The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson (25 page)

The revelation that tabloid outlets had paid several prosecution witnesses for interviews led, indirectly, to my own involvement in the Simpson case. Around the time of the murders, I was completing a story for
The New Yorker
about “cash for trash.” My article focused almost entirely on how the investigation of Michael Jackson for sexual abuse of minors had been severely compromised because so many potential prosecution witnesses had been paid by the tabloids. I had a chance to add a few details about the tabloids’ role in the early days of the Simpson case—specifically, with regard to Jill Shively and the Ross Cutlery witnesses—and my story appeared on newsstands on Tuesday, July 5, 1994.

Later that week, unbeknownst to me at the time, the editor of
The New Yorker
, Tina Brown, asked the photographer Richard Avedon to travel to Los Angeles to take pictures of the defense and prosecution teams in the Simpson case. He and Susan Mercandetti, an editor at
The New Yorker
who often works with Avedon, spent the bulk of that week negotiating with Shapiro and his colleagues about how and when the defense-team photographs would be taken. The photo shoot of the prosecutors went off fairly smoothly, but dealing with Shapiro turned out to be a tense and frustrating experience for my colleagues. First the session was on, then it was off. Some people were included in the picture, and then they were not. The problem, as Shapiro explained it to Susan, was that the makeup of the defense team was in flux. (Though he did not say so at the time, the key issue was whether Johnnie Cochran would be joining the team.)

In the end, Shapiro proposed a compromise to Avedon and Mercandetti. Shapiro could not produce the entire defense team for a photograph, but he could produce … Shapiro. He would agree to sit for a solo portrait. He proposed this solution as if it had not
been his hope all along, and Avedon ultimately did take Shapiro’s photograph. Shapiro knew that the process leading up to the portrait had been bumpy, to say the least, so he made a peace offering to the
New Yorker
team. He and his wife would take Avedon and Mercandetti to dinner at Eclipse, a trendy West Hollywood restaurant. Mercandetti, who had given birth to a daughter just a couple of months before, wanted nothing more than to go home to Washington, but she agreed to go to dinner.

At the restaurant Shapiro was in his glory. Producers and agents paid court at the banquette. Shapiro basked. Avedon, in an expansive mood, felt compelled to share with the table the fact that Susan was a nursing mother. On learning this news, Shapiro rose theatrically from his seat and spoke to Bernard Erpicum, the suave maître d’ of Eclipse. Moments later, Bernard reappeared with a package for Susan: a breast pump. Needless to say, Susan had not requested this gift, but she managed to mumble a stunned thank-you. She spent the rest of the meal mortified by Shapiro’s presumptuousness (however well intentioned), and contemplating a departure from the business altogether.

In any event, Tina Brown told me on Monday, July 11, that Shapiro had told Susan he might—
might
—agree to be interviewed by me about the case. Tina said I should make plans to go to Los Angeles the next morning. I made an airplane reservation, but I doubted anything would come of it. It didn’t sound like Shapiro had made much of a commitment to Susan, and I worried that I would just be stuck out there with nothing to write.

Tina had no patience for my agonizing. “Look,” she said. “There’s no story in New York. Just go.” I went.

I did have one possible lead. While I was still in New York, I had had a brief telephone conversation with Alan Dershowitz, who had by then joined Simpson’s defense team. Ten years earlier, I had taken Dershowitz’s first-year criminal law class at Harvard Law School, and we had spoken occasionally in subsequent years. In the course of a rambling and unfocused talk, Dershowitz went on a lengthy tirade about one of the detectives involved in the case. Knowing that in my previous career as a prosecutor I had been a junior
member of the Iran-contra Independent Counsel’s staff, Dershowitz described the detective in question to me: “He sounds like Oliver North, looks like Oliver North, and lies like Oliver North.” I had thought little of the comment at the time, but reviewing my notes on the flight to California, I thought it might be worth pursuing the subject.

When I arrived late Tuesday, I found out there had been no progress in my getting an audience with Shapiro. So, on the morning of Wednesday, July 13, I decided to follow up on what I had heard from Dershowitz. There was, I was sure, no news in the fact that Dershowitz thought ill of the detective. But if the detective really did have a bad record, there was bound to be an official file. I began by calling the LAPD and asking if I could see the detective’s disciplinary record. I was not allowed to see anything in his file, but I was told there had been no formal adjudications against him. In short, no help. So I thought of another tack. From my days as a prosecutor, I knew that law enforcement officials were often sued for violating the civil rights of people they encountered. Perhaps there had been judgments against the detective. I decided I would go look.

But before I set out to find any records, I had to settle something. From my hotel room, I placed a call to David Kirkpatrick, a fact checker for
The New Yorker
. I asked him to check the spelling of the name Dershowitz mentioned.

“I have it in my notes as F-U-R-M-A-N, but that looks wrong to me,” I said.

Kirkpatrick set me straight: F-U-
H
-R-M-A-N.

