ONE NIGHT IN August, 1912, when Thomas Patrick Brophy was the Fire Marshal of Brooklyn, four men were getting ready to build a fire in a stable far out on Johnson Avenue, in one of the more desolate sections of the borough. That day the men had removed from the stable seven sound horses, which had been insured for two hundred dollars apiece, and had led into the stalls seven old, decrepit horses, all of them lame and one blind, which they had bought at auction sales for three and four dollars apiece. The men laid the fire carefully. They piled straw against the wooden walls of the stable and around and under the horses in the stalls. They poured kerosene oil over the straw and with sponges rubbed kerosene into the coats of the seven horses. There were no houses near the stable, which stood in the middle of a wide meadow, but to be on the safe side the men made another big pile of hay in the doorway so that anybody who might happen along would have to go through flames to get to the horses. They poured kerosene over that, and then they got out their matches. But this arson plot didn’t succeed, because Brophy had found out about it in advance. He was hiding in the tall grass outside the stable, with seven assistant fire marshals, four firemen carrying fire extinguishers, and a couple of police detectives. Two blocks away, Engine Company No. 237 waited in an alley ready to rush to the stable. As soon as the first flicker of flame could be seen, Brophy fired his revolver twice into the air, which was the signal for the engine company to come on, and with his men closed in on the stable. The fire was put out, the horses were saved, and the four men went to Sing Sing.
Brophy was able to be there, hiding in the meadow, because of nothing more complicated than his habit of going for long walks by himself, talking to people, trying to keep track of everything that was going on in Brooklyn. He had known that about a third of the stable fires in the city that year had been of undetermined origin, which is the fireman’s way of saying that they may have been incendiary. So on his customary walks, on which he systematically covered the whole borough of Brooklyn, he had been making the acquaintance, among hundreds of other people, of horse auctioneers. He knew that among the myriad forms of fire-insurance fraud was the system of burning up worthless horses which had been substituted for valuable ones, adequately insured. Worrying about this, he went about asking auctioneers for the names of men who were buying up worthless horses. He got the names of dozens of people who bought that kind of horse, and his deputies investigated them all. Some of them were representatives of firms that shipped horses to France to be eaten by the French, or were otherwise in legitimate, if curious, trades. But after many such horse-buyers had been investigated, one was found who seemed to have no legitimate business. Yet he owned seven sound horses, which he kept idle in a stable out on Johnson Avenue. His name was Louis Evan-sky and he was clearly not a racing man or a polo player. The rest was a comparatively simple matter of watching the stable and shadowing Evansky.
This coup of Brophy’s received wide publicity at the time, and editorials appeared in most of the papers calling attention to the hideous cruelty of the firebugs who had tried to burn up horses. The notice it attracted probably was an important factor in Brophy’s eventual elevation to the post of Chief Fire Marshal and the establishment of the Bureau of Fire Investigation of the New York Fire Department, which he directed until his retirement in 1948. The public interest in that case has always puzzled Brophy, because it seemed a minor one to him, since only horses were involved. He had saved the lives of dozens of people before that by the same general method of painstaking detective work, and the public had shown hardly any interest at all.
In December, 1911, for instance, a citizen of Brooklyn had taken out an insurance policy on his furniture in a flat on Cleveland Street and had hired two professional firebugs to set fire to the place. When the firebugs arrived at the apartment house on the afternoon appointed for the fire, they looked up and down the street to make sure they were not being watched. All they saw were two peddlers with a vegetable wagon down at one end of the block and a couple of street-cleaners sitting on the curb in front of the corner saloon, drinking beer from a growler. They went up to the flat, started the fire, and came down to the street again. Brophy, who had been hiding in the areaway, grabbed them both, and when they resisted knocked them down with two efficient blows of his fist. The street-cleaners at the end of the block fished fire extinguishers out of their wagons and came running. The peddlers produced three hundred feet of hose from the vegetable wagon, connected it at a fireplug, and rushed into the flat with it. The fire was put out before it spread to adjoining flats, in which, among the other tenants, were two invalids and several babies.
Brophy kept on engineering feats of this kind until the day of his retirement. The Plaza Hotel at Rockaway Beach would probably have been burned down in 1932 if Brophy had not been there to intercept the professional firebugs before they lit the fire. Only two or three years ago he caught a professional firebug and put out the fire he had started in a Bronx tenement house in which fifty-four families were sleeping.
Just where Brophy fits into the scheme of civic evolution is a little uncertain. He might be catalogued as a sort of municipal freak, part fireman, part detective. The distinguishing characteristics of both the Police and Fire Departments may be observed in Brophy, which suggests that firemen and policemen do not represent two distinct species, as might be supposed, but must have sprung from some common source. When he was a fire marshal, he had a fire-alarm signal in his home, but wore neither boots nor helmet, and carried a gun. He went to fires in a red automobile, with bell clanging, but never touched hose or ladder, and usually turned his back to the blaze and watched the crowd.
