Episode 103. A Discussion with Retired ATF Agent - Wayne Miller
CONTACT US: Email: paranaughtica@gmail.com Twitter: @paranaughtica Facebook: The Paranaughtica PodcastContact Cricket: Website: www.theindividuale.com Twitter: @Individualethe Greetings to you all!Over a distinguished 25-year tenure with the U.S. Treasury’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF), Mr. Miller built a robust foundation in law enforcement as a Special Agent, Criminal Investigator, and Certified Fire Investigator. His extensive experience in dealing with high-profile criminal cases involving illegal firearms, bombings, and arsons represents a key aspect of his career.After two and a half decades of service in federal law enforcement, Mr. Miller transitioned to the private sector, where he continued to apply his expertise as a fire and explosion analyst for the Massachusetts-based Wright Group, Inc. Over the past 17 years, he has leveraged his vast knowledge and experience to examine more than 2,300 fire and explosion scenes.His extensive involvement in over twenty-five major incidents and his role as an expert witness in more than forty cases in Federal and State courts underline his authority in the field.He is here with us today to bring us stories from his experiences, and let me tell you, they’re pretty impressive.So please, strap those velcrow slippers nice and tight, grab your snackies, and prepare for an awesome episode! Wayne Miller’s Info:Email: AuthorWayneMiller@gmail.comWebsite: burnbostonburn.com Oh, go to this link ===> https://on.soundcloud.com/Q1XRaY9WSpzawV9r7 to listen to some of Coops music. ***If you’d like to help out with a donation and you’re currently listening on Spotify, you can simply scroll down on my page and you’ll see a button to help us out with either a one-time donation or you can set up a monthly recurring donation. You can also go to the Facebook page where we have a link to Ko-Fi and Pay-Pal if you'd like to help out the show. We would greatly appreciate it! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Paranautica Podcast.
We have a special show for you today.
We've got author Wayne Miller here with us.
And over a distinguished 25-year tenor with the U.S. Treasury's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, ATF, Mr. Miller has built a robust foundation in law enforcement as a special agent, criminal investigator, and certified fire investigator.
His extensive experience in dealing with high-profile criminal cases Involving illegal firearms, bombings, and arsons represents a key aspect of his career.
As a member of the ATF National Response Team, Mr. Miller played a critical role during major incidents of fire and explosions.
His ability to operate under pressure and think critically allowed him to respond to urgent situations effectively.
This experience not only sharpened his investigative skills, but also deepened his understanding of the technical aspects of fire dynamics and criminal behavior.
After two and a half decades of service in federal law enforcement, Mr. Miller transitioned to the private sector, where he continued to apply his experience as a fire and explosion analyst for the Massachusetts-based Wright Group, Inc.
Over the past 17 years, he has leveraged his vast knowledge and experience to examine more than 2,300 fire and explosion scenes.
His extensive involvement in over 25 major incidents With that introduction,
I'm ready to leave.
That was great.
Thank you.
Thank you for having me.
Absolutely. Anytime.
It is more than a privilege to have you on the show.
I mean, personally, I find it awesome to actually be here sitting with a real ATF agent.
Read a lot of stories involving ATF, you know, Waco and Ruby Ridge and Oklahoma City bombing and these sorts of things.
And like right now we have you, an ATF agent here with us today.
So thank you for being here.
And as my understanding, you have a number of books.
How many books do you have?
I just got my third book out on the market.
And that one is called?
Flames of Secrecy.
Flames of Secrecy.
And what are your other books?
What was the first one?
Burn, Boston Burn.
The story of the largest arson case in the history of the country.
The second one was Bang, Boom, Burn.
I stuck with the BBB.
Triple B. Yep.
Bang, Boom, Burn is a collection of 21 short stories.
It's got some gun cases.
It's got two horrific bombing cases and about 14 more arson cases of all types.
Very good.
Very good.
And you just got back from Crime Bay.
2024 Crime Bake?
It was a New England chapter, but it was interesting as all heck.
Crime Bake, if people don't know what it is, it's sort of like a Comic-Con type of thing.
And they have a national convention of the year, but this was the New England one.
And there was well over 200 people there.
And they're all mystery writers and crime, true crime writers.
And it was just great baiting some of these people and some of the more famous people.
You know, I'm a nobody compared to these people.
Yeah, like who?
This guy, Gabino Iglesias.
He's written 16 books, and he was a guest speaker, and he's well-known around the country.
I personally didn't know him.
Hank Phillippe Ryan.
Hank is a woman.
She was a reporter here in the Boston area for years, but she's now done a dozen books, and she's won.
I couldn't believe how many awards she has won.
And some of her stuff has become TV shows.
And just to let you know right now, I'll let your listeners know, I've signed a contract for Burn Boston Burn.
They're planning on making a major motion picture of that story.
Congratulations, man.
Thank you.
Thank you.
And to know that it's moving along, my screenwriter, who's in L.A., I grew up here in Massachusetts.
My screenwriter just got his contract to write the script.
So I know they're spending money, so they must be serious about it.
That's awesome.
That's got to be a great feeling to know that, well, first you wrote a book, you publish it, you sold copies, and it's like, it's so good, someone wants to make a movie out of it.
That's got to be like, oh my god!
Yeah. Screenwriter Mike, I won't tell you his last name.
Screenwriter Mike went to a wedding in Phoenix, Arizona.
And it was an ATF agent.
And the agent said to him,"You grew up in Boston.
You know about this story?" Mike said,"No." So he got the book.
He loved the story.
And he was coming out to visit family.
So he got a hold of me.
We met.
And while we're talking, he couldn't talk more about the book and about the story and what he wanted to do with it.
So he said, look, on my phone, I have six producers right here, and I'm flying back tomorrow.
I'm going to get some producer interested in your story.
Now we have two production companies who are on board.
It's going to go through.
Yep. That's official.
Wow, man.
Again, congratulations.
I can't imagine.
Thank you.
I mean, just the amount of work that goes into authoring a book is extensive.
It certainly is.
Alright, so what story do you want to start with?
Or actually, can I ask you, do you know who...
Did you mention Julio Gonzalez?
No. Gabino Iglesias.
Okay. Yeah, he was just one of the most notable arsonists.
He killed 87 people.
This was in New York City, actually, around that area in 1980.
He had lost his job, and then he got really drunk, and he burnt a club down when there were a bunch of people in it.
Oh, is that the one?
Yep. I did not know his name, though.
I've been part of the DuPont Plaza Hotel fire down in Puerto Rico.
New Year's Eve, 1986.
There's been some employee problems.
They had an employee meeting that broke up just after 3 o'clock on New Year's Eve.
And the hotel is right on the beach, full of people.
They have a casino there.
And these three guys decided...
They had set a couple small closet fires, but they did not understand the power of fire.
And they took three sterno cans, you know, which you heat your food with at functions, and they threw those into a pile of brand new furniture that was stacked in one of the ballrooms.
And the furniture pile was about 35 feet long, 6 feet high, still in boxes.
And so they put the sterno cans there, and this thing took off.
Within 15 minutes, it went 300 feet within the hotel.
And it blocked the doorways to the casino.
And people were trying to get out a 36-inch regular door, you know.
And the door opened inward.
Oh, man.
And all the people are pushing against the door.
And if you saw the nightclub fire in Rhode Island, it killed 100 just 10 years ago.
This was similar to that.
87 of the 97 people died right there, stacked, trying to get out that doorway.
And so I was on a team that traveled to the national response team.
And within 24 hours, we're supposed to respond.
And this was the first case that ATF did off the continent.
So I was on an 8 a.m. flight on New Year's Day.
Kind of change your New Year's Eve and New Year's Day plans.
I was on an 8 a.m. flight.
I spent the next eight days in Puerto Rico.
And we worked the origin and cause, figured it out.
And those three guys, they ended up confessing because they, you know, they were very religious guys, believe it or not.
You know, they didn't intend to kill people.
They just didn't understand what could happen.
This grew into a major inferno.
They pled guilty to 97 counts of murder.
What were they intending to do?
What was the actual plan here?
Because it obviously did not work out.
Right. Just like the closet fires they had, they were just small fires.
Harassment fires.
Some people might spray paint something.
Some people might break windows.
Well, they were using fire as their weapon.
And not understanding it, it took off.
You know, it's the first time that we used fire computer modeling.
And it became something very standardized afterwards.
We had the FBI was there.
ATF was there.
I think we had an Air Force crash team to help remove the bodies.
Because you want to get the personal effects as you remove them, that type of thing.
And very intense.
You know, 97 people, and it took eight days to remove the bodies.
And, like, you know, the front of the place had a portico, a cover.
So the ladder trucks couldn't even get close to the front.
As you're looking at it from the left, the pool is on the left, so you can't get close because of the pool.
On the back side is the beach, so you couldn't put any apparatus on the beach side.
And on the right-hand side was an alleyway for deliveries.
So you can't even get an aerial truck in there.
But by the time they even responded, the people were already dead.
They were dead by the time the fire department got on site.
Sad. Yeah, it was.
I mean, I interviewed...
I was working side-by-side with a Puerto Rico police officer, and he was...
He was translating.
We interviewed an employee.
They did not know what to do with the money on the tables or any place.
They had no instruction, no plan, no sprinkler system, no alarm system.
Oh, man.
So he's there, and he said, I was trying to make my way out through the crowd of people, and everybody was like a...
Every person for themselves.
And the door closed, and they were all coming back towards me, and I'm trying to swim through them to stay standing.
And I ended up by the floor-to-ceiling windows with about 12-foot-high windows.
And somebody broke out these windows.
And somehow I ended up down by the pool area.
He said, I don't even know how.
But before he did that, he turned around and called to his friend.
You know, he said, Julio, Julio, come on.
Julio ignited from the waist up.
From the heat that was coming down from the ceiling, he ignited from the waist up.
Oh, dude, no.
Yeah. No.
Horrible, horrible story.
Was it the station nightclub fire that you were mentioning before?
Yep, I grew up in a town next door to West Warwick.
West Warwick, Rhode Island, is where the station nightclub happened.
I was on the private side then, and ATF did...
