The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson (43 page)

But the treatment of these witnesses all fit into a larger pattern. “This case is about a rush to judgment,” Cochran asserted, “an obsession to win at any cost and by any means necessary.” Invoking Malcolm X’s most famous phrase, “by any means necessary,” Cochran declared war on the LAPD. The case against O.J. Simpson, in other words, was really about the conspiracy to convict him.

It was about something else, too. Like the prosecution’s juror research, the defense focus groups had also found hostility among black women toward Nicole Brown Simpson. In his opening, Cochran gave the jurors every reason to reinforce their presumed predisposition to view O.J. as an icon and Nicole as a tramp. Cochran took issue with Darden’s assertion that O.J. had “exercised all this control over her and picked her friends.… The evidence will show that Miss Nicole Brown Simpson is a very strong, independent woman,” Cochran went on. “She picked and chose her own friends, [neither] O.J. Simpson or no one else could tell her who her friends were to be. She had whatever friends she wanted, she did whatever she wanted.”

Cochran then regaled the jury with tales of Nicole’s fast life. Though nominally aimed at refuting the charge of stalking, Cochran ran though a catalogue of her sexual exploits. Sex on a couch with Keith Zlomsowitch while the children slept upstairs … Sex with one of Simpson’s best friends (Marcus Allen, though Cochran did not name him)… One man “sitting astride Miss Nicole Brown Simpson, giving her a massage or something in her shoulders”… “Miss Nicole Brown Simpson came over to the Rockingham house and said she had found a boyfriend, somebody different than Keith.” But with these examples, Cochran was just warming up for his main point about Nicole’s sordid personal life—that the sinister figure of Faye Resnick was at the center of it.

“Let me say this about Faye Resnick,” Cochran said gravely. On June 3, 1994, her boyfriend, Christian Reichardt, had thrown her out of their house because she was freebasing cocaine. “They ran in this circle out there in Brentwood. And when she was put out on June third,… she then moved over and lived with Nicole Brown Simpson.”

Cochran implied that Nicole and Faye were doing drugs together: “Because they were friends, they would go out at night. The evidence will be these ladies would go out two, three, four nights a week and stay out until five o’clock in the morning. Nobody was controlling these women … They go out dancing, they would do whatever they would do, and we know Faye Resnick was using drugs during this period of time.” Cochran went on to say that Faye’s drug problem got so bad that on June 8, her ex-boyfriend
and ex-husband forced her to enter a drug treatment facility. Cochran then said Faye Resnick was “one of the people that called Miss Nicole Brown Simpson on the night of June 12, perhaps after nine o’clock, that particular night, from this drug treatment facility.” After a pause, Cochran said darkly, “We will be talking about that and her role in this whole drama.”

Cochran’s opening statement represented a bold risk. Most defense attorneys use their opening statements to remind jurors of the presumption of innocence, to urge them to keep an open mind—and to make as few promises as possible. A defendant in a criminal case has no obligation to put forward any evidence, and few defense attorneys want to commit themselves at the beginning of a long trial to naming the witnesses they will call to the stand. So what Cochran did was all the more remarkable. He made scores of specific, factual claims about the evidence in the case, and described in detail some of the witnesses he would be calling. Cochran’s supremely confident opening statement demonstrated how central a figure he was to the defense strategy. He became the very incarnation of O.J. Simpson, his voice for the jury. Cochran sought to transfer his enormous prestige in the middle-class black community to his client. On the defense team, only Cochran had the stature—and the race—to do that.

There was another new player in the courtroom during opening statements, and he took an amused interest in Cochran’s tale of the nefarious Faye Resnick. Five and a half feet tall and nearly as wide, Lawrence Schiller would become a frequent presence in the corridors outside Department 103 and in the twelfth-floor media center. Bearded, balding, shoveling endless fistfuls of M&M’s past his yellowing teeth, the fifty-eight-year-old Schiller represented an apotheosis of sorts for the O.J. Simpson spectacle: the perfectly amoral profiteer. Schiller bore a passing resemblance to the actor Zero Mostel, and he appeared in the Simpson case as the reincarnation of Mostel’s character in the film
The Producers
—the man who tried to sell the public on a show called
Springtime for Hitler
.

A onetime photographer for
Life
and other magazines, Schiller operated on the fringes of show business for decades and left a
trail of multiple divorces, embittered business associates, and bankruptcy. Schiller specialized in exploiting an arcane and odious corner of the literary marketplace: the purchase of book rights to murderers’ life stories. He made deals with Jack Ruby, Susan Atkins (of the Manson family), and Gary Gilmore. It was, in fact, Larry Schiller’s interviews with Gilmore and others that provided the raw material for Norman Mailer’s masterpiece
The Executioner’s Song
. The only real surprise about Schiller was that he took several months to surface in the Simpson affair. Schiller even had good entree: He was a longtime acquaintance of Robert Kardashian, and had lived near O.J. and his first wife many years before. Through Kardashian, Schiller inveigled an invitation to visit Simpson in jail. As he later described it to a friend, Schiller told O.J., “You are a literary resource. You need someone who can exploit it”—i.e., me.

Simpson agreed, and Schiller came up with the idea of a book of O.J.’s responses to the many thousands of letters he had received in jail. With Kardashian’s help, Schiller contrived to have his name placed on the list of “material witnesses” who were allowed to visit Simpson in jail. (There were, ultimately, fifty-two people on this list, and many of them, like Paula Barbieri, were Simpson’s friends more than potential witnesses in the trial; this arrangement is another example of Simpson’s favorable treatment by law enforcement authorities.) Schiller acknowledged privately that it was preposterous to suggest that he was really a “material witness” in the case, but the jail guards never challenged him, even when he began to lug a large, high-quality tape recorder into his meetings with the defendant.

