- Monday, February 18, 2019
Carmen Trotta, prisoner of his own conscience
BY MARY REINHOLZ
| It’s not every day that I get a chance to interview a devout
man of faith and derring-do whose religiously inspired activism has
put him under house arrest at an East Village soup kitchen and men’s
shelter run by Catholic Worker volunteers. However, I did just that when I
recently sat down with Carmen Trotta, indicted last spring after an anti-nuke
protest in the deep South.
There, inside the
Catholic Worker’s fifth-floor walk-up building on E. First St., his longtime
residence, Trotta, 56, wears an ankle monitor and awaits trial out of
state. The reason why? Trotta joined six elderly pacifists who, on
April 4, broke into the Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base in Georgia under
cover of darkness to mark the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther
King’s assassination. They splattered blood on government property to protest
the anti-ballistic nuclear missiles stored inside the port’s Trident
submarines, calling them illegal, immoral and an existential threat to the
planet.
Carmen
Trotta at St. Joseph’s House on E. First St. Photo by Mary Reinholz
“We went to the
scene of the crime,” Trotta told me. He was referring to his Catholic comrades
in the radical Plowshares movement who carried bolt cutters, hammers,
crime-scene tape, vials of human blood and their own indictment of nuclear
weapons. “These weapons are illegal,” he insisted. “If they’re not illegal,
then there is no law.”
It took naval
officers more than two hours to discover the seven protesters, according to
early news reports. A base spokesperson, Scott Bassett, flat-out refused to
answer my questions on what appeared to be a major breach of security at Kings
Bay.
I reminded Trotta
that he had broken laws to get inside a 1,700-acre base of the Atlantic Fleet,
which has at least six subs that contain missiles with nuclear warheads capable
of delivering far more firepower than the U.S. bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
“Is it a crime
to to break into somebody’s house if it’s burning?” he responded.
In the wake of his
April 5 arrest, for which he pleaded not guilty, Trotta — who was named
Carmen after his immigrant Italian grandfather — spent about 50 days in a
Georgia county jail. He was then released on $1,000 bond. He told me he now
faces the possibility of up to 20 years in federal prison.
A court date for his
jury trial has yet to be scheduled, so he continues to cook meals for
hungry people who come to St. Joseph House (“St. Joe’s”) from all over the
city.
A sturdily built
bachelor described as “angelic” by criminal defense lawyer Ron Kuby, who once
represented him years ago, Trotta also remains politically active.
Carmen
Trotta must wear an ankle monitor as he awaits trial out of state after he and
fellow protesters were arrested for breaking into a Georgia nuclear-missile
submarine base and splattering human blood inside of it. Photo by Mary Reinholz
He’s an
associate editor for the Catholic Worker newspaper and a member of the
executive board of the War Resisters League. Since 2009, he has divided his
time between St. Joe’s, where he helps feed hungry people from all over the
city, and Long Island, where he looks after his 91-year-old widowed father.
Trotta’s life
changed dramatically when he and his co-defendants were hit with an
indictment for alleged criminal conduct at Kings Bay. Among the others are
Martha Hennessy, 63, a granddaughter of the late Dorothy Day, co-founder
of the Christian anarchist Catholic Worker movement, which is
committed to fostering peace and social justice. Day is being
considered for sainthood by the Catholic Church.
The aging protesters
are being called the Kings Bay Plowshares Seven. They were charged with three
felonies, including conspiracy to commit damage on federal property and one
misdemeanor for trespassing.
Trotta said their
intent was to stage a nonviolent and “symbolic disarmament” of the Trident
submarines.
“We wanted to
address the single most-lethal weapons on earth,” he said. “A single
Trident submarine, if it’s blasted off, with all it has inside of
itself, could drastically change life as we know it on this planet.”
Trotta’s protest at
Kings Bay was his first “non-Gandhian” action under the aegis of Plowshares. A
controversial movement, Plowshares takes its name from the biblical prophecy of
Isaiah, who called on nations to “beat their swords into plowshares.” There
have been about 100 raids of nuclear sites since the group’s founding in 1980
by the famed Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan and his brother Philip Berrigan.
During a
hearing on the case in U.S. District Court in Brunswick, Ga., federal
prosecutor Karl Knoche claimed that the movement has created a “cottage
industry” for activists seeking to denuclearize the U.S.
“I believe that they
think they are trying to prevent the end of the world,” countered Bill Quigley.
A prominent civil-rights lawyer and professor at Loyola Law School in New
Orleans, Quigley is one of a group of pro bono attorneys representing the
Plowshares defendants. He views them as part of a long tradition of civil
disobedience by people “willing to risk arrest and prison” for their
beliefs.
On Jan. 16, Quigley
filed a brief in Georgia’s Southern District Court for dismissal of the charges
against the Plowshares defendants. His argument was based on provisions of a
little-known federal law called the Religious Freedom Revival Act of 1993.
As for Trotta, who
had no prior felonies from his more than 30 arrests over decades of activism,
Quigley believes that “realistically” he could spend a year behind bars.
Trotta is not that
optimistic.
“I’m preparing for
five years,” he said. “A long time.”
This reporter hopes he gets lucky.
© TheVillager.com (Copyright 2019)
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
No comments:
Post a Comment