The New York Bureau of Fire Investigation itself is an anomaly, originally built around Brophy. When Brophy took a civil-service examination and entered the Fire Department in 1907 as a young assistant fire marshal in Brooklyn, arson was a crime that usually fell halfway between the Police and Fire Departments, and lay there indefinitely, unsolved. The function of fire marshals was to inspect all fires and to find out which ones were incendiary. They traveled about on streetcar or afoot, and usually did not get around to the scene of a fire until hours after it had been put out. If a dwelling or a store appeared to have been saturated with kerosene and eyewitnesses had seen a man run from the place before the fire broke out, the chances were that the fire marshal would report that the fire was “suspicious,” but the task of catching the firebugs was usually left to the Police Department. After the Fire Department had thus dropped a case, and before the Police Department had picked it up, a good deal of time and enthusiasm was lost, and incendiarists, as a result, were seldom caught.
Brophy had been a district reporter on Bennett’s Herald before he became an assistant deputy fire marshal, and the idea of going to a fire after it was out seemed to him too ridiculous to be considered. There was no provision in the Fire Department bud get for the rapid transportation of fire marshals, so Brophy bought a motor-cycle with his own money. He used to rush to fires as soon as an alarm was turned in and often got there before the engines. The fact that he did not have explicit powers of arrest did not bother him; he would follow up clues until he was sure of his man and then call in a policeman. He solved a number of cases of professional arson in his first few months on the job, and his work began to attract attention at Fire Headquarters. After three years he was appointed Fire Marshal of Brooklyn. In a few more years it had become clear that something extraordinary would have to be done with the Brooklyn Fire Marshal. He had begun, by then, to arrive at fires not only before the engines but before the alarm had been turned in, and several times he had nabbed incendiarists at the moment they applied the match, as in the case of the stable fire. Brophy had also begun to study intelligently that singular type of city dweller known as the pyromaniac—the lunatic who sets fire to things for fun. He had installed a cross-index system in his Brooklyn office in which were filed the names and peculiarities of all known pyromaniacs and people he suspected of being pyromaniacs. He had learned more about their habits than had been known before, and had caught a number of them. In 1915, Fire Commissioner Adamson decided that Brophy was the man to deal with the problem of incendiarism for the whole city. He abolished the fire marshals’ offices in the various boroughs and set up the Bureau of Fire Investigation, with headquarters in the Municipal Building. Brophy was given the new title of Chief Fire Marshal and a staff of twenty-eight deputies to assist him. He could subpoena witnesses and take legal testimony, but when he decided that he had a prima-facie case against somebody, he would call in a policeman to make the formal arrest. In every other way, Chief Fire Marshal Brophy acted like a detective rather than a fireman, and the Bureau of Fire Investigation still seems like a branch of the Police Department rather than a branch of the Fire Department.
The idea of searching for potential firebugs and embryonic pyromaniacs in a city of this many million people makes a needle-in-haystack hunt seem about as simple as a two-handed game of who’s-got-the-button. No other type of criminal is as hard to catch as a professional firebug who burns up buildings in order to collect insurance. If he is an expert and does his job well, all of what might be evidence against him is destroyed by the blaze he sets off. He does not have to be in the building when the fire breaks out. He can light a candle and fix it so that he will be blocks away by the time it burns down and ignites a bundle of oiled rags. He can use a piece of Chinese punk and a little gunpowder, and be in Philadelphia when the blaze starts. Or, having wired the doorbell of the place so that it will start the fire, he can call up Western Union and get a boy to go there and ring it. The pyromaniac is even harder to catch than the professional firebug. No rational motive is involved, only an insane whim. Yet the pyromaniac is cunning, and often his intelligence has been polished by good breeding and higher education. These are the two types of townspeople that Brophy had to keep ahead of.
Brophy was a practical man rather than an imaginative one, and his outlook was prosaic in the extreme. To begin with, he treated the largest metropolis in the world as if it were a village. He worried about New York. Street by street and section by section, the city troubled him, and sometimes he grew anxious about all five boroughs at the same time. He went about his work not so much with enthusiasm as with a grim, almost morbid determination. He had what would have been called, a generation ago, a sense of moral responsibility. He was shocked and outraged by a crime which endangers, and often takes, human life. When a case of professional arson was discovered, he would be genuinely indignant. He is a Catholic, and a devout one. He is one of those Irishmen whose eyes glisten perceptibly when they say “mother” or “little child.” When he was Chief Fire Marshal, he never slept well or with any regularity. He was always getting up and going out at night to make sure everything was all right. He would ride to the district that was bothering him, leave his car at a fire house, and walk around by himself for hours at a time, seeing how things looked, making a note now and then in a little book he carried in his vest pocket, talking to people—storekeepers, bartenders, taxi-drivers, the policeman on the beat. Sometimes on these informal excursions he was following a tip, some bit of information he or his deputies had picked up somewhere, but usually when he left his home in Brooklyn after a few hours’ rest and went riding to some distant neighborhood in Manhattan or the Bronx or Queens, it was merely because that neighborhood had been on his mind and he wanted to look it over.
