The Illegal Fireworks Pipeline Behind L.A.’s Nightly Explosions

LATE ON A WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON LAST SPRING, Nicholas Schroeder, an arson and bomb investigator for the state fire marshal’s office, got a tip. A warehouse near a high school in the southeast Los Angeles County city of Commerce was stuffed full of illegal fireworks — and could potentially blow sky high at any minute. 

Schroeder, who often works side by side with his explosive-sniffing German shepherd “K-9 Flash,” tore up his schedule and got out to the warehouse. What he saw, as he would later detail in a search warrant affidavit, bore all the signs of a massive black-market fireworks operation. 

Hundreds of thousands of pounds of dangerous fireworks were stacked floor to ceiling in boxes and shipping pallets. There were also purchase requests that appear to have come in via text message or DM. Meanwhile, agents observed cars and trucks arriving and departing at a steady clip from the loading dock, presumably customers loading up with illegal products. 

It was a massive operation — the kind of thing officials in the business of regulating illegal fireworks in California had long been trying to stop. For years, many of those who paid attention had been seeing ominous signs that the fireworks black market was surging. Exhibit A was the night sky above Los Angeles on almost any given date: Commercial-grade explosives, the kind that are only legal when deployed by trained experts, were frequently fired from random street corners across the basin. Exhibit B was the growing human toll: of homes and public storage facilities incinerated in accidents, of amputated limbs, and even deaths from explosions gone awry. 

The contents of that Commerce warehouse offered a big clue about where some of these dangerous fireworks might be coming from, how they were being distributed and who might be profiting. 

But the signal came too late. 

Just weeks after authorities raided the warehouse in Commerce, a massive fireball burst above almond orchards on a Northern California ranch near a town called Esparto, sparking a blaze that raced across nearby dry fields. That July 1, 2025 inferno made national headlines and left seven men dead, along with at least one dog. 

Operations in both Commerce and Esparto, authorities quickly learned according to court papers, were linked to the same company: Devastating Pyrotechnics. The company had contracts to put on Fourth of July fireworks shows for several Northern California cities — but authorities began to suspect that legal displays were only part of its business, and that the company was also involved in importing millions of pounds of dangerous fireworks from China and selling them on California’s booming black market. 

Then, before authorities could even safely clear the ranch property, there was another death. On the night of July 4, in Buena Park, an 8-year-old girl was killed after an illegal firework malfunctioned and hit her. The explosive, authorities said in court papers, was traced back to that same Northern California ranch. 

Earlier this spring, the Yolo County district attorney’s office, working in conjunction with numerous other agencies, filed murder charges against five people involved with fireworks businesses on that ranch, which one prosecutor called “the northern California hub for an illegal enterprise that imports and sells illegal explosives on the black market.” 

As officials scramble to hold people accountable, many around the state are warning that even if the alleged Devastating Pyrotechnics network has been unraveled, the overall illegal fireworks situation in Los Angeles and across California remains out of control — and that officials must do much more to combat it. 

This is the story of a booming black-market fireworks economy hiding in plain sight, enabled by gaps in state, local and federal oversight and deeply intertwined with the nightly spectacles that many Angelenos take for granted. The reporting here is based on interviews with law enforcement and government officials, people involved in the fireworks trade both legal and otherwise, and family members of the victims, along with a review of hundreds of pages of court documents, grand jury reports and police reports. 

All fireworks, even sparklers, are outlawed within Los Angeles city limits. 

And yet, as anyone who has ever looked up at the sky on a holiday or even a random Saturday night knows, many, many residents break this law on a regular basis. Drive down the 10 Freeway on the Fourth of July and you’ll see and hear a thousand neon battle scenes being waged in every direction, with the occasional palm tree bursting into flames. 

Most of the time, this unfolds with zero consequence. Los Angeles may, in fact, be the illegal fireworks capital of the world, with near-nightly displays that function as both a symbol of the city’s joie de vivre and its lawlessness. 

The colorful flashes, crackles and booms prompt delight from some residents, and terror from others, particularly those of the canine persuasion. Still others find themselves wondering: If all this is illegal, where on earth do all these fireworks come from?

For a long time, the conventional wisdom among police and fire officials was that California’s illegal fireworks were being trucked in from Nevada, where they are sold legally, and then distributed across the gray market to aficionados. 

There was plenty of evidence to support this. Every year, law enforcement busts up illegal fireworks rings, and the trail often leads back to Nevada. In 2016, for example, officials raided a warehouse in South Gate and found 200,000 pounds of fireworks. They arrested a truck driver who had thousands of pounds in his truck. 

