By Gregory Smith
PROVIDENCE — An Olneyville furniture factory

allegedly targeted for an arson fire was insured for $4 million, an arson investigator testified in District Court yesterday.

East Sider Markus Gorkin, owner of the factory, is charged with first-degree arson for an alleged unsuccessful attempt to destroy the building by using what investigators describe as elaborate incendiary devices triggered by timers.

City arson investigator Joseph F. Dorsey testified that an insurance company representative told him that Gorkin had renewed the insurance policy in early December, only weeks before the alleged arson attempt fizzled, on Dec. 27. It was not clear in testimony whether the building or its contents, or both, were insured for fire loss.

In the past, Dorsey said he was told, the policy had lapsed from time to time due to nonpayment of the premium, and then had been renewed.

Dorsey took the stand at a hearing in which Gorkin is attempting to persuade Judge Elaine T. Bucci to short-circuit his prosecution at an early stage. With the unusual maneuver, called a probable-cause hearing, the accused seeks to win dismissal of the charge against him for lack of probable cause to believe he committed the crime.

Gorkin, 67, of 14 Maxcy Drive, is a well-regarded member of the Jewish community who emigrated in 1979 from what is now Belarus, but was at the time a part of the Soviet Union.

Now a naturalized U.S. citizen whose wife is a physician, he said outside court that he has helped hundreds of Jewish émigrés to relocate to the United States by assisting them with jobs, short-term living expenses, education and similar arrangements.

The police allege that Gorkin, who holds a college degree in engineering, used his mechanical expertise to cobble together simple components to set up six incendiary devices to burn his business, United Industries of New England, which is housed in a mill complex at 99 Hartford Ave., across the street from the Olneyville Post Office.

Only one of the devices placed throughout the two-story building ignited, apparently at about midnight Dec. 26, causing a fire that scorched a wall and burned a small hole in the first-floor ceiling. The smoldering blaze, which set off the sprinklers, was discovered at about 5:30 a.m. when a factory employee saw water running under a door and out of the building.

According to testimony, each device consisted of a heating coil removed from a space heater, attached to a timer, mounted on a wood plank for stability, and plugged into an electrical wall socket. A wire connected the heating element to a cardboard tube about 4 feet long and 1½ feet in diameter that was stuffed with upholstery foam and pieces of cloth soaked in a flammable substance thought to be gasoline.

Plastic bags filled with upholstery foam were packed around at least some of the devices. A sample of the foam burned readily, Dorsey testified.

The investigator said that in his 16 years of specializing in arson, he has never seen such an elaborate incendiary device and that Mike West, an investigator for the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, told him that he had never encountered such an elaborate device.

The bespectacled Gorkin, attired in a beige sweater, gray slacks and black shoes, his head crowned with a skullcap, sat quietly at the defense table in a courtroom in the Garrahy Judicial Complex downtown, listening to his lawyer, Keven A. McKenna, make urgent arguments to the judge.

Bucci complimented McKenna for his passion but admonished him for making inappropriate gestures and facial expressions and for interrupting her. At one point McKenna suggested that she step away from handling the case because, he contended, she had prejudged it. Bucci rejected his suggestion.

The hearing lasted for more than three hours yesterday and is scheduled to resume today. At several points, McKenna suggested outright or in his questions to witnesses that the devices were intended to be a warning or were merely a case of vandalism rather than a serious attempt to burn the building.

Providence police Detective Maurice Green said the police charged Gorkin based on a variety of factors, including their discovery, in his van, of items that apparently were used in making the incendiary devices; statements that Gorkin made in police interviews; and the fact that there was no forced entry into the building and that Gorkin was the last person in the building before the abortive fire and the first person to enter the building afterward.

While talking to the police, according to Green, Gorkin speculated that someone might have assembled the devices as part of an effort to force him to retire from the business. His son, Baruch, and a salesman both wanted him to retire early, the elder Gorkin was quoted as saying. Baruch Gorkin was in the gallery yesterday, listening to the testimony.

“Someone was trying to move him out,” Green said he concluded from Gorkin’s remarks.

Dorsey testified under questioning by Special Assistant Attorney General Dawson Hodgson that half of the sprinkler system had been shut down for months, meaning that the system would have been less capable of containing a fire.

Asked what would have happened if the devices had worked as intended, Dorsey declared, “It is my belief that they would have overpowered the sprinkler system and the building probably would have burned to the ground.”

gsmith@projo.com