phone. Lynne was at the doctor’s office with her mother.
“Hello?”
“Lynne—it’s Bernie. You sitting down?”
“That all depends—what do you have to say?”
“I told you we’d get him. And we did.” A long pause. He could sense Lynne’s emotion. He heard her begin to cry. Then the widow and the retired FBI agent were both in tears. Tolbert burst with pride over the work his old team had done. Some of the guys back in Buffalo had a poster made for him, the James Kopp wanted poster with “captured” splashed across it. Eventually he had it framed and matted and hung like a prized trophy on the wall of his NBA office on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.
That afternoon rain clouds gathered, a damp chill in the air. Loretta Marra had been at the cramped, dingy laundromat a block away from her apartment at 385 Chestnut Street in Brooklyn. Her cell phone rang. It was Dennis. The news had spread. In France, where it was now evening, James Charles Kopp was in custody.
“I’ll be right home,” Loretta said. She hung up, then phoned him back again. “Clean up the computer,” she said.
Dennis killed the files. Loretta neared the outside of the building, towards the front door, when she saw FBI agents moving towards her. She was not about to submit quietly, she didn’t have it in her. She took a FedEx receipt out of her pocket and ripped it up, then pressed speed dial on her cell phone.
“Put the cell phone away,” said an agent, grabbing her arm.
She hung on to the phone and screamed—not a scream of terror, but a prolonged war cry, one of warning for Dennis, perhaps.
“Put the cell down now!” yelled the agent over her shriek. “Right now! Drop it! Drop it!”
The agent was on her now, turning Loretta around, forcing her hands up on the wall. Two uniform New York Police Department officers who happened to be nearby came running. Loretta saw the cops pull their guns. FBI agents flashed their badges for the police to see. A heavily armed FBI SWAT team moved upstairs to the apartment. The team had been well briefed on Dennis Malvasi’s violent history. Do not treat him lightly. He had blown up clinics. Take all precautions. Agents pushed Malvasi to the floor in the apartment, cuffed him, then escorted him outside. The couple’s two boys, ages five and two, were in the next room, looked after by agents.
Malvasi knew the drill. “I’ve never met Kopp in my entire life,” he told agents. “I don’t know this man.”
Neighbors emerged from the building, hearing the screams. They were shocked to see the photos of Marra and Malvasi in the newspapers the next day. Arrest warrants were processed charging that the couple had harbored and concealed “a fugitive, James Charles Kopp, and did aid and abet in his movement in interstate and foreign commerce to avoid prosecution.”
Agents searched the apartment, collecting evidence. They found documents stuffed in the back of the toilet. They found letters from Kopp, Irish phone numbers, library cards for Joyce Maier, an address for Amy Boissonneault, an Internet printout from a group called the Pensacola Pro-life Hunt Club, a false Arizona driver’s license in Joyce Maier’s name, a social security card and birth certificate for one Rose Marie Carroll. They also found two Canadian birth certificates for Loretta Marra’s two sons, bills for electricity, gas, telephone for Ted Barnes, a driver’s learner permit for Joyce Maier. There were receipts for $4,381 in gold and silver bars—and four bars, plus cash, stuffed inside the base of a lamp, along with Marra’s legitimate passport in her own name. There were pages from the Army of God Code of Conduct handbook, and seven pages from the website of the Canadian Abortion Rights Action League—including pages listing abortion clinics in Quebec, Ontario and British Columbia.
After the arrest, agents Michael McAndrew and Christy Kottis drove Marra to the 75th Precinct at 1000 Sutter Avenue in Brooklyn. After processing, Marra was driven to the U.S. Eastern District New York courthouse in an FBI van. She still looked for a way out.
“As I see it, you two have three options,” she told the agents from the backseat. “One, is to quit doing what you do altogether.”
The agents said nothing.
“The second option is to do your job but to stop persecuting Christians. The third option would be the heroic and Christian thing to do, which would be to pull the car over right now, let me out and give me 20 dollars.”
The agents still said nothing.
“Look, I’m not insane. I don’t actually believe that you would let me out, but that would be the heroic thing to do.”
Chapter 20 ~ St. Paul 4:18
Five days after the arrests of Kopp, Marra and Malvasi, the phone rang at a farmhouse in Lewisburg, Tennessee. Susan Brindle picked up. It was John Broderick, the lawyer who had once defended her sister, pro-life radical Joan Andrews. Broderick talked to Brindle about the arrest of Jim Kopp in France. He was going to see Jim on Thursday. “Any messages for him?” he asked.
“You’re seeing Jim?” Susan said, the name sounding more like “Jeem” in her southern accent. “Can I go with you?”
“Susan—”
“I’ll raise the money. Please. Can I go?”
Susan Brindle had been a pro-life activist for years, although not as high-profile as Joan. She hadn’t seen Jim Kopp in years. Susan had first met him at a pro-life convention in Atlanta in 1987, gave him a ride one day. A real decent man, she thought, really holy. A pacifist, too. She didn’t want to believe he was guilty of murder, but needed to ask him in person and see his reaction to be convinced. Broderick agreed to Susan’s request. He would get her in.
“There’s someone else I’d like Jim to meet,” she added.
That “someone” was Bart Slepian’s niece, Amanda Robb.
Bart’s death had hit her hard. She went on tranquilizers. Amanda started thinking about her uncle’s killer, maybe too much. She went to a shootings range, felt an assault rifle rock her bones as she tried to blow holes in human-shaped targets at 100 yards. Amanda’s writing career had included a daytime Emmy nomination as part of a team writing television shows like All My Children. Now she was researching an article on Kopp, on the shooting, its impact on her own family. She wanted to meet her uncle’s killer.
Her phone interview with Susan took place on the day of Jim’s arrest. The call had been prearranged, the timing was a coincidence—although Susan felt there was deeper meaning. She didn’t believe Jim had shot Dr. Slepian and she believed the call was a sign that Jesus was welcoming Amanda into Jim’s life. So she would try to get Amanda an audience with him.
The next day, April 4, Broderick, Susan, and Amanda each flew to Paris and met at Charles de Gaulle Airport. Together they took a train west to Rennes. Amanda agreed that for the first visit it would be just Susan and Broderick. At that time, Susan would prepare Jim for meeting a special visitor.
Herve Rouzaud–Le Boeuf rose early, dressed, looked out the window towards the old stone building a few blocks away. A room with a view, mused the lawyer with a grin, his pale blue eyes twinkling. The building down the street was the Rennes Court of Appeals. No matter how many times he saw it, the power of the building as a