Brophy walked up and down nearly every sidewalk in New York at one time or another. He carried in his mind a picture of the whole city as graphic and full of detail as the picture most New Yorkers have of the block they live in. In his fire-alarm signal books (one at his office and another at home), he wrote down the names and telephone numbers of at least one resident for every fire-alarm box in the hazardous districts of the city, so that when an alarm came in he could call up that person and get quick first-hand information about the nature of the fire, often before the fire engines got there. He maintained a speaking acquaintance with hundreds of people besides—two or three, perhaps, in every square mile of the city—and through them kept abreast of a great deal of what was going on in all the hundreds of neighborhoods. If there had been a suspicious-looking fire in the garment district, Brophy was extremely likely to know whether the firm whose stock was destroyed had been doing well, or whether it was in such bad shape that its proprietors were desperate. He knew a good deal about business conditions in general—how things were going with manufacturers of women’s hats, for instance, and which of the warehouses down on the waterfront were packed with perishable goods that owners would never be able to sell. His cross-index of pyromaniacs covered all five boroughs, and filed away in it are case histories of some four hundred known pyromaniacs, and the names and peculiarities of several hundred other people who he suspected were pyromaniacs who had never been caught in the act.
Brophy and his deputies checked up on all these people discreetly and systematically, and when suspicious fires broke out in Brooklyn or Queens or the Bronx or on Manhattan Island, the search for the person who applied the torch became a great deal easier. And there was always the possibility that Brophy might find out that a professional firebug had been hired to set fire to the clothing store or the hat factory or the warehouse, and be waiting there to grab him; there was always the chance that Brophy would catch a wild-eyed lunatic sneaking into a tenement hallway with a bundle of excelsior under his arm. That kind of thing happened just often enough to keep Brophy from relaxing very much or sleeping more than three or four hours at a time.
Brophy had practically no personal life as Chief Fire Marshal and did not seem to care about anything very much but his work. He had no hobbies and indulged in no luxuries to speak of. He would forget even the necessities when he was preoccupied with an important case. Brophy’s deputies often had to lead him into a restaurant, order something for him, and hand him a knife and fork. It was not unusual for him to work on a case for thirty-six hours without going to sleep at all. After a stretch like that, he would go home and go to bed, but never for more than six or seven hours. Then he would reappear at his office in the Municipal Building, look over the record of fire alarms, and, if there was nothing much doing, go out for one of his walks. He lived in a brownstone house on Park Place in Brooklyn, not far from where he was born. His mother and two sisters lived with him. He never married and had only a few intimate friends, mostly men he had known all his life. When he went to their houses for dinner he nearly always brought along a box of candy for their wives and a present of some kind for their children. When he used to work late, and couldn’t go home for dinner, he usually dined at the Schrafft’s across the park from the Municipal Building. He had never been fond of drinking, and until recent years an occasional shot of straight rye at the home of a friend was all he ever cared for. Toward the end of his career as Chief Fire Marshal he usually had a couple of drinks before meals and sometimes a couple afterwards. His friends used to accuse him of being behind the times. A few years before his retirement, he was having lunch with one of them at Luchow’s and they happened to sit near a young mother who was lunching with her small son and daughter. The mother had a cocktail or two and, between courses, smoked a cigarette. “Now, look at that!” said Brophy. “A mother oughtn’t to set an example like that for those little kids.” He was sincerely troubled about it. This incident occurred in 1947.
The building of the Williamsburg Bridge was partly responsible for Brophy’s choice of career. As soon as the bridge was opened, in 1903, there began a great exodus from Manhattan’s lower East Side. Thousands of families gathered up their belongings and crossed the bridge to settle in the new Williamsburg and East New York tenement districts. For a while the bridge was actually crowded during the day with caravans of movers, and was called “the fire escape.” The term proved to be inappropriate. Within a year the Williams-burg and East New York sections of Brooklyn had become the worst fire areas in the city. The tenements were like tinder boxes, they were overcrowded, and the hallways were usually piled with rubbish. There were scores of bad fires, and some were plainly incendiary. Too many small merchants had moved into those neighborhoods, and some of them used the torch to save themselves from ruin. The tenements seemed to invite pyromaniacs. The big news stories in Brooklyn for the next few years were about the fires of Williams-burg and East New York. As a district reporter for the Herald, Brophy covered all of them.
