Murder in Brentwood (32 page)

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MURDER IN BRENTWOOD

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absolutely lying-and Marcia will back me up on this-the contacts he has with Lieutenant York are the kind that are very hard to forget.”

All of a sudden I was Johnnie Cochran’s best witness, and the defense had a new strategy. After reminding Ito of his wife’s position, Johnnie Cochran promised they would never call York as a witness. To the defense team, getting the tapes into the trial was more important than holding the York issue over Ito s head.

And the prosecution changed course as well. While Marcia knew from the start that she could derail the trial at any time, she had not wanted to question York’s declaration or call her as a witness. Now, during the in-camera hearing, she said that the prosecution might call her after all

The argument shifted to the courtroom, where Ito held an open hearing without the jury present. Here, Cochran played to the cameras, using the forum to publicize the tapes and play racial politics. His argument in open court was theatrical and long-winded, even for Johnnie Cochran. Among other things, he said, “This is a blockbuster! This is a bombshell! This is perhaps the biggest thing that’s happened in any case in this country in this decade.” Cochran continually downplayed York’s role in the tapes, and the issue of her testimony was obscured by a blizzard of inflammatory rhetoric and carnival barking that could only heighten the public’s interest.

Still, a decision had to be made, If York were called as a witness, either another judge would have to hear her testimony, or Ito would have to step down and declare a mistrial. At this stage of the trial, nobody wanted to start all over again. Ito recused himself from the issue of deciding whether or not his wife was a material witness. The conflict of interest dispute was eventually settled by Judge John H. Reid, who ruled that York could offer no relevant testimony to the Simpson trial. Reid’s ruling established that Ito would stay on the case. The York issue was finally laid to rest.

Judge Reid found that York could testify to no relevant issue in this case, despite the fact that she was married to the judge, and had made a sworn declaration that was problematic at best. Meanwhile, my use of an epithet in notes for a fictional screenplay is supposed to be relevant and material? Is there something wrong here?

Now Ito had to decide whether the tapes should be admitted as evidence. But before he did so, Lawrence Schiller created an edited tape version for use in the courtroom. Schiller’s job was to enhance the sound quality and select vignettes for the court. What he did was to wrench my statements out of context and make them seem even more hateful.

While Ito considered the issue, the defense leaked selected portions of the tapes to the media. Not only had the public heard these excerpts, but no doubt members of the jury, who had a conjugal visit over the weekend the tapes were leaked, did also.

On August 29, Ito had been reviewing the material for nearly a week and still hadn’t come to a decision. He called for oral arguments from both the prosecution and defense, without the jury present. Laura was called in to testify, and Schiller’s excerpts from the tapes were presented. After a fifteen-minute recess, Ito said from the bench: “I think that there is an overriding public interest in the nature of the offer. I don’t want this court ever to be in a position where there is any indication that the court would participate in suppressing information that is of vital public interest.”

In other words, politics and publicity had once again overwhelmed the law. The tapes could be admitted as material evidence in O.J. Simpson’s trial for murder.

Sitting in Sandpoint watching this mess unfold, I received a phone call from Laura’s husband, Dan McKinny. Dan called to tell me that Laura was subpoenaed to appear at the Simpson trial. I knew this already, but Dan added that Laura didn’t want to speak to me in case they asked if she had been in contact with me since being served with a subpoena. Dan went on:

“Laura wants you to know that if she’s asked on the stand about your relationship with her, she is going to admit that you and she had a sexual relationship in the beginning.”

Dan also added that he knew that Laura and I had had this type of relationship when we first started the project. I thanked Dan for the heads up.

My wife could tell that something was wrong. I turned to her and, although it wasn’t easy, told her what Dan had said. I had never admitted to her that Laura and I had been sexually involved because I still had to meet Laura periodically and I didn’t want my wife to think anything was going on. I shouldn’t have worried about it.

Caroline simply said, “I’ve known that for years, even if you didn’t want to admit it. I once found a letter she wrote you. It was a letter only a lover writes.”

At that moment I saw the profound strength in this woman I thought I already knew so well.

