01-06-2010, 06:51 PM
Anderson Valley AdvertiserDecember 31, 2003
I Was a Communist for the FBI
by Mike Sweeney, as told to Bruce Anderson
I'm speaking out as a man about to be tossed overboard by a whole bunch of people who can no longer afford to protect me. Some of them might even be in more trouble than me, Mike Sweeney, but I'm the only person who knows the whole truth about the bombing of Judi Bari because I did it and I've orchestrated the cover-up for 14 long, long years. The other person who knows the whole truth is dead because I murdered her, albeit in slow motion. There are quite a few people who know parts of the truth about the bombing, and there are quite a few people who've lived off its mythology all these years — literally lived off it in some cases. Over the next few weeks, I'll name each of these mercenary frauds and explain how each was involved. Why? Because I'm not going to prison alone, and I know they are working overtime to figure out how they can get me without implicating themselves. Hah! I go, we all go.
I bombed Judi Bari in May of 1990. Like Judi, I'm a violent person. She may have been even more violent than me. She might have been crazy too, but all that baloney about "Gandhian non-violence" from her was belied by her real life behavior. She was Mike Tyson in female form.
Judi and I fire bombed the hangars at the old Naval air strip southwest of Santa Rosa back in 1980. We were just married. I guess you could say the 1980 bombs we did together in Santa Rosa were our version of a honeymoon to Niagara Falls. Before we did that one, which got a big play in the local newspapers, we did minor league sabs of my former wife's property out in Sebastopol. We wrecked her water pump one time, for instance. Judi loved those late-night sabotage forays; me too. We were true soulmates, and deeply in love.
At the time I hooked up with Judi Bari at a Maoist labor convention, we were both labor organizers, more or less, although neither one of us ever had a real job for more than a few weeks. My estranged first wife, Cynthia Denenholtz, whose water pump we'd sabbed, had restraining orders out on me for harassing her, and as much as I wanted to bomb Cynthia I'm pretty sure I would have got caught if I did it because she and I used to be Maoist bombers back at Stanford where we met in 1968. People still knew us, and they'd know I did it. But Cynthia, even when we broke up, never threatened to go to the cops about me like Judi did all the time after we moved to Redwood Valley. In Redwood Valley, Judi even accused me of a Michael Jackson with my youngest daughter. She would say anything if she thought it served her interests, and that's why I thought she was truly nuts.
We'd moved to Redwood Valley from Santa Rosa after we'd scammed Hewlett-Packard by threatening to sue them; the threat did it. H-P settled with us because it was cheaper for them. We used that money to buy a big piece of bare ground on Humphrey Lane in Redwood Valley. We built a spec house on that lot but we were no longer happy. She wanted more than her share of the money we had and she wanted to run around all the time with hippies and smoke dope and use speed. I wanted to be respectable. I didn't like hippies, and I still don't like hippies.
So I started writing recycling grants with some help from Richard Shoemaker, my pal and protector, who's now a Mendocino County Supervisor. Shoemaker got Wes Chesbro, now a state senator, who sat on the state's garbage board, to shove a half-million tax dollars my way. All I had to do then was shove a Fort Bragg lady named Carol O'Neal out of the way of the recycling operation she was running — which I did — and I was up and running, reborn, as the county's recycler. Shoemaker and Chesbro got me all set up in Ukiah even though Mendocino County already had a garbage agency of its own.
But here Judi Bari was running around in the woods with Cherney doing all kinds of crazy stuff to get her name in the paper while I stayed home with the kids or had to take them with me to my "office" at the Mendocino Environment Center in downtown Ukiah. When I complained about her hippie life style, she'd say, "Bleep you, Mike. I'll go to the cops and tell them everything." So I'd say, "Don't forget I've got a bleep load of felonies on you too, sweet thing."
Like I was supposed to live with this for the next fifty years?
Cynthia Denenholtz and I had two kids together before we split up and I married Judi Bari with whom I had two more kids. She didn't want to be a radical anymore. Or a snitch. I was both a radical and a snitch. My first two kids with Cynthia are grown now and Cynthia is a family court magistrate in Santa Rosa!
A judge! Can you believe it? This lady wanted to overthrow the government and now she is the government! There are lots of old sellout rads like us out there; not that I blame her for going straight. I tried to go straight myself but my big mouth wife wouldn't let me. She was always hanging the bombs we did together over my head. And other stuff, some of it worse.
Hard to believe I met ol' Cyn when she was a Maoist with me back at Stanford. All the people we knew then who survived the 60's went back to the upper middle-class privilege they'd come out of and now they all have big houses in the hills. Heck, my house on Running Springs Road, off Orr Springs Road west of Ukiah is pretty darn big on a pretty darn big 20 acres. If you didn't know I was a bomber and an FBI stoolie you'd think I was just like Dave Nelson and Dan Hamburg! Just another rich Stanford guy up in the big redwood solar house in the hills who's done real well for himself.
By the way, my house on Running Springs is the only one on the road that isn't numbered, and don't ever try to drop in on me because it's kinda dangerous, if you get my drift. Bruce Anderson and Kate Coleman were up here snooping around one day last winter and they don't know how close they came. I had both of them in my crosshairs; if either one of them had put one foot on my property — especially that lying sack of recycled super doo-doo Anderson — they'd have both been wherever my ex-wife is now, and wherever she is I doubt she can tune in K-MUD.
Way back in the late 1960's, as I've mentioned, I joined Venceremos, a Maoist-oriented college gang based at Stanford. As a kid in Santa Barbara I'd belonged to the Young Republicans. My dad was a lawyer who worked for Mobil Oil and then was an official in the Nixon Administration. I grew up in a nice house in Santa Barbara. (There are no not nice houses in Santa Barbara. You gotta have major dough to even drive through town.) I never was a liberal, and I certainly never was a real radical either. I was always for the government, but in college I joined the radicals so I could help the government destroy them.
