Murder in Brentwood (15 page)

Judge Ito finally ruled that if the epithet was used in a relevant incident it could be introduced in court. That should have meant that it would be relevant only if it somehow proved I manufactured or planted evidence. The word by itself could not have any relevance under Ito’s ruling.

First, Ito ruled that the defense would have to show some evidence that I planted the glove before they could elicit testimony about racism or epithets. Then he changed his mind and decided: “I find the issue of racial animosity to be something that the defense is entitled to cross-examine on.”

The defense played the race card, and Ito allowed it. Now the trial, and my life, would take a turn for the worse.

Chapter 10

THE ALLEGATIONS AND THE FACTS

The jurors come from the same public that would be watching the preliminary hearing on television. And judges, too, are human beings who are influenced by public opinion.

ALAN DERSHOWITZ

FOR TWO YEARS I have been reading about somebody in the papers and hearing about him on the television and radio. The person is an LAPD detective who is a rogue cop, a racist, a Nazi, a liar, someone who beats up suspects and frames innocent people. Although they call him Mark Fuhrman, I don’t know who this person is. It certainly isn’t me.

When the Simpson trial started, I had been a street cop for nearly twenty years. During that time, I had made thousands of arrests and had contact with tens of thousands of suspects. In my twenty years living in Southern California, I had come into contact with countless people, both socially and professionally. A lot of them liked me. Some of them didn’t. And a handful of them wanted a part of the action, or a little money, or else they just wanted to see themselves on television. While the defense liked to use these questionable sources together to create a pattern of racism, none of their charges had any validity or relevance. Here I will answer all of the allegations separately and honestly.

There was no standard tactic for the defenses charges against me. They floated rumors, leaked “stories” to the media, and talked about supposed future witnesses, many of whom never appeared. The defense used the shotgun technique, firing everything at me and hoping that something would hit the target. There was no master plan, no rhyme or reason why some charges seemed to stick while others didn’t. Too many people wanted in on the trial. There was too much media attention, too much money. The possibility of being associated with celebrities, or even becoming celebrities themselves, proved impossible for many to resist.

The defense needed to portray me as a racist in order to float their bizarre conspiracy theories. And the media was much more interested in the story of a rogue cop (which I wasn’t) than a good detective (which I was). As the hysteria grew and attention increased, people came forward with lies and allegations about me. Unfortunately, they were given the benefit of the doubt, while those who told the truth about me were either shouted down or simply ignored.

The process was long and murky-Toobin’s first story was published on July 19, 1994, and I did not testify until March 9, 1995. The true story of how the defense team floated its theories would be a fascinating study, if anyone could ever get to the truth. What’s more important is how rumors, innuendo, and lies were interwoven into the trial itself. The charges against me supplied much of the spice and gossip in what otherwise should have been a fact-filled and solemn proceeding.

Toobin got his planted glove story from Bob Shapiro, but former LAPD officer turned criminal defense investigator Bill Pavelic was the source of the disability claim allegations. Pavelic worked for Robert Deutsch, an attorney on another case involving me. At about the same time of the Simpson case, I was being sued in a federal court for shooting Joseph Britton, a suspect involved in a robbery in progress. During that trial. Pavelic obtained medical records on my disability claim and thrust them into the suit brought by Britton.

The Britton shooting occurred in 1987, where we had reports of two robbers who sat and watched ATM machines at two locations across the street from each other. On at least three prior occasions, they had robbed people, threatening to shoot or kill them. The suspects’ descriptions were unique, their modus operandi was clear, and the time and dates of the robberies had a pattern. I analyzed these crimes, and realized that a stake-out might produce the suspects in the act of committing a robbery. On April 7, 1987, at approximately 11:20 P.M. this in fact did happen.

