On the eve of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, we spoke to patriots in the January 6 attack on the Capitol: ‘This time we won’t lose’
WASHINGTON — The patriot is wearing unsoiled work boots, crisp new chinos, a pinstriped shirt and a dark suit jacket — very demure, very mindful. He is sitting alone on a bench in the hallway of the federal courthouse in Washington, a few hundred metres from the glaring white dome of the United States Capitol. It isn’t his first visit to D.C.
“I AM the guy,” Antonio LaMotta smiles, and he invites me to sit down.
I am beginning a journey through an enraged and potentially violent populace on the eve of another Election Day. The hope is to divine what will happen if Trump wins again, or if Trump loses again, and whether the whole eggshell cupola of American democracy is likely to crumble under dynamite and drywall.
The people I encounter on both sides are hopeful, contrite, lost in fantasia or already behind bars — but it will take only one man or woman in the right place with the right weapon to unleash the storm again.
“Where were you 23 years ago?” I open, referring to the Islamic terror squadron of 2001, and LaMotta says that he was laying carpet for a homebuilder down in Norfolk. He tells me about his Army career — his posting in Germany, his training in the martial arts, the flattened nose that he ascribes to a sparring match against a fellow heavyweight, back in the day.
“As soon as I heard about the World Trade Center,” the patriot recalls, “I put a big flag on my Geo Tracker and I drove it ‘til that flag fell apart.”
Now it is Sept. 11, 2024, more than three and a half years after LaMotta held a door open during the melee at the Capitol and, according to the government’s interpretation of his actions, waved his arms 19 times as if beckoning others to join the melee.
“There’s not going to be any jail time,” the big man says his lawyers assured him.
As Donald Trump once said to Hillary Clinton: Wrong.
***
United States Bureau of Prisons Inmate No. 28787-509 is sitting in a booth at Panera Bread in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, schmearing cream cheese onto a toasted bagel. Released from the Federal Correctional Institution in Hazelton, West Virginia — or “Misery Mountain,” as the maximum-security portion of the facility is called by its long-term guests — she served part of her sentence in solitary confinement, not because she came at a guard with a homemade shiv or anything like that, but because she refused to get a COVID shot.
Of all the domestic terrorists, flag-wavers and patsies who stormed the Capitol on 1/6/21, Bancroft may rank among the most boneheaded. Convinced that the Democrats had somehow managed to rig the 2020 election in every state except the states where Trump won, she put on a Make America Great Again toque and voyaged down to D.C. from Philadelphia on an Amtrak train with a friend.
“We broke into the Capitol, we got inside, we did our part. We were looking for Nancy to shoot her in the frickin’ brain, but we didn’t find her.”
She sent that clip to only one person, a close friend (make that ex-friend). The receiver forwarded the file to the FBI. And Bancroft, a 60-year-old divorced mother of three (including a social worker and a U.S. Navy officer) and grandmother of two who operated a CrossFit gym in Bucks County, Penn., soon found herself being lambasted by a judge who was saying, “Those comments, Mrs. Bancroft, are not acceptable in a democratic society. I feel bad for you, I feel bad for you that you made these comments.”
Bancroft wasn’t the only ingénue who got caught up in the madness. In September, I went through Hell to track down a young man named Adam Kovsky, the general manager of a banquet facility and wedding venue, whom the FBI discovered smiling into someone’s camera outside the besieged dome on Jan. 6 while he was holding up two shards of furniture from some lawmaker’s office. Kovsky pleaded guilty to a petty offence. I don’t blame him for not wanting to talk to me. Hell is a hamlet in Livingston County, Michigan, that has borne that infernal name since the 1840s.
Bancroft’s Capitol companion was sentenced to 20 days in a Philadelphia lockup. Bancroft got three times that long in Hazelton, where a regimen of corn, beans and oatmeal took 15 pounds off her muscular frame. That, she says, “was one of the only good things!”
But there was another good thing that came out of Jan. 6, if you choose to view it in that light — the forging of a hard-bodied platoon of political street fighters from what had been a scattering of disconnected X-peckers — Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables,” more united and more vengeful than ever on the eve of Election Day 2024.
“If you had had a bullet,” I ask at Panera Bread, “would you have actually put it in Nancy’s brain?”
