People
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
fi fth-fl oor 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 pacifi sts 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.
“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 offi cers more than two
hours to discover the seven protesters,
according to early news reports. A base
spokesperson, Scott Bassett, fl at-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
fi repower 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
Carmen Trotta at St. Joseph’s House on E. First St.
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.
as “angelic” by criminal defense lawyer
Ron Kuby, who once represented him
years ago, Trotta also remains politically
active.
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
PHOTOS BY MARY REINHOLZ
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
fi rst “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 fi led 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 littleknown
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 fi ve years,” he
said. “A long time.”
This reporter hopes he gets lucky.
Schneps Media TVG February 21, 2019 23