BOOK EXCERPT
A Car Bomb Nearly Killed Eco-Activist Judi Bari—and Yet the Feds Blamed HerGreg King
Sun, June 18, 2023
Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Greg King/Getty
LONG READ
I spent the summer of 1990 “hiding out” at my parents’ modest home in western Sonoma County. At twenty-nine years old I’d landed back at the family abode after my two closest colleagues had been violently attacked and almost killed for attempting to protect redwood forests. After I’d lived through five years of threats and assaults for the crime of trying to save the very last ancient redwood groves still standing outside of parks—a disturbing tide of attrition now horribly punctuated by an assassination attempt—I had little choice but to take up residence in my old bedroom, surrounded by the safety of family.
On May 24, Earth First! activist Judi Bari was piloting her Subaru station wagon through Oakland, California, when a pipe bomb exploded under her driver’s seat. When Judi hit the brakes a ball bearing broke out of a small slot and rolled into a groove where it connected two points and ignited the sophisticated bomb. The explosion blew a wide hole through the floorboard beneath Judi’s seat and blasted the roof of the Subaru wagon into a dome. Nails from the bomb entered the seat back but miraculously missed Judi. Bari was severely injured. Her passenger, fellow Earth First! activist Darryl Cherney, suffered a scratched cornea and a blown eardrum.
As if the bombing wasn’t bad enough, the FBI and Oakland Police immediately arrested Bari and Cherney for “transporting their own bomb.” The arrest of the non-violent activists set off a chain of events that would once again demonstrate the FBI’s complicity in violence aimed US activists for exercising their constitutionally protected right of protest. The Alameda County district attorney refused to file charges against the pair, citing a lack of evidence, as it was clear that Bari and Cherney had been set up.
Three months after the bombing Bari ran an op-ed in the New York Times. She called the attack an act of “unspeakable terrorism,” and she warned, “If [the FBI] can succeed in framing and discrediting us, then domestic dissent is not safe from Government sabotage. The right to advocate social change without fear of harassment is the cornerstone of a free society.”
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To this day neither the FBI nor Oakland Police has ever conducted a genuine probe of the bombing, choosing instead to smear Bari and Cherney in the press. A subsequent investigation and successful lawsuit filed by the activists against the police agencies not only uncovered official malfeasance in the case—the “framing” of the activists and the violation of their civil rights—but would leave little doubt in the minds of many, including one of the country’s most celebrated civil rights attorneys, that the FBI had been directly involved in the bombing itself.
Predictable Violence
State violence against environmental activists—whether perpetrated directly or simply enabled—is nothing new in the United States. As a veteran of the “redwood wars” of Northern California during the 1980s and 1990s, I was assaulted several times and received dozens of death threats, all of which garnered no more than a shrug from police officials. During the years that we fought for environmental justice, we would also witness in horror as police and sheriff’s officers would actually instigate, rather than investigate, violence against activists.
No matter the countless assaults and death threats against us, I don’t recall a single instance of a police officer making an arrest or even investigating. When a logger assaulted a woman in front of thirty witnesses, breaking her nose, then threatened those thirty witnesses by firing a shotgun in the air, Mendocino County sheriff’s deputies refused to arrest the assailant or even take statements from the victims. In 1998, when redwood activist David “Gypsy” Chain was crushed to death by a falling tree—cut by an angry timber worker who had previously threatened to kill him—the logger who felled the tree was not arrested nor did the Humboldt County District Attorney even investigate the incident. When the owner of a log trucking company struck a demonstrator in the face as she was protesting the company’s hauling of old-growth redwood logs—and did so directly in front of a Humboldt County Sheriff’s officer who witnessed the attack from just two feet away—the truck owner was not arrested nor cited, nor even admonished. When private tree climbers, employed by timber companies but deputized by Humboldt County sheriffs, violently and dangerously extracted tree sitters from 100 feet above the ground, law enforcement lauded the action. When Humboldt County Sheriff’s officers used cotton swabs to rub pepper spray directly into the eyes of environmental protestors, the cops were neither reprimanded nor suspended. Amnesty International called the pepper spray attack “torture.” The activists won a lawsuit.
Assassination
The assault that most brazenly exposed police complicity in violence against environmental activists was the 1990 assassination attempt against my two closest colleagues in the redwood fight, Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney. On May 24, 1990, the Earth First! activists were traveling in Oakland, California, when a pipe bomb detonated directly under Bari’s seat. The attack severely injured Bari and left Cherney with a scratched cornea and a blown eardrum. The FBI immediately took over the case and directed the Oakland Police to arrest Bari and Cherney for “knowingly carrying their own bomb.” Still, the Alameda County District Attorney refused to file charges in the case, citing a lack of evidence.
To this day neither the FBI nor Oakland Police has ever conducted a genuine probe of the bombing, choosing instead to smear Bari and Cherney in the press. A subsequent investigation and successful lawsuit filed by the activists against the police agencies not only uncovered official malfeasance in the case—the “framing” of the activists and the violation of their civil rights—but would leave little doubt in the minds of many, including one of the country’s most celebrated civil rights attorneys, that the FBI had been directly involved in the bombing itself.
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My path to Earth First! began in 1985, when I worked as a newspaper reporter who happened to cover timber politics. By late in 1986 I’d quit my job, moved from my native Sonoma County 200 miles north to Humboldt County, and camped for weeks at a time 150 feet into the redwood canopy to prevent a Houston corporation, Maxxam, from clear-cutting the last virgin redwoods still standing outside of parks. My immersion was so total that on April 24, 1990, I had been arrested, alongside a dozen other activists, for attempting to hang a banner 250 feet over the roadway of the Golden Gate Bridge. It was my sixth arrest in three years for non-violent civil disobedience. Exactly one month later, the pipe bomb exploded under Judi Bari’s driver’s seat.
Soon after the bridge action, a producer from a San Francisco television station invited me to attend one of the weekly roundtables hosted by a group of Bay Area TV and radio journalists. She said that each week they discussed current issues. Would I like to address their meeting on May 24 and provide input on what, perhaps, they should cover? I prepared a short discourse on efforts by a Houston corporation, Maxxam, to liquidate the last virgin redwood groves still standing outside of parks. In late 1985 Maxxam had partnered with Michael Milken and Drexel Burnham Lambert, among other future financial felons, to float nearly $800 million in high yield “junk bonds” to force a takeover of the 117-year-old Pacific Lumber Company. At the time Pacific Lumber owned the very last ancient redwood groves still standing outside of parks. It was a pitched battle already well covered by Bay Area and press outlets across the country.
