TRIAL BY FIRE-Scott James

sign up now at Chumbuck Casino dot com. That's Chumbuck Casino dot com.

collect daily bonuses. So join me and the fun. Sign up now at Chumba casino dot com.

local police chief were calling for criminal charges. Although the investigation had barely begun, key evidence still needed to be gathered, and many of the victims hadn't been identified. Though many parties could be held responsible, Fingers pointed quickly at the two brothers who owned the club, But were they really

to blame. Best selling author and three time Emmy Award winning journalist Scott James investigates all the central figures, including the band's manager and lead singer, the fire inspector, the maker of the acoustical foam, as well as the brothers. Drawing on first and accounts interviews with many involved in court documents, James explores the rush to judgment about what happened that left the victims and their families, whose stories

he also tells, desperate for justice. Trial by Fire is the heart wrenching story of the fire's aftermath because while the fire, one of America's deadliest, lasted minutes, the search for the truth would take years. The book that we're featuring this seating is Trial by Fire, a devastating tragedy, one hundred lives lost, and a fifteen year search for truth, with my special guest, journalist and author, Scott James. Welcome to the program, and thank you so much for this interview.

is connected to everybody else. And I grew up in a suburb of Providence, and so I really consider this to be the worst thing to happen where I grew up. But I have long ago, and many many years before the fire, had moved to California and was not really part of the community there. But I would come home, and I'm a journalist and I worked in television and the newspapers, and I would come home to see my family and friends a few times a year and people

would say, you know this fire. While these people died, they were never any trials. Everything was settled plea bargained settlements, and so nothing was really vetted in court, and there were a lot of unanswered questions, and people thought that there had been a miscarriage of justice, that justice was not served, that there had been a rush to judgement, all these questions, and so about ten years ago I

decided to start looking into the case. I did have an edge over some of the other journalists who pursued this story because two of the central figures, the nightclub business owners, they didn't actually own the building. They owned the business. These two guys, Jeffrey and Michael Didarien. And when I was a news director in Providence, so it means basically, I'm the person who oversaw a TV news department for many years, one of my employees was a

reporter named Jeffrey de Darien. He would turn out to be the co owner of this club. So I thought, well, we're going to look into this. I'll go to Jeffrey because we'd worked together, even though as many more than twenty five years ago now, but at least I knew him, and I thought perhaps he would speak to me. And what I discovered was that even though Jeffrey had been a TV news reporter and a journalist himself, he and

his brother hated journalists. They felt that they had been mistreated by the media, had had vowed never again to speak to another reporter or journalist. And so I come into the picture, and it actually took years to gain Jeffrey's trust, to get him to tell me anything, and to get him to introduce me to his Michael brother, his brother Michael, and that after that, other people came forward.

Other people told me their stories for the first time, and it was really illuminating that much of what the public had been told about the fire turned out there were other facts to consider. And so the book really for the first time, kind of lays out all the facts of this case so that people can desire for themselves what happened, Was it a crime, and if it was a crime, who was really guilty.

idea that Fred had forgotten his crucifix. Tell us a little bit about Fred and Gina and just introduce these very very important characters.

did everything together. Fred was the life of the party, always could have to He was always itching to do something. This is that type of guy, larger than life character. And they'd gone to a movie and the movie had already started, and they're like, well, we don't want to see a movie. It's already started, So what else can we do, and eventually they decided to go to this club, this nightclub with this band's Great Jack Russell's Great White

is about to perform. So they get there and they park and Fred realizes that he's left his good luck cross, probably at home. Probably he probably took it off while he was showering and forgot to put it back on. Now he's only a few minutes away from the club, and they actually have a little discussion in the car, like, well we go back and get it, And eventually Fred says, you know what, you know whatever, but I'm not gonna you know, I'm not Jewelry is not a big deal

to me, so let's just go in. That decision to go into that club rather than go home and get that good luck cross and put it on, was a life and death decision. By going to that club. They were there when the show actually started. They were there when the band took the stage and let out those fireworks. The fireworks ignited the foam and on the inside of the club walls, foam that should have been sound. Foam that should have been you know, sound, should have been

fire proof, fire resistance, but instead was packing foam. The type of foam you've been using in sending things in the mail, which is highly flammable. It's an accelerant, it's the equivalent of solid gasoline. In fact, a federal investigation would determined that the walls of the nightclub were had about thirteen gallons of gasoline, the equivalent of thirteen gallons of gasoline on the wall. So when that fire started,

it just went off like a torch. Well, Fred and Gina were right in the front row, and he immediately senses danger. A lot of people did not sense danger. In fact, when the fire started, people mostly didn't move. They were there dancing and cheering and seeing the columns of flames and thinking that it was part of the show. I mean, we see pyrotechnics at rock concerts all the time. So many people were doomed because they stood there thinking this was part of a special effect, and they did

not run for the exits, and they died. Fred immediately senses this problem, and so he tries to get Gina out, and they try. First, they tried to go through the stage door, which is close to where they are, but they're turned back because well, that actually becomes a real debate in the investigation as to what happened? Why were

they turned back? We know now that that door was shut during shows and had to remain shut because there were so many complaints that by the neighbors about the noise coming from this rock and roll club, and that door was right next to the stage, so if the door was open, the sound went into the neighborhood. The neighbors called the police. So the door was watched carefully and kept closed during the performance. And there is a performance happening as Fred sees these calumns of flames and says,

we've got to get out. So they're turned away from the door that is closest to where they are, and they had, like almost everyone else did, eventually towards the way they came in. That's kind of the way our minds are wired, right, and the panic we're going to say, how do I get out of here? And what your brain knows is, well, you know how you got in,

that's the way you should get out. Well, when hundreds of people all head to the same door simultaneously, it created a traffic jam and eventually literally a pile of people at the door that prevented people from getting out. And that's part of the reason why one hundred people died,

and they died. It happened very fast. It's hard for us to imagine this, but within seconds that fire near the stage was something like fourteen hundred degrees and then within ninety seconds the place was filled with this black smoke that was deadly. And if you were inside that building at ninety seconds after that fire started, you most likely did not get out.

and he was one of their star reporters. And so when something happened nationally like the Columbine shootings, they put him on a plane and he would report from there. He would be reported from nine to eleven. He did live shots and reporting for the Today Show as an NBC affiliate. So he was at the top of his career. But as many of us who work in the news media have witnessed over the time, and he was an early witness to this, this is not a very stable business to be in as far as law, long term

career survival was concerned. And also the media landscape was changing, as we've seen, you know, a lot of news organizations have downsized or gone out of business. He was starting to see this happen and he thought that he should have something else in his life besides being the TV news reporter to support his family. And so his brother, who was a local businessman, had had several different ventures.

