Pod Insights American Scandal Station Nightclub Fire | Ninety Seconds to Get Out | 4 About this episode On February 20th, 2003, the rock band Great White took the stage at The Station nightclub in West Warwick, Rhode Island. But when they began their set by igniting pyrotechnic sparklers, a fire broke out and ripped up the walls before quickly spreading to the rest of the building. Veteran journalist Scott James says people had only about ninety seconds to react and escape. Unanswered questions about the disaster led him to spend years investigating what happened. Today, James joins Lindsay to talk about his book, Trial By Fire: A Devastating Tragedy, 100 Lives Lost, and A 15-Year Search for Truth.
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0:00 Lindsay Graham? Audible subscribers can binge new seasons of American Scandal early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts. A listener note: this episode contains graphic details and may not be suitable for our younger audience.
0:27 Lindsay Graham? From Wondery, I'm Lindsay Graham, and this is American Scandal.
0:51 Lindsay Graham? For hard rock fans in West Warwick, Rhode Island, the evening of February 20, 2003 should have been just another fun night out. The 80s metal band Great White had just taken the stage behind a wall of pyrotechnics ignited by their tour manager. Lead singer Jack Russell sang the opening lines of their first song, then stopped when he saw flames creeping up the walls of the club. At first, the club patrons thought the flames were planned, until it became clear that they were not, and the fire was out of control. Black smoke spread quickly, as people fought to get out, and a hundred would lose their lives in the flames. Veteran journalist Scott James grew up in Rhode Island and ran a TV newsroom there before the fire. One of his former colleagues lost her son in the tragedy.
1:36 Lindsay Graham? Station nightclub owner Jeffrey Dodarian also worked as a reporter, and for a time, James had been his boss. And Brian Butler, the videographer who was filming the club that night, also once worked for James. But that there were still so many unanswered questions about this hometown tragedy led James to spend years reading court documents and interviewing people who were there that night to try to piece together the facts of what happened. Scott James is the author of Trial by Fire: A Devastating Tragedy, 100 Lives Lost, and a 15-Year Search for the Truth. Our conversation is next.
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2:49 Speaker 02 Hi, I'm Candace DeLong, former FBI profiler and host of the podcast Killer Psyche. In our latest episode, we go inside the case of Krista Pike, the woman Tennessee tried to execute and failed. Listen to Killer Psyche on Audible or wherever you get your podcasts.
3:16 Lindsay Graham? Scott James, welcome to American Scandal.
3:18 Speaker 03 Hey, Lindsay, thanks for having me.
3:20 Lindsay Graham? So do you remember where you were, where you heard about the station nightclub fire first?
3:25 Speaker 03 Yes, I think like millions of other people, I saw it on TV. This is the worst thing that ever happened where I grew up. I ran a newsroom there in Rhode Island for many, many years. And it turned out later, I would find out that I knew many of the people there. But I had long since, years earlier, before the fire had moved out to California. So I was not there covering the news at that point. So I saw it on CNN. And one of the many twists of this terrible tragedy was that this fire was caught on videotape from inside the nightclub. And so that video, because it was so rare, this is before iPhones, where everything gets recorded. And it was a professional television news crew that was inside the building, rolling when this started. Because footage like that was so rare,
4:10 Speaker 03 it kind of elevated the story beyond being just a horrible tragedy, one of the worst fires in American history, to being something seen all around the world. I think it's fair to say that probably hundreds of millions of people saw this video. People I talked to later for the book saw it. One guy saw it on a remote island in Greece. Think of that, a fire in Rhode Island, making news halfway around the world. So I was like many people who just saw it on TV.
4:38 Lindsay Graham? But this part of Rhode Island, this is your hometown and you've been inside the Station Nightclub. What was your memory of the place?
4:44 Speaker 03 I remember a club that was kind of dingy. It smelled like old beer and cigarettes, typical roadside dive bar. But you know what? It was fun and people don't remember because of the tragedy that this was a place where people came to have a good time. Working class people, waitresses, people who move furniture, people who work at gas stations. They would go there for their time off, let their hair down and party. It was a party place.
