Who Bombed Judi Bari?

Nearly nine years after a homemade bomb almost killed forest activists Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney in their car in Oakland, Don Foster, the scholar who made his reputation by identifying Joe Klein as the "Anonymous" of Primary Colors, has buttressed suggestions by a California north coast writer, Ed Gehrman, that investigators of the bombing should focus far greater scrutiny on Bari's former husband, Mike Sweeney.

In an upcoming edition of Flatland Magazine, published out of the old timber mill town of Fort Bragg on the Mendocino coast, Foster contributes an essay entitled "The Bari Bombing: Pen Names, Pyrotechnics, and Paranoia in the Timber Wars." In the same issue is a long article by Gehrman, "The Bombing of Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney." Gehrman, a long-time resident of the north coast, offers a richly detailed account of the circumstances of the bombing that almost cost Bari her life. Nearly crippled by the explosion, Bari succumbed to cancer in 1997. Initially, the FBI and Oakland police department charged Bari and Cherney with knowingly carrying the bomb. But the Bureau's charges came under heavy criticism and were effectively finished off by a public television documentary by Steve Talbot. Bari herself claimed that she and Cherney had been the targets of a COINTELPRO-style conspiracy sponsored by the FBI.

At the time of her death, Bari was well on the way towards winning a substantial settlement from the FBI. Additionally, Bari helped point the finger at Irv Sutley, a former Marine and left political organizer. Talbot lent credence to this theory when he uncovered a snitch-letter to the Ukiah police containing little known details of Bari's organizing activities, plus charges that she and her Earth First! colleagues were engaged in weapons training. This accusation was buttressed by a photograph included in the Argus package of Bari toting an Uzi, in the famous "Tanya" pose popularized by Patti Hearst. The anonymous letter to the Ukiah cops, signed "Argus" (many-eyed watchdog of Greek myth), also stated that Bari had posted marijuana in the U.S. mail on a specific date. (Gehrman notes that Bari had admitted that the marijuana was a gift to a friend.)

It was the photograph that fixed suspicion on Sutley when Talbot unearthed the Argus packet. In a well-known incident, Sutley, a gun enthusiast, had once visited Bari, Cherney, and friends, bringing along weapons from his armory for some target practice in the woods. To publish a record album she and Cherney had put together, Bari and Cherney posed with the automatic weapons and this photograph ended up in the pages of the Anderson Valley Advertiser, California's foremost radical weekly. Sutley had sent the photograph to the AVA, and many, including the AVA's editor, Bruce Anderson, saw this act as being that of a provocateur and possible police undercover agent. No formal charges were ever laid against Sutley and no other suspect has come under serious scrutiny by the police or the FBI.

After Bari filed her suit, the FBI lapsed into inactivity and no local police department pursued the case, though there were inviting leads. Aside from the Argus letter, which was mailed to the Ukiah police a year before the bombing, there was an anonymous, threatening letter to Bari mailed a few weeks before the ill-fated trip to Oakland, saying she should "get out." Finally, there was a letter sent to Mike Geniella, a reporter for the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, who was covering the timber wars at the time, signed by "the Lord's Avenger." This letter, mailed five days after the bombing, displayed detailed knowledge not only of the explosive device placed in Bari and Cherney's car, but of another homemade bomb that exploded prematurely--without injuring anyone--at the Louisiana-Pacific mill outside the small timber town of Cloverdale earlier in the year. Written in archaic biblical terminology, the Lord's Avenger letter seemed clearly designed to suggest that the bomber was a right-wing religious nut, violently enflamed by Bari's public stand in favor of abortion.

Gehrman, who has been investigating the bombing for years, argues strongly in his lengthy piece in Flatland Magazine, scheduled for publication in early March, that Sutley has been unfairly accused, not least by Bari herself. He produces the results of a polygraph voluntarily undertaken by Sutley and suggests that among the reasons for Bari's hostility to Sutley was that a close friend of Bari's, Pam Davis, had repeatedly asked the former Marine to kill Bari's estranged husband, Mike Sweeney, for $5,000. Sutley says he had energetically declined the proposal on four different occasions. Bari did subsequently admit, in the wake of the polygraph test in which Sutley stated the offer had been made, that Sutley had been approached in this manner, but that it was all a joke.

In Flatland, Gehrman explores Sweeney's background in some detail, tracing his past from the anti-war turbulence of the Stanford campus in the early 1970s, where, among other activities, radicals burned down a branch of the Bank of America, to a later arson designed to halt development at the Santa Rosa Airport. Although estranged, Sweeney and Bari lived on the same property in Redwood Valley and shared parenting responsibilities for their two children. Gehrman scrutinizes in close detail the chronology of the bombing, calculating that given the 12-hour clock activating the bomb, it is quite possible that the bomb was placed under the driver's seat at the property owned by Sweeney and Bari or when the car was parked and left unlocked in Ukiah near the Mendocino Environmental Center. Gehrman counters, as a false lead, the claim by the Lord's Avenger that the bomb was put in the car in Willits where, in fact, it was locked and parked outside a police station. Gehrman cites friends who were told by Bari that Sweeney had used violence against her several times. Gehrman does not state whether Sweeney knew of Davis and Bari's efforts to hire Sutley to kill him. Gehrman does emphasize that Sweeney had a financial interest in the property he and Bari shared.

Gehrman says he enlisted Foster's help after hearing of his success in identifying Joe Klein as the author of Primary Colors and that Foster became increasingly interested in the case. These days Foster has a national reputation as a literary detective, working pro bono on criminal cases. Aside from the work on Klein, perhaps his best known coup is the identification of William Shakespeare as the author of a little-known Elizabethan elegy.

Gehrman supplied Foster with writings by many of the suspects in the Bari bombing, including material from Sweeney. Among examples of Sweeney's writing were some pages of a roman a clef he had been writing, including a portrait of Bari. Using his techniques of stylistic comparison and typographical analysis, Foster states in his article: "There is, of course, no guarantee that the Flatland archive includes writing by the actual bomber of Judi Bari, but among the examined documents, only one writer emerges from the pack as a plausible author of the Lord's Avenger letter: Mike Sweeney." Foster also says that the "Argus, Warning, and Avenger texts bear a family likeness ... Though inconclusive, this overlapping web of textual and stylistic similarities indicates that all three anonymous letters may have been written by the same subject." Foster avers that the Lord's Avenger letter and memos written by Sweeney to a colleague on environmental matters were produced by the same brand of typewriter.

It seems that those arousing suspicions about Sweeney are seeking to push newly elected Mendocino District Attorney Norman Vroman into convening a grand jury. But Vroman, taking over an office left in a state of spectacular disorganization by his predecessor, Susan Massini, seems unlikely to plunge into so fraught an affair, at least at the outset of his term. (Flatland's website is: http://www.flatlandbooks.com.)