A lot of the work with the Rhode Island authorities there, but on the private side, I was called to be hired by the owner's investigator, except he called back a short time later and said, you know, we kind of know what happened,
so we don't really need you.
You know, we only had a million dollar insurance policy, he said, and that's going to go away pretty fast.
So we don't really need somebody to tell us what happened here.
Yeah, and that was pretty interesting just because, well, you have footage of the entire thing happening.
Right. The local TV station was there for promotional purposes.
And so the guy was filming the whole thing in the beginning.
And you probably didn't even see a piece of footage.
They showed it here, like, within a half hour after it happened, with the people stuck in the doorway and people trying to pull them out by their arms.
Piled on top of each other.
And then they never showed that footage again.
It was just too gruesome.
Yeah, I'm not sure if I've seen that particular piece of footage.
I've seen other footage.
I don't know if it's this same nightclub, but it was another club.
And the whole place went up in flames.
And there was inside surveillance cameras, like CCT footage, showing what's happening.
And people cannot get out.
And the footage shows people running around.
The fire, like, you just slowly see the fire making its way toward, like, basically where the camera is.
And people have nowhere to go and want this old guy.
He runs away, trying to find a way out, and the smoke's, like, halfway, you know, in the room, so you can't see much.
And then you see him come back to where he was, his table.
He has nowhere to go, and he literally just kind of, like, lays there, knowing it's over, it's done.
It's it.
It breaks my freaking heart, man, to see that sort of thing.
It's just knowing what happened.
It's insane.
It's a really good book on the Station Nightclub.
It was written by an attorney who got involved in the lawsuits, but he personalized it really well, talking about people who went there, some who survived, and talking about a lot of other people who did not survive.
But it's a great story.
So sad, man.
So sad.
There's just so many fires.
The manager of the band was the one that was fined or face charges or something?
He did.
It was Great White was the name of the band.
Yeah, yeah.
And they decided to use the pyrotechnics, the gerbs, the ones that send up flares.
And the bar owners never stopped them.
The manager of the nightclub itself, they talked about it or something.
Nobody ever stopped him.
They wanted to charge the inspector from the fire department because he should have noticed that there was this foam for sound purposes on the wall like you have behind you, in a sense.
You have some sort of foam.
They had a lot of foam.
That goes up quick.
Yes. And so they did.
They actually charged the guy from the manager from the band.
That's crazy.
What was the outcome of that?
Millions and millions of dollars in lawsuits that were...
Pretty rapidly settled.
But a couple people went to jail, went to prison.
I think the bass player, the band itself, I think the bass player ran back to get his bass so it wouldn't burn and he ended up dying.
He did, he did.
The leader of the band just passed away last year.
Oh, did he?
Yeah, I mean, he's had to live with that all his life too, you know?
How could somebody put up an indoor...
Pyrotechnic display.
I mean, the word pyro being in it should indicate that you should exercise some real discretion when using it around flammable things.
You'd think so.
But bands have been doing it forever, you know?
They get so used to just cavalierly shooting them off at all the places they're at that they probably don't even really think about.
You know, each place is different.
Yeah, I know...
There's a little bit different danger.
I know the New York City plays or shows, and in Boston, you know, you have to have the fire marshal's permission and everything has to be just so.
And, you know, when you do it right, it's not a problem.
Yeah. Yeah, especially if you look around where you're putting the instruments of inevitable...
Yeah. You look around where there's going to be.
It's like, oh, there's a bunch of foam right there.
Probably shouldn't put it there.
Oh, there's a fake Christmas tree right there.
You should probably keep it away from that.
Exactly. But yeah, I mean, a lot of that just goes right out the door.
That would fail a checklist for sure.
So what is your...
Well, let's get into your latest book here.
What is the story of the book that really made it for you?
Personally, like this one really touched at your heartstrings.
I can't tell you most of it.
Buy the book!
Flames of Secrecy.
I jumped from my true crime books, I jumped to fiction.
It's a fictionalized story about a serial arsonist who only kills women because of mommy issues.
Because of how he...
Grew up under a domineering, abusive mother.
You know, a lot of us...
I did a presentation just yesterday.
I had about 30 people in a library audience.
And as I'm reading stuff to them, I explained to them.
I said, look, a lot of us faced parents who said...
You're going to sit there all night until you finish that food or stop crying.
I'll give you something to cry about.
This guy right here, I've heard it all.
Yeah. Well, that is part of...
Some people can live with that and grow and just forget about it.
Yeah. Other people are weaker and they can't.
And, you know, some things get more serious than that.
So... This book has a lot of my personal life in it.
And I tease my live audience with, while I'm doing it, I give them some true or false.
I read them two lines from the book and I say, did this really happen in my life or did I make it up?
And I have a lot of fun with my audience.
All right, give us one of these.
Try us out here.
So it's like gonzo journalism.
Yeah. Okay, I read him a line about Internal Affairs, ATF.
So the investigator's name is Mark Miller.
Not very imaginative on the last name, but there's a very specific reason for it, okay?
But Internal Affairs called Mark Miller into the office, and they said, look, we have some...
Serious allegations from this woman.
You know Monique?
Yeah. Well, she says that you slept with her and then you intimidated her to testify in a fire case.
What's your relationship with her and tell us about it?
You know, that type of thing.
Well, so I read a few lines about that to the audience and then I say, true or false?
Did that really happen?
That one is a little ambiguous.
That particular thing where I get accused, I never got accused of sleeping with a woman who was my informant.
But I did have a female informant.
And I did get called into internal affairs because of her.
But this is the reason.
I'll explain this.
And this is something I've never given on the air before.
Oh, man.
Thank you.
Good. Okay.
A local police officer from about 10 miles away from here and myself interviewed this woman.
I can't even remember how we came up with her.
The very first time we interviewed her was recorded.
Four hours worth of recording.
And we're asking her about this guy named Miles Connors.
Miles Connors is still alive.
I don't know if he's in prison right now or out.
But Miles is an infamous criminal in the greater Boston area.
Miles was associated with major art thefts here and drugs and murders and bank robberies, all sorts of crimes.
And this woman, in her apartment, two other women got murdered in her apartment.
She shows up one day.
She wasn't there when the two women were murdered.
She shows up and there's blood all over her apartment.
And, you know, she's freaking out about this.
These two other women witnessed another murder.
So, to eliminate witnesses, they got killed in her apartment.
Now, she told us about that, but she told us about a bank robberies and stuff.
And she told us about all sorts of stuff over four hours.
But she wasn't 100% truthful.
Like, for instance, one of the bank robbers was either a...
Blue Cadillac or Brown Lincoln.
And she told us one.
I can't remember which one.
But the other one was what was used, okay?
So eventually I asked her, why did you lie to us?
60 Minutes, or one of those shows very similar to 60 Minutes on TV, they were showing how paid informants are liars.
And they took my voice from that recording.
And they put on one thing.
Why did you lie to me?
To show that she was a paid liar, amongst a bunch of other things they put on, but not for my case.
I interviewed for four hours and they put on 15 seconds.
Yeah. Okay?
Just to prove their point.
You know, their very slanted view that they had for that show.
Yeah. Internal Affairs wanted to know, why did that tape recording get to...
This TV show.
And they're accusing me.
Now, doesn't it make sense that if you're making a case against somebody, you have to turn over stuff.
Well, you give stuff to the U.S. Attorney's Office or the local attorneys.
And they have to turn over stuff as part of discovery.
Right. So it gets turned over to the defense.
Well, wouldn't the defense want to show?
That my witness was a liar?
By putting it on national TV?
Well, that's how it happened.
But they bring me in and they start accusing me.
That's incredible.
So I put a little twisted version of that in the story as one of the obstacles I had.
I keep saying I because Mark Miller is really kind of based a lot on me.
It's you!
The name!
It's semi-me.
But the serial arsonists grew up under very bad circumstances, and Mark Miller grew up under some very bad circumstances.
I'll tell you something now.
My mother, real life, grew up in Austria during World War II.
She was in her teens.
During that time period.
And her schooling was very interrupted.
And everybody, every student was forced to be a member of the Hitler Youth or the woman's branch of the Hitler Youth.
So that's how she grew up.
Oh my God.
Okay. She grew up under those very Germanic...
She ended up living her life, the rest of her life, sort of, I could say, like a Nazi drill sergeant.
She was...
Extremely strict and non-loving.
And there's a lot of that in flames and secrecy.
And the arsonist has the worst of that type of life.
And so he starts targeting women who piss him off.
Naturally. You know, most of us might say, well, freak you, right?
Well, you know, but...
In his case, he takes it to an extreme level.
But very believable.
I mean, people do it all the time.
There's shootings of people that just get another person angry, road rage, and there's shootings all the time.
So he took it to the extreme.
So you get to actually watch the arsonists go.
How he finds the women or how they come across, how he restrains them, how he sets his fire.
You're actually right there in the room with him setting the fire.
And then you see the investigators.
But I didn't want to make the investigators so extreme that a layperson got bored by it.
So there's tidbits and there's, you know, an investigation might only take two pages.
Sort of like a TV show that's an hour and it's completely solved, you know?
Right. Yeah.
So you get to see the investigators and you get to learn some cute little tidbits that I learned in my 37 years of fire training and stuff.
And you get to see how there's conflict between ATF and Boston fire because almost all but one of the fires actually occurs in Boston.
You get to see some of that was true.
So I read this one line, this one paragraph.
I'm really pissed at you for not telling us when the press conference was supposed to be.
It was supposed to be 1 o'clock and you guys changed it on us and made it 1 o'clock.
I mean 12 o'clock.
And here it is.
It's 1 o'clock right now and you're all done.
We were supposed to be up there on a podium with you guys.
That actually...
That actually happened in Burn, Boston, Burn.
Somebody changed the time and didn't tell Boston Fire.
Just on purpose to mess with them?
The bosses could have done it on purpose.
Let me tell you, the street guys would never do that.
I mean, it just ruined our relationship completely on the street with these guys.
But that really happened.
And that's in the book.
Okay, so I took the true life and I made it into a fictionalized story.
And it just grows to this dramatic climax and see nice big twists happen.
My biological father actually left when I was six months old.
And I met him when I was 44 years old.
Wow. So I have something like that in the book.