He was the kind of reporter that has been almost entirely stamped out by schools of journalism and the literary blight which has infected newspapers in the past thirty years. He did not know anything about fine writing, or care about it, and he could face a dozen spectacles without having a literary impression enter his head to obscure the facts. He just went around asking “How?” and “Why?” and when he telephoned his city desk he was full of information. His father was a police lieutenant, and Brophy knew most of the Brooklyn police and fire officials by their first names. He was accepted as one of them—an honor few reporters achieve today. The doom of the fact-gathering reporter was approaching, however, even as early as 1905. The Herald and the Sun were filled with feuilletons, the up-the-dark-stairs or delayed-lead era of the World was almost at hand, and Pulitzer had announced his plans for founding the Columbia School of Journalism. Brophy began to look around for something with some future in it, and decided to try the fire marshal’s office.
When Brophy was trying to prevent arson by catching professional firebugs before they had started a fire, he had little assistance except from his own deputies. As soon as an important case of arson had been discovered, however, he could be sure that the New York Board of Fire Underwriters, which represents all the great fire-insurance companies, would investigate the fire whether their assistance was needed or not. Fire-insurance companies have traditionally maintained a somewhat ambiguous attitude toward the crime of arson. Practically the only motive for professional arson is furnished by fire insurance. What tempts the professional firebug and the people who employ him is that merchandise and house hold effects can without any difficulty be insured for more than they are worth. When a person is applying for a fire-insurance policy, the insurance companies seem to play the role of innocent, unsuspecting institutions which will take anybody’s word for anything. The goods to be insured are not, in most cases, inspected before the policy is issued. But as soon as a fire occurs in a dwelling or a place of business that has been insured, the fire-insurance companies become openly suspicious and demand documentary proof that the property destroyed was worth as much as the policy holder claimed it was when he paid his premium and got the policy. And if there is any evidence of incendiarism, the Board of Fire Underwriters assigns a firm of lawyers to help the district attorney. The fire commissioners of New York have urged for years that the insurance companies be made to inspect the property of all prospective policyholders at the time the policy is issued, but the insurance companies claim that this would cost so much it would ruin them.
It is undoubtedly true that the question of just how far to go with fire prevention is one that the insurance companies have to consider with care. Life-insurance men do not have to fear that institutional advertising of the sort that urges the public to be careful crossing streets and to button up its overcoat will eliminate the hazard of death, but too much fire prevention might, in time, very nearly eliminate the hazard of fire. If professional arson were eliminated, for instance, the fire hazard would be materially cut down and the demand for fire insurance would not be so great as it is now. It is difficult to tell exactly how many of New York’s fires are incendiary, and Brophy, knowing more than anybody else about it, does not try to guess. What he considers important and indisputable is that between a hundred and a hundred and fifty persons are arrested every year for setting fires, and that most of them are convicted. Investigators for the Board of Fire Underwriters are more willing to guess, and their guess is that between fifty and seventy-five percent of the city’s destructive fires are of incendiary origin. Yet the fire-insurance companies for years have appeared to show more interest in convicting professional firebugs after the fires have occurred than in making it harder for them to obtain the policies in the first place. The manager of the Scottish Union & National Fire Insurance Company of Edinburgh once made an illuminating speech on the general subject of fire prevention in which he said, “I say we cannot make profits for our shareholders without fires; within certain well-defined limits, we welcome fires.” In his retirement, Brophy thinks and talks about this side of the situation sometimes but he would rather think and talk about the firebugs he has caught.
PROFESSIONAL FIREBUGS REGARD themselves as upright citizens and their calling as one that is made necessary by the exigencies of competition in the business world. They are at least as arrogant as bootleggers were during Prohibition, and as a rule enjoy a considerable amount of respect among the merchants who employ them. Charles Carmen, who went to jail in 1927 for a long term, was known as the Professor among the merchants he served. He was a snob at heart, and if he had followed his natural snobbish instincts, he might still be at liberty. When he was first asked by one Socrates Moscahlades to set fire to Bishop’s warehouse on Greenwich Street, he said, “I don’t want to do any business with Greeks.” But he finally took the job, and on June 24th, 1927, did set fire to the warehouse, which burned to the ground and destroyed merchandise which Moscahlades and some associates had insured for a million dollars. Carmen was so highly thought of by one local group, made up of merchants who either had hired him in the past or had thought they might hire him some day, that after his arrest and conviction they organized a benefit performance for him at a Yiddish theatre on lower Second Avenue. The benefit performance was duly held in December, 1929. In the course of keeping up with current events about town, Brophy learned of this benefit and attended it, but there was nothing he could do about it. It just gave him something more to ponder over.
Carmen made the mistake of leaving a gasoline tin behind him when he set fire to Bishop’s warehouse. He would never have left such a damaging piece of evidence if everything had gone smoothly. He had arranged on the second floor of the warehouse a fire-making apparatus consisting of a large candle placed on top of gasoline-soaked rags in such a way that the rags would catch fire when the candle burned down. The fire was supposed to start some four hours after he left the warehouse. As it happened, Carmen lit a match, and was bending over to light the candle when a black cat walked out from behind a packing case. Carmen jumped and the match dropped from his hand. It fell into the gasoline-soaked rags. The flames leaped up and Carmen had to run, leaving inside the gasoline tin he had intended to take away with him after he had lighted the candle.
