The Fire Man

Charting the locations that Enger is thought to have struck reveals another of his characteristics, an odd combination of shrewdness and indolence that works to his advantage. As Enger's fire-starting career progressed, the area he targeted shrunk. Investigators claim he burned down a garage on Humboldt Avenue North in 1976, and over the next few years he allegedly set some fires on the industrial fringe of Northeast near Hennepin Avenue, but as time passed the places he burned were closer and closer to his home.

"He used to get around more," says McKenna. "Now he's been 86'd from just about every bar he ever set foot in, and besides, he's not as energetic as he used to be. His routine is, he sits at the kitchen table and drinks beer until the early morning hours, then he goes out and sets a fire nearby so he can see it when he goes back to the kitchen and starts drinking again."

Ironically, although local arson investigators have spent much of their working lives trying to put him in prison, Enger considers them his only friends. "You guys talk to me like I'm a person," he once told Tony Miranda, an MPD arson investigator who's gotten to know Enger well over the years. He was sober and polite during that conversation, which Miranda taped. When he's drunk, their discussions are punctuated by primal roars. Queried as to why he set a fire, Enger replied, "I was angry, nobody to talk to, couldn't talk to my ma, I was frustrated mad drinkin', and—RAARRGGH!—just lit it."

"Call me when you're drinking," Miranda urged. "I'll talk to you."

Enger took him up on that offer many times. "Hey, Tony," he began, one evening in 2004. "I'm feeling like I might cook something up tonight." A long and rambling conversation followed, in which Enger talked frankly about his compulsion. He said he targets buildings at random. "Just if I'm pissed off, walking along, I think, 'Hey, this looks like it'll burn pretty good.' It's not like if I'm mad at you, I'm gonna run over and burn your shit. It'll be somebody else, totally innocent. There's no rhyme or reason to what I do. Like I'm pissed off at my ma all the time, but I ain't gonna burn her house down."

Investigators got in the habit of visiting Enger's home whenever there was a fire in the vicinity. The inevitable knock on the door would awaken his long-suffering mother, who in turn shook Alan until he got up and came to the door. Invariably he denied everything. "His mom will say he's been in bed for hours, that we're picking on poor Alan, but she knows better," claims McKenna. "You tell her it's quite a coincidence that just about every structure you can see from their back window has burned in the past few years, and she shrugs like she can't understand it either."

McKenna thinks the changing composition of Enger's northeast Minneapolis neighborhood may have fueled his mania. When Enger was young and prone to light an occasional fire, Central Avenue was a rust-belt thoroughfare that ran through the heart of a white, primarily eastern European neighborhood. In the late 1980s, as black people began moving in, Enger's activities picked up. In the 1990s, when Latinos began arriving in numbers, he hit a manic pace that he's kept up ever since.

Subsequent waves of immigration have turned Central Avenue into a gaudy mix of cultures, their cuisines and their hangouts, but Enger, who talks like a cartoon racist, lost count at two. The invective he lobs at the people he calls "Nig-rows" and "Messicans" may amount to a more general complaint aimed at all the people who have transformed his little world: Africans, African Americans, Mexicans, Uzbeks, Palestinians, Hmong, Pakistanis. Enger's propensity for race-baiting loudly and publicly when he's drunk has earned him a number of beatings over the years. "Those nig-rows got a challenge when they fight with me," Enger once boasted to investigators. "I don't like no nig-rows on my avenue where I grew up!"

"There was some thought that the Alan Enger problem might solve itself back in the '80s," notes McKenna, "when young black guys started hanging out in the joints he frequented. But it didn't work out that way. Al's a survivor."

"He feels powerless, and fire gives him a feeling of power," adds Miranda. "He tells me he doesn't target buildings with people in them, and for the most part that's true."

Miranda and McKenna believe Enger contributed to at least one death. At 2:00 a.m. on a bitterly cold morning in January 2003, police and firemen responded to a report of a camper trailer on fire. It appeared to be in Enger's backyard. Enger was stone drunk when he finally appeared from his bedroom, according to the officer who questioned him. He issued his standard denial in more truculent terms than usual, complaining that investigators were always waking him in the wee hours just because he'd been involved in a few fires. The smell of beer on his breath was overwhelming.