“No, good Lord, no!” says Bancroft. “We just wanted to tell them to return the electoral votes.
“I’m not an insurrectionist. I’m a Grandma!”
***
D.C.’s Courtroom 3 is big enough to hold dozens of family members, spectators, students and reporters. But on 9/11/24, no one attends Antonio LaMotta’s sentencing except one government lawyer, one counsellor for the defence, one staffer from the probation office, one note-taker from a local law school, the National Post, and Judge Jia M. Cobb — a Harvard Law School graduate who was appointed to the federal bench by President Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr.
Judge Cobb, who was born, apropos of nothing, in alleged dog-and-cat-eating Springfield, Ohio, has handled manifold Jan. 6 cases, including the conviction of LaMotta for “civil disorder” back in March.
Making his argument for the most severe possible punishment, the government lawyer introduces freeze-frames from 1/6/21 that show LaMotta hemmed between the riot shields held by police officers and the Make America Great Again crush behind him. Much is made of his arm-waving and the fact that LaMotta chose to position himself at the head of the demonstrators rather than at the rear.
“He may not have started the riot, but he certainly fanned the flames,” the prosecutor declares.
It does not help the defendant’s case when some of his earlier social-media posts are placed in evidence, to wit:
“We may have to fight an all-out civil war.”
And: “We need strong men. This is real war.”
The defence counters by invoking LaMotta’s age and military service and arguing that “he didn’t bring a gas mask or a helmet … January 6 is just a small snapshot of his life … he acted as part of a human buffer zone to protect the police.”
Granted the chance to speak before sentence is passed, LaMotta says: “When I get in there, I don’t escalate things.” He avers that he was waving for people to come to the aid of a police officer who had been injured just outside the door and out of camera range.
But then there was Philadelphia, and LaMotta couldn’t argue Philadelphia away.
On Nov. 5, 2020, while ballots were being counted two days after the election at the Philadelphia Convention Center in the wake of the latter-day King of Prussia’s profession of massive fraud, LaMotta, armed and wanting to Stop The Steal, drove his Hummer with a companion from Chesapeake, Va., to the City of Brotherly Love, where he was arrested for an open-carry violation.
As it turned out, LaMotta and his peer got off fairly easily — two years’ probation for violating the Uniform Firearms Act. But on 9/11/24, this history is enough to persuade Judge Cobb to proclaim that, “I need to send a message that this is not warranted behaviour.”
So, LaMotta IS going to jail. Not for very long, only six months, and not to Misery Mountain, but probably to a medium-security facility closer to his home.
We’re in civil war now…Look at the Democrats and Republlicans killing each other
Antonio LaMotta, Jan. 6 patriot
“Good luck to you, sir,” says Judge Cobb.
LaMotta and I walk toward the elevators — he has been accorded the privilege of self-surrender.
“What if Trump loses this time?” I ask him.
“They won’t cheat this time,” he says. “No, they can’t. We’re watching it good.”
“If the same thing happens again, what will you do?” I ask.
“I can’t do a thing. They got me. I can’t do a thing. They’re gonna chain me up, but I have good friends that I can talk to who can do more things than I can. They’re real military officers and all that. “
“What about those texts about civil war?” I wonder.
“We’re in civil war now. It’s just a different kind. Look at the Democrats and Republicans killing each other.”
“Do you think there’s a real danger of violence?”
“That’s not the intention, that’s not the intention, but that will come from the other side, from the enemies. Our side, we want to keep the guns just in case.
“This time, we won’t lose.”
***
The funny thing, Dawn Bancroft tells me in the booth at Panera, is that she never really liked Donald Trump at all.
“I never watched The Apprentice,” the ex-con says. “I just thought he was a bully. But then I voted for him because I hated Hillary and he was on the Republican ticket, and then he started following through on his promises. And I was like, ‘Holy shit! No elected official does that!’ And I grew to love him.”
By Election Day 2020, Bancroft had lost her CrossFit franchise to the coronavirus. Then came the bellowing claims of fraud and the recounts and the lawsuits and Stop the Steal.
“I saw it on TV, on Fox,” Bancroft testifies. “Listen, when in my lifetime or your lifetime did they shut down polls, throw out the Republicans and all of a sudden take days to count votes? I really feel like you have to be a real idiot to think there was no cheating going on or you have to have such hatred in your heart for Trump. You don’t care? I care. This is my country. They cheated!
