“Would you be interested in scouting some clinics?” Loretta’s friend—the informant—agreed.
“Hear from Jim lately?” he asked.
“Yeah. He’s doing all right, but he said he needs money.” “We should get him some,” the friend replied. “How would you do that?”
“It has to go through me. He’ll certainly take it but he said he’ll only take it if I approve.”
Later they talked about morality and philosophy, Loretta’s favorite topics. New York bishop Austin Vaughan had recently died. He was a hero in the pro-life movement, had been arrested many times. He had once warned pro-choice New York governor Mario Cuomo that he was risking the fires of hell for his support of the killing of unborn children. When was violence justified in the war to save babies? The sniper who had killed Dr. Barnett Slepian, intentionally or not, had taken a definite position on the moral spectrum. “I think I’d be capable of killing, for God and a higher good,” Loretta told her friend. Surely only a moral coward would rule out violence in all circumstances.
Special Agent Michael Osborn met with the informant. What did he have? Osborn listened as CS1 talked about what Loretta had said. Interesting, but not what Osborn was after. “Anything on Kopp’s location?” he asked. “No. Nothing.”
Loretta had been careful whenever Kopp’s name came up. So far, all the FBI had court permission to do was listen to what CS1 relayed to them. They needed more surveillance, they needed a fly on the wall. In October, Osborn filed court applications to conduct audio surveillance on a car. CS1 had access to several vehicles. They’d put the bug in a car, have him take Loretta for a drive, get her talking. Osborn and Buffalo special agent Joel Mercer went before a judge to argue their case. They said the bugs were necessary for two reasons: one, to establish that Marra and Malvasi were themselves breaking the law by harboring a fugitive and obstructing justice; and two, the prime reason, to locate the fugitive himself, James C. Kopp. “There is probable cause,” argued Mercer, that the couple will “further the conspiracy to harbor and conceal Kopp… and would talk in connection to facilitate, accomplish, and continue his status as a fugitive from justice and to continue to evade apprehension and arrest.” On November 1, U.S. Court of Appeals Second Circuit judge Ellsworth A. van Graafeiland signed an order authorizing the FBI to bug a gold Chevy Malibu for 30 days “for the purpose of obtaining evidence concerning the location of a fugitive as defined in Section 2516(1) pursuant to Section 2561(1)(n).”
CS1 phoned Loretta. They chatted. She said she wanted to visit a friend in Oneonta, New York. Turned out she was in luck—her friend had use of a Malibu. He picked up Loretta and Dennis. He turned the conversation to a familiar topic. “So when do want to scout clinics?” he asked Loretta. “Anytime you want,” she replied.
Osborn listened on the bug as talk turned to details about what type of clothing the friend should wear and which night of the week was best to glue locks at clinics. They moved to the bigger picture of the pro-life movement, where it was heading, use of force, and Slepian’s death.
“I’m still not sure myself—you think the shooter was trying to kill him?” CS1 asked.
“You’re always out there to maim,” said Loretta.
“What’s Jim’s opinion on that?”
“I know he feels bad for Slepian’s children. But he knows Slepian was not an innocent person, either. He was, morally, a guilty person.”
The talk turned to Malvasi’s surrender to police after blowing up an abortion clinic back in 1986, when Cardinal John O’Connor had urged him to turn himself in.
“I disagree with it,” Loretta said.
“With what?”
“Surrendering.”
“Why?”
“In my opinion Dennis had an obligation not to obey him. But he didn’t know that.”
“Would you have given yourself up?”
“No, I don’t care if the Pope tells me to. He has no authority to tell me, to tell me to turn myself in for doing something morally praiseworthy. O’Connor’s request was a sinful command.” Later they discussed whether the FBI was on to them. “If I leave the security of that address, you know,” said Marra, “my whole life will fall apart again. I can’t risk it.” Loretta knew the government had come close. How did she know? asked CS1. Because they had questioned her brother Nick. But the FBI did not know where they lived. If they did, she knew, they would be breaking down her door by now.
Dublin, Ireland
November 2000
On November 26, Jim Kopp was issued a new passport, number T895122, in the name of John O’Brien, date of birth January 2, 1960, parents Charles and Bridget O’Brien, from County Cork. On December 14, he applied for a provisional driver’s license under the name Daniel Joseph O’Sullivan, and took an eye test. He was getting some work in construction, paid through the Irish Nationwide Building Society, checks made out to Sean O’Briain. In January, he got a part-time job at Dublin’s Hume Street Cancer Center using the name Tim Guttler. He did clerical work, a quiet, unassuming man, avoided eye contact with anyone, walked with a limp.The hospital was a few blocks from his beloved Grafton Street and St. Stephen’s Green.
On Sundays Jim Kopp attended St. John’s church in a seaside port town called Dun Loughanie, a short train ride south of the city along Dublin Bay. St. John’s had been an Anglican church before its conversion to the St. Pius X denomination. The Society of St. Pius X is a breakaway sect of the Roman Catholic Church, rooted in disaffection over liberal church reforms. Canadian police hadn’t been too far off the mark to follow leads linking Jim Kopp to the group. St. Pius X churches around the world still held their mass in Latin. Its fundamentalist Catholicism appealed not only to Kopp’s faith, but also to his fascination with intrigue, power, connections. One of his favorite books was A Windswept House, by Malachi Martin, a novelist and Vatican insider. It is a dark tale about a global conspiracy of satanists and freemasons that threatens to take control of the church—and is opposed only by the few Catholic traditionalists who cling to the old ways. It was fiction, but Martin claimed that much of it was true.
A typical winter daytime service. About 50 people. The smell of candle smoke, air so frigid inside the old building some parishioners wear coats. Before the service begins, total silence. A young woman kneeling in prayer, dressed in black, head covered according to the rules, a veil over her face. A rumpled man named Pat sitting in one of the back rows, holding his personal Bible, which is bloated, as if it had fallen into a bathtub long ago, pages worn and yellowed and patched with tape.
The priest enters, keeps his back to the congregation, says no words of greeting. To the uninitiated, the Latin mass is a hard, cold ceremony. The priest kneels at the altar and begins.
In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen. Introibo ad altarre Dei. (In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen. I will go up to the altar of God.) Ad Deum, qui laetificat juventutem meam. (To God, who gives joy to my youth.) Judica me, Dues, et discerne causam meam de gente non sancta: ab homine iniquo et doloso erue me. (Judge me, O God, and distinguish my cause from an ungodly nation: save me from an unjust and deceitful enemy.)
Later, he gives a brief sermon. ‘‘It is time to wake up from our sleeping. We have the power to wake up from our lives, to overcome materialism, to witness the supernatural life. God is a god of vengeance. He will strike the unjust. Some would say, there is no God, no hell. Oh, but wait until the day of judgment.’’