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Speaker 3: You are now listening to True Murder, the most shocking
Speaker 3: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 3: written about them. Gaesy Bundy Dahmer, The Nightstalker DTK every
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Speaker 4: Good evening. All it took for one hundred people to
Speaker 4: die during a show by the hair metal band Great
Speaker 4: White was a sudden burst from four giant sparklers that
Speaker 4: ignited the acoustical foam lining the Station nightclub. But who
Speaker 4: was that fault and who would pay? This? Being Rhode Island,
Speaker 4: the two questions wouldn't necessarily have the same answer. Within
Speaker 4: twenty four hours, the Governor of Rhode Island and the
Speaker 4: local police chief were calling for criminal charges. Although the
Speaker 4: investigation had barely begun, key evidence still needed to be gathered,
Speaker 4: and many of the victims hadn't been identified. Though many
Speaker 4: parties could be held responsible, Fingers pointed quickly at the
Speaker 4: two brothers who owned the club, But were they really
Speaker 4: to blame. Best selling author and three time Emmy Award
Speaker 4: winning journalist Scott James investigates all the central figures, including
Speaker 4: the band's manager and lead singer, the fire inspector, the
Speaker 4: maker of the acoustical foam, as well as the brothers.
Speaker 4: Drawing on first and accounts interviews with many involved in
Speaker 4: court documents, James explores the rush to judgment about what
Speaker 4: happened that left the victims and their families, whose stories
Speaker 4: he also tells, desperate for justice. Trial by Fire is
Speaker 4: the heart wrenching story of the fire's aftermath because while
Speaker 4: the fire, one of America's deadliest, lasted minutes, the search
Speaker 4: for the truth would take years. The book that we're
Speaker 4: featuring this seating is Trial by Fire, a devastating tragedy,
Speaker 4: one hundred lives lost, and a fifteen year search for truth,
Speaker 4: with my special guest, journalist and author, Scott James. Welcome
Speaker 4: to the program, and thank you so much for this interview.
Speaker 5: Scott James, Hey, thank you for having me, Dan, I
Speaker 5: appreciate it.
Speaker 4: Thank you so much. As I just mentioned before we
Speaker 4: went on the air, this is an incredibly exciting book
Speaker 4: and it is a heart wrenching book at the same time,
Speaker 4: it's hard not to shed some tears at these very,
Speaker 4: very very personal stories of devastation and this trial by fire.
Speaker 4: Let's start just by just your connection to these owners
Speaker 4: of this club, sure, the Durindians, and just briefly your
Speaker 4: background and what really brought you to this story.
Speaker 5: Well, should probably start by explaining to the basics to
Speaker 5: folks about what exactly happened here. So this is February twentieth,
Speaker 5: two thousand and three. Rock band Great White sets off
Speaker 5: fireworks and in a matter of minutes, this nightclub becomes
Speaker 5: an inferno. When one hundred people are dead, hundreds of
Speaker 5: others are injured. The ripple effect is felt by the
Speaker 5: thousands in this community. It's really tightened the community of
Speaker 5: Rhode Island, the smallest state where it seems like everybody
Speaker 5: is connected to everybody else. And I grew up in
Speaker 5: a suburb of Providence, and so I really consider this
Speaker 5: to be the worst thing to happen where I grew up.
Speaker 5: But I have long ago, and many many years before
Speaker 5: the fire, had moved to California and was not really
Speaker 5: part of the community there. But I would come home,
Speaker 5: and I'm a journalist and I worked in television and
Speaker 5: the newspapers, and I would come home to see my
Speaker 5: family and friends a few times a year and people
Speaker 5: would say, you know this fire. While these people died,
Speaker 5: they were never any trials. Everything was settled plea bargained settlements,
Speaker 5: and so nothing was really vetted in court, and there
Speaker 5: were a lot of unanswered questions, and people thought that
Speaker 5: there had been a miscarriage of justice, that justice was
Speaker 5: not served, that there had been a rush to judgement,
Speaker 5: all these questions, and so about ten years ago I
Speaker 5: decided to start looking into the case. I did have
Speaker 5: an edge over some of the other journalists who pursued
Speaker 5: this story because two of the central figures, the nightclub
Speaker 5: business owners, they didn't actually own the building. They owned
Speaker 5: the business. These two guys, Jeffrey and Michael Didarien. And
Speaker 5: when I was a news director in Providence, so it
Speaker 5: means basically, I'm the person who oversaw a TV news
Speaker 5: department for many years, one of my employees was a
Speaker 5: reporter named Jeffrey de Darien. He would turn out to
Speaker 5: be the co owner of this club. So I thought, well,
Speaker 5: we're going to look into this. I'll go to Jeffrey
Speaker 5: because we'd worked together, even though as many more than
Speaker 5: twenty five years ago now, but at least I knew him,
Speaker 5: and I thought perhaps he would speak to me. And
Speaker 5: what I discovered was that even though Jeffrey had been
Speaker 5: a TV news reporter and a journalist himself, he and
Speaker 5: his brother hated journalists. They felt that they had been
Speaker 5: mistreated by the media, had had vowed never again to
Speaker 5: speak to another reporter or journalist. And so I come
Speaker 5: into the picture, and it actually took years to gain
Speaker 5: Jeffrey's trust, to get him to tell me anything, and
Speaker 5: to get him to introduce me to his Michael brother,
Speaker 5: his brother Michael, and that after that, other people came forward.
Speaker 5: Other people told me their stories for the first time,
Speaker 5: and it was really illuminating that much of what the
Speaker 5: public had been told about the fire turned out there
Speaker 5: were other facts to consider. And so the book really
Speaker 5: for the first time, kind of lays out all the
Speaker 5: facts of this case so that people can desire for
Speaker 5: themselves what happened, Was it a crime, and if it
Speaker 5: was a crime, who was really guilty.
Speaker 4: You talk about some of the characters that you were
Speaker 4: able to have access to, and survivors and people involved
Speaker 4: in this incredible fire, and one of those is Fred Chrysotomy.
Speaker 4: You chronicle his story with his fiance, Gina Russo, and
Speaker 4: so you open the book basically with Fred and Gina
Speaker 4: come into this concert and the reason why they even
Speaker 4: came to the club in the first place, and the
Speaker 4: idea that Fred had forgotten his crucifix. Tell us a
Speaker 4: little bit about Fred and Gina and just introduce these
Speaker 4: very very important characters.
Speaker 5: Well, it's really interestingly how so much of this tragedy,
Speaker 5: decisions that seem, you know, possibly unimportant, turned out to
Speaker 5: be consequential and our life decisions. So this the book
Speaker 5: opens with Fred and Gina in the car and they
Speaker 5: just parked. First of all, they kind of a new
Speaker 5: relationship less than a year old, but they had fallen
Speaker 5: in love and it was not their first time. Gina
Speaker 5: was divorced with kids, but they were in love and
Speaker 5: did everything together. Fred was the life of the party,
Speaker 5: always could have to He was always itching to do something.
Speaker 5: This is that type of guy, larger than life character.
Speaker 5: And they'd gone to a movie and the movie had
Speaker 5: already started, and they're like, well, we don't want to
Speaker 5: see a movie. It's already started, So what else can
Speaker 5: we do, and eventually they decided to go to this club,
Speaker 5: this nightclub with this band's Great Jack Russell's Great White
Speaker 5: is about to perform. So they get there and they
Speaker 5: park and Fred realizes that he's left his good luck cross,
Speaker 5: probably at home. Probably he probably took it off while
Speaker 5: he was showering and forgot to put it back on.
Speaker 5: Now he's only a few minutes away from the club,
Speaker 5: and they actually have a little discussion in the car, like,
Speaker 5: well we go back and get it, And eventually Fred says,
Speaker 5: you know what, you know whatever, but I'm not gonna
Speaker 5: you know, I'm not Jewelry is not a big deal
Speaker 5: to me, so let's just go in. That decision to
Speaker 5: go into that club rather than go home and get
Speaker 5: that good luck cross and put it on, was a
Speaker 5: life and death decision. By going to that club. They
Speaker 5: were there when the show actually started. They were there
Speaker 5: when the band took the stage and let out those fireworks.
Speaker 5: The fireworks ignited the foam and on the inside of
Speaker 5: the club walls, foam that should have been sound. Foam
Speaker 5: that should have been you know, sound, should have been
Speaker 5: fire proof, fire resistance, but instead was packing foam. The
Speaker 5: type of foam you've been using in sending things in
Speaker 5: the mail, which is highly flammable. It's an accelerant, it's
Speaker 5: the equivalent of solid gasoline. In fact, a federal investigation
Speaker 5: would determined that the walls of the nightclub were had
Speaker 5: about thirteen gallons of gasoline, the equivalent of thirteen gallons
Speaker 5: of gasoline on the wall. So when that fire started,
Speaker 5: it just went off like a torch. Well, Fred and
Speaker 5: Gina were right in the front row, and he immediately
Speaker 5: senses danger. A lot of people did not sense danger.
Speaker 5: In fact, when the fire started, people mostly didn't move.
Speaker 5: They were there dancing and cheering and seeing the columns
Speaker 5: of flames and thinking that it was part of the show.
Speaker 5: I mean, we see pyrotechnics at rock concerts all the time.
Speaker 5: So many people were doomed because they stood there thinking
Speaker 5: this was part of a special effect, and they did
Speaker 5: not run for the exits, and they died. Fred immediately
Speaker 5: senses this problem, and so he tries to get Gina out,
Speaker 5: and they try. First, they tried to go through the
Speaker 5: stage door, which is close to where they are, but
Speaker 5: they're turned back because well, that actually becomes a real
Speaker 5: debate in the investigation as to what happened? Why were
Speaker 5: they turned back? We know now that that door was
Speaker 5: shut during shows and had to remain shut because there
Speaker 5: were so many complaints that by the neighbors about the
Speaker 5: noise coming from this rock and roll club, and that
Speaker 5: door was right next to the stage, so if the
Speaker 5: door was open, the sound went into the neighborhood. The
Speaker 5: neighbors called the police. So the door was watched carefully
Speaker 5: and kept closed during the performance. And there is a
Speaker 5: performance happening as Fred sees these calumns of flames and says,
Speaker 5: we've got to get out. So they're turned away from
Speaker 5: the door that is closest to where they are, and
Speaker 5: they had, like almost everyone else did, eventually towards the
Speaker 5: way they came in. That's kind of the way our
Speaker 5: minds are wired, right, and the panic we're going to say,
Speaker 5: how do I get out of here? And what your
Speaker 5: brain knows is, well, you know how you got in,
Speaker 5: that's the way you should get out. Well, when hundreds
Speaker 5: of people all head to the same door simultaneously, it
Speaker 5: created a traffic jam and eventually literally a pile of
Speaker 5: people at the door that prevented people from getting out.