While I was watching the ATM at the Sumotomo Bank on Olympic Boulevard through binoculars from across the street, a male approached the ATM machine. A

[If I were a racist, why would l work so hard to free a black man whose guilt seemed obvious to so many others?]

male suspect, later identified as Joseph Britton, confronted the male and attempted to rob him. I and two other officers went to detain Britton, which led to a foot pursuit by the three of us. Britton hid in some bushes, refused to

give up, and although ordered to surrender, instead acted aggressively to another officer who was completely exposed to Britton’s possible gunfire.

Joseph Britton was shot several times and fell to the ground. Some of the wounds came from my weapon. Britton was handcuffed, and medical personnel were summoned immediately. A few feet south of him was the large butcher knife that he had been holding while hiding in the bushes. At the time of these crimes, Joseph Britton plead guilty to four counts of robbery, including the one after which he was shot. At no time during his plea did he express any claim that the knife that he dropped was planted by the police or that he was called any name or racial epithet. Only after he obtained a civil attorney, Robert Deutsch, did these charges surface. Even then, Britton said that an officer with red hair and a mustache (I have neither) called him an epithet. The first trial ended on a hung jury on one of the five counts, and it was set for retrial sometime in the near future. Then the Simpson case began, and the city settled out of court to eliminate my having to take the stand on the Britton case during the Simpson trial, regardless of the merits of Britton’s charges. Britton eventually admitted on the CBS Evening News that I had never said anything racially oriented to him.

After my face was on television in the preliminary hearing, Deutsch contacted Robert Shapiro about my medical records, and Pavelic was used as the go-between. Pavelic spent a great deal of time, money, and energy to find witnesses against me. He also came up with a variety of witnesses willing to testify to all sorts of different things. He had witnesses who claimed to have seen a gang of Hispanics, an Oriental suspect, and some white guys, all at the murder scene around the time of the killings. Where was he finding these people-Witnesses ‘R Us? Of course none of them ended up testifying.

While the first issue that surfaced was my 1982 disability claim, the onslaught continued when Johnnie Cochran received a letter written by a woman named Kathleen Bell. She claimed that she met me in a Marine Corps recruiting station in 1985 or 1986. During this encounter when I supposedly met her, I also supposedly made horrible references to blacks, which reduced her to tears and sent her fleeing to her upstairs office.

The next time Bell supposedly saw me was at Hennessey’s Tavern in Redondo Beach, where she tried to introduce me to her girlfriend, Andrea Terry. Being a former Marine who lived in the neighborhood, I visited the recruiting office on occasion, and I went to Hennessey’s frequently. While I remember a female in the office, I do not recall the faces of Bell or her friend. And if she was so hurt and offended, why would she play matchmaker and try to set up her friend with such an evil man? I find it uncanny that she could remember these ten-year-old incidents so clearly, particularly since one of them purportedly occurred in a bar where she probably had been drinking.

This was not simply a matter of Bells word against mine. When Bell supposedly came into the recruiting station, I was seated with a recruiter named Joe Foss, who was eventually interviewed by the district attorney’s office and my private investigator, Anthony Petheano. Joe remembered Bell coming into the office and then trying to edge into the conversation. Joe described her introduction to me, but he recalled that I barely turned at all and basically kept my back to her. Joe was asked about the reported racial comments, and he responded that he never heard anything of the kind. Two other Marines who worked in the recruiting office said they hadn’t witnessed or heard about the incident.

Staff Sergeant Max Cordoba was also assigned to this recruiting station and was present when Bell supposedly heard these remarks. Petheano also interviewed Max, who stated that he did not hear anything that Bell described.

While Bell’s statements were made public and became part of the trial, one of the tabloid news programs caught up with Max Cordoba. Max told them that I was a nice guy and that he never heard me make any racial comments. But just as my testimony in the trial commenced, Cordoba claimed he had a dream about me in which I called him a racial epithet. This miraculous dream triggered a recollection, and Max then claimed that I made those remarks. Of course by then he was already talking to the defense.

The entire country was engulfed by Simpson frenzy, with people everywhere trying to exploit some attachment to the “trial of the century.” So, why would my home town be any different? Two brothers named Darrell and Dan Blue lived in Eatonville at the same time as I did, and I knew them both. They were members of the only black family in our town of 952 people.

