Early one morning last week in the gashouse district on Manhattan's lower East Side, a neat, grey-haired watchman named George Preston, 47, was caught setting fire to a rubbish heap under the stairs of a tenement house whose occupants lay sleeping. Watchman Preston, once a probationary fireman at Lynn, Mass., tearfully told police he took a few drinks every time he got a headache, set fires for excitement every time he took a few drinks. When he accompanied them to The Bronx, pointed out nine buildings he had previously fired, police believed they...
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