Speaker 5: And that's part of the reason why one hundred people died,
Speaker 5: and they died. It happened very fast. It's hard for
Speaker 5: us to imagine this, but within seconds that fire near
Speaker 5: the stage was something like fourteen hundred degrees and then
Speaker 5: within ninety seconds the place was filled with this black
Speaker 5: smoke that was deadly. And if you were inside that
Speaker 5: building at ninety seconds after that fire started, you most
Speaker 5: likely did not get out.
Speaker 4: Tell us for the reason for this this foam and
Speaker 4: why this highly flammable foam was installed in this club.
Speaker 4: But let's go back a little bit to the ownership
Speaker 4: of this club and the real we You mentioned that
Speaker 4: you were Jeffrey's boss at one time in journalism, TV broadcasting,
Speaker 4: So what was the Jeffreys interest in his brother in
Speaker 4: this club and what was the state of the club
Speaker 4: in terms of ownership just recently in terms of I
Speaker 4: think some.
Speaker 5: People who are from New England might remember an old
Speaker 5: chain of Italian restaurants called Papa Brillows, and this was
Speaker 5: an old Papa Brillos restaurant that had been converted into
Speaker 5: a rock and roll club. I mean, it's about as
Speaker 5: basic you can get in terms of a public venue.
Speaker 5: And so Jeffery worked in television news. After he worked
Speaker 5: for me, he went on to actually be quite successful
Speaker 5: working in Boston at a TV station, their WHDH Channel seven,
Speaker 5: really one of the premier local TV stations in the nation,
Speaker 5: and he was one of their star reporters. And so
Speaker 5: when something happened nationally like the Columbine shootings, they put
Speaker 5: him on a plane and he would report from there.
Speaker 5: He would be reported from nine to eleven. He did
Speaker 5: live shots and reporting for the Today Show as an
Speaker 5: NBC affiliate. So he was at the top of his career.
Speaker 5: But as many of us who work in the news
Speaker 5: media have witnessed over the time, and he was an
Speaker 5: early witness to this, this is not a very stable
Speaker 5: business to be in as far as law, long term
Speaker 5: career survival was concerned. And also the media landscape was changing,
Speaker 5: as we've seen, you know, a lot of news organizations
Speaker 5: have downsized or gone out of business. He was starting
Speaker 5: to see this happen and he thought that he should
Speaker 5: have something else in his life besides being the TV
Speaker 5: news reporter to support his family. And so his brother,
Speaker 5: who was a local businessman, had had several different ventures.
Speaker 5: He went to his brother and said, hey, we should
Speaker 5: do some business venture together so we can have some
Speaker 5: sort of other stable income in our lives besides, you know,
Speaker 5: for him TV news, And they looked at a laundry
Speaker 5: chain that they thought about purchasing as an investment, and
Speaker 5: that felt through and then this nightclub business was for sale.
Speaker 5: It was just the business. The club itself. The building
Speaker 5: itself was owned by someone else, in fact, owned by
Speaker 5: the person who owned those Papa Brillo restaurants had an
Speaker 5: investment in that, so they didn't actually own the building.
Speaker 5: The building was quite old, dated back to I think
Speaker 5: the twenties or third when it was originally built, and
Speaker 5: it was originally built as a public venue. In fact,
Speaker 5: they had live music back in the band of the
Speaker 5: days of the big bands they were playing in there.
Speaker 5: And so as a result of that, because it was
Speaker 5: always a public venue for entertainment on and offering, it's
Speaker 5: time it was grandfathered. So what that means for people
Speaker 5: that don't know is that basically the fire codes that
Speaker 5: applied early to when the building was built and expanded
Speaker 5: and established were in force, and so it was not
Speaker 5: subject to the most modern fire codes. It did not
Speaker 5: have sprinklers. Sprinklers or a technology that dates back to
Speaker 5: the eighteen hundreds, but they were not required in this
Speaker 5: particular building because of this grandfathering. So when this fire happens,
Speaker 5: and when this follm is ignited, it goes up like
Speaker 5: a torch. People have no protection from sprinklers, and we
Speaker 5: know this sprinkler probably would have saved every single life
Speaker 5: because just a couple nights earlier in Minneapolis, an almost
Speaker 5: identical situation happened. We were a rock band set off
Speaker 5: fireworks indoors in a club that set the acoustic foam
Speaker 5: on fire, but that building had sprinklers and every single
Speaker 5: person survived. So yeah, a lot of things isn't wrong
Speaker 5: on a lot of different ways that led to this tragedy.
Speaker 5: People who often refer to it as kind of the
Speaker 5: perfect storm of fires because so many things went wrong
Speaker 5: all at the same time. If fireworks were not legal,
Speaker 5: it was not legal to light off fireworks inside that nightclub.
Speaker 5: These were fifteen foot arcs of sparks in a club
Speaker 5: that had twelve foot ceiling, so the decision to light
Speaker 5: them off was not very smart. It was definitely illegal
Speaker 5: in the state of Rhoe Island to have those fireworks
Speaker 5: and to use them indoors. The band would claim that
Speaker 5: they had permission from the nightclub business own owners to
Speaker 5: do this the Jadarian brothers, but the ja Darian brothers
Speaker 5: have always maintained that that is not true. And within
Speaker 5: twenty four hours of the fire, the New York Times
Speaker 5: actually did an investigation because the band had claimed that
Speaker 5: they had permission to do fireworks, and they went to
Speaker 5: several of the venues that it hosted the shows by
Speaker 5: the same band in the days leading up to the
Speaker 5: fire and found one after another after another said that
Speaker 5: the band let off fireworks without permission in their clubs too.
Speaker 5: Probably the most famous on that list was a place
Speaker 5: called the Stone Pony, which is known as kind of
Speaker 5: where Bruce Springsteen and the EA Street Band got their
Speaker 5: start down in Asbury Park, New Jersey, and that nightclub
Speaker 5: owner was so angry that the band had set off
Speaker 5: fireworks there without permission and that he saw what happened
Speaker 5: in Rhode Island, and so he released all the contracts
Speaker 5: that the band had signed down in New Jersey and
Speaker 5: it showed, you know, these riders are very specific for
Speaker 5: rock bands, you know, down to like the type of
Speaker 5: potation chips are going to serve in the Green room.
Speaker 5: But there's no mention in any of that paperwork about
Speaker 5: fireworks or pyrotechnics, and yet it happened. And the guy
Speaker 5: was livid when it happened. I guess he read them
Speaker 5: the Riot Act and then when he saw what happened
Speaker 5: in Rhode Island, he went public and said, you know,
Speaker 5: they did the same thing to me. You know, we
Speaker 5: were lucky that we didn't die, but they did the
Speaker 5: same thing here. So there were a lot of questions
Speaker 5: about did the band have permission, did the band not
Speaker 5: have permission? But whether or not they had permission, it
Speaker 5: was illegal to set off those harroworks. So again another
Speaker 5: thing that went wrong that was preventable.
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Speaker 4: Now, Scott, how did it come to be that there
Speaker 4: was video camera and a photographer in this club?
Speaker 5: Tell yeah, I mean this. This story is full of
Speaker 5: so many twists, and many of them incredibly cruel. Possibly
Speaker 5: one of the cruelest twists was that this tragedy was
Speaker 5: captured on video from inside the nightclub. So in twenty twenty,
Speaker 5: we're very used to the idea of things being caught
Speaker 5: on video. It happens all the time. But in two
Speaker 5: thousand and three, the iPhone had not even been invented yet,
Speaker 5: so it is extremely rare to cast for something on video.
Speaker 5: But at the club on the night of this tragedy
Speaker 5: inside was a local TV news videographer basically a photojournalist
Speaker 5: for one of the local TV stations, who is there
Speaker 5: shooting what they call broll. B Roll is kind of
Speaker 5: generic footage that's going to be used later by the
Speaker 5: reporter to cover in their story. So the photojournist is
Speaker 5: there to shoot b roll for this upcoming story, and
Speaker 5: you can't make this up. The story he was working
Speaker 5: on was one about public venue safety, So he is
Speaker 5: rolling as the band takes the stage, as the fireworks
Speaker 5: go off, as the flame the stage turns into columns
Speaker 5: of flames. This is why we know there's thirty seconds
Speaker 5: between when the fire starts and when panic really sets
Speaker 5: in in the crowd, because it's all caught on tape.
Speaker 5: It is probably one of the most documented fires in
Speaker 5: the history of United States. This fire is taught to
Speaker 5: every fire investigator in the United States and most firefighters
Speaker 5: study this fire as an example of how all things
Speaker 5: can go wrong. At the same time, that videotape, as
Speaker 5: horrible as it is, is actually used as a learning
Speaker 5: tool now and probably has prevented many other people from
Speaker 5: dying because firefighters use this as a training tool. But yeah,
Speaker 5: just awful. A twist yet another in this case, whereas
Speaker 5: it all was caught on tape.
Speaker 4: Now we didn't talk about and it comes up later
Speaker 4: as well. But there was a reason why the brothers
Speaker 4: put this foam in this in their in their club,
Speaker 4: but also the reasons why somebody wanted that foam to
Speaker 4: be there for them to make those kinds of changes.
Speaker 4: Tell us about that.
Speaker 5: Well, it's really interesting where we hear about, you know,
Speaker 5: neighborhood squabbles about zoning and things like that. This is
Speaker 5: really almost a classic case of how yet again something
Speaker 5: went horribly wrong. So when the place was a restaurant,
Speaker 5: that old Italian restaurant that had eventually become you know,
Speaker 5: there's a lot of houses around there. It's somewhat of
Speaker 5: a busy commercial route, but right next to it is
Speaker 5: a residential area, and everybody lived in peace and quiet
Speaker 5: for years and years. Mean Italian restaurant doesn't make much noise,
Speaker 5: and all of a sudden somebody put in for a
Speaker 5: permit to turn it into some sort of bar or
Speaker 5: watering hole or something, and and that was fine, except
Speaker 5: it wasn't. It wasn't really just a bar watering hole.