He went to his brother and said, hey, we should do some business venture together so we can have some sort of other stable income in our lives besides, you know, for him TV news, And they looked at a laundry chain that they thought about purchasing as an investment, and that felt through and then this nightclub business was for sale.

It was just the business. The club itself. The building itself was owned by someone else, in fact, owned by the person who owned those Papa Brillo restaurants had an investment in that, so they didn't actually own the building. The building was quite old, dated back to I think the twenties or third when it was originally built, and it was originally built as a public venue. In fact, they had live music back in the band of the days of the big bands they were playing in there.

And so as a result of that, because it was always a public venue for entertainment on and offering, it's time it was grandfathered. So what that means for people that don't know is that basically the fire codes that applied early to when the building was built and expanded and established were in force, and so it was not subject to the most modern fire codes. It did not have sprinklers. Sprinklers or a technology that dates back to the eighteen hundreds, but they were not required in this

particular building because of this grandfathering. So when this fire happens, and when this follm is ignited, it goes up like a torch. People have no protection from sprinklers, and we know this sprinkler probably would have saved every single life because just a couple nights earlier in Minneapolis, an almost identical situation happened. We were a rock band set off fireworks indoors in a club that set the acoustic foam on fire, but that building had sprinklers and every single

person survived. So yeah, a lot of things isn't wrong on a lot of different ways that led to this tragedy. People who often refer to it as kind of the perfect storm of fires because so many things went wrong all at the same time. If fireworks were not legal, it was not legal to light off fireworks inside that nightclub. These were fifteen foot arcs of sparks in a club that had twelve foot ceiling, so the decision to light

them off was not very smart. It was definitely illegal in the state of Rhoe Island to have those fireworks and to use them indoors. The band would claim that they had permission from the nightclub business own owners to do this the Jadarian brothers, but the ja Darian brothers

have always maintained that that is not true. And within twenty four hours of the fire, the New York Times actually did an investigation because the band had claimed that they had permission to do fireworks, and they went to several of the venues that it hosted the shows by the same band in the days leading up to the fire and found one after another after another said that the band let off fireworks without permission in their clubs too.

Probably the most famous on that list was a place called the Stone Pony, which is known as kind of where Bruce Springsteen and the EA Street Band got their start down in Asbury Park, New Jersey, and that nightclub owner was so angry that the band had set off fireworks there without permission and that he saw what happened in Rhode Island, and so he released all the contracts that the band had signed down in New Jersey and it showed, you know, these riders are very specific for

rock bands, you know, down to like the type of potation chips are going to serve in the Green room. But there's no mention in any of that paperwork about fireworks or pyrotechnics, and yet it happened. And the guy was livid when it happened. I guess he read them the Riot Act and then when he saw what happened in Rhode Island, he went public and said, you know, they did the same thing to me. You know, we were lucky that we didn't die, but they did the

same thing here. So there were a lot of questions about did the band have permission, did the band not have permission? But whether or not they had permission, it was illegal to set off those harroworks. So again another thing that went wrong that was preventable.

com to claim you're free. Welcome Bonett That's Chumbuck Casino dot com and live at Chumberlane no.

But at the club on the night of this tragedy inside was a local TV news videographer basically a photojournalist for one of the local TV stations, who is there shooting what they call broll. B Roll is kind of generic footage that's going to be used later by the reporter to cover in their story. So the photojournist is there to shoot b roll for this upcoming story, and

you can't make this up. The story he was working on was one about public venue safety, So he is rolling as the band takes the stage, as the fireworks go off, as the flame the stage turns into columns of flames. This is why we know there's thirty seconds between when the fire starts and when panic really sets in in the crowd, because it's all caught on tape. It is probably one of the most documented fires in

the history of United States. This fire is taught to every fire investigator in the United States and most firefighters study this fire as an example of how all things can go wrong. At the same time, that videotape, as horrible as it is, is actually used as a learning tool now and probably has prevented many other people from dying because firefighters use this as a training tool. But yeah, just awful. A twist yet another in this case, whereas it all was caught on tape.

for years and years. Mean Italian restaurant doesn't make much noise, and all of a sudden somebody put in for a permit to turn it into some sort of bar or watering hole or something, and and that was fine, except it wasn't. It wasn't really just a bar watering hole. It turned out to be a rock and roll live music venue. So literally one night, the neighbors wake up to this incredible sound disrupting their sleep, and they are angry, and it starts this campaign that goes for years and

years and years against the town. They felt they were the victims of a bait and switch. They didn't get notification. Had they been told that this was going to be a rock and roll club, they would have asked for something to be done to protect them from the sound, or maybe they would have said not here, don't do it here, not in my backyard. But they didn't have that chance, and so they felt victimized by the system in this town that allowed this to happen. So they

filed complaint and painting complaints. Well, the Dadarians in the year two thousand decide to buy this nightclub business, and they are told immediately by the local police chief that look, we're tired of all these complaints from the neighbors. So either you were going to deal with this sound problem from this night club, or we're not going to issue you a business license or an entertainment license so that

you can have your shows. So you know, this had gone off for years and years, but when the Darians bought it, the towns on opportunities to deal with this, and they made it a threat, a kind of an existential threat, like you will fix this problem that has never been fixed, or we will put you out of business. So they go on a search for answers. The first thing they do is go to the neighbors and they say, well,

what can we do? And they offered to buy them air conditionings, for example, so that they could keep their windows shut. They would be white noise and that would help keep the sound out of their homes. One of the neighbors worked for a foam company, American Foam, and he suggested, he says, he made a lot of suggestions as to how to abate the sound, but among them was foam.

it wasn't sound foam, it was packing foam. And that's part of what we look at in the book is like, how did a mistake like that happen? And you actually see for the first time, the public actually sees the letter, the facts that the brothers sent to the phone company and what they ordered. What they ordered, however, was not what they received. And the two types of home are identical visually, there's no difference even the way they feel.

