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

11. THE DREAM TEAM

John Tobin was seventy-two years old and ailing in 1960, but his reputation as a criminal defense lawyer still towered in Massachusetts. That year, as was customary, Tobin was retained in the headline murder case of the day-the killing of Betty Edgerly, a Lowell housewife. Her body had been scooped out of the Merrimack River in pieces, and her grisly demise had given the crime its nickname: the Torso Murder. Her husband, George, was charged with the crime.

The key evidence against George involved a polygraph examination, and John Tobin knew nothing about the new and evolving science of “lie detection.” He asked around for an expert, and all he could come up with was the name of a recent law school graduate by the name of Francis Lee Bailey.

Bailey was just twenty-seven years old at the time, the son of a struggling advertising man and a nursery-school teacher. His parents had sent him to prep school and then on scholarship to Harvard, where he drifted on “gentleman’s C’s” until the United States Navy summoned him for active duty. Bailey trained as a fighter pilot, and developed a lifelong obsession with flying and owning his own planes. As a secondary assignment, Bailey joined his unit’s legal office, which transformed his life even more than flight school. He worked as a sort of jack-of-all-trades in the military justice system-trading roles as prosecutor, defense lawyer, investigator, and judge. Bailey developed a specialty in the use of the polygraph, a machine that has always been more favored in the military than in civilian life. When he went to Boston University for law school, Bailey refined his expertise with the polygraph when he moonlighted as an investigator for lawyers preparing for trials. He was still running his little investigation business when he passed the bar examination in November 1960, just a few weeks before he heard from John Tobin.

Tobin confided to the young lawyer that he had been snookered. Polygraph results were generally inadmissible in criminal trials, but Tobin had blundered into allowing the jury to hear that his client had flunked a test administered by a novice examiner. It looked like the entire case would come down to whether the defense could discredit Augustine Lawlor, a local pharmacist who had volunteered his polygraphy services to the police. Tobin was tired and sick, and after speaking to Bailey briefly about the new technology, he had a question for the young lawyer:

“Lee,” he said, “would you be willing to come into the case to cross-examine this guy Lawlor? I don’t think there’s another lawyer in Massachusetts who would recognize a lie detector if you dropped one on him. I think you could help us.”

F. Lee Bailey had never before set foot in a courtroom, but he jumped at the chance.

Over the years Bailey has written a great deal about his own career and about criminal law generally; his specialty-in both theory and practice-has been the art of cross-examination. His first law is a simple one: “The cross-examiner’s first task is to pin down all that the witness claims to know about the subject and all that he says he doesn’t know,” Bailey has written. “Until a witness is firmly committed to a definite statement or position, he can parry a question or sidestep it with some kind of explanation.”

Bailey’s task, thus, was to pin down Lawlor, the polygrapher. The young lawyer brought a whole stack of books about the polygraph to the courtroom and tried to get Lawlor to concede that one of them was authoritative-which would allow Bailey to show how this beginner had violated the book’s commands. Lawlor was wise to this game and would not vouch for any of the books. But Bailey-meticulously prepared-had also found the instruction manual for the polygraph machine that Lawlor used, and the witness, trapped, had to admit that the manual did describe the appropriate procedures. Bailey promptly went on to show the jury how the witness had violated many of the manual’s commands. The weight of Lawlor’s testimony crumbled.

One successful cross-examination does not make a career, but in fitting storybook manner, the elderly Tobin suffered a seizure shortly before final arguments in the Edgerly case. From his sickbed, he asked Bailey to give the summation.

Bailey did, of course, and then went to a neighboring tavern to await the verdict. “I kept fidgeting and drinking Scotch,” he wrote of the scene. “I had done little boozing in the service, and I couldn’t afford liquor while I was in law school. But I drank like fourteen fishes while the Edgerly jury deliberated. Interestingly enough, the liquor had little effect on me. Perhaps it has something to do with tension. Or with adrenaline. All I know is that most trial lawyers drink. And the good ones can hold their booze.”

The verdict came back in less than a day: not guilty. A career-and a legend-was launched.

When Bailey told the story of the Edgerly case-as he has done in a pair of memoirs and hundreds of conversations-he lingered on his favorite part: his humiliation of the hapless Lawlor. Bailey was only sixty-one during the Simpson trial, but his heavily lidded eyes, which bore the toll of decades of drink and overwork, twinkled as he told of Lawlor’s abject surrender. Bailey didn’t spend much time worrying about whether George Edgerly actually murdered his wife. That was not Bailey’s concern. Proximity to murder can harden a conscience, and so it is with Lee Bailey. He is a consummately cynical man, with an eye only for the bottom line-legal and financial. The guilt or innocence of his clients means little to him. He once wrote, “I prefer cases that offer whopping fees and/or professional challenge.” Regularly and rancorously, Bailey has rotated law partners and wives. (He has been married four times.)

