Firebombing linked to Gypsy feud

The hairstylist was sweeping the floor when he heard the guttural screams.

"These were not normal screams," the man said. "They were the screams of someone being killed."

He ran out onto a darkening Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood and saw the woman -- his neighbor, a psychic reader -- lying on the sidewalk, her clothes burned off, her hair ablaze, her skin peeling off.

"She was enveloped in smoke and flames," the man said, asking that his name not be used. "She said something about someone throwing liquor on her and setting her on fire."

It was Sept. 3, 2007, just before 9 p.m. L.A. firefighters put the building fire out in about 11 minutes. Rose Marco, 57, a fortune-teller with a penchant for doing readings into the early mornings, died six days later.

LAPD detectives Wednesday said that Marco was burned by a Molotov cocktail thrown into her business because of an ongoing feud between two Gypsy families.

Det. Mike Oppelt of the Robbery-Homicide Division said that Frank Shano Siganoff, a 24-year-old with a long rap sheet, was the man who stood outside Marco's storefront, lighted the incendiary device and threw it in.

"He threw it through the open sliding glass door," Oppelt said.

Siganoff allegedly punished Marco after her family went outside the insular Gypsy community and reported a 2005 burglary to police. In a society where disputes include fighting over bridal dowries and competition over fortune-telling, problems are expected to be settled in a communal tribune known as a kris.

But law enforcement experts say the price of eschewing tradition is rarely murder.

"Disputes are common. In terms of violence, there are some cases of it," said San Francisco Police Inspector Greg Ovanessian, a fraud investigator regarded as a national expert on crimes committed by ethnic Gypsies. "But killing each other?"

The dispute between the two families began with an act of disrespect, Oppelt said. He declined to be more specific. Then in April 2005, a Reseda home belonging to a relative of Marco was burglarized.

Instead of going before a kris, relatives of Marco decided to go to the LAPD. Then forensic investigators found a fingerprint at the burglary scene. They found a match for the print: Frank Siganoff, Oppelt said. He was arrested and charged with burglary in December 2006.

But according to records, he didn't appear in court. Instead, last September, he allegedly went to Marco's fortune-telling business on West Sunset Boulevard.