Speaker 5: It turned out to be a rock and roll live
Speaker 5: music venue. So literally one night, the neighbors wake up
Speaker 5: to this incredible sound disrupting their sleep, and they are angry,
Speaker 5: and it starts this campaign that goes for years and
Speaker 5: years and years against the town. They felt they were
Speaker 5: the victims of a bait and switch. They didn't get notification.
Speaker 5: Had they been told that this was going to be
Speaker 5: a rock and roll club, they would have asked for
Speaker 5: something to be done to protect them from the sound,
Speaker 5: or maybe they would have said not here, don't do
Speaker 5: it here, not in my backyard. But they didn't have
Speaker 5: that chance, and so they felt victimized by the system
Speaker 5: in this town that allowed this to happen. So they
Speaker 5: filed complaint and painting complaints. Well, the Dadarians in the
Speaker 5: year two thousand decide to buy this nightclub business, and
Speaker 5: they are told immediately by the local police chief that look,
Speaker 5: we're tired of all these complaints from the neighbors. So
Speaker 5: either you were going to deal with this sound problem
Speaker 5: from this night club, or we're not going to issue
Speaker 5: you a business license or an entertainment license so that
Speaker 5: you can have your shows. So you know, this had
Speaker 5: gone off for years and years, but when the Darians
Speaker 5: bought it, the towns on opportunities to deal with this,
Speaker 5: and they made it a threat, a kind of an
Speaker 5: existential threat, like you will fix this problem that has
Speaker 5: never been fixed, or we will put you out of business.
Speaker 5: So they go on a search for answers. The first
Speaker 5: thing they do is go to the neighbors and they say, well,
Speaker 5: what can we do? And they offered to buy them
Speaker 5: air conditionings, for example, so that they could keep their
Speaker 5: windows shut. They would be white noise and that would
Speaker 5: help keep the sound out of their homes. One of
Speaker 5: the neighbors worked for a foam company, American Foam, and
Speaker 5: he suggested, he says, he made a lot of suggestions
Speaker 5: as to how to abate the sound, but among them
Speaker 5: was foam.
Speaker 2: Well.
Speaker 5: Jeffrey de Darien, because he had been a TV news reporter,
Speaker 5: he'd worked in radio he was very familiar with sound foam.
Speaker 5: In fact, you could say that he was more familiar
Speaker 5: with sound foam than probably anyone else would be, because
Speaker 5: he spent his entire career in broadcast studios that are
Speaker 5: covered in this type of foam sound booth. You go
Speaker 5: into every recording studio has it. So he's like, well,
Speaker 5: I know that stuff. You know that works, And so
Speaker 5: they purchased it from American Foam. They installed it, but
Speaker 5: it wasn't sound foam, it was packing foam. And that's
Speaker 5: part of what we look at in the book is like,
Speaker 5: how did a mistake like that happen? And you actually
Speaker 5: see for the first time, the public actually sees the letter,
Speaker 5: the facts that the brothers sent to the phone company
Speaker 5: and what they ordered. What they ordered, however, was not
Speaker 5: what they received. And the two types of home are
Speaker 5: identical visually, there's no difference even the way they feel.
Speaker 5: Interesting that that neighbor, the one who was an expert
Speaker 5: about foam, went to the club after the phone had
Speaker 5: been installed and stood on the stage and saw with
Speaker 5: his close up, touched it with his hands, and he
Speaker 5: had no idea, even as an expert, that what was
Speaker 5: on the walls of that night club was not sound foam,
Speaker 5: but was in fact deadly packing foam.
Speaker 4: Now let's talk about, as you do, about the tour manager,
Speaker 4: Great White's tour manager, Daniel Baschel and his role in this.
Speaker 4: And you explained these gerbs, these giant sparklers.
Speaker 5: Right, So basically it's really interesting again how things turn
Speaker 5: on a dime. Great White or Jack Russell's Great White
Speaker 5: is officially the legal name of the group at that
Speaker 5: point because they had been part of breakups and litigation.
Speaker 5: Like a lot of rock bands, Go Through had never
Speaker 5: used fireworks as part of its shows in the past.
Speaker 5: In fact, they had appeared at the same club. This
Speaker 5: would have been probably around the year of two thousand,
Speaker 5: after the Dariens had first purchased the nightclub business, and
Speaker 5: they didn't use any fireworks then, so there was no
Speaker 5: idea that people should have known that this was their stick,
Speaker 5: because it wasn't their stick. They incorporated fireworks as part
Speaker 5: of this new tour that they had just started a
Speaker 5: few months earlier. But Daniel Beakley, that's how you say
Speaker 5: his last name, Beakley, He is the person who is
Speaker 5: their tour manager, kind of like a roadie but a
Speaker 5: little bit more elevated than that, and he had done
Speaker 5: pyrotechnics with other bands, including a band called Wasp, and
Speaker 5: so he was familiar with how to get a hold
Speaker 5: of them, and he would do this on his own
Speaker 5: kind of do it yourself thing. Now, the companies that
Speaker 5: sold him these fireworks, and this is something it's documented
Speaker 5: and made public for the first time in the book,
Speaker 5: came with a lot of warnings and they were very
Speaker 5: explicit even in writing, and they said, you know, basically, Dan,
Speaker 5: if you're going to be doing these pyrotechnics, here's a
Speaker 5: checklist of ten things you need to make sure you
Speaker 5: do for safety of people if you're to use him.
Speaker 5: And he did none of those things. I mean, some
Speaker 5: of them are really interesting and basic, like when you
Speaker 5: transport the fireworks, to make sure they're in like a
Speaker 5: lead lined box, so you know, we're talking about the
Speaker 5: equivalent of the explosives here, so that when you're traveling
Speaker 5: on your tour bus with these explosives, you know, blow
Speaker 5: up the bus and the highway. He had him in
Speaker 5: a cardboard box and you actually see the cardboard box
Speaker 5: in pictures from the night of the event. They said
Speaker 5: you should have have your own fire extinguishers, yeah, at
Speaker 5: the ready on each side of the stage, held in
Speaker 5: people's hands, so that if something goes wrong, you can immediately,
Speaker 5: you know, get in there and deal with it, and
Speaker 5: that they had had nothing like that. They also said
Speaker 5: that he should test at the venue in the exact
Speaker 5: spot where he intends to do pyrotechnics, you know, hours
Speaker 5: before the actual show. He should do a whole test
Speaker 5: run of the system to make sure that nothing is
Speaker 5: is going to go wrong. And of course nothing like
Speaker 5: that happened, and on and on and on and on
Speaker 5: things like that. So, but I will say this in
Speaker 5: Dan Beakley's defense, there was no way for him to
Speaker 5: know that when he let off these fireworks that the
Speaker 5: club itself was such a death trap, that the walls
Speaker 5: were so flammable and dangerous. That was not something that
Speaker 5: he could have anticipated. You know, a lot of people
Speaker 5: look at him and say, you know, that was idiotic
Speaker 5: for him to do those fireworks, And I see that,
Speaker 5: and I understand that. But you know, there's no intent
Speaker 5: here by him or anyone else to hurt anyone, and
Speaker 5: so he could not have known that. And they had
Speaker 5: successfully used these fire techniques at all sorts of shows.
Speaker 5: In fact, Jack Russell used to brag about how that
Speaker 5: he could stick his head in these sparks and not
Speaker 5: hurt himself, like it was seeming like a magic trick
Speaker 5: type thing. So so he would not have known that
Speaker 5: this was going to turn so deadly so quickly.
Speaker 4: So what does the what is the owner corner? Jeff
Speaker 4: is Mykels not working that shift that doesn't work at
Speaker 4: the club like Jeff. What does Jeff doing during this
Speaker 4: whole thing? What does he notice and how does he
Speaker 4: make himself? How does he make it out of the club.
Speaker 5: Well, it's interesting that Jeff is behind the bar. He's
Speaker 5: even though he's, you know, this kind of hotshot TV
Speaker 5: reporter and in fact he's still working doing TV news
Speaker 5: reporting when he's co owning this club on this night,
Speaker 5: he's basically a bar back. He's behind the bar with
Speaker 5: the bartenders running down, getting beer from the cooler, things
Speaker 5: like that, just keeping the bar stocked. So he's he
Speaker 5: says that he didn't actually see the fireworks go off.
Speaker 5: He get his head down doing whatever he was doing,
Speaker 5: and only when it becomes clear that there's a fire
Speaker 5: and he recognizes that it's not normal, he goes running
Speaker 5: towards the stage, and so does one of the club
Speaker 5: managers and with the fire extingisher, but they can't get
Speaker 5: past the crowd. At that point. It's a rock concert
Speaker 5: and basically between the bar and the stage are hundreds
Speaker 5: of people who are all partying and jumping up and
Speaker 5: down and having a great time. And so immediately when
Speaker 5: it turns bad, as soon as the fire alarm goes off,
Speaker 5: which is about that that thirty second mark, this is
Speaker 5: when people realize that this is serious. It's a stampede.
Speaker 5: And Jeffrey is like many people kind of just pushed
Speaker 5: out by the stampede outside because he's towards because the
Speaker 5: bar is towards the more towards the exits than the stage.
Speaker 5: So he runs around the nightclub checking the exits. The
Speaker 5: stage door exit is wide open where and the band
Speaker 5: had just come out of there and a couple of
Speaker 5: other people. But because that's where the fires started at
Speaker 5: the stage, that's where it gets to about fourteen hundred
Speaker 5: degrees within a matter of seconds, So that door effectively,
Speaker 5: even though it's open, it effectively is impassable because the
Speaker 5: fire is so intense at that one spot and then
Speaker 5: really within seconds after that, we have what's called a flashover.
Speaker 5: So a flashover is when the room when the fire
Speaker 5: becomes very superheated, heated, and things just kind of spontaneously combust.
Speaker 5: A firefighter explained it to me. Basically, a flashover is
Speaker 5: the moment where a fire in a room becomes a
Speaker 5: room on fire. And at that point, really, I'll hope
Speaker 5: is kind of lost for folks who are inside. But
Speaker 5: Jeffrey goes out in front. He's trying to get people
Speaker 5: out of that pile up at the front door. He's
Speaker 5: seen on video, Remember that news photographer, he's pushed out
Speaker 5: in the stampede. You actually see him pushed out in
Speaker 5: the stampede, and he continues to roll tape because he
Speaker 5: doesn't know, and no one knows, by the way, how
Speaker 5: deadly this fire is. In fact, it would be hours
Speaker 5: and hours later till people realize that even a single
Speaker 5: person had perished in the fire, let alone one hundred.