Interesting that that neighbor, the one who was an expert about foam, went to the club after the phone had been installed and stood on the stage and saw with his close up, touched it with his hands, and he had no idea, even as an expert, that what was on the walls of that night club was not sound foam, but was in fact deadly packing foam.

In fact, they had appeared at the same club. This would have been probably around the year of two thousand, after the Dariens had first purchased the nightclub business, and they didn't use any fireworks then, so there was no idea that people should have known that this was their stick, because it wasn't their stick. They incorporated fireworks as part of this new tour that they had just started a

few months earlier. But Daniel Beakley, that's how you say his last name, Beakley, He is the person who is their tour manager, kind of like a roadie but a little bit more elevated than that, and he had done pyrotechnics with other bands, including a band called Wasp, and so he was familiar with how to get a hold of them, and he would do this on his own

kind of do it yourself thing. Now, the companies that sold him these fireworks, and this is something it's documented and made public for the first time in the book, came with a lot of warnings and they were very explicit even in writing, and they said, you know, basically, Dan, if you're going to be doing these pyrotechnics, here's a checklist of ten things you need to make sure you do for safety of people if you're to use him.

And he did none of those things. I mean, some of them are really interesting and basic, like when you transport the fireworks, to make sure they're in like a lead lined box, so you know, we're talking about the equivalent of the explosives here, so that when you're traveling on your tour bus with these explosives, you know, blow up the bus and the highway. He had him in a cardboard box and you actually see the cardboard box

in pictures from the night of the event. They said you should have have your own fire extinguishers, yeah, at the ready on each side of the stage, held in people's hands, so that if something goes wrong, you can immediately, you know, get in there and deal with it, and that they had had nothing like that. They also said that he should test at the venue in the exact spot where he intends to do pyrotechnics, you know, hours

before the actual show. He should do a whole test run of the system to make sure that nothing is is going to go wrong. And of course nothing like that happened, and on and on and on and on things like that. So, but I will say this in Dan Beakley's defense, there was no way for him to know that when he let off these fireworks that the club itself was such a death trap, that the walls were so flammable and dangerous. That was not something that

he could have anticipated. You know, a lot of people look at him and say, you know, that was idiotic for him to do those fireworks, And I see that, and I understand that. But you know, there's no intent here by him or anyone else to hurt anyone, and so he could not have known that. And they had successfully used these fire techniques at all sorts of shows.

In fact, Jack Russell used to brag about how that he could stick his head in these sparks and not hurt himself, like it was seeming like a magic trick type thing. So so he would not have known that this was going to turn so deadly so quickly.

He get his head down doing whatever he was doing, and only when it becomes clear that there's a fire and he recognizes that it's not normal, he goes running towards the stage, and so does one of the club managers and with the fire extingisher, but they can't get past the crowd. At that point. It's a rock concert and basically between the bar and the stage are hundreds of people who are all partying and jumping up and

down and having a great time. And so immediately when it turns bad, as soon as the fire alarm goes off, which is about that that thirty second mark, this is when people realize that this is serious. It's a stampede. And Jeffrey is like many people kind of just pushed out by the stampede outside because he's towards because the bar is towards the more towards the exits than the stage.

So he runs around the nightclub checking the exits. The stage door exit is wide open where and the band had just come out of there and a couple of

other people. But because that's where the fires started at the stage, that's where it gets to about fourteen hundred degrees within a matter of seconds, So that door effectively, even though it's open, it effectively is impassable because the fire is so intense at that one spot and then really within seconds after that, we have what's called a flashover. So a flashover is when the room when the fire becomes very superheated, heated, and things just kind of spontaneously combust.

A firefighter explained it to me. Basically, a flashover is the moment where a fire in a room becomes a room on fire. And at that point, really, I'll hope is kind of lost for folks who are inside. But Jeffrey goes out in front. He's trying to get people out of that pile up at the front door. He's seen on video, Remember that news photographer, he's pushed out

in the stampede. You actually see him pushed out in the stampede, and he continues to roll tape because he doesn't know, and no one knows, by the way, how deadly this fire is. In fact, it would be hours and hours later till people realize that even a single person had perished in the fire, let alone one hundred. So the news photog does, whether the news photographer does, he basically starts getting the wide shots of the fire.

He goes walks all around the building, and you can see Jeffrey in some of the video at the front door. He's trying to tear down to the signs that they're near the front door to clear it to so that people can get out of that jam up clearing the entrance. You also see Daniel Beakley, the tour manager who the firefighters arrive and he's helping them try to get their hose up to the building, things like that. So you see these people and what they're doing. This is all again,

seconds have gone by, seconds and minutes. This is not something that this is something that happens so quickly. It's kind of mind boggling. So yeah, so Jeffrey is there, he sees all of this and he you know, some of it we don't know. I mean, one of the challenges of writing this book was getting Jeffrey to remember things. What we do know is that Jeffrey is got blood all over himself in the aftermath. What we don't know is whose blood it is, because it's not his own.

