One afternoon in mid-July, the phone rang in the office of a lawyer who also knew the stresses of high-profile cases. “You should do it,” Cochran teased the lawyer, but he was really turning his own possible role over in his mind. The upside wasn’t difficult to recognize. Any trial lawyer would relish the chance to perform in front of the biggest audience in American legal history. The downside, as Cochran explained it, was more complex. Simpson was a peer. “He’s a friend,” Cochran said, “and that’s a mess when you start trying to represent a friend.” Cochran wondered whether their relationship might hinder his ability to conduct the case the way he wanted. The last problem was in many ways the simplest, but also the most profound. Cochran’s relationship with this friend was such that he could speak in a shorthand they would both understand. He hesitated for a while before he came out and said what was on his mind. If Johnnie Cochran’s career had established anything at that point, it was that he liked to win. But he had talked to his prospective client and sized up the evidence against him. Ultimately, Cochran’s problem with the Simpson case was a simple one.
“The case,” said Cochran, “is a loser.”
Of course they knew.
Of course Robert Shapiro and Johnnie Cochran knew from the start what any reasonably attentive student of the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman could see: that O.J. Simpson was guilty of killing them. Their dilemma, then, was the oldest, as well as the most common, quandary of the criminal defense attorney: what to do about a guilty client.
The answer, they decided, was race. Because of the overwhelming evidence of Simpson’s guilt, his lawyers could not undertake a defense aimed at proving his innocence—one that sought to establish, say, that some other person had committed the murders. Instead, in an astonishing act of legal bravado, they sought to create for the client—a man they believed to be a killer—the mantle of victimhood. Almost from the day of Simpson’s arrest, his lawyers sought to invent a separate narrative, an alternative reality, for the events of June 12, 1994. This fictional version was both elegant and dramatic. It posited that Simpson was the victim of a wide-ranging conspiracy of racist law enforcement officials who had fabricated and planted evidence in order to frame him for a crime he did not commit. It was also, of course, an obscene parody of an authentic civil rights struggle, for this one pitted a guilty “victim” against innocent “perpetrators.”
These conclusions are the result of more than two years of reporting on the Simpson case. The week after the murders, I was assigned to cover the story for The New Yorker magazine. In addition to attending Simpson’s trial in Los Angeles Superior Court, I interviewed more than two hundred people, many of them repeatedly. I have had access to the full documentary record of the case—including internal memoranda of both the prosecution and the defense teams; advice provided by jury consultants to both the prosecution and the defense; the police “murder book,” with its summaries of all LAPD interviews with witnesses; the written summaries of all witness interviews by members of the defense team; heretofore secret grand-jury testimony; and depositions from the pending civil case against Simpson. I have also reviewed the enormous coverage of the case in the news media, an especially important task in the context of this case. The participants in the Simpson case worked obsessively to influence press coverage. These efforts to shape the news—some successful, some not—had important and lasting consequences from the night of the murders to the morning of the verdict.
Indeed, the heart of the defense strategy featured an effort at public storytelling, the creation of a counternarrative based on the idea of a police conspiracy to frame Simpson. For this effort, the defense needed a receptive audience, which it most definitely had in the African-Americans who dominated the jury pool in downtown Los Angeles. The defense strategy played to experiences that were anything but fictional—above all, the decades of racism in and by the Los Angeles Police Department. The defense sought to identify the Simpson case as the latest in a series of racial abuses by the LAPD, which featured such celebrated outrages as the Rodney King case and thousands of other insults and affronts great and small. This legacy of black distrust of the LAPD was the fertile soil in which the Simpson defense strategy grew. As the events of the case unfolded, the LAPD more than lived up to its reputation as one of the worst big-city police departments in the United States, one that tolerated sloth, incompetence, and racism. As it happened, though, bad as the LAPD was, it did not frame O.J. Simpson; no one planted or fabricated any evidence. In fact, the defense cleverly obscured the one actual police conspiracy that was revealed over the course of the case—that of the starstruck cops who in 1989 tried to minimize and excuse O.J. Simpson’s history of domestic violence.
