New York City
Thursday, March 1, 2001
The special agent left the FBI office in lower Manhattan, drove down Broadway, left on Chambers Street, past the New York City County Courthouse and the municipal building with the grand archway and golden statue of justice on top. Right on Center Street, quick left to cross the Brooklyn Bridge over the East River, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center just off to the right and behind the car. Osborne headed up Brooklyn Bridge Boulevard, left on Atlantic Avenue, the low-rise buildings, subway cars emerging from belowground to raised tracks, rattling loudly. Finally, Chestnut Street. Surveillance.
Later, an agent watched as Loretta Marra and Dennis Malvasi left their apartment. All clear. The agent entered the building, opened the door to apartment 2D, went inside, quickly planted the bug, and left. Earlier that same day, Eastern District judge Nina Gershon had signed an order authorizing the FBI to install a listening device. The bugs in the automobiles had so far turned up useful information, but not Kopp’s latest location or any hint of what his plans were. Osborn wanted ears in the apartment. The agents kept odd hours, sat on watch all through the night.
That evening, Loretta and Dennis talked about what they would say to other pro-lifers when trying to get assistance for Jim upon his return from Europe. “We should say, ‘Jim is looking for work again, and he’s willing to teach, train others.’”
Osborn listened. Kopp was planning to come back, and soon. And Marra and Malvasi planned to help him, and enlist others as well. The next day, Friday, New Jersey District judge Dennis M. Cavanaugh signed an order for another bug, this time for a red Ford Windstar and hotel rooms 1401 and 1402 at the Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City. Saturday morning, Loretta logged on to a computer, opened her Yahoo! mail account, and typed in the user name.
Subject: all set
On Monday, she left a new message in the draft folder.
Subject: Thumb twiddling
She logged off the email and later surfed for information about weather conditions in Montreal. At 11 a.m. she opened the email again. “We have to get Jim’s money,” she told her husband.
“Why am I getting money for you?” Dennis said. “I’m the one who’s going to meet him.”
“True. You’re gonna meet Jim. Jim told me to give $1,000… for Amy. I’ll take care of that, and leave Jim a note about it.” Amy was Amy Boissonneault. Their pro-life friend had been diagnosed with breast cancer. Loretta phoned her brother, Nick, said she might come visit. When she got off the phone she told Dennis that he needed to keep checking the computer for new email while she was away. On Thursday, March 8, at 7:55 a.m., she left a new draft message in the folder.
Subject: Partial success
At 7:57 a.m. she left another.
Subject: Getting worried
What’s going on, anyhow? Haven’t heard from you in ages. Please let me know how you are.
Loretta left the apartment to visit a man named Richard Bruno. She had a letter to show him from Jim, and also a request. Bruno owned a chimney company and had employed Kopp for a time before he had gone missing. Bruno did not believe that Jim could ever hurt anyone—he was a prayerful, peaceful man. A holy man. Loretta explained that Jim had directed her to give money to Bruno, so that he in turn could give the cash to Amy. Jim wanted Amy to use it for alternative breast cancer treatments.
Later, Loretta talked to Dennis about plans to visit Nick on Saturday. Dennis would need to check the email account before leaving the apartment and joining her. “OK,” Dennis said, “now, if he’s coming to town then forget going there—if he’s gonna be here tomorrow or Saturday, forget going there, right?”
“We’ll have to talk,” she said.
“Why don’t we just take a cab and go hook up with him and bring him here.”
“If he’s coming to town.” Michael Osborn listened to the recording. It was clearly a reference to James Kopp. He might be planning a return trip to the United States. But it also appeared likely that Marra and Malvasi would be out of the apartment on Saturday. That would be the time to move. Osborn had already applied for and received a “sneak and peek” search warrant. On Saturday, agents entered 2D, searched, photographed letters and documents. They found several false IDs for Loretta, including an Arizona driver’s license.
In a new letter from Kopp, he had asked Loretta to obtain the birth certificate of a dead child that he could use for false ID. He also wrote that he had moved to another job to earn more money, and a manuscript he was chipping away at was coming along. And he raised the possibility of entering the United States perhaps through Buffalo or Niagara Falls, posing as a tourist. The agents carefully replaced the letter and other items and left. Where was Kopp, exactly? The letter did not say. And when exactly was he planning to return?
On Tuesday, March 6, Dennis picked up the phone in the apartment. Loretta was on the other end.
“Anything?” she said.
