Without a Doubt (20 page)

Except for Phillips, none of these guys knew Mark well. They would hardly risk their jobs, not to mention an indictment, to protect him. If their testimony was to be believed, it was a physical impossibility for Mark Fuhrman to have planted evidence.

From where I was sitting, Fuhrman was in the clear. I did my best to reassure him of that. But he was very anxious. Very paranoid. He complained about being treated like a “goddamned suspect.” He complained that the defense was targeting him, trying to destroy him. Things took a turn for the worse when the FBI found a single Caucasian hair on the glove from Rockingham. It most likely belonged to Ron Goldman, but no one could establish this conclusively. The defense asked for hair samples not only from Fuhrman, but from Phil, Tom, and Ron as well.

When I passed this request along to the cops, they went absolutely ballistic.

“We’re not going to be treated like goddamned suspects. Next they’ll want to take our blood,” they huffed.

I warned them that their refusal would look bad, but I said, “Fine. I’ll fight it.” I got myself charged up to oppose a court order for the hair samples. But before I could strap on my armor, the cops had a change of heart. Their attorneys had told them that in refusing, they’d appear to be hiding something. So they agreed to give the hair samples.

I got on the horn to Shapiro. “You won’t need a court order for the hair, Bob,” I told him. Fine, fine. Everything’s cool. I had barely gotten off the line when the cops did another flip-flop. “We’re not giving samples,” they insisted. “We’re not goddamned suspects.” Finally, they complied. And, thank God, when the results came back a few weeks down the line, nobody matched the mystery hair.

The thing that annoyed me was that I’d really gone to bat for those guys, and still they went around grousing that I was disloyal. I could already see the police distancing themselves from this case. By late September, Tom and Phil were “too busy” to do anything I asked. Finally, I just quit calling them and used our D.A. investigators instead.

Annoyed as I was with Tom and Phil, I felt very sorry for them. They’d been beaten down by a barrage of idiotic requests and make-work motions coming their way from the defense team. Shapiro had started his own “investigation” to find the real killer or killers. He’d set up an 800 number that during its first two weeks of operation drew over 250,000 calls. Most of them seemed to come from psychics, psychos, and general cranks who’d had dreams about where the knife was hidden. “Look in the sandbox.” “Look in the tree by the playhouse.” Like we hadn’t thought of that? We got our share of crank callers as well. My favorite was the one who theorized that Simpson, Nicole, and Ron had all sat around in a circle stabbing one another. Crazy stuff. But Tom and Phil had to follow up every lunatic lead or risk being harangued by the defense. After a couple of weeks of this, their expressions were hangdog, their eyes tired. I could just about tell what they were thinking: “We’re too close to retirement to take this bullshit.”

Naturally, Shapiro’s make-work motions ended up on my desk. He wanted murder logs. He wanted dispatching logs. He wanted records of all the people treated for dog bites at emergency wards. The message of this last request, I guess, was that any resident of West L.A. who’d been bitten by a dog during the late hours of Sunday, June 12, 1994, was a potential suspect in the murder of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman. That one gave me a laugh. The perpetrator of a grisly double homicide is going to walk into an emergency room to get treated for a dog bite?

As primary litigator, I shouldn’t have been saddled with these day-to-day distractions. I should have been concentrating on building what is called the case-in-chief—the essence of a presentation that proves the defendant committed the crime. But there was absolutely no time for overall planning or, indeed, any creative thought about this case.

After the prelims were over, I’d expected to have a little breathing room to sit down and organize the mountains of evidence gathering around my desk. A case like this one usually takes a year or more to come to trial. Generally, the defense wants to delay things as long as possible to give themselves time to prepare. They are also hoping that key witnesses will die or disappear in the meantime, so they’ll ask for postponement after postponement until either we or the judge says, “Enough, already. Let’s go.”

Shortly after the prelims, however, Shapiro announced that his client intended to invoke his right to a speedy trial.

When the news reached me, I just put my head on my arms and moaned. “Speedy trial,” by law, means no more than sixty days after an arraignment. It was a good strategy. In fact, I’m surprised that more defense attorneys don’t use it. What it meant was that we had to be ready in eight weeks. It was an absolutely impossible deadline.