And he told me something the very first time I met him that changed the whole dynamics of...
My family and my growing up life.
And something like that happens in the book also.
That's pretty wild.
The whole interdepartmental thing, we've heard it all before, right?
The FBI can't work with whatever put your city police here.
They don't like to work with other departments, it seems.
FBI, particularly.
Especially FBI and ATF.
It seems like you guys are kind of, you know, at odds with each other.
Why is that?
I mean, I know, like, a lot of it's because you guys, I'm not saying you, but, like, this department wants to solve the case themselves without having to go outside with the FBI because that's saying, like, we don't have the resources or knowledge to figure out this case, so we're going to give the FBI the case.
You know, the main reason is...
The FBI wants to dominate the world.
I can agree with that.
I don't mean run your life.
I can agree with that.
I don't totally mean run your life in that fashion.
But they want to be the preeminent law enforcement agency in the world.
And so they jumped into arsons.
We had a fire on the federal building, on the JFK federal building in downtown Boston.
Up on the roof, there's a four-story water cooling tower.
The way they used to cool the building was, if you looked at the top of the building, you saw, not windows anymore, you saw louvers.
It's all louvers.
And it was a wooden cooling tower, four stories tall.
What happens is, if you got beyond those walls, water is piped through the building to cool it.
And then it goes up to the top of the cooling tower, and it's just let go into all these lightweight wood baffles.
It just bounces with all the airflow that's coming up through those louvers, okay, and cooling the water again.
And it goes back into the system, and that's how they used to cool that building.
That's crazy.
But they shut it down in October, and it dries out extremely fast.
I mean, you've got airflow constantly in the sun.
It dries out within a couple days.
Well, that caught on fire.
Now, there's no electricity up there.
There's no cooking.
There's no candles, you know.
So there's only like two ways it could happen.
But either way, it's human caused.
Either the handyman who had to actually shovel out the sludge every winter up there, he had access.
It was either him reading the newspaper and he had a cigarette and he caused fire.
Happens also.
Or he set the place on fire because he's the only one who had access during any normal day.
So all four stories burned.
And this is like lightweight kindling wood burned down to four feet of solid ash.
Okay, so.
ATF has jurisdiction on fires except in federal buildings and postal buildings.
Postal has their own investigators, but they usually invite ATF.
But they didn't know how to investigate fires.
They weren't trained for it whatsoever, okay?
So they were going to do it.
Well, a friend of mine in the state fire marshal's office, he went there, and he's saying, you've got to have Wayne Miller come work with you.
And they said, no, no, no, no.
Really? You got it.
He's the one with the most experience around here.
It's a federal building.
He can help you.
So they said, well, if he comes, he can't bring the ATF truck.
You know the one with the big letters on the side?
If he does, he has to cover it with a tarp or it has to be put in the garage.
Now, isn't that like petty, petty stuff?
Very, very petty.
So we'll take your help, but don't you dare advertise it.
Right, right.
So they finally invited me.
They finally did.
And they put me in charge.
And I had all these FBI agents working under my tutelage.
They wanted to sift.
That's one thing you can do at Fire Saints is sift, looking for something.
You know, if you had a bombing, you could sift.
You're looking for a component of a device.
So I said to him, look, this was basically kindling wood, and it could be set easily just by sticking a couple pieces of newspaper and light.
It's all made out of, like, balsa wood, like model airplane?
That's exactly the wood I usually use.
That's exactly the wood.
So I told him.
Well, it's designed to be wet all the time, normally.
Sure. Yeah, right.
So... I said, are you looking for something in particular, a device or something?
Well, we don't know what we're going to find, so we want to sift it.
I said, okay.
So we broke it up into eight-foot squares using, you know, like police tape, you know, the yellow tape.
Eight-foot squares, and an agent would stand on top of four feet of pure ash.
And I'm telling you, it was nothing but charcoal ash.
And they shoveled some into like a wheelbarrow and then sifters.
And they had people sifting.
And I got to be in charge of that for three or four days as they whittled down their piles and had one agent in each square.
And I'm telling you, this is half a city block.
Yeah, it's a lot of area.
Yeah. So, hey, you guys want to do it.
You know, that's not what I would do.
And guess what they found at the end?
A lot of ash.
A lot of ash.
They found nothing but ash.
Painful. Go ahead, guys.
We're down at the Olympic.
I was at the Olympic bombing in Atlanta in 96. And all sorts of agencies were there.
And I was on 12-hour shifts.
And I had gotten off at midnight from 12 hours.
I had just gone to bed.
And my wife called from Massachusetts.
She said, you know, a son was...
Up late, watching TV.
It's summertime.
He's a teenager.
And something broke across the news on TV about bombing at the Olympics.
So he woke up mom, and she called me before my supervisor even called me.
And about 1:30, I was up about 1:30, and by 3:00 a.m., we were picking up pieces.
And the FBI had primary jurisdiction with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and other agencies.
But ATF, FBI, Georgia, Atlanta police and fire agencies all over.
So we broke that up into about 10 foot squares again.
You pick up pieces.
The bombing pieces were all up on a CNN building across the street, which was about four stories tall.
There were pieces up on top of that building.
Holy crap.
That's why it spread.
Yeah. If you remember, it was basically a pipe bomb, and it was in a backpack underneath a park bench right near the stage.
That's a pretty powerful pipe bomb.
Yeah, absolutely.
That's like government-grade explosives.
It was very powerful.
So, the normal way that ATF would work a scene like that, I mean, obviously you work the crater.
The crater.
Round zero and working out.
Blast. Blast.
Right. But then, when you go out 10, 20 feet, 100 feet, 100 yards, you have 10-foot squares.
In that square...
You collect the evidence, and that square is what?
Oh, it's 105 feet from the crater, okay?
So the way the FBI wanted to do it was each and every single piece from your square had to be a separate piece of evidence.
The way ATF would do it, you would have baggies.
One would be for the green wooden park bench, put those pieces in.
One would be for wire pieces.
One would be for shrapnel pieces, like the metal from the pipe or nails or something that somebody might put in a bomb.
And so you have maybe four or five bags per square.
Because when you're testifying, does it make a difference to a juror that you have these four bags from 105 feet away in this square, square labeled L2, L10, okay?
Do you have to have each one at 105 inches, 105 feet and 3 inches, 108 feet and 4 inches, you know, and confuse the jury and make more mistakes?
FBI wouldn't hear it.
I mean, we had that battle going back and forth, and they insisted.
They're the ones that leaked Richard Jewell, okay?
They're the ones who insisted Richard Jewell was the bomber and ruined his life.
It's crazy because they're so sure of themselves, but they're not equipped to investigate those crimes, right?
Oh, they smeared that poor guy so badly.
And too quick to investigate.
And they still believe.
You know the jet that went down Long Island Sound?
That was right after the Olympics.
And I was supposed to go.
Because... The jet blew up, and it was a major jet that lost, I don't know, 139 passengers or something.
And you were supposed to be on that jet?
No, I was supposed to investigate.
Oh, okay, okay.
I was like, who's trying to kill you, man?
Who's trying to kill you?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I just got back from Atlanta when it happened, I think.
I'm almost positive that's how it happened.
And I'd been away for seven weeks, and I said, can I pass on this one, you know?
You got enough other people.
Well, I don't know if you ever saw a documentary on that, but they got the pieces from the ocean bottom and floating pieces.
And they put together about 90% of that jet.
They put it all back together in a giant hangar.
And there are direct distinct patterns that show that it exploded from like the center fuel tank.
And the center fuel tank is the one that sucks the fuel out first as you're taking off.
For balance purposes.
And then you got the fuel tanks are out in the wings and stuff.
And there was wiring that was not protected.
And it scraped and rubbed.
And it arced.
And you have the right fuel mixture with air, oxygen, gas.
And it exploded.
It could have happened any day, any time.
And that's actually what caused the explosion.
But I'm telling you.
There's still, the guy who was in charge of the New York office and stuff, he still insisted that it was a missile shot from Connecticut somewhere.
Surface-to-air missiles, yeah.
Tons of those around the United States.
Yeah. In civilian hands.
Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Right, exactly.
Just go to your local SAM station.
They'll sell you a six-pack.
Oh, my God.
So it was fun talking about those things, because I don't usually talk about those things on here.
Well, thanks for bringing that one up.
Do I have an accent to you?
A very small one.
Very small one.
Not too bad.
You have an accent?
Yeah, yeah.
But you know, I love it.
I love the accent.
Whenever I try to do an accent or something, this is the accent I give off.
I don't know where that would be from.
Queens? Yeah, you have a mixture of Staten Island, Queens, along with Italian New York.
Hey! Why not just borrow a little of each?
I try.
I find it crazy that people actually have a legitimate accent.
And people that live over in your area can be like, that's not, no, that's from this area.
That's not from that area.
That's from this precinct, you know, or something like that.
It's like, wow!
I mean, Cranston, Rhode Island has a Cranston.
Cranston. Cranston.
And my wife grew up just north of Boston in Revere.
Revere, Mass.
Revere. I love it, man.
Yeah. So here's something weird, too.
This is my second marriage.
29 years we're coming up on.
And I met my wife at a singles place.
Every Thursday night, 500 singles would show up.
And mostly people who are older and divorced.
I was in my 40s.
Was this one of those, you sit at a table and you go around in a circle to each table and meet someone?
Not at all.
A lot of loud music.
A huge bar in the middle.
Tap somebody on the shoulder and say, hi, my name is Wayne.
It worked!
Yeah, so we have what's like a Mason-Dixon line here in Boston area.
People who live north of Boston don't go to the beach on the south of Boston that much.
They go to North Shore beaches.
They go to North Shore restaurants.
And just the opposite.
People south don't go north for entertainment or the beaches typically.
They go south.
And that's the way it is around there.
So her friends dragged her south of Boston to come to this place.
She didn't want to go.
She's not comfortable in those type of settings.
And come on, you got to go in.
We got to meet another friend of ours.
We got to go in.
So the bar is huge.
It's around 25 feet across and 40 or 50 feet long.
And I'm sitting at one end waiting for a friend of mine.
And she's with her friends at the opposite end.
And her friends go, hey, there's a guy over there for you.
