The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson

8. HORRIBLE HUMAN EVENT

I had an early taste of what the reaction might be to my story. The New Yorker sent out copies to the wire services on Sunday night, July 17, and it was the lead story on many newscasts around the nation. At 8:00 on Monday morning, Maurie Perl, The New Yorker’s chief of public relations, received an early morning call from public television’s Charlie Rose, asking if I could be on his program that night. Similar requests came in all day. For me, the week passed in a haze of television talk shows and radio “phoners.” Maurie’s indefatigable staff computed that, based on Nielsen ratings, approximately 170 million people heard a reference to the “Incendiary Defense” story in The New Yorker in the first two days after it was published.

By far the most important experience for me came on Monday night, July 18, when I traveled to Washington to be the first guest on that night’s Larry King Live. King would come to occupy an unusual niche in the Simpson case. By the time of the trial, King had decided to devote the bulk of his program to the case, and he even moved his base of operations to Los Angeles for long periods. I eventually made several dozen appearances on the show, and King’s CNN studio on Sunset Boulevard came to resemble a sort of Hyde Park Corner for the Simpson case. On any given day that I appeared, I was likely to find a defense lawyer, an expert witness, or some other witness or peripheral figure lingering in the makeup room. For me, a reporter who was actually covering the case, the visits amounted to priceless opportunities to chat with these people in a quiet and intimate setting. So many people involved with the case developed relationships with King that he became a quasi-participant himself. Robert Shapiro, though he never appeared on the show until the trial was over, became a friend of King’s; so did Skip Taft, Simpson’s business manager, who never even agreed to appear on the show. On the air King always maintained a scrupulous nonpartisanship. His renowned even-handedness extended to his famously busy social life. During the trial King simultaneously dated Jo-Ellan Dimitrius, the defense team’s jury consultant, and Suzanne Childs, Gil Garcetti’s director of communications.

On July 18, 1994, King started his show this way: “The charge is simple and stunning, and it’s already touched off a fresh round of fierce debate in the O.J. Simpson case. The claim from the defense, made public today through a pair of respected magazines, is this: O.J. was framed. Set up as a murderer by a racist cop, who planted one of the famous bloody gloves at the Simpson mansion…” After the introduction, King turned to me and asked, “How did you get the story?”

“I got the story by being tipped off by the defense to go look in the court records. And I burrowed down two stories in the archives of the L.A. Superior Court, and looked in an index under Mark Fuhrman’s name and found a case called Fuhrman v. The City of Los Angeles.”

“You were in L.A.?” King asked.

“Yeah.”

“The tip came from the defense?”

I answered, “Tip came from the defense.”

The interview proceeded for the remainder of the hour, and I never gave a second thought to my answers until about a week later. At that point, I checked in with Dershowitz, whose vague tirade had led me to look at the court records in the first place. I had no special agenda with him, but rather called to ask what was up.

“Bob is very pissed at you,” Dershowitz said.

“Why?”

“Because you said on Larry King that we had given you the records.”

“I don’t think I said anything like that. It’s not true.”

“No,” Dershowitz continued confidently. “We’ve reviewed the transcript, and that’s what you said. Bob is very pissed.”

We’ve reviewed the transcript, I thought. They’ve got a client looking at the gas chamber, and they’re reviewing transcripts of Larry King Live? I mumbled a vague dissent and steered the conversation in another direction. Much later, when I had a chance to look at the transcript, I came to believe that Shapiro did have a point, although not the one Dershowitz had raised. I never said on Larry King that the defense gave me the court records, but I did say that the defense tipped me off to their existence. That was a mistake. They had only spoken vaguely about Fuhrman; I had sought out the records on my own. Still, I wondered, why did Shapiro care? He had gotten his point across. Why was he upset?

