Red Mass Explosive Man Asked S. Ct. to “Remove Arizona from the United States” and “Declare It a ‘Foreign Enemy'”

From a Justice Department press release Monday:

Louis Geri, 42, of Vineland, New Jersey, was sentenced today in U.S. District Court to 70 months in prison in connection with threatening to detonate more than 100 homemade explosive devices on the steps of St. Matthew’s Cathedral during the annual Red Mass attended by U.S. Supreme Court Justices and other senior government officials, announced U.S. Attorney Jeanine Ferris Pirro.

Geri pleaded guilty March 5 before Judge Randolph M. Moss to a count of Hobbs Act extortion by wrongful use of force, violence, or fear, and to a count of possession of an unregistered firearm (destructive device)….

According to the plea agreement, on the evening of Oct. 4, 2025, Geri rode his motorcycle to St. Matthew’s Cathedral, on the 1700 block of Rhode Island Ave. NW, and erected a tent on the church’s front steps. Inside the tent, he assembled more than 100 explosive devices he had manufactured from materials—including nitromethane, magnesium, charcoal, and thermite—purchased in Arkansas and assembled in Virginia. He also carried a nine-page list of written demands.

The Red Mass, a high-profile annual religious ceremony attended by members of the Supreme Court, Cabinet, Congress, and the diplomatic corps, was scheduled at the cathedral for the following morning.

About 5 a.m. on Oct. 5, 2025, Metropolitan Police Department officers approached Geri’s tent while patrolling the area before the service. When officers told him he would need to move, Geri refused and threatened to throw one of his explosive devices into the street to demonstrate its destructive power. He told officers that “several of your people are gonna die from one of these” if federal agents did not come to negotiate his demands.

Geri allegedly demanded, among other things (text converted into a bulleted list):

• hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments to himself and others;
• that federal arrest warrants be issued for all elected government officials and all judges so they could be held as terrorists under the “Patriot Act designation”;
• that the President of the United States call on Congress to declare war on the “rogue cartel state” formerly known as Arizona;
• extended hotel stays at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C.;
• the Supreme Court remove the state of Arizona from the United States, declare it a “foreign enemy,” and limit the movements of the residents of Arizona;
• numerous requests to leaders of the Catholic and Jewish faiths, including but not limited to:
  • (i) barring woman from positions that carry legal authority over church holdings and parishes;
  • (ii) excommunicating all Arizona-based Catholics; and
  • (iii) revealing the lie of the Holocaust and removing all social controls based on it, especially in the “Jewish welfare system” in Germany; and finally, an expatriation flight to Japan.

Josh Satter was the prosecutor on the case.