The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson (28 page)

In his current entry in
Who’s Who
, Robert Shapiro lists his occupation during the period of 1972 to 1987 this way: “sole practice L.A.” In fact, during most of this period Shapiro was Harry Weiss’s
associate, and during all of it, in an informal sense, he was Weiss’s partner. But after Shapiro became famous in the 1990s, he found it convenient to minimize, and then consign to oblivion, their relationship. The Weiss name—and the Weiss style—did not comport with Shapiro’s later pretensions. Once, during a break in the Simpson trial, I made the mistake of mentioning to Shapiro that I had just met Harry Weiss. Shapiro looked at me as if he had never before heard the name. But for fifteen years, the formative period of his professional life, Bob Shapiro was Harry Weiss’s protégé. And that fancy Napoleonic desk Shapiro sat behind in Century City? A gift from Harry.

At the age of eighty, Harry Weiss—bearing his trademark monocle and two-tone shoes—remains a familiar figure along the corridors of the Los Angeles Criminal Courts Building. He works every day, just as he has since he was four years old and a child star in vaudeville. He had six sisters, and they traveled as a family around the Midwest on the Orpheum circuit, the largest and most prestigious network of vaudeville theaters. As a four- and five-year-old, in the years around 1920, Harry would close the act by demonstrating the now lost art of “recitation.” These were monologues—anything ranging from the Gettysburg Address to soliloquies from
Hamlet
—addressed directly to the audience. “I used to stop the show,” Weiss boasted three quarters of a century later.

The Weiss act ended with the decline of vaudeville and the advent of child labor laws in the twenties, and the family moved to Los Angeles in 1929. Harry became a lawyer in 1940 and never let the skills honed onstage go to waste. From the beginning, long before the era of celebrity defense attorneys, there was something rakish and theatrical about Weiss’s style of practice. In a way, Weiss’s law business reflected his roots in vaudeville—more mass than class, just shy of total respectability. He had his share of famous clients—Peter Fonda, in a marijuana case, and John Lennon, in an immigration dispute—but mostly Weiss believed in volume. There was a saying: Every hooker in Hollywood has Harry’s card.

The seventies, the heyday of Shapiro’s association with Weiss, were boom years for their law practice. They shared a penthouse suite at 8600 Sunset Boulevard, which boasted a private swimming pool to go with the palatial offices for Weiss, Shapiro, and
Knecht. Harry always began his workday the same way, with a conference call at seven in the morning to go over the day’s court appearances. This was no simple matter, because at the time Harry Weiss may have had the biggest criminal law practice in the United States. In an office that never had more than half a dozen lawyers who appeared in court, there might be a hundred appearances to be handled in courthouses that were sometimes twenty miles from one another. (Weiss provided chauffeurs for his top lawyers to help them make their rounds; Shapiro, for a time, hired his own father to drive for him.) The morning conference calls would feature a rotating cast of characters, but there were four regulars: Harry Weiss, Shapiro, Knecht, and Sammy Weiss, Harry’s nephew. (Sammy’s surname was originally Greene, but he changed it to Weiss to bathe in Harry’s reflected glow.) Both Sammy Weiss and Peter Knecht, who drove a Ferrari and dated starlets, had active social lives that made the early morning phone calls an unwelcome chore.

“Are we all here?” Harry would begin.

Sammy Weiss at this point might reply with a slight groan.

“Sammy?” the senior Weiss would ask.

“Wha …”

“SAMMY!”

“What!?”

“You been out again, Sammy? Out dancing or whatever?” Harry would continue at deafening volume. “This is what you have to do. You go get an enema. You listening?”

“Leave me alone, Harry,” Sammy would mumble.

“Listen to me, Sammy!” Harry would shoot back. “Mae West told me that’s why she looks so good. She’s seventy-six years old, she gets enemas. You should too!”

After a little more in this vein it was usually Shapiro, the most levelheaded member of the group, who would interrupt to suggest that Harry move on to the case assignments, and so another day on the circuit would begin. Mostly, Weiss and Shapiro cut deals for their clients. This was imperative, given the number of clients they had to service, but it also reflected the nature of their cases and the personalities of the lawyers. In the mid-1970s the police in Los Angeles still arrested large numbers of people for so-called victimless
crimes—prostitution, drug usage, and some consensual-sex offenses. The firm specialized in the speedy and painless resolutions of these matters. Weiss, in particular, always had many clients in Los Angeles’s gay community, and in the days when Shapiro worked with him, the police were still routinely arresting men for having sex with one another. According to Weiss, “Bob handled many of these cases—vag lewds, we called them. The cops always had these guys dead-bang, and no one ever wanted to go to trial. In those days, the men couldn’t stand the embarrassment of fighting it in public, and anyway, judges never came down too hard on them. So you had to make deals, and Bob made deals. That’s the way you’ve got to do it. He learned.”

Deal making suited Shapiro’s temperament. He has an unusual quality for a successful lawyer—a strong aversion to conflict. Plea bargains please him; both sides win. He is, to be sure, an effective trial attorney, but the area of the law where he truly excels is the cultivation of clients, a skill he honed from his earliest days with Weiss. Shapiro always had ambitions that went beyond the profitable, if low-prestige, Harry Weiss assembly line. He married a beautiful model, Linell Thomas, in 1970. They had no children for a decade, a period that Shapiro spent developing the social contacts that later blossomed into law clients. He and Linell had lunch almost every Sunday at the Beverly Hills Hotel with one high-powered friend or another. One of them was Dale Gribow, a personal-injury lawyer. Gribow introduced Shapiro to Dennis Gilbert, then a successful insurance salesman. In time, Gilbert became one of the biggest agents in professional baseball. When, as sometimes happened, Gilbert’s clients were arrested, he referred them to Shapiro, who became something like house counsel to ballplayers in trouble, a group that came to include Jose Canseco (gun possession), Darryl Strawberry (tax evasion), and Vince Coleman (throwing a firecracker at a group of fans).