“No. There’s been no messages. It’s been ten days now.”
“I’m worried.”
“Don’t worry, we’ve gone longer than ten days without contact in the past.”
Dublin, Ireland
March 13
The cramped newsroom of the Irish Mirror tabloid pulsed with the energy of an afternoon deadline crunch. The paper had a small staff, maybe just four reporters. Phones ringing, ties loosening, epithets bouncing off the walls. News editor Mick McNiff’s cell phone rang. The call display showed the number for his contact with the Gardai. He’d take that one.
“Yah. McNiff.” Gardai headquarters was a few blocks up the street from the Mirror by sprawling Phoenix Park. McNiff listened to his contact and scribbled on his pad. The tip he was getting was big. Terrific story. A bonafide scoop. Seems the Gardai were working with the FBI to catch an American abortion doctor killer. The man, James Charles Kopp, had been living among Dubliners, even working at a hospital on Hume Street. Should the Mirror go with the story? The contact said nothing about holding it. Even if he had, it wouldn’t have mattered. The Mirror didn’t hold news. It broke news. That’s what it would do this time.
McNiff passed the tip to a reporter. This was going front page. The next day, Wednesday, March 14, the Mirror published a story inside that said the FBI was flying in agents from America to work with the Gardai to catch the Yank James Kopp. On page one, it splashed as its main story a photo and headline pumping an exclusive interview with Muhammad Ali. American cultural icons like Ali always sold well at the newsstand. So did pieces like the second story, about the axing of an Irish TV program by the BBC. But over in the left corner was a photo of a man with a gaunt face and ragged beard. Kopp. The headline read:
Mick McNiff rarely regretted a bold news decision, but he felt the heat on this one. He got a call from an official with the Gardai who wasn’t happy about it. “Couldn’t you have waited just a day or two?” he said. Why had someone called McNiff with the tip in the first place? Was it possible that the police source was strongly opposed to abortion, and had leaked on purpose to give the American a fighting chance to escape Ireland?
Bernie Tolbert, the FBI’s supervisor in the case, never heard anything to suggest that a member of the Gardai was trying to tip off Kopp. But he also knew anything was possible. As for McNiff, he mostly lamented one thing—that they hadn’t splashed Kopp as the main story and art. Muhammad Ali was not the big story. It was Kopp! But then, when he first got the tip he had no idea how big it would all get—that within days, reporters from Fox News and CBS would visit their humble newsroom chasing the story.
The Gardai were close, but their target disappeared. The Mirror’s coverage may have been the cold hard knock that rousted Jim Kopp from whatever complacency had set in while living in Dublin. “Well,” cracked one of the Mirror’s editors, “at least we know we have one reader.”
It’s a lovely journey by car south from Dublin along the coast. Emerald-green fields rolling towards rounded mountains and the Irish Sea, chimney smoke from tiny old homes lingering as a gray haze above the rooftops. Church spires mark each small town, Dalkey, Killiney, Bray, Greystones, Newcastle, Wicklow.
Jim Kopp had little time to reflect on the beauty of the countryside. He was leaving in a hurry. But where to now? The Gardai, FBI would expect him to fly out of Dublin. Or take a fast Seacat ferry from Dublin or Dun Laoghaire to Britain—once he crossed it would be a short trip to Holyhead in Wales, where he could hop on a train. But the train would mean many stops, opportunities for the police to find him. Better to leapfrog the U.K. altogether. Misdirection. Hitler had thought the allies would invade Europe at Calais. He had been fooled—the target was Normandy. Misdirection. Jim Kopp’s target was not England. It was France.
There are two ports along the southern Irish coast where you can take a ferry directly to France, across the Celtic Sea and the English Channel. The port at a town called Rosslare is closest to Dublin. The main road leads down to a rocky beach and the passenger ferry terminal. One of the ferries that serves Rosslare is called the Normandy.
The vessel, which is large enough to carry shipping containers, tractor trailers and dozens of cars, has two dining rooms for passengers, a games area, a bar and small movie theater. Early evening, the horn sounds on board, engines rumble, water churns as the ferry lumbers out of port, ropes of white foam roll in to the shore. Looking back at the Irish coast, sun setting, the sky a tapestry of pale blue and orange and navy, and darkness out at sea.
The captain’s voice comes over a loudspeaker. “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. We’re anticipating light northerly winds. Shouldn’t be too bad, perhaps just a moderate chop. A relatively calm voyage.”