Speaker 5: So the news photog does, whether the news photographer does,
Speaker 5: he basically starts getting the wide shots of the fire.
Speaker 5: He goes walks all around the building, and you can
Speaker 5: see Jeffrey in some of the video at the front door.
Speaker 5: He's trying to tear down to the signs that they're
Speaker 5: near the front door to clear it to so that
Speaker 5: people can get out of that jam up clearing the entrance.
Speaker 5: You also see Daniel Beakley, the tour manager who the
Speaker 5: firefighters arrive and he's helping them try to get their
Speaker 5: hose up to the building, things like that. So you
Speaker 5: see these people and what they're doing. This is all again,
Speaker 5: seconds have gone by, seconds and minutes. This is not
Speaker 5: something that this is something that happens so quickly. It's
Speaker 5: kind of mind boggling. So yeah, so Jeffrey is there,
Speaker 5: he sees all of this and he you know, some
Speaker 5: of it we don't know. I mean, one of the
Speaker 5: challenges of writing this book was getting Jeffrey to remember things.
Speaker 5: What we do know is that Jeffrey is got blood
Speaker 5: all over himself in the aftermath. What we don't know
Speaker 5: is whose blood it is, because it's not his own.
Speaker 5: He's not cut, he's not burned, and so whose blood
Speaker 5: is that and how did it get all over him?
Speaker 5: We don't know. Well, he doesn't remember. He remembers some
Speaker 5: things from that trauma, but not all things. And in fact,
Speaker 5: most people who lived through this have suffered some sort
Speaker 5: of post traumatic stress disorder. One of the failings in
Speaker 5: this besides the failing of you know, to obviously to
Speaker 5: have a safe building with proper fire inspections. In the aftermath,
Speaker 5: people did not get the help that they needed, and
Speaker 5: part of the help they did not receive was mental
Speaker 5: health care. I mean, so many people I spoke to
Speaker 5: after all of these years are still suffering, They're still
Speaker 5: messed up. It's just really awful that people did not
Speaker 5: get the intervention they needed. They were kind of really
Speaker 5: left to fend for themselves. And I think part of
Speaker 5: that was because of who they were. The people who
Speaker 5: were at that show were rockers, most of them have tattoos,
Speaker 5: working class people, you know, whether they're waitresses or work
Speaker 5: for a moving company or electricians or whatever they are,
Speaker 5: and so this is not the typical crowd that you know,
Speaker 5: elite charities raise money for. So after the initial trauma
Speaker 5: of this disaster, they were kind of just abandoned and
Speaker 5: left to fend for themselves. Really kind of an awful
Speaker 5: commentary about our society and our institutions that we think
Speaker 5: are going to be there to protect us or help us.
Speaker 5: They were not there for these people either before or
Speaker 5: after this this awful catastrophe.
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Speaker 4: talked about the club and this fire and its aftermath,
Speaker 4: and in a short order, within minutes, these people were
Speaker 4: most people were burned beyond recognition or incinerated. You said
Speaker 4: that the temperature went up to fourteen hundred degrees in
Speaker 4: that building in a very very short order. What was
Speaker 4: the capacity of the club or the known capacity of
Speaker 4: the club, because that's going to be important later when
Speaker 4: we talk about the civil case and the and the
Speaker 4: trial or the proposed trial. Let's talk about how many
Speaker 4: people they thought were one of them.
Speaker 5: In one of the enduring mysteries of this case, and
Speaker 5: it is to a largest an unanswered question is how
Speaker 5: many people were inside that nightclub when the fire started.
Speaker 5: One of the mistakes made early on by journalists was
Speaker 5: that they determined. I don't know how they got this,
Speaker 5: what sources they were using, because it was incorrect. The
Speaker 5: initial reporting was that the club had a capacity of
Speaker 5: three hundred people, and clearly there were more than three
Speaker 5: hundred people there because one hundred were dead and a
Speaker 5: couple hundred more were hurt. So immediately the local newspaper
Speaker 5: and the local media concluded that the club was illegally
Speaker 5: over capacity. The truth was that the club had nicclub
Speaker 5: had a capacity of four hundred and four and so
Speaker 5: whether they exceeded that is something that is still open
Speaker 5: to debate, and I do quite a bit of reporting
Speaker 5: on that and try to look at it from all
Speaker 5: the different angles, and there are you know, the Attorney
Speaker 5: General had warned the media immediately after the fire to
Speaker 5: not to jump to conclusions about that because this is
Speaker 5: a place where it was a fluid situation. The way
Speaker 5: I describe it in the book is that people were
Speaker 5: in and out of the nightclub, so the parking lot
Speaker 5: was kind of a party in and of itself besides
Speaker 5: the club. And so, you know, this is the days
Speaker 5: when people could smoke, still smoke inside a nightclub that
Speaker 5: was allowed in two thousand and three at least in
Speaker 5: Rhode Island, but you couldn't smoke pot. And this was
Speaker 5: a party in crowd that you know, like to smoke pot.
Speaker 5: So people were outdoor smoking pots. Some people had booze
Speaker 5: in their car, some people were hooking up. I mean,
Speaker 5: there's a lot of It was a party. This is
Speaker 5: a rock show, and so it's a fluid situation. Is
Speaker 5: who's inside the building and who's not so key probably
Speaker 5: defining out what is what's the clicker? So at the
Speaker 5: door there's a person taking note of people going in
Speaker 5: and out, Andrea Mancini, and she uses clicker. And so
Speaker 5: according to curiously secret grand jury testimony, several witnesses said
Speaker 5: that they saw the clicker and it put the crowd
Speaker 5: just before showtime at three twenty five, maybe three fifty
Speaker 5: something of that, but certainly below the capacity of the
Speaker 5: club at four or four. Well, Andrea perishes in the fire,
Speaker 5: and the States never reports finding the clicker in the aftermath.
Speaker 5: So that would have provided a really important clue to
Speaker 5: let us know. But beyond that, you have witnesses. So
Speaker 5: one of the main characters of or subjects I should say,
Speaker 5: in the book, we talked about Gina and Fred Gina
Speaker 5: talks about how that when she and Fred got there
Speaker 5: that they were able to they got there just minutes
Speaker 5: before showtime, that they were able to walk up right
Speaker 5: to the stage and it was crowded, but not you know,
Speaker 5: so crowded that they couldn't move around. They had One
Speaker 5: of the band members of Jack Russell's Great White, was
Speaker 5: kind of the savant when it came to estimating crowd sizes,
Speaker 5: probably because the band gets a cut of the door
Speaker 5: in a lot of places. So he had this ability
Speaker 5: to estimate a club and how many people were in it.
Speaker 5: And he's the first person actually to testify before the
Speaker 5: grand jury, and he has this astounding memory, like he
Speaker 5: can just go through all the different venues they were
Speaker 5: at in the last several years and say, that place
Speaker 5: we had, you know, to fifty, this place we had
Speaker 5: one hundred and seventy five, whatever, and he estimates it
Speaker 5: it being about three fifty. The officer they had an
Speaker 5: off duty officer there for you know, for safety purposes
Speaker 5: that the Darien brothers had hired put it in like
Speaker 5: the three hundreds. But all of that said, what happens
Speaker 5: in the aftermath is one of the local news organizations
Speaker 5: the local newspaper, the Province Journal, determines that they even
Speaker 5: though they've been told, you know, this is a difficult
Speaker 5: thing to know because people are in and out, and
Speaker 5: even though there's this other evidence out there, they decide
Speaker 5: that they are going to solve this riddle. And so
Speaker 5: what they do is they set up a huge team
Speaker 5: of reporters and journalists to try to determine exactly how
Speaker 5: many people are inside that nightclub. And the article that
Speaker 5: they do says that there were four hundred and twelve,
Speaker 5: and they put this on the front page while well
Speaker 5: the grand Juries meeting and while this being determined whether
Speaker 5: or not they're going to be any criminal charges, and
Speaker 5: they just make this statement of that the club was
Speaker 5: illegally overcrowded based on their information. Well, when you look
Speaker 5: at their story quite carefully, you find out that in fact,
Speaker 5: they had not confirmed all of those people on that
Speaker 5: of that four hundred and twelve, then in fact, there
Speaker 5: was one hundred and eleven of them who they never
Speaker 5: even spoke to. There were people like friends of friends,
Speaker 5: like you know, I saw Dave there. So Dave's name
Speaker 5: ended up on the list they heard got from from
Speaker 5: from lawyers, personal injury attorneys who were all jockeying at
Speaker 5: that point to get as many people signed up in
Speaker 5: a lawsuit against all the responsible parties or legally libel parties,
Speaker 5: and so they just you know, came with a whole
Speaker 5: list of people. I mean, later I would hear from
Speaker 5: people that said when they saw that list of names
Speaker 5: in the newspaper, to his credit, published all the names,
Speaker 5: so people would look at it and say, well, that
Speaker 5: person wasn't there. That person wasn't there. One of the
Speaker 5: people they had on the list was a guy who
Speaker 5: is seen on a YouTube video running to the fire.
Speaker 5: He's a journalist, he's a photo journalist trying to get
Speaker 5: pictures of the fire. He's seen running to the fire,
Speaker 5: responding to it to cover it. And he is on
Speaker 5: the journal's list as somebody who was inside the nightclub
Speaker 5: when the fire started. So the other flow on the
Speaker 5: province journals reporting was that that capacity I spoke about
Speaker 5: the four hundred and four that only accounts for the
Speaker 5: public areas of the nightclub. And this is very clear
Speaker 5: when you study the grand jury testimony of the fire inspector,
Speaker 5: is that the four hundred and four only applies to
Speaker 5: the square footage where people are standing who are patrons.
Speaker 5: So the staff in the kitchen, behind the bar, the band,
Speaker 5: behind the scenes, the green room, none of those people
Speaker 5: can be counted in that four hundred and four capacity
Speaker 5: because they're not in the public part of the club.