The gasoline tin formed the basis of a painstaking investigation by Brophy which led to the arrest of the Greek merchants two months after the fire. They confessed and in their confessions named one Joseph Kwit as the person who had carried on the negotiations with the firebug, who was known to them only as the Professor. Kwit, however, maintained his innocence. He said he had been a stakeholder of the sum of five hundred dollars left with him by the merchants for payment to the Professor for some job the nature of which he had never known.
Kwit was ostensibly a merchant, dealing in furs, and had a shop on West Twenty-seventh Street. Not knowing exactly what he was looking for, Brophy went to the shop and examined all the papers in Kwit’s desk. He came to a portion of an envelope on which appeared the name “Cormin,” laid it aside, and looked at all the other papers in the desk. When he had finished, all he had that seemed even vaguely helpful was the envelope with the name Cormin on it. Something about that name had caused Brophy, almost unconsciously, to lay the envelope aside when he first came to it; now he thought about it some more and remembered that, ten years before, in 1917, he had sent to Sing Sing a professional firebug whose name was Carmen. Brophy went to Police Headquarters and picked up a rogues’-gallery photograph of Carmen. He also ascertained that Carmen had been released from Sing Sing a year or so before, and that he now lived on Pitkin Avenue, in Brooklyn. Brophy showed Kwit the photograph of Carmen, and Kwit admitted that this was the Professor. Brophy then got a uniformed policeman and went to Carmen’s flat in Brooklyn. He thought Carmen would be on the alert, so he had the policeman ring the bell and say that a man named Carmen had been in an accident down the street and had given this address when he was taken to the hospital. “It couldn’t be my husband,” said Carmen’s wife, “because he is here in bed, asleep.” Brophy, who was hiding in the hallway, then rushed into the flat, followed by the policeman, and Carmen woke up with handcuffs on.
After Carmen had been arrested, Kwit admitted that his real business was that of acting as go-between for the Professor. As soon as Carmen had got out of Sing Sing, he had made Kwit his partner and, by way of demonstrating his skill as a firebug, had set fire to a small store Kwit owned at that time on the lower West Side. Kwit collected $12,500 insurance on this fire, and was able thereafter to recommend Carmen to other merchants with an enthusiasm based on personal experience.
Joe Eisenstein, another firebug who was convicted and sent to prison in 1930, prided himself especially on his knowledge of chemistry. He claimed to have worked out a secret formula for a highly inflammable fluid which left no suspicious trace or odor after it had been used. He wore tortoiseshell glasses and called himself Dr. Eisenstein. He was also proud of his timing. When he was finally arrested for setting off a blaze in the Dachis Fur Company building on West Twenty-seventh Street, he asked what time the alarm had been turned in. He said he had timed it to start three hours and a half after he had left the place. It turned out that he had been wrong by only twelve minutes.
Eisenstein lived like any respectable citizen. He had a wife and two boys, the elder of whom, it developed after his father’s arrest, was specializing in chemistry. Eisenstein had been a clothing merchant in Pleasantville, New Jersey, at one time, but for five years before his arrest had been a professional firebug. He usually charged from eight hundred up for a fire, with a stipulation that he was to receive a bonus of one hundred dollars if he achieved “complete destruction.” In going over his past record, Brophy found that in Philadelphia Eisenstein had once sued a merchant who had just had a fire, and had obtained an attachment on the insurance money the merchant was to receive. When he had contracted to set this merchant’s store on fire, Eisenstein had accepted a part payment in cash, and had made the merchant give him conventional promissory notes for the balance. The merchant had tried to default, Eisenstein had hired a lawyer, and a Philadelphia court had made the merchant pay him out of the insurance money.
The Dachis fur store occupied the ground floor and the front half of the second floor of the building on Twenty-seventh Street. Months before the fire the fur merchant had partitioned off a section of the second floor and installed there a small perfumery shop. He hired a man named Leavitt, who, it turned out later, knew nothing about perfume, and made him the dummy proprietor of the shop. Dachis confessed later that this shop was set up simply to furnish an explanation for the inflammable liquids which would be used by the firebug. When Eisenstein was placed in charge, the first thing he did was to make several gallons of inflammable fluid, using his secret formula. Then he cut a hole about two feet square in the floor of the fake perfumery shop and a similar hole in the floor of the Dachis store, leading into the cellar. This was to insure a draught. To make the draught even better, he pulled up two or three floorboards in the store. Eisenstein then set up the fire-making apparatus. He had brought with him a grooved board, a piece of punk, some non-safety matches, some tissue paper, and several large bundles of absorbent cotton. All through these preparations he was chewing a large wad of chewing gum. He laid the punk along the groove in the board (which was nailed to the floor of the fur shop) and at one end of the board placed the chewing gum. The matches were stuck in the chewing gum so that their heads touched one end of the punk. The tissue paper was then laid over the matches, loosely fluffed. Leading from the tissue paper to the two rooms on the second floor, and to the four corners of the downstairs room, like streamers at a gala, were ropes of absorbent cotton which had been soaked in the inflammable fluid. An open container of the fluid stood at the end of each streamer. Eisenstein then lit the end of the punk, and left. When the inflammable fluid was ignited a little more than three hours later, the explosion was so terrific that it blew out the front wall of the building and hurled an iron gate across the street. It was after midnight on a Sunday, and the street was not crowded. The gate hit a passing Greek, who had to be treated for cuts and bruises at St. Vincent’s Hospital, but no one else was injured by the explosion. Eisenstein achieved “complete destruction” on this job. It was a two-alarm fire.