Robert Shapiro always wanted to be liked. In the eighth grade of his public school in Los Angeles, he and his friend Joel Siegel-now the lavishly mustached and preternaturally cheerful entertainment reporter for ABC’s Good Morning America-had an experience they still talked about forty years later. A clique that called itself the Idols was having a meeting one day, and neither Shapiro nor Siegel was invited. So they just hung around together and moped until the meeting ended. The slight festered. It was as if from that day forward Bob Shapiro, like an updated Scarlett O’Hara, made a vow: With God as his witness, he would never be unpopular again. And he never was.

He was born in Plainfield, New Jersey, in 1942 and the family moved to Los Angeles a year later-an advance guard in the great Jewish migration to West Los Angeles that followed World War II. His mother was a housewife, and his father did a lot of things-drove a lunch wagon, worked in a factory-but Marty Shapiro’s real passion was playing the piano in a small band that did gigs at bar mitzvahs and weddings around the West Side. An only child much loved by his parents and his grandparents, who lived downstairs in their apartment building, Bob sought early on never to disappoint them, and he rarely has.

By the time he arrived at UCLA, at the dawn of the sixties, Shapiro had a showman’s moxie and a taste for action. His taste for the high life earned him the nickname Trini, after the stylish singer Trini Lopez, and fellow students recall his big hair and powder-blue polyester suit with “zero lapels.” He was always a joiner, first of Zeta Beta Tau, a Jewish fraternity (with a rowdier reputation than the stereotypes suggest), but also of a campus booster organization called the Kelps. Resplendent in their blue-and-yellow caps, the Kelps didn’t do a lot more than cheer for the Bruins at football games, but they were distinctive at UCLA nonetheless. At a time when campus life was rigidly, if unofficially, segregated by race and religion, the Kelps were a diverse group. This appealed to Bob Shapiro, who collected friends promiscuously and who, decades later, would still attend Kelp reunions.

Shapiro went to law school because, well, the frat practically went en masse. Smart and a quick study, Shapiro thrived at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, even though he went through a quick marriage and annulment while there. He was so nervous about California’s notoriously difficult bar exam that he compulsively tore out his eyebrows, but he passed on his first try and began work as a deputy district attorney in the relative backwater of Torrance.

Shapiro spent three years as a prosecutor-a successful if unremarkable tenure-before he caught the eye of the man who would change his life. The way he found his ticket out of Torrance said a good deal about both Shapiro and where he was going. The criminal defense lawyer Harry Weiss, overwhelmed with work, had hired one junior associate, Peter Knecht, and he needed another one in 1972. (Around this time, Weiss asked a young lawyer named Johnnie Cochran to join him. Cochran demurred and gave Weiss a revealing explanation. “I don’t want to work for Harry Weiss,” Cochran said. “I want to be Harry Weiss.”) Weiss had also seen Robert Shapiro in action, and found the young lawyer “presentable and charming,” as he later recalled. But something Knecht told Weiss about Shapiro really stuck in his mind. “You know,” Knecht told his boss, “Shapiro is the only deputy D.A. I know who drives a Bentley.” It was, to be sure, only a used Bentley, and Shapiro had no great fortune in those days, but it was all Weiss needed to hear.

In his current entry in Who’s Who, Robert Shapiro lists his occupation during the period of 1972 to 1987 this way: “sole practice L.A.” In fact, during most of this period Shapiro was Harry Weiss’s associate, and during all of it, in an informal sense, he was Weiss’s partner. But after Shapiro became famous in the 1990s, he found it convenient to minimize, and then consign to oblivion, their relationship. The Weiss name-and the Weiss style-did not comport with Shapiro’s later pretensions. Once, during a break in the Simpson trial, I made the mistake of mentioning to Shapiro that I had just met Harry Weiss. Shapiro looked at me as if he had never before heard the name. But for fifteen years, the formative period of his professional life, Bob Shapiro was Harry Weiss’s protégé. And that fancy Napoleonic desk Shapiro sat behind in Century City? A gift from Harry.