It is ultimately unknowable whether a brilliant effort by prosecutors in the Simpson case could have produced a conviction in spite of the defense effort to make the case a racial referendum. There was, alas, no such splendid performance. Indeed, despite the best intentions, the case was largely botched by the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office. The prosecutors were undone by the twin afflictions most common among government lawyers: arrogance (mostly Marcia Clark’s) and ineptitude (largely Christopher Darden’s). Drunk on virtue, the prosecutors squandered what little chance they had for victory.
At its core, the Simpson case was a horrific yet routine domestic-violence homicide. It metastasized into a national drama, one that exposed deep fissures in American society, for one reason: because the defendant’s lawyers thought that using race would help their client win an acquittal. It did. That was all that mattered to them. More than a decade ago, Alan Dershowitz, one of Simpson’s lawyers, gave a candid précis of the approach that would characterize the defense team’s efforts. In his book The Best Defense, Dershowitz wrote, “Once I decide to take a case, I have only one agenda: I want to win. I will try, by every fair and legal means, to get my client off—without regard to the consequences.”
1. DROP DEAD GORGEOUS
The geographic spine of Brentwood—indeed, the spine of wealthy West Los Angeles—is Sunset Boulevard. The legendary thoroughfare begins modestly, just a few blocks from the Los Angeles Criminal Courts Building, in the city’s forlorn downtown, where it begins its twenty-mile trek west to the Pacific Ocean. From downtown, it passes through the honky-tonk precincts of Hollywood and then moves ever upscale, through Beverly Hills and then to Bel-Air. When Sunset then crosses the San Diego Freeway, the air clears—literally. The next community is Brentwood, where ocean breezes scrub the pervasive smog from the sky. Here, in its last stop before the ocean, Sunset Boulevard shimmies along the base of the foothills that lead up to the Santa Monica Mountains. When planners first laid out Brentwood in the 1920s, their model was Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. The little roads that sprout from Sunset still follow the curves of the hills. Big houses have always been the rule in Brentwood, in the usual stylistic mix for wealthy Los Angeles: Normandy farmhouse; English Tudor; English Cotswold cottage; Spanish Colonial Revival. In one respect, the houses in Brentwood differ from their wealthy cousins in the Hollywood Hills or Beverly Hills. It is a less showy neighborhood, with fewer modernist architectural gestures and rococo European follies—a conservative place.
The iron law of real estate in Brentwood is simple and unchanging: North of Sunset, sometimes called Brentwood Park, is better than south. On February 23, 1977, O.J. Simpson bought a house on a prime corner lot at 360 North Rockingham for $650,000. (Real estate agents say the house is probably worth about $4 million in 1996.) The home reflects the stolid grandeur of the hilly neighborhood north of Sunset Boulevard: 6,000 square feet in a timber-and-stone frame, with an adjoining pool and tennis court. A six-foot-tall brick wall protects the house’s privacy. Some of Simpson’s monthly expenses, as revealed in legal papers from his 1992 divorce from Nicole, give a sense of the scale of the place: $13,488 annually for utilities; $10,129 for gardening; and $4,371 for “Pool—Tennis Court Services.”
Shortly af
ter O.J. bought the house, he began seeing eighteen-year-old Nicole Brown, and then he separated from his wife, Marguerite. (At the time, O.J. was thirty and near the end of his professional football career.) O.J. and Marguerite divorced in 1979, the same year that their two-year-old daughter, Aaren, accidentally drowned in the pool at Rockingham. Nicole lived with O.J. in the Rockingham house for more than a decade, through their marriage in 1985, the birth of their daughter, Sydney, eight months later, and the birth of their son, Justin, in 1988. However, when they separated in February 1992, there was never any doubt that the house was his. As Simpson stated in a declaration filed as part of the divorce proceeding with Nicole, “Because of the nature of my estate and my existing obligations, I requested that [Nicole] sign a Prenuptial Agreement. There were substantial negotiations over a period of 7 to 9 months which resulted in a signed agreement essentially providing that all property rights would remain separate.”
So Nicole and the two children moved to nearby 325 Gretna Green Way, in a quiet and pleasant part of Brentwood without gated estates on the southern side of Sunset. Her new house reflected one of the most common styles for modern California homes—what might be called Discount Mission. Spray-on stucco lined the exterior walls, a few wooden beams spruced up the sides, and clay tiles covered the roof. A two-car garage dominated the front.