I also asked the reporters to pay greater attention to “the ongoing and often illegal harassment, incarceration, and violence wielded by the state, in partnership with private companies, against activists who are exercising their constitutionally protected rights of free speech such as demonstrations and direct action.” By then redwood activists in California’s Humboldt and Mendocino counties had suffered several assaults and countless death threats, all delivered under a shield of impunity granted by officials and police agencies in those counties. We were on our own. I wanted the Bay Area media to understand that, from where I sat, something terrible was about to happen.
After the meeting I returned from the Bay Area to my parents’ quiet home in western Sonoma County. A note from my mother said that a friend had called. “Darryl and Judi in car accident,” said the note. When I talked with my friend her voice broke. She told me there had been no accident. “It was a bomb,” she said.
Near Death
The pipe bomb exploded directly under Judi Bari’s driver’s seat just before noon on Thursday, May 24, 1990. The sophisticated antipersonnel device was wrapped in finishing nails, for shrapnel, and detonated while Bari was driving along Park Boulevard, near Oakland High School, in the East Bay Area. When Bari hit the brakes a ball bearing broke out of a small slot and rolled into a groove where it connected two points and ignited the bomb. The explosion blew a wide hole through the floorboard beneath Bari’s seat and blasted the roof of the Subaru wagon into a dome. Nails from the bomb entered the seat back but miraculously missed Bari. Also miraculously, the gas-oil mixture included with the bomb did not ignite. Still, the seat spring impaled Bari’s butt, and her pelvis and coccyx were shattered. Nerve damage was severe, and surgeons initially told Bari she would never walk again.
When the bomb exploded, Bari and Cherney were headed to Santa Cruz to perform a benefit concert in support of Redwood Summer, a planned three-month suite of demonstrations and occupations designed to draw thousands of protesters to the northern redwoods. Redwood Summer, along with a looming ballot initiative that threatened to ban clear-cutting in all of California, had set the timber industry on edge. Violence was in the air.
The bomb was meant to kill Bari. And it would have, except the full force of the blast shot downward instead of up. Had it worked perfectly, Bari would have been blown to pieces, and both she and Darryl would have been immolated. Nonetheless, within hours after the bombing Oakland Police, operating on orders from the FBI, placed both activists under arrest for “transporting an explosive device.” The truth was something far grimmer.
Just after the bombing, as Bari was being wheeled into surgery, an Oakland Police officer asked Bari, “Who did this to you?”
“Timber,” said Bari.
The following year, when a reporter asked Bari what she wanted the FBI to do about the bombing, she said, “Find the bomber and fire him.”
The activists and their attorneys would eventually come to believe that both answers were correct, a view widely shared in U.S. environmental and activist communities. Revered environmentalist David Brower, former executive director of the Sierra Club, said of the bombing, “We’ve seen, in the operation of our own government, all sorts of acts that make it almost impossible to believe our government. As they can fund death squads in El Salvador, they can fund death squads in the United States.”
The first FBI agent to show up at the bomb scene was Special Agent Timothy McKinley. He’d arrived less than twenty minutes after the bomb detonated. Later, in a report, McKinley wrote that the next FBI officer on the scene had told him, “Judy Beri [sic] and Darryl Cherney are the subjects of an FBI investigation in the terrorist field.” This agent was Frank Doyle, a bomb expert with the FBI. Later court testimony revealed that exactly one month before the Oakland bombing—on the same day that we were trying to banner the Golden Gate Bridge—Doyle “had run what he called ‘bomb school’ anti-terrorism courses on Louisiana-Pacific land” in Humboldt County, reported The Los Angeles Times. At the time, Louisiana-Pacific was one of the world’s largest timber companies. In the United States, the company faced no louder nor more effective foe than Judi Bari. Bari didn’t just lead demonstrations against the firm’s liquidation logging of 300,000 acres of second-growth redwood in Mendocino County. She also organized labor. Judi Bari was a double threat.
Doyle arrived on scene shortly after McKinley and immediately took charge. Later he told the court he just happened to be “driving around the East Bay” in his Suburban. Special Agent John Conway showed up next, followed by a dozen other agents from what the FBI called its Terrorist Squad. Later Bari quipped that the FBI had arrived so quickly, it was as if agents had been “standing around the corner with their fingers in their ears.”
During a briefing on the evening of the bombing, FBI agent John Reikes told Oakland Police officers that he was “in charge of the FBI terrorist investigation unit and that these people [Bari and Cherney] in fact qualified as terrorists, and that there was an FBI investigation going on other incidents where these individuals were suspects,” Oakland Police sergeant Michael Sitterud later declared in a sworn deposition. At the time of the bombing, Reikes was in a meeting with Soviet security agents to formulate a safety plan for an upcoming visit to the U.S. by Mikhail Gorbachev, then the president of an unraveling Soviet Union. Yet, when the call came, Reikes left the important meeting. At the bomb site, he told the assembled cops and G-men that Bari and Cherney had been headed to Santa Cruz County to bomb the Moss Landing power plant and that the pair were “known terrorists.” In court, both statements would be revealed as false.
The FBI moved with remarkable speed to link Bari and Cherney with the bomb. Later the activists’ lawyer, famed civil rights attorney Dennis Cunningham, said, “They cooked [an affidavit] up and presented it to a judge at 2:00 in the morning, got a search warrant, searched the homes of Darryl and Judi overnight. The next day, the news was there. It was all on the news. They took several of [Judi and Darryl’s] friends into custody, and then they went ahead with this case.”
FBI agents traveled by helicopter two hundred miles to Bari’s and Cherney’s homes. The FBI didn’t just search Bari’s house; they tore it apart and terrorized her young children, who were there with Bari’s ex-husband. They confiscated hundreds of common household items—a red marker, duct tape, Elmer’s glue—that they said were bomb-making materials. Agents ripped apart windowsills in search of nails, which they would later claim matched those that were strapped to the bomb. It was a transparent fabrication, but from coast to coast the press covered the “discovery” as fact. Even after the FBI’s own top crime lab analyst, David R. Williams, based in Washington, D.C., examined the nails and determined that they were nowhere near a match—nor could they possibly be, since nails are produced in batches of many millions—the FBI insisted that indeed they were. In his affidavit, Sitterud, the Oakland Police sergeant, even reported that Williams had told him that the “‘bomb fragmentation nails’ and the two identical nails from the box in Ms. Bari’s residence were manufactured by the same machine within a batch of two hundred to one thousand nails.” In a later deposition, Williams testified that he had said no such thing.