For all his stormy and dissolute personal life, insatiable ego, and pervasive misanthropism, one fact stands out about Bailey: He invented the contemporary practice of criminal-defense law. Prior to his emergence into public view in the 1960s, criminal defense had been a vaguely disreputable (and mostly unprofitable) backwater of the legal profession. Bailey changed that. First, he understood the news media and how to manipulate the press for his ends. If Bailey did not invent the impromptu press conference on the courthouse steps, he made the practice his own. He recognized the general importance of appearance. His clothes were tailor-made, and so were his elevator shoes. His lust for the spotlight even led him into questionable ethical territory when, on some cases, he accepted as part of his fee the right to write a book about his work on a case. Bailey also engaged in the kind of exhaustive preparation for cases that, before him, had been the practice of only the best lawyers in the biggest firms. Bailey came of age when the term “superstar” first came into vogue, and he was, without question, the first legal superstar. Within a half dozen years of his debut in the Edgerly case, he had an estate south of Boston and a helicopter for commuting to work. Before he was forty years old, he boasted that he had charged a client a million dollars.

There was no shortage of clients, at any price. Two days after Bailey’s first anniversary as a member of the bar, he met Dr. Samuel Sheppard, an osteopath from the Cleveland suburbs who had been charged, like Edgerly, with murdering his wife. It was an even more sensational case-the inspiration for the television series The Fugitive-and Bailey spent half a decade winning Sheppard his freedom. Along the way, Bailey traveled on both the high and low roads, as would be his custom. To publicize his attempt to give Sheppard a polygraph test in prison, Bailey went on The Mike Douglas Show and demonstrated the technique on a comedienne. In a more exalted setting, the United States Supreme Court, Bailey successfully argued that Sheppard’s original conviction should be thrown out because of excessive pretrial publicity. While Sheppard’s case was moving through the system, Bailey also represented Albert DeSalvo, the admitted “Boston Strangler.” (The court in the DeSalvo case rejected Bailey’s argument that DeSalvo should be committed to a mental hospital rather than a prison. DeSalvo was eventually murdered in prison in 1973.) Bailey also won an acquittal for Dr. Carl Coppolino when he was charged with poisoning his lover’s husband in New Jersey-but even Bailey couldn’t help this doctor when he was charged with, and convicted of, poisoning his wife in Florida.

Bailey’s lust for the spotlight-and cash-led him astray in the years after his initial fame. In 1973, he was indicted in a federal mail fraud conspiracy case in Florida, along with his former client Glenn Turner, whose motivational business, known variously as Dare to be Great and Koscot Interplanetary, turned out to be little more than a Ponzi scheme. (Characteristically, Bailey was tempted into working with Turner because the entrepreneur promised the lawyer a new Learjet as his fee.) Thanks to the efforts of his lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, Bailey managed to have the case against him dismissed. After the Turner fiasco, Bailey represented Patricia Hearst, the newspaper heiress, in the case that arose out of her kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army. Bailey’s performance was much criticized, and Hearst was convicted of bank robbery. In 1982, Bailey was again charged with a crime, drunk driving, and his friend Robert Shapiro successfully represented him at his San Francisco trial. Not coincidentally, the abuse of alcohol has been a leitmotif of Bailey’s professional life. The first line of Bailey’s 1975 memoir reads, “Heavy trials make me thirsty.” He has long dismissed friends’ advice to cut back. “It’s my fuel,” Bailey has said.

For all his faults and traumas, Bailey continued to try cases throughout the 1980s and 1990s and, for the most part, try them very well. Indeed, of all the lawyers on either side of the Simpson case, Bailey not only had the most experience trying murder cases, he had conducted the most recent murder trial as well. In March 1994, Bailey won an acquittal for one Paul Tanso, charged with a double murder in Boston’s North End. Bailey’s bravura cross-examination of Tanso’s ostensible accomplice marked the turning point in the case. His trademark had not changed since John Tobin summoned him from obscurity almost forty years earlier. For all his fame, Bailey has never been an especially theatrical courtroom performer. He is, rather, a master of preparation. Endlessly, meticulously, remorselessly, Bailey investigates the facts-or hires those who do.