As their divorce litigation went forward in 1992, it became clear that Nicole had many years earlier made herself a hostage to O.J.’s fortunes. In the divorce proceeding, Nicole pressed O.J. for both child and spousal support, stressing her complete financial dependence on him. “I am not currently employed and spend my time caring for my two young children,” she declared in an affidavit. Her attorneys wrote in a brief that as a teenager, around the time she met Simpson, Nicole “worked as a waitress for two months. Prior to that, she worked as a sales clerk in a boutique. She worked there for a total of two weeks and did not make a single sale. These two jobs are the sum total of her employment experience.” In a court-ordered meeting with a “vocational counselor,” Nicole described herself as a “party animal” and said her personal goals were “to raise my kids as best I can; beyond that I haven’t thought about me.” She added, “I’m sure I will get a goal someday.” It wasn’t until Nicole was in her mid-thirties and divorced that she began to consider entering the business world. Her friend and fellow party animal Faye Resnick later reported in a book about Nicole that at the time of her death, the two women were hoping to open a coffeehouse in Brentwood called “Java Café or something like that,” with “poetry readings and fabulous teas and coffees.”
O.J. and Nicole’s divorce was settled without a trial. On October 15, 1992, the parties agreed that O.J., whose after-tax income amounted to $55,000 monthly (that is, $660,000 a year), would pay Nicole $10,000 a month in child support. Nicole kept title to a rent-producing condominium in San Francisco, and O.J. agreed to make a one-time payment to her of $433,750. “It is the intent of the parties,” the settlement stated, “that a substantial portion of this sum shall be used by [Nicole] for the acquisition of a residence.”
Real estate agents in Brentwood speak about the extraordinary intimacy of their relationships with their clients. The brokers are often women who have entered the business as a new career in midlife. According to an experienced agent, “People are so wrapped up in their houses here that you become their confessors. It’s amazing what I hear. People think nothing of telling their brokers that they were raped by their fathers.” Nicole Simpson quickly developed a close friendship with Jeane McKenna, who had been a broker in Brentwood since 1978. They had much in common: Both had been married to prominent athletes in Los Angeles. McKenna’s ex-husband is Jim Lefebvre, the former Dodger infielder, whom she had met when she was a flight attendant. When the two women met in October 1993, McKenna learned that Nicole had been divorced for about a year. After a period of on-and-off reconciliations with O.J., she was finally ready to buy her own place.
Nicole needed to move quickly on a purchase. She had sold the rental property in San Francisco, and to avoid taxes on the sale, she was required to invest the proceeds promptly in another rent-producing property. According to Jeane McKenna, “She was paying five thousand a month at Gretna Green, which had a pool and a guest house, so when she bought a new place, she wasn’t going to get everything she had before, but this would be her own.” As it turned out, McKenna had just what Nicole wanted.
In exasperation, Jeane McKenna used to refer to 875 South Bundy Drive as her “career listing”—the house she couldn’t sell. Bundy Drive is the main north-south artery of Brentwood, a noisy, busy, traffic-filled thoroughfare. McKenna’s property was the north side of a two-family condominium building in an area real estate agents refer to as the Brentwood flats or, sometimes, the poor man’s Brentwood. McKenna had had her name on a FOR SALE sign in front of that property for more than six months when she received a call from Nicole in October 1993. According to McKenna, “It’s not exactly an ace area of Brentwood, south of Sunset. The windows were double-paned so you couldn’t hear the noise on the street, and when I marketed the property, I told potential buyers, including Nicole, ‘You’re not going to be doing any outdoor entertaining, with all the buses and sirens screaming by.’ ” But the three-story condominium did have its advantages. It was modern, built in 1991, and it had a two-story living room, several skylights, and an assortment of high-end accoutrements, including a Jacuzzi, a Sub-Zero refrigerator, and a kitchen full of marble countertops. But McKenna couldn’t sell it until Nicole came along.