At his home in Studio City, Schiller used his personal computer to edit the letters and O.J.’s responses, and even to lay out the pages. As Schiller put it together, the book was almost comically sympathetic to O.J. In a chapter called “Spousal Abuse,” for example, the first letter to Simpson began, “Mr. Simpson—One thing I wanted to say, everyone is focusing on the alleged abuse you inflicted on your ex-wife. No one has mentioned the abuse she inflicted on you.…” Simpson responded to these letters with a series of banal pieties, most of them focusing on his supposed great faith in God. (In fact, before his arrest, Simpson neither attended
church nor showed any interest in spiritual matters in conversations with friends.) Speculating about his life after prison, Simpson wrote, “I know that I will raise my children differently in relationship to God. Without a doubt. I can visualize it. I have already visualized each Sunday. I won’t play golf. Sunday we will go to church.…”

Wandering around the pressroom, Schiller chuckled at the notion that Simpson’s protestations of innocence might be true. His interest in the matter was purely commercial. In concert with his publisher, Little, Brown, Schiller arranged for the book to be printed under false names at three plants around the country. Then, according to the plan, the trucks would roll up to bookstores just before Cochran was to begin his opening statement. In perhaps his greatest marketing coup, Schiller arranged for an audiotape of Simpson reading excerpts from the book to be sold at the same time. Schiller thought the tape itself might be profitable, but he knew that the news media would rush to give the public the opportunity to hear Simpson’s voice—and thus give the book enormous free advertising.

Schiller’s plan worked to perfection. The book, called
I Want to Tell You
, was released a few days early, on January 7, and it became an enormous success, selling more than 650,000 copies. As Don Vinson might have predicted, booksellers found that black women bought the book in especially large numbers.

It wasn’t just Simpson’s obvious guilt that Schiller found amusing. He also scoffed at the notion that Simpson actually wrote or said all that was attributed to him in the book. One of the most quoted passages in the book came on the very last page: “I know in my heart that the answer to the death of Nicole lies somewhere in the world that Faye Resnick inhabited.” According to Schiller, “I put that in at the last minute.”

It was all, thus, part of a coordinated attack on Nicole, her lifestyle, and especially her friends—Uelman’s elliptical hints about drug dealers; one of Cochran’s opening remarks about “these ladies [who] would go out two, three, four nights a week and stay out until five o’clock in the morning”; and finally, Schiller’s book. Through all these allegations—indeed, through the entire trial and beyond—not a shred of evidence ever surfaced linking
any individual except O.J. Simpson to the crime. The defense never ventured an explanation of why drug dealers linked in some way to Faye Resnick would have wanted to kill Nicole Brown Simpson (much less Ron Goldman). That wasn’t the point of the defense strategy. The point was to muddy the character of the target of this homicide.

In the end, the reason for the defense’s obsession with Resnick can be found in the focus groups—that is, in the overwhelming lack of sympathy that black women felt for Nicole Brown Simpson. The “Resnick card” was just another version of the “race card”—in this case, an outlet for the resentment of black women toward the blond temptress who had snared this black hero.

The remainder of Cochran’s opening statement hewed predictably to the defense themes. He described what he called O.J.’s “circle of benevolence”—a phrase the lawyer used to describe the defendant’s financial contributions to charity (which in fact were minimal) and to Nicole’s family (which were considerable). He said that O.J. suffered from arthritis so severe that on the day of the murder, “he could not shuffle the cards when he played gin rummy at the country club.” Cochran mentioned a dog walker by the name of Tom Lang (not the detective), who said he saw Nicole embracing a man on the street in front of her home on the night of the murder, as well as “a man that he described as Hispanic or Caucasian standing … there looking as though he was angry.” Cochran disparaged the work of the LAPD employees who had collected and analyzed the evidence, and he offered a brief criticism of the DNA evidence. At the same time, Cochran asserted that DNA tests (presumably reliable ones) proved that blood found underneath Nicole’s fingernails was inconsistent with her own, Goldman’s, or Simpson’s. Finally, Cochran returned again and again to Rosa Lopez—the next-door maid who would testify that O.J.’s Bronco was parked on Rockingham at the time that the prosecution asserted the murders were taking place. (In all, Cochran mentioned Lopez’s name more than a dozen times.)

It was, on one level, a remarkable opening statement. Cochran cited any number of specific witnesses who would directly contradict
the government’s theory of the case. If the defense lawyers could back up Cochran’s claims, the prosecution’s case would be shattered. But as it turned out, they couldn’t; indeed, they didn’t even try. By the end of the trial, the defense would never back up
any
of Cochran’s startling claims. It would never call dog walker Tom Lang to the witness stand. It would never call Faye Resnick. It would never even call Rosa Lopez (although she would indeed become a participant in the trial.) The blood under Nicole’s fingernails turned out to be her own. The reason Simpson didn’t shuffle the deck of cards was because his friend Alan Austin didn’t let him: Austin knew O.J. always cheated when he dealt. And Cochran’s star witness, Mary Anne Gerchas, turned out to be a pathological liar who spent her life dodging creditors and who, shortly after Cochran’s opening statement, would plead guilty to defrauding the Marriott Hotel of more than $24,000. Before Gerchas pleaded guilty, she claimed that an impostor using her name had actually run up the bill at the hotel. The defense would never call Gerchas, either.