In 2021, 17 people were injured and an entire neighborhood was displaced following a massive explosion in South Los Angeles, caused when the LAPD’s bomb squad tried to safely detonate seized fireworks — but miscalculated. The fireworks in question had been trucked in from Nevada by a resident, who intended to sell them in advance of the Fourth of July. 

In March of 2023, the state fire marshal seized a moving truck stuffed with 20,000 pounds of fireworks as it tried to enter California from Nevada. 

Many fireworks on L.A.’s streets still do come from Nevada. But over the past few years, some in the industry began to wonder if the trade was changing. 

“The volume of illegal fireworks that was being used was increasing at exponential rates,” said Dennis Revell, a public affairs consultant who represents the state’s leading wholesale distributor of legal fireworks and has been working with policymakers on combating illegal fireworks for three decades. 

No matter how many fireworks officials seized coming over the border, the streets of California were flooded with ever larger quantities of ever more explosive illegal varieties. And state officials did not seem to be stepping up their investigations to try to understand what was going on. 

Then, in June of 2023, an accident happened that flashed like a warning sign.

On the afternoon of June 14, 2023, a public storage facility in San Jose was rocked by an explosion. Firefighters responded, and found the cause was a stockpile of black market fireworks. Subsequent investigation led them to the two men who had rented the storage unit, and to numerous other storage units full of fireworks, totaling more than 38,000 pounds in all, along with cash, cocaine, marijuana, methamphetamine and a semiautomatic weapon. 

In the following days, Revell said he told state officials he could help trace the fireworks that had been seized in the raids by consulting import records to see who might have brought them in. He saw that the manufacturer of the seized goods matched merchandise that had been imported from China through the Port of Oakland on June 11, by a company called Devastating Pyrotechnics. 

Devastating Pyrotechnics had contracts to perform public displays for a few cities in California.

But the fact of Devastating Pyrotechnics’ civic work just left a more pressing question: If those were their fireworks, what were they doing in a storage unit controlled by a couple of black-market fireworks sellers, along with a pile of meth and a gun? And how did they get there? 

On the afternoon of July 1, 2025, Sergio Medrano was parked in his taco truck on a rural county road in the little farm town of Esparto when, a bit before 6 p.m., he heard an explosion. And then another. And then another. 

“Everything was vibrating,” he recalled. “I was scared. I didn’t know what it was. It sounded very close.” 

He dove to the ground to take cover, and as he did, he saw a giant fireball rise up in the sky above the nearby almond orchards. 

Tucked at the base of the famous-to-foodies Capay Valley, where organic farms cultivate bespoke vegetables for some of San Francisco’s most exclusive restaurants, Esparto is home to fewer than 5,000 people, many of whom have lived there for generations. 

It’s the kind of place where everyone knows everyone’s business. So lots of people were aware that local farmer Jerry Matsumura had long put on small fireworks displays on a ranch he owned southwest of town. The shows were “a rare treat” and a “community asset,” according to a Yolo County grand jury report. 

What few people knew until the fireball loomed over their homes, however, was that following his death in 2015, the farmer’s small fireworks operation had expanded to almost gargantuan proportions. 

Matsumura’s daughters, who both worked for the Yolo County Sheriff’s Office, inherited his property. According to the Yolo County civil grand jury report and court testimony, a man named Kenneth Chee — an optician at Costco who had a side business working with Matsumura — began using more and more of the farm for fireworks, paying Matsumura’s son-in-law rent in cash. 

By 2021, according to an indictment filed in Yolo County Superior Court, Chee and his partners had drawn up plans for more than 80 storage containers for fireworks, along with a warehouse affording more than 4,000 square feet of storage space. One of the names they operated under: Devastating Pyrotechnics. A company owner was the optician, Kenneth Chee.

On the day of the accident, prosecutors alleged, more than 1 million pounds of explosives were stored there. (They also alleged that from 2015 to 2025, people affiliated with the ranch imported more than 11 million pounds of fireworks or components to make them; to put that in perspective, the July 4 fireworks at Pasadena’s Rose Bowl — which last year switched to drones because of fire risk and air pollution — has deployed about 5,000 pounds of explosives.)

Fireworks continued to explode at the Esparto ranch for hours. First responders judged the site too dangerous to access to search for the missing right after the explosion. 

The stories from some passersby were horrific. A man who was in a nearby water irrigation truck had rushed over to try to provide aid, and then recorded a video in which he said he was sure he could hear screams from the center of the flames.

July 1, 2025 was the first day at a new job for 18-year-old Jesus Ramos.