Immediately after he was retained by O.J. Simpson the week after the murders, Shapiro called Bailey. He treated Bailey with a deference befitting the elder lawyer’s exalted history as a defense attorney, but there were tensions from the outset, too. Shapiro couldn’t help but enjoy the change in status between them. Twelve years earlier, Bailey had favored Shapiro with the assignment of defending him in the drunk-driving case. Now Shapiro had the kind of case that once would have gone to Bailey as a matter of course. When Bailey appeared on the Simpson case’s quasi-official forum, Larry King Live, on June 24 to announce that he had joined the defense team, his choice of words reflected the possibility of future trouble between him and Shapiro. “We are close friends,” Bailey said of Shapiro. “I’m the godfather of Bob’s oldest child… I also want to make perfectly plain the fact that he is the lead counsel in this case, and I am consulting with him.”

King asked why Bailey had waited to announce that he was part of the defense team.

“Simply because my recommendation, with all the sniping that someone has been sponsoring, saying Bob Shapiro couldn’t handle this case-which I think is silly, because, when I was in trouble, I hired him, and he won my case. And he is the only lawyer in the country allowed to have my name on his letterhead. I thought it would be best to let the case proceed down the road a little bit, until it was firmly established that he had control. He has. He’s handled it brilliantly.”

In fact, there had been very little sniping about Shapiro’s abilities until Bailey raised the issue on the air that night. As for the purported drama about when to make Bailey’s announcement, Bailey invented that issue as well. His entire presentation had the air of a man protesting too much; by defending Shapiro, Bailey demeaned him.

Still, Bailey had been giving Shapiro very specific advice since the day he was retained. From his days as a private investigator during law school, Bailey never lost faith in their value. He urged Shapiro to have his own investigators chase down any favorable leads in the case before they grew stale. In comparison, Shapiro had little experience with private eyes (besides Bill Pavelic, whom he had engaged earlier), so he deferred to Bailey on whom to hire and where to send them. Bailey didn’t hesitate with his first suggestion: Hire Pat McKenna and send him to Chicago.

McKenna-an affable and hardworking native of that city-lived near Bailey’s adopted home of West Palm Beach, Florida, and the two men had occasionally worked together on cases in the past. On hearing from Shapiro and then Bailey, McKenna got himself on the first flight to Chicago to learn what he could about Simpson’s brief stay there in the hours after the murders.

McKenna found a chaotic scene at the O’Hare Plaza-Chicago cops, Los Angeles detectives, a swarm of reporters from around the world, not to mention agents from the United States Secret Service who were preparing for an imminent visit by President Clinton to the hotel. Working an old connection with the Chicago police, McKenna managed to find a couple of people who had seen Simpson when he arrived in the city on his red-eye flight from L.A. These witnesses reported that O.J. seemed in relatively good spirits. His demeanor, it seemed, was not that of a killer. It was from tiny threads like these that McKenna-and Bailey-believed reasonable doubt could be knit.

McKenna traveled on to Los Angeles, where the scene at Shapiro’s office seemed peculiar in another way. After the intense activity of the prelim, Shapiro had resumed the more sporadic work habits that were his custom. He sent his colleagues cryptic memoranda. For example, on August 18, Shapiro dispatched the following message to all the investigators: “Goldman was fired; allegedly, from the California Pizza Kitchen for giving a customer a free Coke. I will follow up on this.” When Shapiro was in his office, the investigators often found him autographing photographs of himself with a gold pen. Shapiro’s on-again, off-again presence left his nineteenth-floor office suite, nominally the nerve center of the case, directionless. Part of the reason was friction among the personnel. Shapiro had hired his own investigators, chief among them Bill Pavelic, who had brought the Fuhrman file to the defense’s attention. The prickly former LAPD detective did not enjoy outsiders like McKenna treading on his turf. The problems were exacerbated when Shapiro, again at Bailey’s suggestion, hired another investigator, John McNally. A gruff ex-New York City cop, McNally had worked with Bailey for more than twenty years. McNally took an immediate dislike to Shapiro and his media-friendly ways. Shortly after McNally arrived, he was looking through some unopened boxes of discovery material when, to his astonishment, he saw a man wandering around the office taking pictures of everyone. It was Roger Sandler, the ubiquitous photographer for Time and Life. Confidential documents were everywhere, and McNally wanted to throw him out, but Shapiro had given Sandler free rein.

