The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson (38 page)

Pat McKenna had only the residue of an unpleasant divorce to return to in Florida so, unlike McNally, he decided to stay on in Los Angeles, even with a pay cut. He and Harris did take a brief Christmas vacation, and when they returned to Shapiro’s office on January
4, 1995, they sensed a distinct chill from Shapiro’s secretary, Bonnie Barron. McKenna gave her a hug, as was his custom, and Barron kept her hands at her sides. Harris and McKenna were still puzzling over Barron’s reaction to them when, later that night, they were having a drink at the Bel Age Hotel. As they were chatting, Harris’s cellular phone rang. The caller was Kristin Jeannette-Meyers, an energetic reporter who was covering the defense team for Court TV. Harris listened for a moment. A big grin spread across his face, and then he started repeating the same phrase over and over again:

“Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God.”

When Harris handed the phone to McKenna and he heard what Jeannette-Meyers was saying, McKenna reacted the same way.
This
was why Barron was upset.

Jeannette-Meyers was reading them a column by Mike McAlary from that day’s New York
Daily News
headlined
VAIN SHAPIRO DESERVES HIS FATE
. It began, “He has spent a year fooling the nation, this lawyer. He has made them all believers: that he is a heroic, hard-working lawyer in the hunt for a grand, fantastic verdict. Unfortunately, Robert Shapiro is your typical Hollywood invention—a character only tan-deep in makeup and significance.”

The column was filled with details known only to a handful of insiders. It mentioned how Shapiro had recently taken a vacation in Maui, to which he flew first-class and his kids traveled coach, and had registered at the Grand Wailea Hotel under the alias Tony DiMilo. “Unlike Venus,” McAlary quipped, “this statue is headless.” McAlary observed that Shapiro “has amazed members of the defense team with his unfamiliarity with the facts.” Shapiro thought, for example, that on the night of the murders Ron Goldman had walked from his waiter’s post at Mezzaluna to Nicole’s house, when in fact he drove a borrowed car. The story went on to detail Shapiro’s vanity, in particular how he had hired an extra secretary to clip stories about him out of newspapers. (The designated clipper was actually Petra Brando, daughter of Marlon and sister of Shapiro’s onetime client Christian.) McAlary’s story concluded by explaining how Shapiro had recently decided to cut back on defense team expenses: “From his first-class plane seat, Shapiro phoned the office and fired one of the secretaries he
hired with O.J.’s money to snip the name Robert Shapiro out of newspapers.”

After hearing the column read to them, McKenna and Harris had no doubt about what to do next. Still using Harris’s cellular phone, they dialed John McNally in New York. Chuckling, McKenna asked McNally, “You crazy fuck, how could you give that shit to the papers about Shapiro?”

McNally laughed right back at him. “Fuck him,” McNally said. “He’s an asshole anyway. And besides, he still owes me money.”

McAlary’s column prompted no laughter from Bob Shapiro. He had been stewing for weeks, torn by conflicting emotions about his role in the case. On the one hand, he loved his newfound social prominence, and he reveled in the attention he received at restaurants and public occasions. When, over the summer, the big-screen video projector at the Rose Bowl focused on him during a Rolling Stones concert, Shapiro waved his arms with delight and the crowd cheered. But it also galled Shapiro that the press sniped at his many public appearances. On December 25, 1994—just before McAlary’s column ran—a gossip column in the
Los Angeles Times
sniffed that Shapiro “goes to the opening of every (bleep)ing door.” Simpson himself had taken note of Shapiro’s high public profile and asked him to lower it. Shapiro complied, but the instruction irritated him and enraged his wife, Linell, who relished their nights out together.

The McAlary column attacked Shapiro’s refined sense of his own dignity. Furious, he asked Bill Pavelic to conduct a secret investigation to see who had leaked the inside information, and Pavelic quickly came back with the predictable report that it was McNally. Rather than blame McNally, Shapiro fixated on Bailey, whom he held responsible for the investigator’s hostility. So Shapiro decided to strike back in similar terms. He leaked word to
Newsweek
’s Mark Miller that he was no longer speaking to his old friend Bailey. In the issue that was released on Sunday, January 15, 1995, Miller broke word of the breach in the defense camp. The
Newsweek
report stated that an unnamed defense source (obviously Shapiro) believed that “Bailey-inspired ‘saboteurs on our own team’ have been working to destroy [Shapiro’s] credibility and reputation through leaks to the media.”

David Margolick, the
New York Times
reporter covering the case, followed up by calling Shapiro that Sunday. This time Shapiro agreed to go on the record. Margolick wrote on January 16 that “an extraordinary and apparently irreparable break has developed between” Shapiro and Bailey. Margolick quoted Shapiro as saying, “The landmark word to me is ‘loyalty.’ I felt a lifelong commitment to him because he gave me the opportunity to represent him when his professional reputation was at stake. But recent events have been so painful that we’ll never be able to have a relationship again.” Shapiro told Margolick that he hoped Bailey would leave the defense team. “His presence before this particular jury adds nothing that can’t be done by Johnnie and others on the team.” But as for the final word on whether Bailey stayed or went, “I’m leaving that decision to Mr. Cochran.” When the
Los Angeles Times
joined in the next day, Shapiro was even more scathing. “We can’t have snakes sleeping in the bed with us,” he said.