There was another Venceremos sponsored by the CPUSA that went to Cuba for a couple of weeks every year to cut a few stalks of sugar cane and generally have a good time showing solidarity with Castro. Our Stanford group thought that Venceremos was a bunch of wimps. Besides which they were Stalinists while we were followers of The Great Helmsman, Mao Tse Tung, and practically memorized his Little Red Book.
Yes, we were that dumb. And natural fascists, a lot of us, as I will be the first to admit. A lot of rich kids who went to elite colleges in the 1960's played revolution for a while, and I was one of them. Sort of.
At Stanford, I snitched on the rads for the FBI at the same time as I committed crimes for the revolution, which partially explains why I haven't been arrested yet for bombing my ex-wife, Judi Bari, in 1990. Back in my Stanford days my little group of revolutionaries planted bombs all over the Bay Area. Our leader was an English professor named H. Bruce Franklin. He wore a lot of leather, slept with his 18 and 19-year-old students and strode around campus like he was a tough guy prole. Rich radicals who've never worked still act like this. They think it's "working-class." It's patronizing and stupid is what it is, but how smart do you have to be to get over on the Pacifica people?
H. Bruce got a lot of Stanford kids in deep trouble, and he got some off campus kids killed. But he landed on his feet, not in the pen where his jive ass should have gone for at least a few years so we could see how tough he really was. Instead of jail, H. Bruce landed in another English department without even breaking his tea cup! He's at Rutgers now where he writes scholarly papers on Moby Dick. Melville and who? But being a fake radical in 1969 was the in-thing to do. Until people started getting killed
Judi Bari always pretended to be from the "working-class," but she grew up in Silver Springs, Maryland, hardly a haven of wage workers. Her parents had been communists, but they weren't communists by the time Judi was born. They'd been scared straight by events of an earlier era. Very nice people, actually, and very successful. Mom was a math prof at Johns Hopkins, Dad a diamond cutter. I guess you could say, though, that Judi was a red diaper baby.
By the way, I knew another Mendo guy back at Stanford — Mike Koepf. He lives near Elk on Greenwood Road. He was just out of the Green Berets and back from Vietnam when he was around Stanford in the 1960's. Some of the young writers in Wallace Stegner's writing program — people like Max Crawford — were weekend radicals at the time. Koepf showed them how to wear camo and how to walk around in the woods looking like guerrillas. Koepf has always been a snitch, just like me. Woman beater like me, too, incidentally. Koepf hated Judi Bari; hated her maybe even more intensely than I hated her, but much as he enjoyed seeing her get blown up, Koepf wouldn't have had the cojones to do it himself in another 25 life times. He's afraid of the cops and even more afraid of jail. A real wuss, in other words.
Anyway, as you can already see we'll be jumping around a lot, chronologically speaking, as I tell my story over the coming weeks, but it's interesting how the '60's have come back to bite so many of us years after we all thought it was all finally over and everyone, even the cops, had closed the books on us.
Of course when you kill people it's never really over, is it?
And I killed Judi Bari in 1990 but she didn't die until 1997.
Mike Koepf's pal, Max Crawford, wrote a semi-famous book about all of us pretend-revolutionaries at Stanford. Crawford's opus was called "The Bad Communist," but that book was no novel. It was a prose documentary. Max was obviously at ground zero to have written that one because his purported novel tells in insider detail about the black guy who was offed up in the hills of Santa Cruz. And that poor dupe wasn't the only person offed in that period either, which is what happens when a bunch of college whack-offs like we were bring real life criminals into our political groups. The idea was that criminals — prison inmates — were the vanguard of the proletariat. Har de har, Professor H. Bruce. Got any more bright ideas? The vanguard we grouped with were the vanguard of sleep-with-the-naive-coeds-and-ripoff-the-rest-of-the-young-fools for their credit cards and whatever else they've got that I can use; that was that vanguard. Between the vanguard and the feds and the attention his book attracted, Crawford got so scared he took off for Paris to hide out for a couple of years.
A month before I tried to kill Judi Bari with the car bomb, I helped Judi and Darryl Cherney with the fire bomb at LP's office just south of Cloverdale in April of 1990. It didn't work the way it was supposed to, unfortunately, but it did start a small fire. Judi made a sign we leaned up against a tree facing 101 that said, "L-P Screws Millworkers." As if millworkers didn't know that, and as if a bunch of trust fund potheads in the hills were of any use to any working person anywhere anyway.
Worse than unfortunately for me, the Sonoma County Sheriff's Department still has most of the apparatus from the L-P bomb. I understand that it's been compared to the fire bombs Judi and I made in 1980 to get rid of the air strip hangars southwest of Santa Rosa. Only one of the hangar detonators worked the way it was supposed to work; the other one didn't go off. The cops have it, too. Signature bombs they call them. My signature. But so far they haven't made the link to me; or if they have they aren't saying.
The 1980 air strip bomb that didn't go off was supposed to ignite the 20,000 gallons of airplane fuel in the underground tanks outside the hangars. As it was, the kid asleep in the hangar that did explode the way it was supposed to had to run for his life. If the underground fuel had gone up that boy would have been a roasted marshmallow. Hey! Like I give a bleep? Judi and I thought the explosions were funny, and the Press Democrat's coverage even funnier. And we both knew the cops were way too dumb to pin it on us. Sure enough, they didn't.
But Bob Williams was no dummy. He leased the hangars. He knew we did it but he couldn't pin it on us either. Bob lives in Novato these days. I'm sure he's looking forward to testifying against me as soon as the cops get around to making the DNA link. They've got me on the DNA, but so far so good. They haven't subpoenaed any of us, and here we are material witnesses to big league felonies!
