war. Was the time ripe to strike? Jim Kopp had been sentenced to life in prison, Paul Hill executed, and Eric Rudolph, who bombed a clinic in Alabama, arrested—all within the space of five months. If Jordi decided to hit a clinic, he would be a marked man. On the other hand, George W. Bush, a pro-life Republican, was in the White House, and the FBI’s focus was now on al-Qaeda. He had no intention of ending up strapped to a gurney like Hill, or getting caught like Rudolph or Kopp. “As long as I keep hitting places, they’ll keep after me,” he told his friend. “But it’s like trying to catch a cockroach in a house. They won’t get me.”
Jordi ‘s friend sold him a .45-caliber pistol with an attached silencer and two empty magazines. Jordi tried to liaise with others on the fringe of the pro-life movement. One warned Jordi to be careful. In the current climate, he was playing a risky game. And one more thing: always assume that anyone you might be talking to could be a cop. On Tuesday night, Jordi met again with his friend, who lived on a houseboat at a Miami Beach marina. Perhaps Jordi felt especially safe talking with him, under cover of darkness, water lapping gently against the sides of the boat. Safe, until FBI agents emerged from the shadows to arrest him. Jordi’s friend had been an informant. He had told the feds everything. Jordi plunged into the water to escape, managed to pull away from the boat. Half an hour later he was pulled from the water by the U.S. Coast Guard. He was charged with solicitation to commit a crime of violence, distribution of information relating to making and using explosives for arson, and possession of an unregistered firearm or destructive device. The FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force had been investigating Jordi for four months, after getting a tip from his own brother.
One of Jordi’s relatives told reporters that he was a loner, had a strained relationship with his family. Jordi was “overzealous about the Lord, but not a violent person.” Four days prior to the arrest, the pastor at the Baptist church Jordi attended had faxed a letter to police, warning that the parishioner had violent views on stopping abortion. Clearly, in contrast to Kopp, Stephen Jordi stood out, with a shaved head and religious tattoos on both forearms. He was described in the press as a devout evangelical Christian who had four kids named Noah, Elijah, Charity and Trinity.
And Jim Kopp? A chameleon. Had seemed to one and all gentle, spoke like a devout Christian—and carried inside him a capacity for violence like a concealed shiv. Kopp knew the media would, “in its infinite wisdom,” try to answer the puzzle of his life by finding some old lady somewhere who had known him, “and she would stand there for the camera, rub rosary beads in her hands, and say: ‘Oh, dear, yes, Jim was such a nice boy. Can’t believe he’d ever do anything wrong to anyone.’” Oh, Kopp mused, they’d trot out the old Jekyll-and-Hyde explanation for his behavior.
It was a bit more complicated than that, he reflected. Wasn’t the FBI still trying to construct a psychological profile of him for the federal case? Why else would they, in the spring of 2004, with the federal trial still pending, fly him all the way to San Diego for a psychiatric evaluation? Federal prosecutors had asked for the evaluation to determine Kopp’s fitness to stand trial. Was that the only reason? Why move him all the way from Buffalo to San Diego, near his boyhood home in Southern California? Perhaps they were trying to jog some old memories, shake him up a little bit? But of course. They wouldn’t get inside him, though. He was sure the Edgars still hadn’t figured out the code he had used in his letters to Loretta when he was on the run.
Stephen Jordi’s lawyer accused the FBI of entrapment. His big mistake had been talking and trusting too much. The lesson of Jordi’s capture, said a commentary on the Army of God website, is that “your family, pro-lifers and your church ‘friends’ will rat you out in a heartbeat, thinking they are doing God’s will. Do not tell anyone, before, during, or after you are planning on taking action.”