He's not cut, he's not burned, and so whose blood is that and how did it get all over him? We don't know. Well, he doesn't remember. He remembers some things from that trauma, but not all things. And in fact, most people who lived through this have suffered some sort of post traumatic stress disorder. One of the failings in this besides the failing of you know, to obviously to

have a safe building with proper fire inspections. In the aftermath, people did not get the help that they needed, and part of the help they did not receive was mental health care. I mean, so many people I spoke to after all of these years are still suffering, They're still messed up. It's just really awful that people did not get the intervention they needed. They were kind of really left to fend for themselves. And I think part of

that was because of who they were. The people who were at that show were rockers, most of them have tattoos, working class people, you know, whether they're waitresses or work for a moving company or electricians or whatever they are, and so this is not the typical crowd that you know, elite charities raise money for. So after the initial trauma of this disaster, they were kind of just abandoned and

left to fend for themselves. Really kind of an awful commentary about our society and our institutions that we think are going to be there to protect us or help us. They were not there for these people either before or after this this awful catastrophe.

a multivitamin, But Ritual isn't your typical multivitamin. Ritual's clean, vegan friendly formulas made with key nutrients and forms your body can actually use, no shady extras. My wife Lisa decided to try Ritual about eight months ago based on reading about Rituals vitamins and nutrients and their sources as

compared to other multivitamins. She decided that Ritual essential into her healthy eating and exercise regimen, and she believes that Ritual has made a definite difference in her health every day. Now available for women, men, and teens, Ritual multivitamins are scientifically developed to help supple different life stages. Your multivitamins are delivered to your door every month with free shipping always.

You can start snooze or cancel your subscription anytime, and if you don't love ritual within your first month, they'll refund your first order. You deserve to know what's in your multivitamin. That's why ritual is offering my listeners ten percent off during your first three months. Visit ritual dot com slash murder to start your ritual today. Now, we talked about the club and this fire and its aftermath, and in a short order, within minutes, these people were

most people were burned beyond recognition or incinerated. You said that the temperature went up to fourteen hundred degrees in that building in a very very short order. What was the capacity of the club or the known capacity of the club, because that's going to be important later when we talk about the civil case and the and the trial or the proposed trial. Let's talk about how many people they thought were one of them.

couple hundred more were hurt. So immediately the local newspaper and the local media concluded that the club was illegally

over capacity. The truth was that the club had nicclub had a capacity of four hundred and four and so whether they exceeded that is something that is still open to debate, and I do quite a bit of reporting on that and try to look at it from all the different angles, and there are you know, the Attorney General had warned the media immediately after the fire to not to jump to conclusions about that because this is

a place where it was a fluid situation. The way I describe it in the book is that people were in and out of the nightclub, so the parking lot was kind of a party in and of itself besides the club. And so, you know, this is the days when people could smoke, still smoke inside a nightclub that was allowed in two thousand and three at least in Rhode Island, but you couldn't smoke pot. And this was a party in crowd that you know, like to smoke pot.

So people were outdoor smoking pots. Some people had booze in their car, some people were hooking up. I mean, there's a lot of It was a party. This is a rock show, and so it's a fluid situation. Is who's inside the building and who's not so key probably defining out what is what's the clicker? So at the door there's a person taking note of people going in

and out, Andrea Mancini, and she uses clicker. And so according to curiously secret grand jury testimony, several witnesses said that they saw the clicker and it put the crowd just before showtime at three twenty five, maybe three fifty something of that, but certainly below the capacity of the club at four or four. Well, Andrea perishes in the fire, and the States never reports finding the clicker in the aftermath. So that would have provided a really important clue to

let us know. But beyond that, you have witnesses. So one of the main characters of or subjects I should say, in the book, we talked about Gina and Fred Gina talks about how that when she and Fred got there that they were able to they got there just minutes before showtime, that they were able to walk up right to the stage and it was crowded, but not you know,

so crowded that they couldn't move around. They had One of the band members of Jack Russell's Great White, was kind of the savant when it came to estimating crowd sizes, probably because the band gets a cut of the door in a lot of places. So he had this ability to estimate a club and how many people were in it.

And he's the first person actually to testify before the grand jury, and he has this astounding memory, like he can just go through all the different venues they were at in the last several years and say, that place we had, you know, to fifty, this place we had one hundred and seventy five, whatever, and he estimates it it being about three fifty. The officer they had an off duty officer there for you know, for safety purposes that the Darien brothers had hired put it in like

the three hundreds. But all of that said, what happens in the aftermath is one of the local news organizations the local newspaper, the Province Journal, determines that they even though they've been told, you know, this is a difficult thing to know because people are in and out, and even though there's this other evidence out there, they decide that they are going to solve this riddle. And so what they do is they set up a huge team of reporters and journalists to try to determine exactly how

many people are inside that nightclub. And the article that they do says that there were four hundred and twelve, and they put this on the front page while well the grand Juries meeting and while this being determined whether or not they're going to be any criminal charges, and they just make this statement of that the club was

illegally overcrowded based on their information. Well, when you look at their story quite carefully, you find out that in fact, they had not confirmed all of those people on that of that four hundred and twelve, then in fact, there was one hundred and eleven of them who they never even spoke to. There were people like friends of friends,

like you know, I saw Dave there. So Dave's name ended up on the list they heard got from from from lawyers, personal injury attorneys who were all jockeying at that point to get as many people signed up in a lawsuit against all the responsible parties or legally libel parties, and so they just you know, came with a whole

list of people. I mean, later I would hear from people that said when they saw that list of names in the newspaper, to his credit, published all the names, so people would look at it and say, well, that person wasn't there. That person wasn't there. One of the people they had on the list was a guy who is seen on a YouTube video running to the fire. He's a journalist, he's a photo journalist trying to get pictures of the fire. He's seen running to the fire,

responding to it to cover it. And he is on the journal's list as somebody who was inside the nightclub when the fire started. So the other flow on the province journals reporting was that that capacity I spoke about the four hundred and four that only accounts for the public areas of the nightclub. And this is very clear when you study the grand jury testimony of the fire inspector, is that the four hundred and four only applies to the square footage where people are standing who are patrons.