The problem I had with Judi was her big mouth. She had all this felony information on me and she just kept on bringing it up. If she talked, I'd go to the pen for a long time. But she'd go too because I had a lot of felony information on her. And I had the goods on Cherney and Pam Davis and Karen Pickett and Darlene Commie-Gore. And Tanya Brannan. And Utah Phillips. And Bill Simpich and Dennis Cunningham and Tony Serra and those obnoxious little pricks Ben Rosenfeld and Robert Bloom. I couldn't believe it when that dingbat juror in Oakland described fat ass Bob as "suave" and "debonair." He's about as suave as South State Street and about as debonair as a pig pen. I've even got the goods on low-level folks like Gary and Betty Ball and the MEC's landlord, John McCowen. Like I said, when I go all these people are going with me. And that's why I haven't gone to prison. Yet. The feds and the Oakland cops are trying to figure out how to take me out by myself so I can't rat off all of the above.
McCowen rented the MEC premises to the FBI all those years, which is one big reason why I got to have my "office" there at 106 Standley, Ukiah, back in the Redwood Summer days. I even had my own key to the front door, to which I tacked one of the so-called death threats Judi used to say she was getting all the time. (She either wrote them herself or I wrote them.) And of course I wrote the Argus letter to the Ukiah cops about Judi doing her mail order marijuana business. Because I lived literally inches from her at 9691 Humphrey Lane, Redwood Valley, even after we were separated, I knew all her movements and everything she was doing; I was the only person who could effectively snitch her off.
But snitching her off didn't work so I decided to kill her.
I put that last bomb — my most famous bomb — under the driver's seat of her car while her car was parked in front of the Mendocino Environment Center on West Standley Street in Ukiah on the north side of the Mendocino County Courthouse. I built it so it would explode far from Ukiah. Which it did. When Judi didn't die like she was supposed to, I had to write The Lord's Avenger Letter saying I, Mike Sweeney, aka The Lord's Avenger, put the bomb in her car in Willits two full days before it blew up. I had to say I put the bomb in her car in Willits because I was with Meredyth Rinehard that Tuesday night. I don't have an alibi for any part of the next day, Wednesday, or Wednesday night. Judi drove down to the Bay Area Wednesday afternoon with the bomb and Utah Phillips in her car. The bomb exploded just before noon on Thursday, May 20th, 1990.
But Judi survived it. And I had a big prob, hence the Lord's Avenger Letter.
Meredyth my alibi, my love, now works for the Mendocino County Health Department and, I can tell you, she is very unhappy to be involved in any of this after all these years. But she'll tell the truth that I was with her when the Lord's Avenger says he was putting the bomb in Judi Bari's car in Willits because she was with me and the Avenger both, so to speak, and so were her two kids.
Nobody was with me the next day. I have no alibi that fits the known facts. Which is why I'm screwed. And doubly screwed when the cops get around to the DNA party for the dozen or so material witnesses, including, it seems, poor old Meredyth and her kids.
Nobody, then, was with me on Put-The-Bomb-In-Judi's-Car Wednesday when I did what I had to do although I've made the mistake of placing myself, however vaguely, in three presumably different places that day. "With my kids; at work; at home." Which I was at different times. I was with my kids after Judi left Redwood Valley for Ukiah. I was at work in my office at the MEC with the bomb I'd made; and after I shoved the bomb under her seat with its timer and switch on I went back home to Redwood Valley.
But nobody can place me at any of these venues when I need to be placed at them!
My co-conspirators in the cover-up for all these years are right now getting their stories ready for court. They now say Utah Phillips was playing his guitar in the doorway of the MEC the day I put the bomb in Judi's car. He wasn't. Utah and the lawyers, who I'll take down with me too when I go because they're also in this up to their shifty, dollar sign eyebrows, are merely doing some legal site prep here by placing Utah in the MEC's doorway so he can say he never saw me there. In living fact, Judi was showing Utah off across the street in front of the Courthouse at her Redwood Summer press conference. He was kind of a trophy for her because a lot of the doofuses around here think Utah is a real deal famous person anarchist. He isn't that either. Which is about as impressive as saying you're the tallest guy in Philo. Like Bari and the rest of them, Utah Phillips is strictly a photo-op, cash-up-front "radical." Stalinist too. Big Bill would want no part of this guy.
I put the bomb in Judi's car from my office at the MEC because: (1) I knew our two little girls would definitely not be in the car because they were at Meredyth's house in Redwood Valley, (2) If I put the bomb in Judi's car out in Redwood Valley where we all lived together, the girls might have jumped in to go into Ukiah with their mother for some reason, and I didn't want to risk the thing going off with them in the car, (3) I was afraid that if I put the bomb in Judi's car in Redwood Valley real early Wednesday morning after she and Utah and Dakota Sid and Mrs. Utah and Mrs. Dakota finally fell asleep about two in the morning, the 12 hours on my timer might elapse and activate the bomb in Ukiah, thus focusing a whole lotta attention on me, (4) I had total access to Judi's Subaru at all times, just like I had total access to her garage-house inches from the trailer where we both lived out on Humphrey Lane in Redwood Valley.
And my "office" was at the MEC in downtown Ukiah in McCowen's dingy cave of a slummy structure opposite the Courthouse. Nobody would suspect anything peculiar if they saw me open Judi's car door and put something in her car. Which is what I did. I walked right out of the MEC with the thing wrapped in a towel and shoved it under Judi's seat. I put the bomb under her seat, having constructed it so it would be a perfectly snug fit. I snapped the On switch On, set the clock going and wished my little creation a happy trip south, far from me, the perp, the man who's made a lot of bombs but not a single known one that worked the way it was supposed to.
Sure enough. The bomb got all the way to Berkeley and Oakland without going off. Judi went to a meeting with Seeds of Peace (another group of lurks and murks) in Berkeley then drove to Oakland where she spent the night in the busy home of mega-creep, David Kemnitzer. All this time the bomb was silently ticking off the minutes. Some time between three and four in the morning the twelve hours on the clock had elapsed and my beautiful little bomb was live! All it would take now was the sudden movement of the vehicle — a sharp turn, sudden braking, even a lane change — to ignite it. Which is what happened only a few blocks from Kemnitzer's house in front of Oakland High School.