At the age of eighty, Harry Weiss-bearing his trademark monocle and two-tone shoes-remains a familiar figure along the corridors of the Los Angeles Criminal Courts Building. He works every day, just as he has since he was four years old and a child star in vaudeville. He had six sisters, and they traveled as a family around the Midwest on the Orpheum circuit, the largest and most prestigious network of vaudeville theaters. As a four- and five-year-old, in the years around 1920, Harry would close the act by demonstrating the now lost art of “recitation.” These were monologues-anything ranging from the Gettysburg Address to soliloquies from Hamlet-addressed directly to the audience. “I used to stop the show,” Weiss boasted three quarters of a century later.

The Weiss act ended with the decline of vaudeville and the advent of child labor laws in the twenties, and the family moved to Los Angeles in 1929. Harry became a lawyer in 1940 and never let the skills honed onstage go to waste. From the beginning, long before the era of celebrity defense attorneys, there was something rakish and theatrical about Weiss’s style of practice. In a way, Weiss’s law business reflected his roots in vaudeville-more mass than class, just shy of total respectability. He had his share of famous clients-Peter Fonda, in a marijuana case, and John Lennon, in an immigration dispute-but mostly Weiss believed in volume. There was a saying: Every hooker in Hollywood has Harry’s card.

The seventies, the heyday of Shapiro’s association with Weiss, were boom years for their law practice. They shared a penthouse suite at 8600 Sunset Boulevard, which boasted a private swimming pool to go with the palatial offices for Weiss, Shapiro, and Knecht. Harry always began his workday the same way, with a conference call at seven in the morning to go over the day’s court appearances. This was no simple matter, because at the time Harry Weiss may have had the biggest criminal law practice in the United States. In an office that never had more than half a dozen lawyers who appeared in court, there might be a hundred appearances to be handled in courthouses that were sometimes twenty miles from one another. (Weiss provided chauffeurs for his top lawyers to help them make their rounds; Shapiro, for a time, hired his own father to drive for him.) The morning conference calls would feature a rotating cast of characters, but there were four regulars: Harry Weiss, Shapiro, Knecht, and Sammy Weiss, Harry’s nephew. (Sammy’s surname was originally Greene, but he changed it to Weiss to bathe in Harry’s reflected glow.) Both Sammy Weiss and Peter Knecht, who drove a Ferrari and dated starlets, had active social lives that made the early morning phone calls an unwelcome chore.

“Are we all here?” Harry would begin.

Sammy Weiss at this point might reply with a slight groan.

“Sammy?” the senior Weiss would ask.

“Wha…”

“SAMMY!”

“What!?”

“You been out again, Sammy? Out dancing or whatever?” Harry would continue at deafening volume. “This is what you have to do. You go get an enema. You listening?”

“Leave me alone, Harry,” Sammy would mumble.

“Listen to me, Sammy!” Harry would shoot back. “Mae West told me that’s why she looks so good. She’s seventy-six years old, she gets enemas. You should too!”

After a little more in this vein it was usually Shapiro, the most levelheaded member of the group, who would interrupt to suggest that Harry move on to the case assignments, and so another day on the circuit would begin. Mostly, Weiss and Shapiro cut deals for their clients. This was imperative, given the number of clients they had to service, but it also reflected the nature of their cases and the personalities of the lawyers. In the mid-1970s the police in Los Angeles still arrested large numbers of people for so-called victimless crimes-prostitution, drug usage, and some consensual-sex offenses. The firm specialized in the speedy and painless resolutions of these matters. Weiss, in particular, always had many clients in Los Angeles’s gay community, and in the days when Shapiro worked with him, the police were still routinely arresting men for having sex with one another. According to Weiss, “Bob handled many of these cases-vag lewds, we called them. The cops always had these guys dead-bang, and no one ever wanted to go to trial. In those days, the men couldn’t stand the embarrassment of fighting it in public, and anyway, judges never came down too hard on them. So you had to make deals, and Bob made deals. That’s the way you’ve got to do it. He learned.”