Both Doc Eisenstein and Professor Carmen were family men who did not consort with professionals in other types of crime. This seems to be typical of firebugs. Brophy has found that most of them have been respectable married men, and while their wives knew what business their husbands were in, the ladies did not appear to consider it criminal. Some years ago a notorious firebug named Horowitz, who had been operating in the metropolitan area for some time without being caught, was killed in an explosive fire which went off before he expected it to in a store in Paterson, New Jersey. It was found that he lived in lower Manhattan, and had a family. When his wife was informed of his sudden death, she exclaimed in an aggrieved tone, “For three years I have been expecting something like this to happen!” Firebugs sometimes exhibit civilized feelings and a highly developed sense of decorum. Brophy once was hot on the trail of a gang of firebugs, and had learned of their plan to set fire to an East Side building on a certain day. Mysteriously, the setting of the blaze was postponed, and Brophy failed to catch them that time. Brophy did not find out why the postponement had been made until he arrested the firebugs some months later: somebody had died in the tenement next door to the store that was to be burned, and the firebugs had not wished to upset the funeral services by having a fire. So they had put off the fire for three days.
Professional arson seems to be a man’s job, on the whole. Only a dozen or so women have been convicted of the crime in the past thirty years in New York. Several of these burned up outmoded clothes with the idea of making insurance companies buy new ones. Three were rooming-house keepers. Another, a widow, burned up her apartment in order to collect the insurance on her furniture. She was betrayed by an urn containing the ashes of her husband, who had been legally cremated some years before. Not wishing her husband’s ashes to be mingled with the ashes of the furniture, she placed the urn in the oven of the kitchen range. Brophy always looks into everything when he investigates a fire. He investigated this one, looked into the oven, found the urn, and asked the widow about it. “It’s nothing,” she said vaguely. Brophy remarked that it must be something and started ostentatiously to pour some of the ashes into his hand, as if to examine them. “Oh, my poor husband!” the widow moaned. Brophy suggested gently that she would not have put the urn in the oven if she had not been expecting a fire, and she admitted that she had set fire to the place herself.
With only ten or twelve hours of steady work a day in and out of his office at the Municipal Building, Brophy was able to protect the city about as adequately as it could be protected from professional firebugs. What kept him working longer than that, and made him get out of bed when he ought to have stayed there, was the knowledge that every now and then some apparently normal, law-abiding citizen among the city’s millions suddenly and inexplicably comes to the conclusion that what he has to do to be happy is to set fire to a building and see the fire engines come. Professional firebugs, and the dishonest merchants who employ them, are cunning, but they are rational individuals. They confide in their friends, get drunk and talk too much to strangers, are inclined to be too greedy in making claims against insurance companies, and otherwise leave clues lying around. Pyromaniacs go about satisfying their strange desires without telling even their best friends or the members of their own families. There is usually no concrete clue which will connect the pyromaniac with the particular building he chooses to see in flames. One building is as good as another for his purpose, and he may very well never have seen it before he applies the torch. Any neighborhood will do for him, although he usually chooses one far from where he lives and most frequently selects the tenement districts, where the buildings burn well and where hallways are full of inflammable refuse.
Psychiatrists have various explanations for the causes and the nature of pyromania, none of which has been of much help to Brophy. It is generally agreed among the experts that pyromaniacs are neurotic, frustrated, and crave the sight of flames or the satisfaction of being able to look at something as spectacular as a fire and say to themselves, “I did that.” It is supposed to be a rather sexy and perverted mania on the whole; and it is one that used to give old-fashioned psychoanalysts immense satisfaction, because the symbolism of both fire and water could be worked in. Fascinated by this, some of them evolved elaborate theories, laying great emphasis on the traditional relationship, in all known languages, of desire and words like “fire,” “burn,” “hot,” and “scorching.” Modern psychiatrists believe that professional firebugs are borderline pyromaniacs who nurse a flame psychosis and happen to have been able to combine business with pleasure. They like to point to the case of a local firebug-pyromaniac who was, according to this theory, madly in love with a West Side warehouse. The firebug was employed by an importer to set fire to this commodious building, and during the negotiations which preceded the fire he wrote notes to his employer and used such euphemisms as “bride” and “sweetheart” when referring to the warehouse and “wedding” when referring to the night the fire was to take place.