“They weren’t the first to cheat, no, but they got caught. They got caught and they committed a coup d’état, and we saw it and they think we’re stupid and blah, blah, blah, but we all know that they cheated. I was already angry about COVID and losing my business. I was pissed. And now you’re gonna steal my election? You’re gonna steal my president? I don’t think so!”
“So,” I probe, “then comes ‘a bullet in her frickin’ brain’?”
“Yes, that was a stupid thing to say. That was really stupid. I would have never posted that on social media or put it on TV. But I hate Nancy Pelosi. I’m not gonna deny that.”
***
Within hours of his sentencing, I began to receive texts from LaMotta.
At first, they are about what he affirms really happened inside the Capitol:
“I kept hearing a call: ‘They need you back there!’ I looked and it was an officer in full riot gear, with blood trickling from under his helmet. We carried him in supinated position as I was trying to push our way back to the police line. He can vouch for what I am saying, the rescued riot officer.”
Then he posits a link between the young Pennsylvania man who shot Donald Trump in the ear and the older guy who set up an ambush on Trump’s golf course in Florida: they were best friends and brothers in arms, LaMotta types. “They’re sending their kamikaze … Just like the desperate Japanese in WW-ll.”
Then more messages about Satanists, the Rothschilds, Chabad, the Roman Catholic Church, the Rockefellers, Big Pharma … “Whatever is hidden shall be exposed. They can’t win by truth and honesty, they can’t get up the rankings in that way … they must steal, scam, murder and make war … Go ahead, fact check it … eating your pets is icing on the cake LOL. The punishment is death, but we will win. God is on our side. They may have all the money and gold in the world, but God owns the whole universe and beyond.
“By the time we get done, Big Pharma will owe over 90 Trillion Dollars to everybody.”
***
A Democratic senator from California and a Democratic representative from Pittsburgh are holding a press conference at the U.S. Capitol to unveil a bill that would make it illegal for anyone to openly carry a weapon near a polling place, apparently with the single, partisan objective of protecting local election officials.
Even with free sandwiches, only three reporters show up. One of the legislators’ props is a poster with scary news headlines. Purely by coincidence, the top one reads: “Two Arrested With Guns After Police Get Tip of Convention Center Threat.”
That Convention Center was Philadelphia in 2020. The “Two Arrested” were, of course, LaMotta and friend.
I quote to Rep. Chris Deluzio a text from LaMotta: “This is not going to be a cakewalk by any means. Commander-in-Chief Donald Trump has assembled a million-man army inside the United States to fight the armed illegal immigrant militia.”
“Are we really in a civil war?” I ask the Steel City congressman, who attended the U.S. Naval Academy and served in Iraq as a civil affairs officer. “Are these guys for real?”
“I think there are still people who have those beliefs,” he allows.
“You seem to be ascribing all of America’s problems solely to one man,” I suggest.
“He is the principal voice,” Rep. Deluzio replies. “The former president’s rhetoric about pardoning criminals from January 6, that’s dangerous.”
“If Trump loses, is this over?” I ponder. “Does all of this just fade away when Trump departs the scene?”
“Whether the rhetoric will stop, if he will accept the result, we can’t legislate that,” the congressman says.
“We can’t legislate what’s in a candidate’s heart.”
***
The buddy who accompanied LaMotta in his Hummer from southern Virginia to the convention hall in Philly back in 2020 was a younger man named Joshua Macias, a Christian chaplain and leader of a group called Vets For Trump.
According to the report of the House’s Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, Macias was in Washington on Jan. 5, 2021, where he attended a meeting in a garage with the senior leadership of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, a gathering that also enfolded what the not-exactly-unbiased committee called “a motley coalition of far-right political activists who were united in their shared belief in President Trump’s Big Lie.”
Enrique Tarrio, now serving a 22-year sentence for seditious conspiracy, was a senior leader of the Proud Boys at the time.
“Vets for Trump leader Macias rested his hand on Tarrio’s shoulder at various points,” the committee report states, equating cuddling with conspiracy. And the document quotes another attendee as saying, “that there was discussion of going to ‘storm the Capitol,’ although she claimed that this was ‘normal’ discussion and supposedly did not indicate violence or ‘any of that type of stuff.’”
