The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson (27 page)

So, following up, I asked Fuhrman again straight out if he planted the glove.

“Of course it didn’t happen.”

So much for Ron Ziegler. Fuhrman said he couldn’t talk any more and hung up.

My story appeared on Monday, July 18. All through the editing process, the title had been “Playing the Race Card.” But at the last moment, someone at
The New Yorker
thought that was too similar to another headline in the issue, so mine was changed to “An Incendiary Defense.” I wrote that in a series of conversations the previous week, “leading members of Simpson’s defense team floated [a] new and provocative theory. Those conversations revealed that they plan to portray [Mark Fuhrman] as a rogue cop who, rather than solving the crime, framed an innocent man.” Though I summarized the defense hypothesis and explained its basis in the court records from Fuhrman’s pension case, I did not suggest that the theory was true—that is, that Fuhrman did indeed plant the glove. And, of course, I included Fuhrman’s denial prominently.

It is important to remember just how early in the case this was: Nicole and Goldman had been dead for just about a month. Indeed, I noted that “for all its bravado last week, the defense has not
foreclosed any option, including a claim that Simpson did kill his ex-wife and Goldman but was suffering from some sort of insanity. Even a plea bargain remains a possibility.… The new strategy may simply be a form of desperation; the race card may be the only one in Simpson’s hand.”

Was it plausible that Fuhrman had planted the glove? It was, at that point, impossible to say. No one—not the prosecutors, not the defense lawyers, and certainly not reporters like me—knew many details about the case. Few of the DNA tests had been completed. The gloves themselves had scarcely been examined; certainly at this time prosecutors did not know where or when this pair had been purchased or by whom. In testimony at the preliminary hearing, the movements of police investigators, including Fuhrman, in the early morning hours of June 13 had only been hastily sketched.

In retrospect, what mattered most about my story—as well as a similar item about Fuhrman by Mark Miller that appeared in
Newsweek
the same week—was what they promised about how the case would unfold. The issue of race had, to this point, hovered around the edges of the case, with the prosecutors, the press, and even the defense unwilling to acknowledge its explosive potential. Now it was out in the open. I wrote in my article, “If race does become a significant factor in this case—if the case becomes transformed from a mere soap opera to a civil rights melodrama; that is, from the Menendez brothers writ large to Rodney King redux—then the stakes will change dramatically.” At the time, I thought I might be overstating the case when I added, “It appears that the case is about to enter a new phase—one with the potential to affect the city of Los Angeles as a whole, and not just one of its most famous residents.”

Robert Shapiro had a parochial, if accurate, reaction after his Fuhrman-as-racist-villain theory appeared in my story. On the day that issue of
The New Yorker
appeared, Shapiro called F. Lee Bailey in London and said, “It’s over. I won the case.”

8. HORRIBLE HUMAN EVENT

I
had an early taste of what the reaction might be to my story.
The New Yorker
sent out copies to the wire services on Sunday night, July 17, and it was the lead story on many newscasts around the nation. At 8:00 on Monday morning, Maurie Perl,
The New Yorker
’s chief of public relations, received an early morning call from public television’s Charlie Rose, asking if I could be on his program that night. Similar requests came in all day. For me, the week passed in a haze of television talk shows and radio “phoners.” Maurie’s indefatigable staff computed that, based on Nielsen ratings, approximately 170 million people heard a reference to the “Incendiary Defense” story in
The New Yorker
in the first two days after it was published.

By far the most important experience for me came on Monday night, July 18, when I traveled to Washington to be the first guest on that night’s
Larry King Live
. King would come to occupy an unusual niche in the Simpson case. By the time of the trial, King had decided to devote the bulk of his program to the case, and he even moved his base of operations to Los Angeles for long periods. I eventually made several dozen appearances on the show, and King’s CNN studio on Sunset Boulevard came to resemble a sort of Hyde Park Corner for the Simpson case. On any given day that I appeared, I was likely to find a defense lawyer, an expert witness, or some other witness or peripheral figure lingering in the makeup room. For me, a reporter who was actually covering the case, the visits amounted to priceless opportunities to chat with these people in a quiet and intimate setting. So many people involved with
the case developed relationships with King that he became a quasi-participant himself. Robert Shapiro, though he never appeared on the show until the trial was over, became a friend of King’s; so did Skip Taft, Simpson’s business manager, who never even agreed to appear on the show. On the air King always maintained a scrupulous nonpartisanship. His renowned even-handedness extended to his famously busy social life. During the trial King simultaneously dated Jo-Ellan Dimitrius, the defense team’s jury consultant, and Suzanne Childs, Gil Garcetti’s director of communications.

On July 18, 1994, King started his show this way: “The charge is simple and stunning, and it’s already touched off a fresh round of fierce debate in the O.J. Simpson case. The claim from the defense, made public today through a pair of respected magazines, is this: O.J. was framed. Set up as a murderer by a racist cop, who planted one of the famous bloody gloves at the Simpson mansion …” After the introduction, King turned to me and asked, “How did you get the story?”