From a practical point of view, Brophy knows more about the ways of pyromaniacs than anybody else in the country, but he doesn’t theorize about them. “They are a strange bunch,” he says, and lets it go at that. Some of them, he has found, look like lunatics, and others do not.
Brophy usually caught pyromaniacs simply by getting to fires while they were still burning. At most fires in the tenement districts, Brophy and some of his trained deputies were likely to be standing somewhere in the crowd, keeping an eye on the faces of the people who were watching, and taking note of what they said and how they acted. Brophy’s mind accommodated an enormous gallery of faces, divided up into neat and clearly defined categories. There was a large section devoted to pyromaniacs he had sent to prison or to institutions and those he had arrested and released for lack of evidence at some time or other during the last four decades. These he could identify in the filing system at his office, with names and addresses and certain remembered peculiarities. Then there was an extensive section in which he could find the faces of men he had suspected, at one time or another, of being pyromaniacs—vague faces with no names to them, faces that he saw once weeks or months or years before and which for some reason, perhaps forgotten, aroused his suspicion. The face of a man who had once talked just a shade too excitedly about the fire he was watching would probably be in this group, or that of a man who had once been questioned at the scene of a fire but not arrested, because there was no real evidence against him. These faces did not, somehow, get mixed up with the faces of the hundreds of people in all the neighborhoods of New York with whom Brophy kept up a slight acquaintance and who were in no way suspicious characters. Those faces were in still another section of his mind. It was all part of the Brophy intellect.
Brophy always made it a point to go to practically all hospital fires. No other variety of fire creates as much excitement as a hospital fire, and for this reason a pyromaniac may easily be tempted to have a try at one. And if there is any chance that a pyromaniac has set fire to a hospital, Brophy wants to catch him before he does it again. When the nurses’ home and dining hall of the Methodist Episcopal Hospital in Brooklyn was destroyed by fire in October, 1927, there was plenty of excitement. The fire threatened the hospital building, where three hundred patients were in bed. While smoke was billowing through the halls, an expectant mother gave birth to a baby, and two major operations which had been begun had to be completed. The most excited person in the whole place was one of the hospital porters. He had turned in the alarm, given advice to the firemen, and had finally run into the burning building yelling that he wanted to save the nurses. He had collapsed on a stairway, overcome by smoke, and when Brophy saw him was in the infirmary. The doctors and nurses were making a fuss over him and calling him a hero. But the porter’s face was one of the faces in Brophy’s memory. Brophy had had him arrested ten years before and charged him with having set a series of fires in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn. A sympathetic jury, unable to understand why he should set fires without any conceivable motive, had acquitted him. He confessed that he had started the hospital fire by stuffing a pile of gauze under a bureau and lighting it with a match. This man seemed a good-natured, slow-witted, rather likable chap to everybody who knew him. He admitted he had gone to work at the hospital with the express intention of setting fire to it.
Bellevue Hospital had a pyromaniac among its employees at one time, an Irishman who worked there as a plumber’s helper. He succeeded twice in creating excitement by setting fire to newspapers he had stored in linen closets. He tried a third time, got caught, and was transferred to the psychopathic ward as a patient. Large institutions of all kinds attract the pyromaniac. In 1929, a guard who worked in the House of Refuge on Randall’s Island confessed that he had started three fires there, and that earlier in the year, when he was working at the New Jersey State Hospital in Morris Plains, he had set fire to that institution, causing the destruction of a million dollars’ worth of property.
Schools and hotels are also favored by the pyromaniac. Brophy has caught as many as three dozen public-school boys in the last thirty years who have tried to set fire to the schools they were attending. Pyromania usually develops in the adolescent period, and sometimes can be cured by modern psychiatric therapy. Not infrequently, however, it seizes a man of middle age. Brophy hurried over to the Hotel St. George in Brooklyn one day in the fall of 1929 when he received reports that four fires had broken out in the hotel between midnight and dawn. Brophy had five of his assistants disguise themselves as porters and waiters, and started watching the guests as they came and went. Brophy suspected a pyromaniac was loose in the hotel, because all the fires had started in vacant rooms or hall closets, where fires would not be likely to start by accident. The house detective, who had been up all night and had been commended by the management for discovering two of the fires himself, roved about from floor to floor and reported every fifteen minutes or so that all was well. Three more fires occurred in empty rooms and hall closets during the morning, and five more followed in rapid succession as the day wore on. Brophy’s men were unnerved and the house detective was beside himself with excitement, rushing about from floor to floor, exclaiming about the mystery of it all. Brophy finally began to concentrate his attention on the house detective, and discovered that every now and then the man was going to his room in the hotel and taking a swig from a bottle of rye. Brophy thought there was something inconsistent about a man who pretended to be so interested in catching the pyromaniac and at the same time was getting royally drunk. The house detective was questioned and finally accused of setting the fires himself. He began to weep and readily confessed. He was a man of forty, and until this time, apparently, had never felt any conscious urge to set anything on fire. He had been grabbed by the impulse the day before, he said, and he had not been able to control it. “It’s the greatest excitement in the world,” he told Brophy. A good many pyromaniacs, both young and old, Brophy has found, start setting fire to things only when they start drinking.