And they're single too, right?
But they said, there's a guy over there for you.
And pointing at me.
And we end up eye dialogue over that distance.
We can't even see each other that far now.
So what's weird about it, though, is her father was a captain.
The city of Revere.
Her brother was a captain on the fire department, both of them on the fire department.
And my wife lived through, we have a lot of three families, what they call three-deckers.
A fire friend of mine said, don't call it a three-decker, that's a sandwich.
It's a three-story, three-family building.
Well, in East Boston, just near Logan Airport, it's right on the ocean and there's always a breeze.
Well, four of them burned down that one night, and she was in the second one that caught fire.
So she lived through it, and her family is
and then she ends up marrying an investigator.
It's like kind of fate, kind of weird stuff.
It's meant to be.
It's like a fire family.
Fire family.
Yeah, exactly.
Her father loved me.
Played out almost like the song Uptown, girl.
Yeah.
So, all right, let's get into Proposition 2 1⁄2.
Everyone loves Proposition 2.5.
Tell the listeners what Proposition 2.5 is, and then we'll just segue into that whole story.
Prop 2.5 was voted in by the citizens of Massachusetts back in November 1980.
It was a tax-cutting measure.
So, very simply, if your house is worth $100,000, it could only be taxed at $2,500, 2.5%.
Okay, so that's the real simple part.
There's a lot more complexity to it.
But how it affected every city and town was we have so many old cities and towns here.
You know, I just go back, you know, three, four hundred years.
But the houses in the city of Boston might have been built in the 20s, 30s, 40s.
And a lot of them were abandoned, just old dilapidated properties.
So we have at least two dozen cities that fall under that same type of thing.
Old, dilapidated, abandoned houses and stuff.
And back in the 80s, even businesses were not that prosperous.
You know, some of the businesses, old mill buildings, that type of thing.
So the cities and towns said, how are we going to pay for our employees?
The usual suspects, like our teachers.
Our firefighters, our police officers.
So just to give you the example, in Boston, they had 1,700 firefighters in the city before Prop 2 1⁄2.
After it went into effect over the next year and a half, through a rapid attrition and layoffs, they lost 600 firefighters.
Wow. That is like 38% of your force laid them off.
And they closed 22 firehouses.
22. And if, you know, last time you were in a major city and you look around and there's, you know, firehouses spread all over cities.
Well, when you start closing them, the response time is much longer.
Yeah. So, like one member of this group, and I'll give you full disclosure right now, too.
One of the arsonists in this case, his name is Greg Bemis.
And Greg and I have a professional friendly relationship today.
He did his prison time.
And when we arrested him and he decided to cooperate, I spent two to four hundred hours interviewing him and prepping him for two trials.
We went to 264 fire scenes, no matter what it looked like, whether it was an empty lot.
Whether it was a burned out Hulk of a building or a rehab place.
We went to all of them and we recorded.
Okay, Greg, who are you with?
What did you do?
Type of thing.
So I know how Greg talks.
I know his exact mannerism, his words, everything.
I interviewed all nine guys in this conspiracy eventually.
So we have this relationship.
So Greg went to, getting back to the...
Prop two and a half.
After it went into effect, he went to two fire scenes because these guys are also fire buffs.
A fire buff is like a sports enthusiast.
You know, fire is their sport.
And Greg grew up wanting to be a Boston firefighter from the time he was like six, seven, eight years old.
And he got a radio and he could hear Boston on the radio.
And then he got cameras and started taking pictures of fires and stuff like that.
So these fire buffs, another nickname for them is Sparks.
And there are legitimate organizations here in the United States.
And Boston has two of the oldest ones.
They go back well over 100 years.
And they have people who get together.
They trade equipment.
Fire helmets, fire boxes, old stuff, and even fire trucks.
Guys go out and buy fire trucks.
And then some of them chase fires, and they try to photograph the fires.
And they like to watch the firefighters put a fire out, and they like to see the challenge, that type of thing.
Well, this group, because of Prop 2 1⁄2, and Greg saw two fires where the firehouse was right around the corner that was closed.
So it took longer response time, and he personally felt that two men died in one fire and two boys died in another fire, young boys.
And Greg actually assisted in doing compressions on one of them, and they put him in a body bag after that because he died, that type of thing.
And that really deeply affected Greg.
His mother used to take him to fires in the small town that they were in.
It was sort of like a town event for a fire.
You know, everybody would show up.
So his mother died when Greg was 16 of cancer.
And Greg was very close to his mother.
And his dad actually moved to Maine a year later and left Greg to finish high school, living with his friend instead.
So this greatly affected Greg.
And he was friends with these other fire buffs who became the militant group of fire buffs.
They became a twisted version of a Robin Hood group.
They, instead of stealing from the rich, give to the poor.
Let's set enough fires.
So the people will scream, the press will pick it up, and they'll put pressure on the mayor and stuff to find money to rehire these guys and open up the fire companies.
And that was their main goal when they first started setting fires.
How big was the group?
Between seven and nine people, typically?
Eight of them were arsonists, and the ninth guy joined the conspiracy, but he never was present for a fire.
Pyro Crusade.
So, any one time, these guys would go out during the day sometimes and make a list of some buildings to burn.
And the typical first buildings were those three families, those three-story.
Abandoned. So they chose those because nobody would be living in them and less firefighters would have a chance of getting hurt.
So they had good intentions.
They had good intentions.
Yeah, they did.
Noble. Noble intentions.
It's the Boston Tea Party on steroids.
Okay. So they set their first fire in an abandoned place and then another and another.
And then it's February.
March, April of 1982.
And they're setting two or three fires in a night.
They're setting 20 to 30 fires in a month.
Their busiest month was 40 fires.
And June 11, 1982 was the busiest night in Boston firefighter history.
They had 10 fires that night, and at least four of them were multiple alarm fires.
Nine alarms is the most you can go.
That means you're calling every engine, all the manpower.
Now remember, you've got 600 guys laid off, and you've got 22 fire companies closed.
And a nine alarm fire has drawn a lot of manpower and a lot of equipment.
Well, when you set 10 fires in one night, and you had a six, a four, and a three alarm too, They had fire companies coming from 20 miles away outside the city to help, okay?
People didn't even know where they were going, the fire.
We didn't have GPS, you know?
So they had no idea where is that address, you know, that type of thing.
Yeah, as I was thinking, you're just like, there's one over there.
Just kind of look around for something on fire.
Yeah, look at the smoke in the air.
So that's what propped two and a half.
did and that's how these guys decided to fight it the only thing is is as they did it it became nightly entertainment for them and they became adrenaline junkies yeah and then when they investigated
like at one point we started doing surveillances at night and we even had people up on an industrial area in south boston and we had crews down below and we had binoculars and radios and we'd be in touch with mobile units and stop somebody in this
area at 3 a.m in the morning i mean really not many people be driving in these areas at three in the morning and uh you know try to identify these people and what they're doing in the area type of thing well funny thing is we had no
Someone had a word.
One of the arsonists was a Boston firefighter who worked in fire headquarters where the arson squad was.
He could easily look out the window and say, hey, let's see, they got eight cars out.
It's Thursday night.
They're going to send a bunch of units out tonight.
So these guys started screwing with the investigators.
They started setting fires every single night of the week.
And they went south of Boston.
And then the same night went north of Boston and set two fires there.
And then they went far north of Boston, set three in another town, a city.
And another night they went in another city.
And October of 82, they went west by 40 miles and set four major fires in one night in the city northwest of Boston.
And they were just absolutely having a blast.
Goodness gracious.
Wow, this is...
So this happened in over a period of two years, caused $25 million in damages?
In 1982 dollars.
In 1982 dollars, yeah.
Yeah. At least double that.
Yeah. At least.
Probably four times.
Just like in the last story, bureaucracy makes everything worse.
Absolutely. In the last story, you got 300 individual finishing nails all labeled as exhibits A through Z-150.
These guys, they were absolutely educated.
Three of them were cops.
And three of them were firefighters, but one a Boston firefighter, one a Boston, full-time Boston cop.
Two of them became Boston Housing Authority police officers.
So they are trained officers.
They could understand surveillance or anything like that.
We didn't even have them as suspects for a long time.
They knew the fire system because they all were fire buffs too.
That's how they met originally.
Fire buffs were hanging out at certain parking lots waiting for calls to come in.
They'd run to a certain fire and take pictures and stuff.
And 200 firefighters ended up getting hurt in this spree of fires.
200. October 2nd, 1982, there was an old World War II military barracks that they set on fire.
After they called in a bomb scare to Mass General Hospital, because the bomb squad's office was directly next door to the building they wanted to burn.
So after they called in the bomb scare, they watched the bomb squad leave, and then they set fire to the building next door.
Maddening. It's like they could just direct resources around as they needed people to move.
They ended up calling fire departments.
When they set fires outside of town, outside the city, they would call on a business line because most business lines weren't recorded lines, not the 911 line.
And they would call and say,"Hey, aren't you glad the Boston arsonist is in town?" And bragged.
They wanted people to know it was this group who was setting Boston on fire that was also setting their town on fire.
Okay? Eventually, they set this threat letter, what eventually became known as a threat letter.
It was done by Greg Bemis, my buddy.
Odd to say, huh?
Yeah, it is.
At the okay of the group, though.
And he cut out letters from magazines and stuff, just like a Hollywood thing.
Yeah, yeah, a ransom letter.
Yep, it's what it was.
No graphology.
Yeah, it was an extortion letter because it said, this is Mr. Flair, and nobody knows where the term Mr. Flair came from this group, but Greg gladly accepted it as his moniker,
his nickname.
And you also know this is the Friday Firebug because the paper started printing the Friday Firebug because a lot of the fires were set Fridays.
In the beginning in particular.
And it said, we will continue setting these fires until all police and firefighters are rehired and the fire equipment is back in service.
If the buildings are started to be torn down, if abandoned buildings are torn down, that way you couldn't burn them, right?
If they're torn down, we will target occupied buildings next.
Oh, goodness.
So, that was a domestic terrorism back before it became popular.
You know, that term is now thrown around all the time.
Yeah. But in 1983, 82, 83, when that came out, it wasn't a popular term at all.
