A few years ago I watched an awful movie called “Bad Day on the Block”, which featured a very coked-out Charlie Sheen as a firefighter who terrorizes his next-door neighbors. Even in the world before 9/11, I simply couldn’t buy the premise…whoever heard of a evil firefighter? A cop, definitely. A doctor, maybe. But a firefighter? It’s hard to conceive of such a thing.
But certainly, SOMEWHERE out there, a firefighter has gotten caught doing something nasty. Can anyone remember a news story where one of our finest and bravest men turned out to be not-so-nice?
We used to live right behind an evil firefighter. He set an abandoned house on fire, a car, some brush nearby and just for a little weirdness, he would put on all his gear when he burned leaves while standing there holding a garden hose and wearing this glazed over look on his face. After they caught him, he said he did it because he didn’t feel he could be a hero if he didn’t know where or when the fires would occur. This was years before 9/11.
There’s “Smoker the Bear”, Smokey’s evil brother…well maybe not so much “evil” as simply dis-inclined to actively stop a woodland fire or wield a shovel while wearing a Forest Ranger’s hat. Smoker sports Rasta dreads (which is quite a trick on bear) and earned his name by starting lots of little indoor fires most of which were snuffed out safely except for a giant blunt he dropped between the cushions of his girlfriends couch last Chistmas but which was quickly extinguished by a glass of Merlot.
Some Chicago firefighters have been caught with prostitutes in the fire house – not evil, perhaps, but certainly naughty.
(Anecdotal evidence suggests this may be fairly widespread. When my friend Jim, a 911 dispatcher, had his bachelor party some years ago, the “entertainment” was supplied by his father, a district fire chief. He seemed to know a lot of ladies in the profession.)
About a month ago in Memphis TN. A firefighter was convicted for shooting and killing a fellow firefighter, over a 5 hundred dollar debt. A touch of evil there.
There was an arson investigator out here in the LA area who started a couple fires, one of which killed two people, and then tried to sell a novel about an arson investigator trying to track down the killers.
As it turned out, he sort of lost track of what fiction and nonfiction meant and the police caught up to him and he has since gone to jail.
The story is actually more lurid than I described it.
BobT, was that the Calabasas/Malibu fire that happened in 1993? I remember hearing something about how it was set by a volunteer fireman who wanted to “prove himself a hero” or something like that, but the details were sketchy and I never heard of anyone being arrested for it. (The Altadena fire that same week was accidentally set by a homeless person. Bad year for fires, that was.)
There are just as many bad firefighters are there are bad cops and doctors. It does make the news, but they’re usually not as newsworthy as bad cops and doctors are. The biggies (the California investigator, the Chicago situation, etc) have already been mentioned. There are more, you just have to keep your eyes open for them in the papers.
In ancient Rome there was an entire Evil Firefighting Brigade.
It was a private venture. If a building was on fire, they would show up in a hurry, and then delay, while their boss offered to buy the burning building for a pittence. If the owner refused, the “fire brigade” stood around & waited while the building burned. Then, after a while, a lower offer would be made. Either the owner agreed to sell, or the building was destroyed. The Evil Fire Brigade also prevented other people from assisting by violent means.
According to retired FBI profiler John Douglas (who writes very interesting books), a lot of arsonists and people prone to become arsonists gravitate toward firefighting, usually the volunteer services.
Also . . . there’s an X-rated “gonzo” video out there where a famous porn starlet (forget her name) “did” a bunch of firemen at a station house, and supposedly a lot of people got in trouble. I don’t know if this is a true story or an UL, but I sure have heard and read about this a lot. I even saw pictures (but how hard would it be to dress a bunch of porn stars up in fireman uniforms and pose them with a starlet next to a fire engine?). Anybody got the straight dope on this one?
Finally, personal experience: I had an EMT instructor who was also a fire captain and who was involved in an extramarital affair with a student, if you consider that evil. I also worked with a firefighter who was a real jerk.
A close friend is a volunteer fire fighter in my hometown in CT and he told me this story about how they kicked out and prosecuted a member of the force for setting many of the brush fires they had to fight over the summer. Apparently he was the first on the scene at most of them.
I haven’t seen the video but I believe that was one by “Seymour Butts” featuring his then wife Shane.
I believe similar practices continued within the last two hundred years. Early fire departments in New York and Philadelphia were private businesses and depended on contracts with building owners. In some cases, competing fire companies fought each other at the firesite in attempts to win the job of saving a burning building. In other cases, owners would find that the firemen would not start working unless they received a generous bonus in advance.
A few years ago there was another story in the news about a hazing ritual at some fire station where the newbies would have to sit on the floor while the other men, with no pants on, would leapfrog over their heads in such a way that everyone’s scrotum would slap the newbies on the forehead.
In Vietnam, it’s common for the fire brigade to demand a “fee” from the owner of a burning building. Sometimes the owner can’t, or won’t, pay, but the next door neighbour is willing to pay to protect his own property, so you’ll see fire crews hosing a non-burning building next to one which is burning to the ground unhindered.