Not wishing to intrude, and preoccupied with his own cases, Bailey initially spent little time in Los Angeles and heard only the complaints of McKenna and McNally. Bailey’s one-on-one relationship with Shapiro remained close, and when he was in L.A., Bailey stayed at the Beverly Hills home of Shapiro’s best friend, Michael Klein. Bailey tried to mollify his investigators as best he could and brought in another protégé, Howard Harris, a database specialist whose mission was to computerize the voluminous files in the case. At one point, McKenna saw Shapiro only once over a period of several weeks, and that was when he went to Shapiro’s house to install his son’s computer. “Don’t worry,” Bailey told his investigators when they complained about Shapiro. “He just has a different style than we do. He’s really very bright.” For his part, Bailey mostly remained in Florida, although he did arrange for the first volume of his memoirs, The Defense Never Rests, to be reissued in paperback. A cheerful new blurb was added to the cover: “O.J. Simpson’s Acclaimed Defense Attorney Re-Creates His Most Famous Wife-Murder Cases.”

Through the summer, the tensions grew between the Shapiro camp (Pavelic and various part-timers) and the Bailey group (McKenna, McNally, and Harris). Their differences were partly philosophical. Bailey’s team favored a minute dissection of the government’s case. For example, McKenna and McNally-and sometimes even Bailey-repeatedly walked up and down Bundy Drive knocking on doors in an effort to locate witnesses who could contradict the prosecution’s theory of when the dog started barking (and thus when the crime occurred). In this way, Bailey hoped, they could undermine the government’s case piece by piece.

In contrast, Pavelic favored an all-or-nothing approach and accordingly spent much of his time chasing theories about the identity of “the real killer.” Almost daily, Pavelic would return to Shapiro’s office with a breathless new theory. On June 22, for example, Pavelic sent Shapiro a memo that stated, “Rumor has it that Ron’s lover discovered his infidelity with Nicole Simpson… and killed them both.” Pavelic had many other theories, however.

“A house burglar saw the guys who did it!” he announced one day. In his memorandum outlining this theory, Pavelic reported that he had spoken to the burglar, and he “distinctly recalled hearing one of the suspects saying, ‘slit the Nigger fucking/lovin bitch.’ ” (Unfortunately for the defense, this burglar also claimed that he had seen the murder of Polly Klaas and a hit by John Gotti.)

“Goldman had semen in his ass, and it was a gay hit!” (The autopsy showed no such evidence, and Goldman wasn’t gay.)

“A marcher at a Gay Pride parade saw two men covered with blood at a phone booth yelling, ‘O.J. is going to pay for what he did to us!’ ” (Too ridiculous even to consider. “You’re a fucking Martian,” McNally told Pavelic.)

It didn’t matter to Pavelic that his theories usually conflicted with one another. His enthusiasm was boundless-as was his contempt for Bailey’s investigators. Howard Harris spent a great deal of time setting up a computer program that was supposed to give the defense team access to virtually every address and phone number in the Los Angeles area. On the day it was completed, Pavelic typed in his own name, and he was delighted when nothing came up-even though he had lived in the same house for decades.

One day late in the summer, Shapiro invited all of the investigators to a screening of Forrest Gump held at the Beverly Hills mansion of his friend Robert Evans. Before the lights were lowered, Shapiro rose and addressed the group. “I know I haven’t been too friendly. I’ve been accused of being too aloof,” he said. “That’s going to change.”

McNally, who loved to twit Shapiro, spoke up in response: “That’s not the problem, Bob. The problem is no one does any work out here.” Shapiro ordered the movie to begin.

By the time jury selection was completed, McNally decided he had had enough. The last straw for him came when Shapiro told the investigators that Skip Taft, O.J.’s business manager, had told him there would have to be pay cuts all around. McNally was supposed to have received $22,500 for his work over the summer, and the bill hadn’t yet been paid. Instead of taking a pay cut, John McNally returned to New York for good.

The tensions among the defense investigators only replicated those that had been simmering, albeit more decorously, among the defense lawyers. When Cochran had been hired, there was no question that he ranked behind Shapiro in the unspoken but real hierarchy of the defense team. Yet the issue of Cochran’s role in the upcoming trial, which had been left conspicuously unsettled all through the fall, weighed heavily on Shapiro. At one level, he never had the illusion that he could try the case by himself, and he welcomed Cochran to the team. But Shapiro all along saw himself as a sort of master of ceremonies for the defense, a notion that became increasingly untenable over time. Throughout the fall, Cochran spent increasing amounts of time at the jail with O.J., and Simpson became ever more enamored of Cochran and alienated from Shapiro-who had always loathed having to visit prisoners. Race, too, assumed ever more importance in the defense strategy, and Shapiro-notwithstanding his having launched the issue in the first place-hated confronting its incendiary aftermath.