Blaming the Victim
The pipe bomb had clearly been placed under Bari’s seat, where police and paramedics found a gaping two-foot-by-four-foot hole. Later a paramedic would testify that he had actually stood in the hole under the driver’s seat to extract Bari from the car. Yet, within an hour of the bombing and forever afterward, the FBI and the Oakland Police would insist that the bomb had been on the floor of the backseat, no matter that the backseat was virtually undamaged. Therefore, they said, Judi and Darryl must have seen the device and were “knowingly carrying their own bomb.”
Yet Bari’s legal team would eventually obtain photos of the bombed-out car taken by Michelle Gribi of the Oakland Police, who was the first police officer on scene. In her report, Gribi writes that she “took photos showing the damage under the driver’s seat.” The photos clearly show a gaping hole directly under the driver’s seat and an intact backseat.
“They released to us these incredible photos that absolutely, without a doubt, show that the FBI and the Oakland Police lied and they knew they were lying,” Bari said at the time. “Any idiot would have known that the bomb was under the front seat and meant to kill… My observation of these photos is that the evidence was unambiguous, and so the arrest, based on the claim that they thought the bomb was in the backseat, must have been deliberate rather than a mistake.”
Falsified Evidence
In 1999, investigative reporter Nicholas Wilson published a retrospective article on the bombing of Judi Bari in the Albion Monitor, based in Mendocino County. Wilson was one of the few reporters to follow the bombing story in real time and throughout the 1990s. By 1999 Wilson had access to troves of material made public through Bari’s and Cherney’s lawsuit.
Wilson wrote, “There is evidence… from the FBI’s own files, that agents falsified evidence against Bari and Cherney, suppressed exonerating evidence, and conspired with Oakland [Police] to try to frame them…There is…good reason to believe the FBI was actively (or passively) involved in the bombing.”
Wilson continued, “Within an hour of the Oakland explosion, none other than Special Agent Doyle, the bomb school instructor, was taking charge of the bomb scene investigation. Since he was the FBI’s top Bay Area bomb expert, the other FBI and Oakland bomb investigators first at the scene, some of whom had been his students, deferred to his assertions about the evidence.
“It was Doyle who allegedly overruled the Oakland sergeant on the scene who said the bomb was under the driver’s seat and that he could see the pavement under the car through the hole in the seat. It was Doyle who falsely said the bomb was on the floor behind the driver’s seat where it would have been easily seen. It was also Doyle who falsely claimed that two bags of nails found in the back of Judi’s car matched nails taped to the bomb for shrapnel effect, when in fact they were not even the same type, and were clearly different to the naked eye.
“Other officers on the scene testified that Doyle argued with them, and quoted him saying, “I’ve been looking at bomb scenes for 20 years, and I’m looking at this one, and I’m telling you you can rely on it. This bomb was visible to the people who loaded the back seat of this car.”
“Was it an honest mistake? Not likely, the judge ruled in denying Doyle immunity from the lawsuit. Dennis Cunningham argued in a court brief, ‘In sum, there was no way such an experienced bomb technician as Frank Doyle… or the other investigators—or Ray Charles or Stevie Wonder—would not have known that the bomb was under the seat when it blew up.’”
Cunningham went on to argue that “the investigation that [the FBI] conducted was in fact really a sham. There was not a serious or good faith attempt to solve the bombing either… And within the cover of that… they did a lot of work investigating Earth First.”
No matter the evidence, FBI and Oakland Police fed state and national media with streams of fabrications to further discredit Earth First! and convict Bari and Cherney in the press. In 1990 the FBI’s media outreach about the bombing was so regular and ubiquitous that in July, when Earth First! activist Mickey Dulas arrived in New York to appear on the Donahue daytime TV show, her cab driver, learning that she was there to represent Bari and Cherney, said, “You mean the people who bombed themselves?”
On July 17, 1990, Alameda County assistant district attorney Chris Carpenter announced that his office would not prosecute Bari and Cherney due to lack of evidence. By then, most people in possession of even a cursory understanding of American politics—and everyone who knew Bari and Cherney—understood that the case against the pair had been made up.
“The D.A. didn’t want to go down with the ship that the FBI and the Oakland Police were sinking in,” Cherney told the press after the district attorney’s announcement. He added, “There’s little joy in vindication when there’s still a mad bomber on the loose.”
“I don’t intend to be run out of town,” said Bari. “I don’t intend to shut up.” Now, she said, “We’re going to sue their asses.”
Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney filed their lawsuit against the FBI on Tuesday, May 21, 1991. Three days later, on the first anniversary of the bombing, Bari addressed two hundred supporters gathered outside the federal building in San Francisco. In her trenchant fashion, Bari laid out the basis of her suit.
“I was targeted for assassination by the timber corporations, backed by the full power of the police state,” said Bari. “No serious investigation has taken place. I’ve been blamed for the crime like a rape victim.”
Disrupt and Destroy
In addition to highlighting the FBI’s history of repression, the Bari-Cherney lawsuit would expose the Oakland Police Department’s long collaboration with the FBI to disrupt and destroy political movements. In a deposition, Kevin Griswold, the “intelligence division” chief of the Oakland Police Department, admitted that his office had monitored Earth First! activities since 1984, including through the efforts of at least one informant who had infiltrated West Coast Earth First! groups. He noted that his department kept files on more than three hundred political groups and individuals throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.
In a 1997 brief, Dennis Cunningham told the court, “What can be found… is overwhelming evidence that the FBI engaged in a plot to ‘neutralize’ Earth First! by fomenting the arrest of Judi and Darryl, after they were bombed, by willing co-conspirators in the Oakland Police Department. Both groups lied about the evidence in order to smear Judi and Darryl in the headlines, then lied again and again to keep the sensational case going, when it was clear there was no evidence to connect the two to the bombing in any way. And they’re lying now to cover-up the lies they told in 1990 & 1991… [T]he major lying and political foul play by the FBI which occurred in this case qualify it as a major scandal in its own right. A Special Prosecutor should be appointed to look into the lying and falsifying that has occurred, and is still going on.”
There would be no such special prosecutor. But after 11 years and many attempts by the FBI to quash the suit, the case would go to court. Plaintiffs’ attorneys in the suit—Dennis Cunningham, Tony Serra, William Simpich, and Robert Bloom, joined by William Goodman and Michael Deutsch at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, with important organizational assistance from Judi’s friend Alicia Bales—emphasized that the bombing of Bari and Cherney was not an isolated case but a symptom and manifestation of an internal U.S. government program of repression that had existed throughout the twentieth century.