He had come with his 22-year-old brother Jhony from their home in the Bay Area to the tiny town of Esparto for a temporary gig packing fireworks in the lead up to Independence Day. 

Their cell phones went quiet following the blast, as did those of their stepbrother Joe Melendez and their friend Carlos Rodriguez, who were also working at the warehouse. 

When their family members saw the disaster on the news, they got in their cars and raced up to the scene, desperate for information about the fate of their loved ones. 

But none was forthcoming. 

Authorities had closed the farm road leading to the ranch, and were tight-lipped about what they were finding as they finally moved onto the property. They eventually revealed that they had recovered the remains of seven people. Identifying them, however, would take time. 

A lawyer for Devastating Pyrotechnics released a statement to the media saying the company was “innocent of any wrongdoing” and expressing “heartfelt condolences to the victims’ families and loved ones.” 

In the absence of information, family members set up a vigil in the dirt lot next to the taco truck of Sergio Medrano, the man who dove to the ground when he heard the explosion. Family members kept vigil, sitting under a blue tarp wearing placards with the missing workers’ faces emblazoned on them. “My two sons were killed,” Jhony Ramos said. “We are family. We are staying here. We are waiting for [officials] to explain.” 

But if they were tight-lipped in public, in private, some officials were facing a growing realization that they were dealing not just with a human disaster, but also a political debacle. 

The property on which Devastating Pyrotechnics was operating was owned by people who had deep ties to the Yolo County Sheriff’s Department. Not only did Matsumura’s daughters both work there, but one of the daughters was married to Samuel Machado, a lieutenant for the department. 

A volunteer firefighter with the Esparto Fire Protection District, Craig Cutright, had also been involved in a fireworks business there, according to court papers. 

It wasn’t long before the San Francisco Chronicle and the Sacramento Bee began publishing a series of investigative stories probing how, exactly, such a massive fireworks business could have been operating for years on a rural property where fireworks storage was against the law.

In the immediate aftermath of the explosion, there were also signs that some of the people involved in the businesses on the ranch were trying to cover things up. 

The prosecution alleged that following the explosion, one of Chee’s colleagues, Doug Tollefsen, “dressed in camouflage clothing, including a camouflage face mask” and drove to the ranch. They said that “text messages show Tollefsen’s goal was to conceal his identity and replace any remaining locks … before anyone else could do so.” 

After lawyers representing the families of the dead workers dug through the public records, the families quickly filed multimillion-dollar claims against the county and the state, alleging that Devastating Pyrotechnics and the other fireworks companies operating there were allowed to violate county and state laws “because of the close relationship between the owners of the property and county officials.” 

“The entire incident was preventable,” wrote lawyers representing the children of one of the dead workers. 

Chee, Tollefsen and others, meanwhile, were allegedly hard at work trying to restart their business, possibly under a different name. Yolo County investigator Brent Dawson wrote in an affidavit filed in court this spring that he had “reviewed several communications regarding the potential purchase of property in Nevada” and also that he “reviewed evidence that Chee has attempted to recruit new workers.” 

In 1981, after heavy lobbying from an Orange County fireworks magnate, W. Patrick Moriarty, the legislature passed a law making it illegal for any California city to regulate so-called “safe and sane” fireworks. 

A few years later, one of Moriarty’s associates summoned reporters from around the state for a series of interviews detailing how they worked to get that law passed: Part of the answer, at least allegedly, was sex workers. 

“I believe the total money Pat Moriarty and his associates spent on hookers between 1978 or 1979 and the present was between $600,000 and $750,000,” the associate, Richard Raymond Keith, told the L.A. Times in 1985. (That’s around $3 million in today’s dollars.) 

Keith claimed that Moriarty and his associates held parties for elected officials in Sacramento, Lake Tahoe, Los Angeles and Orange County and also arranged for officials to spend time with prostitutes in places including Lake Tahoe, San Diego and Palm Springs. One of the goals at the time was the fireworks legislation. (Through his attorney, Moriarty denied any involvement with prostitutes and accused Keith of “trying to create a false defense for his own conduct.”)

Both Keith and Moriarty eventually went to prison as part of a corruption probe. A host of other elected officials spent months answering questions about their activities. “I don’t play around with my zipper up here,” one state senator from Glendora told the Orange County Register. “I don’t play zipper politics.” 

Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed the fireworks bill, preventing it from going into effect.

In the years since, companies selling legal fireworks in California have been largely scandal free. They have also worked to make the industry safer and have partnered with nonprofit organizations that sell “safe and sane” fireworks around July 4, allowing charities to raise millions of dollars to support programs. 