Ka-blooooooooey!
But I was still in Ukiah and Redwood Valley when my bomb went boom. I was shocked! Shocked, I tell you! And doubly shocked that Judi lived. One end cap blew off slightly before the other, thus diverting a lot of the device's power laterally instead of up. If it had exploded the way I built it to explode, Judi and Cherney both would have been hugging trees eternally, far, far from redwood country.
And if she and Cherney had died in the explosion I would have been home free. Everyone would have assumed she was knowingly transporting my creation and all my problems and potential problems would have been over. But because she didn't die my problems were just beginning, and now here I am 14 years later with two big books on the case coming up and a whole lot of people already giving me the perp look, people like Steve Talbot, for instance. Talbot made a whole movie implicating me in the bombing, and just last year he went on Belva Davis's KQED Television Show and said Judi Bari had told him I bombed her! And now DNA. There's DNA on three of the letters, including the Lord's Avenger Letter, that can be linked straight back to me. It's just a matter of time before everything comes apart.
As soon as I heard Judi had survived my bomb, I wrote the Lord's Avenger Letter, a fact Don Foster, currently at work on the Anthrax Case for the FBI, and the best documents analyst guy in the world has confirmed in such excruciating and truly exact detail all I can do is squirm and say, "Not me. I didn't do it."
Every smart person who's paid any attention to this case always points straight at me; I can't keep it in Mendocino County much longer, and the world outside isn't all Nick Wilsons and Gordy Blacks, or KMUD and KZYX, is it?
The idea of the Lord's Avenger Letter was to divert attention from me onto every other male in the Redwood Empire. I wrote it like I was a religious nut case of a logger who was particularly irate about Judi's performance at an anti-abortion rally in Ukiah.
She and Cherney walked right into the demonstrators, many of them visibly deranged, singing "Shall The Fetus Be Aborted," a grotesque insult and infuriating to the nut pies, many of whom were brandishing those tiny plastic fetuses and oola-ooling with their hands raised to the skies, talking in tongues to the objectively indifferent sky gods. Their leader was a huge guy who'd been an All-Pro defensive end with the Cleveland Browns, Bill Staley. If Mr. All-Pro had gone off there would have been some serious mayhem the length of Dora Street. Fortunately for Bari and Cherney and the rest of us, including me, Mike Sweeney, who was there taking photos for my bomb plot and for my buds at the FBI, Mr. Staley was in direct communication with God at the time and had failed to note the pests who'd invaded his flock.
The reason Utah Phillips is now saying 14 years later that he was in the doorway of the MEC playing his guitar while Judi Bari was across the street in front of the Mendocino County Courthouse for a "press conference" (a "press conference" in Mendocino County consists of two persons, one from the Press Democrat, one from the Ukiah Daily Journal and likely as not neither paper shows up) is that Darryl Cherney and my two daughters, Lisa and Jessica haven't got a cent of the $3.2 million they supposedly won in the phony federal defamation suit in Oakland last year. And the money is held up because the whole case is being "reconsidered." Which means I'm about to go down, and my fellow scammers are getting ready to go back into court to defend their roles in helping me elude justice.
(Progressives around the country, and Pacifica Network people, as credulous a group as we've got going, were told the suit was to keep the FBI in check or it was to save redwoods when all these years that Bari, Cherney, their parasitic lawyers, Tanya Brannan and the sociopathic Brannan's psychotic girl friend Noelle Hanrahan, the last a 205 pound former point guard on the Stanford women's basketball team, were living the good life off several million dollars thus falsely raised.)
Utah's buddy Dakota Sid wouldn't help us lie even a little bit, but Utah has been all the way on board from the start. Heck, Utah rode all the way from Ukiah to Berkeley with Judi and the bomb! Good thing I had a timer and an on/off switch on the thing or the old hundred-thou-a-year Wob might have wobbled off 14 years ago!
But something's up, and it looks like it's me. The cops are sniffing around and not one cent of the $3.2 million Darryl Cherney and my two daughters "won" in that phony federal suit has been paid out. I'm pretty sure this is the year I get arrested. But if I go I'm not going alone because a lot of people have helped cover up the truth about the bombing and I'm taking them down with me. Count on that. I'd like to get Anderson, Jim Martin, Ed Gehrman, Mary Moore, and Irv Sutley too, and if they lived closer together I'd give it a try, but they don't and I probably won't have time to take care of them before I go off to help with recycling programs in the federal prison at Lompoc.
I had a girl friend right away when Judi and I split the blanket or, if you prefer, tore up the Little Red Book. Her name was Meredyth Rinehard. I had her kids seal the Lord's Avenger letter I wrote in a big hurry as soon as I heard my bomb hadn't killed Judi. Her kids were little. Little kids will do whatever you ask them to do, and I asked them to seal the envelope and lick the stamp on it for me. DNA was just coming in as a criminal identifier in 1990, but just in case I didn't want DNA on the thing. Or Judi's DNA on it through our daughters. So I asked Meredyth's kids to do it.
When the subpoenas go out I know Meredyth's gonna be real quick to give me up. Pam Davis and Karen Pickett will rat me out, too, but I've got so much felony-quality stuff on all them, including their crumb bum "progressive" lawyers, and even more on that idiot Cherney, and on Utah Phillips and Brannan's Redwood Summer Justice Project Scam-a-rama, and even on Judge Yuppie Buns down there in Oakland, I'll be taking a whole lotta so-called "progressives" down with me when the feds indict me this year. No sir, I'm not going to jail alone. And you watch the snitch fest fireworks when the DNA subpoenas arrive at certain addresses in '04.
Who wants to go to jail at age 55?