“As plaintiffs have constantly tried to get the Court to see, and accept, the gravamen of their case is that defendants’ plot against them, the unconscionable and illegal acts and omissions by defendants, and the blatant lies told and now to be told again in furtherance of it, was born of the unholy, anti-constitutional mission of political repression set for the FBI by J. Edgar Hoover, maintained by his successors, and carried on by various chains of command and legions of field agents throughout its history,” the attorneys wrote on page two of the Bari trial brief, filed on April 8, 2002. “The essence of the conspirators’ secret efforts to smear Earth First!, and ‘otherwise neutralize’ plaintiffs and Redwood Summer, was to manipulate the investigation of the Oakland bombing in such a way as to generate sensational news stories, proclaiming that these environmental activists had been engaged in an effort to carry out a terrorist attack of some sort.”
Leading up to the trial, plaintiffs’ attorneys conducted more than 50 depositions of FBI agents, Oakland Police officers, activists, and others. The FBI and Oakland Police conducted no depositions, an astonishing dereliction that mirrored the agency’s refusal, to this day, to carry out an actual investigation. During the two-month trial, which ran from April into June 2002, plaintiffs called 41 witnesses. The defendants called none.
The FBI went so far as to attempt to disallow Judi Bari from providing her own deposition in her own case. In 1996 Bari was diagnosed with breast cancer, which had spread to her liver. Rather than undergo chemotherapy treatments that were unlikely to work and would further debilitate her and disallow pursuit of the lawsuit, Bari set herself to organizing into a set of binders a complete record of more than fourteen thousand pages of documents and three hundred photos for the legal team to utilize in her absence. The team would also need Bari’s testimony, which she was unlikely to be alive to provide. When Bari’s attorneys asked that she be allowed to give her deposition, Justice Department attorney Joseph Sher managed to block the action for more than a month, accusing Bari of “faking cancer.”
The court finally allowed Bari to give her deposition on January 30 and 31, 1997, providing testimony while reclining on a couch. Attorneys for the FBI and Oakland Police asked not a single question. Judi Bari died on March 2, 1997. Her estate and Darryl Cherney continued to prosecute their case, which would expose a “sham investigation, bogus investigation of the bombing,” which was but one element of “an intelligence gathering operation… political spying operation about the Earth First movement and about the environmental movement in Northern California,” Dennis Cunningham said in his opening remarks during Bari and Cherney’s trial against the FBI and Oakland Police, in 2002. “The mechanism of this was in classic terms a frame-up, a frame-up that was concocted by the FBI and Oakland Police.”
Cunningham said that, whereas the Oakland Police were willing participants in a fabricated effort to harm Bari and Cherney, “Particulars of the frame-up were pretty much all—not all, but mostly generated by the FBI agents.” He continued, “The FBI had a major role. They took possession of all the evidence. They were really the driving force behind the case [which was] instigated by the FBI because of a preexisting desire to harm Earth First in the First Amendment context, harm this group to disrupt its work . . . to smear the group in the public mind, and this was a golden opportunity for that and the people in the car who had been bombed to be represented as bombers. And the headlines could reflect that fact, and the world would be told that Earth First had bombers in it and these environmentalists were dangerous and had to be feared. . . . [W]hen the FBI came on the scene . . . the FBI agents there spoke to the [Oakland] police officers . . . Sergeant [Michael] Sitterud in particular, [and said] that the FBI was familiar with these people already as terrorist suspects, as people who in his words, the kind of people who would be carrying a bomb. And that was told to the police officers within the first hour after the explosion. But you’ll see that the Oakland officers in no sense were duped. … [T]hey were willing coparticipants. They jumped right in. They thought it was a fine idea, and they made their own contributions. And they took on the burden of making the arrests themselves, and putting the case into their system instead of the federal system so that they were operating at the front for the case, for the false case, and the FBI was in the background.”
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On June 11, 2002, the federal jury agreed. They found six of the seven FBI and Oakland Police defendants liable for violating Bari’s and Cherney’s First Amendment right of free speech and for violating the Fourth Amendment through false arrest and illegal search and seizure. A predominantly conservative jury awarded Bari’s estate and Darryl Cherney $4.4 million in compensatory and punitive damages. Darryl Cherney told the press, “The American public needs to understand that the FBI can’t be trusted. Ten jurors got a good, hard look at the FBI, and they didn’t like what they saw.”
In 2017, the Environmental Protection Information Center posthumously honored Judi Bari with its annual Sempervirens Lifetime Achievement Award. Several people spoke in her honor, sang environmental songs, and gathered with three hundred revelers at the Mateel Community Center in Redway, Southern Humboldt County. One of the speakers was Dennis Cunningham.
Cunningham was well known for representing prisoners who had been involved in the 1971 riot at Attica State Prison in New York, which left 43 people dead after guards opened fire on prisoners and hostages alike. He was also a leading attorney in the lawsuit that exposed the FBI–Chicago Police conspiracy to assassinate Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, a case Cunningham pursued for 13 years. In 1983, plaintiffs won a $1.8 million settlement in the suit, the largest damage result against the FBI until the Bari case. Cunningham and attorney Mark Harris also represented plaintiffs in the pepper spray lawsuit against the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Department. He arrived at the Mateel a folk hero.
On stage, Cunningham honored Judi Bari’s acumen and courage. But he also said something that, because it came from the lead attorney in the case, surprised me. Cunningham said, without equivocation, that he believed the FBI must have been directly involved in planting the pipe bomb in Bari’s car. Cunningham told an attentive crowd, “Judi was someone, as events proved, who was dangerous to the state. She was like some of the Panthers and some of the other organizers who were really special targets of the FBI in the sixties and seventies that had something that they could recognize was powerful, that she could generate herself out of her own personality, her own experience, her own understanding of the politics that she was involved in. It was only because she holds that kind of danger that they took the risk of striking at her the way they did. I don’t think after the case that we were ever in too much doubt that they [the FBI] were in on the bombing before it happened. It was the only way to explain how they dealt with it and how they managed to persuade the Oakland cops to arrest her immediately, and how they were able then to put out all the poison in the press and to generate this sense that Earth First! was a closet terrorist group, and it worked for them. It worked for the people that they were working with, which was timber, and it worked in the sense of defeating the Forests Forever initiative, which clearly was gonna win and then clearly lost because it was possible for the timber industry to associate it with the bombing. It took a lot of years—I mean, that bombing happened in 1990, the trial took place in 2002. And then, only then, was it possible to establish that that was all a lie, that the whole case against Judi and Darryl was a lie. Judi and Darryl worked all those years and kept that movement alive to fight back against that terrific and horrendous strike at her, at them, that the bombing represented.”
