The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson (29 page)

“Joel,” Shapiro said, “say hello to O.J. Simpson.”

Siegel unexpectedly found himself on a conference call with America’s most famous murder defendant and his lawyer. Simpson knew Siegel worked in the media, of course, and the defendant started venting his anger at what he regarded as the unfair treatment he had received in the press. “Why don’t they talk to my friends?” Simpson said. “I’m not a wife beater.”

Shapiro said he wanted to raise another subject. They had made great progress in hiring legal and scientific experts, but there was still the matter of a trial lawyer. Shapiro was looking at some people they might want to bring in to help at the trial. There were three main candidates. Astonished at what he was hearing, Siegel could not resist sharing his good fortune. Without telling Shapiro (or, needless to say, Simpson), Siegel patched in Roger Cossack, another old chum of his and Shapiro’s from Los Angeles. In this bizarre four-way phone call, O.J. Simpson evaluated the lawyers who might defend him in court.

Simpson didn’t like one of the candidates, which was actually a team, Leslie Abramson and Gerald Chaleff. Simpson didn’t know Chaleff, a well-regarded Santa Monica—based defense attorney who had represented Angelo Buono in the “Hillside Stranger” case. It was Abramson who was the problem. Simpson just didn’t cotton to the frizzy-haired counsel to Erik Menendez.

The second possibility was Johnnie Cochran. Simpson liked Cochran well enough, and he wasn’t willing to dismiss him as a possibility.

But the third candidate had become Simpson’s favorite. O.J. had seen Gerry Spence on television for years. Dressed in his trademark cowboy hats and fringed leather jackets, the sage of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, had deployed his cornpone charm for clients as diverse as Karen Silkwood and Imelda Marcos. O.J. thought he was great.

“Get me Gerry Spence,” the defendant said.

9. MR. COCHRAN WANTS TO KNOW

O
ne of the enduring fictions of the Simpson case was the notion of the defendant himself as “involved” in his defense. Press reports persistently portrayed Simpson as virtually a member of his own defense team. O.J., it was said, was “plotting strategy” and “planning his own defense.” Simpson’s attorneys manufactured this idea primarily as a gift to their client and as a way of remaining in his good graces. Moreover, the idea of Simpson as a formidable figure in his own right—an African-American of stature—helped rally black support to him. In addition, the lawyers knew that many journalists would take their line about Simpson’s level of involvement at face value, even as it was transparently false. Treating Simpson as the equal of his lawyers fit nicely with the paternalistic approach many mainstream journalists take in writing about race. According to these informal standards, white reporters can write with candor about the intellectual limitations of their fellow whites, but not blacks. Absurdly, black sensibilities are thought to be too tender for the truth. Indeed, it is thought to be flirting with a charge of racism to draw attention to the intellectual limitations of any African-American, especially a prominent one like Simpson. So accepting the idea of Simpson as the peer of his attorneys relieved the mainstream press of confronting the obvious truth about him—that he was an uneducated, semiliterate ex-athlete who could barely understand much about the legal proceedings against him.

O.J. didn’t even understand the nature of the defense strategy Shapiro had constructed. Shapiro was, for example, incredulous
that Simpson wanted Gerry Spence as his lawyer. Shapiro had nothing against Spence, but he regarded the Wyoming attorney as self-evidently the wrong man for the job. The defense in this case would be race—Shapiro had decided that from the very beginning. What could Spence offer to, in Shapiro’s preferred code words, “a downtown jury”?

In truth, Shapiro didn’t really want any other lawyers added to the team. In the first week after the murders, he had assembled all the supporting players he wanted, and he regarded any more high-profile assistance as superfluous, not to mention a threat. But O.J.’s friends—much the same group that had lobbied Simpson to evict Weitzman from the case—felt otherwise. They worried about Shapiro’s reputation as a plea bargainer. They fretted about his relative lack of trial experience. The informal leader of O.J.’s kitchen cabinet, Wayne Hughes, a private-warehouse mogul, made clear that he and his peers wanted another high-powered trial attorney on the team. Shapiro reluctantly agreed. But O.J. wanted Gerry Spence.

Out of a sense of obligation to his client, Shapiro went so far as to invite Spence to California for consultations about the case. On Friday, July 15, Spence came to Los Angeles for a secret meeting, held at the Beverly Hills home of Shapiro’s friend Michael Klein. Shapiro presented the possibility of Spence joining the defense team in terms he knew the lawyer would reject. “I will be the lead counsel,” Shapiro told the famously strong-willed Spence. Shapiro also told Spence of his plans to make race a key part of the defense, and in particular of his intention to use Mark Fuhrman as the focus of that strategy. (Though Shapiro had spoken to me about Fuhrman on Wednesday, July 13, my story would not hit the newsstands until the following Monday, after Spence’s visit to Los Angeles.) As Shapiro could have surmised, Spence had neither the experience nor the inclination to defend this double-murder case based on a nonexistent conspiracy of racist police officers. And, again as Shapiro surely predicted, Spence had no desire to play second fiddle to anyone. “I have to be captain of the ship,” he told Shapiro.