Deal making suited Shapiro’s temperament. He has an unusual quality for a successful lawyer-a strong aversion to conflict. Plea bargains please him; both sides win. He is, to be sure, an effective trial attorney, but the area of the law where he truly excels is the cultivation of clients, a skill he honed from his earliest days with Weiss. Shapiro always had ambitions that went beyond the profitable, if low-prestige, Harry Weiss assembly line. He married a beautiful model, Linell Thomas, in 1970. They had no children for a decade, a period that Shapiro spent developing the social contacts that later blossomed into law clients. He and Linell had lunch almost every Sunday at the Beverly Hills Hotel with one high-powered friend or another. One of them was Dale Gribow, a personal-injury lawyer. Gribow introduced Shapiro to Dennis Gilbert, then a successful insurance salesman. In time, Gilbert became one of the biggest agents in professional baseball. When, as sometimes happened, Gilbert’s clients were arrested, he referred them to Shapiro, who became something like house counsel to ballplayers in trouble, a group that came to include Jose Canseco (gun possession), Darryl Strawberry (tax evasion), and Vince Coleman (throwing a firecracker at a group of fans).

There was a pattern to many of Shapiro’s big cases: The facts were usually undisputed; the only issue was punishment-that is, how a bargain could be structured with the prosecutor and judge. This was no secret. On the day he was retained to represent Christian Brando, Marlon’s son, for murdering his half-sister’s lover, Shapiro told the Los Angeles Times that he would meet with prosecutors and try to resolve the case without a trial. Many lawyers would view such a statement as a pointless surrender of bargaining power, but Shapiro had great confidence in his ability to cut a deal. There was another pattern, too, in the celebrity cases. Shapiro cleverly treated these clients as loss leaders, charging them little or nothing in fees, a practice that did not hurt in attracting even more celebrity clients-and, of course, in drawing the lesser-known souls whom Shapiro would make pay through the nose. (The quest for clients was never far from Shapiro’s thoughts. When the Simpson defense team pulled the ludicrous stunt of establishing an 800 number for tips to help them identify the real killer, Shapiro, quite naturally, gave callers the option of pressing 4 if they wanted to retain his services. Embarrassed by the public attention to this feature, Shapiro quickly had it removed, and the number itself was shut down a little while later. Not surprisingly, the 800 number provided no useful information.)

Shapiro cut so many deals so successfully-the celebrities he represented almost never went to jail-that it contributed to an impression that he didn’t know how to try a case. It was true that Shapiro did not relish that side of the job. For example, he hated having to visit his clients in jail. This became a problem in a difficult federal narcotics trial Shapiro conducted in 1989. His client, George Guzman, who had been stopped in a car that contained cocaine, complained bitterly that Shapiro never came to see him; Guzman was even more offended that Shapiro had instructed him not to speak to him in court. Yet when the time came for summations in the trial, Shapiro became so swept away by the emotion of the moment that he embraced his client in front of the jury and shouted, “This man is innocent!” The theatrics drew an astonished rebuke from the judge, but that was nothing compared to Guzman’s surprise: The prisoner recoiled so quickly that he threw out a muscle in his back. But he never complained; the jury acquitted him.

Many of Shapiro’s cases attracted intense media interest, and Shapiro came to fancy himself an expert on dealing with reporters. In January 1993, more than a year before the murders on Bundy Drive, Shapiro wrote a casually revealing article in The Champion, a trade publication for criminal defense lawyers. Entitled “Using the Media to Your Advantage,” it offered a step-by-step guide for attorneys handling high-profile cases. The article was full of sensible advice-be truthful, be courteous, be prompt-and yet it was written with profound ignorance about the larger implications of what he had to say. In some respects, Shapiro figured out clever ways to deal with the frenzy generated by the media in big cases. His advice was cynical, but probably justified under the circumstances. For example: “I tell the reporters in advance that I will be making a statement at the end of the day, and I direct them to an area outside the courthouse. I prefer a lawn with trees or some other attractive background… The most important lead story on an hour newscast allots only 15 or 20 seconds for a statement from an interview. These ‘sound bytes’ [sic] must be concise and easily understood… Pick and choose the questions you want to answer. You do not have to be concerned with whether the answer precisely addresses the question, since only the answer will be aired… In dealing with all members of the press, avoid clichés. Referring to a case as a tragedy or to a client as being framed does not convey a thoughtful message. To describe an unfortunate death situation, I use the term ‘a horrible human event.’ ” (Shapiro practiced what he preached. On June 11, 1990, when he took over as counsel for Christian Brando, the third paragraph of the Los Angeles Times story read: “ ‘It’s a horrible human event,’ Shapiro said of the fatal shooting last month of Dag Drollet.”)