The illegal side of the industry, however, has grown increasingly sophisticated at taking advantage of loopholes in the law. 

Legal fireworks in California fall into two broad categories. More than 290 communities in California — not including Los Angeles — allow “safe and sane” fireworks to be sold around July 4. These are fireworks that do not fly through the air, move across the ground unpredictably, or explode. Think: sparklers, “snakes,” and “ground spinners.” 

The second category is professional pyrotechnics (things that fly through the air, explode, or go “boom”), which are generally illegal, except when used by professionals at licensed shows.

Under California law, the state fire marshal requires anyone who wants to manufacture, import, export or sell fireworks to get a license. Transporting or shooting off giant “display” fireworks like those used in most civic shows requires a federal license from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. 

But as regulators learned after the deadly disaster in Yolo County, there was “a significant disconnect between state, local and federal fireworks regulations” as State Sen. Chris Cabaldon’s office put it, which “allowed dangerous situations to develop.” 

Among the big issues: The state does not require that the same person in a company who holds the federal license also holds the state license. Chee, the head of Devastating Pyrotechnics, had been rejected when he had applied for a federal license in 2009; he had been convicted of a felony in his youth. (One of his business partners, using the name “Devastating Pyro” got the license instead, according to the indictment.) But state officials granted Devastating Pyrotechnics a license — and renewed it after they raided the Commerce warehouse and found hundreds of thousands of pounds of fireworks, according to a report from Yolo County. 

Another pressing issue, according to some experts: Regulators need to do a better job monitoring import records, as well as coordinating with each other, to identify trafficking networks before disaster strikes. 

Cabaldon, who represents Yolo County, has introduced legislation to close some of these loopholes. “Illegal fireworks are entering, being stored, and being detonated in California at a level we’ve never seen before,” he said. “The ultimate tragedy of [this] is that it was avoidable. The system let public safety down.”

On April 10, the Yolo County district attorney’s office held a press conference to announce an indictment against eight people involved in the fireworks debacle. Five of them, including Chee, Tollefsen (the man who had allegedly snuck back onto the property after the blast to cover up evidence), and Machado (the sheriff’s lieutenant who co-owned the land) were indicted on murder charges. 

The indictment, said Deputy District Attorney Clara Morain Nabity, alleges “a decade-long conspiracy which turned the property of a former Sheriff’s lieutenant into the Northern California hub for an illegal enterprise that imports and sells illegal explosives on the black market.”

The investigation, said District Attorney Jeff Reisig, was the largest his relatively small office had undertaken in decades, and involved hundreds of law enforcement agencies across California, and even overseas. Investigators served search warrants around the state. Most of these went under the radar, but one made headlines last October when officials found so many fireworks at a house in East Los Angeles that they evacuated nearby Garfield High School and the surrounding neighborhood. 

Many of those charged have not yet entered pleas. Attorneys for Chee and several other men either declined to comment or could not be reached for comment. Earlier this month, the court issued an unusual gag order prohibiting attorneys in the case from talking about it. 

Some attorneys have argued in court that murder charges are an excessive response to what was, in essence, a tragic industrial accident. 

Chee’s attorney Doug Horngrad said there was “insufficient showing to support a felony murder charge” in a statement last month to the San Francisco Standard, while an attorney for one of the other men said that his client was “2,500 miles away when the explosion took place” and should not be facing a murder charge. 

In court, an attorney for Machado, who has pleaded not guilty, has argued that he was “only a landlord” and “did not set off a single device.” 

Back in Los Angeles, the toll from illegal fireworks blazes on.

At the end of January, two brothers in Bell Gardens, aged 13 and 24, were killed and their apartment building destroyed in an explosion from illegal fireworks. Then, in May, 26-year-old Javier Acosta was killed after an accessory dwelling unit where he was staying exploded in a blaze of illegal fireworks. 

“People are … engaging in illegal fireworks and explosives at a level in this county that is absolutely both unfathomable and incredibly dangerous,” L.A. County District Attorney Nathan Hochman said last week, at one of many news conferences that law enforcement officials held around the state to beg the public not to participate in illegal fireworks shows on July 4. 

Josh F.W. Cook, the former regional administrator for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency who was involved in helping remove fireworks from the Commerce warehouse, said such press conferences were no match for the problem, which, on top of being dangerous, he called “an environmental disaster.” California officials, he said, needed to find a way to better track the ordnance coming into the state. 

“People love fireworks,” he said. But the problem of illegal fireworks “has grown to where they have to do something. Until they can control the flow, we’re just going to be awash in explosives.”