(4 of 4)
Last week's mass arrest in Boston also depended partly on the grand jury testimony of a suspected torch who turned state's evidence, pointing the finger at local landlords and corrupt city officials. Until then, private investigators for insurance companies had been sniffing around the remains of burned-out houses, working the streets and doing undercover work in Boston bars with an eye out for well-known torches. With evidence of a conspiracy growing, 15 teams of city and state police joined the private eyes, and finally, after 16 months of probing suspicious fires in the Boston area coupled with the talkative torch's testimony, they rounded up 100 more witnesses and paraded them before a second grand jury in September.
But the initial breakthrough in the investigation was the result of mobilized anger on the part of residents in one of the burned-out sections. After appealing to local politicians and city agencies to investigate the wave of fires that had been destroying their neighborhood since 1973—and getting little action—a group of Symphony Road residents went to State Attorney General Bellotti with their own evidence that landlords and others were deliberately torching buildings in their community. Armed with these documented complaints, Bellotti ordered the state's criminal bureau to begin the probe that led to last week's indictments against what officials charge is the largest known arson ring in the U.S. One lesson of the Boston arrests is that in order to fight back against organized arson, the victims themselves may have to get organized and join forces with beleaguered —and all too often insufficiently interested—city officials.