5:11 Lindsay Graham? So if this fire was so well covered, why did you decide to make this the subject of your book Trial by Fire? What were the unanswered questions for you?
5:20 Speaker 03 There were many unanswered questions. Part of it was because there was never trial, not a criminal trial, not a civil trial. And because the facts were not all laid out for people to consider, they only got the government's version of what happened. So only the government was able to say their side of the case. You didn't hear from anyone else. So when I would go home to see my family, because they all still live there, they asked questions about this. They raised the idea that they didn't hear all of the facts. And they were right. Because there had never been a trial, none of the information from the other side, conflicting information was ever put before the public. And frankly, in a situation where you have such a one-sided version of the story, it really relies on the fourth estate, the media,
6:05 Speaker 03 to question what the government has to say with their version of events. And that really didn't happen.
6:11 Lindsay Graham? It's interesting that you bring up the phrase conflicting information because in a crisis like this, there are many times in which stories do not match, even eyewitness stories. Gina Russo is an example of this. Can you tell us how?
6:23 Speaker 03 Well, I think Gina Russo is, well, she's an amazing person. First of all, you need to know that about her. She was one of the worst injured in the fire who survived. Her personal tale of survival and then eventually recovery, then leading the effort to help other people who suffered in the fire and then eventually went on to help create a memorial for the people who perished in the fire. She's an amazing person. But from her perspective... She sees the fire, she sees everyone consumed, she sees what happens to her own lens. But it's not necessarily the most factual lens. She wrote a book about her personal experience, which is very heartfelt, and I recommend that people read it.
7:03 Speaker 03 But some of the observations that she made go into the realm of being kind of sensational. I'll give you one example. So when the fire starts, she and her boyfriend Freddie make their way to the stage door exit. He's very aware instantly that this is a problem, that there's danger. But not everyone was. Remember, this fire was caught on videotape, so we know second by second what actually happened. The fire starts, and for the first 30 seconds after the fire is raging, people actually think it's part of the show. This is pyrotechnics that started this fire. He early on sees danger and tries to go out the stage door, but the stage door is closed, and there's a person there whose job it is to keep the stage door closed during a show
7:46 Speaker 03 because of complaints from the neighbors about the noise. So that person says, no, you've got to go out the other way. And so they did, and unfortunately Freddie didn't make it, and Gina was terribly burned. But in her retelling of the story, it takes a bit of a turn where she believes, and I do believe she believes this, that the bouncer turned away from the door because she was a regular person, that the stage door was only for famous people to go out. And she actually says something in the book about like, this person decided that we were not worth saving. There's compelling evidence that that's not what happened. We hear from the bouncer in his testimony before the grand jury. We see a photograph of the bouncer with his back to the stage when it's fully engulfed
8:31 Speaker 03 in flames, and it's quite clear, he's standing there with a cigarette in his mouth, he has no idea that there's a fire raging. This is a man who then becomes vilified. He becomes one of the villains of the fire, when in fact, he lost his own wife in that fire. And also, because we know this happened second by second, we know that there's no way there could have been that type of thought going in to anyone's mind that some will live and some will die.
8:57 Lindsay Graham? Another person whose motivations, I suppose, were questioned were those of Channel 12 videographer, Brian Butler. What did he do to that night? And how did some people misconstrue his actions?
9:08 Speaker 03 So, a little bit of context here. Why was there a professional TV news crew inside that nightclub when the fire started? Well, they were doing a story, kind of a "could it happen here" story, based on public venue safety. There'd been a tragedy in a nightclub in Chicago days earlier, so the TV station decided they were going to do this story. Brian Butler, a TV news photojournalist, was assigned to go to this club and shoot what's called "B-roll." So, "B-roll" is kind of generic pictures that go with the story to help cover the audio track. And his job was to get pictures of people drinking, ordering from the bar, hanging out. Well, he was finished getting all the footage he needed, and so he decided that he would hang out. He knew that Great White was coming up, and he thought, "You know what? I think the guys back at the TV station would probably get a kick out of this footage."