Speaker 5: So Jeffrey de Darien, we talked about him. He's behind
Speaker 5: the bar, he's doing bar back, he's running up, up
Speaker 5: and down from to the basement, cooler, storage room to
Speaker 5: the bar. He can't be counted in that capacity number.
Speaker 5: But he is counted in the Province Journal story. So
Speaker 5: there's this problem with the journal does this, And the
Speaker 5: journal is a very powerful news organization in that area,
Speaker 5: So if the journal says it, it has a lot
Speaker 5: of weight. And so the public was basically told by
Speaker 5: an authoritative source that the club was illegally overcrowded, and
Speaker 5: that is what people believe. But the truth is, we
Speaker 5: don't know for sure that it was illegally overcrowded. Now
Speaker 5: it's four hundred and four too many people for a
Speaker 5: club that size, that's a different question, and that's a
Speaker 5: really good question to look at. What was the capacity
Speaker 5: set too high for a club of that size. We
Speaker 5: know for a fact of course, because of what happened
Speaker 5: that the club could not be safely evacuated in time
Speaker 5: to save everyone's life. But in determining how capacity, they're
Speaker 5: not thinking that the walls of the club are covered
Speaker 5: in gasoline and that people are only going to have
Speaker 5: a minute to live or die. They think of evacuations,
Speaker 5: but you know, a normal fire that would have not
Speaker 5: been lit by this accelerant would not have gone up
Speaker 5: this quickly, and people would have had enough time to
Speaker 5: get out. Each of the doors were four exits to
Speaker 5: the club, and each of the doors was rated to
Speaker 5: be able to let one hundred and fifty people per
Speaker 5: minute out each of those doors, which would be obviously
Speaker 5: six hundred, which would be the rough math on that.
Speaker 5: But of course that's not how things happened in reality
Speaker 5: when it came right down to it. But again, in
Speaker 5: calculating clubs, you know the capacity, there's no way a
Speaker 5: fire inspector would have thought that well, And of course
Speaker 5: we're going to take into acount the idea that this
Speaker 5: place is is so explosive that it's just not what
Speaker 5: has happened. But you know, the other failing of this
Speaker 5: that gets a lot of attention is worth talking about
Speaker 5: is the fact that why didn't the fire inspectors notice
Speaker 5: this foam on the walls and test it to make
Speaker 5: sure that it was the non flammable type and not
Speaker 5: the flammable type. It's actually that's what they're supposed to do.
Speaker 5: That's part of inspections, and it's done all the time
Speaker 5: in public venues. If a bar or a nightclub put
Speaker 5: up a new curtain, for example, or a theater, when
Speaker 5: the inspector comes by, they're supposed to either ask for
Speaker 5: the paperwork that shows that this curtain is flame retardant,
Speaker 5: or they have to snip off a little piece of it,
Speaker 5: bring it out to the parking lot and try to
Speaker 5: set it on fire to see if it's flammable or not.
Speaker 5: So those type of that type of inspection was not done.
Speaker 5: That foam had been on the walls for about almost
Speaker 5: three years, and the club had been inspected many many times,
Speaker 5: even just a few weeks before the fire had been
Speaker 5: declared safe. It's part of the reason why the TV
Speaker 5: journalist was at that particular place to get the b
Speaker 5: roll for that story about save public venues. He was
Speaker 5: working with Jeffrey de Darien, who was a co owner
Speaker 5: of the club, and Jeffrey had to get this be
Speaker 5: roll and he thought, well, why not shoot it at
Speaker 5: my club. It it's passed all its inspections, and so
Speaker 5: it's a safe club. So this is an example that
Speaker 5: we can use, at least in a generic sense of
Speaker 5: a safe venue. And of course then everything goes horribly,
Speaker 5: horribly wrong. But as somebody said later, only a crazy
Speaker 5: person would have invited in a photojournalist into a club
Speaker 5: that they thought was inherently dangerous.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, let's stop for these messages. Now. It's interesting you
Speaker 4: talk about the journal and them overestimating or not knowing
Speaker 4: at all whatsoever what the capacity of that club was,
Speaker 4: reporting that it was overcrowded and it was beyond capacity.
Speaker 4: But more importantly was the portrayal by all media and
Speaker 4: the journal about the portrayal of who was culpable in this.
Speaker 4: So tell us who you believe was obviously targeted in
Speaker 4: this the three players.
Speaker 5: Well, it's interesting. So one of the things that happens
Speaker 5: I called us a rush to judgment, which some people
Speaker 5: have a tough time again their head around, because in fact,
Speaker 5: it took years for the legal wranglings of this case
Speaker 5: to play out and for the legal aspects to end.
Speaker 5: All of this ended with plea bargains and legal settlements.
Speaker 5: The plea bargains were done under enormous pressure for the
Speaker 5: people the accused to take to do some sort of
Speaker 5: plea and that took years. But when I talk about
Speaker 5: a Russian judgment, I'm talking about what happens in the
Speaker 5: first moments and in the first hours of this tragedy.
Speaker 5: So as this awful catastrophe is happening, the local police
Speaker 5: chief tells the Associated Press that the nightclub business owners,
Speaker 5: the Darien brothers quote most definitely will be indicted. So
Speaker 5: he is already pronounced who he thinks is guilty in
Speaker 5: this case, and he has done no investigation. And I
Speaker 5: remember I was watching this like so many people because
Speaker 5: of that horrible video, this story, you know, the tragedy
Speaker 5: in it itself is enormous, and then that video made
Speaker 5: Because that video existed, the story became viral. Before we
Speaker 5: even used words like viral, had been shown all over
Speaker 5: the world, as the videos of the fire has probably
Speaker 5: been seen by hundreds of millions of people. Well, I
Speaker 5: was one of them. I was sitting out in California
Speaker 5: and I'm watching this unfold on CNN, And of course
Speaker 5: I remember that Jeffrey was a co owner of that club,
Speaker 5: and in fact, I, because I'm local, I had been
Speaker 5: in that club years earlier myself and had seen it myself.
Speaker 5: So I was interested. And when I heard that this comment, well,
Speaker 5: the police chief had decided who was guilty before there
Speaker 5: was an investigation. I immediately thought, well, gosh, that's not right.
Speaker 5: That seems like a rush to judgment. But being out
Speaker 5: in California and not being a part of the Rhode
Speaker 5: Island news media at that point, it really is nothing
Speaker 5: I could do about it, but it did plant that
Speaker 5: question in my mind as to what in the world
Speaker 5: is going on now those who may or may not
Speaker 5: know much about Rhode Island. Rhode Island has a very
Speaker 5: shaky history when it comes to corruption. It's known as
Speaker 5: one of the most corrupt states in the United States.
Speaker 5: I mean, if governors go to prison, mayors, it's somebody
Speaker 5: have had two Supreme Court justices resign in disgrace or
Speaker 5: because of mob ties or misuse of you know, it's
Speaker 5: just that's kind of how things roll in that state.
Speaker 5: So and because I had worked there and covered the
Speaker 5: news there, I was well aware of the corruption and
Speaker 5: just thought, well, this is just great, another example of
Speaker 5: Rhode Island corruption, pronouncing guilt before you've even done one
Speaker 5: minute of investigation. So what happens the chief says this
Speaker 5: to the associated press, It gets picked up all over
Speaker 5: the world, is even carried by Fox News. Well what
Speaker 5: happened then, though, was this dramatically, This is a domino
Speaker 5: effect that dramatically changes and alters the investigation and frankly
Speaker 5: the outcome of this case and this and how we
Speaker 5: under our understanding of it. So until that moment, the
Speaker 5: Dadarien brothers, who as the owners of the nightclub business,
Speaker 5: had all the keys to the castle. They were the
Speaker 5: ones who knew everything. They knew how the business operated,
Speaker 5: they knew what was where, They could answer all of
Speaker 5: these questions, and in fact, they had done interviews with
Speaker 5: the police and prosecutors, the state police investigators. Jeffrey had
Speaker 5: done two lengthy interviews the night of the fire, telling
Speaker 5: them everything he knew and as far as he was concerned,
Speaker 5: from his perspective, somebody came in his club and set
Speaker 5: off a bomb and killed all these people. So he's
Speaker 5: seeing it from that perspective that they have been suffered
Speaker 5: this horrible disaster that he's part of that. So he's
Speaker 5: telling them everything he knows, and they get Michael Michaels
Speaker 5: out of town, Michael's in Florida. They get Michael on
Speaker 5: the phone. Michael cooperates. Michael is an interview with police,
Speaker 5: telling them what he knows, and so they are cooperating.
Speaker 5: But then where it gets out about what the police
Speaker 5: chief has said, and then lawyers for the brothers say,
Speaker 5: you have to stop cooperating, you have to stop talking.
Speaker 5: You may never speak to another investigator again because they
Speaker 5: have already concluded that you are guilty before they have
Speaker 5: done an investigation, so you can't talk to them. So
Speaker 5: they stop, and that alters the investigation. They also stopped
Speaker 5: talking to the local news media because at the same
Speaker 5: time their lawyers are like, look, clearly, you are going
Speaker 5: to be accused in this, this of a crime, in
Speaker 5: all of this, so we're going to do this in court.
Speaker 5: You know, if there's going to be a trial, We're
Speaker 5: going to present our evidence in court, not in the media.
Speaker 5: So it takes all of Jeffrey's restraint because he is
Speaker 5: a journalist. He in fact, when he worked for me,
Speaker 5: he was the type of reporter who we would send,
Speaker 5: you know, to chase the bad guy down the street,
Speaker 5: you know what, stand outside the courthouse and yell at
Speaker 5: the person, did you do it? Did you do it?
Speaker 5: And then actually, you know, he's that guy, he's the accused.