“I got the story by being tipped off by the defense to go look in the court records. And I burrowed down two stories in the archives of the L.A. Superior Court, and looked in an index under Mark Fuhrman’s name and found a case called
Fuhrman v. The City of Los Angeles
.”

“You were in L.A.?” King asked.

“Yeah.”

“The tip came from the defense?”

I answered, “Tip came from the defense.”

The interview proceeded for the remainder of the hour, and I never gave a second thought to my answers until about a week later. At that point, I checked in with Dershowitz, whose vague tirade had led me to look at the court records in the first place. I had no special agenda with him, but rather called to ask what was up.

“Bob is very pissed at you,” Dershowitz said.

“Why?”

“Because you said on
Larry King
that we had given you the records.”

“I don’t think I said anything like that. It’s not true.”

“No,” Dershowitz continued confidently. “We’ve reviewed the transcript, and that’s what you said. Bob is very pissed.”

We’ve reviewed the transcript
, I thought. They’ve got a client looking at the gas chamber, and they’re reviewing transcripts of
Larry King Live
? I mumbled a vague dissent and steered the conversation in another direction. Much later, when I had a chance to look at the transcript, I came to believe that Shapiro did have a point, although not the one Dershowitz had raised. I never said on
Larry King
that the defense gave me the court records, but I did say that the defense tipped me off to their existence. That was a mistake. They had only spoken vaguely about Fuhrman; I had sought out the records on my own. Still, I wondered, why did Shapiro care? He had gotten his point across. Why was he upset?

Robert Shapiro always wanted to be liked. In the eighth grade of his public school in Los Angeles, he and his friend Joel Siegel—now the lavishly mustached and preternaturally cheerful entertainment reporter for ABC’s
Good Morning America
—had an experience they still talked about forty years later. A clique that called itself the Idols was having a meeting one day, and neither Shapiro nor Siegel was invited. So they just hung around together and moped until the meeting ended. The slight festered. It was as if from that day forward Bob Shapiro, like an updated Scarlett O’Hara, made a vow: With God as his witness, he would never be unpopular again. And he never was.

He was born in Plainfield, New Jersey, in 1942 and the family moved to Los Angeles a year later—an advance guard in the great Jewish migration to West Los Angeles that followed World War II. His mother was a housewife, and his father did a lot of things—drove a lunch wagon, worked in a factory—but Marty Shapiro’s real passion was playing the piano in a small band that did gigs at bar mitzvahs and weddings around the West Side. An only child much loved by his parents and his grandparents, who lived downstairs in their apartment building, Bob sought early on never to disappoint them, and he rarely has.

By the time he arrived at UCLA, at the dawn of the sixties, Shapiro had a showman’s moxie and a taste for action. His taste for the high life earned him the nickname Trini, after the stylish singer Trini Lopez, and fellow students recall his big hair and powder-blue
polyester suit with “zero lapels.” He was always a joiner, first of Zeta Beta Tau, a Jewish fraternity (with a rowdier reputation than the stereotypes suggest), but also of a campus booster organization called the Kelps. Resplendent in their blue-and-yellow caps, the Kelps didn’t do a lot more than cheer for the Bruins at football games, but they were distinctive at UCLA nonetheless. At a time when campus life was rigidly, if unofficially, segregated by race and religion, the Kelps were a diverse group. This appealed to Bob Shapiro, who collected friends promiscuously and who, decades later, would still attend Kelp reunions.

Shapiro went to law school because, well, the frat practically went en masse. Smart and a quick study, Shapiro thrived at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, even though he went through a quick marriage and annulment while there. He was so nervous about California’s notoriously difficult bar exam that he compulsively tore out his eyebrows, but he passed on his first try and began work as a deputy district attorney in the relative backwater of Torrance.

Shapiro spent three years as a prosecutor—a successful if unremarkable tenure—before he caught the eye of the man who would change his life. The way he found his ticket out of Torrance said a good deal about both Shapiro and where he was going. The criminal defense lawyer Harry Weiss, overwhelmed with work, had hired one junior associate, Peter Knecht, and he needed another one in 1972. (Around this time, Weiss asked a young lawyer named Johnnie Cochran to join him. Cochran demurred and gave Weiss a revealing explanation. “I don’t want to work for Harry Weiss,” Cochran said. “I want to
be
Harry Weiss.”) Weiss had also seen Robert Shapiro in action, and found the young lawyer “presentable and charming,” as he later recalled. But something Knecht told Weiss about Shapiro really stuck in his mind. “You know,” Knecht told his boss, “Shapiro is the only deputy D.A. I know who drives a Bentley.” It was, to be sure, only a used Bentley, and Shapiro had no great fortune in those days, but it was all Weiss needed to hear.