I was in Los Angeles, waiting to be called back to the stand, when Laura testified. I avoided following the trial during her testimony, but my wife watched carefully. When Laura was asked if she and I had had a sexual relationship, she testified, “No, it was a business relationship.”

My wife was furious. The moment she heard Laura’s statement, she called Patty Jo Fairbanks in the “O.J. room” and told her about the love letter and the phone call from Laura’s husband. Patty Jo was plugged into the prosecution table by computer, so she immediately typed the information and sent it on to Clark and Darden. This message to the prosecutors caused Darden to ask Laura about the letter, but she denied writing it.

Darden asked Laura one question that should have been the pivotal issue in putting the whole tape controversy into its proper context. Darden asked Laura, “Did Mark Fuhrman talk this way when you were not taping for the screenplay?”

“No.”

The prosecution should have followed up on that question and later used it to argue that I was not expressing my own thoughts or feelings, but those of fictional characters. Unfortunately, the inflammatory nature of the excerpts and the media and public’ reaction to them made the prosecution run scared. Not only would they not defend me, but they ran away from me as fast as they could. And sometimes they even spent more time and energy attacking me than the defense did.

I don’t want to sound as if I’m trying to justify what I said on those tapes. I am ashamed of my words. Taken out of context, they are worse than horrible. And even in context, they are ugly. There is no excuse, not even literary license, that can justify or condone the pain I caused people of all colors. I had no idea that the tapes would ever be made public, but I should have thought about how my friends, black and white, would feel if they heard them. Notwithstanding my shame about what I said on those tapes, there are issues and comparisons that reasonable people should at least consider.

Johnnie Cochran deems the “N” word as a term of affection. Here is a description of life in his law firm according to Lawrence Schiller:

“In Cochran’s office, there were few whites. A distinct minority, they came and went. There was a camaraderie among the entire staff that transcended racial politics. For the most part, the white world stayed outside. Inside the firm, you were family. Words that shocked and offended white society were coin of the realm. ‘Nigger’ and ‘motherfucker’ were terms of affection.”

It appears Johnnie Cochran is offended by certain hateful words only when it suits his own self-interest.

Joseph Wambaugh is America’s premier cop novelist. I am a big fan of Joe’s and have read every book he has written, one of which is The Choirboys.

The Choirboys is a fast-paced book about street police with all the action, sex, racism, and controversy Hollywood likes, but that would take any normal cop six lifetimes to experience. I read the book long before I worked with Laura on the screenplay, and I’m sure it influenced how I viewed a good cop story.

Recently, I pulled out my copy of The Choirboys. Here’s what’s written on the back jacket: “The Choirboys is fiction, but every major scene in it happened; the most bizarre events depicted are all real. Joseph Wambaugh gives us action scenes reminiscent of In Cold Blood and surrounds them with humor scenes equally strong. For this is the story of a group of men endangered ultimately not by the violence of their jobs but by their choice of off-duty entertainment. The result is a novel as boisterous and freewheeling as a Rabelaisian romp and as chillingly authentic as only a veteran police officer can make it.”

Wambaugh himself said about The Choirboys, “This is the truest novel I have ever written.”

Rereading The Choirboys, I discovered countless examples of characters describing African Americans and others in extremely crude and racist terms. Taken out of context-by someone like Johnnie Cochran perhaps-they are the words of Joseph Wambaugh, racist. But within the structure of the novel, they are the words of Joseph Wambaugh, author, and are necessary for the tone, theme, and character development of the book.

The Choirboys was the first novel Joseph Wambaugh wrote after leaving the department. Joe was drawing on his own experiences, no doubt embellishing them; but he also did research, including interviews, and most probably tapes of several policemen, past, present, and retired, who have different personalities, different imaginations, and different abilities to expound on humorous and dangerous situations. In some ways, I think Joe Wambaugh was an unconscious mentor of my novice attempt at writing a work of fiction. In writing The Choirboys, Wambaugh no doubt sifted through countless notes and tapes, and one can only imagine what he left out. In the research material Laura and I worked on, there are forty-one references to the “N” word. In the published edition of The Choirboys, there are fourteen references to the “N” word. Does that mean Joseph Wambaugh is a racist?