9:53 Speaker 03 So, even though he didn't need it for his piece, he set up his camera in the back of the room, and he was rolling before the band started their set. And so, you see, second by second, the flames go up, the pyrotechnics, the place getting on fire. And that's why we know that for 30 seconds, people didn't move because they thought it was part of the show. We know all of this because of that footage from Brian Butler. When it becomes clear that this is a real fire and people are in danger, he backs up. You can see from the camera, the camera never stops rolling, that he's pushed out in the swarm of humanity and back outside. And he continues to take video because that's his job. He's a TV news reporter. He had no idea that people were really in mortal danger. In fact, nobody really did until much later in the night,
10:36 Speaker 03 when it became clear that the people had perished. But at that point, he's a journalist. He's doing his job. There's a fire, you shoot the fire. And he goes outside, and you can see him getting the various angles of it. He does not know, I think, fully what's going on until later, when you look at this footage and you see the details of what's going on. But, so what happens is, in the public's mind, here's a guy, because afterwards we know that so many people have died, who videotaped when he should have gone in there and saved people. Kind of like- Like the classic, like, how could you be there watching people suffer and taking video of it? But I would say that he didn't know people were suffering. He didn't know people were dying. He was just doing what he's supposed to do, which is get footage.
11:20 Speaker 03 And you hear him talk to the TV station through their two-way radio system, because, again, the camera never stops rolling. You hear him saying, you know, we've got a big fire here. Come send more people. So that's in his mind what he's doing. He's covering the fire. Now, this was misconstrued later to be that he was some sort of villain that he had just watched as people perished, just so he could get some good videotape. But that's not really what happened. Being a person who worked in TV news for many, many years, I can tell you that if you were photog at a fire, you'd take pictures of the fire, and that's what he did.
11:53 Lindsay Graham? Now, you have another close connection to this tragedy in that Station Nightclub co-owner Jeffrey Dodarian worked for you at one time. How well did you know him? And why do you think he agreed to talk to you for your book?
12:06 Speaker 03 Well, you know, it's going on almost 30 years now since all of this happened, but many of the key players in this tragedy worked for me. I ran a newsroom in Providence, Rhode Island, and it's a very small state, very parochial. Brian Butler, the photographer who shot the infamous footage, he worked for me. Jeffy Dodarian was a reporter in our newsroom. He worked for me. One of the people who lost her son in the fire, receptionist at the TV station, we worked together. So there were all these different connections to the fire, which is not unusual in a state like that. Everybody knows everybody. What I remember about Jeffrey, when he was somebody who worked for me, was he was a very tenacious reporter. He was the fight dog you'd send out to go after the bad guys.
12:48 Speaker 03 So when there was a perp walk at the courthouse, you would send Jeffrey, because he would be the one who would walk down the street and say to the person, "Did you do it? Did you do it? Did you do it?" And so it was a remarkable twist of fate when, after this fire, Jeffrey became the person who reporters hounded and said, "Did you do it? Did you do it? Did you do it?"
13:09 Lindsay Graham? After this tragedy, there's an understandable and desperate need to find those responsible for it, to point a finger of blame. How do you think the Dardarians were treated in the aftermath of the fire?
13:20 Speaker 03 Well, while the fire is still happening, and they haven't even determined what has happened yet, they're still finding bodies, they're still at the scene, already they have decided who is going to be guilty for this. The local police chief actually goes on television and says that the nightclub owners, and Jeffrey was a co-owner with his brother Michael, would be held responsible for this, that they were going to take the fall, they were going to be indicted. I'm watching this at my home in San Francisco on CNN, and I see this, and I immediately think, wait a minute, we don't know what happened. Not one minute of actual investigation has been done, and already the person leading the investigation has decided who's guilty?
14:04 Speaker 03 That got my attention, but also it had an implication by doing that. So if you're suddenly accused of a crime before they've done any investigation, your lawyer is going to say to you, hey, you can't talk anymore to these people, they've already decided you're guilty. And so at that moment, the nightclub owners basically don't talk anymore, until they talk to me for this book many, many years later.
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15:06 Speaker 05 Hi, I'm Kenya Barris.