Simpson had hired Cochran as a trial lawyer, and the trial was fast approaching. How could Cochran remain number two? He couldn’t-and the implications made Shapiro squirm. In a bid to forestall the inevitable, Shapiro made a final effort to keep control of the case in the only way he knew how.

One afternoon late in the jury selection process, Bailey and Kardashian were talking with Simpson in the tiny lockup beside Judge Ito’s courtroom. Shapiro joined them and said he had just spoken to the prosecutors. He said that he now understood their theory of the case. “The prosecutors think that you were mad at Nicole because she didn’t invite you to dinner at Mezzaluna with the kids,” Shapiro told Simpson. “They think you sat around your house getting pissed off, then went over to Nicole’s, probably with the idea of slashing the tires on her car. There was some sort of confrontation at the house, and you killed her. Then Goldman showed up.”

The lawyers and their client listened to Shapiro’s summary without comment.

“So,” Shapiro went on, “that leaves room for manslaughter. And Bob [Kardashian] would have to account for the knife, but that’s probably no more than five years for accessory after the fact.”

There was stunned silence-incredulity that Shapiro would propose a plea bargain at this late date. But cutting deals was Shapiro’s specialty, and making one now was the only way for him to remain in charge of the case. Simpson did not reject the proposal so much as ignore it. The conversation simply moved on to other topics.

With this final gambit, Shapiro ignored his own lessons about the importance of deference to celebrity clients. There was no logical reason to suggest a plea at that moment. The Fuhrman issue had poisoned the racial atmosphere surrounding the trial in a way that could only help the defense. Thanks to Cochran, jury selection seemed likely to produce a politicized, pro-defense panel. By proposing that Simpson agree to plead guilty to anything-at a time when O.J.’s outright acquittal was more likely than ever-Shapiro alienated his client beyond measure (likewise Kardashian, Simpson’s most loyal courtier). Shapiro’s prompt departure from leadership of the case became, at that moment, inevitable.

The impending end of his reign as lead defense counsel led Shapiro into increasingly erratic behavior. In early December, he sent several reporters who were covering the case (including me) a gift. It was a large bottle of men’s cologne; the brand, D.N.A. News of the gift promptly leaked, of course, and virtually all the reports stressed the inappropriateness of the gesture. (Like many of the reporters, I sent mine back with a polite note.) Even Shapiro’s friend Michael Klein was appalled. Klein told him, “Bob, don’t you realize that two people are dead in this case?”

Klein also figured in another bizarre Shapiro episode. Later in December, Shapiro decided to take his wife and two sons to Hawaii for a brief vacation. Klein set up the trip through United Airlines, where he had high-level connections. The day before Shapiro’s scheduled departure, the lawyer called Klein in a panic. He demanded that Klein change his reservations to a pseudonym: Tony DiMilo. Klein didn’t understand the need for secrecy. All the while wondering about his friend’s stability, he agreed to put through the change. It was a pointless formality, of course, for Shapiro was instantly recognized both on the plane and at his hotel. While in Hawaii, Shapiro also put in a strange phone call to Bailey. Still hoping to salvage control of the case, Shapiro beseeched Bailey, “You gotta get Johnnie to back off.”

Bailey was noncommittal to Shapiro, but he would tell Cochran no such thing. A savvy political creature himself, Bailey saw that Shapiro had at this point no chance of remaining in charge. Indeed, Bailey had spent much of the fall cultivating Cochran so that he, Bailey, would be able to carve out a significant role at the trial. Almost in passing during this long conversation from Hawaii, Shapiro mentioned Bailey’s financial status in the case. This is always a prickly subject among lawyers, and Bailey’s arrangement had been conspicuously vague for several months. But Bailey had had other business and his time commitment to Simpson had been modest, so he hadn’t pressed for a resolution of the issue. Still, Bailey was not prepared for what Shapiro told him from Hawaii: “You know you’re a volunteer, right?”