Excerpted from The Ghost Forest: Racists, Radicals, and Real Estate in the California Redwoods by Greg King. Copyright © 2023. Available from PublicAffairs, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
I spent the summer of 1990 “hiding out” at my parents’ modest home in western Sonoma County. At twenty-nine years old I’d landed back at the family abode after my two closest colleagues had been violently attacked and almost killed for attempting to protect redwood forests. After I’d lived through five years of threats and assaults for the crime of trying to save the very last ancient redwood groves still standing outside of parks—a disturbing tide of attrition now horribly punctuated by an assassination attempt—I had little choice but to take up residence in my old bedroom, surrounded by the safety of family.
On May 24, Earth First! activist Judi Bari was piloting her Subaru station wagon through Oakland, California, when a pipe bomb exploded under her driver’s seat. When Judi hit the brakes a ball bearing broke out of a small slot and rolled into a groove where it connected two points and ignited the sophisticated bomb. The explosion blew a wide hole through the floorboard beneath Judi’s seat and blasted the roof of the Subaru wagon into a dome. Nails from the bomb entered the seat back but miraculously missed Judi. Bari was severely injured. Her passenger, fellow Earth First! activist Darryl Cherney, suffered a scratched cornea and a blown eardrum.
As if the bombing wasn’t bad enough, the FBI and Oakland Police immediately arrested Bari and Cherney for “transporting their own bomb.” The arrest of the non-violent activists set off a chain of events that would once again demonstrate the FBI’s complicity in violence aimed US activists for exercising their constitutionally protected right of protest. The Alameda County district attorney refused to file charges against the pair, citing a lack of evidence, as it was clear that Bari and Cherney had been set up.
Three months after the bombing Bari ran an op-ed in the New York Times. She called the attack an act of “unspeakable terrorism,” and she warned, “If [the FBI] can succeed in framing and discrediting us, then domestic dissent is not safe from Government sabotage. The right to advocate social change without fear of harassment is the cornerstone of a free society.”
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To this day neither the FBI nor Oakland Police has ever conducted a genuine probe of the bombing, choosing instead to smear Bari and Cherney in the press. A subsequent investigation and successful lawsuit filed by the activists against the police agencies not only uncovered official malfeasance in the case—the “framing” of the activists and the violation of their civil rights—but would leave little doubt in the minds of many, including one of the country’s most celebrated civil rights attorneys, that the FBI had been directly involved in the bombing itself.
Predictable Violence
State violence against environmental activists—whether perpetrated directly or simply enabled—is nothing new in the United States. As a veteran of the “redwood wars” of Northern California during the 1980s and 1990s, I was assaulted several times and received dozens of death threats, all of which garnered no more than a shrug from police officials. During the years that we fought for environmental justice, we would also witness in horror as police and sheriff’s officers would actually instigate, rather than investigate, violence against activists.
No matter the countless assaults and death threats against us, I don’t recall a single instance of a police officer making an arrest or even investigating. When a logger assaulted a woman in front of thirty witnesses, breaking her nose, then threatened those thirty witnesses by firing a shotgun in the air, Mendocino County sheriff’s deputies refused to arrest the assailant or even take statements from the victims. In 1998, when redwood activist David “Gypsy” Chain was crushed to death by a falling tree—cut by an angry timber worker who had previously threatened to kill him—the logger who felled the tree was not arrested nor did the Humboldt County District Attorney even investigate the incident. When the owner of a log trucking company struck a demonstrator in the face as she was protesting the company’s hauling of old-growth redwood logs—and did so directly in front of a Humboldt County Sheriff’s officer who witnessed the attack from just two feet away—the truck owner was not arrested nor cited, nor even admonished. When private tree climbers, employed by timber companies but deputized by Humboldt County sheriffs, violently and dangerously extracted tree sitters from 100 feet above the ground, law enforcement lauded the action. When Humboldt County Sheriff’s officers used cotton swabs to rub pepper spray directly into the eyes of environmental protestors, the cops were neither reprimanded nor suspended. Amnesty International called the pepper spray attack “torture.” The activists won a lawsuit.
Assassination
The assault that most brazenly exposed police complicity in violence against environmental activists was the 1990 assassination attempt against my two closest colleagues in the redwood fight, Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney. On May 24, 1990, the Earth First! activists were traveling in Oakland, California, when a pipe bomb detonated directly under Bari’s seat. The attack severely injured Bari and left Cherney with a scratched cornea and a blown eardrum. The FBI immediately took over the case and directed the Oakland Police to arrest Bari and Cherney for “knowingly carrying their own bomb.” Still, the Alameda County District Attorney refused to file charges in the case, citing a lack of evidence.
To this day neither the FBI nor Oakland Police has ever conducted a genuine probe of the bombing, choosing instead to smear Bari and Cherney in the press. A subsequent investigation and successful lawsuit filed by the activists against the police agencies not only uncovered official malfeasance in the case—the “framing” of the activists and the violation of their civil rights—but would leave little doubt in the minds of many, including one of the country’s most celebrated civil rights attorneys, that the FBI had been directly involved in the bombing itself.
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My path to Earth First! began in 1985, when I worked as a newspaper reporter who happened to cover timber politics. By late in 1986 I’d quit my job, moved from my native Sonoma County 200 miles north to Humboldt County, and camped for weeks at a time 150 feet into the redwood canopy to prevent a Houston corporation, Maxxam, from clear-cutting the last virgin redwoods still standing outside of parks. My immersion was so total that on April 24, 1990, I had been arrested, alongside a dozen other activists, for attempting to hang a banner 250 feet over the roadway of the Golden Gate Bridge. It was my sixth arrest in three years for non-violent civil disobedience. Exactly one month later, the pipe bomb exploded under Judi Bari’s driver’s seat.
Soon after the bridge action, a producer from a San Francisco television station invited me to attend one of the weekly roundtables hosted by a group of Bay Area TV and radio journalists. She said that each week they discussed current issues. Would I like to address their meeting on May 24 and provide input on what, perhaps, they should cover? I prepared a short discourse on efforts by a Houston corporation, Maxxam, to liquidate the last virgin redwood groves still standing outside of parks. In late 1985 Maxxam had partnered with Michael Milken and Drexel Burnham Lambert, among other future financial felons, to float nearly $800 million in high yield “junk bonds” to force a takeover of the 117-year-old Pacific Lumber Company. At the time Pacific Lumber owned the very last ancient redwood groves still standing outside of parks. It was a pitched battle already well covered by Bay Area and press outlets across the country.
