The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson (31 page)

As always, Cochran’s motives were mixed. Reducing his income at that moment allowed him to pare down his divorce settlement with
Barbara. Also, his having done a stint in a prominent public position would help his law practice when he returned to it. But Cochran brought unfeigned passion for racial justice to his job as a prosecutor, and he made a special effort to leave a legacy on the issue that mattered most to him.

Cochran had come to focus his practice on the racial abuses of the LAPD. He had no shortage of material. His most prominent case after Deadwyler involved the murder prosecution of former Black Panther Geronimo Pratt, who was convicted over Cochran’s vehement insistence that he was framed. The case became, and remains, a cause célèbre in black Los Angeles. Later, Cochran joined the D.A.’s office in the middle of the investigation of the police shooting of Eulia Love, a woman whose chief crime seemed to have been the failure to pay her gas bill. As a top prosecutor, Cochran had finally arrived in a position where he could take on the LAPD on nearly equal terms. He and Van de Kamp organized what became known as the “rollout unit,” a special cadre of deputy district attorneys who would independently investigate all police shootings in the city. The LAPD despised the rollout unit, and the powerful police union went so far as to picket a Van de Kamp fund-raising event in protest, yet the unit still seems to have had an impact in reducing the unjustified use of force. The rollout unit also demonstrated the small-world nature of the Los Angeles legal world. Cochran’s subordinate, who ran the unit on a day-to-day basis, was deputy district attorney Gil Garcetti. (Ironically, as district attorney in 1995, Garcetti reluctantly disbanded the unit because, among other reasons, the Simpson trial was draining so many of his office’s resources.)

The three-year tour in the district attorney’s office only added to Cochran’s professional luster. By the 1980s, Cochran discovered that there was big business in the LAPD’s misdeeds, and his office became a regular port of call for victims of excessive police force. In little more than a decade of filing civil suits based on these incidents, Cochran amassed more than $40 million in damages against the city—which meant that, according to legal-industry custom, Cochran netted about $15 million in fees from those cases alone. Thanks to his friendship with his fraternity brother (and, later, mayor of Los Angeles) Tom Bradley, Cochran took his
place at the head of a growing black establishment in the city. Bradley named him to the Board of Airport Commissioners, which runs the Los Angeles International Airport, and that in turn fed a growing corporate law practice for the dozen or so lawyers in the firm known as the Law Offices of Johnnie L. Cochran, Jr. His personal life also settled down during this period. He separated from Patricia shortly after his divorce from Barbara, and entered into a happy marriage with his current wife, marketing consultant Dale Cochran, in 1985. All of Hattie’s children thrived. Johnnie’s sister Pearl became a high-ranking administrator in the L.A. school system, and her husband ultimately reached the post of the deputy chief of the L.A. Sheriff’s Department. Martha became a real estate broker and married an accountant. A much younger brother, Rolonzo, born in 1955, has prospered somewhat less and works as a trainer for a long-distance telephone company.

Even though Cochran had official duties on behalf of Tom Bradley’s government, that did not stop him from milking the city’s coffers on behalf of his clients. The lawyers in his firm, all members of minority groups, worked with great zeal to exploit the city’s racial climate for profit. In the aftermath of the 1992 riots in Los Angeles, for example, Cochran took on a civil case on behalf of Reginald Denny, a white truck driver who was removed from his vehicle in South Central Los Angeles and beaten by an African-American mob. Cochran’s civil suit on behalf of Denny did not seek damages from the black men who had nearly beaten him to death (after all, the assailants were poor) but rather from the city of Los Angeles, whose police officers intervened and saved Denny’s life. Cochran’s audacious theory posited that the LAPD was engaged in racial discrimination by devoting insufficient forces to the black neighborhood where Denny was injured. (The case is still pending.) Whatever the case, civil or criminal, prosecution or defense, Cochran worked reliable magic with black jurors, at least in part because he could turn anything into a racial issue. Cochran knew that a black defendant could scarcely go wrong crying racism in the downtown Criminal Courts Building, and he exploited that phenomenon with singular determination and success.