Cases involving multiple defense lawyers invariably generate internal tensions, but Shapiro’s public attack on a colleague was unprecedented. (Shapiro was on the warpath privately, too. He insisted that his friend Michael Klein evict Bailey as his houseguest, and Klein, with some embarrassment, did so.) As much as anyone on the defense team, Shapiro understood the importance of public relations. At this moment, on the eve of opening statements, the only priority should have been to stress Simpson’s innocence, or at least the weaknesses in the government’s case. Instead, with his client’s freedom for the rest of his life on the line, Shapiro shifted the focus to his own complaints—to O.J.’s clear detriment. In times of crisis—as during his press conference after Simpson disappeared on June 17—Shapiro invariably placed his own interests above those of his client. Worse yet, his grievances with Bailey were largely unjustified. While McNally had indeed attacked Shapiro in the press, Bailey himself was innocent of this kind of chicanery. In response to Shapiro’s tirades, Bailey knew that he had to take the high road. In a statement released through his office, Bailey said only that he “declined to disparage Mr. Shapiro in any way. This case is not about Mr. Shapiro or Mr. Bailey. It is about O.J. Simpson.”

The controversy ended the only way it could: Simpson demanded that all his attorneys meet him at the jailhouse and end all
public feuding. “I played football with plenty of guys I didn’t like,” Simpson told them, “but it was a team and we got along. Your job is to get along.”

On the morning of Wednesday, January 18, the lawyers met at Cochran’s office shortly after seven. Roosevelt Grier, the minister and former football star, was there, and he approached Shapiro. “I’ve looked into this situation, and I believe that Brother Bailey is innocent of what you think he did to you,” Grier said. “I believe you should apologize to him.” Now completely alone on the defense team, Shapiro had no choice but to utter a few perfunctory words of contrition to Bailey. Also in response to Grier’s suggestion, Shapiro and Bailey arrived at the courthouse together. Press reports said that the two men had arrived “arm-in-arm,” and that was, at some level, technically true. As they left Shapiro’s car, Bailey placed his hand on Shapiro’s wrist. For a moment, Shapiro regarded Bailey’s hand as one might look upon a putrid fish. Shapiro did not exactly recoil, but he marched down the steps to the door with a cross between a smile and a grimace on his face.

After court that day, the lawyers returned to the lobby for a news conference. Cochran—now clearly the leader of the defense team—stood between Bailey and Shapiro, and he beamed while announcing that the defense was a united front. “The Dream Team is never going to break up,” Cochran proclaimed. Shapiro, looking pained, nodded dutifully. Asked about the controversy, Bailey said simply, “That’s history.” The unity tableau was marred only by the presence—in the background, behind the first-string lawyers—of Cochran’s young associate Shawn Chapman and Shapiro’s junior colleague Sara Caplan. Every time the lawyers told the reporters that the feud was over, history, forgotten and unimportant … the two underlings, who had enjoyed front-row seats to the diatribes, started to laugh.

Shapiro sulked. In court, he sat at the opposite end of the defense table from Bailey, and for the next nine months the two men did not exchange a word. Outside the Criminal Courts Building, Shapiro’s petulance took another form. Slowly but inexorably, he began broadening the circle of people to whom he told his true
feelings about his client. From the start of Shapiro’s representation, his wife, Linell, had never had any compunction about sharing her views at social gatherings: “Guilty, guilty, guilty.” Both inside and outside the defense-team offices, particularly as the racial polarization about the case intensified, Shapiro decided to prove his kinship with the West Los Angeles world that meant so much to him. Their view of the case was his, too. “Of course he did it,” Shapiro would say.

For his part, Bailey, who never worried too much about any client’s guilt or innocence, just wanted to return to the big time. Indeed, one irony of Shapiro’s attack on Bailey is that it was launched before Bailey had uttered a single word in Judge Ito’s courtroom.

In the last legal argument before opening statements, Bailey would finally speak in that court for the first time. Prosecutors had urged Ito to let them introduce evidence of Simpson’s pattern of domestic violence against Nicole as proof that he murdered her. This was an important controversy for Ito to resolve, but in a rather minor sideline to the main issue, prosecutors called to the stand a Canadian expert to testify about domestic violence in general. Late on a sleepy Thursday afternoon, Bailey rose to cross-examine Dr. Donald Dutton of Vancouver.

Nature has favored Bailey with a glorious voice, which summons a stream of Dewar’s tumbling down a pebbly brook. His hands tremble a good deal, but with one in his pocket and the other on the lectern, Bailey can still command a moment. He speaks a language that has almost vanished from American courtrooms, a kind of British English that combines wry whimsy and baroque locution. When Dr. Dutton didn’t understand a question, Bailey attributed it to “the vicissitudes of give-and-take,” and when the Canadian witness was not clear on another matter, Bailey asked to “see if we can surmount the barrier of our common language.”

In his redirect examination, prosecutor Scott Gordon at one point asked Dutton to explain a phrase he had used: “narcissistic personality.”

“A narcissistic personality,” the expert explained, “will be someone who has an exaggerated or a grandiose view of their own importance,
who needed a constant kind of reinforcement, who over-reacted to any kind of slight criticisms, and was incapable of developing empathy with other people.”

In the silence before the next question, Bailey took a long look at his colleagues on the defense team. Then he leaned over and whispered to Gerry Uelman: “Sounds like everyone at this table.”

12. A VISIT FROM LARRY KING

T
he decision—the last roadblock to opening statements in the Simpson trial—was the most important of Lance Ito’s career. At one level, the issue was a simple one: Would the prosecution be allowed to present to the jury evidence of Simpson’s history of physical and emotional harassment of his former wife? At another level, however, the domestic-violence motion raised profound questions about the nature of criminal trials. Should any information about a defendant be kept from a jury, even if it is accurate? What evidence, if any, is
too
prejudicial to a defendant? If a husband abuses his wife, does that mean he is more likely to murder her? Does a defendant stand trial for what he did or for who he is?