Bailey was, though he didn’t know it. Shapiro’s retainer agreement with Simpson was contained in a letter dated August 24, 1994. (Shapiro never showed this agreement to Bailey.) “Dear O.J.,” the letter read. “You will compensate me for my personal legal services through the end of the… trial in the sum of $1,200,000, payable as soon as reasonably possible, but no later than in monthly installments of not less than $100,000.” The letter went on to state, “You will not be responsible for any additional payment of fees for legal services performed by… F. Lee Bailey, which shall be my responsibility, if any.” (Cochran’s separate agreement called for a fee to him of $500,000.) Bailey knew none of this at the time. Nor could he know, of course, that once Shapiro’s role in the trial was reduced, he would stop receiving the monthly checks, and that he would ultimately receive only about $700,000 from Simpson, plus expenses.

At the time of the phone call, Bailey was enraged by Shapiro’s presumptuous reference to his status, not to mention the status itself. Bailey was in the Simpson case more for ego gratification than for money, but he found Shapiro’s treatment of him demeaning. (Bailey later negotiated a modest retainer agreement of his own with Skip Taft, O.J.’s business manager.) In this phone call from Hawaii, Shapiro succeeded only in alienating Bailey, an erstwhile ally. It would soon become clear that Shapiro had no allies left.

As part of his effort to ingratiate himself with Cochran, on December 21 Bailey sent Cochran a thirteen-page single-spaced memorandum as “a preliminary effort-i.e. a ‘first cut’-to bring the preferred trial strategies and tactics in the forthcoming trial into focus.” The memo, which turned out to be remarkably prescient, laid out a number of defenses to be used at the trial. They included “Demeanor Evidence”-proof that Simpson was the usual “relaxed, happy, affable O.J.” before his trip to Chicago; once he learns of the murder, “his affect reverses.” There was also the “Time Line” defense, “to demonstrate that at no time is there a ‘window’ of fifteen or more minutes when O.J. could have snuck off and committed the crime.” About the time line, Bailey wrote, “Properly orchestrated, this can be a powerful garden in which reasonable doubt can grow and flourish.” There was also “Lack of Motive”-no reason why Simpson “would butcher the mother of the two small children he adored,” especially “in light of his manifest equanimity when confronted… with Nicole’s sexual expeditions.”

In sum, Bailey wrote, the evidence in the case “warrant[s] a demeanor of controlled indignance… This ought not to be a polite request to the jury, but a formal demand supported by a foundation of appropriate righteousness… The manner in which the investigation in this case was botched from beginning to end-including protection and preservation of the crime scene, intervention of the medical team, letting the Bronco sit about for all to enter, delaying the blood testing unconscionably, and ‘salting’ the blood evidence to incriminate O.J.-will be described by historians as a blight on the face of justice.” In a footnote to this peroration, Bailey showed just how well he understood the case. “None of the above will have much value,” he wrote, “unless and until it is translated into the ‘Downtown’ dialect by our able colleague Cochran; given the makeup of the jury, he would probably be very effective at delivering his translation himself.”

Pat McKenna had only the residue of an unpleasant divorce to return to in Florida so, unlike McNally, he decided to stay on in Los Angeles, even with a pay cut. He and Harris did take a brief Christmas vacation, and when they returned to Shapiro’s office on January 4, 1995, they sensed a distinct chill from Shapiro’s secretary, Bonnie Barron. McKenna gave her a hug, as was his custom, and Barron kept her hands at her sides. Harris and McKenna were still puzzling over Barron’s reaction to them when, later that night, they were having a drink at the Bel Age Hotel. As they were chatting, Harris’s cellular phone rang. The caller was Kristin Jeannette-Meyers, an energetic reporter who was covering the defense team for Court TV. Harris listened for a moment. A big grin spread across his face, and then he started repeating the same phrase over and over again:

“Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God.”

When Harris handed the phone to McKenna and he heard what Jeannette-Meyers was saying, McKenna reacted the same way. This was why Barron was upset.

Jeannette-Meyers was reading them a column by Mike McAlary from that day’s New York Daily News headlined VAIN SHAPIRO DESERVES HIS FATE. It began, “He has spent a year fooling the nation, this lawyer. He has made them all believers: that he is a heroic, hard-working lawyer in the hunt for a grand, fantastic verdict. Unfortunately, Robert Shapiro is your typical Hollywood invention-a character only tan-deep in makeup and significance.”

