as an additional price of passage, requiring them to buy cheese, sauce, ovens, fixtures--the works--from Gambino-controlled companies such as Ferro Foods, Inc., of New York. The regrouped Bonanno forces want a piece of that, the theory goes, because, since the Forties, they have controlled cheese-making facilities in Vermont and Wisconsin. The Bonanno family has employed "arson diplomacy" to force some of the Sicilian immigrants into its camp. Happenings such as the accidental incineration of two clumsy Bonanno-clan arsonists in a competing pizza parlor fuel the suppositions, as do a series of recent arson fires in south Jersey restaurants associated with Gambino interests.

But common as arson is as an intimidator among underworld entrepreneurs, my investigation suggests that the pizza-war arsons are mostly for profit, and probably serve as a ready-cash source for the Gambinos. The pizza parlors can also launder a lot of money. One parlor might "do" $100,000 the first year, $150,000 the second, and then $450,000. Then it burns. The straw-man owner, perhaps an alien or a family member, could then collect both the insurance on the building and equipment and a hefty chunk of "business interruption insurance," based on the inflated value of the money made, say, in dope or pornography and poured through the place for washing. The whole scam might net upwards of half a million dollars.

In order to derail investigators, such (continued on age 248)Fire for Hire(continued from page 170) an arson-for-profit operation--and this seems to be the case in the pizza arsons--involves dummy corporations using family members or friends as officers, multiple title switches to "prove" the business is in demand, thus eligible for greater fire insurance, and even a "front" insurance company controlled by the arson ring. The Mob's insurance company might write a $100,000 policy on a parlor, then insure its policy with an "offshore" insurer--such as Lloyd's of London--for $200,000. When the pizzas go up in smoke, the Mob is up not $100,000 but $200,000, once the paper is shuffled.

To penetrate such a grand scheme obviously requires either an informant or a thorough and painstaking paper chase. FBI agents in Philadelphia not long ago revealed they had a former hit man talking to them about Mob business--including the murder of Jimmy Hoffa--in such detail that they expected soon to be able to cripple the Syndicate's Eastern Seaboard operation. Arson was one of the operations the killer talked about, which is logical, since hit men and burglars often double as torches.

But to date, the pizza-fire scam hasn't been busted, and those captured arsonists aren't talking. One reason may be the example of Locarno. Out on bond, he was found dead with 54 stab wounds. Towels were stuffed into his mouth. Bellini, the nephew of a well-known New York mafioso, is sitting tight.

That leaves the arson task force as the main hope. According to Wallace P. Hay, special agent in charge in Philadelphia, "We can put four or five men on it for months, something the local guys can't. We've learned more about organized crime investigating arson than from anything else. It's their Achilles' heel, because it was so easy they didn't put enough distance between themselves and the operation--like they did with narcotics and gambling."

In Rochester, New York, the FBI and the county sheriff's office eventually caught Frank Valenti's band of mafiosi with their fires burning--when a torch finked. But not before they had cashed $120,000 in insurance checks collected on torched buildings. The money again may have helped out other Mob activities, perhaps dope, whores, numbers or gambling. A fire official allegedly covered for them, but he was acquitted of the charges against him, along with three others of the eight indicted. Three were convicted, the longest sentence being ten years. Capo Valenti wasn't tried because his health was bad.

Where arson is concerned, organized crime doesn't always mean Mafia. "Nine out of ten arsons for insurance fraud are connected with organized crime one way or another," says one grizzled arson investigator, "even if it's just some nice country-club fellow asking around for a bum to burn his failing envelope factory."