15:08 Speaker 06 And I'm Malcolm Gladwell. We're back for season two of our Audible original podcast, The Unusual Suspects.
15:14 Speaker 05 We'll sit down with extraordinary guests from the worlds of art, film, literature, comedy, and wellness to hear from their unexpected stories of success.
15:21 Speaker 06 And who do we have this season? Well, we'll talk with Grammy winning artist Anderson Paak, athlete Rich Roll, portrait artist Amy Sherald, Oscar winning director Ron Howard, legendary writer David Sedaris, and many more. These conversations are more intimate than last season, wouldn't you say?
15:37 Speaker 05 I would. Listen to season one of The Unusual Suspects wherever you get your podcasts and sign up for a free trial audible to listen to season two in the Audible app or by subscribing to Apple Podcasts.
16:02 Lindsay Graham? A grand jury was convened after the station nightclub fire to look into what happened. Explain for our listeners the process of discovery that unfolded.
16:12 Speaker 03 So the grand jury, a secret grand jury, starts to look at the evidence in this case. And the grand jury is put together just six days after the fire. So less than a week, they start hearing evidence. And so people come in who were witnesses of the fire and what happened that night, and they start telling their story. It's a massive gathering of information. I mean, think about it. 100 people are dead, 230 people are hurt. So you have a lot to unpack. You have a lot of people to talk to. So it becomes very clear, very early in the process of the grand jury, that the prosecutors have already decided to focus all of their attention only on a few people. And that would be the nightclub owners, Michael and Jeffrey Duderian,
16:53 Speaker 03 and Daniel Beakley, who's the manager, roadie for the band Great White. He lit the explosives that started the fire. So you actually hear from the jurors themselves, who are a little bit incredulous. They're like, okay, why are we only really focusing all of our attention on these three guys? It seems like a lot of people had a role in being culpable for this. For example, the nightclub- Was a death trap. It was basically filled with this foam. It was supposed to be for soundproofing. But the foam itself was highly flammable. It was like solid gasoline. It was on the ceilings and on the walls. Well, all right, so who put that foam in there? Where'd it come from? Are those people responsible? What about the fire inspector who actually did an inspection multiple times?
17:37 Speaker 03 And there's a piece of paper where it says, "All OK." He has written the words "all OK." So he gave this place a passing grade for being fire safe. And in fact, it was the complete opposite. Hey, what about the band? The band that set off the pyrotechnics because they were trying to relive their old stadium days? They set off 15-foot fireworks in a club that only had 12-foot ceilings. So you actually hear from the grand jurors themselves, who are pushing back on the Attorney General's folks, saying, "OK, why is the focus only on these guys?" And there are some interesting answers. One of the things that got my attention was that when it came to the fire inspector, for example, who a lot of people think he should have been held accountable. And the argument as to why he wouldn't be is just fascinating.
18:22 Speaker 03 Basically, the prosecutors say that, "Look, this guy, maybe he didn't do his job, and maybe not doing his job led to the deaths of these people. But if we went after every state employee or government employee who didn't do their job in this state, then who would want to be a government worker?" An incredible spin on why that person wasn't held accountable.
18:43 Lindsay Graham? So you've read these thousands of pages of court documents from the grand jury investigation. What are some of the things that they left out of you? Maybe we can start with the foam.
18:52 Speaker 03 So basically, the nightclub was filled with this highly flammable foam. And there are two types of foam. Sound foam. Sound foam is supposed to be flame retardant by law. And then there's other foam that's used for packing, and that is not required to be flame retardant. And that is what will go up like a match being thrown into a bucket of gasoline. So this club, instead of having sound foam, it had the highly flammable foam on the walls. If you saw one next to another, you would not know as a layman, but also an expert would not know. By touch or look, which was which. So why did the nightclub owners put this highly flammable foam on the wall?