So the staff in the kitchen, behind the bar, the band, behind the scenes, the green room, none of those people can be counted in that four hundred and four capacity because they're not in the public part of the club. So Jeffrey de Darien, we talked about him. He's behind the bar, he's doing bar back, he's running up, up and down from to the basement, cooler, storage room to the bar. He can't be counted in that capacity number.

But he is counted in the Province Journal story. So there's this problem with the journal does this, And the journal is a very powerful news organization in that area, So if the journal says it, it has a lot of weight. And so the public was basically told by an authoritative source that the club was illegally overcrowded, and that is what people believe. But the truth is, we

don't know for sure that it was illegally overcrowded. Now it's four hundred and four too many people for a club that size, that's a different question, and that's a really good question to look at. What was the capacity set too high for a club of that size. We know for a fact of course, because of what happened that the club could not be safely evacuated in time

to save everyone's life. But in determining how capacity, they're not thinking that the walls of the club are covered in gasoline and that people are only going to have a minute to live or die. They think of evacuations, but you know, a normal fire that would have not been lit by this accelerant would not have gone up this quickly, and people would have had enough time to

get out. Each of the doors were four exits to the club, and each of the doors was rated to be able to let one hundred and fifty people per minute out each of those doors, which would be obviously six hundred, which would be the rough math on that. But of course that's not how things happened in reality

when it came right down to it. But again, in calculating clubs, you know the capacity, there's no way a fire inspector would have thought that well, And of course we're going to take into acount the idea that this place is is so explosive that it's just not what

has happened. But you know, the other failing of this that gets a lot of attention is worth talking about is the fact that why didn't the fire inspectors notice this foam on the walls and test it to make sure that it was the non flammable type and not the flammable type. It's actually that's what they're supposed to do. That's part of inspections, and it's done all the time

in public venues. If a bar or a nightclub put up a new curtain, for example, or a theater, when the inspector comes by, they're supposed to either ask for the paperwork that shows that this curtain is flame retardant, or they have to snip off a little piece of it, bring it out to the parking lot and try to set it on fire to see if it's flammable or not. So those type of that type of inspection was not done.

That foam had been on the walls for about almost three years, and the club had been inspected many many times, even just a few weeks before the fire had been declared safe. It's part of the reason why the TV journalist was at that particular place to get the b roll for that story about save public venues. He was working with Jeffrey de Darien, who was a co owner of the club, and Jeffrey had to get this be roll and he thought, well, why not shoot it at

my club. It it's passed all its inspections, and so it's a safe club. So this is an example that we can use, at least in a generic sense of a safe venue. And of course then everything goes horribly, horribly wrong. But as somebody said later, only a crazy person would have invited in a photojournalist into a club that they thought was inherently dangerous.

plea and that took years. But when I talk about a Russian judgment, I'm talking about what happens in the first moments and in the first hours of this tragedy. So as this awful catastrophe is happening, the local police chief tells the Associated Press that the nightclub business owners, the Darien brothers quote most definitely will be indicted. So he is already pronounced who he thinks is guilty in

this case, and he has done no investigation. And I remember I was watching this like so many people because of that horrible video, this story, you know, the tragedy in it itself is enormous, and then that video made Because that video existed, the story became viral. Before we even used words like viral, had been shown all over the world, as the videos of the fire has probably been seen by hundreds of millions of people. Well, I

was one of them. I was sitting out in California and I'm watching this unfold on CNN, And of course I remember that Jeffrey was a co owner of that club, and in fact, I, because I'm local, I had been in that club years earlier myself and had seen it myself. So I was interested. And when I heard that this comment, well, the police chief had decided who was guilty before there was an investigation. I immediately thought, well, gosh, that's not right.

That seems like a rush to judgment. But being out in California and not being a part of the Rhode Island news media at that point, it really is nothing I could do about it, but it did plant that question in my mind as to what in the world is going on now those who may or may not know much about Rhode Island. Rhode Island has a very shaky history when it comes to corruption. It's known as one of the most corrupt states in the United States.

I mean, if governors go to prison, mayors, it's somebody have had two Supreme Court justices resign in disgrace or because of mob ties or misuse of you know, it's just that's kind of how things roll in that state. So and because I had worked there and covered the news there, I was well aware of the corruption and just thought, well, this is just great, another example of Rhode Island corruption, pronouncing guilt before you've even done one

minute of investigation. So what happens the chief says this to the associated press, It gets picked up all over the world, is even carried by Fox News. Well what happened then, though, was this dramatically, This is a domino effect that dramatically changes and alters the investigation and frankly the outcome of this case and this and how we under our understanding of it. So until that moment, the Dadarien brothers, who as the owners of the nightclub business,

had all the keys to the castle. They were the ones who knew everything. They knew how the business operated, they knew what was where, They could answer all of these questions, and in fact, they had done interviews with the police and prosecutors, the state police investigators. Jeffrey had done two lengthy interviews the night of the fire, telling them everything he knew and as far as he was concerned, from his perspective, somebody came in his club and set

off a bomb and killed all these people. So he's seeing it from that perspective that they have been suffered this horrible disaster that he's part of that. So he's telling them everything he knows, and they get Michael Michaels out of town, Michael's in Florida. They get Michael on the phone. Michael cooperates. Michael is an interview with police, telling them what he knows, and so they are cooperating.

