Judi Bari Tells All

by Judi Bari

Editor's note. The late Judi Bari, through her executor Darlene Commingore, left me the following letter with a strict instruction that it not be made public until five years after her death. Mrs. Bari-Sweeney died of liver cancer in 1997, cursing her former husband and her murderer, Mike Sweeney, to her last breath.

* * *

You're probably surprised, Bruce, to be hearing from me again, albeit from the other side, as some among the living call the place where I am now. We'd been good friends until you belatedly began asking all the wrong questions about the bomb that blew me up in Oakland in 1990. I had to blame the bombing on the FBI or Bill Staley or loggers, because if I told the truth about what had happened to me Mike (Sweeney) would have driven up to my Willits cabin in the woods off String Creek and finished me off, as he often threatened to do. Does anybody besides that pervert Nick Wilson seriously think I would have moved to String Creek where any old body could have literally driven up to my front door and shot me without even leaving his car? String Creek! Are you kidding? The nearest neighbor was a hundred yards away. When it rained you couldn't hear anything, and most of the people out there can't here anything anyway because they're stoned all the time.

If I didn't know who bombed me, if I thought somebody would try to kill me again I would have moved into the Willits Police Station, not deep into the woods at the end of a lonely dirt road. I moved to String Creek after I was bombed because I knew Mike had bombed me, not some Christian obsessive like Bill Staley, or some deranged logger, or the FBI. I knew my husband did it.

So why'd I let him get away with it? I mean, he abbreviated my life. I was in perfect health before the bomb, but seven years later I was gone at age 47. And I was a feminist, too. Kind of. I didn't like women much, but I never did meet a man I could trust.

I had no choice. If I'd told the cops the truth, Mike would have told the truth about me, and both of us would have gone off to jail for a long time. We would have lost our kids and the money and property we'd accumulated together and that he was trying to cheat me out of. Worse, I'd be nothing more than one more violent nut, one more mad dog who had to be permanently locked up.

You've got most of it right. We — Mike and I — knew we'd have a hard time keeping the truth from coming out. Too many people were already suspicious, but I had to tell someone and, unfortunately for both Mike and me that someone was Steve Talbot. Like you, he believed me totally that the bombing was a kind of mystery. Like you the only thing he knew about Mike Sweeney was that he existed, the evil ex-husband every other ex-wife in America complains about. Then I told him all about Mike, and Steve went and put it in his movie!

Unlike most ex-husbands, my ex really was evil. And smart. Well, not really smart. Cunning. He's about half as smart as he thinks he is, which is still twice as smart as you and dumb ass Darryl put together, Bruce. I knew it was only a matter of time before Mike either killed me or tried to kill me. Which is why I tried to hire Irv Sutley to kill him. Hey! Peace and love on you, too. We're talking "movement" here! Gandhi my patootie.

But as soon as the bomb went off I knew who'd done it. If the FBI or a logger or some Jesus crank had wanted me dead he'd have picked me off out in Redwood Valley. Or downtown Ukiah. Or anywhere in Mendocino County. You can do anything you want in that place because the cops are (1) stupid (2) lazy, and the DA is the cops squared. Anyway, if the FBI had wanted to kill me I'd be dead. They wouldn't have used some cockamamie pipe bomb like the one Mike made and put under my seat.

So what was a girl to do? I knew I could pin it on the FBI and half the nut pies on the Northcoast would believe me. And if that didn't work I knew I could blame it on the timber corporations and the other half of the nut pies would believe me. Or I could simply say a man did it and every woman in Ecotopia would say, "I knew it. I knew it. That's what men do to us after two weeks of sex. They're all the same."

Mike decided to murder me because his attempt to snitch me off to the Ukiah Police Department didn't work. He wrote to them using the pseudonym "Argus," a typical freshman world lit reference a Stanford pseud like him would use. He told the cops he'd give them a heads up before I mailed off pot to my pot customers. The cops said, "Great! Let's do it, Argyle." But both the cops and Mike could never quite coordinate a bust.

