The Run of His Life

by Jeffrey Toobin

  Easy Rawlins, the private eye in Walter Mosley’s novels, once described the Los Angeles of the early fifties this way: “California was like heaven for the southern Negro. People told stories of how you could eat fruit right off the trees and get enough work to retire one day. The stories were true for the most part but the truth wasn’t like the dream. Life was still hard in L.A. and if you worked every day you still found yourself on the bottom.” Such was—and in many respects still is—the paradox of black life in the city. After World War II, thousands of African-Americans bought real estate in Southern California, worked in factories for good pay, and shared in the American dream to a degree that would be difficult to fathom in, say, Caspiana, Louisiana. But no one (and especially not black Angelenos) confused their hometown with paradise. The realities of racism, most visible in the blue uniforms of the Los Angeles Police Department, lingered like the smog.

  Hattie Cochran was determined that no son of hers was going to wind up on the bottom. She and her husband had already escaped from the ghetto, so her hopes for Johnnie junior called for success on a wider stage, a life of accomplishment and prominence. For all the pluck it took to bring his family into the middle class, the elder Cochran had a diffidence about him, finding contentment in the small things, like family, home, and church. Hattie Cochran hungered for greater success, and she fastened those ambitions onto her firstborn son. The life of the lawyer Johnnie Cochran, Jr., stands as confirmation of a famous observation of Freud’s: “If a man has been his mother’s undisputed darling he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling, the confidence in success, which not seldom brings actual success with it.” Johnnie’s mother determined that education would be his route, and she had a simple formula for the kind of place that would push students in the right direction: a school with white children. So Hattie pushed and pulled and made sure that young Johnnie came to be one of about thirty black students out of the two thousand or so at Los Angeles High School, even though he didn’t live in the district. For Hattie’s son, the experience among the children of doctors and lawyers would prove, as she had predicted, transforming. “If you were a person who integrated well, as I was, you got to go to people’s houses and envision another life,” Cochran has said of those years. “I knew kids who had things I could only dream of. I remember going to someone’s house and seeing a swimming pool. I was like, ‘That’s great!’ Another guy had an archery range in his loft. An archery range. I could not believe it. I had never thought about archery! But it made me get off my butt and say, ‘Hey, I can do this!’ ” These slices of life among his largely Jewish peers were every bit as important to Cochran as an afternoon with Willie Mays had been to O.J. Simpson. For Simpson it meant that sports was the route out; for Cochran it meant that education was the way up.

  Cochran went to the city’s great public university, UCLA, which was then in the midst of its own postwar boom, admitting sons and daughters of the striving middle class and vaulting past its crosstown rival, the private USC. (Indeed, the Simpson case illustrated rather starkly the changing fortunes of the two schools. In earlier decades the private USC traditionally supplied Los Angeles with its leaders, but the public UCLA could count among its alumni not only Cochran but also Robert Shapiro, Marcia Clark, and Lance Ito—who were all smart kids of modest means when they arrived at the Westwood campus. Only one former USC student figured prominently in the Simpson trial: the defendant.) Cochran thrived at UCLA, where he joined the elite black fraternity Kappa Alpha Psi and made a lasting bond with an older Kappa by the name of Tom Bradley. While still in college, Cochran also polished his considerable verbal skills selling insurance for Golden State Mutual, but he recognized quickly that the most profitable outlet for his talents lay in the law.

  Cochran graduated from Loyola Law School in 1962 (six years before Shapiro did) and faced the classic dilemma of the newly minted lawyer: to do good or to do well. He thought he could do both. The first stirrings of the civil rights movement were beginning in Los Angeles, and Cochran and his new wife, Barbara, a schoolteacher who had attended UCLA with him, had heard Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., when he visited the pulpit of their Second Baptist Church. His message had moved them both. But so, too, did the lessons of his father’s business. Serving the black community, he decided, could also serve Johnnie Cochran. He spent his first three years in practice as a prosecutor with the city attorney, trying misdemeanor cases and building a reputation as a trial lawyer. When he left the government, he set up shop as a defense lawyer, with one office near downtown and another in largely black Compton. When Watts exploded in the riots of 1965, Cochran basically sat out the controversy. And when the NAACP and other civil rights organizations launched efforts to integrate the fire department and local schools, Cochran left no mark on these struggles. Notwithstanding these absences, young Johnnie Cochran did find his way into the public eye in a case that reflected the city’s painful racial dilemmas.