But then where it gets out about what the police chief has said, and then lawyers for the brothers say, you have to stop cooperating, you have to stop talking. You may never speak to another investigator again because they have already concluded that you are guilty before they have done an investigation, so you can't talk to them. So

they stop, and that alters the investigation. They also stopped talking to the local news media because at the same time their lawyers are like, look, clearly, you are going to be accused in this, this of a crime, in all of this, so we're going to do this in court. You know, if there's going to be a trial, We're going to present our evidence in court, not in the media. So it takes all of Jeffrey's restraint because he is

a journalist. He in fact, when he worked for me, he was the type of reporter who we would send, you know, to chase the bad guy down the street, you know what, stand outside the courthouse and yell at the person, did you do it? Did you do it? And then actually, you know, he's that guy, he's the accused. He's the one that everyone's coming after and saying did you do it? So it took a lot of they really killed him not to speak to the media, but

he did not. And also when he decided, they decided they would not cooperate with the media, they would not

do an interview with the Province Journal, things change. I did an accounting of the newspaper articles from just in the aftermath of the fire, and so the Province Journal, which is trying to get the Darians to speak and they refuse to speak, did one hundred and twenty two articles regarding the da Darians in the aftermath, and during the same period they only did eighteen that mentioned Daniel Beakley, the guy who actually set off the bomb, the bomb

that killed all the people. So the guy who undeblatably did this, he is basically, you know, taken out of the attention, and all the attention shifts to the Deadarians, and it goes into stuff that is very questionable. I mean, they're looking at Michael's to Darien's divorce and the fact that it was contentious and not amicable, and you know that's spun up into all sorts of drama. They published their home addresses, their street addresses in the newspaper, something

that is very dangerous to do. I think today we call it doxing that people do, you know, to try to get revenge on people in the met use the media as revenge the newspaper. The newspaper doesn't, by the way, never publishes the home street addresses of anyone else who is seen as culpable in this tragedy, but Prince the Ddarian brothers, which puts them at risk. They had to

move out of their homes. They had some Jeffrey had four year old kids, twins, so there were antics like that that raised a lot of serious questions about how did the media impact not just the case, but what

the public knows about the case. Early on, there's a scene in the book which I was fascinated to hear about and to get it confirmed, where two of the most arguably the most powerful men in the state at the time, the governor, Governor donk Cherry, and Joel Rosson, who is the editor in chief of the Province Journal newspaper. They meet in the back room just days after the fire and get into a terrible fight about who's going

to control the narrative of this story. Who is going to determine what the public knows and what the public will not know about this fire. Imagine this actually happened. We think that stuff that only happens in drama. When I spoke to both of the men about this, they each told me the story from their perspectives, and their perspectors were identical. I don't think I've ever had that as a reporter where two people saw things exactly the

same way. So to my mind, maybe they're only two people in the room, so they're only to confirm this, But think of that. People are trying early on to control the narrative of the story. What is the public going to know and what is in the public not going to know? So that's troubling. That's troubling about when

it comes to transparency about this. You know, in my mind, one of the deadliest fires in the United States history, there shouldn't be any unanswered questions, and because of that, because they've been unanswered questions, I'm not sure that the lessons of this fire that should have been learned and were actually learned. This is not a safe building, was obviously not properly inspected, it did not have proper safety controls, and so a lot of people died as a result

of that. I'd love to say that in the aftermath everything changed and now we have safe buildings, but it's not true. Just a few years ago out in Oapen, California, the goot Ship fire, thirty six people died, different facts, different circumstances, but the same in that this is a dangerous building. It did not have sprinklers, people were allowed to gather there, it was not inspected. I mean, does

this sound familiar? So all these years later we have a similar tragedy happen because we really didn't learn the lessons that we should have that came out of the Station nightclub fire.

to believe. As a journalist, documents like that that our contemporaneous to the time are you know, generally, you give them more weight than somebody trying to remember something, you know, fifteen years later, where they may or not have the same command of the facts. So what happens inside that grand jury room is that much like the police chief said, the decision has already been made that the nightclub business owners are the ones who are going to take the fall.

And almost every witness and almost every question gets around to pointing the finger at the Jadarian brothers. And it's

really fascinating. There's some people who put on the stands who don't even know the brothers who performed at the club's club years before the brothers even owned the nightclub business, And somehow they're expert witnesses and they'll even say things like, you know, I wouldn't know those guys if they walked into the room right now, I've never met them, ever done business with them, and yet somehow they're there, and then the prosecutor will say, well, what do you think

of them? It's like, what are they suppots to think of them? They don't know them. It really was all designed to get that result. And part of the reason that happened was something that gets revealed in the book is what the Attorney General refers to as the documents. So the document is a fascinating little sidebar in this whole investigation because in the fire aftermath, and you have to remember, we're seeing things today, you know, looking back

in time. We have commanded the information, we know what happened to But when this unfolds, it's not immediately clear that there's deadly foam on the walls. People don't immediately understand all the things that went wrong that led to this horrible tragedy. They're still putting together pieces, so they're

trying to make sense out of chaos. So one of the things that the Attorney General does is he sets out his team to investigate other major fires where a lot of people died, whether in the United States or overseas, and what he wants them to do is look and explain in those cases, who were the people most likely to be indicted, Who were the people and if they were indicted, were they convicted, and if they were convicted, how many years imprisoned did they spend for their crimes?

And so he creates this, he calls it the document, and it became his guiding force for the entire prosecution. And what he found was that in these cases, historically it's the nightclub business owners who are the ones who take the fall. You could look at this one way and say, well, that's smart. He's looking at precedent, he's looking at what the system allows. Or you could look at it another way and just say that he basically this was indictment by spreadsheets, not by instead of following

the facts of this particular case. And in this particular case, what should we be looking at. Should we be looking at that the band, should we be looking at that fire inspector not doing his job? Should we be looking at that foam company. None of those people have looked at because they're not on the spreadsheet, they're not part

of the document. The document says, go for nightclub owners, and so that's what they did, and so all of this other stuff is almost excluded or diminished or pushed aside. I mean, there are some things when you've looked very closely at the grand jury testimony, there's some astounding things that are said in there, and they're either ignored or

brushed over or diminished. To the point where the grand jurors themselves actually stand up to the prosecutors, there's an amazing thing to read for them to say, well, wait a minute, what do you mean we can't go out

after the fire inspector? What about these phone people. They're incredulous that they are being pushed in only one direction, which is go get those nightclub owners, and to the point where they're saying, I don't understand, like why why can't we do these other things they are they push back, but basically they're told there's nothing in the law that allows for indicting anyone else except who they say they're

supposed to indict. And so the grand jurors themselves are quite troubled by this, but in the end, they do what the Attorney General tells them to do, and he is determining what to do from this document.

criminally accountable for injuries. So we've talked about the one hundred people who died, there are hundreds more who are hurt. Some of them suffer wounds that they will have to deal with for the rest of their lives. And the suffering is it's hard to get your mind around. Burns are a terrible thing to experience, and it happens on a scale that basically, you know, almost overwhelms the entire medical system for New England to deal with this one night.