Speaker 5: He's the one that everyone's coming after and saying did
Speaker 5: you do it? So it took a lot of they
Speaker 5: really killed him not to speak to the media, but
Speaker 5: he did not. And also when he decided, they decided
Speaker 5: they would not cooperate with the media, they would not
Speaker 5: do an interview with the Province Journal, things change. I
Speaker 5: did an accounting of the newspaper articles from just in
Speaker 5: the aftermath of the fire, and so the Province Journal,
Speaker 5: which is trying to get the Darians to speak and
Speaker 5: they refuse to speak, did one hundred and twenty two
Speaker 5: articles regarding the da Darians in the aftermath, and during
Speaker 5: the same period they only did eighteen that mentioned Daniel Beakley,
Speaker 5: the guy who actually set off the bomb, the bomb
Speaker 5: that killed all the people. So the guy who undeblatably
Speaker 5: did this, he is basically, you know, taken out of
Speaker 5: the attention, and all the attention shifts to the Deadarians,
Speaker 5: and it goes into stuff that is very questionable. I mean,
Speaker 5: they're looking at Michael's to Darien's divorce and the fact
Speaker 5: that it was contentious and not amicable, and you know
Speaker 5: that's spun up into all sorts of drama. They published
Speaker 5: their home addresses, their street addresses in the newspaper, something
Speaker 5: that is very dangerous to do. I think today we
Speaker 5: call it doxing that people do, you know, to try
Speaker 5: to get revenge on people in the met use the
Speaker 5: media as revenge the newspaper. The newspaper doesn't, by the way,
Speaker 5: never publishes the home street addresses of anyone else who
Speaker 5: is seen as culpable in this tragedy, but Prince the
Speaker 5: Ddarian brothers, which puts them at risk. They had to
Speaker 5: move out of their homes. They had some Jeffrey had
Speaker 5: four year old kids, twins, so there were antics like
Speaker 5: that that raised a lot of serious questions about how
Speaker 5: did the media impact not just the case, but what
Speaker 5: the public knows about the case. Early on, there's a
Speaker 5: scene in the book which I was fascinated to hear
Speaker 5: about and to get it confirmed, where two of the
Speaker 5: most arguably the most powerful men in the state at
Speaker 5: the time, the governor, Governor donk Cherry, and Joel Rosson,
Speaker 5: who is the editor in chief of the Province Journal newspaper.
Speaker 5: They meet in the back room just days after the
Speaker 5: fire and get into a terrible fight about who's going
Speaker 5: to control the narrative of this story. Who is going
Speaker 5: to determine what the public knows and what the public
Speaker 5: will not know about this fire. Imagine this actually happened.
Speaker 5: We think that stuff that only happens in drama. When
Speaker 5: I spoke to both of the men about this, they
Speaker 5: each told me the story from their perspectives, and their
Speaker 5: perspectors were identical. I don't think I've ever had that
Speaker 5: as a reporter where two people saw things exactly the
Speaker 5: same way. So to my mind, maybe they're only two
Speaker 5: people in the room, so they're only to confirm this,
Speaker 5: But think of that. People are trying early on to
Speaker 5: control the narrative of the story. What is the public
Speaker 5: going to know and what is in the public not
Speaker 5: going to know? So that's troubling. That's troubling about when
Speaker 5: it comes to transparency about this. You know, in my mind,
Speaker 5: one of the deadliest fires in the United States history,
Speaker 5: there shouldn't be any unanswered questions, and because of that,
Speaker 5: because they've been unanswered questions, I'm not sure that the
Speaker 5: lessons of this fire that should have been learned and
Speaker 5: were actually learned. This is not a safe building, was
Speaker 5: obviously not properly inspected, it did not have proper safety controls,
Speaker 5: and so a lot of people died as a result
Speaker 5: of that. I'd love to say that in the aftermath
Speaker 5: everything changed and now we have safe buildings, but it's
Speaker 5: not true. Just a few years ago out in Oapen, California,
Speaker 5: the goot Ship fire, thirty six people died, different facts,
Speaker 5: different circumstances, but the same in that this is a
Speaker 5: dangerous building. It did not have sprinklers, people were allowed
Speaker 5: to gather there, it was not inspected. I mean, does
Speaker 5: this sound familiar? So all these years later we have
Speaker 5: a similar tragedy happen because we really didn't learn the
Speaker 5: lessons that we should have that came out of the
Speaker 5: Station nightclub fire.
Speaker 4: Tell us now about how the grand jury's convened and
Speaker 4: the talk of any kind of plea bargain at that point.
Speaker 5: Well, the grand jury meets almost immediately in the days afterwards.
Speaker 5: In fact, for me as a journalist, that the once secret.
Speaker 5: Grand jury transcripts are just a gold mine of information
Speaker 5: because people are sworn. Obviously, getting sworn statements are supposed
Speaker 5: to be telling the truth, but also because it's done
Speaker 5: so quickly after the fire, their memories are fresh, and
Speaker 5: when you're assessing like what to believe and what not
Speaker 5: to believe. As a journalist, documents like that that our
Speaker 5: contemporaneous to the time are you know, generally, you give
Speaker 5: them more weight than somebody trying to remember something, you know,
Speaker 5: fifteen years later, where they may or not have the
Speaker 5: same command of the facts. So what happens inside that
Speaker 5: grand jury room is that much like the police chief said,
Speaker 5: the decision has already been made that the nightclub business
Speaker 5: owners are the ones who are going to take the fall.
Speaker 5: And almost every witness and almost every question gets around
Speaker 5: to pointing the finger at the Jadarian brothers. And it's
Speaker 5: really fascinating. There's some people who put on the stands
Speaker 5: who don't even know the brothers who performed at the
Speaker 5: club's club years before the brothers even owned the nightclub business,
Speaker 5: And somehow they're expert witnesses and they'll even say things like,
Speaker 5: you know, I wouldn't know those guys if they walked
Speaker 5: into the room right now, I've never met them, ever
Speaker 5: done business with them, and yet somehow they're there, and
Speaker 5: then the prosecutor will say, well, what do you think
Speaker 5: of them? It's like, what are they suppots to think
Speaker 5: of them? They don't know them. It really was all
Speaker 5: designed to get that result. And part of the reason
Speaker 5: that happened was something that gets revealed in the book
Speaker 5: is what the Attorney General refers to as the documents.
Speaker 5: So the document is a fascinating little sidebar in this
Speaker 5: whole investigation because in the fire aftermath, and you have
Speaker 5: to remember, we're seeing things today, you know, looking back
Speaker 5: in time. We have commanded the information, we know what
Speaker 5: happened to But when this unfolds, it's not immediately clear
Speaker 5: that there's deadly foam on the walls. People don't immediately
Speaker 5: understand all the things that went wrong that led to
Speaker 5: this horrible tragedy. They're still putting together pieces, so they're
Speaker 5: trying to make sense out of chaos. So one of
Speaker 5: the things that the Attorney General does is he sets
Speaker 5: out his team to investigate other major fires where a
Speaker 5: lot of people died, whether in the United States or overseas,
Speaker 5: and what he wants them to do is look and
Speaker 5: explain in those cases, who were the people most likely
Speaker 5: to be indicted, Who were the people and if they
Speaker 5: were indicted, were they convicted, and if they were convicted,
Speaker 5: how many years imprisoned did they spend for their crimes?
Speaker 5: And so he creates this, he calls it the document,
Speaker 5: and it became his guiding force for the entire prosecution.
Speaker 5: And what he found was that in these cases, historically
Speaker 5: it's the nightclub business owners who are the ones who
Speaker 5: take the fall. You could look at this one way
Speaker 5: and say, well, that's smart. He's looking at precedent, he's
Speaker 5: looking at what the system allows. Or you could look
Speaker 5: at it another way and just say that he basically
Speaker 5: this was indictment by spreadsheets, not by instead of following
Speaker 5: the facts of this particular case. And in this particular case,
Speaker 5: what should we be looking at. Should we be looking
Speaker 5: at that the band, should we be looking at that
Speaker 5: fire inspector not doing his job? Should we be looking
Speaker 5: at that foam company. None of those people have looked
Speaker 5: at because they're not on the spreadsheet, they're not part
Speaker 5: of the document. The document says, go for nightclub owners,
Speaker 5: and so that's what they did, and so all of
Speaker 5: this other stuff is almost excluded or diminished or pushed aside.
Speaker 5: I mean, there are some things when you've looked very
Speaker 5: closely at the grand jury testimony, there's some astounding things
Speaker 5: that are said in there, and they're either ignored or
Speaker 5: brushed over or diminished. To the point where the grand
Speaker 5: jurors themselves actually stand up to the prosecutors, there's an
Speaker 5: amazing thing to read for them to say, well, wait
Speaker 5: a minute, what do you mean we can't go out
Speaker 5: after the fire inspector? What about these phone people. They're
Speaker 5: incredulous that they are being pushed in only one direction,
Speaker 5: which is go get those nightclub owners, and to the
Speaker 5: point where they're saying, I don't understand, like why why
Speaker 5: can't we do these other things they are they push back,
Speaker 5: but basically they're told there's nothing in the law that
Speaker 5: allows for indicting anyone else except who they say they're
Speaker 5: supposed to indict. And so the grand jurors themselves are
Speaker 5: quite troubled by this, but in the end, they do
Speaker 5: what the Attorney General tells them to do, and he
Speaker 5: is determining what to do from this document.
Speaker 4: Now what are the plea agreements that are discussed and
Speaker 4: the practical time that would be served in reality for
Speaker 4: Beakley and to the two brothers, And how's it coming.
Speaker 5: Up to Weekley is the other person who is indicted,
Speaker 5: and that's more of a slam dunk because he is
Speaker 5: the person who broke the law, the fireworks law. He
Speaker 5: set out the fireworks, you know, he lit the bomb,
Speaker 5: so to speak, and he does take up a plea bargain.
Speaker 5: What's interesting about the way the law is the two
Speaker 5: things that cause particular outrage when the legal aspects of
Speaker 5: this case play out. Number one is that there's nothing
Speaker 5: in the local law that allows anyone to be held
Speaker 5: criminally accountable for injuries. So we've talked about the one
Speaker 5: hundred people who died, there are hundreds more who are hurt.
Speaker 5: Some of them suffer wounds that they will have to
Speaker 5: deal with for the rest of their lives. And the
Speaker 5: suffering is it's hard to get your mind around. Burns
Speaker 5: are a terrible thing to experience, and it happens on
Speaker 5: a scale that basically, you know, almost overwhelms the entire
Speaker 5: medical system for New England to deal with this one night.