I Was a Communist for the FBI
by Mike Sweeney, as told to Bruce Anderson
I'm speaking out as a man about to be tossed overboard by a whole bunch of people who can no longer afford to protect me. Some of them might even be in more trouble than me, Mike Sweeney, but I'm the only person who knows the whole truth about the bombing of Judi Bari because I did it and I've orchestrated the cover-up for 14 long, long years. The other person who knows the whole truth is dead because I murdered her, albeit in slow motion. There are quite a few people who know parts of the truth about the bombing, and there are quite a few people who've lived off its mythology all these years — literally lived off it in some cases. Over the next few weeks, I'll name each of these mercenary frauds and explain how each was involved. Why? Because I'm not going to prison alone, and I know they are working overtime to figure out how they can get me without implicating themselves. Hah! I go, we all go.
I bombed Judi Bari in May of 1990. Like Judi, I'm a violent person. She may have been even more violent than me. She might have been crazy too, but all that baloney about "Gandhian non-violence" from her was belied by her real life behavior. She was Mike Tyson in female form.
Judi and I fire bombed the hangars at the old Naval air strip southwest of Santa Rosa back in 1980. We were just married. I guess you could say the 1980 bombs we did together in Santa Rosa were our version of a honeymoon to Niagara Falls. Before we did that one, which got a big play in the local newspapers, we did minor league sabs of my former wife's property out in Sebastopol. We wrecked her water pump one time, for instance. Judi loved those late-night sabotage forays; me too. We were true soulmates, and deeply in love.
At the time I hooked up with Judi Bari at a Maoist labor convention, we were both labor organizers, more or less, although neither one of us ever had a real job for more than a few weeks. My estranged first wife, Cynthia Denenholtz, whose water pump we'd sabbed, had restraining orders out on me for harassing her, and as much as I wanted to bomb Cynthia I'm pretty sure I would have got caught if I did it because she and I used to be Maoist bombers back at Stanford where we met in 1968. People still knew us, and they'd know I did it. But Cynthia, even when we broke up, never threatened to go to the cops about me like Judi did all the time after we moved to Redwood Valley. In Redwood Valley, Judi even accused me of a Michael Jackson with my youngest daughter. She would say anything if she thought it served her interests, and that's why I thought she was truly nuts.
We'd moved to Redwood Valley from Santa Rosa after we'd scammed Hewlett-Packard by threatening to sue them; the threat did it. H-P settled with us because it was cheaper for them. We used that money to buy a big piece of bare ground on Humphrey Lane in Redwood Valley. We built a spec house on that lot but we were no longer happy. She wanted more than her share of the money we had and she wanted to run around all the time with hippies and smoke dope and use speed. I wanted to be respectable. I didn't like hippies, and I still don't like hippies.
So I started writing recycling grants with some help from Richard Shoemaker, my pal and protector, who's now a Mendocino County Supervisor. Shoemaker got Wes Chesbro, now a state senator, who sat on the state's garbage board, to shove a half-million tax dollars my way. All I had to do then was shove a Fort Bragg lady named Carol O'Neal out of the way of the recycling operation she was running — which I did — and I was up and running, reborn, as the county's recycler. Shoemaker and Chesbro got me all set up in Ukiah even though Mendocino County already had a garbage agency of its own.
But here Judi Bari was running around in the woods with Cherney doing all kinds of crazy stuff to get her name in the paper while I stayed home with the kids or had to take them with me to my "office" at the Mendocino Environment Center in downtown Ukiah. When I complained about her hippie life style, she'd say, "Bleep you, Mike. I'll go to the cops and tell them everything." So I'd say, "Don't forget I've got a bleep load of felonies on you too, sweet thing."
Like I was supposed to live with this for the next fifty years?
Cynthia Denenholtz and I had two kids together before we split up and I married Judi Bari with whom I had two more kids. She didn't want to be a radical anymore. Or a snitch. I was both a radical and a snitch. My first two kids with Cynthia are grown now and Cynthia is a family court magistrate in Santa Rosa!
A judge! Can you believe it? This lady wanted to overthrow the government and now she is the government! There are lots of old sellout rads like us out there; not that I blame her for going straight. I tried to go straight myself but my big mouth wife wouldn't let me. She was always hanging the bombs we did together over my head. And other stuff, some of it worse.
Hard to believe I met ol' Cyn when she was a Maoist with me back at Stanford. All the people we knew then who survived the 60's went back to the upper middle-class privilege they'd come out of and now they all have big houses in the hills. Heck, my house on Running Springs Road, off Orr Springs Road west of Ukiah is pretty darn big on a pretty darn big 20 acres. If you didn't know I was a bomber and an FBI stoolie you'd think I was just like Dave Nelson and Dan Hamburg! Just another rich Stanford guy up in the big redwood solar house in the hills who's done real well for himself.
By the way, my house on Running Springs is the only one on the road that isn't numbered, and don't ever try to drop in on me because it's kinda dangerous, if you get my drift. Bruce Anderson and Kate Coleman were up here snooping around one day last winter and they don't know how close they came. I had both of them in my crosshairs; if either one of them had put one foot on my property — especially that lying sack of recycled super doo-doo Anderson — they'd have both been wherever my ex-wife is now, and wherever she is I doubt she can tune in K-MUD.
Way back in the late 1960's, as I've mentioned, I joined Venceremos, a Maoist-oriented college gang based at Stanford. As a kid in Santa Barbara I'd belonged to the Young Republicans. My dad was a lawyer who worked for Mobil Oil and then was an official in the Nixon Administration. I grew up in a nice house in Santa Barbara. (There are no not nice houses in Santa Barbara. You gotta have major dough to even drive through town.) I never was a liberal, and I certainly never was a real radical either. I was always for the government, but in college I joined the radicals so I could help the government destroy them.