A country-club fellow in Philadelphia named Sigmund Moskow commissioned more than 17 torch jobs, burning down for money the slum properties he owned. Each time, he tried to make sure they were empty. Moskow specialized in small claims, the biggest about $14,000. No insurance company--most of these were FAIR-plan insurers--recognized him as an arson profiteer (until the ATF task force did), because each property was a separate corporation (e.g., 1132 1/2 Chestnut St., Inc.) held by Moskow's parent company. True, he insured with several firms, but no more than one torched building belonged to the same company. The lack of data, or perhaps a so-what attitude, prevented any insurance company from denying Moskow's claims. Coincidentally, it seems, the same four adjusters handled all the claims, but nobody could show they weren't straight. Moskow hiked his insurance coverage by pretending to make improvements--scattering a few cans of paint about. The buildings burned nicely when the arsonist--several times it was a bozo behind in rent to Moskow--went in, trailed gasoline around and threw the match. When finally convicted, Moskow, much to his surprise, got nine months. (Arson juries aren't noted for meting out prison terms.)

Free-lancers do well in rural areas, too. Probably even better, since most rural police aren't well trained in arson detection, nor are the members of the often-volunteer fire departments. Arsonists are helped by some state laws, such as those in Missouri, which hold that all fires are accidental or natural until proved otherwise, a provision that compounds the usual arson problem of proving a negative--that is, that the fire wasn't accidental.

One Missourian we know of was his own one-man arson ring. He was both a real-estate man and an independent insurance agent. He would buy trashy rural properties, then buy inflated fire insurance, maybe $12,000 worth, on one of 35 companies, listing each structure as a corporate entity. To garnish the deals, he made sure his fire insurance included mortgage insurance--since he was the mortgagee--knowing that such insurance must by law be paid, even it both arson and arsonist can be proved. Finally, he hired low types to light the fires. Soon his buildings were burned out. The scam was undone only when the wife of one torch who worked for him broke down and confessed to the county sheriff. He collected around $125,000 for 20 fires before being caught and tried. He got two years on one count, five years on four more counts, was paroled early and is now a free man.

Free-lancers like Moskow and the Missourian are everywhere, from the wife who wants a new kitchen and decides to just let the grease burn, to the TV dealer stuck with last year's models who sets a fire big enough to turn on the sprinkler system and ruin the equipment but not big enough to take his building down. They're all bilking insurance companies, some for large amounts.

But it remains the organized arsonists who ring up the largest scores. My curiosity led me to other arson-for-profit operations akin to the New Jersey pizza-parlor fires. These involve organized crime, too, but here, as if proving the catholicity and vertical mobility of America, the arsonists are very recent immigrants, taking a leaf from the Mafia's book and taking advantage of an insurance industry that in the first case, seems to be Allah-sent.

•

In 1974, officials in Detroit and surrounding Wayne County noticed that small grocery stores were being burned with some regularity (this may have been hard to notice, since in Detroit about 39 percent of investigated building-damaging fires are arson). The Wayne County Organized Crime Task Force soon learned that an arson ring was at work, one composed of several families, nearly a tribe, of Chaldean Arab immigrants. The task-force investigation brought enough heat to bear so that by 1976, after some 40 arrests, the number of Arab grocery fires had decreased from 85 to 13. A victory for law enforcement.

Except that from Detroit, lines radiated clear across the country to California. Not long after the Wayne County prosecutions, arson investigators in San Diego noticed a dramatic increase in small-grocery-store fires--small groceries in large, decaying neighborhoods, inhabited mostly by Arabs. "They were going up like balloons," one detective says. And the strings, it was found, were held by the same tribe of Chaldeans that had made money burning the mom-and-pop businesses in Detroit.

According to Captain Art Robertson of San Diego's Arson Task Force, the Detroit elders--the first immigrants--send out arsonists alter previously sending out people to buy the businesses. The Arab ranks soon were augmented by other immigrants incorporated into the scam. A favorite ploy was the round-robin business venture: Buy a store here, move the meat and cigarettes and booze out of it, giving or selling that to others of the estimated 100 family members, then gas the store and run--secure in the knowledge that over here, a cousin has a store to launder the money; and over there, another cousin has one to serve as a storage place for the next switched goods; and way over there, yet another cousin has another place to serve as the next target. Simple. In fact, the investigators learned the Arabs had honed their skills on automobile-insurance fraud, faking accidents and personal liability, stealing another's car and the like.