Dan and Darrell got their fifteen minutes of fame at my expense by- claiming that I drove by their house yelling racial epithets. They said they were called such names repeatedly in Eatonville. Dan Blue even described how he observed my racist conduct when we supposedly played high school football together.

The truth is, I never heard either brother called anything other than their name, by me or anyone else. I never drove by their house yelling anything, let alone a racial slur. Darrell was something of a knucklehead, but harmless. Dan was a star high school athlete who dated one of the cheerleaders. Dan graduated from high school in 1974 with my brother Scott. Not only did I never play high school football with him, but I was in the Marine Corps during his four years of high school. Dan also forgot that I attended a different school, Peninsula High School in Gig Harbor, Washington.

The defense dug up two more witnesses, Natalie Singer and Roderic Hodge, to claim I was a racist. Later in the trial, after the screenplay tapes were admitted, they both testified.

I met Natalie Singer in 1987 because my partner was dating her roommate. I can’t recall exact incidents, but I won’t say we didn’t argue. I do remember that we did not get along, and I tried hard to irritate and anger her.

I came to know Roderic Hodge while working a gang/narcotics unit as a uniformed officer in West Los Angeles from 1985 to 1987. Hodge was under investigation for dealing narcotics. I had many contacts with Hodge and arrested him twice. During both arrests, he made complaints about his handling by both arresting officers and wanted to speak with a sergeant. There was no merit to his charges, and he never claimed I used racial epithets. He was just complaining in an attempt to draw attention away from his own arrests.

Around that same time, I worked with Officer James Purdy, who eventually told the defense that when he married a Jewish woman, I supposedly painted a swastika on his locker.

I never touched Purdy’s locker, nor would I have done anything so hateful. Purdy was hardly popular in West LA. There were so many people in the division who either didn’t care for him or flat out couldn’t stand him that it would be difficult to speculate who might have defaced his locker, if that incident really ever occurred.

Another ridiculous allegation concerned a newspaper cartoon I had in my desk. Yes, I did have a cartoon by Paul Conrad that had a swastika in it. My friends knew that I appreciated political satire, and even drew myself. They also knew that I liked Conrad but didn’t read the Los Angeles Times, where he was the regular political cartoonist. So, when they saw a cartoon they thought was powerful or thought-provoking, they’d often clip it out and give it to me. I had about fifteen such cartoons in my desk. The cartoon in question is a single-frame drawing of a swastika rising out of the ashes of the newly fallen Berlin Wall. Conrad was asking whether we were making a mistake by allowing a country with the power and the history of Germany to be reunified. He was asking if we had awakened a sleeping giant, and whether we might have been better off leaving the giant alone. The fact that a single image can provoke such subtle and disturbing thoughts shows Conrad’s great artistry, and that is the only reason I saved the cartoon.

I was also attacked for collecting war memorabilia, some of which happened to be German. In fact, I’m something of a history and military buff and collect all sorts of memorabilia. Decorations, daggers, and sabres are about the only artifacts from World Wars I and II which are neither too expensive, nor too rare for me to collect. British and German war decorations are recognized for their superb craftsmanship, many of these pieces are documented and engraved, and their makers took great pride in their work.

The defense claimed that because I had some German war memorabilia I was therefore supposedly a Nazi. That’s like saying because I collect late 19
^th
century American cavalry items, I approve of the slaughter of Indians. When I could still own weapons, I also collected old Winchesters and single action Colts. Does this mean I’m an outlaw? I’m not obsessed, only extremely intrigued by holding a piece of history, no matter what period it might come from.

While the defense combined these imaginative leaps with I lie statements of a few disgruntled or attention-seeking witnesses, the district attorney’s office thoroughly checked out my background, as well as the backgrounds of those who were making claims against me. The district attorney’s investigators told me that they had stacks of impeachment evidence on every witness against me, but they never used any of it.