19:35 Speaker 03 They ordered sound foam, and we know this because there's a document that shows that they asked for and ordered sound foam, but what they got instead was packing foam. And it became the crucial part of the criminal charge against the nightclub owners. The way it was spun, again, was to make villains out of the nightclub owners, that it was cheaper. They paid $575 for this foam to put on the walls. They wouldn't know if that was more or less, depending on what you were ordering. All they knew was that they asked for sound foam and they would deliver something else. So this document that shows they actually ordered sound foam, it was buried inside thousands and thousands of pages of documents that were given to the defense, and then
20:18 Speaker 03 eventually I was able to see them. It was actually that document that made me realize this was a bigger story than the one that the public had been led to believe. It's what convinced me that in fact, the public had not really been told the truth about this. Now, the document itself did not come from the Didarians, and this has been misreported even fairly recently as one of these he said, she said situations. They're saying that this is a document that came from the Didarians and therefore it should be suspect as to its validity. But in fact, the Didarians' copies of all of their paperwork went up in flames when the nightclub went up in flames. So the only copy that existed was the copy at American Foam, the company that sold the foam.
21:02 Speaker 03 The only one who could get that was the government. How do I know this? Because it became part of the grand jury documents that the government submitted. And when I saw this document, I remember saying to the nightclub owners, "Who has seen this besides me?" And they said, "Well, it came from the government. They were the ones who had it, but the public didn't see it." And so therefore, a story has been allowed to foma for years that the brothers irresponsibly ordered highly flammable foam. We don't know why the nightclub owners were given highly flammable packing foam instead of the sound foam that they were ordered. There are a lot of theories about this. One would be that it was simply a mistake inside the company, that the order was filled
21:46 Speaker 03 out incorrectly when it was processed. Some mistake happened there. They didn't send over deadly foam because they were trying to hurt people. We don't convict people of crimes unless there's intent. And in this case, I can't see intent by anyone. Even the irresponsible people with the band or the band themselves, they didn't intend for anyone to be hurt. It's an accident that happened. A lot of things went wrong simultaneously. There's a lot of little bits of culpability here that add up to a terrible tragedy.
22:18 Lindsay Graham? What did you learn about the prosecution's investigation into the use of pyrotechnics at the club, other than this one night?
22:26 Speaker 03 Well, one of the things that's been talked about, and it's used against the defendants, is something that, on the face of it, can't possibly be true. The argument was made by the government and in the media that at the nightclub, they were doing this all the time, that they were shooting off fireworks like this all the time. So the implication there is that these people were incredibly irresponsible, that they put people's lives in danger on a regular basis. The problem with that theory is that, you know, if you throw a match into a bucket of gasoline, it's gonna burn every single time. Not just sometimes, not just on Tuesdays, it's gonna burn every single time. So if they had been doing pyrotechnics like this inside that nightclub with that flammable material on the wall, it would have burned before then.
23:11 Lindsay Graham? The judge who sentenced the Dodarians, Michael, to four years and Jeffrey to 500 hours of community service and three years of probation, did he get access to this grand jury evidence at the time?
23:23 Speaker 03 That's a great question. I think the judge could have had access to anything he wanted to have, but remember, there was a plea bargain done here between the defendants and the Attorney General's office. And this was presented to the judge, and it was the judge's decision whether or not to accept this or not accept this. And that became the crucial issue, was do we want to go through all this evidence? Do we want to have this trial? And it's pretty much understood that absolutely no one wanted to have the trial, not the defendants, not the prosecution. The only people who really wanted to have the trial were frankly the families of the victims and their survivors. They really wanted to have that day in court where everything was put before them so they could understand what happened. I'm one of
24:03 Speaker 03 the few people who's actually seen the photographs from the aftermath of the fire, to see the bodies, or some are unrecognizable, others, even more troubling, are completely recognizable. I'm not sure that family members understood that their demand to have a trial would have ended up the way that they expected it to, because when you consider what they would have had to present as evidence, it would be very, very disturbing. So there was no criminal trial, so therefore the evidence was never presented for the public or the families to see. And the feeling was, after that plea bargain was made, was that, well, there at least will be a civil trial, because there's going to be a ton of lawsuits over this, and then all the facts will be presented then. But that also was settled. And so even
24:48 Speaker 03 at that moment, they didn't get access to any of the information other than what the government said had happened.