Mike always has thought he was smarter than everyone else. I wouldn't have married him if I thought he was a dummy. And I certainly wouldn't have gone through the bourgie rigmarole of marriage and kids and a house and stupid ass car insurance if I'd known he was psycho. Which he quickly turned out to be, a really scary, controlling kind of guy. But like most women who marry the true psychos like Mike Koepf, to name another one who's been married like seven times or something and has beat up every woman who spent any time at all with his fat, soleric ass, I didn't know Mike Sweeney was a violent nut case until about a month after we'd thrown the rice around and cashed the big wedding checks we got from our rich parents. By the way, I grew up in Silver Springs Maryland, not in Waiting For Lefty's taxi cab. Silver Springs is like Mill Valley or the Kentfield area of Marin County only the weather is shitty.

Looking back, I can say I was always out of control even though on the surface I was a goody two shoes cheer leader and a jock boffer in high school. And I got straight A's, which anybody but an absolute moron couldn't help getting because Maryland's schools were even more retarded than the so-called schools here in Mendocino County. Also, thanks to high school football, I learned how to make the demo signs Mike and I years later stacked up in the corner of the MEC — including the one we propped up against a tree when Mike and I bombed LP's office outside Cloverdale in June of 1990, the one that said "LP Screws Mill Workers." I learned poster making in freshman girl's pep club back in Silver Springs High School, home of the hip-yups. Incidentally, the only high school guy who ever treated me like a human being was the quarterback. After him it was like a hundred long-haired, lice-ridden oinkers in a row until I met Mr. Mega Oinker, ol' Triple Oink, Mike Sweeney, the agent of my destruction.

I grew up terminally jealous of my yuppie sister. She was not only a lot better looking than me, she was a big time reporter at The New York Times. She had the big house in the 'burbs, the rich academic husband at Princeton, and here I was a food stamp, money-from-home hippie married to a pipe bomb communist for the FBI in Christ awful west Santa Rosa! Could life be worse? We even had a fucking hibachi in the back fucking yard! It was pure hell. The only fun we ever had together was blowing up that hangar down the street.

Worse, I chose him! Mike had just been dumped by his first wife, the one he met at Stanford in Professor Franklin's Maoist koffee klatch kampus klub. Mike had an interim girl friend we all called "Whisper." I was "Shout," of course. Whisper was a bedraggled, beaten down little thing who Mike glared at every time she dared say something. But I, Shout, like a fool, decided to take him away from her, Whisper, so I got into my halter top and bent over in front of him a few times as I poured his coffee and, like all men at the sight of large breasts, Mike's eyes crossed, he began moaning and biting the back of his hand to regain control of himself. He was mine. God, men are dumb! Just like dogs. No control whatsoever. By my fourth anti-nuke meeting bend-over, Mikey was mine.

And I was dead.

But death was still 17 years up the Redwood Highway.

Like Rocky Graziano and my sister, I wanted to be somebody, too. I guess you could say getting bombed was the best thing that ever happened to me, fame-wise, which was another reason I lied about who did it. I liked being famous. I liked being a famous PC martyr even better. Fame helped me get what I wanted, which was to become even more famous. I noticed right away that I could do or say anything to anybody, and when someone tried to argue with me all I had to do was scream, "How can you talk to me like this? I'm a single mother who's been the victim of a political assassination attempt!" That shut everyone but you and Mark Heimann up. Neither of you pigs ever did cut me any slack.

There were a few women who stood up to me: Anna Marie would get right back in my face, and so would Roanne Withers, Melissa Roberts, Jim Gibbons' girlfriend Susan, Mary Moore, and even Susan Massini, the DA at the time. Massini really hated me. And there were other women I had to watch it around — smart, self-respecting women like Daphne Miller. She wouldn't put up with any bullshit from me, and the others who argued with me like Melissa and Roanne and Anna Marie and Mary Moore, I would lie about behind their backs and get them ostracized. I just ignored your wife, Bruce, her and that Indonesian woman who lived with you guys. I knew if I even looked cross-eyed at them I'd have more than I could handle. Both of them hated me, and I knew both of them thought I was rude and crude, which I was, but I could have used them as Third World Women of Color if I needed them. Not that I did, so I never did have to turn on the charm. A lot of us upper middle-class girls are like this. Why? Entitlement, dude, a natural sense of entitlement. Daddy will always be there to bail us out no matter what we do. Look at my idol, Bernadine Dorn. She got over big time, didn't she? And so did I, kind of.