Jordi had military training, but he lacked Jim Kopp’s guile. Kopp would have never been fooled by an informer, would never have talked like that. His advantage was that no one could see him coming. He used deception in every facet of his life, the Romanita. Yet in the end, the reason Kopp was caught and convicted was that he, too, had trusted, had talked too much—to the woman he loved. Loved? He never married, never had serious relationships. It had to be that way. His connections with adults were weak at best. Perhaps he eventually became so desensitized to grown humans that it created in him the soul of a killer, enabling him to shoot doctors, play Russian roulette with lives, shatter whole families for his cause. And yet he chose to shoot from a distance, ran after he pulled the trigger. He gave himself a buffer zone from the carnage, did not have the certainty of the up-close killer. In the end he was not completely desensitized, not quite enough. His connection with the fetus, his mission to save the unborn, wasn’t enough, not when he was tired and vulnerable, “sleeping” on the run. It was then that Kopp reached for perhaps the only person he could connect with, and that was Loretta Marra.
Loretta was his blind spot, the chink in his psychological armor. His contact with her led directly to his capture. And, while few knew it at the time, she also led to his conviction. When he shocked everyone by confessing to shooting Bart Slepian, Jim Kopp was trying to sacrifice himself for Loretta’s freedom. That fact all became clear one day in a Brooklyn court.
Chapter 27 ~ Free Conscience
Loretta Marra had labored over the speech in her cell. She had spent much of her adult life proselytizing, debating philosophy and morality, and now she was preparing the argument of her life. She was to make her case before federal judge Carol Amon. Marra’s mission was nothing less than freeing herself and her husband, Dennis Malvasi, returning to their two young sons. They had been in custody for 29 months, since March 29, 2001, repeatedly denied bail. And now, having pled guilty to conspiracy to harbor a fugitive, Amon would decide their punishment. The maximum sentence was five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
In Judge Amon’s courtroom, Marra’s lawyer, Bruce Barket, would argue for leniency. But Loretta would also speak. She could not try to make a pro-life argument to the judge, cite the feds’ bigotry against pro-life Catholics— even though she believed that to her core. Why else had they been denied bail, labeled a flight risk? No, she had to make a legal argument. No one knew her case better than she did, no one knew what had gone on behind the scenes. Few knew the real reason why Jim Kopp had confessed. Now was the time to tell the whole story.
The morning broke clear and sunny. The courthouse sat on the other side of the Brooklyn Bridge from Manhattan. Spectators filed into the room, took their seats and waited: Loretta’s friend Luanne, who loved Loretta, considered her a saint; old acquaintances of Loretta’s late father; friends from the movement, like Joan Andrews with two of her five adopted children, one of them a child of Chernobyl born with physical disabilities; Jim Kopp’s friends James Gannon and Betty Lewis, both of whom still lived in the Crestwood Village retirement community in Whiting, New Jersey; a priest who had been arrested many times for protesting and had met with Kopp in jail. The priest knew what he would have done if he had been in Loretta’s shoes—he would have helped Jim, too. Any one of them would have taken in an old friend.
An activist named Bill Koehler was there. He supported the use of force against abortion providers, wished he had the nerve to actually pull the trigger. He actually hoped Kopp was not the lone sniper. That would mean there was more than just one man willing to defend the unborn. There was Luis, nickname Lifeboat, who looked as though he had hiked to the court through time from Woodstock, 1969, a long scraggly gray beard and a huge wooden cross hanging on his chest clicking against an assortment of pro-life pins. Lifeboat was 61, had been at the siege of Atlanta in ’88.
Marra’s sister Julia was there, too. Julia had cared for Loretta’s two sons while she was in jail. So was brother Nick. He looked like Loretta, the dark French complexion of their late mother. He came to watch his sister get hammered again by the courts. It is what the establishment does, beats up on people like her. She didn’t stand a chance. He turned to a journalist outside the courtroom and flashed a broad, sarcastic grin. “Ah yes,” he said, “The media is here, that paragon of truth and balance.”
Marra and Malvasi were led into the courtroom in handcuffs, wearing scrubs and baggy white prison-issue T- shirts. Loretta carried a stack of papers, looked weary and pale, had lost weight in prison. But Dennis Malvasi looked alert, his arms and upper body lean and hard. Loretta smiled nervously at the crowd. Guards unlocked the cuffs; they sat side by side at a table, but never touched each other in. “I love you,” she mouthed silently to her sons, who sat in the front row.
The lawyers entered. Bruce Barket would argue that Marra deserved leniency in her sentence for harboring a