I knew that Shapiro was no more ready than we were, but he didn’t have to prepare a case to prove his client’s innocence. All he had to do was stand by and be ready to kick us in the shins. He wouldn’t have to present any evidence until we finished our case. We were at a bigger disadvantage than he was.

The clock started running on July 22, the morning of the defendant’s second arraignment. (A second arraignment is standard. A prosecutor may have acquired more information that would change the charges. In this case, however, they remained the same.)

Simpson arrived at court that morning sporting an expensive dark suit and an irritating swagger. This was new. I remember thinking that his handlers must have adjusted his medication because he was clear-eyed and alert. He appeared confident, which gave me odd comfort. My guess was that Simpson’s confidence often led him to do stupid things. He seemed in the mood to bluster. I wondered if he was being coached to display that swagger in hopes that press and public would remember that the guy in the dock here was the ostentatiously confident O. J. Simpson.

“Do you understand the charges against you, sir?” asked the supervising criminal court judge, Cecil Mills.

Simpson stood up straight and answered as if breaking from a huddle. “Yes, Your Honor.”

“How do you plead?”

Simpson snapped to full attention and boomed, “Absolutely, one hundred percent not guilty.”

You asshole
, I thought.
You unregenerate, scum-sucking creep
.

I watched Simpson as the deputies led him out of the courtroom. He gave the crowd a thumbs-up.
Beneath that three-thousand-dollar suit he’s just one more sadistic punk
, I told myself.
You’ve put a lot of those away. He’s no different
.

But, of course, he was.

By my estimate, O. J. Simpson had already sunk more than a million dollars into his defense, and the case was barely six weeks old. Shapiro alone must be pulling down a retainer well into six figures. Possibly seven. With each passing week, the defense team seemed to be doubling in size. There were at least three private investigators we knew of working for the team, with scores more P.I.s on the freelance pad. Their names kept turning up in the press—as did those of defense attorneys around town looking to get some ink.

One of those was Johnnie Cochran.

Johnnie’s name began circulating through the rumor mill almost immediately after Howard Weitzman dropped out of the picture. At first, Cochran demurred: he was too close to O. J. Simpson to take the case. “He’s a friend,” he would later be quoted as saying. “And that’s a mess, when you start trying to represent a friend.”

I was not surprised to hear that Johnnie knew Simpson. Johnnie knew just about everybody worth knowing in L.A. Smooth, affable, urbane, he was one of those guys who seemed welcome wherever he went, whether it was a political fund-raiser, a film screening, or the courthouse corridors. Johnnie joked and glad-handed like a pol. “Howyadoin? Howyadoin? Howyadoin?”

Everybody wanted to be his friend. He’d done a short stint in the D.A.‘s office as an assistant to John Van de Kamp. That was a political plum; his duties were largely ceremonial and administrative. As for private practice, no one in our office could recall his trying a single, big murder case, save one. During the early seventies he’d defended Geronimo Pratt, a Black Panther who’d been accused of murdering a white schoolteacher. He lost; Pratt was sentenced to life in prison.

Rather, Johnnie had made his reputation as a litigator in civil suits—ones brought against the city by blacks and other minorities who claimed they’d been roughed up by the LAPD. On the wall of his office hung larger-than-life blowups of the seven-figure settlement checks he’d won for his clients. Bill Hodgman had, in fact, tried an attempted-murder case against Johnnie and lost. To Bill’s way of thinking, Cochran was no legal scholar, nor was he a particularly clever tactician. But he was smooth and charismatic and judges seemed to love him. Bill warned me early on that Johnnie would play the race card. Johnnie always played the race card.

I doubted that Cochran would risk his reputation as a pillar of the community for the likes of O. J. Simpson. The defendant was not some brother who’d been shaken down by cops for driving in a white neighborhood. O. J. Simpson could have jogged nude through Bel Air without being arrested. He hobnobbed with white golfing buddies, married a white woman, lived in a mansion, and had effectively turned his back on the black community. He had, moreover, committed two murders of horrific savagery.