Speaker 5: So people are understandably bitter and angry because they've been
Speaker 5: hurt and no one is going to ever be criminally
Speaker 5: charged for them being hurt. So already you have hundreds
Speaker 5: of people, and by extension of that, thousands of friends
Speaker 5: and family who are outraged that there was going to
Speaker 5: be no justice for those people at all. So now
Speaker 5: we only have the ability to go after the folks
Speaker 5: who are who were killed. And so in order to
Speaker 5: do that, though, they have to take a smaller criminal acts,
Speaker 5: an infraction or a misdemeanor, And in the case of
Speaker 5: Daniel Bakley, it's the fireworks. No one goes to prison
Speaker 5: for lighting off for having illegal fireworks or lighting them
Speaker 5: off in Rhode Island. It's not an offense that gets
Speaker 5: people put in the slammer. And so you've got to
Speaker 5: take this infraction, this misdemeanor, and then tie it to
Speaker 5: the fact that so many people died, and now you
Speaker 5: get to a manslaughter charge. And so he does plead
Speaker 5: to that. But because he didn't know places of death trap,
Speaker 5: he didn't know about that foam on the walls, there's
Speaker 5: an argument to be made that in fact, he can
Speaker 5: only be called so only so responsible because of all
Speaker 5: of these other extenuating circumstances. And by the way, the
Speaker 5: underlying charge is one that people never go to prison for.
Speaker 5: So when he does his plea bargain deal, he basically
Speaker 5: is sentenced to the equivalent of eighteen months to serve
Speaker 5: in prison. Well, eighteen months for one hundred people being
Speaker 5: killed does not go over well. And so now there's
Speaker 5: a second wave of outrage that justice is never going
Speaker 5: to happen in this case because look at this guy.
Speaker 5: He killed one hundred people and he's going to serve
Speaker 5: eighteen months. It's just the craziest thing. And said is sentencing,
Speaker 5: which is carried live all over the world by CNN
Speaker 5: because it is so crazy, just so dramatic. Family member
Speaker 5: after family member gets up and just really unloads their
Speaker 5: rage and their anger at how the legal system has
Speaker 5: let them down. But that takes care of Daniel Beakley,
Speaker 5: the guy has set off the bomb that there's only
Speaker 5: two people left because remember the grand jury was only
Speaker 5: allowed to indict so many people, and that's the Dadarian brothers,
Speaker 5: and they are put in this situation where all of it,
Speaker 5: any ability for people to feel that justice has been
Speaker 5: served all comes down to their case. And so there's
Speaker 5: enormous pressure on them to take a plea bargain. One
Speaker 5: of the things that I earned learned very early on
Speaker 5: this that actually drove me to turn this into a
Speaker 5: book was that the defense and the prosecution all did
Speaker 5: what were called mock trials. So mock trials are basically
Speaker 5: kind of a practice trial before you get to the
Speaker 5: real trial, and you have jurors and you have evidence,
Speaker 5: and then you see kind of test out your theories
Speaker 5: as to how things would go in court. And so
Speaker 5: there were three mock trials, and in each of the
Speaker 5: three mock trials, the jurors will not convict the de Darians.
Speaker 5: So when I heard about the mock trials early on,
Speaker 5: when I started asking those questions ten years ago, that's
Speaker 5: when it hit me that I wasn't the only person
Speaker 5: who questioned what happened in this case. Because when the
Speaker 5: mock jurors were presented with all of the evidence, not
Speaker 5: just one side of the story that came from the government,
Speaker 5: but all of it, they would not convict. So that
Speaker 5: was part of my job after hearing about the mock trials,
Speaker 5: was to find out, well, what did those mock jurors
Speaker 5: hear that the public never heard that made them decide
Speaker 5: that no, it's not so simple as these guys or
Speaker 5: these three guys are the whole story. I think. Look,
Speaker 5: the public was let down by again by the institutions
Speaker 5: that we think are going to be there to protect us.
Speaker 5: There's no reason, no good reason, why a public venue
Speaker 5: that has hundreds of patrons doesn't have sprinklers. You know,
Speaker 5: sprinklers are technology from the eighteen hundreds. There's no reason
Speaker 5: for buildings to be so unsafe by this sign. There's
Speaker 5: no reason for building to be not properly inspected, and
Speaker 5: on and on and on, so again, the perfect storm
Speaker 5: of fires, so many things and wrong. But people were
Speaker 5: let down. The government itself. I think there's an enormous
Speaker 5: responsibility in this case. But the government does not indict itself.
Speaker 5: It has to indict someone else. And I think that
Speaker 5: in this case there was an effort to find scapegoats
Speaker 5: to hang this on because the people who were partially responsible,
Speaker 5: the system, the establishment, was not going to hold itself
Speaker 5: criminally accountable.
Speaker 4: It's incredible too that you talk about this eighteen months
Speaker 4: in tip. In real terms, for this Beekley and it
Speaker 4: would be a work release program and they offered the
Speaker 4: same thing to the brothers. Tell us about this bizarre
Speaker 4: deal that one has to choose to go to prison.
Speaker 5: Right, so this is one of the one of the
Speaker 5: again another twists in the story, and it's fascinating to
Speaker 5: read it because it all plays out in a dunkin
Speaker 5: Donuts in Cranston, Rhode Island, and that's where the brothers
Speaker 5: meet with their wives to discuss what are they going
Speaker 5: to do or are they going to take this plea
Speaker 5: bargain or not? And they meet at the dunkin Donuts
Speaker 5: because they can't meet at their home because they have
Speaker 5: small children. They don't want to overhear this. But basically
Speaker 5: in the end they're pressured into take a plea bargain
Speaker 5: because of all the you know, it had happened for
Speaker 5: the Daniel Beagley in there. A similar deal is offered
Speaker 5: to them, but with a twist, and the twist is
Speaker 5: that they must only one of them is going to
Speaker 5: go to prison. The concept here was buy one, set
Speaker 5: one free. That's actually the language that was used behind
Speaker 5: the scenes to describe the deal, and the idea was
Speaker 5: that this two brothers, one will go to prison, the
Speaker 5: other one will stay out and take care of their families,
Speaker 5: try to earn a living, try to support people while
Speaker 5: the other one serves the time on behalf of both
Speaker 5: of them. But the twist is they have to decide
Speaker 5: amongst themselves which one is going to go to prison.
Speaker 5: So think of that. So they're at this duncan donuts, like,
Speaker 5: you know, who's better to go to prison? You or
Speaker 5: me or him? Or it's just crazy because these are,
Speaker 5: you know, just working class guys. None of neither of
Speaker 5: them have any experience with the criminal justice system, neither
Speaker 5: is a hardcore criminal, knows anything about all of this,
Speaker 5: And so they go into this debate who's better suited
Speaker 5: to be the one to be behind bars? And in
Speaker 5: the end they make a decision and it turns out
Speaker 5: to be the wrong decision for so many reasons that
Speaker 5: you can read about which to kind of boggle the
Speaker 5: mind how the system works. But in the larger sense,
Speaker 5: the fact that they took this plea bargain, thinking that
Speaker 5: this week to bring things to a closure, to allow
Speaker 5: the state to begin to heal, to allow people to
Speaker 5: move on with their lives, to get this behind them,
Speaker 5: not just Daminem families, but also the victims' families and
Speaker 5: the survivors that this would be a turning point, that
Speaker 5: it would finally put these proceedings to an end. But
Speaker 5: it has the opposite effect. The public is livid that
Speaker 5: these guys have been given any sort of plea bargain.
Speaker 5: There are people who think that they're murderers and that
Speaker 5: they should be given the death penalty for what happened. So, yeah,
Speaker 5: it doesn't have It does not work out the way
Speaker 5: that they think it's going to work out or where
Speaker 5: the public dog is going to work out. In fact,
Speaker 5: people are I think, possibly more angry than ever once
Speaker 5: this plea bargain plays out.
Speaker 4: Now Michael gets a rough ride in prison because he
Speaker 4: doesn't seem to get once he's in prison the same
Speaker 4: deal as Weakley, and he's not let out on work
Speaker 4: release program initially, he has a tough time in prison
Speaker 4: up doing a lot more than eighteen months. How does
Speaker 4: it come? Tell us about the conditions that the civil
Speaker 4: case goes forward, right.
Speaker 5: So that people understand the criminal cases. When we're talking
Speaker 5: about so far with regard to the charges, the manslaughter
Speaker 5: charges that everybody face, well there's also the case of damages.
Speaker 5: So the civil case has going to determine, you know,
Speaker 5: who's libel financially and in that respect, and that case
Speaker 5: goes on for years and years and years and years.
Speaker 5: I mean, it's really not settled quickly. It goes through
Speaker 5: a lot of different twists and turns. Probably, first of all,
Speaker 5: the way the local law was, they actually had to
Speaker 5: go to the state legislature and essentially get a special
Speaker 5: waiver in order to hold people responsible, kind of a
Speaker 5: wider net, and then the legislature allows them to do this,
Speaker 5: and then then in fact they sue everybody and anybody
Speaker 5: who has any connection to this venue, this concert, you know,
Speaker 5: the beer sponsors. They sue the TV station, And then
Speaker 5: we talked about that local TV news photographer who's in there,
Speaker 5: who's happened to be rolling taking pictures b Roll for
Speaker 5: his upcoming story. They sue him and his TV station
Speaker 5: and people contend that he by being there, his presence,
Speaker 5: that he blocked people from leaving, that people perished as
Speaker 5: a result of him being present. They sue Home Depot
Speaker 5: because I guess plywood from Home Depot was used in
Speaker 5: the construction of the building. It goes on and on
Speaker 5: and on and on and in the end they are
Speaker 5: able to get an amazing amount of money one hundred
Speaker 5: and seventy six million dollars to help people, the survivors
Speaker 5: and the victims' families out of all this, but they
Speaker 5: don't get the money, at least not all of it.
Speaker 5: So the lawyers pocket fifty nine million dollars of that,
Speaker 5: which is really kind of an astonishing amount. It's what
Speaker 5: they're legally entitled to. But a lot of people thought
Speaker 5: that wasn't right because you know, they could have covered
Speaker 5: their costs and a little bit more. The idea that
Speaker 5: they would profit to that amount was very controversial. What's
Speaker 5: left over gets divided up. But by the time this
Speaker 5: all plays out, others have gotten to the victims, the
Speaker 5: victims' families and the survivors, and they've gone to them
Speaker 5: and they've got them to sign deals. And the deals
Speaker 5: are basically, look, this settlement's going to happen. Someday, I'm
Speaker 5: going to upfront you some money. I'm going to give
Speaker 5: you some money now in exchange for that, I get
Speaker 5: to have your settlement money when the deal finally comes through.