So, that's what they wanted people to know, their motivation.
And that's why they sent that letter.
They rode around in what we called Nerf cruisers.
Nerf. You know, like the little soft basketball or football?
Yeah. Not a real football.
Their cruisers weren't real cruisers, but they were black Impalas and black LTDs.
So were they trying to look like police?
Yeah. Authorities?
Yes. Somewhat resemble them, at least.
Yes. Without impersonating them.
They had the black walls and they had an antenna on the back, that type of thing.
And to show you how crazy they were, they stole a brand new, unmarked cruiser from a Ford dealership west of Boston to upgrade the parts on their personal cruisers.
And then they dumped it in a body of water that separated downtown Boston from South Boston.
They dumped it into the ocean.
Wow. Kidnapped a car and harvested its organs.
Yeah, they did.
That's a good way of looking at it.
That's what they did.
They stole fireboxes.
In the cities, you have the pull boxes a lot.
That would be on maybe a telephone pole, utility pole on the side of a building.
But they didn't just steal it to be like a trophy, you know, like a rapist might steal women's panties, you know.
They stole it because they had a good reason to.
Now, they know how firefighter operations work.
They know who responded, what engine company and stuff responded first.
So if they set their fire, I'll make it very simple.
If they set their fire at A and B Street and they stole the box at B and C Street and the firehouse is closed at C and D Street, So by the time a fire company gets alerted way out here, in the middle of the night in somebody's neighborhood where people are sleeping, the fire is now a major inferno.
And so many of the buildings, I have actual footage and actual slides from some of those fires.
And almost every single one of them, all you see is a lot of flames coming out of every door and window.
So they graduated from those.
Abandoned houses to, I'll call them unoccupied warehouses and businesses.
Not abandoned.
They were live businesses.
But at night, nobody's there.
The biggest one they set was 1,000 feet long, 300 feet wide.
Jesus. Okay.
And that was a nine alarm fire.
And the company never opened up again in Boston.
They went down to New Jersey.
I was like, ah, let's stay out of Boston.
I mean, there's people who just randomly burn your place down for attention and funding, apparently.
Yeah. And you mentioned just randomly burn their place.
The investigators had to investigate it as if it was a single incident.
You know, like, we didn't know it was part of the spree.
You know, so you still have to interview owners, employees.
Competitors. You have to look into the financial condition.
Right. The insurance.
A lot of insurance scams.
Waste. Yeah, make sure they're not just trying to make a quick payoff.
Right. So, you know, I mean, you wasted a ton of time.
And that's why this investigation took as long as it did.
You know, I mean, you could also have any one of 600 firefighters as suspects who got laid off just in Boston.
And I'd imagine you get a lot of...
You get a lot of people doing the insurance fraud thing that would be covering it up with just how many random arsons were going on at the time.
You get that copycat fire in a sense, yeah, absolutely.
Just like a 9-11 type of event, it was a good day for a murder for someone because it would never get investigated because people were so busy.
Police and fire, they'd never get to it.
Nobody'd even notice.
Yeah, or the hurricanes, the ones like in North Carolina, Helene and stuff.
What a great time to bop somebody over the head and throw them in the river, you know?
Pretty fun fact about the group.
They put a vanity plate on one of the cars that said arson.
Yeah, the Boston firefighter actually had arson for his license.
Arson. Genius.
It's ironic.
So one of the fires they went to in South Boston, I knew the police officer.
The police officer actually got hurt in a bombing.
He was on the bomb squad, and he got hurt in a bombing less than a year later.
But he lived, but he got some severe injuries.
But he's on the street one night.
Because he's like one of the first people to discover this fire.
So he's blocking the street pretty much with his cruiser.
And the car with the arson license plate goes right around him, past him, not stopping to say hello or anything, heading right to the fire scene.
And he sees the plate, arson.
He just figures it's somebody from the arson squad or something.
Oh, my God.
They had big balls.
They really did.
Yeah, you see, it says arson.
It would say arsonist if he was the one.
It's all about the adjective, you know?
Right, see?
So we had a couple breaks.
We became friendly with a TV cameraman.
Nat Whitmore.
That's it.
After my wife, Nat is my biggest supporter.
Okay? He says that burn Boston Burn is his legacy as well as mine, you know?
So, Nat was a fire buff, but his job was to get paid being out there at night chasing these fires with his camera.
So, November 1982, Nat Whittemore goes through a lumberyard fire, and we called it Garrity II.
Garrity II because a month earlier they burned Part of Garrity Lumberyard.
And it was a major inferno, but it was such a big lumberyard, there was plenty left to burn.
So this night...
Got a twofer.
That's it.
Nat went there with a Cambridge mass.
Cambridge is right over the river, Charles River, outside of Boston.
And Ed Fowler was a fire investigator, and he was also a cameraman, a photographer.
So they would chase some of these fires.
They get there, and they see something that, to them, sort of indicated possibly that somebody got there before the firefighters and put these tire tracks in the grass, but now there's fire hoses over them, so maybe that's the arsonist,
you know?
Well, we had a lot of people, spectators.
That doesn't make them an arsonist, right?
Right. So, Nat's with his camera, and he comes around a pile of lumber.
And he hears this god-awful noise.
These people, they were cheering and rooting for the home team.
Who's the home team, guys?
The fire.
The fire.
They're rooting for the home team.
Not the visitors, the firefighters.
They're rooting for the home team.
They're making a lot of noise.
And Nat takes his camera and swings it towards the group at the same time as the...
Off-duty Boston police officer pulls his gun out of his shoulder holster.
Nice. And that always wore ballistic vest and carried a gun himself and stuff.
But he was wondering if he was going to get shot.
So, but he's filming these guys and the Boston cop waved his gun for about two seconds over his head as if he was on a bucking bronco.
Okay, like a...
A complete idiot.
And the other guys with him, including Greg Beamers, a guy who owned a security company who was one of the arsonists, was there.
And another guy wanted to be a state trooper, but he was a fire buff.
So those guys were right there.
And they were all caught on film, okay?
And they said,"Hey, he's filming you." So he puts his gun right away.
And he filmed them, and they're laughing, and they're looking to one side, and over there, not caught on film, was the Boston firefighter.
He was there, too.
Okay? And an off-duty firefighter.
He was sitting there rooting for the home team.
And because of that, we ended up knocking on some doors, including that Boston cop.
We knocked on his apartment door a couple days later, and he just lied to us about...
Any involvement, that type of thing.
And on the floor in his living room was one of those Boston, one of those pool boxes.
No connection, though.
No connection.
Nope. You can get them at flea market.
So he claimed he got it at flea market, but not to us that day.
So Boston usually has one missing a year.
Well, 1982, we had 14 of them missing.
Because these guys started, Yanking them off poles and cutting the wires and taking them.
Again, that was because the fires would grow bigger if you couldn't report it by, let's say, cab drivers.
Let's say just somebody coming home late at night, but not home yet.
And you could normally pull in the residential, you could pull the box and you couldn't do it.
So it delayed notification.
So that box was there and my partner got up and looked at it.
Hey, my grandfather makes lamps out of these things.
And the reason he wanted to look at it a little closer is because they have a number right on the front painted in plain daylight.
Nice. Box 1712.
Well, Box 1712 was the first one stolen that year.
And we went back with a local search warrant.
Now, I don't know what your thoughts are sometimes, but that...
Thin blue line or something.
We went with Boston.
It was outside of Boston, but we went with a couple of Boston detectives and local detectives from that town.
And the Boston cops wanted nothing to do with the search warrant against one of their own guys.
Of course.
You know?
So we got let in.
He wasn't...
The guy's name was Bobby Grabluski, the bad guy.
And he wasn't home the second time we went there with the search warrant.
So we got let in by management.
And the box was still sitting on the floor.
So I guess ATF got no respect.
Yeah. It's like if you're asking questions about people setting fires and that's a stolen firebox, you might move it somewhere.
You'd think.
Not just leave it on the floor.
So, simply, he got charged with receiving stolen property, and then they took his gun away, and he got put in dispatch while Internal Affairs investigated him.
Ouch. In the doghouse.
Yeah. Well, he wasn't too worried, because over the next 13 months, we didn't get to talk to him again.
And they continued setting fires throughout 1983.
It slowed down a bit.
But they continued.
And because we knocked on the door of one of the other arsonists who said to me, oh, I don't really know anything about it, but I'll tell you anything I can.
Well, he played with me for months, except he told me about that car that got dumped into the Fort Point Channel.
He told me that, and I don't know why.
He never told me why.
While he was giving me this information, he still...
Set 50 fires himself with this crew.
My God.
You know, he could have cut the whole thing short and saved himself 20 some odd years behind the walls.
He ended up going to prison for over 20 years.
But we recovered that car.
And eventually we used that leverage against the Boston cop whose car the parts were put on.
And he finally confessed in January.
Actually, it was...
We made the arrest on January 13th, Friday the 13th of 1984.
Yeah, January the 13th.
And after some wrangling around federal court, he decided to cooperate.
And we wired him 17 times.
Half of those in-person meetings with some of these guys and the other ones were phone calls.
And we had great material.
I mean, they had taken so many pictures themselves.
So at one of the meetings, he said, oh, I'm going to go to prison in a couple of weeks.
He said, you guys take these slides.
Let's look at them one more time.
So they were looking at them and actually laying out the groundwork for some of these fires.
Oh, yeah.
I remember that one.
I jumped over the fence.
I ran through the back.
Yeah, we put the device on the window because they used a little incendiary device.
Wow, that's incriminating.
Yeah. So we had seven out of nine pled guilty.
Two of them went to trial, three-week trial separately, and both of them found guilty.
The longest sentence back then was 40 years.
Literally, it could have gotten 400 years.
Because you hurt 200 firefighters and set 264 buildings on fire.
But nobody was a victim of...
I guess no one died?
No one died.
That's incredible.
No one died.
It would have changed the whole dynamics of everything.
Yeah. So props to the firefighters.
I mean, the good ones, right?
Yep. The ones not creating them, yes.
Yeah, right, right.
So that is definitely the craziest story in my career.
That is nuts.
Besides the 46 machine gun seizure I had.
Ooh, 46 machine gun seizure.