There was another Venceremos sponsored by the CPUSA that went to Cuba for a couple of weeks every year to cut a few stalks of sugar cane and generally have a good time showing solidarity with Castro. Our Stanford group thought that Venceremos was a bunch of wimps. Besides which they were Stalinists while we were followers of The Great Helmsman, Mao Tse Tung, and practically memorized his Little Red Book.
Yes, we were that dumb. And natural fascists, a lot of us, as I will be the first to admit. A lot of rich kids who went to elite colleges in the 1960's played revolution for a while, and I was one of them. Sort of.
At Stanford, I snitched on the rads for the FBI at the same time as I committed crimes for the revolution, which partially explains why I haven't been arrested yet for bombing my ex-wife, Judi Bari, in 1990. Back in my Stanford days my little group of revolutionaries planted bombs all over the Bay Area. Our leader was an English professor named H. Bruce Franklin. He wore a lot of leather, slept with his 18 and 19-year-old students and strode around campus like he was a tough guy prole. Rich radicals who've never worked still act like this. They think it's "working-class." It's patronizing and stupid is what it is, but how smart do you have to be to get over on the Pacifica people?
H. Bruce got a lot of Stanford kids in deep trouble, and he got some off campus kids killed. But he landed on his feet, not in the pen where his jive ass should have gone for at least a few years so we could see how tough he really was. Instead of jail, H. Bruce landed in another English department without even breaking his tea cup! He's at Rutgers now where he writes scholarly papers on Moby Dick. Melville and who? But being a fake radical in 1969 was the in-thing to do. Until people started getting killed
Judi Bari always pretended to be from the "working-class," but she grew up in Silver Springs, Maryland, hardly a haven of wage workers. Her parents had been communists, but they weren't communists by the time Judi was born. They'd been scared straight by events of an earlier era. Very nice people, actually, and very successful. Mom was a math prof at Johns Hopkins, Dad a diamond cutter. I guess you could say, though, that Judi was a red diaper baby.
By the way, I knew another Mendo guy back at Stanford — Mike Koepf. He lives near Elk on Greenwood Road. He was just out of the Green Berets and back from Vietnam when he was around Stanford in the 1960's. Some of the young writers in Wallace Stegner's writing program — people like Max Crawford — were weekend radicals at the time. Koepf showed them how to wear camo and how to walk around in the woods looking like guerrillas. Koepf has always been a snitch, just like me. Woman beater like me, too, incidentally. Koepf hated Judi Bari; hated her maybe even more intensely than I hated her, but much as he enjoyed seeing her get blown up, Koepf wouldn't have had the cojones to do it himself in another 25 life times. He's afraid of the cops and even more afraid of jail. A real wuss, in other words.
Anyway, as you can already see we'll be jumping around a lot, chronologically speaking, as I tell my story over the coming weeks, but it's interesting how the '60's have come back to bite so many of us years after we all thought it was all finally over and everyone, even the cops, had closed the books on us.
Of course when you kill people it's never really over, is it?
And I killed Judi Bari in 1990 but she didn't die until 1997.
Mike Koepf's pal, Max Crawford, wrote a semi-famous book about all of us pretend-revolutionaries at Stanford. Crawford's opus was called "The Bad Communist," but that book was no novel. It was a prose documentary. Max was obviously at ground zero to have written that one because his purported novel tells in insider detail about the black guy who was offed up in the hills of Santa Cruz. And that poor dupe wasn't the only person offed in that period either, which is what happens when a bunch of college whack-offs like we were bring real life criminals into our political groups. The idea was that criminals — prison inmates — were the vanguard of the proletariat. Har de har, Professor H. Bruce. Got any more bright ideas? The vanguard we grouped with were the vanguard of sleep-with-the-naive-coeds-and-ripoff-the-rest-of-the-young-fools for their credit cards and whatever else they've got that I can use; that was that vanguard. Between the vanguard and the feds and the attention his book attracted, Crawford got so scared he took off for Paris to hide out for a couple of years.
A month before I tried to kill Judi Bari with the car bomb, I helped Judi and Darryl Cherney with the fire bomb at LP's office just south of Cloverdale in April of 1990. It didn't work the way it was supposed to, unfortunately, but it did start a small fire. Judi made a sign we leaned up against a tree facing 101 that said, "L-P Screws Millworkers." As if millworkers didn't know that, and as if a bunch of trust fund potheads in the hills were of any use to any working person anywhere anyway.
Worse than unfortunately for me, the Sonoma County Sheriff's Department still has most of the apparatus from the L-P bomb. I understand that it's been compared to the fire bombs Judi and I made in 1980 to get rid of the air strip hangars southwest of Santa Rosa. Only one of the hangar detonators worked the way it was supposed to work; the other one didn't go off. The cops have it, too. Signature bombs they call them. My signature. But so far they haven't made the link to me; or if they have they aren't saying.
The 1980 air strip bomb that didn't go off was supposed to ignite the 20,000 gallons of airplane fuel in the underground tanks outside the hangars. As it was, the kid asleep in the hangar that did explode the way it was supposed to had to run for his life. If the underground fuel had gone up that boy would have been a roasted marshmallow. Hey! Like I give a bleep? Judi and I thought the explosions were funny, and the Press Democrat's coverage even funnier. And we both knew the cops were way too dumb to pin it on us. Sure enough, they didn't.
But Bob Williams was no dummy. He leased the hangars. He knew we did it but he couldn't pin it on us either. Bob lives in Novato these days. I'm sure he's looking forward to testifying against me as soon as the cops get around to making the DNA link. They've got me on the DNA, but so far so good. They haven't subpoenaed any of us, and here we are material witnesses to big league felonies!
