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12.18.2003
The Fire Marshal
BY TOM MOONEY and ZACHARY R. MIDER
Journal Staff Writer
WEST WARWICK -- How did he miss the foam?
In the summer of 2000, hundreds of square feet of cheap, highly flammable packing foam were glued to the interior walls of The Station nightclub -- in violation of the state fire code.
Over the next three years, West Warwick Fire Marshal Denis P. Larocque inspected the club at least twice. At least two other town inspectors would come calling.
No inspector ever noted the foam in their reports.
Since February, West Warwick has been left to ponder the central question of inspections. Why were unsafe conditions -- the foam, faulty exits, permission for big crowds, rock 'n' roll fireworks -- allowed to exist for years at The Station, despite regular inspections?
Larocque, a reserved man who until February enjoyed a quiet and simple small-town life in West Warwick, has declined to speak publicly about his decisions. In an interview in August, his lawyer, Joseph J. Rodio said that the legal challenges facing Larocque -- he's named in some of the civil suits brought since the fire -- have made it difficult for Larocque to comment.
Given all the scrutiny, Rodio said, Larocque wants to talk: "He wants to find a way to exonerate himself as best he can."
Meanwhile, Larocque has continued to go about his job as the fire marshal in West Warwick, where almost everyone knows him as "Rocky."
THE SHOWDOWN at The Station came in 2000, on a morning in March.
Howard Julian had achieved his goal of transforming the neighborhood bar into a cult center for heavy metal.
Julian was seeking to sell the business, but he and the prospective buyers had problems.
And the cadre of officials pulling into the parking lot on Cowesett Avenue expected solutions.
There was the fire chief who had voiced "grave concern" about the club's constant overcrowding.
And the police chief who months earlier had visited late at night and heard music pounding through the back wall and into the abutting neighborhood.
Two members of the town's Building Department had arrived; the town had cited the club for repairing the roof without a permit.
And there were the Derderian brothers, Jeffrey and Michael, promising that if the town would approve the transfer of the club's liquor license to them, the headaches would end: the noise; the complaints that council members were fielding; and the capacity violations, which had safety officials warning of calamity.
Lastly came the ace in the town's hand: the stoic, thick-set man with heavy black brows, Denis P. Larocque.
He was raised in West Warwick, in a tiny house in the mill village of Arctic, just uphill from the local factory. He had played football for the high school Wizards, joined the Fire Department not long after graduating and married a local girl. He was two weeks shy of his 44th birthday -- a Frenchman born on St. Patrick's Day.
For years, Larocque had been a presence in town: coaching friends' children in football and baseball; leading a painting crew to spiff up St. John the Baptist School, where his own children attended; and day to day, passing from village to village, the insignia of his job stenciled on the door of his town van:
FIRE MARSHAL.
On this morning, Larocque had the power to make the club owners' day pleasant or miserable.
A day earlier, Julian had told Larocque that all the fire-code violations previously identified had been corrected. Now Larocque would see for himself.
He proceeded to find 11 violations:
An exit door by the stage was blocked. Some emergency exit signs were hung in the wrong places, others had missing or burned out lights. The "panic hardware" on two exit doors needed to be replaced. The fire-suppression system in the kitchen needed upgrading.
And there was that curtain.
He couldn't tell if it was fire retardant.
He said Julian or the Derderians would have to prove the curtain was safe or remove it, and scrawled "remove curtain or rate it" on his inspection report.
Then, jotting down a few pages of calculations, Larocque raised the club's occupancy limit by an additional 87 people, bringing the total allowed inside to 404. Only three months earlier, he had set the occupancy limit at 317.
IN THE LATE 1800s, Larocque's forebears migrated from Quebec, joining other French Canadians working in the Rhode Island textile mills.
Larocque's father was born into West Warwick poverty, one of eight children. He served in the Army during World War II, returned to town after the war and started work at the Warwick Mills. He changed jobs a few years later, working at the Apponaug Print Works for a time, before starting a career as a grinder for the submarine maker Electric Boat in Groton, Conn.
It was physically demanding work, operating a heavy air gun in the cold of winter and the heat of summer. But the pay was the best around and Joe Larocque worked it, for 32 years, carpooling with other EB workers for the 90-mile roundtrip.
Young Denis would be in the street after school, passing a football with a friend, and would watch his father slip into the car with the other second-shift EB workers, off to provide for their families.
He would watch and learn.
When his father died in January 2002, Denis Larocque stood on the altar of Christ the King Church and eulogized him. With the calm demeanor he had shown since high school, Larocque described his father as a modest man who had sacrificed for those he loved and who had given to his community.