That's crazy.
Well, first of all, it was U.S. Attorney William Weld, and he called that arson spree the largest arson case in history, both state and federally, in terms of the number of fires.
Correct. That's pretty intense.
Now, you asked me about John Orff, the most famous arson investigator in the state of California, who became the most famous arsonist in the state of California.
Ironic. Yep.
His case, again, he was a sole individual, and over 25 years, the prosecutor guesses that he might have set a thousand fires, which would make him...
The most prolific arsonist known to man.
But John Orr never confessed, and it's just a guess.
We don't know how many he really set.
Thomas Sweat, an individual in the greater Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Virginia area, did confess to 350 fires in the mid-1990s.
He set his fires over 25 years.
And some of them were sheds, some of them were cars, some of them were dumpsters.
But I can tell you we have eight arsonists who conspired and set fires for two years of 264 buildings.
Definitely as of 82, it was the largest arson case in the history of the country, and it's still definitely one of the biggest and craziest arson cases ever.
Yeah, it's pretty nuts.
This is crazy, because everyone knows David Berkowitz, being son of Sam, and went out, shot people in the heads as he sat in the cars.
But he actually set a shit ton of fires.
Yes, yeah.
You know, as serial killers grow up, they're usually somebody else first.
They're the ones that are pulling the wings off of, you know, bugs and using magnifying glasses to set little things on fire.
Including little animals and stuff like that.
Horrible. And then they go about setting buildings on fire, and then they become serial killers, too.
They're just trying to find something that...
Escalation of stimulus.
Escalation, yes, yes.
The fires weren't doing it anymore, so then he decided to go shoot someone.
That's good profiling there, Cricket.
Yeah, and again, Greg...
Been out of prison now for 25 years.
Hasn't started a fire since?
To my knowledge, has not.
He actually works for a fire equipment company today.
He can't stay away from it.
So when my book came out, we reconnected.
But in the book, you're going to see conversation.
You're going to see dialogue between the arsonists.
Now, where did that come from?
Well, it's part of that two to four hundred hours of interviewing him.
And then the Boston cop was the first one who confessed.
And I interviewed him two to four hundred hours.
And so I know exactly how these guys talk.
But I didn't make up the conversation.
When Greg went to prison, he wrote a 163-page typed, single-spaced journal.
I have that journal.
He let me take dialogue directly from it and use it in the book.
So when you read the arsonists talking to each other, you hear what they say, you see what they did, and you know what some of them were thinking.
Man, it's incredible stuff.
That's a nice perspective, too.
On top of that whole layer of expertise where there's a lot of things where you'd get a lot of nuance out of it that most other people wouldn't even think they'd.
Think of two put in the book.
True. You know, like, you know, the FBI profiling section that they have, they don't call it that anymore, but it's basically profiling section.
You know, they try to go into the prisons and interview like these serial killers and serial rapists and try to get that deep dive into their psyche.
And some of them give up good information.
Some of them...
BS along the way.
And some just won't talk to them at all.
But that's part of getting good information to get out there to local police and police around the country.
Who's the most, I guess, well-known profiler?
Is that like John Douglas?
That's who it is.
Hold on.
Hold on.
Where is it?
I wasn't sure.
I just know he's done a lot in that area.
I wasn't sure if he was like the godfather of it.
There it is.
Oh, yeah.
John Douglas.
Obsession. The reason it's right next to me, because I haven't put these away, it was part of...
I used the BTK killer.
You know the one in Kansas?
Dennis Rader.
Yep, I used that.
I used American Predator.
I used all that information as part of my research and my background anyway, because I had background in it.
To write my fiction book.
So you see profiling as part of Flames of Secrecy also.
Okay. Let's move on to the...
Well, I want to know about this reverse sting operation.
Some people would like to jump on it right away and say it's entrapment.
Is that what you're doing?
I know a lot of people...
I'm not.
I'm not saying that.
I know a lot of people don't have a good view of ATF to begin with.
And let me say one thing.
I mean, how do you set somebody up to burn down a building?
I feel like that requires some intent on your part in the end.
I'll explain it.
But let me just talk for one moment about any listeners about gun stuff.
Absolutely. You know, I did 25 years with ATF, and I know hundreds of ATF agents.
And some of them, when they retired, ended up going to work for Smith& Wesson and other companies, you know, stuff like that.
But we never thought in terms of taking somebody's guns away, you know, anybody.
We were after the guns that are on the street that were being used in drug dealing, hold-ups, just shootings, period, stuff like that.
I know some of the cases, you know, the Waco stuff, how bad it went wrong.
And I know some other stuff.
Somebody compared some cases in my Bang Boom Burn book where we did not, where people were found not guilty.
I put those stories in there to show how hard arson cases are to prove.
And someone compared, why would you put that stuff, that embarrassing stuff to you?
I mean, after Ruby Ridge they compared it to, and Waco they compared it to.
And I have a picture, a painting up on the wall that was done by one of the Waco guys who was killed there, an ATF guy who was killed.
His sister did this beautiful picture that I have up on the wall.
But we didn't try.
That's not what we're there for.
We're there to get the bad.
People with the bad guns.
I could care less.
In my mind, there was never a slippery slope.
You know?
That type of thing.
And people can think what they want to think about what I'm saying right now.
But I'm just telling you, we never talked about it.
We never expressed any desire for that.
You know?
So, reverse things.
They're somewhat common in drug cases.
Where you're trying to get the bigger fish, so some agency might come up with a couple kilos of their own and stuff like that.
But in this case, reverse things in Austin cases, it's kind of unique.
We would come across somebody who's already burned buildings.
An informant might, like in the state of Vermont, this guy was selling drugs and guns to an undercover state trooper in Vermont.
And all of a sudden, he said, do you know anybody needs a building burned?
Now, we didn't put the idea in his head.
And the trooper said to him, well, maybe I do.
You know, type of thing.
He's like a one-stop shop.
Yeah. For all things crime.
Acme. We ended up getting a building.
We actually get a building as a target to be burned.
And we have an undercover agent meet with the guy who has allegedly burned buildings before.
Well, this guy is in my second book, Bang.
And it's Timmy Roberts.
And Timmy had been hired to burn dairy barns in the Northeast Kingdom, almost in Canada.
And the reason he was burning the dairy barns for the farmers is because the U.S. government was Paying farmers not to produce milk.
It's part of that stabilization of milk prices when it gets too high.
Yeah, they're doing that a lot now with beef and chicken.
Are they?
Eggs. Yeah.
So these farmers said, that's five years.
My barn's going to be kind of useless by then or something.
So I might as well give it to the insurance company.
Have them pay me for it, you know?
So they hired Timmy to burn their barn.
Yeah. When the undercover agent met with Timmy, we had the place wired for sound and video.
And we had a camera aimed right at Timmy's face that he didn't know was there.
And the undercover agent says, very simply, I understand you have a service that you can provide for me.
The undercover agent was supposed to be a businessman who owned this crappy building he wanted burnt.
So he never said...
I'm going to give you $10,000 to burn my building.
No. He let Timmy talk.
And Timmy said, I never saw a building I couldn't burn.
Okay? And then Timmy told him somewhat about the dairy barns.
So we didn't put the idea in his head.
And then he said, well, how much is it going to cost to burn my place?
And I can't remember if Timmy said $3,000, $5,000, whatever he said.
And the agent...
On top, just said, okay, I'll give you the money.
And he just said, no, I'm only going to give you this much.
You know, he haggled with him.
And we actually show him where the building is.
And we actually give him the key.
And we tell him it has to be done by, like, the insurance is going to run out tonight at midnight.
Can you do it before then?
So we put agents on the inside.
I was on the inside of this building.
I was with one other agent.
And it was an old, it was a dilapidated, sort of a small wooden warehouse for carpeting.
Sort of rolls the carpet in there.
It was around the 1st of November or so up in Vermont.
And it was cold as hell.
He had no heat on.
There was no heat on.
It was cold as hell.
And we had teams all over the place.
We had surveillance teams.
They saw him drive into New Hampshire and get...
Stop at a gas station and fill up something in the back of his pickup truck.
They saw him park a couple blocks away from us.
And the team told us, he's approaching your building now.
Now we're inside.
And there's one of those translucent upper glass doorways.
So you could see shadow on the other side.
And we had somebody right across the street saying, okay, he's approaching the doorway now.
So our plan was on the inside.
Our plan was the other agent had a shotgun.
I said, when he comes through the door, we silently count to yourself 1,001, 1,002, 1,003.
I will hit him in the face with my flashlight, and my gun will be aimed right at him.
And you rack one in the shotgun, because Timmy will know that sound coming from...
Northern Vermont.
He'll know it.
Everybody knows that sound.
Yeah. Universal sound of get out of my house.
Yeah. So I'm about 25 feet in.
And I got a doorway from an old office open.
And again, it has the glass upper.
And you could hear Timmy.
You could see a shadow through the glass.
And you could hear him trying to work the door with the key.
It was dark out, so he was struggling with the key.
But he got it open.
He closed the door behind him.
Now, remember, this guy is selling drugs.
He could be on drugs.
He's selling guns.
He could have a gun.
And he's going to burn the place that I'm standing in.
Okay? It's a volatile situation.
Yeah. Your heart's going.
Yeah. So, I count 1,001, 1,002.
1003. And exactly.
I hit him with the flashlight.
Freeze! Police!
Damn! Nobody knows who ATF is.
Freeze! Police!
Freeze ATF!
He's like, who the fuck is that?
Yeah, right.
So, Jerry racks, you know, Sheldon, you know.
And so, Timmy must have gone to the bathroom before he got there.
Because if I was Timmy...
I would have pissed if I shit my pants at that point.
And his trousers were clean.
As a matter of fact, he froze.
He totally froze.
I said, turn around, put your hands against the wall.
He couldn't even move.
He was shocked.
I bet.
And I physically had to go up and spin him around, put his hands up there, and pat him down.
He had two Coke bottles in his pocket with a lighter.
So the Coke bottles had the gasoline in them.
Hey, you're not supposed to fill your glass containers with gasoline!
Nice little Molotov cocktails if you want, right?
And the whole idea of that is not only to get the arsonists off the street, but to get the people who hired him previously.