The column was filled with details known only to a handful of insiders. It mentioned how Shapiro had recently taken a vacation in Maui, to which he flew first-class and his kids traveled coach, and had registered at the Grand Wailea Hotel under the alias Tony DiMilo. “Unlike Venus,” McAlary quipped, “this statue is headless.” McAlary observed that Shapiro “has amazed members of the defense team with his unfamiliarity with the facts.” Shapiro thought, for example, that on the night of the murders Ron Goldman had walked from his waiter’s post at Mezzaluna to Nicole’s house, when in fact he drove a borrowed car. The story went on to detail Shapiro’s vanity, in particular how he had hired an extra secretary to clip stories about him out of newspapers. (The designated clipper was actually Petra Brando, daughter of Marlon and sister of Shapiro’s onetime client Christian.) McAlary’s story concluded by explaining how Shapiro had recently decided to cut back on defense team expenses: “From his first-class plane seat, Shapiro phoned the office and fired one of the secretaries he hired with O.J.’s money to snip the name Robert Shapiro out of newspapers.”

After hearing the column read to them, McKenna and Harris had no doubt about what to do next. Still using Harris’s cellular phone, they dialed John McNally in New York. Chuckling, McKenna asked McNally, “You crazy fuck, how could you give that shit to the papers about Shapiro?”

McNally laughed right back at him. “Fuck him,” McNally said. “He’s an asshole anyway. And besides, he still owes me money.”

McAlary’s column prompted no laughter from Bob Shapiro. He had been stewing for weeks, torn by conflicting emotions about his role in the case. On the one hand, he loved his newfound social prominence, and he reveled in the attention he received at restaurants and public occasions. When, over the summer, the big-screen video projector at the Rose Bowl focused on him during a Rolling Stones concert, Shapiro waved his arms with delight and the crowd cheered. But it also galled Shapiro that the press sniped at his many public appearances. On December 25, 1994-just before McAlary’s column ran-a gossip column in the Los Angeles Times sniffed that Shapiro “goes to the opening of every (bleep)ing door.” Simpson himself had taken note of Shapiro’s high public profile and asked him to lower it. Shapiro complied, but the instruction irritated him and enraged his wife, Linell, who relished their nights out together.

The McAlary column attacked Shapiro’s refined sense of his own dignity. Furious, he asked Bill Pavelic to conduct a secret investigation to see who had leaked the inside information, and Pavelic quickly came back with the predictable report that it was McNally. Rather than blame McNally, Shapiro fixated on Bailey, whom he held responsible for the investigator’s hostility. So Shapiro decided to strike back in similar terms. He leaked word to Newsweek’s Mark Miller that he was no longer speaking to his old friend Bailey. In the issue that was released on Sunday, January 15, 1995, Miller broke word of the breach in the defense camp. The Newsweek report stated that an unnamed defense source (obviously Shapiro) believed that “Bailey-inspired ‘saboteurs on our own team’ have been working to destroy [Shapiro’s] credibility and reputation through leaks to the media.”

David Margolick, the New York Times reporter covering the case, followed up by calling Shapiro that Sunday. This time Shapiro agreed to go on the record. Margolick wrote on January 16 that “an extraordinary and apparently irreparable break has developed between” Shapiro and Bailey. Margolick quoted Shapiro as saying, “The landmark word to me is ‘loyalty.’ I felt a lifelong commitment to him because he gave me the opportunity to represent him when his professional reputation was at stake. But recent events have been so painful that we’ll never be able to have a relationship again.” Shapiro told Margolick that he hoped Bailey would leave the defense team. “His presence before this particular jury adds nothing that can’t be done by Johnnie and others on the team.” But as for the final word on whether Bailey stayed or went, “I’m leaving that decision to Mr. Cochran.” When the Los Angeles Times joined in the next day, Shapiro was even more scathing. “We can’t have snakes sleeping in the bed with us,” he said.

Cases involving multiple defense lawyers invariably generate internal tensions, but Shapiro’s public attack on a colleague was unprecedented. (Shapiro was on the warpath privately, too. He insisted that his friend Michael Klein evict Bailey as his houseguest, and Klein, with some embarrassment, did so.) As much as anyone on the defense team, Shapiro understood the importance of public relations. At this moment, on the eve of opening statements, the only priority should have been to stress Simpson’s innocence, or at least the weaknesses in the government’s case. Instead, with his client’s freedom for the rest of his life on the line, Shapiro shifted the focus to his own complaints-to O.J.’s clear detriment. In times of crisis-as during his press conference after Simpson disappeared on June 17-Shapiro invariably placed his own interests above those of his client. Worse yet, his grievances with Bailey were largely unjustified. While McNally had indeed attacked Shapiro in the press, Bailey himself was innocent of this kind of chicanery. In response to Shapiro’s tirades, Bailey knew that he had to take the high road. In a statement released through his office, Bailey said only that he “declined to disparage Mr. Shapiro in any way. This case is not about Mr. Shapiro or Mr. Bailey. It is about O.J. Simpson.”