The similarities are not mere coincidence. Joe and I are both widely experienced former police officers and detectives of the Los Angeles Police Department. Joes novels are best-sellers, while my screenplay was never produced, but both of us, in our own ways, have taken our experiences on the street and tried to transform them into gritty, dramatic works of imagination.

Joe wrote The Choirboys at a time when we weren’t so thin-skinned, when we had a better sense of humor and a greater appetite for realism. Even a movie as sweet and innocent as Forrest Gump uses the “N” word several times, as of course do other works of fiction like Huckleberry Finn. When is the word evil, when is it ironic, and when is it legitimately used by an author to capture the realities of life on the street?

I believe the “N” word is evil if it is meant to pierce someone’s feelings, to demean and dehumanize them. Used in a story like Joe Wambaugh’s, the word either reflects the hatred of a character, or shows how that character is attempting, however insensitively, to make light of racial pressures and troubling situations. When some fictional cops use the word to refer to criminals, they mean it to be insulting. It’s difficult to work the streets every day, to see innocent people robbed and beat up and sometimes killed, and not have strong feelings about criminals. But just because Joe used harsh dialogue doesn’t mean many of today’s cops actually talk that way. Any one of the epithets in Joe’s book would result in a suspension or possible civil rights lawsuit. Either way, when the word is used in a story, it’s not an attack on anybody, just artistic license.

Joe wrote The Choirboys in an attempt to give the public what it seemed to want, and, judging by its success, he must have done just that. Drama is always exaggerated, with larger-than-life heros and villains. The Choirboys was a best-seller that was made into a movie and eventually earned its author millions of dollars. Wambaugh went on to write several other best-selling novels and nonfiction books, many of which also became films or television specials. He’s a talented writer and a smart guy who actually has real experience out on the street. There are a lot of other people out there writing cop books, but Wambaugh’s struck a responsive chord.

People want realism in novels, movies, or television shows about cops, though our ideas of realism change. In the 1950s people responded to Dragnet and Joe Friday, ramrod straight and stone cold sober, decked out in a suit and a flattop, wanting nothing but the facts, ma’am. In the 1990s, people respond to NYPD Blue and Homicide and characters like Andy Sipowicz, a tough, troubled man who makes mistakes but has a good heart, who’s trying to do an almost impossible job and somehow keep his life together. People still want cops who are dedicated to the job, and they also want to know what makes these people tick. They want to know about the problems cops have with their families, with alcohol, with stress and the pressures of their job. People want to see the toll the job takes. They want to feel like they’re experiencing policework at the gut level.

If NYPD Blue and Homicide were on cable instead of the networks, the racist, sexist, and violent language on those programs would probably be much like the screenplay I tried to write. Go to any theater or video store and check out the current selection of cop movies. I guarantee you’ll find racism, sexism, vile language, and despicable actions by cops and criminals alike. In real life, people need cops to perform some of the most distasteful tasks that civilized society requires. In entertainment, people need cop stories for catharsis, to work out some of their own frustrations and moral confusion, to pursue criminals who all too often go unpunished, and to express the difficulties of living in a fallen world.

That’s all I was trying to do in writing a screenplay with Laura Hart McKinny. She wanted gritty realism about life on the streets, so I told her some stories and did some play-acting. These stories were, in part, based on my own experiences and the experiences of others. But they were also stories that had gone through the meat grinder of my own imagination. They were embellished, exaggerated, even entirely made up.

The issue of truth versus fiction aside, we have to recognize that there is a difference between words and deeds. O.J. Simpson murdered two people. I said some horrible things. Somehow the defense, aided by the media and a public eager to let a popular celebrity off the hook, was able to turn the trial around. Of course, Judge Ito and the prosecution helped out. Ito could have ruled that my use of the “N” word was irrelevant to the murder trial. The prosecution could have fought harder to exclude the tapes or, once they were introduced, put them in their proper perspective. But in the end, since I made the tapes, I bear the responsibility.