I also asked the reporters to pay greater attention to “the ongoing and often illegal harassment, incarceration, and violence wielded by the state, in partnership with private companies, against activists who are exercising their constitutionally protected rights of free speech such as demonstrations and direct action.” By then redwood activists in California’s Humboldt and Mendocino counties had suffered several assaults and countless death threats, all delivered under a shield of impunity granted by officials and police agencies in those counties. We were on our own. I wanted the Bay Area media to understand that, from where I sat, something terrible was about to happen.
After the meeting I returned from the Bay Area to my parents’ quiet home in western Sonoma County. A note from my mother said that a friend had called. “Darryl and Judi in car accident,” said the note. When I talked with my friend her voice broke. She told me there had been no accident. “It was a bomb,” she said.
Near Death
The pipe bomb exploded directly under Judi Bari’s driver’s seat just before noon on Thursday, May 24, 1990. The sophisticated antipersonnel device was wrapped in finishing nails, for shrapnel, and detonated while Bari was driving along Park Boulevard, near Oakland High School, in the East Bay Area. When Bari hit the brakes a ball bearing broke out of a small slot and rolled into a groove where it connected two points and ignited the bomb. The explosion blew a wide hole through the floorboard beneath Bari’s seat and blasted the roof of the Subaru wagon into a dome. Nails from the bomb entered the seat back but miraculously missed Bari. Also miraculously, the gas-oil mixture included with the bomb did not ignite. Still, the seat spring impaled Bari’s butt, and her pelvis and coccyx were shattered. Nerve damage was severe, and surgeons initially told Bari she would never walk again.
When the bomb exploded, Bari and Cherney were headed to Santa Cruz to perform a benefit concert in support of Redwood Summer, a planned three-month suite of demonstrations and occupations designed to draw thousands of protesters to the northern redwoods. Redwood Summer, along with a looming ballot initiative that threatened to ban clear-cutting in all of California, had set the timber industry on edge. Violence was in the air.
The bomb was meant to kill Bari. And it would have, except the full force of the blast shot downward instead of up. Had it worked perfectly, Bari would have been blown to pieces, and both she and Darryl would have been immolated. Nonetheless, within hours after the bombing Oakland Police, operating on orders from the FBI, placed both activists under arrest for “transporting an explosive device.” The truth was something far grimmer.
Just after the bombing, as Bari was being wheeled into surgery, an Oakland Police officer asked Bari, “Who did this to you?”
“Timber,” said Bari.
The following year, when a reporter asked Bari what she wanted the FBI to do about the bombing, she said, “Find the bomber and fire him.”
The activists and their attorneys would eventually come to believe that both answers were correct, a view widely shared in U.S. environmental and activist communities. Revered environmentalist David Brower, former executive director of the Sierra Club, said of the bombing, “We’ve seen, in the operation of our own government, all sorts of acts that make it almost impossible to believe our government. As they can fund death squads in El Salvador, they can fund death squads in the United States.”
The first FBI agent to show up at the bomb scene was Special Agent Timothy McKinley. He’d arrived less than twenty minutes after the bomb detonated. Later, in a report, McKinley wrote that the next FBI officer on the scene had told him, “Judy Beri [sic] and Darryl Cherney are the subjects of an FBI investigation in the terrorist field.” This agent was Frank Doyle, a bomb expert with the FBI. Later court testimony revealed that exactly one month before the Oakland bombing—on the same day that we were trying to banner the Golden Gate Bridge—Doyle “had run what he called ‘bomb school’ anti-terrorism courses on Louisiana-Pacific land” in Humboldt County, reported The Los Angeles Times. At the time, Louisiana-Pacific was one of the world’s largest timber companies. In the United States, the company faced no louder nor more effective foe than Judi Bari. Bari didn’t just lead demonstrations against the firm’s liquidation logging of 300,000 acres of second-growth redwood in Mendocino County. She also organized labor. Judi Bari was a double threat.
Doyle arrived on scene shortly after McKinley and immediately took charge. Later he told the court he just happened to be “driving around the East Bay” in his Suburban. Special Agent John Conway showed up next, followed by a dozen other agents from what the FBI called its Terrorist Squad. Later Bari quipped that the FBI had arrived so quickly, it was as if agents had been “standing around the corner with their fingers in their ears.”
During a briefing on the evening of the bombing, FBI agent John Reikes told Oakland Police officers that he was “in charge of the FBI terrorist investigation unit and that these people [Bari and Cherney] in fact qualified as terrorists, and that there was an FBI investigation going on other incidents where these individuals were suspects,” Oakland Police sergeant Michael Sitterud later declared in a sworn deposition. At the time of the bombing, Reikes was in a meeting with Soviet security agents to formulate a safety plan for an upcoming visit to the U.S. by Mikhail Gorbachev, then the president of an unraveling Soviet Union. Yet, when the call came, Reikes left the important meeting. At the bomb site, he told the assembled cops and G-men that Bari and Cherney had been headed to Santa Cruz County to bomb the Moss Landing power plant and that the pair were “known terrorists.” In court, both statements would be revealed as false.
The FBI moved with remarkable speed to link Bari and Cherney with the bomb. Later the activists’ lawyer, famed civil rights attorney Dennis Cunningham, said, “They cooked [an affidavit] up and presented it to a judge at 2:00 in the morning, got a search warrant, searched the homes of Darryl and Judi overnight. The next day, the news was there. It was all on the news. They took several of [Judi and Darryl’s] friends into custody, and then they went ahead with this case.”
FBI agents traveled by helicopter two hundred miles to Bari’s and Cherney’s homes. The FBI didn’t just search Bari’s house; they tore it apart and terrorized her young children, who were there with Bari’s ex-husband. They confiscated hundreds of common household items—a red marker, duct tape, Elmer’s glue—that they said were bomb-making materials. Agents ripped apart windowsills in search of nails, which they would later claim matched those that were strapped to the bomb. It was a transparent fabrication, but from coast to coast the press covered the “discovery” as fact. Even after the FBI’s own top crime lab analyst, David R. Williams, based in Washington, D.C., examined the nails and determined that they were nowhere near a match—nor could they possibly be, since nails are produced in batches of many millions—the FBI insisted that indeed they were. In his affidavit, Sitterud, the Oakland Police sergeant, even reported that Williams had told him that the “‘bomb fragmentation nails’ and the two identical nails from the box in Ms. Bari’s residence were manufactured by the same machine within a batch of two hundred to one thousand nails.” In a later deposition, Williams testified that he had said no such thing.
