Mendo’s Great Crimes

“We only catch the dumb ones.” — the late Norm Vroman, Mendocino County District Attorney

In two hours on a September night in 1987, Fort Bragg's library, Ten Mile Justice Court and the famous old Piedmont Hotel went up in flames. The very heart of the old logging town was gone. Who did it? Lots of people were questioned, even more people talked, but nobody was ever arrested for Mendocino County's grandest night of arson.

Susan Massini was Mendocino County’s District Attorney at the time, but she seemed more intent upon firing the seethingly unhappy prosecutors in her office than taking on the star members of Fort Bragg’s brazenly criminal business class. (Massini had had present Mendo DA David Eyster marched out of his job as assistant DA at gunpoint. The old girl seemed to take office dissent more seriously than major crimes.)

But then Massini always was soft on Dominic Affinito, a Sacramento transplant who had very quickly become a major property owner in the Fort Bragg area, so major he still owns the County structures housing the Mendocino Coast branches of County government.

Before Affinito began collecting big rents on Mendocino County’s extensive complex of Fort Bragg offices, he’d “loaned” the needier members of the Fort Bragg City Council attractive sums of money to ensure their support for such Affinito projects as the Glass Beach housing development at the north end of town and his later triumph, a garish one-story-too-tall motel called the North Cliff overlooking the Pacific at the north end of the Noyo Bridge. The present site of the North Cliff was conveniently cleansed of the structure previously located there by arson fires. The North Cliff exists not only in violation of Fort Bragg’s unenforced building codes, but managed to rise with an entire extra floor in flagrant violation of the otherwise rigidly enforced state Coastal Act.

The Fort Bragg police soon knew who’d burned the library, the Ten Mile Court and the Piedmont Hotel. They were young Fort Bragg men addicted to cocaine and their odd logistics man, a not-so-young proprietor of a late night janitorial service, all of them funded by a pair of Italian-surnamed Fort Bragg businessmen. Even though the FBI and the ATF dispatched small armies of agents to Fort Bragg to assist in the investigations of the fire, nobody was ever arrested, let alone charged for the crimes. (A few years later, the FBI managed not to exclude from consideration Judi Bari's ex-husband as the man who blew her up with a car bomb in downtown Oakland.)

The old Fort Bragg library and the even older Ten Mile Court were burned as a diversion for the fire that finished off the Piedmont Hotel, the Piedmont being the evening’s primary target.

Diversions? Diversions.

And how much more contempt could the arsonists have had for Fort Bragg than to have destroyed its very soul simply to get at a rival restaurant? Was it too central to the town’s history?

When I went looking for the police files on the Fort Bragg Fires. I asked the ATF and the FBI where their reports on the arsons were. “Oh, we sent them all to Mendocino County years ago,” I was told. “Surely, you can find them there.”

I surely couldn’t.

District Attorney Susan Massini either took the files with her when she left office or she shredded them to permanent oblivion before she left office. The Fort Bragg Fire files are not where they belong — the Mendocino County Courthouse.

When Dominic Affinito slugged Fort Bragg Councilman-elect Dan Gjerde in the lobby of Fort Bragg City Hallin the late 1990s, DA Massini treated the assault as if it were a kind of “boys will be boys” affair. She wasn’t even going to pursue it as a misdemeanor battery, and if she hadn’t been un-elected, Affinito, who was promptly charged and prosecuted by Massini’s successor, Norm Vroman, and subsequently sentenced to felony probation and community service he never served, would obviously have not only gone unsanctioned, he wouldn’t even have been inconvenienced by court appearances.

The arsons-for-profit boys weren’t the only people to elude Massini’s benignly distracted gaze. The Orsi brothers of Fort Bragg literally got away with killing an old friend of theirs, Dan Murray, 27 when he breathed his last, but try to find a public file on that one. The cops didn’t even bother to take a report after the Orsi Brothers went out to Murray’s house on Airport Road, challenged him to a fight during which Murray was shot in the upper arm with his own handgun. A few months later Murray, complaining of pain in his shoulder from the bullet wound, went to Coast Community Hospital to see if the wound had properly healed. It hadn’t, and Danny Murray died of an embolism that raced from the bullet the doctors had left in his arm straight to his heart and killed him.

And who remembers the Orr Sisters? Accused of child molests in the context of the non-existent phenomena called Satanism, a hysteria that swept through the more primitive segments of the Fort Bragg population as intensely as it did through other areas of the country, reminding us that America is never far from the rattling of chicken bones as an explanation for the prevailing unreal reality, the Orr Sisters lost their property, one sister lost custody of her daughter to CPS and Trinity School, Ukiah, where the child was repeatedly raped by older residents of that hellish institution, and nearly lost their lives.

The Orr Sisters, you see, were witches who rented the children in their daycare home to Satanists. The little ones were ferried up the Coast — get this — in the Georgia-Pacific helicopter for unwholesome ceremonies, but were always back in time for mommy and daddy to pick them up after work, none the worse. The proof? The three and four-year-olds said so.

When I went looking for the police files on Beezlebub’s rampage through Fort Bragg, Captain Gary Hudson, then a candidate for Sheriff, told me I couldn’t have them because “a murder may have been committed, and because a murder may have been committed the files are not public record.”

Hudson had been dispatched at public expense to attend Satanist seminars. Lots of police departments sent representatives to these idiot affairs.