24:55 Lindsay Graham? So without a criminal or even a civil trial, no one really knew what happened inside the club. How did this fire become such a tragedy? It seems like it was a perfect storm of sorts. How did it get so bad, and was anyone truly culpable?
25:10 Speaker 03 I think in this particular fire, probably several things went wrong at the same time. And had one of those things not gone wrong, everyone would have survived. So you could say that all of those mistakes, that there's accountability to be had on each of them. But this was an accident. Nobody intended for anyone to be hurt. There is no villainy villain in the background who schemed to make this happen. They're all just mistakes that when they add up in total, killed 100 people. So, you know, a good example is the fire code. And why weren't the sprinklers inside that building? We know that sprinklers would have saved every single person because it happened only days earlier in Minneapolis. Nearly the same thing.
25:54 Speaker 03 A band set off fireworks inside a nightclub. The nightclub caught on fire, but because that one had sprinklers, all that happened was people got wet. They all lived. There's one small example. If the band had not lit off fireworks, then everyone would have lived. Now, were they intending to hurt people when they did those fireworks? Of course not. They were intending to have a great show. The nightclub was approved for a capacity of 404 people. They had four exits. That should have been enough to get everybody out safely, but it didn't work that way. Because where the fire started was at the stage. So the stage door very quickly became inaccessible. There was a wall of fire between the patrons and that door.
26:37 Speaker 03 Remember, in 90 seconds, that building was fully engulfed. If you were inside that building after 90 seconds when the fire started, you didn't make it out. And so, we take 90 seconds and now we subtract 30 seconds where people thought it was just part of the show. Now you have one minute to get hundreds of people out of there. And if you're in there, basically, things are spontaneously exploding. You can hear explosions of the bottles of alcohol that are exploding because of this heat. So you were not going to live in that situation if you were there for more than 90 seconds. The few people who did survive were on the floor. There was one gentleman who was covered. He fell on the floor and other people fell on him in like a big pile. And they all died.
27:21 Speaker 03 But those corpses that he was under, they saved him from being burned by the fire. So that's the only scenario where somebody was in there for a very long time and lived. So if the head count had been kept smaller, the capacity was smaller, maybe there would be a chance for more to get out. But that was what the law said. This is how many people could be in there at that moment. So you go through this whole list of the what ifs. What if this? What if that? Would it have been different? And if any of those things had been different, then no one would have died. So there's plenty of culpability and responsibility to go along. But is it criminal? That's the question in this case.
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30:15 Lindsay Graham? You mentioned that there are a lot of what ifs in this tragedy. Many things that had they been different, the fire may not have turned out to be such the tragedy that it was. One of those is the fire code. Had it been different, more stringent, then lives may not have been lost. So what impacted this fire have on fire safety codes afterwards?
30:33 Speaker 03 This fire has probably saved thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of lives for several reasons. First of all, when people saw that video, it was a wake up call. So many people thought, my goodness, I need to check where the exit is when I go to some public event. I mean, I do it now, a lot of people do it now. How do I get out in the case of a fire? The other issue is that because we know second by second by second, how this fire evolved, it has taught firefighters and fire investigators more about how a fire spreads and what can be done to prevent that. And they've changed fire codes as a result. If you work as a fire investigator in the United States, you have studied this case because of that video.
31:15 Speaker 03 On the issue of foam, for example, the flammable foam, the foam company, of course, denied any responsibility for this, but in the end, they paid $6.3 million in a settlement and they changed their procedures. Now there are warning labels on the foam that is flammable so that you know that if that's what's been delivered to you, that's what you're getting. So up and down the line, there have been improvements in fire code and fire safety because of this fire.
31:42 Lindsay Graham? You also have your own personal experience with soundproofing foam.
31:46 Speaker 03 I do. So this goes years later, I'm working on this investigation and on this book, and I'm part of a writers group, kind of a co-working space for writers in San Francisco. And at some point, we think about doing soundproofing so that the writers can concentrate a little bit more. And so we look at ordering foam and we find a product that is sold as being fire retardant because it's used for indoor use for soundproofing. So I order it and just some sample sheets to see if we're going to use it or not. And before the handyman starts working with it, I say to him, look, let's just do an experiment. Let's see if this will light on fire. So he takes his BIC lighter and we videotape this to be sure.