Blaming the Victim
The pipe bomb had clearly been placed under Bari’s seat, where police and paramedics found a gaping two-foot-by-four-foot hole. Later a paramedic would testify that he had actually stood in the hole under the driver’s seat to extract Bari from the car. Yet, within an hour of the bombing and forever afterward, the FBI and the Oakland Police would insist that the bomb had been on the floor of the backseat, no matter that the backseat was virtually undamaged. Therefore, they said, Judi and Darryl must have seen the device and were “knowingly carrying their own bomb.”
Yet Bari’s legal team would eventually obtain photos of the bombed-out car taken by Michelle Gribi of the Oakland Police, who was the first police officer on scene. In her report, Gribi writes that she “took photos showing the damage under the driver’s seat.” The photos clearly show a gaping hole directly under the driver’s seat and an intact backseat.
“They released to us these incredible photos that absolutely, without a doubt, show that the FBI and the Oakland Police lied and they knew they were lying,” Bari said at the time. “Any idiot would have known that the bomb was under the front seat and meant to kill… My observation of these photos is that the evidence was unambiguous, and so the arrest, based on the claim that they thought the bomb was in the backseat, must have been deliberate rather than a mistake.”
Falsified Evidence
In 1999, investigative reporter Nicholas Wilson published a retrospective article on the bombing of Judi Bari in the Albion Monitor, based in Mendocino County. Wilson was one of the few reporters to follow the bombing story in real time and throughout the 1990s. By 1999 Wilson had access to troves of material made public through Bari’s and Cherney’s lawsuit.
Wilson wrote, “There is evidence… from the FBI’s own files, that agents falsified evidence against Bari and Cherney, suppressed exonerating evidence, and conspired with Oakland [Police] to try to frame them…There is…good reason to believe the FBI was actively (or passively) involved in the bombing.”
Wilson continued, “Within an hour of the Oakland explosion, none other than Special Agent Doyle, the bomb school instructor, was taking charge of the bomb scene investigation. Since he was the FBI’s top Bay Area bomb expert, the other FBI and Oakland bomb investigators first at the scene, some of whom had been his students, deferred to his assertions about the evidence.
“It was Doyle who allegedly overruled the Oakland sergeant on the scene who said the bomb was under the driver’s seat and that he could see the pavement under the car through the hole in the seat. It was Doyle who falsely said the bomb was on the floor behind the driver’s seat where it would have been easily seen. It was also Doyle who falsely claimed that two bags of nails found in the back of Judi’s car matched nails taped to the bomb for shrapnel effect, when in fact they were not even the same type, and were clearly different to the naked eye.
“Other officers on the scene testified that Doyle argued with them, and quoted him saying, “I’ve been looking at bomb scenes for 20 years, and I’m looking at this one, and I’m telling you you can rely on it. This bomb was visible to the people who loaded the back seat of this car.”
“Was it an honest mistake? Not likely, the judge ruled in denying Doyle immunity from the lawsuit. Dennis Cunningham argued in a court brief, ‘In sum, there was no way such an experienced bomb technician as Frank Doyle… or the other investigators—or Ray Charles or Stevie Wonder—would not have known that the bomb was under the seat when it blew up.’”
Cunningham went on to argue that “the investigation that [the FBI] conducted was in fact really a sham. There was not a serious or good faith attempt to solve the bombing either… And within the cover of that… they did a lot of work investigating Earth First.”
No matter the evidence, FBI and Oakland Police fed state and national media with streams of fabrications to further discredit Earth First! and convict Bari and Cherney in the press. In 1990 the FBI’s media outreach about the bombing was so regular and ubiquitous that in July, when Earth First! activist Mickey Dulas arrived in New York to appear on the Donahue daytime TV show, her cab driver, learning that she was there to represent Bari and Cherney, said, “You mean the people who bombed themselves?”
On July 17, 1990, Alameda County assistant district attorney Chris Carpenter announced that his office would not prosecute Bari and Cherney due to lack of evidence. By then, most people in possession of even a cursory understanding of American politics—and everyone who knew Bari and Cherney—understood that the case against the pair had been made up.
“The D.A. didn’t want to go down with the ship that the FBI and the Oakland Police were sinking in,” Cherney told the press after the district attorney’s announcement. He added, “There’s little joy in vindication when there’s still a mad bomber on the loose.”
“I don’t intend to be run out of town,” said Bari. “I don’t intend to shut up.” Now, she said, “We’re going to sue their asses.”
Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney filed their lawsuit against the FBI on Tuesday, May 21, 1991. Three days later, on the first anniversary of the bombing, Bari addressed two hundred supporters gathered outside the federal building in San Francisco. In her trenchant fashion, Bari laid out the basis of her suit.
“I was targeted for assassination by the timber corporations, backed by the full power of the police state,” said Bari. “No serious investigation has taken place. I’ve been blamed for the crime like a rape victim.”
Disrupt and Destroy
In addition to highlighting the FBI’s history of repression, the Bari-Cherney lawsuit would expose the Oakland Police Department’s long collaboration with the FBI to disrupt and destroy political movements. In a deposition, Kevin Griswold, the “intelligence division” chief of the Oakland Police Department, admitted that his office had monitored Earth First! activities since 1984, including through the efforts of at least one informant who had infiltrated West Coast Earth First! groups. He noted that his department kept files on more than three hundred political groups and individuals throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.
In a 1997 brief, Dennis Cunningham told the court, “What can be found… is overwhelming evidence that the FBI engaged in a plot to ‘neutralize’ Earth First! by fomenting the arrest of Judi and Darryl, after they were bombed, by willing co-conspirators in the Oakland Police Department. Both groups lied about the evidence in order to smear Judi and Darryl in the headlines, then lied again and again to keep the sensational case going, when it was clear there was no evidence to connect the two to the bombing in any way. And they’re lying now to cover-up the lies they told in 1990 & 1991… [T]he major lying and political foul play by the FBI which occurred in this case qualify it as a major scandal in its own right. A Special Prosecutor should be appointed to look into the lying and falsifying that has occurred, and is still going on.”
There would be no such special prosecutor. But after 11 years and many attempts by the FBI to quash the suit, the case would go to court. Plaintiffs’ attorneys in the suit—Dennis Cunningham, Tony Serra, William Simpich, and Robert Bloom, joined by William Goodman and Michael Deutsch at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, with important organizational assistance from Judi’s friend Alicia Bales—emphasized that the bombing of Bari and Cherney was not an isolated case but a symptom and manifestation of an internal U.S. government program of repression that had existed throughout the twentieth century.