It seemed they were entranced with the idea of insurance. Nothing like it at home. In America, you give a company a little money, have an accident or a fire and get a lot of money back. Allah be praised! The San Diego front is quiet for the moment, but I found out that Robertson was right when he sighed and said, "The West Coast is still considered the mother lode by these guys."

In fact, the Arab arsonists are working their way up the Coast, and they aren't the only organized arson ring at work west of the Great Divide. In Los Angeles, arson increased 91 percent from December 1977 to December 1978 (a big part of the increase is due to better detection and reporting), and the Arab arsonists played a big role in that. "They know the laws," Captain Pat McGuinness of the L.A. Fire Department Arson Unit says, "and certain loopholes in the laws presently written allow these people to operate with virtual immunity."

The plot is the same, except that in L.A., the Arab organization is based on an interlocking network of import shops and other businesses tailored to claiming large losses, with the help of friendly adjusters, on merchandise that's been switched to other locations. "They burn up old stereo carcasses after moving out $1,000,000 worth of merchandise they ordered and will never pay for," says one of McGuinness' investigators. "Sometimes the stuff shows up in other parts of the state in other stores they own. If they don't collect all the insurance money, they just declare a tax loss."

McGuinness has an 18-man squad for his city, only one man on duty for every 500,000 residents. Even so, the squad has had impressive successes, but too few. Sighs McGuinness, "These Arabs, they're burning right in front of the law." And not, clearly, only for the substantial profits. My investigation revealed that the Arabs also use fires to break leases, discipline subordinates, cover other crimes and perhaps move in on businesses.

The Arab legion may be making such moves in San Francisco. Earlier this year, a six-alarm, $2,000,000 fire broke out on the Bay City's Market Street, starting in a building owned by a Chinese import firm. The arsonist's crude gas-and-match technique tended to corroborate police suspicions that some arson neophytes among San Francisco's Arabs wanted a piece of Chinese business action. There are also rumors in San Francisco of Arabs' conducting arson schools to train a new generation of arsonists in more sophisticated methods. More ominously, I learned that a "Detroit" torch recently went to the Bay Area along with two public insurance adjusters. That could mean the adjusters will direct the torch to likely arson targets, with or without the connivance of the owner. Such an alliance pays off both ways. When the fire starts, the adjuster rushes to represent the poor victim. If he's in on the fraud, the ring gets the torch's fee, plus the adjuster's ten percent. If not, it still gets the adjuster's cut.

California's Arab arsonists are not alone in their enterprise. Proving that arson for profit transcends geopolitics, I found that Israelis had formed another ring, as organized and sinister as any Arab or Sicilian brotherhood. Many of the Jewish "Mafia West" came to America at the time of the 1967 Six-Day War, say authorities, and settled in Los Angeles. In many cases, Israel had used the war as an excuse to deport them. Most had criminal records, were the dregs. Like the Arabs and the Sicilians, they fell with glee on the hapless American insurance industry. Like the Arabs and the Sicilians, they have bolstered their forces by importing illegal aliens. They use arson for profit in interlocking businesses, and they use it to extort and threaten new arrivals, forcing them to participate in the racket. One detective reports that if the Israeli racketeers encounter resistance from a Jew who might not want in on the scam, they'll threaten his family back in Israel. "Just like the Nazis," the detective says. "They learned well."

They've done well, too. I'm told that one Israeli in the burn business is a multimillionaire now and moves in good circles. Those circles also include "a lovely house up on Mulholland Drive," an investigator marvels, "where there's all-night swinging, $100 to get in, all the coke and grass you want. All from arson. You know, it used to be if your name wasn't Italian, it wasn't organized crime." What's most worrisome about the Sicilian, Arab and Jewish rings is not their concentricity but their possible interpenetration. Elements of the Arabian group have moved arson profits into narcotics and are now providing dope in Las Vegas. You don't do that without Sicilian permission, at least not for long.