Nicole liked the Bundy condo, in part because of its location near a school. Nicole wanted to be close to a playground because her children would no longer have a yard. McKenna negotiated a deal for Nicole to buy the house for $625,000, but she wound up paying an additional $30,000. “The seller was this television producer who was in financial trouble, so Nicole had to pay all the seller’s closing costs, too,” McKenna explained. “She just really wanted that place.”
In January 1994, when Nicole moved into the Bundy condominium, her relationship with O.J. oscillated between reconciliation and a final breach, and the financial tensions between them escalated. The first point of conflict revolved around a man named Kato Kaelin. Although the Simpson affair made the name Kato synonymous with houseguest, his original relationship to Nicole was the more familiar one of tenant to landlord. Kaelin had rented her guest house at Gretna Green for five hundred dollars a month, a figure he could reduce somewhat by baby-sitting for her children. (During this period Sydney and Justin grew so fond of Kato that they named their pet Akita after him.) When Nicole moved to Bundy, she and Kaelin planned to continue the deal, with Kato paying to stay in a small guest suite wedged between the garage and kitchen. Shortly before the move, however, O.J. told Kaelin that although he had had no objections to his living in a separate guest house at Gretna Green, he didn’t want him living under the same roof as his ex-wife. Simpson’s solution was to give Kaelin a rent-free guest house at his home on Rockingham. O.J.’s offer thus simultaneously removed a potential rival for Nicole’s affections and took money out of his ex-wife’s pocket. It also led ultimately to Kaelin’s prominent place in the history of freeloading.
In May 1994, O.J. and Nicole’s final attempt at a reconciliation ended, leading to a financial controversy that dwarfed the dispute over Kato Kaelin. Around Memorial Day, less than six months after she and her children had settled into the Bundy condominium, Nicole called Jeane McKenna and said they would have to move out because O.J. was threatening to report her to the Internal Revenue Service.
When Nicole had sold her rental property in San Francisco she had invested the proceeds in the home on Bundy, but she apparently told the IRS that the new place was also a rental property. As a result, she had avoided tax on the initial sale. For tax purposes, she kept Rockingham as her official residence. Around Memorial Day, O.J. told her that he would no longer permit her to use his address. “He’s threatening to tell the
IRS that I’m living in Bundy,” Nicole told McKenna. As a legal matter, O.J. seems to have had a point, but McKenna scoffed at the idea that Simpson would force his children to move for the second time in a year. “Oh yes he is,” Nicole told her broker. “Of course he is—the asshole.” In the entry in her diary for June 3, Nicole quoted the exact words of O.J.’s threat: “You hang up on me last nite, you’re gonna pay for this bitch, you’re holding money from the IRS, you’re going to jail you fucking cunt. You think you can do any fucking thing you want, you’ve got it comming—I’ve already talked to my lawyers about this bitch—they’ll get you for tax evasion, bitch, I’ll see to it. You’re not going to have a dime left bitch etc.”
On Monday, June 6, O.J. delivered on his threat. He put his warning in icily official terms, in a typed, formal letter to his ex-wife, which began: “Dear Nicole, On advice of legal counsel, and because of the change in our circumstances, I am compelled to put you on written notice that you do not have my permission or authority to use my permanent home address at 360 North Rockingham … as your residence or mailing address for any purpose.… I cannot take part in any action by you that might intentionally or unintentionally be misleading to the Internal Revenue Service …” Nicole showed the letter to her friend Cynthia Shahian on June 7. Not surprisingly, Nicole was horrified by it—especially by the prospect of being forced to move out of Bundy so soon after she and her children had moved in. The same day Shahian saw the letter, June 7, Nicole also telephoned the Sojourn shelter for battered women in Santa Monica to report that she was being stalked by O.J.
On Thursday, June 9, on Nicole’s instructions, McKenna officially put 875 South Bundy up for lease, asking $4,800 a month. “Drop dead gorgeous 1991 townhome in the heart of Brentwood” was how McKenna described the property in the listing. Nicole told Jeane McKenna that if she stayed at Bundy, it would cost her $90,000 in taxes, which was just about all the money she had in the world. She didn’t want to sacrifice that stake, so she decided to look for a new place to live with her kids.
The Run of His Life Page 2