I had so many groupies after the bombing, especially big shot groupies like David Brower and Amy Goodman who knew nothing about either me or Earth First!, and sure as hell steered clear of me until the FBI bombed me and I was famous for a week, ha ha ha. My fame was my main weapon here in Ecotopia, and I surrounded myself with idiots who helped me and Mike get over. Er, check that. Karen Pickett and Pam Davis aren't idiots. Darlene Commingore is a useful idiot, as are nutballs like Tanya Brannan, Annie Esposito, that dwarf Esposito is married to, and the whole gangs of gullibles at KMUD and KPFA. Great big women, little cringing "feminized" men. The activists of the Northcoast!

Alicia Littletree Bales came to stay with me when she was about 12, fresh out of junior high drug rehab in Sacramento. Talk about blank slates! I taught her everything she knows, meaning, I'm afraid, that she is forever unteachable. But she and cracked pots like Naomi Wagner and a couple of other crones still show up for Earth First! events with my ashes in a see-through jar, channeling me on the solstices and throwing the E. Chingawa or whatever it's called.

Hard to believe Mike hasn't been arrested yet. The cops are soooooooo dumb. What does he have to do, bend himself over? He'll blow up the Mendocino County Courthouse first. Remember when those pages from the novel he wrote about me turned up? He called me "Eliza Devlin," which ought to give all the KZYX and KMUD-type doofuses some idea of what Mike really thought about me. Well, duh, as a certain 210 pound Sapphist at the Redwood Summer Justice Project likes to say. If your husband wrote a 400-page novel about you, a roman cliff, I believe they're called, while you were still married whose main character was called "Eliza Devlin" ("lying devil," and do I have to explain everything to you morons?), well duh mister man, what's so surprising about a pipe bomb under my car seat?

Any kind of real life complications are way too tough for the stoners I surrounded myself with to figure out. Yes, my ex-husband bombed me. But we went on to cooperate for joint childcare and my guy even went on to make two replica bombs for me so I could take them on the road to show the saps what kind of device the FBI made to try to kill me! I made darn near a million bucks just for myself, and not an audit ever from anyone! I even bragged on film about how accurate Mike's dummy bombs were! I hear you and Jim Martin and Ed Gehrman and Irv and the rest of you have a copy of that tape, and that you also have the audio tape from KZYX where I admit I got Pam Davis to try to get Irv to kill Mike for me. Kay Rudin made the video tape of me demonstrating the replica bomb and you and everyone else has the KZYX tape where I say I got Pam Davis to talk to Irv about killing Mike. So there's all this evidence pointing straight at Psycho Man, Mendocino County's so-called recycler, and the lazy ass cops just go on pretending it doesn't exist.

But in a way I still love the guy. He's a real mensch, whatever else anybody says about him. When I hit him, he decked me. When I called him a child molester he put the pipe bomb in my car. Most men wouldn't have the guts. And I hated him, too. That's life! It's not always so simple. Yes, just before I died I screamed the bastard away from me. My stooges didn't know how to handle that one, but what was I supposed to do, give Sweeney a goodbye kiss? He killed me for cryin' out loud!

Yeah? What about my family? Why hasn't my father stationed himself outside a federal building demanding that the Justice Department find the bomber? Why hasn't my New York Times sister written a book about me to find the bomber? Why hasn't my family come out for me? My sister can find the time to write a book about, of all things, exercise, but she won't write one to find out about Sweeney? Is that pathetic? My sister, a big shot reporter and author, a 55-year-old woman writing a book about how old bats can look like they're 15?

My parents and both my sisters knew Mike did it. They always hoped it would all just go away. Instead, I went away, and you know what? I don't like it. I hope you get Sweeney, Bruce, although you better hope you get him before he or his father get you. They could get a Mex to do you for $3,000 and hop back across the border. Happens all the time.

This place where I am now is no fun. Just like they say in church, it's run by a great big white bearded patriarch man-type guy. Women get all the lousy jobs. They've got me working in a day care center, and I'm the smartest person up here.