As he spoke, Jean P. Roch, a friend of Denis's since first grade, listened, recognizing Denis's own values in his remembrance of his father.
Denis had always been a quiet plugger, too, who had worked a paper route while in grade school, who kept up the three rental properties he now owned in town.
"He's always been a worker," says Roch. "His work ethic is second to none. He came from parents with limited financial means, and that instilled in him a good work ethic."
AFTER HIGH school, Denis Larocque hustled.
While earning an associate's degree in retail management from Rhode Island Junior College, he worked with a local firefighter, cleaning, repairing and painting houses.
Larocque's lifelong friend, Gregory Laboissonniere, recalls that Larocque was a good student, both at Christ the King School and in high school. Laboissonniere was somewhat surprised when Larocque joined the West Warwick Fire Department in 1977.
"I always thought he was more ambitious than that."
Larocque was 21 and only three years out of high school when he signed on as a firefighter.
For a young man in a town where job opportunities were slim, fighting fires was a good-paying, honorable profession that promised a nice pension. There was pride in joining a fraternity where at any moment members put themselves in harm's way -- for the sake of strangers.
Like many fire departments, West Warwick's is close-knit. Fathers who fight fires have sons who fight fires. Brothers serve alongside each other.
There have been times, though, when jobs on the department have been viewed as patronage plums. Like the time in 1986, when the Town Council put the son of a police captain on the payroll, though he had not received the fire chief's recommendation. And the time in 1978 when two councilmen running for reelection promised a 41-year-old campaign worker a job, though the department's policy forbade hiring anyone over age 28.
The year 1977, when Larocque came aboard, was a low point in department history.
Another private, Donald F. "Doc" Lombardi, helped his cousin dynamite a Warwick restaurant in an attempt to eliminate some competition. (He received a suspended sentence.)
And Battalion Chief Anthony J. "Tootsie" Parente agreed to slow the department's fire trucks when a friend set his warehouse ablaze. Parente was found guilty of conspiracy in 1980, yet the town kept him on the payroll for three years until the state Supreme Court upheld his conviction. He was sentenced to serve six months and a day.
DENIS LAROCQUE steadily climbed the ranks. He was a lieutenant on the department when, in 1991, a Providence businessman opened a sports bar called Crackerjacks at 211 Cowesett Ave., in what would later become The Station, and started bringing in live music.
The first noise complaints soon followed.
Barbara and Barry Warner lived behind the club, beyond a thin stand of trees. Sometimes when the bands played, the pictures on their walls shook.
Band members and patrons would shout profanities. Loud parties would spill outside after closing time, along with the occasional fistfight.
In 1993, Barbara Warner wrote to the police, complaining that she and her family couldn't sleep on band nights. The police chief recommended against renewing the bar's liquor license. The Town Council overruled him.
One Saturday night in June 1994, Barry Warner called the police. When the officer pulled up, Warner asked him to shut off his cruiser and listen. The officer later reported the music was so loud the whole area behind the club "appeared to vibrate."
In 1995, Warner's councilman, Robert B. Moorehead, proposed a new noise ordinance. After it became law, the police began measuring the noise level outside the club on concert nights.
The police have released no record that the club was ever cited for breaking the ordinance.
More often, the police would find the noise to be within the limits. When they did crack down on the club, employees would simply turn down the volume, change bands, or tell the police they were on the last song of the evening.
The bands played on.
The noise and complaints continued.
One neighborhood family, the Caponigros, moved away.
FIRE CODE inspection has historically been an unpopular job, generating much paperwork, little glamour and few friends.
Robert E. Kelley, who filled in as West Warwick's fire marshal in the early 1990s -- though he said he was never certified as an assistant deputy state fire marshal -- recalls few ever really wanted the responsibility.
When Russell N. Ouellette retired as West Warwick's fire marshal in 1998, Denis Larocque was a battalion chief, with 21 years in and eligible for retirement.
Larocque was living on Arctic Hill -- around the corner from where he and his three siblings were raised. But now his house was the largest in the neighborhood, an elongated structure that looked almost as if Larocque had pulled two or three of the surrounding small homes together, and added a top floor and a two-car garage.
Here Larocque had found small-town success: a big home with a pool in the backyard, and a wife and three children whose lives were busy with school activities and sports. Evenings, they carted kids to practice. Weekends, they fixed up ball fields, coached games, and sold Big League bubble gum and hot dogs at concession stands.
The vacant fire marshal's job paid the same as a battalion chief, but it did offer, on the surface anyway, a more set schedule. Rather than answer fire calls in the middle of the night, he could work his four-day, 10-hour shifts, and be home to cart his children to practice.