In the course of their meeting, Shapiro mentioned to Spence in passing that he was also talking to Johnnie Cochran about joining
the team as a trial lawyer. Who else but the foremost black attorney in Los Angeles to conduct a defense based on race? Spence averred that Cochran sounded like a much better fit. Shapiro agreed. So did Wayne Hughes, and so, ultimately, did all of Simpson’s friends who were consulted. For a time, only O.J. demurred. He liked Cochran, had even talked to him several times since the murders, but he wasn’t sure if he wanted him as his lawyer. It is one of the richer and more revealing ironies of the case that only O.J. Simpson—“I’m not black. I’m O.J.”—failed to understand the preeminent place of race in his own defense. Simpson was himself so alienated from the world of his fellow black Angelenos that he alone failed to recognize what was obvious to whites and blacks alike: that Johnnie L. Cochran, Jr., had been waiting his whole life for this case, and this case had been waiting for Johnnie Cochran as well.

Shapiro and the others prevailed upon Simpson to put aside his infatuation with Spence, and Cochran was hired officially on Monday, July 18. Since the day of the murders, Cochran had been commenting on the case almost daily for the
Today
show and other programs, presenting himself as a nominally independent outside analyst of the case. In fact, he had been laying the groundwork all along for the role that he saw would probably be coming his way. Shortly after the freeway chase, for example, Cochran told Bryant Gumbel on
Today
, “I think Mr. Cowlings is probably a hero and helped save O.J. Simpson’s life. I would urge all your viewers to keep an open mind until you’ve heard all the evidence, and don’t prejudge the case, so that hopefully we can get a fair trial.” During the preliminary hearing, Katie Couric asked Cochran on
Today
if he thought the police had violated Simpson’s rights in searching his house. “I think it’s a little more in favor of the defense right now,” Cochran said. “They were there, it seems to me, looking for suspects, and they created this fanciful justification for their having gone over the wall after the fact. These officers had the Fourth Amendment backward. Search first, then ask permission.” All in all, as Cochran put it another time on
Today
, “I think the defense made a very strong showing.… I think this case is now clearly
about the Fourth Amendment and whether or not it’s alive and well in Los Angeles County.”

Boundless confidence and infectious enthusiasm served as touchstones of Cochran’s character, and Simpson quickly absorbed his new lawyer’s good cheer. Cochran had a standard greeting for friends and colleagues. “Are you okay, my brother?” he would ask, and then continue, without pausing for an answer, “I’m okay. Are you okay? I’m okay.” It was patter more than conversation, but it tended to work. On the first day Cochran appeared beside him as his lawyer, O.J. looked better than he had at any time since his arrest. That was at the arraignment on July 22, 1994, when Simpson boomed out his “Absolutely, 100 percent not guilty.” Simpson’s spirits reflected Cochran’s attitude—upbeat, positive, even chipper. Once Cochran signed onto the case, the question of whether Simpson had in fact murdered his ex-wife and her friend became immaterial. Cochran had a gift, and he knew it. Preeminently in his generation of lawyers, Johnnie Cochran had perfected the art of winning jury trials in downtown Los Angeles. Now he was going to do it for O.J. Simpson.

As the strap on the burlap sack rubbed his shoulder raw and his young man’s fingers turned cramped and gnarled under the Louisiana sun, Johnnie L. Cochran, Sr., had only one thought: This is not for me. He was working the fields in the tiny town of Caspiana, about twenty miles south of Shreveport, and for the first time in his life, harvest duties on the family’s eight-acre patch of cotton had fallen to him.

It was June 1935, and Johnnie had just turned nineteen. Northern Louisiana was desperately poor country. But the Cochrans were ambitious, even in tiny Caspiana, which had only about thirty families. As an only child, Johnnie was blessed with as much good fortune as a sharecropper’s son might reasonably allow himself to expect. His father valued education, and forgoing the young man’s help in the fields, he sent young Johnnie to live with an aunt in Shreveport so that he could go to high school.

There Johnnie L. Cochran, Sr., would find his life’s work: insurance sales. After graduating from high school, he plugged into one
of the most important social and financial networks in early twentieth century African-American life, albeit one mostly invisible to the white world. Cochran went to work at Louisiana Life, which was one of several black-owned insurance businesses that had cropped up around the turn of the century. In an era when white-owned banks and insurance companies refused to do any business with black folks, these small and often struggling insurance companies represented practically the only way African-Americans could save for their future. Just as important, jobs at these companies represented nearly the only employment options, outside of the ministry, for white-collar work in the black community. The slogan of one of the best-known black insurance companies—“The Company with a Soul and a Service”—reveals that they saw their mission as something more than merely commercial. They were also cautious instruments of black empowerment. The tension between these motives—between God and mammon, the spiritual and the earthly—formed a central theme of the Cochran family story.

Every payday, the dapper young insurance agent would go door-to-door in Shreveport’s black neighborhoods. He collected about a nickel a week for the policies, which paid death benefits of about $100. Polite yet dogged, Cochran built a business and a life in the late 1930s. He was promoted to manager and married a local girl. From 1937 to 1940, he and his wife, Hattie, had three children in rapid succession: Johnnie junior, Pearl, and Martha. As it did for so many other families, the specter of World War II threw their ordered lives into tumult.