Shortly after ten, I parked near the long, low Los Angeles County Courthouse and made my way inside. About halfway down the corridor that runs the length of the main floor, I found the room where all cases are indexed on microform. I sat down to see if Mark Fuhrman had ever been sued.

No—not exactly. But the file did indicate that on August 24, 1983, Fuhrman himself had filed a lawsuit. And the defendant, curiously enough, was the City of Los Angeles Fire and Police Pension System. I showed the clerk the case number—C 465,544—and asked where I might find the paperwork. She told me that since it was so old, it would be in closed files in the archives, across
Hill Street. Following her directions, I found myself staring at an elevator door that seemed to have been planted by itself near the side of the street. I stepped aboard the elevator and saw that there was, of course, nowhere to go but down. I rode it to the bottom.

There I discovered a ghostly subterranean Los Angeles, a network of cool, deserted corridors connecting the buildings above to one another. I followed the signs to the archives, which turned out to be housed in a vast, hangarlike chamber where everything, especially the employees, seemed to exist in a fluorescent haze. I filled out a form and then watched the clerk disappear into the endless stacks of forgotten papers. After less than ten minutes, she called my number and handed me a file about two inches thick. I took it to a table and began to study the contents.

The case file amounted to a miniature autobiography of Mark Fuhrman: born February 5, 1952; grew up in Washington State; a brother died of leukemia before Mark was born; father a truck driver and carpenter; parents divorced when he was seven. In 1970, Fuhrman joined the marines, then served in Vietnam as a machine gunner. He thrived in the service until his last six months there. As Fuhrman later explained to Dr. Ronald R. Koegler, a psychiatrist, he stopped enjoying his military service because “there were these Mexicans and niggers, volunteers, and they would tell me they weren’t going to do something.” As a result of these problems, in 1975 Fuhrman left the marines and went almost directly to the Los Angeles Police Academy.

Fuhrman excelled at the academy, finishing second in his class, and his career at the LAPD had a promising start. His early personnel ratings were high. One superior wrote, “His progress is excellent and with continued field experience he would progress into an outstanding officer.” But in 1977, Fuhrman’s assignment was changed to East L.A., and his evaluators began to show some reservations. “He is enthusiastic and demonstrates a lot of initiative in making arrests,” a superior wrote at the time. “However, his overall production is unbalanced at this point because of the greater proportion of time spent trying to make the ‘big arrest.’ ” Dr. Koegler wrote, “After a while he began to dislike his work, especially the
‘low-class’ people he was dealing with. He bragged about violence he used in subduing suspects, including chokeholds, and said he would break their hands or face or arms or legs, if necessary.”

Fuhrman was moved into the pursuit of street gangs in late 1977, and while his job ratings remained high, he reported that the strains of the job affected him. “Those people disgust me, and the public puts up with it,” he told Dr. John Hochman, another psychiatrist, referring to his gang work. Fuhrman said that he was in a fight “at least every other day” and that he had to be “violent just to exist.” In just one year, he said, he was involved in at least twenty-five altercations while on duty. “They shoot little kids and they shoot other people,” he told Dr. Hochman. “We’d catch them and beat them, and we’d get sued or suspended.… This job has damaged me mentally. I can’t even go anywhere without a gun.” Fuhrman explained, “I have this urge to kill people that upset me.”

The stress of police work took such a toll that in the early 1980s, Fuhrman sought to leave the force. His lawyers asserted that in the course of his work, Fuhrman “sustained seriously disabling psychiatric symptomatology” and as a result should receive a disability pension from the city. To get that pension, Fuhrman waged a protracted legal battle. The extensive case file documenting his efforts, replete with detailed psychiatric evaluations of the officer, was paradoxical. In all of Fuhrman’s own briefs, he was portrayed as a dangerously unbalanced man; as one of them put it, Fuhrman was “substantially incapacitated for the performance of his regular and customary duties as a policeman.” In the city’s answers, however, he was called a competent officer, albeit one involved in an elaborate ruse to win a pension. Dr. Hochman observed, “There is some suggestion here that the patient was trying to feign the presence of severe psychopathology. This suggests a conscious attempt to look bad and an exaggeration of problems which could be a cry for help and/or overdramatization by a narcissistic, self-indulgent, emotionally unstable person who expects immediate attention and pity.” In either case—whether Fuhrman was a psychotic or a malingerer—the picture of him was an unattractive one. Fuhrman lost his case and, as a result, remained on the force.

As I studied the file, its implications were obvious. The Fuhrman disability case had the potential to thrust the specter of Rodney
King into the middle of the Simpson case. The officer depicted in this battle over a pension seemed the archetype of the bigoted, bullying L.A. cop. If Simpson’s lawyers chose to use this file—and I wondered at the time whether they even knew about it—it could transform the case, which to that point had been regarded as largely apolitical. Would that change? Having seen Fuhrman’s file, I decided it was now all the more important that I speak to Shapiro.