In reality, the job demanded overtime.
Out of a 70-man department, only one person was responsible for preventing fires: the fire marshal.
Annual club inspections for liquor-license renewals were just a small part of Denis Larocque's responsibilities.
Every time a house changed hands in West Warwick, Larocque had to ensure its smoke detectors worked. Every time a fire broke out, Larocque investigated and reported a cause. Every time a new building was proposed, Larocque approved the plans. Every proposed subdivision required Larocque to check area water pressure and plot new fire hydrant locations.
And in between those duties, Larocque was to inspect other businesses licensed through the town, from boarding houses to filling stations.
On top of those regular duties, Larocque spent much of his first year on the job helping local and state authorities investigate the rash of 14 arson fires in Arctic over the course of seven months, from October 1996 to April 1997.
In May 1999, authorities announced with great fanfare that they had cracked one of the biggest of the unsolved cases, the 1996 Christmas Day fire that destroyed the Odeon Theater. They charged a local man with first-degree arson; the charge was eventually dropped for lack of evidence.
Larocque's lawyer, Rodio, says the fire marshal was overworked. Town officials acknowledge Larocque worked a large amount of overtime, but they have refused requests by The Providence Journal to release records pertaining to his work.
WHEN THE Derderian brothers came onto the scene in early 2000 as prospective owners of The Station, Paul M. Vanner, the club's sound man, says he gave them advice: cooperate with the neighbors.
Buy them air conditioners, he suggested, so they can keep their windows closed during summer concerts. And talk to them.
"Once you show them your face, you become like a human being," Vanner said. "Once you start talking to someone, the compromise thing comes into play. When you show them your situation, they're willing to bend a little bit. They think, 'At least the guy's trying.' "
Several times, Jeffrey Derderian wandered up Kulas Road to visit the Piasczyks, a retired couple who lived behind the club. Sometimes, he would bring his two young sons, who played in the yard.
"He seemed like the nicest young man," Helen Piasczyk recalls.
Derderian made one thing abundantly clear: If there was ever a problem with the noise, don't call the police. Call us.
Helen Piasczyk wrote the brothers' home phone numbers in a spiral-bound notebook she kept by her telephone.
ON MARCH 21, 2000, three weeks after Larocque had identified 11 different fire-code violations in The Station, the Derderians went before the Town Council for the long-awaited decision about the liquor-license transfer.
They had worked hard to remove the last obstacles to approval.
The Fire Department's alarms expert, John A. Peiczarek, had performed a follow-up inspection earlier in the day and reported in a memo: "All deficiencies noted on 3-02-00 report have been corrected."
The police and fire chiefs voiced guarded optimism.
"They've been very cooperative," said Fire Chief Richard J. Rita. "They have also agreed for any major concerts to have a firefighter on duty in the building."
Larocque had helped the cause, too.
By raising the club's occupancy limit on March 2, 2000, Larocque gave the Derderians an important cushion against the fire chief's objection that The Station was packed beyond its legal limit on busy nights.
In a memo that day, Larocque explained he was raising the occupancy limit because the Derderians planned to remove some tables and chairs during big shows to get more people inside.
But Larocque's own mathematical notes of his March 2 inspection show that it wasn't the furniture's removal that was primarily responsible for the significant change in the occupancy limit.
It was because Larocque had reclassified all public areas of the club as "standing room" -- the category allowing the most people.
Three months earlier he had put the spaces in more restrictive categories.
The state fire code doesn't allow the classification of all public areas of a building as standing room, according to William F. Howe, the chief of inspections in the state fire marshal's office.
Larocque's lawyer Rodio said in August that Larocque was working with an "open-ended" code book with room for different interpretations when he increased the occupancy limit.
Town Manager Wolfgang Bauer defended his fire marshal, describing Larocque as "very cautious." If Larocque raised the occupancy "he did that for a purpose that had very concrete and sound principles behind them. He didn't do it on a whim."
Before the Town Council, the Derderians handed out a letter on club stationery listing the steps they pledged to take to improve conditions: control the illegal parking problems, monitor noise with a decibel meter, and limit crowds to Larocque's new capacity -- 404.
And the letter outlined another step the brothers had already taken to curb noise: "Sound retardant insulation has been employed around the stage area."
It is unclear what kind of insulation the Derderians were referring to in their letter that night.
But three months later, 540 square feet of highly flammable packing foam would be delivered to the doors of The Station.
THE COUNCIL gave the Derderians a chance; nobody wanted to see a viable business shut down. Not a business that employed local people and paid property taxes.