In the Celtic Sea, a “moderate chop” makes the vessel roll, dip, pitch. Keeping balance in the cabin showers is an athletic endeavor, even in relatively calm seas. In rough water, passengers can barely stand, stomachs turn and people retch. Items in the gift shop fall off the shelves.
The ferry has no phone service, televisions or Internet hookups—just small radios in each room with two channels bringing in classical music. On a clear night, six hours into the voyage the lights that dot the Welsh shoreline come into view. In your bunk you can feel the roll of the sea underneath, your body moving with each swell, tips of waves and spray hitting cabin windows with a hard smack. Roll, pitch, roll. Up on deck outside, a biting wind whips across the mist-soaked deck, slaps faces like a cold glove. It is peaceful, too, the engines humming evenly, water pounding the hull rhythmically, aqua and white foam churns and fizzes. Roll, pitch, roll. The ferry rounded Land’s End, crossed the western edge of the English Channel, passed the Channel Islands. Daylight returned.
Around midday, 20 hours after the voyage began, the coast of France came into view. Jim Kopp was about to land not far from the D-day beaches. He believed that most people associated Second World War heroism with the D-day landings and it grated on him because his dad had served in the Pacific—the underappreciated theater. The ferry pulled past the long breakwater and into dock at Cherbourg. A bit farther east along the coast rose the steep cliffs at Pointe du Hoc, where American Rangers pulled off their audacious landings more than 50 years ago. Jim Kopp had arrived.
New York City
March 14, 2001
Special Agent Michael Osborn heard the news from the FBI field office in Buffalo, via the London branch. They had a bead on Kopp in Dublin, but lost him. The bureau was feeling the heat. They seemed so close. Loretta Marra remained the key. If for some reason Kopp ceased his contact with Marra he might drop off their radar completely. Osborn knew the email communications between the pair was key. They needed to act quickly. He needed to break into their shared account.
On March 14, Western New York District judge William M. Skretny approved a request from the FBI to “intercept electronic communications made to or through the Yahoo! account with the user ID of aheaume, registered under the name heaume, alyssa.” The warrant also allowed the FBI to use “trap-and-trace” technology on the account—akin to tapping a phone line. All Internet servers have an Internet service provider or ISP address, a 32-bit designation written as numbers separated by periods. By tracing the origin of the ISP address used by Kopp—an Internet café, for example—the FBI could scan all material being sent from that address and isolate and read Kopp’s messages. With the ISP address, they might be able to trace the file to a specific business using that server. But first they needed to search the Yahoo! account.
In Santa Clara, in the heart of Silicon Valley, FBI agents arrived at a collection of eight low-rise buildings in a nondescript commercial strip mall—the global headquarters of Yahoo!. They served the warrant and cracked the aheaume account. The emails saved in the draft folder had not been deleted. Back in New York, Osborn was soon analyzing the messages, in particular those written a month earlier, on February 17. He read and reread the code Kopp and Marra used. “DV”; “Ronald Reagans”; “on margins”; “Jackie area”: what did it all mean? Jim Kopp would always remain certain there were code words the Edgars never figured out. But Osborn’s people cracked most of them. “DV” appeared frequently in his correspondence. He loved to throw around Latin. DV is the acronym for Deo volente: God willing.
Kopp and Marra discussed his future, whether he should he return “to the field.” They talked about “outcome” number one and two. Number one referred to wounding abortion doctors. Number two meant killing them. Number one, wrote Marra, is the desired option, but the “rate of recidivism” is high—abortion doctors may return to work after being wounded. “Ronald Reagans” or “Rsquared” was a reference to the assassination attempt on President Reagan’s life. “Jackie area”? Jackie might be a reference to Loretta’s son, who was born near Montreal, “Jackie area” was probably that part of Canada. Loretta had also written: “Mech points out that jackie is said to be under closer scrutiny these days, because others have thought of what you’ve thought of, with those others are said to be very, very naughty.” Mech was Dennis Malvasi. And jackie—Canada, or Canadian Immigration, the Canadian border—was under scrutiny of late. Kopp’s reference to “on margins” meant international borders. “Capital city of mom’s birth” was a reference to Loretta Marra’s mother, who was born in Paris.
Osborn wrote out his analysis of the emails and passed it to the Buffalo office. Murder suspect and fugitive James Charles Kopp is likely in the vicinity of Paris, plans to fly to Montreal in order to return to the field—to shoot more doctors.