In May 2022, Macias was called before the Select Committee.
“I am asking you what you were talking about,” a congressional staffer pressed him.
“I have no idea, sir. I talk a lot.”
Now Macias, a 46-year-old father of three, is on the phone from Virginia, talking about “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” and about “peace, love and joy.”
“If you were making a movie about a coup in America,” he says, “January 6 would not be that movie.
“Our world is in a much worse condition than it was” that day, Macias states. Echoing his friend LaMotta, he warns that, “our country is pervaded by millions of millions of armed insurgents” who have streamed across the Mexican border.
“The American eagle,” Macias says, “has been asleep for far too long.”
At Election Day 2024, he insists, “this is not simply a MAGA, GOP conversation. This is ground-up and grassroots. No matter what happens at the presidential election level, this is a county-by-county conversation. The county, the state capitals, that’s where it will all flush out.”
“What if there is exactly the same result this time?” I ask. “Did January 6 allow MAGA to blow off steam? Has the temperature gone down?”
“The steam never dissipated,” Macias replies. “It made it worse.”
***
A Jan. 6 defendant named Edward Jacob Lang has been locked in various cellblocks for more than three years, most recently in Brooklyn, N.Y. Lang has used this time, he claimed in numerous media interviews earlier in 2024, to organize a 20,000-member militia of like-minded patriots in all 50 states.
“I thought it was necessary to get organized in case these encroachments, these violations of our civil liberties, our natural rights were to escalate to a point where it’d absolutely be untenable and that we would need to defend ourselves,” Lang was quoted as saying.
“It’s important to recognize that Lang is, first and foremost, a grafter,” one of the scholars sniffed.
In March, Lang’s supporters were urged to rally in his defence outside the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, N.Y. The resulting turnout numbered Jake’s father, eight other humans, and one horse: a “gaucho for Trump,” Brooklyn Magazine called the rider.
“The next election won’t be decided at a Ballot Box,” ProPublica reports, citing “a private Telegram chat with an AP3 member.”
“It’ll be decided at the ammo box.”
***
“What about your guns?” I ask Dawn Bancroft.
“I don’t have any guns,” she replies. “Well, I mean, my Dad left me a gun, but my gun is with my friend because I had to take it out of the house while I’m on probation. So, she has my gun.”
“What will happen if Trump wins — total amnesty for everybody, even the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers? Will he wipe out your conviction?”
“Yeah, everybody out, everyone out. If he gets in, we’re good. Everyone’s good.”
“And if he loses? Do you know who will certify the Electoral College this time? Vice-President Kamala Harris!”
I say to my kids all the time, ‘If she’s voted in, I’m on their list.’ Because I won’t sit down.
Dawn Bancroft, Jan. 6 patriot
“Listening to JD Vance and Tucker Carlson last night, one of the questions was, ‘What do you think will happen if she wins?’” Bancroft answers. “It’ll be a slow death, and there will be more political prisoners. I say to my kids all the time, ‘If she’s voted in, I’m on their list.’ Because I won’t sit down. That’s how I look at it becoming, because there’s a lot of us that are going to be killed. All of a sudden, we’re going to be suiciding ourselves, dead or whatever.”
“Will you bear arms if it comes to that?”
“I don’t think Trump is going to start a riot in the country. I really don’t. When Trump says ‘fight,’ he doesn’t mean guns and ammo and knives. I don’t think he’s saying ‘fight with guns’ at all.
“I love my country. We just want to live our lives and take care of our kids. If she wins, we’ll just get on with our lives. I mean, we survived Obama!”
***
One last tale from the flip-side of the coin.
On Jan. 6, 2021, at the same hour that thousands of Dawns and Antonios were obeying Donald Trump’s urging to stream toward the halls of Congress and “fight like hell,” 20 or so men and women, waving U.S. flags, assembled beneath the equestrian statue of Civil War Gen. Philip Sheridan at the New York State Capitol in Albany to exhibit their own displeasure at the election of Biden. Some of these people called themselves “the Albany Proud Boys.”