32:28 Speaker 03 And it goes up like a torch. This is foam being sold as flame retardant, as something you can put in your home for your kids' recording studio. So I posted a review. I included that videotape and warned people not to buy this product. That's the most I could do on my own to warn people about something that's highly dangerous. So this is years later. This is after the fire. This is after all of these people were killed because of foam. And still the dangerous foam is out there.
32:56 Lindsay Graham? Your book came out in 2020. What was the reaction to it?
33:00 Speaker 03 Well, the CBS News program 48 Hours read the book and decided to adapt it for an episode of their program. They did an excellent job, I have to say, very powerfully emotionally written. And in fact, it would be the finalist for the National Emmy Award. But it's different than doing a book. When you do a book, you're kind of laying out a bunch of facts and letting the reader decide. You know, who's guilty, not guilty, if anyone's guilty. But television is more like a blunt instrument. And so very effectively, they put out the evidence to a point where I think a lot of people concluded that it was an exoneration of the nightclub owners. And it didn't help that on TV you had the Attorney General who was asked about, for example, that document I spoke about, the one that ordered the foam that said, "Sound Foam."
33:45 Speaker 03 And they tried to introduce this to him and he doesn't have a good response. He's like, "I don't want to hear about any of this." It basically makes the government look bad. And so that airs and there's a reaction. And so because the DeDarin brothers, the nightclub owners, are basically seen as, you know, maybe the story wasn't everything the public had been led to believe. Now, they had been devastated by this fire. Every single person who was there that night has been devastated by this fire. So even though you might say, were they really guilty criminally of what they were convicted of? There's a great question about that. Talking to them, they have always Felt responsible, as they would say, it was their name on the club, so to speak. So they have felt personal culpability and it has changed their lives, ruined their
34:30 Speaker 03 lives to a certain extent. But after it goes on TV, things change a little bit. They start to reclaim their lives. And Jeffrey DeDarian, who was a really capable TV news reporter who had left the business completely, he gets back on TV. He is back on TV now as a TV news reporter, a profession that he had walked away from. And frankly, he was embittered about because when this tragedy happened, he literally was the star TV news reporter and the next day was the villain.
34:58 Lindsay Graham? At the beginning of this discussion, you mentioned the memorial that Gina Russo helped establish where the club used to stand. What's it like to go there?
35:07 Speaker 03 It's a living memorial, which is appropriate for a place where so many people died. She turned it into a park. It has plants and it will go and grow for years. The way it was designed as a music theme to it, basically instead of headstones, they have the names and images of each of the people who perished on things that look like little speakers, the speakers that you would see at a rock concert. And you kind of walk along these paths and in the paths you meet all 100 people. It's an incredibly moving scene and it was done by volunteers, people who were the victims' families and the survivors. They were the ones who spearheaded this, raised the money.
35:48 Speaker 03 One of the sad facts about this story is that because the victims were mostly working class people, the waitresses, the movers, the people who were at gas stations, these are not people who had a lot of clout with charities, so to speak. You know, the traditional institutions that might help people like this simply didn't. FEMA did not step up. There was some initial help at first to help them get on their legs that paid for like funerals and some hospital costs. But these were people who were seriously hurt and needed a lifetime of support. They didn't get that. So what Gina Russo does after she comes out of the hospital is she helps organize a fund to help people who need help.
36:28 Speaker 03 So this is the victims of the fire are raising money for other victims to help them survive. And this goes on for years, the Station Family Fund. And then eventually, when there is a payout from settlements, from lawsuits, that kind of winds down and then she winds back up again to build this memorial so that people will be remembered. The settlements are something we should talk about because they are highly controversial. It took nearly seven years to get a settlement in this case. And when it finally was all said and done, it was $176 million, which sounds like an incredible amount of money. However, lawyers pocketed about 59 million of that, according to the victims' families and the survivors.
