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by William Murphy
One by one, 40 city firefighters stepped forward earlier this month at City Hall to accept a medal from the mayor and the fire commissioner for valor during the past year.
Most of the citations detailed the chaos and danger at fire scenes: intense smoke, flames, confusion and exhaustion.
One of the 40 got his medal for a different reason: he went undercover and helped bring down an arson ring, leading to a federal fraud indictment against eight people Thursday.
Supervising Fire Marshal John David Lynn posed as a corrupt marshal and was so effective the officials of Allou Healthcare of Brentwood paid him $50,000, officials said.
That was one-half of the $100,000 he was supposed to get for filing a false Fire Incident Report reclassifying a warehouse fire on Sept. 25, 2002, as an accident.
Officials said the defendants hooked up with Lynn -- they would not say how -- after the fire marshals who responded to the blaze made a finding of arson based on evidence that fires were set in four separate parts of the warehouse at 80 Evergreen Ave. in Bushwick.
The defendants supplied Lynn with four scorched electrical heaters he could use as evidence, thinking that his altered finding would free up more than $100 million in insurance proceeds they had taken out on inventory that did not exist, officials said.
"Lynn played the edgy role of a corrupt fire marshal for a tense six months, staying one step ahead of the scammers," Lynn's Fire Department citation read.
"He secretly audio- or videotaped more than 100 meetings with them, piling up evidence, which finally resulted in the apprehension of the eight men on federal arrest warrants," the citation said.
Chief Fire Marshal Louis Garcia recommended Lynn for the medal, writing that he "was the point man in a very successful investigation, planned and executed with the enthusiastic cooperation of nine federal and local agencies." The Fire Department would not comment on the investigation Thursday, citing the pending criminal case.
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