But the only murders committed were the psychic killings of the Orr Sisters whose lives were ruined by the cretins in County government and the sub-cretins of CPS, who not only succumbed to the hysteria, but kept it alive.

The Fort Bragg Fires, though, topped anything the Orsi Brothers and the foul incompetents of Mendocino County Social Services could bring off. The Fires were Fort Bragg’s biggest crime ever, and all of official Mendocino County aided and abetted them.

A fellow by the name of Durigan was logistics man for the Fort Bragg Fires of '87. He’s the husband of Barbara Durigan who was a helping professional ubiquitous in Fort Bragg.

Mr. Durigan, prior to the arrival of the Durigans in Fort Bragg, was employed by the San Mateo County Coroner’s Office where he was a body hauler. It was Durigan’s job to carry off the remains of the freshly dead. He and a couple of his fellow body baggers were caught stealing from the deceased; a gold watch here, a nice hunk of cash there. Durigan eluded a jail term in San Mateo County by giving up the names of his crime partners. He and Mrs. Durigan soon found their way north to Mendocino County, America’s largest open air witness protection program, and the only place in the world where you are whatever you say you are, and history starts all over again every morning.

Established in Fort Bragg around the time Satan was active in local daycare centers and Dominic Affinito was buying up some 50 Coast properties, including the thriving Tradewinds motel, restaurant and bar complex, Mr. Durigan, who often weighed within ounces of 600 pounds, started up a late-night janitorial service he mostly supervised from the seated side of the mop. Durigan quickly developed a side gig delivering cocaine for the Coast's major distributor before that distributor branched out into arsons. The big man hired young people to do the janitorial work while he ran his other late night chores.

Among Durigan’s janitorial clients were the phone company building in downtown Fort Bragg and both branches of the Savings Bank of Mendocino, whose manager was heavily addicted to white powder and sex with whomever, whenever, including children in Thailand.

While Fort Bragg slept, Durigan drove around town in his spiffy red janitorial van delivering cocaine to the fast set and arson instructions to a couple of the young men who couldn’t keep up with their drug bills. In between these errands, Durigan’s janitorial crews mopped up, so to speak.

The early morning of the most famously infamous fires — the big blazes had been preceded by several attempts and faux attempts to burn other restaurants — at about 5am on September 20th, 1987, Durigan loaded up his gas cans at Fast Gas on the north side of town and delivered them a few blocks south to young men waiting at the corner of Highway One and Laurel, Fort Bragg’s very soul.

The town’s entire history, its 150-year-old social-political archive, its historical heart, was contained in the adjoining library and court buildings on the southwest corner of Main and Laurel.

The young torches went quickly to work. Gasoline soon seeped into the old library and the even older Ten Mile Court, and both went up in flames.

Down the street to the south, and visible from Laurel and Main, sat the Piedmont Hotel where another young man waited for Durigan. As Fort Bragg’s unique volunteer fire department, Fort Bragg being the only town its size in all of America to rely on a non-professional firefighting capacity, fought to save the library and the court house, up went the Piedmont. The firefighters were overwhelmed, and all three buildings were lost.

The library and the court house were torched as diversions; the Piedmont was the evening’s target.

A young man named Ken Rick was lead torch. Rick occasionally worked for Durigan’s multi-tasking. janitorial service. The day before Rick was scheduled to tell a federal grand jury in San Francisco the names of the persons above Durigan who’d hired him to set the fires of September 20th 1987, and the fires preceding them, Ken Rick committed convenient suicide. The cops said he’d placed a shotgun between his knees and pulled the trigger with his toe; although the kid owned handguns he chose an acrobatic exit. Probable suicide, the cops said, emphasis on probable.

There’s fear and then there’s terror. I’ve never encountered people more afraid to talk than the people we encountered during the investigation and writing of our five-part Fort Bragg Fire saga. One woman begged me not to even mention her in connection with anything related to the Fort Bragg Fires. “They’ll kill me,” she said, “and I have a family and a whole new life now.”

All the material witnesses we talked to — 20 of them — said things like, “They’ll kill me. Go away and never bother me again. They’ll kill me. Don’t tell anybody where I live. They’ll kill me. How did you find me? They’ll kill me. Who gave you my number? They’ll kill me. I wasn’t involved. They’ll kill me.” That was a guy living in a hard-to-find cabin off a remote dirt road deep in the woods.

The statute of limitations ran on the Fort Bragg Fire case. DA Susan Massini just couldn’t seem to bring a case. Couldn’t quite get it up and into court although the names of the arsonists were known and the late Durigan’s role limned so vividly the whole mob amounted to a prosecutorial slam dunk. Faced with long jail terms, the arson mob probably would have come up with plenty on Mr. Big, too, despite his advising them that he’d wipe out them and their whole family trees down to the tenth generation if any of them ratted him out.

The FBI, incidentally, and true to incompetent form, hired Mr. Big’s girl friend to function as stenographer for the FBI’s Fort Bragg interviews with material witnesses. Every day after her stenography work for the G-Men this cocaine-addled floozy ran straight back to fully inform Mr. B as to who said what.

And the one guy who was going to tell a federal grand jury everything about the fires turned up dead the day before he was supposed to testify in San Francisco.

Nobody can be prosecuted now for the arsons. The statute ran long ago. And Satan hasn't been spotted lately lurking around Fort Bragg daycare centers, and the FBI gave Judi Bari's ex a free pass to kill her, and a pair of prominent Fort Bragg brothers got away with murder.