For those of you just tuning in to this long-running whodunit, Bari and Cherney were driving through east Oakland in May 1990 when a bomb exploded in their car. The injured pair were prominent figures in the Earth First! movement, a loose-knit, nominally leaderless group of shit-disturbing environmentalists. Oakland cops – working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation – quickly arrested the duo. Cherney and Bari, the cops said, had accidentally blown themselves up while transporting their own bomb.
“We’re assuming the device was placed in the car by the occupants,” one Oakland detective told the San Francisco Examiner at the time.
The press pounced on the story. The Ex painted Earth First! as a band of deranged ecoterrorists. The New York Times ran a front-page piece on the incident. Then, a few months later, with Earth First!’s reputation in tatters, the charges were quietly dropped for lack of evidence.
The cops never busted the real bomber – a fact that’s tied amateur sleuths and paranoiacs from Arcata to the Golden Gate in Pynchonian knots for the past 12 years.
To Cherney and Bari it smelled like a classic COINTELPRO-type setup, the kind of thing J. Edgar Hoover did to the Black Panthers. They figured the feds and local cops had jumped at the chance to arrest them – and link them to terrorism in the media – even though the evidence was shaky at best. In 1991 the two Earth First!ers hit back, suing the FBI and the Oakland Police Department, charging the agencies with fabricating evidence, giving false testimony, and collaborating in a smear campaign.
Last month, after more than a decade of legal tussles – and five years after Bari died of cancer – Cherney and Darlene Comingore, the executor of Bari’s estate, finally got the suit in front of a jury.
It was a wild ride. Testimony in the courtroom of U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken lifted the lid on some amazingly suspicious – possibly criminal – behavior on the part of the FBI and the OPD.
First the agencies were forced to admit that information included in two key search warrants was bogus – the only real question was which agency had lied. Later testimony revealed that Oakland cops raided Bari’s house even after she and Cherney were exonerated by an FBI bomb expert. Then we learned about the mysterious disappearance of 57 FBI documents related to the case.
On top of the bungling or subterfuge – it’s tough to say which – the trial unearthed another fairly stunning fact: A shadowy OPD unit kept tabs on scores of local dissidents and shared that information with the feds. The G-men, for their part, compiled a database of some 600 people Bari and Cherney called on the phone.
And who said the Red Squads and COINTELPRO were a thing of the past?