So people are understandably bitter and angry because they've been hurt and no one is going to ever be criminally charged for them being hurt. So already you have hundreds of people, and by extension of that, thousands of friends and family who are outraged that there was going to be no justice for those people at all. So now we only have the ability to go after the folks

who are who were killed. And so in order to do that, though, they have to take a smaller criminal acts, an infraction or a misdemeanor, And in the case of Daniel Bakley, it's the fireworks. No one goes to prison for lighting off for having illegal fireworks or lighting them off in Rhode Island. It's not an offense that gets people put in the slammer. And so you've got to take this infraction, this misdemeanor, and then tie it to the fact that so many people died, and now you

get to a manslaughter charge. And so he does plead to that. But because he didn't know places of death trap, he didn't know about that foam on the walls, there's an argument to be made that in fact, he can only be called so only so responsible because of all of these other extenuating circumstances. And by the way, the underlying charge is one that people never go to prison for. So when he does his plea bargain deal, he basically is sentenced to the equivalent of eighteen months to serve

in prison. Well, eighteen months for one hundred people being killed does not go over well. And so now there's a second wave of outrage that justice is never going to happen in this case because look at this guy. He killed one hundred people and he's going to serve eighteen months. It's just the craziest thing. And said is sentencing, which is carried live all over the world by CNN

because it is so crazy, just so dramatic. Family member after family member gets up and just really unloads their rage and their anger at how the legal system has let them down. But that takes care of Daniel Beakley, the guy has set off the bomb that there's only two people left because remember the grand jury was only allowed to indict so many people, and that's the Dadarian brothers, and they are put in this situation where all of it, any ability for people to feel that justice has been

served all comes down to their case. And so there's enormous pressure on them to take a plea bargain. One of the things that I earned learned very early on this that actually drove me to turn this into a book was that the defense and the prosecution all did what were called mock trials. So mock trials are basically kind of a practice trial before you get to the real trial, and you have jurors and you have evidence, and then you see kind of test out your theories

as to how things would go in court. And so there were three mock trials, and in each of the three mock trials, the jurors will not convict the de Darians. So when I heard about the mock trials early on, when I started asking those questions ten years ago, that's when it hit me that I wasn't the only person who questioned what happened in this case. Because when the mock jurors were presented with all of the evidence, not just one side of the story that came from the government,

but all of it, they would not convict. So that was part of my job after hearing about the mock trials, was to find out, well, what did those mock jurors hear that the public never heard that made them decide that no, it's not so simple as these guys or these three guys are the whole story. I think. Look, the public was let down by again by the institutions that we think are going to be there to protect us. There's no reason, no good reason, why a public venue

that has hundreds of patrons doesn't have sprinklers. You know, sprinklers are technology from the eighteen hundreds. There's no reason for buildings to be so unsafe by this sign. There's no reason for building to be not properly inspected, and on and on and on, so again, the perfect storm of fires, so many things and wrong. But people were let down. The government itself. I think there's an enormous responsibility in this case. But the government does not indict itself.

It has to indict someone else. And I think that in this case there was an effort to find scapegoats to hang this on because the people who were partially responsible, the system, the establishment, was not going to hold itself criminally accountable.

small children. They don't want to overhear this. But basically in the end they're pressured into take a plea bargain because of all the you know, it had happened for the Daniel Beagley in there. A similar deal is offered to them, but with a twist, and the twist is that they must only one of them is going to go to prison. The concept here was buy one, set

one free. That's actually the language that was used behind the scenes to describe the deal, and the idea was that this two brothers, one will go to prison, the other one will stay out and take care of their families, try to earn a living, try to support people while the other one serves the time on behalf of both of them. But the twist is they have to decide amongst themselves which one is going to go to prison. So think of that. So they're at this duncan donuts, like,

you know, who's better to go to prison? You or me or him? Or it's just crazy because these are, you know, just working class guys. None of neither of them have any experience with the criminal justice system, neither is a hardcore criminal, knows anything about all of this, And so they go into this debate who's better suited

to be the one to be behind bars? And in the end they make a decision and it turns out to be the wrong decision for so many reasons that you can read about which to kind of boggle the

mind how the system works. But in the larger sense, the fact that they took this plea bargain, thinking that this week to bring things to a closure, to allow the state to begin to heal, to allow people to move on with their lives, to get this behind them, not just Daminem families, but also the victims' families and the survivors that this would be a turning point, that it would finally put these proceedings to an end. But

it has the opposite effect. The public is livid that these guys have been given any sort of plea bargain. There are people who think that they're murderers and that they should be given the death penalty for what happened. So, yeah, it doesn't have It does not work out the way that they think it's going to work out or where the public dog is going to work out. In fact, people are I think, possibly more angry than ever once this plea bargain plays out.

