As he would later repeat in his post-trial video, O.J. insisted he never stalked his ex-wife. It was a small neighborhood, and they often simply ran into each other in the same bars and restaurants. The reason he ’d seen them being intimate on that one occasion was that he ’d gone there on what he thought was an invitation from Nicole. The curtains were open and he saw the two of them having sex in the living room. He went away then, he said, and waited until the next day to tell Nicole that he ’d seen them. He told her that he didn ’t think their behavior appropriate, considering that his two young children might walk in the room. He didn ’t hit anybody, he didn ’t yell, he didn ’t break anything. He just said, “Don ’t do that so openly around my kids.”
After hearing this story, it occurred to me that Zlomsowitch might be a good defense witness; after all, in similar circumstances—an ex-wife having sex with someone on the couch, his two small children upstairs—what man wouldn ’t go completely ballistic? And yet, O.J. didn ’t.
As we began preparations for the trial, a simultaneous grand jury investigation started up regarding A.C. Cowlings, who had been arrested after the Bronco chase on suspicion of aiding and abetting a fugitive. Christopher Darden was the assistant district attorney in charge of the grand jury ’s investigation.
I was more than a little suspicious of the prosecution ’s motives. By investigating A.C., they could gather information, witnesses, and testimony (given under oath) that could be used in the case against O.J.
The law says that once a trial is in progress (and we were considered “in progress” once O.J. had been arraigned), a grand jury proceeding related to witnesses in that trial is not allowed. Nevertheless, Bob Kardashian was one of the first people subpoenaed; Cathy Randa was right behind him, and so was almost everyone who had been involved in the case since the first week, including Michael Baden, Henry Lee, and even Keno Jenkins, my driver.
Normally very soft-spoken and polite, Keno became completely unnerved during the grand jury hearing when it was suggested that he—and I—had somehow been part of a plan for O.J. to evade the police with A.C. Cowlings. “They said they didn ’t believe me,” he said. “They called me a liar!” His blood pressure immediately spiked, and he had to see his doctor the following day.
I even heard from an anguished Henry Lee in Connecticut, who was also completely unaccustomed to having his integrity questioned. “Bob,” he said, “I think I might have to resign. My department is very upset with me.” He was very upset about being subpoenaed, he ’d been criticized by his bosses for giving me the Connecticut State Police baseball cap, and the press was making his life miserable. “They follow me, they follow my wife. Wherever we go, there they are.” He would continue to consult on the case, he said, but he couldn ’t do so in a senior position.
When I received a subpoena demanding that I produce O.J. Simpson ’s datebook for 1994. I called Chris Darden myself.
“Chris, I just received a subpoena, and I ’m certainly willing to cooperate in any way possible. But I don ’t have this datebook here. I don ’t think I ever had it.”
“Cathy Randa told us she ’d turned it over to you,” Darden said.
I called Cathy, who told me she ’d given the datebook to her own attorney, Melvyn Sacks. I called Sacks and asked him to seal the datebook in an envelope and bring it to my office the next day with a letter declaring the envelope ’s contents. I then presented it to the court, under seal, arguing that I objected to turning it over to the grand jury. It was “privileged material beyond the scope of the Cowlings investigation, but containing information pertinent to the Simpson prosecution” that they were not entitled to get by this method. As Dean Uelmen argued, “The grand jury is not empowered to conduct roving investigations.”
We were assured by the district attorney ’s office that what is euphemistically known as a Chinese wall had been built between Chris Darden ’s investigation of A.C. and Bill Hodgman ’s prosecution of O.J., keeping the current grand jury investigation confidential. While I trusted Bill Hodgman implicitly, I never believed for a minute that there was a wall high enough or thick enough to keep these two matters from spilling over onto each other.
In November 0f 1994, when the grand jury concluded its investigation, it was announced that there was no sufficient cause for the D.A. to seek an indictment of A.C. The very next day, Christopher Darden became part of the Simpson prosecution team; when Bill Hodgman fell seriously ill in January, Darden became co-lead counsel. There was a great hue and cry (from Johnnie Cochran, among others) that Darden had been added to the prosecution team primarily because he was African-American. However, to my mind it had less to do with that than it did with the grand jury hearing that Darden had overseen and the confidential information he was privy to. So much for the Chinese wall, I thought.