“As plaintiffs have constantly tried to get the Court to see, and accept, the gravamen of their case is that defendants’ plot against them, the unconscionable and illegal acts and omissions by defendants, and the blatant lies told and now to be told again in furtherance of it, was born of the unholy, anti-constitutional mission of political repression set for the FBI by J. Edgar Hoover, maintained by his successors, and carried on by various chains of command and legions of field agents throughout its history,” the attorneys wrote on page two of the Bari trial brief, filed on April 8, 2002. “The essence of the conspirators’ secret efforts to smear Earth First!, and ‘otherwise neutralize’ plaintiffs and Redwood Summer, was to manipulate the investigation of the Oakland bombing in such a way as to generate sensational news stories, proclaiming that these environmental activists had been engaged in an effort to carry out a terrorist attack of some sort.”
Leading up to the trial, plaintiffs’ attorneys conducted more than 50 depositions of FBI agents, Oakland Police officers, activists, and others. The FBI and Oakland Police conducted no depositions, an astonishing dereliction that mirrored the agency’s refusal, to this day, to carry out an actual investigation. During the two-month trial, which ran from April into June 2002, plaintiffs called 41 witnesses. The defendants called none.
The FBI went so far as to attempt to disallow Judi Bari from providing her own deposition in her own case. In 1996 Bari was diagnosed with breast cancer, which had spread to her liver. Rather than undergo chemotherapy treatments that were unlikely to work and would further debilitate her and disallow pursuit of the lawsuit, Bari set herself to organizing into a set of binders a complete record of more than fourteen thousand pages of documents and three hundred photos for the legal team to utilize in her absence. The team would also need Bari’s testimony, which she was unlikely to be alive to provide. When Bari’s attorneys asked that she be allowed to give her deposition, Justice Department attorney Joseph Sher managed to block the action for more than a month, accusing Bari of “faking cancer.”
The court finally allowed Bari to give her deposition on January 30 and 31, 1997, providing testimony while reclining on a couch. Attorneys for the FBI and Oakland Police asked not a single question. Judi Bari died on March 2, 1997. Her estate and Darryl Cherney continued to prosecute their case, which would expose a “sham investigation, bogus investigation of the bombing,” which was but one element of “an intelligence gathering operation… political spying operation about the Earth First movement and about the environmental movement in Northern California,” Dennis Cunningham said in his opening remarks during Bari and Cherney’s trial against the FBI and Oakland Police, in 2002. “The mechanism of this was in classic terms a frame-up, a frame-up that was concocted by the FBI and Oakland Police.”
Cunningham said that, whereas the Oakland Police were willing participants in a fabricated effort to harm Bari and Cherney, “Particulars of the frame-up were pretty much all—not all, but mostly generated by the FBI agents.” He continued, “The FBI had a major role. They took possession of all the evidence. They were really the driving force behind the case [which was] instigated by the FBI because of a preexisting desire to harm Earth First in the First Amendment context, harm this group to disrupt its work . . . to smear the group in the public mind, and this was a golden opportunity for that and the people in the car who had been bombed to be represented as bombers. And the headlines could reflect that fact, and the world would be told that Earth First had bombers in it and these environmentalists were dangerous and had to be feared. . . . [W]hen the FBI came on the scene . . . the FBI agents there spoke to the [Oakland] police officers . . . Sergeant [Michael] Sitterud in particular, [and said] that the FBI was familiar with these people already as terrorist suspects, as people who in his words, the kind of people who would be carrying a bomb. And that was told to the police officers within the first hour after the explosion. But you’ll see that the Oakland officers in no sense were duped. … [T]hey were willing coparticipants. They jumped right in. They thought it was a fine idea, and they made their own contributions. And they took on the burden of making the arrests themselves, and putting the case into their system instead of the federal system so that they were operating at the front for the case, for the false case, and the FBI was in the background.”
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On June 11, 2002, the federal jury agreed. They found six of the seven FBI and Oakland Police defendants liable for violating Bari’s and Cherney’s First Amendment right of free speech and for violating the Fourth Amendment through false arrest and illegal search and seizure. A predominantly conservative jury awarded Bari’s estate and Darryl Cherney $4.4 million in compensatory and punitive damages. Darryl Cherney told the press, “The American public needs to understand that the FBI can’t be trusted. Ten jurors got a good, hard look at the FBI, and they didn’t like what they saw.”
In 2017, the Environmental Protection Information Center posthumously honored Judi Bari with its annual Sempervirens Lifetime Achievement Award. Several people spoke in her honor, sang environmental songs, and gathered with three hundred revelers at the Mateel Community Center in Redway, Southern Humboldt County. One of the speakers was Dennis Cunningham.
Cunningham was well known for representing prisoners who had been involved in the 1971 riot at Attica State Prison in New York, which left 43 people dead after guards opened fire on prisoners and hostages alike. He was also a leading attorney in the lawsuit that exposed the FBI–Chicago Police conspiracy to assassinate Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, a case Cunningham pursued for 13 years. In 1983, plaintiffs won a $1.8 million settlement in the suit, the largest damage result against the FBI until the Bari case. Cunningham and attorney Mark Harris also represented plaintiffs in the pepper spray lawsuit against the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Department. He arrived at the Mateel a folk hero.
On stage, Cunningham honored Judi Bari’s acumen and courage. But he also said something that, because it came from the lead attorney in the case, surprised me. Cunningham said, without equivocation, that he believed the FBI must have been directly involved in planting the pipe bomb in Bari’s car. Cunningham told an attentive crowd, “Judi was someone, as events proved, who was dangerous to the state. She was like some of the Panthers and some of the other organizers who were really special targets of the FBI in the sixties and seventies that had something that they could recognize was powerful, that she could generate herself out of her own personality, her own experience, her own understanding of the politics that she was involved in. It was only because she holds that kind of danger that they took the risk of striking at her the way they did. I don’t think after the case that we were ever in too much doubt that they [the FBI] were in on the bombing before it happened. It was the only way to explain how they dealt with it and how they managed to persuade the Oakland cops to arrest her immediately, and how they were able then to put out all the poison in the press and to generate this sense that Earth First! was a closet terrorist group, and it worked for them. It worked for the people that they were working with, which was timber, and it worked in the sense of defeating the Forests Forever initiative, which clearly was gonna win and then clearly lost because it was possible for the timber industry to associate it with the bombing. It took a lot of years—I mean, that bombing happened in 1990, the trial took place in 2002. And then, only then, was it possible to establish that that was all a lie, that the whole case against Judi and Darryl was a lie. Judi and Darryl worked all those years and kept that movement alive to fight back against that terrific and horrendous strike at her, at them, that the bombing represented.”
Excerpted from The Ghost Forest: Racists, Radicals, and Real Estate in the California Redwoods by Greg King. Copyright © 2023. Available from PublicAffairs, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