a lot of different twists and turns. Probably, first of all, the way the local law was, they actually had to go to the state legislature and essentially get a special waiver in order to hold people responsible, kind of a wider net, and then the legislature allows them to do this, and then then in fact they sue everybody and anybody who has any connection to this venue, this concert, you know,

the beer sponsors. They sue the TV station, And then we talked about that local TV news photographer who's in there, who's happened to be rolling taking pictures b Roll for his upcoming story. They sue him and his TV station and people contend that he by being there, his presence, that he blocked people from leaving, that people perished as a result of him being present. They sue Home Depot because I guess plywood from Home Depot was used in

the construction of the building. It goes on and on and on and on and in the end they are able to get an amazing amount of money one hundred and seventy six million dollars to help people, the survivors and the victims' families out of all this, but they don't get the money, at least not all of it. So the lawyers pocket fifty nine million dollars of that, which is really kind of an astonishing amount. It's what

they're legally entitled to. But a lot of people thought that wasn't right because you know, they could have covered their costs and a little bit more. The idea that they would profit to that amount was very controversial. What's left over gets divided up. But by the time this all plays out, others have gotten to the victims, the victims' families and the survivors, and they've gone to them and they've got them to sign deals. And the deals

are basically, look, this settlement's going to happen. Someday, I'm going to upfront you some money. I'm going to give you some money now in exchange for that, I get to have your settlement money when the deal finally comes through. So those deals are played out behind the scenes. These are working class people. None of them can't work because they're so injured. They need help now, they need to survive, they need to not be evicted and lose their homes

and their cars and all these things. And so they a lot of them take this money, make these deals before the settlements, so by the time the settlement money finally pays out, they end up getting really pennies on the dollar. So that one hundred and seventy six million dollars sounds really impressive, but in the end, it really didn't turn out to be the windfall for people that it should have been. Didn't. It ends out not to be the safety net that they needed in order to

continue with the rest of their lives. So very tough, you know, again, not exactly how what we've seen, how the story was presented necessarily been told so far, but the reality of what really happened behind the scenes.

the victims of the fire. So this little grassroots, this makeshift memorial exists for years and years and years, and there's an immediate effort to try to get the place turn into some sort of more permanent memorial, something a little bit, you know, possibly a statue or something like that.

But there are problems. One of the issues that we talked about in the book, really for the first time, is that there's a terrible fighting behind the scenes between the victims families and the survivors, and it turns out that in many cases the victims' families hate the survivors.

It becomes this weird story conflict that plays out where they somehow have come to believe that the reason their loved ones are dead is because somebody who survived stomped on them on their way out to say themselves, none of which we know to be true at all, but it doesn't matter. This is what happens. It's a dissension, so this is fighting, and some of the people who are most outspoken also want to go after the owner

of the nightclub property. Remember I said the brothers were renters, you know, they were kind of the business, but they were not the owners of the property. So they go after the owner of the property and they're trying to filify him and he should have known and all of this stuff. Well, at the same time, they're asking the owner of the property to donate the land. So on one hand, they're asking him to donate the lands of

memorial moreau could be made. On the other hand, they're vilifying the guy in the media and threatening lawsuits and all the rest of it. So that's not exactly how you win somebody over to make a donation. But after the settlements are made in the case, and he is among those, the owner of the property is among those who has to do a settlement, or at least his insurance company does to put in that pot of money.

So that settle that's done. And then Gina Russo, who is one of the survivors, and she heads up this task force to create a memorial. She is able to persuade him to donate the land, and then she goes on this journey of raising I think, you know, between the in kind donations and actual donations, the equivalent of a couple million dollars to build a really incredible memorial at the site. I mean, you go there and it's

so devastating. Each of the one hundred victims is remembered with a marker, and there's a kind of looks like a chapel that oversees it giving it's a garden. It's going to grow and blossom every year that goes by and go there every time I'm I'm back in Rhode Island, I go and visit. Something new has you know, grown or this is what was once a ceiling now is like a little bit of a tree. I mean, it's

really kind of amazing. And people go there and they have their moment to remember their loved ones, and other people go there just to see it and to reflect. I mean, it's it's a powerful statement, a powerful memorial to those people. And so in that respect, you know, people are being remembered and if you're in Rhode Island. It's something to see. It's something to have a few moments of introspection about.

screens people who are going to talk to him. And I spent hours talking to that guy and was given the thumbs up. I guess it was okay to talk to. And then the night before our formal interview we're going to go through things in depth, he called me up and he asked me for money. He intended to try to make money off of this tragedy, and I said no, And then he talked about some sort of back door, which I think is like show business talk for like, can I get a cut of the profits or something?

And anyone who knows anything about the book business knows that, you know, books are not profit centers to say the least, but it is somebody. Ninety five percent of books failed to make back their investment. In the fact, a project like this is very expensive to mount, and so there are no profits, and so there's no backdoor, and and I just tried to explain to him that in real journalism, in professional journalism, we don't pay people to tell their stories.

So once this was made clear to him, he canceled the interview and has never spoken to me. Now, the good news for readers of the book is there's plenty to hear from Jack Russell, in fact, stuff that most people had never heard before, because even though he wouldn't

answer my specific questions, he has not remained silent. One of the weird things he did recently was in the last few years he started to go public about the fact that he is a very serious criminal past that predates this fire that, in fact, you could argue, showed a real disconnect between you for human life and safety.

When he was a young man he was involved in the way he described it, was an attempted murder, so and he went to prison, none of which was known, none of which was reported at the time of the fire, none of which was I'm not convinced that even the prosecutors of the attorneys involved in the case even knew about this. So that is there, and that is a revelation that we get from Jack Russell, even though I did not pay him to speak to me. I would

not pay him. And in fact, it's very important to note that no one was paid to participate in this. These are journalism, journalism interviews. No one was compensated, and no one will make any money out of the book.

be called the Station Family Fund, and you can read about that. It's one of the more bizarre scenes in the book was where his representative comes to these people who are you know, just lost loved ones. They're suffering from horrible burns and the skywalkers and says, you know,

he offers them a deal with the devil. The deal with the devil was, you know, the person who set off the bomb, the group that set off the bomb that killed all these people and heard all you people, is now offering to do to take proceeds from their upcoming concert tour and donate them to this fund. And they have to decide will we take that money or not? And it causes a lot of anger and a lot of disagreement. Let's put it that way. That's a nice way to put it.

and also some of the photos. There's one photo in particular that is incredibly remarkable and that it is the beginning of the fire on the wall and there's three people there, including a member of the staff that they're smoking a cigarette. So it's an incredible collection of photos in this book for people that might want to take a look. Do you have a website that.