WITNESS TELLS OF ACCUSED PAIR'S TIE
Boston Globe, The (MA) - July 17, 2002
Author: Thanassis Cambanis, Globe Staff
In the eyes of her best friend, accused bombing conspirator Erica Chase was an active player in the national neo-Nazi network, using her energy, looks, and charm to recruit prisoners, make cross-country trips to skinhead rallies, and flirt with the charismatic leader of a well-known white supremacist organization.
But it was a fateful romance with Leo Felton - one of her many prison pen pals - that pushed Chase from a bright-eyed, gun-toting teenager to a federal conspiracy defendant, according to the testimony of Kathy McGaffigan yesterday.
Even as Chase was allegedly helping Felton, her newly released boyfriend, assemble a potentially devastating homemade bomb - funded in part by passing counterfeit currency together - she told McGaffigan that Felton's marriage was her biggest concern.
"She didn't want to be with someone who had a wife," McGaffigan, a Harvard senior and Chase's longtime friend, testified yesterday. "Leo had a wife, and Erica was getting romantically involved with Leo. She didn't want to be his mistress."
Chase, 22, and Felton, 31, are on trial together in US District Court, charged with a conspiracy to spark a "racial holy war" by bombing a Jewish or African-American landmark in Boston. Chase's lawyer has tried to portray his client as a naive young woman enthralled by Felton, a charismatic neo-Nazi who drew her into his plan to transform racist ideology into violence.
In her second day on the witness stand, McGaffigan portrayed her best friend as a restless young woman who wasn't shy about making new friends and being active in the white supremacist network as she moved between Cape Cod, New Hampshire, Philadelphia, and Indiana.
"Erica is a very extroverted person," McGaffigan said. "She would talk a lot. She had a lot to say."
Chase, she said, regularly wrote and recruited prison inmates for the World Church of the Creator, an Illinois-based organization dedicated to " rahowa " - racial holy war - and extermination of minorities and Jews from America.
Attractive, outgoing, and energetic, Chase caught the eye of many men, including World Church founder Matt Hale, McGaffigan testified. Though Chase had moved to the Midwest, McGaffigan said, correspondence with Felton, a New Jersey inmate, drew Chase back East.
On April 9, 2001, McGaffigan told the jury, she took Chase to meet Felton, who had just been released from prison and had moved back to the Boston area. The two spent the night together in a hotel room, McGaffigan testified, and moved into a North End apartment the next day.
Though "she never said she was in love with him," McGaffigan said, Chase poured her heart out to her friend for three hours, talking about her relationship with Felton. Two days later, Felton and Chase were arrested in East Boston, allegedly passing fake bank notes at a Dunkin' Donuts.
"He was still going back to visit his wife, and Erica was very concerned about that," she said. "We talked a little about the bomb," said McGaffigan, who noticed a 50-pound bag of ammonium nitrate - a commercial fertilizer and key ingredient in the Oklahoma City bombing - in Chase and Felton's Salem Street apartment.
McGaffigan said she and Chase had been close, sharing homes in New Hampshire and Philadelphia and traveling together to Alaska. After the arrests, McGaffigan said, she went to the North End apartment and removed a gun, neo-Nazi flags, documents, and the bag of fertilizer.
The next day, however, she decided to cooperate with federal investigators from the US Secret Service.
Thanassis Cambanis can be reached at tcambanis@globe.com.
Edition: THIRD
Section: Metro/Region
Page: B4
Index Terms: MET; TRIAL NAME-CHASE NAME-FELTON
Record Number: 0207170238
Copyright (c) 2002 Globe Newspaper Company
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