Johnnie certainly realized this. At age fifty-six, Johnnie was one of the best-known and best-respected black men in the county. He was in a position to be one of those conciliators to whom both blacks and whites could turn in times of racial distress. A word from him could help calm the waters. Why risk a citywide race riot to promote O. J. Simpson as a cause célèbre?

Shows you what I know. On the morning of O. J. Simpson’s arraignment, I walked into court to find Johnnie Cochran sitting at the defense table.

Johnnie, with his dark good looks and strange iridescent suits, was hard to miss. He was one of the most animated men in public life, and yet the thing that struck me that morning in late July was how quiet he seemed. He was hunched in an upholstered armchair, his chin resting on the tips of his index fingers, in a posture of deep thought. He appeared almost withdrawn. Shapiro was clearly running the show, and Johnnie wasn’t used to being anyone’s second chair.

From the moment he logged on as attorney of record, Johnnie was causing mischief. Word filtered back to me that he was telling reporters that Fuhrman should be grilled on his racial attitudes. “Give me one black on that jury,” he was reported to have said. He didn’t need to finish the thought. Clearly, Johnnie figured that even one African American would be enough to hang a jury.

Not long afterward, Johnnie announced—in open court—that there was a witness who purportedly would clear Simpson and provide an “important lead” on the “real killers.” Johnnie said this evidence was totally inconsistent with the theory of a lone assailant. And is entirely inconsistent with the fact that Mr. Simpson is that assailant.” He suggested that the LAPD had given this witness short shrift. As it happened, the “witness” to whom he was referring had already been checked out by the police. Frank Chiuchiolo, a self-described prowler who had called in shortly after the murders, said that he’d seen a pair of heavyset white men running from the rear alley at Bundy. Before the police could even dispatch detectives to the guy’s house, up north in a town called—I just loved this—Happy Camp, the media had sniffed him out and exposed him as a chronic liar and publicity seeker. This goon—the Happy Camper, we called him—had also surfaced in the Polly Klaas abduction-murder case, where he’d
also
tried to give the cops phony information. And yet here was Johnnie using this shaky lead, proclaiming that the cops and the D.A.‘s office had overlooked crucial evidence in their “rush to judgment”!

You might think that pulling a stunt like this would erode a lawyer’s credibility. But Johnnie Cochran would make these far-fetched or unsupported allegations time and time again, and the media never really held him accountable. Johnnie realized that journalists, by and large, have the attention span of gnats; the important thing was grabbing the headline. In the mad rush of events, he wagered that no one would follow up. And he won the bet, nearly every time.

Something more powerful than principle was operating here. Attorneys who should have known better were being drawn to this case like moths to a floodlight. By the time Simpson was bound over for trial, F. Lee Bailey was being cited as a possible addition to the defendant’s all-star team.

Shortly after joining the team in late June, Bailey gave an interview to NBC’s
Today
show in which he made ridiculous assertions about what the prosecution could and could not prove. He quoted misinformation inadvertently passed to the defense by Juditha Brown—that Nicole had spoken to her mother at eleven P.M. Bailey proclaimed triumphantly that this proved Simpson could not have committed the murders and that the case would soon be thrown out. It was a foolish, sloppy mistake. We’d already gotten phone records that showed that the call had been made at 9:45 P.M., not eleven, which gave Simpson plenty of time to kill two people and make the five-minute drive back to Rockingham. I don’t know what possessed Bailey to shoot his mouth off like that. I just think the guy could not resist an impulse to grab the limelight.

Neither, apparently, could others.

Early on, probably during the first or second week of the case, I’d seen Alan Dershowitz do one of his talking-head numbers on national TV. It seemed to me, at least, that he was convinced of Simpson’s guilt. To PBS talk-show host Charlie Rose, he professed indignation at the “excuses” defendants use nowadays to absolve themselves of guilt. He cited “cop-outs” such as the “battered-woman syndrome” and the “abused-child syndrome.” He predicted that the defense in the Simpson case would most likely mount a mental defense. “The Juice Excuse,” he would call it. Then, the next thing I hear, he’s being touted as one of O. J. Simpson’s “legal strategists.”

Do these guys think no one is listening?