The controversy ended the only way it could: Simpson demanded that all his attorneys meet him at the jailhouse and end all public feuding. “I played football with plenty of guys I didn’t like,” Simpson told them, “but it was a team and we got along. Your job is to get along.”

On the morning of Wednesday, January 18, the lawyers met at Cochran’s office shortly after seven. Roosevelt Grier, the minister and former football star, was there, and he approached Shapiro. “I’ve looked into this situation, and I believe that Brother Bailey is innocent of what you think he did to you,” Grier said. “I believe you should apologize to him.” Now completely alone on the defense team, Shapiro had no choice but to utter a few perfunctory words of contrition to Bailey. Also in response to Grier’s suggestion, Shapiro and Bailey arrived at the courthouse together. Press reports said that the two men had arrived “arm-in-arm,” and that was, at some level, technically true. As they left Shapiro’s car, Bailey placed his hand on Shapiro’s wrist. For a moment, Shapiro regarded Bailey’s hand as one might look upon a putrid fish. Shapiro did not exactly recoil, but he marched down the steps to the door with a cross between a smile and a grimace on his face.

After court that day, the lawyers returned to the lobby for a news conference. Cochran-now clearly the leader of the defense team-stood between Bailey and Shapiro, and he beamed while announcing that the defense was a united front. “The Dream Team is never going to break up,” Cochran proclaimed. Shapiro, looking pained, nodded dutifully. Asked about the controversy, Bailey said simply, “That’s history.” The unity tableau was marred only by the presence-in the background, behind the first-string lawyers-of Cochran’s young associate Shawn Chapman and Shapiro’s junior colleague Sara Caplan. Every time the lawyers told the reporters that the feud was over, history, forgotten and unimportant… the two underlings, who had enjoyed front-row seats to the diatribes, started to laugh.

Shapiro sulked. In court, he sat at the opposite end of the defense table from Bailey, and for the next nine months the two men did not exchange a word. Outside the Criminal Courts Building, Shapiro’s petulance took another form. Slowly but inexorably, he began broadening the circle of people to whom he told his true feelings about his client. From the start of Shapiro’s representation, his wife, Linell, had never had any compunction about sharing her views at social gatherings: “Guilty, guilty, guilty.” Both inside and outside the defense-team offices, particularly as the racial polarization about the case intensified, Shapiro decided to prove his kinship with the West Los Angeles world that meant so much to him. Their view of the case was his, too. “Of course he did it,” Shapiro would say.

For his part, Bailey, who never worried too much about any client’s guilt or innocence, just wanted to return to the big time. Indeed, one irony of Shapiro’s attack on Bailey is that it was launched before Bailey had uttered a single word in Judge Ito’s courtroom.

In the last legal argument before opening statements, Bailey would finally speak in that court for the first time. Prosecutors had urged Ito to let them introduce evidence of Simpson’s pattern of domestic violence against Nicole as proof that he murdered her. This was an important controversy for Ito to resolve, but in a rather minor sideline to the main issue, prosecutors called to the stand a Canadian expert to testify about domestic violence in general. Late on a sleepy Thursday afternoon, Bailey rose to cross-examine Dr. Donald Dutton of Vancouver.

Nature has favored Bailey with a glorious voice, which summons a stream of Dewar’s tumbling down a pebbly brook. His hands tremble a good deal, but with one in his pocket and the other on the lectern, Bailey can still command a moment. He speaks a language that has almost vanished from American courtrooms, a kind of British English that combines wry whimsy and baroque locution. When Dr. Dutton didn’t understand a question, Bailey attributed it to “the vicissitudes of give-and-take,” and when the Canadian witness was not clear on another matter, Bailey asked to “see if we can surmount the barrier of our common language.”

In his redirect examination, prosecutor Scott Gordon at one point asked Dutton to explain a phrase he had used: “narcissistic personality.”

“A narcissistic personality,” the expert explained, “will be someone who has an exaggerated or a grandiose view of their own importance, who needed a constant kind of reinforcement, who over-reacted to any kind of slight criticisms, and was incapable of developing empathy with other people.”

In the silence before the next question, Bailey took a long look at his colleagues on the defense team. Then he leaned over and whispered to Gerry Uelman: “Sounds like everyone at this table.”