So, how are we going to do that?
You know, Timmy could call one of them up and say, Hey!
The feds just came knocking on my door.
Have you been talking or something like that?
You know, somebody who has nothing to do with something would say, I don't know what the hell you're talking about.
Or even if you're trying to cover your tracks or something.
But it didn't work for Timmy and a couple of them didn't work that way.
Well, it's unfortunate for Timmy.
Yeah. Yeah.
So Timmy went, he went to prison, you know.
Well, did you work on Oklahoma City bombing?
Did you have anything, any part in that?
No. We had two teams go because...
The national response team has four separate teams.
Northeast, Southeast, Midwest, and Western teams.
Right, right.
And the Western, Midwest teams went to that.
And so we didn't get to go.
Yeah, I just wanted to ask if you ever met like Timothy McVeigh or any of these high-profile figures?
Ever met any of them?
No. Okay.
Because that would have been pretty intense.
I know Timothy McVeigh was at Waco.
Trying to sell t-shirts.
I don't know.
He was doing something there.
Sell t-shirts.
I don't know what the hell he was doing.
But there was video of him at Waco when that whole thing was going on.
It's kind of weird.
What did they say?
I got tanked at Waco?
You got tanked at Waco.
Now remember, guys.
Remember, guys.
ATF had nothing to do with it after the first day.
Yeah. The FBI was out of their minds.
Yeah, they didn't roll a tank in there, definitely.
Yeah. But we have enough of our own bad history, too.
Yeah. Why do you guys use the alcohol, tobacco, firearms?
The tobacco part, what's that about?
I was curious about that.
What is a tobacco case, exactly?
Okay. Someone growing tobacco to sell their own nicotine or something?
Now you know.
You know that they have an E at the end now, too.
Alcohol, tobacco, firearms, and explosives.
They're part of the Justice Department now.
Okay. That's it.
Okay. So, it goes back to the 1790s when the very first taxes were on alcohol and tobacco.
You know, when we first became a country.
And... You know, over the next couple of centuries, there was regulation.
So ATF had a regulation section with people who are just like auditors and compliance, and they regulate your alcohol and tobacco industry.
You know, things are supposed to be done on the up and up.
Like they caught major companies like Budweiser and other companies over the years giving inducements.
Major inducements to sell just their product.
And that can't be done in the alcohol industry according to the laws.
So they fine them like $5 million or something.
Slap on the wrist.
Yeah. So the same as bootleggers making alcohol back in...
The late 1800s into the 1900s, the 1920s and 30s, down south in particular that I know of.
The stills, the illegal stills.
A lot of people will put everything into them.
They put battery acid, they put rat poison, they put anything into them.
And people die that way too.
It's not regulated and it's not taxed.
And the government wants to get its taxes.
Wasn't there a case?
Government was caught putting something in the alcohol.
This was like the 30s or something.
They were putting stuff in the alcohol to purposely make people sick so they wouldn't drink alcohol.
During, like, Prohibition era?
Yeah, it was during Prohibition.
Well, that's probably true, and I don't know that, but that's probably true.
Anyway, continue on.
So, with tobacco, it was the same thing.
It was taxed and regulated.
It's mainly a state problem.
So when cigarettes are made in a cigarette factory, and they are taxed federally.
Now, you know, maybe on cigarette packages on the bottom or something, they have a symbol for your state tax.
Well, if they're stolen directly from the factory, They are shipped from North Carolina to New York and sold in bodegas on the corners and stuff like that without the state tax.
So the federal government was involved with that, and I never ever worked on a cigarette case.
I only know like one agent who worked on one, and that was my early days.
I was on a job in 76. That's a long time ago.
Some of the agents I knew then worked on illegal stills and stuff like that.
They used to look at certain cars and see if they were weighted down with all the sugar or something they carried or the finished product.
That type of thing.
That's simply how they worked on tobacco cases.
Cigarettes stolen and sold in other states where the taxes are much higher.
That makes sense.
I mean, the most common thing I've heard of around here is people fencing the duty-free store.
Right. Yeah.
They'll go to the border store where there's zero duties on anything and then go back and sell it.
Which is why they always have strict limits on how much you can get from them.
Right. Or like a dry state like Utah, people will go anywhere across the border and pick up booze and bring it back or something.
Anything you can't get is so much more valuable.
That's crazy.
You think the ATF would, like, rebrand and name it something that's more, like, I don't know, on point?
Like, alcohols?
Yeah, that's going to be an issue all the time.
But, like, tobacco?
I don't know.
You think, like, alcohol, drugs, and explosions or something?
Explosives. To show you another thing, how we got no respect.
So, I'd go knock on the door to interview John Doe, right?
John Doe's wife.
Jane Doe answers the door.
I have my badge out, and I say, I'm Special Agent Wayne Miller with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.
He didn't say ATF.
Really, nobody knew it.
You know, it's a nice gold badge, you know?
She turns around, hey, John, the FBI's here.
Oh, shit.
Might as well be like, all right, I'm out of here.
You just turn around, like, I'm done.
We get no respect.
No respect.
I was thinking of the Ali G line.
Alcohol, tobacco, and firearms.
So tell me, what else do you sell?
Yeah. Right.
Now we sell explosives.
That's crazy.
Yeah. Well, let's jump into the guy who sent six Christmas packages to his girlfriend's family members.
Oh. One of the nasty cases that's so hard to comprehend.
Yeah, this is a nasty one.
The Helter Skelter Christmas.
Yeah. So this is Western New York State.
And this 50-year-old guy, who, you know, somewhat reputable over his 50 years, is dating a 30-year-old American Native Indian woman.
And her family hates him and wants them to break up.
And he takes umbrage.
He doesn't like that.
So he comes up with an idea and he gets a friend of his who used to be a schoolteacher, was an alcoholic, brain damaged because he got in a car accident and he had a metal plate in his head.
But he convinces him to go along with the little plan, his little plan.
Probably didn't take much to convince.
Oh, I don't think it did.
They went to Vermont and got some illegal licenses.
Just driver's license or something.
Then they went down to Kentucky and bought some explosives.
And I'm not sure how they did that because you're supposed to be in-state and licensed and all this stuff.
And they managed to build in a motel.
They built six bombs and had them stored there for a few weeks before they went into service.
Was this during a time when you could, like, farmers could buy stuff, like a TNT?
Well, yeah.
Monium nitrate?
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, a lot of nitrate, especially, you know, in western parts of the country and stuff when you want to blow up a lot of stumps.
Yeah. Boulders or something like that.
You could buy stuff, but it's usually in-state.
Licensing says the person has to identify themselves as an in-state resident.
So we're never sure how they got this.
They actually got metal ball bearings or something from Pennsylvania because they wanted to hurt people.
The more metal fragments you put in there, the more you can hurt somebody.
So they built these things, and then at Christmas time, they put them in boxes, and they used fishing tackle boxes for their devices, and they put the fishing tackle boxes in cardboard boxes and labeled them to six different addresses,
her family members.
And they got delivered.
Now, think of this.
This is 1990.
Three. Think of this.
This was so well planned that these were delivered in Buffalo, New York area, Rochester, New York area, and to one of the family members on a reservation about a hundred miles away on the Canadian border,
northeast of Buffalo.
Okay? But still in the U.S. And they were all delivered by different manners.
Taxi companies deliver packages, and they delivered them that way.
It wasn't UPS and FedEx because you didn't have UPS and FedEx in 1993.
You had some delivery companies, so one delivered them.
As a matter of fact, one of the taxi drivers has the package in his backseat, and he gets a call on the radio after two or three of them exploded.
Oh, no.
He gets a call on the radio.
Hey, you might have a bomb in your back seat.
He jumps out, throws up, and continues the run.
What? I'm just going to go deliver it now.
I would have stopped, I would have reached back, grabbed the box, shook it a few times, knocked on it.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, the girlfriend of the bomber, she didn't.
Allegedly didn't know about this stuff.
Her brother was one of the targets.
And for some unknown reason, he got one of the packages and felt it was a suspicious package.
He put it outside and he took a rake and he hit it with the rake and it blew up.
Oh no.
And it took off part of his leg and killed his dog.
And, you know, shrapnel and stuff.
But he lived.
But why he did that, I'm not sure.
Yeah, what the hell?
This could kill me.
I should put it outside and hit it.
I mean, nothing says Christmas cheer like finding a bomb and thinking I should reenact swordfish.
So they all got to live.
Let me just set off this ball bearing explosive.
They all got to live in that same day within a three or four hour span.
It was Christmas week, so it was actually the week between Christmas and New Year's.
And the scene that I had, I only had a part of this case.
The scene that I had was in Rochester, New York.
It was a two-story townhouse apartment where the girlfriend's sister lived.
So the girlfriend's sister was living with her boyfriend.
And they got the package around 5 p.m.
Delivered right to the front door.
And hey, it's Christmas week.
This must be a late Christmas package.
You know, he tears off the brown paper wrapper on the outside.
Opens the box.
And he's sitting in a chair in the kitchen.
And it's on the floor in front of him.
And he's leaning over.
And the girlfriend, sister of the bomber's girlfriend, you know, she's standing over his shoulder looking down.
To see what's in this box.
The fishing tackle, he pulls it open and it blows up.
They both died instantly.
She lost her lower...
She lost part of her front of her neck and her lower face.
God damn.
He only ended up with a belt on.
He had clothes on, but he didn't have clothes on afterwards.
It blew the clothes right off his body.
And shrapnel was all his chest and his stomach had...
It was mostly gone.
And it was a gruesome scene.
There was a big hole in the kitchen floor, and I think it was the range, the kitchen range, that was sunk down partially in the hole.
And there was just blood and brain matter and face and tissue everywhere.
And again, we responded within 24 hours.
That was Christmas week.
Again, that's usually a week I would take off to be with my kids.
In 1993, my kids were 10, 12 years old.
And so they have...
I always think of it in terms of somebody has it much worse than you have it right now.
I don't want to leave, but somebody's life is now either gone or miserable for the rest of their days.
Now, think about it.
Four of them went off killing five people.
I had the only scene with two people.
So four of them out of the six went off and killed five.
And they're all the way from Buffalo to Rochester to further upstate New York.