On Monday, August 1, I was surprised to read in the Los Angeles Times that Judge Ito had released O.J. ’s grand jury transcripts to the public. He did it, he said, to “level the playing field,” since significant portions of the transcript had already been leaked in previous weeks. We hadn ’t been notified, and it took me by surprise. Of course, it made big news all day long, with Keith Zlomsowitch and the alleged “stalking” incidents taking center stage.
Later that afternoon, we received a letter from Robert Tourtelot, an attorney representing Mark Fuhrman, notifying us that all the defense attorneys for O.J. were going to be sued for defamation, as were Jeffrey Toobin and the New Yorker; however, if we publicly retracted our “statements,” the suit wouldn ’t be filed. I forwarded the material to Larry Feldman and Tony Glassman, my own attorneys.
On Wednesday, I was called to the jail to meet with Skip Taft and Captain Albert Scaduto, who ran the facility. O.J. ’s security needs in the jail, with special sergeants assigned to guard him, were costing $36,000 a month. They wanted to move him to a different location, to what they called a “high-power unit,” and use a twenty-four-hour-a-day video camera in place of the extra guards. I strenuously objected that a video camera trained on someone around-the-clock would be a significant invasion of privacy, especially where bodily functions were concerned. All I could think of was the thriving tabloid market and what someone might pay for a video of O.J. ’s activities in his cell.
Skip and I then went to inspect the new cell location. Once again, it was the standard nine by seven. I was discouraged to see that since no one would be in any of the seven neighboring cells, O.J. would for all intents and purposes be in solitary confinement. Because he was technically a “protective custody” inmate, he wasn ’t allowed to eat in the community mess halls, work out in the rooftop exercise area, or attend services in the jail chapel. Thus far, he ’d been a model prisoner, still presumed innocent of the crime he ’d not yet been tried for, and yet he was completely isolated. A telephone within his grasp (he couldn ’t receive calls but could make them during limited time periods, like all other inmates) and two hours of television a day—with the channels selected by the guards—weren ’t going to do much to mitigate that.
My mood wasn ’t helped when I got a quick look at that week ’s Time magazine, in which they reported the results of a Time/CNN poll. Sixty-three percent of whites believed that O.J. would get a fair trial; only 31 percent of blacks felt the same. Seventy-seven percent of whites believed the case against him was very strong; 45 percent of blacks agreed. I didn ’t worry so much about the numbers as I did about the distribution. They ’re polling readers by race, I thought.
That afternoon I met Joel Siegel for lunch at the Grill, a discreet restaurant off Rodeo Drive. While there we ran into Mort Zuckerman, owner of the New York Daily News, and then superagent Michael Ovitz. Zuckerman, whose newspaper circulation had steadily climbed since the murders, joked, “Keep it going as long as possible.”
Ovitz, who lives quite near Rockingham, protested. “No, no, Bob,” he said. “Get it over with, so I can return to a normal life.”
When Johnnie Cochran came on board, so di
d his associate, Carl Douglas.
A former public defender who was intelligent and knowledgeable about the law, Douglas had an astonishing capacity for detail and organization. Long entrusted with running Johnnie ’s practice, there is nothing Carl doesn ’t take care of; in fact, if Cochran is a metaphorical airport, Douglas is his air-traffic controller. I did, however, have some reservations about his actual trial skills. He didn ’t project well in court, and I felt that his style before a jury was somewhat pedantic. He often seemed to lecture, rather than draw them in, and the net effect was boredom. In my experience, boring a jury can be more dangerous than making them angry.
Carl was made case manager, in charge of keeping track of the discovery material, which quickly became voluminous. He also kept track of the defense motions to the court and prepared the agendas for all the defense-team meetings. After I ’d known Carl for a while, and understood how much Johnnie depended on him, I was asked to give a toast at his birthday party.
