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