The town had lost too many other businesses.
"I'm pro-business," Councilman Moorehead told the Derderians, "but I'm interested that business be operated with consideration for the surrounding people. When you do that, you've got support."
The council awarded the Derderians an unusual, 90-day entertainment license that kept The Station on a short leash. If complaints rang in, the license would be short-lived.
On April 27, 2000, the band Lovin' Kry performed at The Station and set off pyrotechnics, just as Great White would nearly three years later in the last performance at the club.
Lovin' Kry had neither the required state competency certificate for handling pyrotechnics nor a permit from the town to set them off.
Among the spectators were two West Warwick firefighters working a detail.
The firefighters never cited the band for the pyrotechnics.
"I remember actually shaking hands with the firemen," former band member Rev Tyler said shortly after the fire. "They said, 'Nice show, good stuff,' something to that effect. There was never any mention that you should not blow that stuff off."
WHILE THE Derderians clung to their new-found truce with neighbors and Town Hall, Denis Larocque was making waves.
Since Larocque took over the job of fire marshal in May 1998, several business owners had come to believe that Rocky had it in for them.
"To be honest with you, I thought he was busting my chops," said Stephen E. Simas, who runs Evelyn's Villa, a local restaurant.
Minor violations that had been overlooked by previous inspectors became big problems.
Richard Bettez, who runs a bar and rooming house in the village of Phenix, said inspectors prior to Larocque would usually conduct their annual check for smoke detectors by opening a room or two at random.
Not so Rocky.
He demanded to see every single room, every detector, and made Bettez throw out an old stove he used to cook meals for himself.
"The man takes his job very seriously," says Larocque's friend Christopher J. Coffua, who sells and installs fire-safety equipment in the Pawtuxet Valley.
Larocque's predecessor, Russell Ouellette, had noted a total of six violations in a tour of the town's six public schools in 1997. Two years later, Larocque found 52 violations in the same six schools.
At West Warwick High School, where the only problem Ouellette had cited was clutter in a basement tunnel, Larocque found 17 violations, some of which would require costly improvements and repairs.
Larocque's longtime friend Gregory Laboissonniere runs a liquor store not far from The Station.
He recalled one year when Larocque cited him for an inoperable light in an exit sign -- and promised to return to make sure it was replaced.
"We've been two friends for a long time," says Laboissonniere, "and he wouldn't let me go for a light bulb."
BARRY WARNER was one of the neighbors Jeff and Michael Derderian tried to soften to their side. They offered to buy him an air conditioner.
His initial meeting with the Derderians spun off several subsequent conversations. During one, Warner told the Derderians that he worked as a salesman for American Foam Corp., in Johnston.
According to a police detective's affidavit, Warner told investigators that "he told the Derderians about a foam that is used for packaging that is sold by his place of employment. Warner informed the Derderians that they could purchase the foam and use it as a form of sound-absorbing material."
According to the affidavit, Warner said that soon after purchasing the foam on June 27, 2000, the Derderians invited him to the club and showed him how they had installed it around the stage to muffle noise.
The Derderians bought 25 sheets of the 2 1/2-inch thick foam for $575. American Foam also sold fire-retardant foam that would have cost the Derderians "at least twice as much," Aram DerManouelian, co-owner of American Foam, said shortly after the fire.
BY THE summer of 2000, the highly flammable foam was on the walls for anyone to see.
The town's fire alarm expert, John Peiczarek, inspected The Station on Nov. 21 of that year. He found fire-code violations, including a door near the stage that needed repairs.
He did not make note of the foam on the club's walls.
On Nov. 10, 2001, Denis Larocque returned to The Station as part of the town's annual liquor-license renewal process.
He found some of the same fire-code violations that Peiczarek had noted a year earlier.
He, too, failed to flag the foam on the walls.
The town building inspector, the town fire alarm official and Larocque had visited the club at least a half dozen times while the foam was on the walls, as late as December 2002, two months before the fire.
They had all found violations of one form or another, but never mentioned the foam.
Not long before The Station fire, Larocque wrote as part of a house fire investigation: "When you're a one-man fire prevention division like I am, things get a little backed up sometimes. It becomes difficult at times to handle all inspections, investigations, plan review and public education duties in a timely manner."
Still Larocque seemed to enjoy his work, says his friend Laboissonniere.
When Fire Chief Rita retired in 2002, Laboissonniere says he asked Larocque why he didn't put his name in for the job; he certainly had enough experience.
Larocque said "he didn't want the heat of being chief."
TOMORROW: The Guest List
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