37:12 Speaker 03 And unfortunately, because so many of them were not people who were terribly sophisticated when it came to some of these things, they were victimized by people who basically went to them while the process was still happening and said, hey, I will pay you X amount of dollars in cash if I can get your settlement when it finally happens. Well, the settlements came out to have averaged about $200,000 per person. And some of these people got an advance payment of like $25,000 in exchange for giving up their 200,000. So they were exploited even in the settlement aspect of this case. So Gina, she's an angel, Gina Russ is an angel for what she did for the people when
37:53 Speaker 03 they were hurt, but also how she tried to create some sort of level of peace, I guess, with this memorial, but is a serene place. And it makes you think about what happened to all these people and think about perhaps to prevent something like this from happening again.
38:10 Lindsay Graham? Part of the memorial is a timeline of other fires. The Coconut Grove Fire in 1942, Beverly Hills Supper Club in 1977. Certainly, fires are not just a problem of the past. What do you think we have still to learn?
38:26 Speaker 03 The memorial includes this timeline, and it's really fascinating how they do it. They go back to awful previous fires like Coconut Grove, where 400 and some odd people died. And then to Beverly Hills Supper Club in 1977, we have 165 people who died. It was after the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire that we have developed kind of the modern fire codes that we had today. And yet, 100 people still perished in Rhode Island. So the timeline goes to show how lessons were not learned before this fire. And then this fire happens, and it goes through. Details about what unfolded, sometimes by seconds, minutes, and months. But afterwards, after this fire, they go and talk about fires that have happened since then.
39:10 Speaker 03 Less than a year later, there was a horrific fire in Brazil that killed hundreds of people. And then, as recently as 2016, you had the Ghost Ship Fire in Oakland. A different scenario in some ways, but kind of the same in another. This is a highly dangerous building that had not been managed by the government, even though they were warned that it was a death trap. The government failed to intervene and do its job, like it failed to intervene and do its job in Rhode Island. And 36 young people perished in that one. So you want to say that lessons were learned, both before and after, but it's not so clear that that's true. Whereas, you might be able to adapt your own personal behavior and say, "I'm going to look for those exits, when I go to a place," or "I'm not going to go to a place
39:55 Speaker 03 that's doing pyrotechnics." In the big picture, it's difficult to say what has changed for people, because people are still dying in these situations.
40:04 Lindsay Graham? Well, Scott James, thank you so much for talking to me on American Scandal.
40:08 Speaker 03 Well, thank you, Lindsay.
40:11 Lindsay Graham? That was my conversation with veteran journalist Scott James. He's the author of Trial by Fire: A Devastating Tragedy, 100 Lives Lost, and a 15-Year Search for the Truth. From Wondery, this is episode four of our series on the Station nightclub fire. In our next season, at the height of his fame in the late 1960s, Muhammad Ali refused to serve in the U.S. Army, citing his beliefs as a member of the Nation of Islam. Convicted of draft evasion and stripped of his heavyweight boxing title, Ali found himself at the center of the era's deep divisions over race, civil rights, and the Vietnam War, all while he waited for the Supreme Court to decide his case.
40:58 Lindsay Graham? American Scandal is only possible because of listeners like you, so thank you. And don't miss an episode. Be sure to follow American Scandal on Audible or wherever you get your podcasts. And Audible subscribers can binge new seasons of American Scandal early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts. And to find out more about me, including my other podcasts, my live show, the history tours I'm arranging, and all sorts of other things, go to historyishuman.com. That's historyishuman.com.
41:31 Lindsay Graham? American Scandal is hosted, edited, and executive produced by me, Lindsay Graham for Airship. This episode was produced by Polly Stryker. Our senior interview producer is Peter Arcuni. Sound design by Gabriel Ghul. Music by Lindsay Graham. Produced by John Reed. Managing producer Joe Florentino. Senior producers Andy Beckerman and Andy Herman. Development by Stephanie Jens. Executive producers are Jenny Lauer Beckman, Marshall Louie, and Aaron O'Flaherty for Wondery.
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