The problem I had with Judi was her big mouth. She had all this felony information on me and she just kept on bringing it up. If she talked, I'd go to the pen for a long time. But she'd go too because I had a lot of felony information on her. And I had the goods on Cherney and Pam Davis and Karen Pickett and Darlene Commie-Gore. And Tanya Brannan. And Utah Phillips. And Bill Simpich and Dennis Cunningham and Tony Serra and those obnoxious little pricks Ben Rosenfeld and Robert Bloom. I couldn't believe it when that dingbat juror in Oakland described fat ass Bob as "suave" and "debonair." He's about as suave as South State Street and about as debonair as a pig pen. I've even got the goods on low-level folks like Gary and Betty Ball and the MEC's landlord, John McCowen. Like I said, when I go all these people are going with me. And that's why I haven't gone to prison. Yet. The feds and the Oakland cops are trying to figure out how to take me out by myself so I can't rat off all of the above.
McCowen rented the MEC premises to the FBI all those years, which is one big reason why I got to have my "office" there at 106 Standley, Ukiah, back in the Redwood Summer days. I even had my own key to the front door, to which I tacked one of the so-called death threats Judi used to say she was getting all the time. (She either wrote them herself or I wrote them.) And of course I wrote the Argus letter to the Ukiah cops about Judi doing her mail order marijuana business. Because I lived literally inches from her at 9691 Humphrey Lane, Redwood Valley, even after we were separated, I knew all her movements and everything she was doing; I was the only person who could effectively snitch her off.
But snitching her off didn't work so I decided to kill her.
I put that last bomb — my most famous bomb — under the driver's seat of her car while her car was parked in front of the Mendocino Environment Center on West Standley Street in Ukiah on the north side of the Mendocino County Courthouse. I built it so it would explode far from Ukiah. Which it did. When Judi didn't die like she was supposed to, I had to write The Lord's Avenger Letter saying I, Mike Sweeney, aka The Lord's Avenger, put the bomb in her car in Willits two full days before it blew up. I had to say I put the bomb in her car in Willits because I was with Meredyth Rinehard that Tuesday night. I don't have an alibi for any part of the next day, Wednesday, or Wednesday night. Judi drove down to the Bay Area Wednesday afternoon with the bomb and Utah Phillips in her car. The bomb exploded just before noon on Thursday, May 20th, 1990.
But Judi survived it. And I had a big prob, hence the Lord's Avenger Letter.
Meredyth my alibi, my love, now works for the Mendocino County Health Department and, I can tell you, she is very unhappy to be involved in any of this after all these years. But she'll tell the truth that I was with her when the Lord's Avenger says he was putting the bomb in Judi Bari's car in Willits because she was with me and the Avenger both, so to speak, and so were her two kids.
Nobody was with me the next day. I have no alibi that fits the known facts. Which is why I'm screwed. And doubly screwed when the cops get around to the DNA party for the dozen or so material witnesses, including, it seems, poor old Meredyth and her kids.
Nobody, then, was with me on Put-The-Bomb-In-Judi's-Car Wednesday when I did what I had to do although I've made the mistake of placing myself, however vaguely, in three presumably different places that day. "With my kids; at work; at home." Which I was at different times. I was with my kids after Judi left Redwood Valley for Ukiah. I was at work in my office at the MEC with the bomb I'd made; and after I shoved the bomb under her seat with its timer and switch on I went back home to Redwood Valley.
But nobody can place me at any of these venues when I need to be placed at them!
My co-conspirators in the cover-up for all these years are right now getting their stories ready for court. They now say Utah Phillips was playing his guitar in the doorway of the MEC the day I put the bomb in Judi's car. He wasn't. Utah and the lawyers, who I'll take down with me too when I go because they're also in this up to their shifty, dollar sign eyebrows, are merely doing some legal site prep here by placing Utah in the MEC's doorway so he can say he never saw me there. In living fact, Judi was showing Utah off across the street in front of the Courthouse at her Redwood Summer press conference. He was kind of a trophy for her because a lot of the doofuses around here think Utah is a real deal famous person anarchist. He isn't that either. Which is about as impressive as saying you're the tallest guy in Philo. Like Bari and the rest of them, Utah Phillips is strictly a photo-op, cash-up-front "radical." Stalinist too. Big Bill would want no part of this guy.
I put the bomb in Judi's car from my office at the MEC because: (1) I knew our two little girls would definitely not be in the car because they were at Meredyth's house in Redwood Valley, (2) If I put the bomb in Judi's car out in Redwood Valley where we all lived together, the girls might have jumped in to go into Ukiah with their mother for some reason, and I didn't want to risk the thing going off with them in the car, (3) I was afraid that if I put the bomb in Judi's car in Redwood Valley real early Wednesday morning after she and Utah and Dakota Sid and Mrs. Utah and Mrs. Dakota finally fell asleep about two in the morning, the 12 hours on my timer might elapse and activate the bomb in Ukiah, thus focusing a whole lotta attention on me, (4) I had total access to Judi's Subaru at all times, just like I had total access to her garage-house inches from the trailer where we both lived out on Humphrey Lane in Redwood Valley.
And my "office" was at the MEC in downtown Ukiah in McCowen's dingy cave of a slummy structure opposite the Courthouse. Nobody would suspect anything peculiar if they saw me open Judi's car door and put something in her car. Which is what I did. I walked right out of the MEC with the thing wrapped in a towel and shoved it under Judi's seat. I put the bomb under her seat, having constructed it so it would be a perfectly snug fit. I snapped the On switch On, set the clock going and wished my little creation a happy trip south, far from me, the perp, the man who's made a lot of bombs but not a single known one that worked the way it was supposed to.
Sure enough. The bomb got all the way to Berkeley and Oakland without going off. Judi went to a meeting with Seeds of Peace (another group of lurks and murks) in Berkeley then drove to Oakland where she spent the night in the busy home of mega-creep, David Kemnitzer. All this time the bomb was silently ticking off the minutes. Some time between three and four in the morning the twelve hours on the clock had elapsed and my beautiful little bomb was live! All it would take now was the sudden movement of the vehicle — a sharp turn, sudden braking, even a lane change — to ignite it. Which is what happened only a few blocks from Kemnitzer's house in front of Oakland High School.
