Earth First! could go for seconds

THERE'S A SIMPLE message on Darryl Cherney's answering machine nowadays: "We won."

Fairly understated, considering the Earth First! organizer did more than convince a civil jury last week that he and the late Judi Bari were entitled to a $4.4 million award from three Federal Bureau of Investigation agents and three Oakland cops for violating the duo's First and Fourth Amendment rights.

Indeed, at a moment when the FBI is catching flak from all sides, the jury's decision puts another dent in the agency's beleaguered image.

Not that the bureau doesn't deserve it. In 1990 Cherney and Bari were driving through Oakland when a nail-covered pipe bomb detonated in Bari's Subaru, destroying the car and nearly killing Bari. The FBI and the Oakland Police Department jumped on the case, arresting the duo and very publicly charging them with accidentally blowing themselves up with their own bomb. Two months later the charges were quietly dropped for lack of evidence – and the real bomber was never apprehended.

To the Earth First!ers the arrests looked like a politically motivated attempt to connect them to terrorism – no matter how shaky the evidence – and derail their militant save-the-redwoods campaign, and they said as much in their lawsuit.

And after a six-week trial, the jury agreed.

"We were the victims of terrorism," Cherney told us last week. "And there was never a real attempt to catch the terrorists in our case."

So will the jury's decision whack the FBI into shape? "I don't think so," said attorney Bill Simpich, who represented Cherney and Bari's estate. "I think they need to get hit like this 10 more times."

While this chapter of the 11-year legal grudge match is closed, the Earth First!ers' battle with the feds is ongoing. The FBI and the OPD will undoubtedly challenge the verdict in the appellate courts – and lawyers for the plaintiffs say they're already planning an appeal of their own. "We're going to go after [retired FBI agent] Richard Held," Simpich told us. Implicated in the bogus arrest of Black Panther Geronimo Ji-jaga Pratt in the late 1960s, Held was a high-level agent in the bureau's San Francisco office at the time of Cherney and Bari's arrest. Judge Claudia Wilken exempted Held from the lawsuit in 1998.

But charging ahead with the lawsuit could prove perilous for Cherney and company. In the mid 1980s the Washington, D.C.-based Christic Institute filed a similar suit against the Central Intelligence Agency, charging the agency with orchestrating an anti-Sandinista terror campaign in Nicaragua. When a federal judge shot down the suit in 1989, the Christic Institute got billed for more than $1 million in court costs, bankrupting the group. "I've studied that case," Simpich said, adding that Christic got hammered "because they ran ahead of the evidence. They ran into conspiracy theory-land. In our case, we've got too much evidence."

Thus far, one law enforcement figure at the center of this story has emerged unscathed: FBI bomb expert David R. Williams.

During the trial, Williams, the agent who analyzed the bomb in question, gave testimony that directly contradicted the sworn statements of Oakland cop Michael Sitterud, a defendant. At issue was a search warrant that included nonexistent evidence. Neither man would cop to fabricating the evidence, but in the end the jury slammed Sitterud, finding him liable for $80,000 in damages.

Williams, who wasn't a defendant, has a way of dodging bullets. Responding to allegations of widespread misconduct at the FBI crime lab, the Justice Department's inspector general nailed Williams in 1997, saying he lacked "the objectivity, competence, and credibility that should be expected of examiners from the FBI laboratory." Yet somehow the guy still has a job at the FBI.