BROPHY WAS ALWAYS gentle with pyromaniacs. While he does not subscribe to all the theories of the psychiatrists, he believes that pyromaniacs should be sent to asylums rather than prisons, and usually made this recommendation to judge and jury.
He talked to pyromaniacs kindly, pretended to admire their cunning, and led them painlessly into detailed confessions of all the fires they had set off. Every now and then the confessions of a pyromaniac seem to dovetail nicely with the theories of the psychiatrist. A young man who was an evening student at the Morris High School in the Bronx admitted, when he was caught, that he had set fire to twenty dwellings in Brooklyn and five in Manhattan. Brophy was convinced that he was not just bragging, because the youth was able to describe each fire in a way that checked with the Fire Department records. This pyromaniac worked during the day as a clerk in a Manhattan department store. In the Christmas season of 1934, a friend of his had taken his girl away from him and he had set fire to her house on West Fourth Street, down in the Village. He took up with another young lady, and when she moved away from her rooming house in Brooklyn, leaving no forwarding address, he set fire to that house, After that, he told Brophy, he set fire to a house every time he thought about either girl. The store clerk was arrested at the scene of a fire on Dean Street, Brooklyn. Brophy recognized him as a youth he had questioned, and let go, some months before at the scene of another fire. Brophy used to have various ways of verifying his suspicions when he asked an excited fire-watcher to go along to his office and talk to him. An innocent person, he has found, usually protests violently at the effrontery of such a request, while the guilty one almost invariably says, “Why sure. I have nothing to hide; take me along.” Brophy once casually asked a suspect for a match, and the man replied indignantly, “I never carry matches.” Brophy persuaded him without difficulty to come to his office and answer a few questions. At the office, he had the man searched. A box of matches was found in his pocket, and, confronted with the evidence that he had lied about carrying matches, the man broke down and confessed to having set off a string of fires.
Most pyromaniacs do not consider whether or not the building is occupied when they set fire to it. One that Brophy caught in 1924 burned unoccupied buildings only. He was a lawyer’s son, in his late twenties, and was working as a bank clerk when Brophy arrested him. He had set fire to fifty empty buildings in Harlem and the Bronx in six months. When Brophy saw him standing in the crowd watching a fire in a vacant house on Amsterdam Avenue, he knew that he had seen him before. Brophy talked to him for a while and then remembered that this was a young man who had been sent to a mental institution three years before as a pyromaniac. He had been discharged as cured.
With all these cases, and hundred of others, in the back of his head, Brophy has no room in his mind for anything but the practical point of view. He knows that most psychiatrists no longer believe that the moon has anything to do with lunacy, but he knows, too, that statistics of his Bureau of Fire Investigation show that through the years more incendiary fires have occurred when the moon is full than at any other time. He does not know or care much why this is, but on bright moonlight nights, when he was still Chief Fire Marshal, he and his deputies were more alert than ever, and often didn’t wait for the fire alarms to come in but tried to be nearby when a fire was started. They usually picked a certain neighborhood, or two or three neighborhoods, and stood watch on such nights. They knew that pyromaniacs usually return to the same neighborhood for a second or third try after having set off a successful blaze or two, and one of the functions of the Bureau was and is to keep track of unsolved incendiary fires by means of red pins stuck in maps of the five boroughs. With Brophy’s knowledge of what all neighborhoods of the city look like, what sort of buildings are in them, and his habit of walking systematically around the city and talking to people, he seemed to be able to tell every now and then just about where to look for trouble. His deputies used to accuse him of being subject to a rheumatic twinge in the legs which told him when to expect an outbreak of pyromania or professional arson in a neighborhood that had been worrying him. Brophy denies this gravely, saying, “No, I have never been troubled by rheumatism.” Undoubtedly he worked on hunches a good part of the time in hunting both pyromaniacs and professional firebugs, but they were the knowledgeable hunches of a man who had been working for over forty years on the problem of incendiarism, and thinking, during most of that time, about hardly anything else. In his retirement, Brophy lives a quiet life in Brooklyn these days and, although he still has an alarm box in his home, rarely goes to fires. He is chairman of the Arson Committee of the International Association of Chiefs of Police and is frequently called in as a consultant by fire-insurance companies who want an expert’s opinion on the origin of certain fires. “I’m taking it easy,” he says, “and I’m enjoying it.”