“You know,” I said, “when Johnnie first introduced me to Carl, I wasn ’t sure what his last name was. For months, I thought it was ‘you-take-care-of-it. ’” It brought the house down.
For years, Linell and I have taken the kids to Lake Tahoe for a family vacation in the later summer. in 1994, we had gone ahead and rented the house from mid-August through Labor Day. I had warned her that with so much work on the trial, and jury selection a huge hurdle we still had to get over, I wasn ’t sure how much time I ’d be able to spend with the family, if any.
“Bob, they really need you to be with them,” she said. “They ’re not reacting to all of this very well.”
She was right. We ’d gone to a screening at producer Robert Evans ’s only a few days before, and the first words out of Grant ’s mouth this time were, “Are there any celebrities here?” Earlier, at the airport coming back from the Toney fight in Las Vegas, Brent said, “I wonder how many people are going to ask for your autograph this time, Dad. How much do you think it ’s worth?”
I tried to wave him off, but he wasn ’t buying it. “Oh, come on, Dad,” he scoffed, “you ’re probably going to end up on a baseball card or something.”
One night, Linell told me that our friends had been talking to Michael Klein and Bob Koblin, saying that I was changing, acting differently—signing autographs, stopping to shake hands, allowing perfect strangers to come up to a table in a restaurant and interrupt our private “off-duty” time and personal conversations.
I was taken aback; nobody had said anything to me about it, and now two of my best friends had gone to my wife, not wanting to confront me directly. I ’m not changing, I wanted to tell them; the environment around me is different. The idea that my closest friends would think that I was turning away from them—or worse, that they would turn away from me—was very upsetting.
“This is a no-win situation,” I told Linell. “When people come up to me and ask for autographs, if I don ’t sign, I ’m a jerk. If I do sign, I ’m still a jerk.”
When I was growing up in Los Angeles, there were no pro basketball teams, no major-league baseball teams. Instead, we had the Pacific Coast League, with the Hollywood Stars and the L.A. Angels. The Hollywood Stars were on Fairfax, quite near to where I lived, so I saw them play as often as I could. When the Dodgers came out to Los Angeles from Brooklyn, I quickly got a part-time job selling Cokes and hot dogs in the stands at the Coliseum. I would ask players for autographs, and most of them were generous and kind, not just to me but to all the kids who worked there, and to the fans who came to see them play. Others weren ’t so kind, and I remember vividly their faces and voices when they said “Get lost, kid. I don ’t have time for you.”
A person who aspires to be good, or even the best, at what he does wants recognition for achieving that. Anyone who denies it is denying something basic about being human. And when people came up to me, as they increasingly did, and said “You ’re doing a great job” or “My daughter ’s in law school, would you please sign this for her?” or “My father would love your autograph,” what was I supposed to do? I didn ’t hit home runs or score touchdowns; I was a lawyer. Yet kids wanted my autograph. I simply could not look anyone in the face and say “Sorry, I don ’t have time for you.”
I finally talked with Michael Klein about my mixed feelings, and his. “I know the publicity and everything is an intrusion, on all of our lives,” I said. “Ultimately, though, it ’s not about me. It ’s about O.J.” I reminded him that we still had a jury to pick. “Everybody ’s watching me, Michael, all the time, everywhere. I can ’t be a hard-ass with people; you know I ’m not like that. Besides, I can ’t take the risk of alienating anyone at this point.”
He understood, he said. He just reserved the right to complain about it once in a while. Ultimately, I decided to stop signing autographs when there were cameras around, and I stopped doing it at the courthouse entirely, because that was a place of serious business—T-shirt hawkers and trial groupies notwithstanding. I always responded, however, asking people to write or call my office, and I would send them something. In other circumstances, I tried, and still do, to be as courteous as I can be to people who are courteous to me.
And by and large, people are courteous. Plus, there ’s no denying that VIP treatment can be pleasant. Convenient parking, hard-to-get tickets, front-row seats, good tables in wonderful restaurants. I soon realized that there was another reason for the velvet-glove routine. Browsing quietly in a bookstore one day, I quickly drew a crowd, all of whom were talking at once, some of whom quickly ran out to buy disposable cameras so that they could get pictures. The management was not happy. And at a Kings hockey game one night, a group of a dozen or so people gathered around my seat for autographs—which didn ’t much please the hockey fans in back of me. Celebrities, I discovered, are not isolated simply because they ’re particularly special but because they ’re often security risks, crowd-control problems, and traffic-jam instigators.