Most important for California, my investigation indicates that one or all of the arson rings had a California state assemblyman in their corner. That legislator, investigators say, at times has taken favors from arsonists and acted to hinder arson-task-force investigations at the state-wide level.

Pondering the ultimate implications of all these arson-for-profit episodes, one can't ignore the specter of a nationwide arson cooperative. It's doubtful, for instance, that the coast-to-coast epidemic of porn-shop, massage-parlor and gay-bar fires is coincidental. (Not coincidentally, they are mostly insured by the FAIR plan.) A series of gay-bathhouse fires in California was traced to organized-crime operations in Boston, Atlanta and Miami. Several porn-shop and massage-parlor fires in the Midwest and the East were triggered by electrical devices powered by "Doc Johnson" porn-shop batteries. Since it's known that Mob elements control a hefty chunk of the porn business, a connection seems ineluctable. One convicted arsonist, I was told, has quietly mentioned to officials the existence of a national "arson service" composed of men from various arms of organized crime. A person with the right connections and something worth burning could be put in touch with that service and it would, six or eight or twelve months before the fire, secure higher fire and business-interruption insurance, cover all the paper trails, arrange for the fire and the owner's alibi, all for only 25 to 30 percent of the take.

Most law-enforcement officials would scoff at the idea of a national arson service. They say the vast majority of arson-for-profit frauds are planned no more than 30 days in advance, about when the policyholder really feels the pressure of creditors or business reversals or taxes. Perhaps. But what about the man who knows in advance his serious money needs or who wants his old building down so he can put up a new one?

It may well be that no formalized and national Arson, Inc., exists. There's no question, though, that Mob-connected arsonists are for hire, either home-grown or imported. The famous torch Merill H. "Morrie" Klein makes the point. As others are still doing, Morrie "arranged" fires all over Pittsburgh for the Mob and friends of the Mob. "I sold fire like other people sell anything else," he said when finally caught, after a career that had caused at least $7,400,000 in damages. There's also no question that arson in America, particularly arson for profit, is making the Chicago Fire look like a cub-scout campfire. What can be done? The following, for starters:

• Arson-task-force activity can be expanded and reinforced, both locally and nationally.

• Local units can be better trained in arson detection and investigation, perhaps through the Law Enforcement Assistance Agency.

• New arson-detection equipment can be brought into play.

• Prosecutors can be trained in arson prosecution and encouraged to stick it to the burners.

• The insurance business can quit overwriting fire insurance; it can inspect every property before insuring it; it can speed up efforts to pool its information about fire-prone people and addresses; it can train better adjusters and investigators and cull the crooks.

• State legislatures can look at their bad-faith insurance laws, and the definition of arson (in many states, it's legal to burn down your own property if you don't get anybody else's), to see what new statutes are needed.

• The Federal Insurance Agency should look at its numbers again and see whether or not the FAIR plan, which lost insurers over $400,000,000 from its inception in 1968 until last year, is an incentive to arson and, if so, how better control can be exerted to forestall arson while continuing to insure the inner city. (One Federal official says, "The FIA's arson numbers are flat-ass wrong.")

Much of this program can be implemented without new laws. The Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations has been holding hearings on the arson problem, but the minority's chief investigator, Jonathan Cottin, believes that no new statutes are needed. "We have the laws," he says. "The fact is, we've all been lax and apathetic. The public, the insurers, the FBI, LEAA, other agencies, everybody. Arsonists had to rub our noses in it for us to move."

•

Lenny Ajax looked as if he wanted to end the interview. I wasn't reluctant, especially since I'd heard that he wasn't averse to cracking heads.

"You admit you're an arsonist, then?"

"I've burned things."

"The cops would like to put you away, you know that?"

"Sure. But let 'em prove I set any fire. You know, fires can just happen.

"To anybody. Remember that."

"Our toyman, like many 'respectable' arson hirers, had contacted people who knew how to set fires."

" 'Nine out of ten arsons for insurance fraud are connected with organized crime in one way or another.' "

(Text continued on page 252. "Accident or Arson" follows on page 250.)