There was a pattern to many of Shapiro’s big cases: The facts were usually undisputed; the only issue was punishment—that is, how a bargain could be structured with the prosecutor and judge. This was no secret. On the day he was retained to represent Christian Brando, Marlon’s son, for murdering his half-sister’s lover, Shapiro told the
Los Angeles Times
that he would meet with prosecutors
and try to resolve the case without a trial. Many lawyers would view such a statement as a pointless surrender of bargaining power, but Shapiro had great confidence in his ability to cut a deal. There was another pattern, too, in the celebrity cases. Shapiro cleverly treated these clients as loss leaders, charging them little or nothing in fees, a practice that did not hurt in attracting even more celebrity clients—and, of course, in drawing the lesser-known souls whom Shapiro would make pay through the nose. (The quest for clients was never far from Shapiro’s thoughts. When the Simpson defense team pulled the ludicrous stunt of establishing an 800 number for tips to help them identify the real killer, Shapiro, quite naturally, gave callers the option of pressing 4 if they wanted to retain his services. Embarrassed by the public attention to this feature, Shapiro quickly had it removed, and the number itself was shut down a little while later. Not surprisingly, the 800 number provided no useful information.)

Shapiro cut so many deals so successfully—the celebrities he represented almost never went to jail—that it contributed to an impression that he didn’t know how to try a case. It was true that Shapiro did not relish that side of the job. For example, he hated having to visit his clients in jail. This became a problem in a difficult federal narcotics trial Shapiro conducted in 1989. His client, George Guzman, who had been stopped in a car that contained cocaine, complained bitterly that Shapiro never came to see him; Guzman was even more offended that Shapiro had instructed him not to speak to him in court. Yet when the time came for summations in the trial, Shapiro became so swept away by the emotion of the moment that he embraced his client in front of the jury and shouted, “This man is innocent!” The theatrics drew an astonished rebuke from the judge, but that was nothing compared to Guzman’s surprise: The prisoner recoiled so quickly that he threw out a muscle in his back. But he never complained; the jury acquitted him.

Many of Shapiro’s cases attracted intense media interest, and Shapiro came to fancy himself an expert on dealing with reporters. In January 1993, more than a year before the murders on Bundy Drive, Shapiro wrote a casually revealing article in
The Champion
, a trade publication for criminal defense lawyers. Entitled “Using
the Media to Your Advantage,” it offered a step-by-step guide for attorneys handling high-profile cases. The article was full of sensible advice—be truthful, be courteous, be prompt—and yet it was written with profound ignorance about the larger implications of what he had to say. In some respects, Shapiro figured out clever ways to deal with the frenzy generated by the media in big cases. His advice was cynical, but probably justified under the circumstances. For example: “I tell the reporters in advance that I will be making a statement at the end of the day, and I direct them to an area outside the courthouse. I prefer a lawn with trees or some other attractive background.… The most important lead story on an hour newscast allots only 15 or 20 seconds for a statement from an interview. These ‘sound bytes’ [
sic
] must be concise and easily understood.… Pick and choose the questions you want to answer. You do not have to be concerned with whether the answer precisely addresses the question, since only the answer will be aired.… In dealing with all members of the press, avoid clichés. Referring to a case as a tragedy or to a client as being framed does not convey a thoughtful message. To describe an unfortunate death situation, I use the term ‘a horrible human event.’ ” (Shapiro practiced what he preached. On June 11, 1990, when he took over as counsel for Christian Brando, the third paragraph of the
Los Angeles Times
story read: “ ‘It’s a horrible human event,’ Shapiro said of the fatal shooting last month of Dag Drollet.”)

On close inspection, the calculated sincerity of the Shapiro method certainly may look a little smarmy, but there was little harm in it for a case about a Hollywood peccadillo. Yet Shapiro learned at his peril that the Simpson case was different—because the subject of race is different. In his conversations with me and
Newsweek
’s Mark Miller, Shapiro had raised the subject in American life that is least amenable to compromise and deal making. No “lawn with trees or some other attractive background” could help him here. Shapiro was suddenly out of his league, and he knew it. That was why he was mad at me.

Still, Shapiro’s irritation with me amounted to little more than a minor annoyance. Fundamentally, he was having the time of his
life. He did not give interviews, but he was happy to be courted by the American media royalty. It wasn’t just Larry King who wrote him every day. ABC’s Barbara Walters appeared to pay homage, as did CBS’s Connie Chung. For the moment, Shapiro played coy; there would be no interviews—not least because he didn’t want to be asked on camera whether he thought Simpson was guilty. (He was, however, happy to pose for photographs—by Avedon for
The New Yorker;
by Annie Leibovitz for
Vanity Fair;
and in his boxing trunks for
People
.) So Shapiro took Walters and Chung to dinner, and they agreed to stay in touch.

It was a heady time, and Shapiro loved the action. One day shortly after he was hired, he was waxing nostalgic on the telephone with his old friend Joel Siegel. Siegel was urging Shaps—Bob’s junior high school nickname—to keep a diary of his experiences in the Simpson case. “Just be purely subjective about your feelings about it, and at the end of the trial you’ll have a book,” Siegel said. “You know, we’re not getting any younger, all of us, and this book will be around forever.” Shapiro demurred for the moment, even if he enjoyed the attention. In the middle of the conversation, Shapiro asked Siegel if he could put him on hold. He had to take another call. In a moment, Shapiro was back.