So these things are all going on.
So you've got multiple scenes.
You've got the state police.
You've got the local police and fire.
You've got ATF.
The FBI never got involved, to my knowledge.
But you got the scenes to deal with.
And you got agents within 24 hours doing that stuff.
But you have other people doing interviews.
And that's what a lot of people out about don't realize is how important interviews are to any case.
Every fire case.
Every case.
Any kind of crime.
You watch any show on TV, they're interviewing people.
Yeah. You need information.
So one of the people where the device was delivered, like in the CAD company or something, said it was a guy with a bad eye who was like 50 years, something years old.
Now, the guy who had the metal plate in his head, one eye was like semi-closed, and he had a bad eye.
And he paid with cash, but he took it out of a red wallet.
He had this red wallet.
So the agents went to interview the woman, thinking that she might be in danger too, the girlfriend of the bomber.
They went to interview her, and the bomber and this knucklehead were there.
Oh, shit.
Red wallet.
And bad eye.
They made arrests within 24 hours on that case.
Damn! Yeah.
They did a bang-up job putting everything together, and we ended up identifying, you know, explosives.
You do mock-ups of the device afterwards.
You collect every single piece.
I mean, we had pieces of the brown paper wrapping addresses and stuff like that.
And we had the box and we had the fishing tackle.
So who went and bought six of these fishing tackle?
We'll go to your local store down the street from your house and a distributor sends ten of them to your place and some guy bought six of them.
Receipts. Got the receipts.
If you're making pipe bombs.
And people are always buying two end caps.
You don't have to buy two end caps for six bombs.
That's 12 end caps.
Usually only you put one end cap because you have a piping system.
It's usually one end cap per segment at most.
I need two end caps for this.
My plumbing needs two end caps.
For my completely enclosed plumbing system that doesn't go anywhere.
That's sort of learning how to fly a plane, but I don't need to learn how to land this thing.
Ah, exactly.
It's okay.
I'll learn that as I go.
Learn to fly the planes, but you don't learn to land them.
Yeah. So I would definitely say that that was a very well-founded bad vibe that family got.
Absolutely sick case.
Like, hey, you should break up with him.
Oh, I'll show you.
I'm a good person.
I'll kill all of you.
Wow. So, he had two things in his head.
If I kill them all, they're not going to try to break us up.
And then I can console her, and I can be her hero.
I can be her, you know.
Oh, yeah.
The consolation and hero complex.
That's it.
Some people, man.
I don't understand how people think they're going to get away with these things.
It's just like, what the fuck?
Oh, yeah.
Like that one lady who threw the...
Threw the body out into the river as she was driving across a bridge.
Yeah. Because she saw that in CSI and it destroys all the evidence, but it turns out it was winter, so it was frozen over.
So they just recovered the body from the ice on the surface.
Perfectly preserved.
You guys have heard of the divorced Connecticut style.
I can see your face.
I don't know.
Tell me, please.
There was this airline pilot who was going to get divorced from his wife, but he didn't want to lose his pension, didn't want to lose money, didn't want to split the house, whatever.
That type of thing.
So, I can't remember exactly how he killed her.
But he put her through a wood chipper.
Oh! Fargo shit.
And shot it off into a river.
Her parts, bits, her bits and pieces.
The giblets.
And I don't know if you've ever seen Dr. Henry Lee.
Dr. Henry Lee is one of the chief forensic people in the United States.
I have seen some of his stuff, yeah.
Yeah, I've done some classes with him, and I know the guy.
He's the funniest all hell to get.
He must do this funny stuff to clear his head or something.
But he said, as smart as this guy was, and he washed out the thing, the blood and stuff like that, one tooth got stuck in the chipper.
Oh, man.
And that's what he got sunk on.
One tooth.
Damn! Everybody knows you have to remove the teeth and the fingers.
Yes. Everyone knows that.
Not that guy.
Yeah, Dr. Henry Lee, we had classes and he'd show like a burned body out in a wild land somewhere.
And there'd be a bunch of investigators around it.
And you know how that time period when a lot of people wore those double-knit...
Plaid pants and stuff, these detectives and cops.
He said, I always wondered where they got those pants.
You know, he's showing this gruesome scene.
He's always wanting...
And then he says...
He's fixated on the pants.
That's called the wagon train method of investigation, where you circle the body with investigators.
The wagon train.
Henry Lee.
Yeah, I think he had like a TV show for a minute or something.
Yeah, he might have.
Fascinating stuff, man.
Fascinating stuff.
Did you ever work...
On 9-11 stuff?
Were you ever part of that?
From ATF, I retired two months before that happened.
Now, that doesn't mean I couldn't have gone and probably been able to work along with thousands of others who responded.
I was supposed to teach that night in New Jersey.
Because I've done over 80 classes of teaching before my books came out, and I've done over 100 of those.
But I've instructed all over the country, and I was supposed to have a couple hundred New Jersey police and fire in my class.
Well, I was driving through Rhode Island, and when I got to Connecticut Line, there was one of those...
Billboard signs that said, avoid 95 through New York City.
And I had talk radio on, just AM radio.
And it was like a news station.
And they were interviewing somebody about the first jet when the second one right in front of them hit.
And that's when I got off the highway and turned around and tried to call those people, but I didn't get a hold of them for quite a bit because phone lines were kind of screwed up after that.
But no, I did not.
In one sense, I'm glad.
But in the other sense, I'm not because I usually like being in the middle of that type of thing and helping out.
Yeah, totally understandable.
I mean, if you're a part of it, it's super overwhelming.
But to be part of it, it's kind of like it's something to say, you know?
Like, yeah, I was part of that investigation.
That's pretty wild.
Right. I never had social media until I wrote my first book.
And the only reason I have social media is for my books.
And right now on my Facebook, I have nearly 5,000, mostly people who are related in some way to police, fire and police stuff.
And 11,000 people on LinkedIn and stuff like that.
And Facebook, every day, every week, I'm seeing firefighters dying at World Trade Center.
Yeah. I just read today 1,500 have died over the last 20 years, and 25,000 have cancers relating to it.
Yeah. They say the victims keep adding up because of all of the first responders inhaling all that dust and suicides.
Concrete dust is what...
Concrete dust is one of the worst things you could have, and that's what they were sucking in.
Yeah, suicides.
If you guys ever get the chance, go to New York City and go to the World Trade Center Museum.
I would love to.
It is done so well.
They have one of the engines got partially crushed.
It's in the actual basement of the World Trade Center.
It's in.
You're actually standing.
In the World Trade Center when you're in a museum.
I wonder if that's the engine that you see in the footage when the plane hits.
That engine keeps going.
It is crazy.
Because that flew like probably like eight more blocks or something.
It went far.
Yeah. And it's just they did it so well and so poignant.
You know, the people who weren't alive or too young, they all need to see what can happen, you know?
It's crazy to think a lot of people...
It's weird to be older.
You obviously lived through this.
I'm almost 40. We're the same age, basically.
You have these people born in the year 2000 or 2001.
You're like, God, you weren't even born yet.
Yeah, exactly.
When I was a kid, people would talk about December 7th.
December 7th, you know, the bombing at Pearl Harbor.
And everybody's life took a change right then and there because World War II for the United States went into effect right away.
And, you know, everybody's life changed with 9-11 too because things that we do today are just created because of 9-11.
Yeah, unfortunately our rights are being, you know, impinged upon.
That's the worst part, man.
Patriot Act's the worst part.
And I don't understand why another president can't just go in there and say, I am going to get rid of this.
We're going to do it.
Because it's done far more harm than good, in my opinion.
It could have.
I really don't know enough about it as far as...
People who have been affected, but yes, some warrants or some warrantless...
Warrantless searches, yes.
Yes, searches, you know, things like that.
I mean, we have...
Or if the government just, if an agent or, you know, any authority figure, whoever says, that person's a terrorist, and then, oh, shit, you're done.
They can send you to Guantanamo, no trial, nothing.
Right, and we know that a lot of people...
They just need to stop renewing it.
Yeah, that's true.
That's what I'm saying.
That's what I'm saying.
Any president can go in there and either just stop renewing it or veto it or whatever, do away with it.
I mean, it's not the first time a president has ended a program another president started.
But let's just not pay attention to that.
Yeah. So many things.
I just want to hide right in my house sometimes and not pay attention to anything.
Yeah, me too, man.
It's hard to not turn the news on and be like, what are the lies today?
Yeah. See?
Again, bureaucracy sucks.
This has been fun, fun, guys.
We covered some things I never talk about.
Yeah, it's been great, Wayne.
I appreciate you coming on and sharing your experiences, man.
Interesting stuff.
I love me some fire.
Fires are us.
Fires are us.
Oh, I got a great video to show you sometime, but potato chip fire.
Potato chip fire?
Potato chip fire.
Using potato chips to start fires?
Yeah. I've seen this, yeah.
But, Wayne, Mr. Miller, if you want to tell the listeners where they can find you or look at more of your work or anything, go ahead.
Please, check out my website.
It's done by his son-in-law, my son-in-law.
And he did a great job, burnbostonburn.com.
Burn Boston Burn.
You can buy my books there.
I mail them to you.
I got one a couple hours ago.
It's going out in tomorrow's mail.
That type of thing.
Or you can go to Amazon, too, if you wish.
Stay away from Bezos.
Yeah, exactly.
And I can't sign your book.
And my first two books have a lot of color pictures.
You can only get the color pictures from me because I didn't want to pay their prices for color pictures.
Yeah. I've heard that's extremely expensive to put color photos in your books.
That's why it's so rare.
I found a company in Ohio that only charges me for the 10 pictures that are in color versus charging the whole book as color.
Oh, wow.
That's good.
Wow. Yeah.
Yeah. Oh, wow.
They treat it like the government treats your taxes.
Damn. Oh, you worked overtime for three hours?
Well, that must have been 82 hours then.
Yeah. Yeah, we got your website.
Do you have an email if you want people to email you or anything like that?
Yep. Author, as in writer.
Author, Wayne Miller.
All one word.
At Gmail.
Author, Wayne Miller.
Okay. At Gmail.
Perfect. And I'll put all that stuff in the show notes too.