On close inspection, the calculated sincerity of the Shapiro method certainly may look a little smarmy, but there was little harm in it for a case about a Hollywood peccadillo. Yet Shapiro learned at his peril that the Simpson case was different-because the subject of race is different. In his conversations with me and Newsweek’s Mark Miller, Shapiro had raised the subject in American life that is least amenable to compromise and deal making. No “lawn with trees or some other attractive background” could help him here. Shapiro was suddenly out of his league, and he knew it. That was why he was mad at me.

Still, Shapiro’s irritation with me amounted to little more than a minor annoyance. Fundamentally, he was having the time of his life. He did not give interviews, but he was happy to be courted by the American media royalty. It wasn’t just Larry King who wrote him every day. ABC’s Barbara Walters appeared to pay homage, as did CBS’s Connie Chung. For the moment, Shapiro played coy; there would be no interviews-not least because he didn’t want to be asked on camera whether he thought Simpson was guilty. (He was, however, happy to pose for photographs-by Avedon for The New Yorker; by Annie Leibovitz for Vanity Fair; and in his boxing trunks for People.) So Shapiro took Walters and Chung to dinner, and they agreed to stay in touch.

It was a heady time, and Shapiro loved the action. One day shortly after he was hired, he was waxing nostalgic on the telephone with his old friend Joel Siegel. Siegel was urging Shaps-Bob’s junior high school nickname-to keep a diary of his experiences in the Simpson case. “Just be purely subjective about your feelings about it, and at the end of the trial you’ll have a book,” Siegel said. “You know, we’re not getting any younger, all of us, and this book will be around forever.” Shapiro demurred for the moment, even if he enjoyed the attention. In the middle of the conversation, Shapiro asked Siegel if he could put him on hold. He had to take another call. In a moment, Shapiro was back.

“Joel,” Shapiro said, “say hello to O.J. Simpson.”

Siegel unexpectedly found himself on a conference call with America’s most famous murder defendant and his lawyer. Simpson knew Siegel worked in the media, of course, and the defendant started venting his anger at what he regarded as the unfair treatment he had received in the press. “Why don’t they talk to my friends?” Simpson said. “I’m not a wife beater.”

Shapiro said he wanted to raise another subject. They had made great progress in hiring legal and scientific experts, but there was still the matter of a trial lawyer. Shapiro was looking at some people they might want to bring in to help at the trial. There were three main candidates. Astonished at what he was hearing, Siegel could not resist sharing his good fortune. Without telling Shapiro (or, needless to say, Simpson), Siegel patched in Roger Cossack, another old chum of his and Shapiro’s from Los Angeles. In this bizarre four-way phone call, O.J. Simpson evaluated the lawyers who might defend him in court.

Simpson didn’t like one of the candidates, which was actually a team, Leslie Abramson and Gerald Chaleff. Simpson didn’t know Chaleff, a well-regarded Santa Monica-based defense attorney who had represented Angelo Buono in the “Hillside Stranger” case. It was Abramson who was the problem. Simpson just didn’t cotton to the frizzy-haired counsel to Erik Menendez.

The second possibility was Johnnie Cochran. Simpson liked Cochran well enough, and he wasn’t willing to dismiss him as a possibility.

But the third candidate had become Simpson’s favorite. O.J. had seen Gerry Spence on television for years. Dressed in his trademark cowboy hats and fringed leather jackets, the sage of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, had deployed his cornpone charm for clients as diverse as Karen Silkwood and Imelda Marcos. O.J. thought he was great.

“Get me Gerry Spence,” the defendant said.