Four years earlier, while Donald Trump was delivering his “American carnage” Inaugural Address, Contompasis had come to D.C. to document hundreds of trash-burning, black-masked protesters who were burning flags and throwing bricks (a total of 234 were arrested; a handful pleaded guilty; the rest had their charges dropped; no one went to jail.) And he had been in Charlottesville, Va., to witness the infamous, deadly “Unite the Right” parade in 2017 as well.
Twenty years seems a tad bit excessive
Alexander Stokes Contompasis
Now, in Albany on 1/6/21, Contompasis remained seated while a few citizens began to approach and heckle the Albany Proud Boys. There was some shoving and grappling. One of the Proud Boys allegedly produced an electric stun weapon. Contompasis left the bench, dropped his coffee, produced his knife, pranced in and out of the melee, slashed one man in the upper chest and then stabbed another in the abdomen before walking away from the scene when police arrived.
The man with the knife was identified, arrested and charged with assault, criminal possession of a weapon, and menacing. One of his victims was treated in hospital and released. The other underwent surgery for an eviscerated bowel and was able to return to work a couple of weeks later.
“This wasn’t just a simple stab or an accidental stab or a ‘poke’ as the defendant attempted to describe it in his testimony,” the judge said at the trial. “These were violent knife attacks.”
After watching slow-motion video of the incident three times, the jury concurred. For less than five minutes of mayhem, Contompasis is serving a 20-year sentence at the maximum-security Upstate Correctional Facility in Malone, N.Y., an hour south of Montreal and just within the borders of America’s disembowelled body politic.
Here was the rage of Jan. 6 turned upside-down — the star-spangled soi-disant patriots attacked, the other team locked up. Or at least one of them.
“Twenty years seems a tad bit excessive,” Contompasis writes to me from jail.
***
For the past few weeks, Contompasis and I have been exchanging emails and discussing the political landscape that, since the dawning of the Age of Trump (and even before), has inspired so many Americans of all opinions to acts of violence and civic dystrophy and personal ruin.
“I understand one may inquire as to what I was doing there,” he submits at one o’clock one autumn morning. “I was attending a small counter protest as an activist and independent journalist, which I had done for several years. At the end of the day, I defended people who were being attacked because they were people who were being attacked. At that moment, politics did not factor into what transpired nor was an ideological discourse with the angry mob that was attacking people an option at the time.”
I envision a slender, bearded man in government pyjamas, typing his thoughts in the middle of the night while his fellows and his family and his country toss and turn in fits of fear and confusion.
“We are at the crossroads,” he writes. “I hope things get better. Hope is a high commodity these days.”
On a sunny September Saturday, Contompasis’s mother and father, his two brothers, his fiancée, and a number of his friends and supporters meet me at a diner near Albany. They want to tell me about the progress of their appeal of his sentence and about his decades as a devoted activist and as a champion of refugee resettlement and community gardening. The three brothers once owned a local art gallery; their mother is an artist; their father is a third-generation banana wholesaler at the public market.
Alex certainly did not go to the State Capitol looking for a fight, the fiancée, a professional singer, professes, noting that he had left his geriatric English Bulldog in his car while he went to report on the Proud Boys’ assembly to his online followers.
“He was just going to take a few pictures and walk his dog in the park,” she states.
“You don’t get 20 years for a street brawl,” Alex’s mother says, her eyes moist. “The truth is, Biden won the election. Why fight over what’s not true?”
One of Alex’s brothers is a sturdy man named Max, a craftsman of the Capital District’s 21st-century renovation boom, a voice of reason in a din of pre-election fury.
“It used to be that nobody talked about politics,” Max offers, “and the ones who did were nutjobs. Now everybody’s a nutjob.
“We’re all Americans,” he goes on. “We’re all hurting and we’re all looking for somebody to blame. We had a Civil War. We’ve come back from worse.
“You can’t fight dark forces with dark forces. The people who are full of rage and fear, they’re gonna get left behind. If Trump wins, I’m going to get up the next day and go to work and take care of my family. I’m going to act like nothing ever happened.”
“It does concern me that the Republican party nominated Trump again after the whole insurrection thing,” Alex writes from his cell. “I could definitely elaborate, ramble even,” the inmate writes, “but you could probably guess who I would not vote for …
“If I could still vote.”
”Do you think the right-wing extremists will try again?” I ask the left-wing prisoner of Jan. 6.
“No, I do not,” he replies. “Didn’t go so well last time.”