Before the trial began, I went to an annual charity gathering called the Sports Spectacular, which raises money for Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. At the Spectacular, fifteen or twenty star athletes come together to auction off sports memorabilia, meet fans, and give autographs. In other years, O.J. would ’ve been front and center, but not this time.
I was introduced to Joe DiMaggio by my friend Tommy Lasorda. Standing in front of the legendary DiMaggio, trying to talk to him without stumbling all over my words, I felt all the old boyhood feelings—hero worship, awe, respect. In the noise of the athletes and fans swirling around him, DiMaggio was a quiet, authoritative presence, almost majestic. As he autographed baseballs for my sons, I was struck by how large and strong his hands still were. Little wonder that in his prime he could wield a bat as easily as other men swing flyswatters.
The three of us—Lasorda, DiMaggio, and I—then went to the men ’s room together. In retrospect, it probably wasn ’t a good tactical move. Security had to close off the door to the men ’s room while we were in there, and I was very aware of the people on the other side of that closed door. What were they saying? DiMaggio ’s in the head with Lasorda and Shapiro. Lasorda ’s in there with Shapiro and DiMaggio. Shapiro ’s in there with DiMaggio and Lasorda. Or more likely, “I wish whoever ’s in there would get the hell out, so they ’d open the damn door and let me in!”
O.J. ’s new cell and his isolation in it were very difficult for him to adjust to. As stoic as it was in his nature to be, he was completely miserable. His bunk, which was steel, had only a very thin mattress on the top of it. With his arthritis, he could barely lie down on it. He couldn ’t sit up in it either, because his head hit the upper bunk. And when he was full-length on the bed, his face was practically in the toilet. The television, just beyond his reach outside his cell, was often set on the news—which was more often than not about him and the case, and he was unable to shut it off. One night he ’d been watching the Dodgers game, and in the bottom of the ninth, with bases loaded, the
guards shut off the television set.
He was supposed to take his arthritis medicine with his breakfast, but the food arrived at 6:00 A.M. and the pills didn ’t arrive until 8:00. If he waited until 8:00, the food was cold, and the roaches were more interested in it than he was. The same thing happened with his evening meal. At one point, when he realized that the video camera was (in spite of assurances to the contrary) pointed right at the toilet, he draped a towel over the camera. Within minutes after the first time he did it, the deputies came down and told him to remove the towel.
In addition, when they walked him out of his cell for any reason, they handcuffed him from behind, which aggravated his arthritis. Couldn ’t he be handcuffed in front? “And why do I have a pillow case that hasn ’t been changed in fifty days?” he asked a bailiff. “On the other hand, I guess I should be glad I have a pillow. Some people in here don ’t even have that.”
I spoke with Captain Scaduto, and he met with O.J. to talk about the problems. Scaduto agreed to find him a thicker mattress and take the camera off the toilet area. He would do his best to coordinate the food-and-medicine situation and also agreed that from now on, O.J. ’s hands would be cuffed in front, not in back. Thereafter, O.J. was generally treated well by the deputies in this, one of the most troubled, overcrowded, gang-infested jails in the entire country.
In addition to his living arrangements, O.J. was concerned about my treatment of his friend Bob Kardashian, whose constant presence in court I had questioned. In fact, Lee Bailey had told me straight out that I ’d been too hard on Kardashian. While I was grateful to him for all of his cooperation, and especially for the day-to-day care and attention he was giving to O.J. in jail, I just felt it wasn ’t necessary for him to be at the defense table every day. He wasn ’t actively involved in the pretrial preparation, and in all likelihood he wouldn ’t play a role once the trial began. However, I certainly didn ’t want to alienate him; he was one of my client ’s best friends. I promised O.J. that I ’d make a point to call Bob, get together with him, and talk it through.
The Search for Justice Page 15