It was, for example, a stretch to see the racial dimension in the trial of Todd Bridges, a black child actor who once starred in the
situation comedy
Diff’rent Strokes
. The case generated a good deal of media attention in its day, and the district attorney’s office brought in one of its rising stars to try it—small world again—Bill Hodgman. The facts of the case were not really in dispute. On February 2, 1988, convicted drug dealer Kenneth “Tex” Clay, also an African-American, was shot eight times in a South Central L.A. cocaine “rock house.” At the trial Clay testified that Bridges, a frequent cocaine customer of the drug den, had come to the house with a friend and shot him while he shouted, “I told you, Tex! I told you!” Three other eyewitnesses corroborated the victim’s version of events.

Cochran called the twenty-five-year-old Bridges in his own defense. He testified that at the time of the murder he had been in the midst of a “four-day cocaine binge. Round the clock. Twenty-four hours a day.” He said that he remembered going to Clay’s house at the time of the murders: “I decided to kick the door in to see if we could scare Tex into leaving.” After that, though, Bridges said, he remembered nothing. Asked by Cochran if he recalled shooting Clay, Bridges replied, “I don’t think I did. I didn’t know who did. That’s one of the side effects of the drugs.”

In his summation, Cochran skirted the facts surrounding the murder and instead lashed out at what he called the Los Angeles entertainment establishment, which he said had driven Bridges into the grip of his cocaine addiction. Cochran said that Bridges, an actor since the age of six, had been exploited by the white establishment, which was, by implication, the same establishment that was then conspiring to convict him of this murder. Cochran asked the jury to stand up to these malign forces by acquitting the young man. There were two trials, both before predominantly black jury panels. The first ended in acquittals on the major charges and mistrials on the rest. The second ended in a complete acquittal.

Cochran’s legend grew. Although he was little known in the broader white world, his reputation was matchless in black Los Angeles, especially among the
Sentinel
-reading, jury-serving middle class. He was, in fact, a longtime fixture in publications read by black Angelenos. On December 8, 1994, for example, a large front-page picture in the
Sentinel
showed Cochran receiving the annual
award of the Brotherhood Crusade, a fraternal organization in Los Angeles. Three weeks later, the
Sentinel
devoted more than a full page, including fifteen photographs, to the ceremony at which Cochran was honored. The president of the Brotherhood Crusade, Danny J. Bakewell, Sr., was quoted as saying of Cochran, “He is, in a time when people reflect upon African-American males in a way that is often condescending and shallow, an individual who serves as a tireless warrior against those who would deny justice for all.” In February 1995, the very week of his opening statement in the Simpson case, Cochran was honored with a plaque at a Watts park’s “Promenade of Prominence Walk of Fame.” Taking note of his role in the Simpson case, the article in the
L.A. Watts Times
said that Cochran was “a leader whose task has been likened to Moses demanding that Pharaoh let God’s people go.”

In the years leading up to the Simpson case, Cochran expanded his racial appeals on behalf of clients beyond the courtroom. He began using the press as well. When he represented singer Michael Jackson in the child-abuse investigation launched by the district attorney’s office, Cochran orchestrated a press conference in support of Jackson by a dozen of the top black ministers in Los Angeles. The event was a peculiar one, to say the least. The ministers had never voiced support for Jackson in the past, and the singer, to be sure, had never before been a presence in their lives or churches. But at the widely covered news event, the ministers lashed out at the “prosecution frenzy” surrounding the case—even though Jackson had not been charged with anything and, in fact, never was. Cochran had requested that his own minister, William Epps of the Second Baptist Church, organize the press conference, and his words there could have been Cochran’s own. “I would like to think that it’s not racially motivated,” Epps told the cameras of the investigation of Jackson. “It does seem strange, however.”