Speaker 5: So those deals are played out behind the scenes. These
Speaker 5: are working class people. None of them can't work because
Speaker 5: they're so injured. They need help now, they need to survive,
Speaker 5: they need to not be evicted and lose their homes
Speaker 5: and their cars and all these things. And so they
Speaker 5: a lot of them take this money, make these deals
Speaker 5: before the settlements, so by the time the settlement money
Speaker 5: finally pays out, they end up getting really pennies on
Speaker 5: the dollar. So that one hundred and seventy six million
Speaker 5: dollars sounds really impressive, but in the end, it really
Speaker 5: didn't turn out to be the windfall for people that
Speaker 5: it should have been. Didn't. It ends out not to
Speaker 5: be the safety net that they needed in order to
Speaker 5: continue with the rest of their lives. So very tough,
Speaker 5: you know, again, not exactly how what we've seen, how
Speaker 5: the story was presented necessarily been told so far, but
Speaker 5: the reality of what really happened behind the scenes.
Speaker 4: And lastly, the memorial in twenty and seventeen, and in
Speaker 4: you talk, we didn't talk about all of the characters
Speaker 4: that you bring to life in here in the survivors' stories,
Speaker 4: but the memorial, Gina Russo attends so tell us a
Speaker 4: little bit about this memorial and acted in twenty seen.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so the site of the nightclub. Immediately afterwards, after
Speaker 5: the you know, a lot of the the remnants of
Speaker 5: the structure were taken away. They were actually reconstructed in
Speaker 5: a warehouse for the investigation into especially for the civil investigation.
Speaker 5: So the lot is pretty much bear barren and immediately
Speaker 5: is filled by makeshift memorials. People go in and they
Speaker 5: plant little crosses and all sorts of stuff to remember
Speaker 5: the victims of the fire. So this little grassroots, this
Speaker 5: makeshift memorial exists for years and years and years, and
Speaker 5: there's an immediate effort to try to get the place
Speaker 5: turn into some sort of more permanent memorial, something a
Speaker 5: little bit, you know, possibly a statue or something like that.
Speaker 5: But there are problems. One of the issues that we
Speaker 5: talked about in the book, really for the first time,
Speaker 5: is that there's a terrible fighting behind the scenes between
Speaker 5: the victims families and the survivors, and it turns out
Speaker 5: that in many cases the victims' families hate the survivors.
Speaker 5: It becomes this weird story conflict that plays out where
Speaker 5: they somehow have come to believe that the reason their
Speaker 5: loved ones are dead is because somebody who survived stomped
Speaker 5: on them on their way out to say themselves, none
Speaker 5: of which we know to be true at all, but
Speaker 5: it doesn't matter. This is what happens. It's a dissension,
Speaker 5: so this is fighting, and some of the people who
Speaker 5: are most outspoken also want to go after the owner
Speaker 5: of the nightclub property. Remember I said the brothers were renters,
Speaker 5: you know, they were kind of the business, but they
Speaker 5: were not the owners of the property. So they go
Speaker 5: after the owner of the property and they're trying to
Speaker 5: filify him and he should have known and all of
Speaker 5: this stuff. Well, at the same time, they're asking the
Speaker 5: owner of the property to donate the land. So on
Speaker 5: one hand, they're asking him to donate the lands of
Speaker 5: memorial moreau could be made. On the other hand, they're
Speaker 5: vilifying the guy in the media and threatening lawsuits and
Speaker 5: all the rest of it. So that's not exactly how
Speaker 5: you win somebody over to make a donation. But after
Speaker 5: the settlements are made in the case, and he is
Speaker 5: among those, the owner of the property is among those
Speaker 5: who has to do a settlement, or at least his
Speaker 5: insurance company does to put in that pot of money.
Speaker 5: So that settle that's done. And then Gina Russo, who
Speaker 5: is one of the survivors, and she heads up this
Speaker 5: task force to create a memorial. She is able to
Speaker 5: persuade him to donate the land, and then she goes
Speaker 5: on this journey of raising I think, you know, between
Speaker 5: the in kind donations and actual donations, the equivalent of
Speaker 5: a couple million dollars to build a really incredible memorial
Speaker 5: at the site. I mean, you go there and it's
Speaker 5: so devastating. Each of the one hundred victims is remembered
Speaker 5: with a marker, and there's a kind of looks like
Speaker 5: a chapel that oversees it giving it's a garden. It's
Speaker 5: going to grow and blossom every year that goes by
Speaker 5: and go there every time I'm I'm back in Rhode Island,
Speaker 5: I go and visit. Something new has you know, grown
Speaker 5: or this is what was once a ceiling now is
Speaker 5: like a little bit of a tree. I mean, it's
Speaker 5: really kind of amazing. And people go there and they
Speaker 5: have their moment to remember their loved ones, and other
Speaker 5: people go there just to see it and to reflect.
Speaker 5: I mean, it's it's a powerful statement, a powerful memorial
Speaker 5: to those people. And so in that respect, you know,
Speaker 5: people are being remembered and if you're in Rhode Island.
Speaker 5: It's something to see. It's something to have a few
Speaker 5: moments of introspection about.
Speaker 4: I'm thet want to mention this too much, but what
Speaker 4: was the impression or the attitude towards Jack Russell in
Speaker 4: all of this.
Speaker 5: Well, people feel that Jack never really did properly or
Speaker 5: genuinely apologize for what happened, And my own encounter with
Speaker 5: him is kind of telling. We talked a little bit
Speaker 5: over the years, on and off, little bits of interviews
Speaker 5: here and there. I went and saw him and doing
Speaker 5: one of his concerts. He's still out performing, and he
Speaker 5: had to go through this big, long process with a
Speaker 5: friend of his who's kind of his the person who
Speaker 5: screens people who are going to talk to him. And
Speaker 5: I spent hours talking to that guy and was given
Speaker 5: the thumbs up. I guess it was okay to talk to.
Speaker 5: And then the night before our formal interview we're going
Speaker 5: to go through things in depth, he called me up
Speaker 5: and he asked me for money. He intended to try
Speaker 5: to make money off of this tragedy, and I said no,
Speaker 5: And then he talked about some sort of back door,
Speaker 5: which I think is like show business talk for like,
Speaker 5: can I get a cut of the profits or something?
Speaker 5: And anyone who knows anything about the book business knows that,
Speaker 5: you know, books are not profit centers to say the least,
Speaker 5: but it is somebody. Ninety five percent of books failed
Speaker 5: to make back their investment. In the fact, a project
Speaker 5: like this is very expensive to mount, and so there
Speaker 5: are no profits, and so there's no backdoor, and and
Speaker 5: I just tried to explain to him that in real journalism,
Speaker 5: in professional journalism, we don't pay people to tell their stories.
Speaker 5: So once this was made clear to him, he canceled
Speaker 5: the interview and has never spoken to me. Now, the
Speaker 5: good news for readers of the book is there's plenty
Speaker 5: to hear from Jack Russell, in fact, stuff that most
Speaker 5: people had never heard before, because even though he wouldn't
Speaker 5: answer my specific questions, he has not remained silent. One
Speaker 5: of the weird things he did recently was in the
Speaker 5: last few years he started to go public about the
Speaker 5: fact that he is a very serious criminal past that
Speaker 5: predates this fire that, in fact, you could argue, showed
Speaker 5: a real disconnect between you for human life and safety.
Speaker 5: When he was a young man he was involved in
Speaker 5: the way he described it, was an attempted murder, so
Speaker 5: and he went to prison, none of which was known,
Speaker 5: none of which was reported at the time of the fire,
Speaker 5: none of which was I'm not convinced that even the
Speaker 5: prosecutors of the attorneys involved in the case even knew
Speaker 5: about this. So that is there, and that is a
Speaker 5: revelation that we get from Jack Russell, even though I
Speaker 5: did not pay him to speak to me. I would
Speaker 5: not pay him. And in fact, it's very important to
Speaker 5: note that no one was paid to participate in this.
Speaker 5: These are journalism, journalism interviews. No one was compensated, and
Speaker 5: no one will make any money out of the book.
Speaker 4: His offer for donating to this memorial was also rejected
Speaker 4: by the group, wasn't it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, he has over the years done things where he
Speaker 5: has offered to make a donation or do a show
Speaker 5: on behalf of something, and in fact, you know, one
Speaker 5: of the things in the aftermath, because there were so
Speaker 5: many years before there was a settlement in the case
Speaker 5: and people were suffering, people needed money, there was a
Speaker 5: grassroots effort to raise money for the victims' families and
Speaker 5: for the survivors, and his band did offer to do
Speaker 5: a concert series to raise money for that fund to
Speaker 5: be called the Station Family Fund, and you can read
Speaker 5: about that. It's one of the more bizarre scenes in
Speaker 5: the book was where his representative comes to these people
Speaker 5: who are you know, just lost loved ones. They're suffering
Speaker 5: from horrible burns and the skywalkers and says, you know,
Speaker 5: he offers them a deal with the devil. The deal
Speaker 5: with the devil was, you know, the person who set
Speaker 5: off the bomb, the group that set off the bomb
Speaker 5: that killed all these people and heard all you people,
Speaker 5: is now offering to do to take proceeds from their
Speaker 5: upcoming concert tour and donate them to this fund. And
Speaker 5: they have to decide will we take that money or not?
Speaker 5: And it causes a lot of anger and a lot
Speaker 5: of disagreement. Let's put it that way. That's a nice
Speaker 5: way to put it.
Speaker 4: I want to thank you so much for coming on
Speaker 4: and talking about Trial by Fire, a devastating tragedy, one
Speaker 4: hundred lives lost in a fifteen year search for truth.
Speaker 4: We didn't go into all, but the reader will be
Speaker 4: able to get to hear all of the graphic, incredible
Speaker 4: tales of not only lost but also of incredible survival
Speaker 4: and also some of the photos. There's one photo in
Speaker 4: particular that is incredibly remarkable and that it is the
Speaker 4: beginning of the fire on the wall and there's three
Speaker 4: people there, including a member of the staff that they're
Speaker 4: smoking a cigarette. So it's an incredible collection of photos
Speaker 4: in this book for people that might want to take
Speaker 4: a look. Do you have a website that.
Speaker 5: Yes, Scott James writer, Well, I.
Speaker 4: Want to thank you so much Scott James for this
Speaker 4: Trial by Fire. It has been an absolute pleasure speaking
Speaker 4: with you. Thanks again, thanks for having me.
Speaker 5: I appreciate it.
Speaker 4: Thank you. Good night. H