Ka-blooooooooey!
But I was still in Ukiah and Redwood Valley when my bomb went boom. I was shocked! Shocked, I tell you! And doubly shocked that Judi lived. One end cap blew off slightly before the other, thus diverting a lot of the device's power laterally instead of up. If it had exploded the way I built it to explode, Judi and Cherney both would have been hugging trees eternally, far, far from redwood country.
And if she and Cherney had died in the explosion I would have been home free. Everyone would have assumed she was knowingly transporting my creation and all my problems and potential problems would have been over. But because she didn't die my problems were just beginning, and now here I am 14 years later with two big books on the case coming up and a whole lot of people already giving me the perp look, people like Steve Talbot, for instance. Talbot made a whole movie implicating me in the bombing, and just last year he went on Belva Davis's KQED Television Show and said Judi Bari had told him I bombed her! And now DNA. There's DNA on three of the letters, including the Lord's Avenger Letter, that can be linked straight back to me. It's just a matter of time before everything comes apart.
As soon as I heard Judi had survived my bomb, I wrote the Lord's Avenger Letter, a fact Don Foster, currently at work on the Anthrax Case for the FBI, and the best documents analyst guy in the world has confirmed in such excruciating and truly exact detail all I can do is squirm and say, "Not me. I didn't do it."
Every smart person who's paid any attention to this case always points straight at me; I can't keep it in Mendocino County much longer, and the world outside isn't all Nick Wilsons and Gordy Blacks, or KMUD and KZYX, is it?
The idea of the Lord's Avenger Letter was to divert attention from me onto every other male in the Redwood Empire. I wrote it like I was a religious nut case of a logger who was particularly irate about Judi's performance at an anti-abortion rally in Ukiah.
She and Cherney walked right into the demonstrators, many of them visibly deranged, singing "Shall The Fetus Be Aborted," a grotesque insult and infuriating to the nut pies, many of whom were brandishing those tiny plastic fetuses and oola-ooling with their hands raised to the skies, talking in tongues to the objectively indifferent sky gods. Their leader was a huge guy who'd been an All-Pro defensive end with the Cleveland Browns, Bill Staley. If Mr. All-Pro had gone off there would have been some serious mayhem the length of Dora Street. Fortunately for Bari and Cherney and the rest of us, including me, Mike Sweeney, who was there taking photos for my bomb plot and for my buds at the FBI, Mr. Staley was in direct communication with God at the time and had failed to note the pests who'd invaded his flock.
The reason Utah Phillips is now saying 14 years later that he was in the doorway of the MEC playing his guitar while Judi Bari was across the street in front of the Mendocino County Courthouse for a "press conference" (a "press conference" in Mendocino County consists of two persons, one from the Press Democrat, one from the Ukiah Daily Journal and likely as not neither paper shows up) is that Darryl Cherney and my two daughters, Lisa and Jessica haven't got a cent of the $3.2 million they supposedly won in the phony federal defamation suit in Oakland last year. And the money is held up because the whole case is being "reconsidered." Which means I'm about to go down, and my fellow scammers are getting ready to go back into court to defend their roles in helping me elude justice.
(Progressives around the country, and Pacifica Network people, as credulous a group as we've got going, were told the suit was to keep the FBI in check or it was to save redwoods when all these years that Bari, Cherney, their parasitic lawyers, Tanya Brannan and the sociopathic Brannan's psychotic girl friend Noelle Hanrahan, the last a 205 pound former point guard on the Stanford women's basketball team, were living the good life off several million dollars thus falsely raised.)
Utah's buddy Dakota Sid wouldn't help us lie even a little bit, but Utah has been all the way on board from the start. Heck, Utah rode all the way from Ukiah to Berkeley with Judi and the bomb! Good thing I had a timer and an on/off switch on the thing or the old hundred-thou-a-year Wob might have wobbled off 14 years ago!
But something's up, and it looks like it's me. The cops are sniffing around and not one cent of the $3.2 million Darryl Cherney and my two daughters "won" in that phony federal suit has been paid out. I'm pretty sure this is the year I get arrested. But if I go I'm not going alone because a lot of people have helped cover up the truth about the bombing and I'm taking them down with me. Count on that. I'd like to get Anderson, Jim Martin, Ed Gehrman, Mary Moore, and Irv Sutley too, and if they lived closer together I'd give it a try, but they don't and I probably won't have time to take care of them before I go off to help with recycling programs in the federal prison at Lompoc.
I had a girl friend right away when Judi and I split the blanket or, if you prefer, tore up the Little Red Book. Her name was Meredyth Rinehard. I had her kids seal the Lord's Avenger letter I wrote in a big hurry as soon as I heard my bomb hadn't killed Judi. Her kids were little. Little kids will do whatever you ask them to do, and I asked them to seal the envelope and lick the stamp on it for me. DNA was just coming in as a criminal identifier in 1990, but just in case I didn't want DNA on the thing. Or Judi's DNA on it through our daughters. So I asked Meredyth's kids to do it.
When the subpoenas go out I know Meredyth's gonna be real quick to give me up. Pam Davis and Karen Pickett will rat me out, too, but I've got so much felony-quality stuff on all them, including their crumb bum "progressive" lawyers, and even more on that idiot Cherney, and on Utah Phillips and Brannan's Redwood Summer Justice Project Scam-a-rama, and even on Judge Yuppie Buns down there in Oakland, I'll be taking a whole lotta so-called "progressives" down with me when the feds indict me this year. No sir, I'm not going to jail alone. And you watch the snitch fest fireworks when the DNA subpoenas arrive at certain addresses in '04.
Who wants to go to jail at age 55?
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.â€
Buckminster Fuller
Buckminster Fuller