So the Johnnie Cochran who came to the Simpson case represented a known quantity in Los Angeles legal circles. Hiring Cochran represented the logical next step in the theory of the defense Shapiro had outlined for his circle of lawyer friends the first week after the murders. Cochran had enjoyed a lifetime of success by using the same theme over and over again: that his clients (even a white man like Reginald Denny!) were the victims of official white
conspiracies. So it would be with O.J. Simpson. But Cochran gave this theory immeasurably more force than Shapiro or any other white lawyer ever could. It apparently mattered little that Cochran would be investing his vast credibility and reputation in service of a lie. He took the case with the goal of conveying a simple syllogism: Cochran stands for the cause of all African-Americans, therefore Simpson does, too. To do this, Cochran started by casting aside his previous (if private) doubts about Simpson’s innocence. As Cochran put it in an interview with Katie Couric on the
Today
show shortly after he was hired, “In the O.J. Simpson case, I think winning takes on the form of him being found not guilty and getting out, because this is one of those cases where, from the very beginning, he said, ‘I’m innocent.’ ”

“And you believe him?” Couric asked.

“And I believe him,” Cochran replied. “I believe him. Absolutely.”

Couric pursued the issue, asking, “A hundred percent, in your heart, that he is not guilty?”

Cochran was adamant. “In my heart, I believe that, absolutely.”

10. GROUP THERAPY

A
t first, Cochran made a seamless transition onto the defense team. At the arraignment on Friday, July 22—when Simpson said he was “absolutely, 100 percent not guilty”—Judge Cecil Mills announced that he had assigned the case for trial to Judge Lance A. Ito, of the superior court. Because Ito’s wife, Margaret York, served as a captain in the LAPD, Mills gave the defense the opportunity to have Ito removed from the case with no questions asked. But Cochran and Shapiro agreed that Ito would suit them fine. Ito brought the parties together in his courtroom for the first time the next Monday.

The defense team regarded Ito as about as good a choice as they could expect. Since Jerry Brown had left the governorship of California in 1978, the Republicans who followed him had named a steady stream of conservative law-and-order ex-prosecutors to the state’s trial and appellate courts. Ito seemed to reflect this trend. After spending virtually his entire professional career as a deputy district attorney in Los Angeles, he had been named to the municipal court bench in 1988 by Governor George Deukmejian and promoted to the superior court the following year. But unlike many of his colleagues, Ito had a reputation as a judge who could be reasoned with, one who would at least listen to the arguments of defense lawyers—especially these defense lawyers. Cochran and Shapiro knew him well. During his own stint in the D.A.’s office, Cochran had supervised Ito. Shapiro, ever the networker, had also crossed paths with the judge any number of times over the years.
When, shortly before the murders in Brentwood, the Century City Bar Association named Shapiro “Defense Counsel of the Year” for 1994, Ito sent him a note calling the award “well deserved and overdue.” (Shapiro explained to F. Lee Bailey that he had approved the judge “because Lance Ito loves me.”)

Ito was also known as an energetic judge, and this was important, because speed remained the defense’s objective. Both Shapiro and Cochran saw Simpson’s popularity as a dwindling asset, and they viewed an expeditious trial as imperative. The judge obliged by scheduling jury selection to begin sixty days hence, on September 20. By California standards, Ito’s schedule amounted to warp speed; in ordinary circumstances it often took one or two
years
for a complex murder case to come to trial. But these delays invariably came at the request of defendants who hoped the cases against them would grow stale. In the Simpson trial, by contrast, the defense lawyers believed that additional time would only allow the prosecution to refine its scientific evidence against their increasingly unpopular client.

For their part, Clark and Hodgman’s strategy never changed much after the preliminary hearing. Using Kato Kaelin and Allan Park, they would prove first that Simpson had had the time and the opportunity to commit the crimes—establishing, through Kaelin, that Simpson was alone after about 9:40
P.M.
on June 12, and showing, through Park, that the house at Rockingham appeared empty between 10:35 and 10:55
P.M.
Before the jury, the prosecutors would add the specter of domestic violence to establish Simpson’s motive. The core of their case would always remain the physical evidence tying Simpson to the murder scene and the victims to him: hairs and fibers, shoe prints, and, above all, blood. The prosecutors regarded the defense’s rush to trial as an inconvenience, but by both law and custom, government lawyers almost never seek delays. After charging someone with a serious crime, the theory goes, prosecutors are obligated to put up or shut up. Regardless of when Ito scheduled the trial, Clark and company vowed to be ready.