  In May 1966, Leonard Deadwyler, who was stopped for speeding while rushing his pregnant wife to the hospital, was shot and killed by an LAPD officer. Self-defense, said the police. The Deadwyler family hired Cochran to represent them, and the resulting coroner’s inquest was televised to a rapt citywide audience. According to the peculiar procedure of the inquest, Cochran had no right to address witnesses himself but instead had to ask the deputy district attorney on the case to pose questions for him. The twenty-nine-year-old lawyer scarcely said anything at the inquest, but the government lawyer’s words as he relayed the questions—“Mr. Cochran wants to know”—became something of a mantra heard around the city. After the inquest, the district attorney brought no charges against the officer, and Cochran lost the family’s civil suit against the city. But Cochran’s career—and his issue—were launched. Many years later, shortly before the murders of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman, Cochran summed up the impact of the Deadwyler case in an interview with Gay Jervey of American Lawyer. “What Deadwyler confirmed for me was that the issue of police abuse really galvanized the minority community,” Cochran said. “It taught me these cases could really get attention.”

  Cochran’s public relations triumph in the Deadwyler case contributed to a feeling of invincibility on his part, and this attitude extended to his personal life. In 1967, Cochran began living an extraordinary double life—one that required, among other things, astonishing bravado.

  Over the course of that year, Barbara Cochran began to suspect that her husband was having an affair. Night after night, he worked late, and he took what she regarded as suspicious trips on weekends. Barbara hired a private detective, who reported that Johnnie was in fact spending those evenings at the home of Patty Sikora, a blond legal secretary. When Barbara confronted Johnnie, she later wrote in a book, he turned violent, and he beat her on several occasions. Pounding his hands on her head above the hairline, Cochran yelled, “I’m going to hit you where there won’t be any bruises!” (Cochran has denied hitting Barbara.) Not long after these incidents, Barbara threw him out of the house they shared with their young daughter. Cochran, however, vowed to mend his ways, and Barbara took him back after a brief separation.

  The beatings stopped, but Cochran kept seeing Patty Sikora, telling her that he was in the midst of a drawn-out divorce battle with Barbara. Patty believed him, and their relationship continued. Awaiting the formal end of Johnnie’s marriage to Barbara, Patty went so far as to change her legal name to Cochran. Indeed, while he was still living with Barbara, Cochran entered into a quasi-marriage with Patty; they traveled together, bought property together, and had their own group of friends. As Barbara pieced it together years later (with Patty’s help), Johnnie would “stop over at Patty’s after he left the office. He’d read, help April [Patty’s daughter from a previous marriage] with her homework, or watch TV while Patty made dinner for the family. After April was in bed, they might have some intimate time together. Then John would leave and come home to our house.” Barbara simply thought her husband still worked lat
e.

  Incredibly, Cochran managed to juggle these two lives for ten years. Over the course of this period, Patty had a son with Johnnie, and Barbara had another daughter with him. Both women had their suspicions—Patty, that no divorce would ever happen, and Barbara, that there was another woman—but neither made a final move to put Cochran out of her life. At last, in 1977, Barbara ceased playing the fool and moved out of the elegant home they had purchased five years earlier in the tony Los Feliz district of the city. The 1970s had been prosperous years for Cochran, and he had purchased what he later called “my first Rolls” to go with the fancy new house. Facing a potentially expensive divorce settlement, however, Johnnie Cochran decided to make a change. A crusading young liberal named John Van de Kamp had been elected the new district attorney that year, and Johnnie agreed to join him as the number three prosecutor in the office.

  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 ag
ainst 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.’ ”