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

17. “IN THE PAST TEN YEARS, DETECTIVE FUHRMAN…”

After the conclusion of Detective Lange’s long-delayed testimony just before lunch on March 9, the trial reached a critical juncture.

“The People call Detective Mark Fuhrman,” said Marcia Clark.

Neither side made even a pretense of treating Fuhrman as just another witness. His arrival was timed with military precision. Before most witnesses in the trial were summoned to Ito’s courtroom, they waited in the ninth-floor hallway, chatting nervously with passersby. Not Fuhrman. The D.A.’s office had gone to extraordinary lengths to insulate him from any unplanned encounters. Unlike any other witness in the case, Fuhrman came down from the district attorney’s headquarters on the eighteenth floor on the freight elevator-the same one used by the jurors. Even the prosecutors crammed into the passenger elevators along with all the other courthouse denizens, but the D.A.’s office didn’t want to take that chance with Fuhrman. And unlike other witnesses, Fuhrman walked into court surrounded by a quartet of beefy bodyguards, investigators assigned to the district attorney. Clark’s examination promptly bore out the metaphor implicit in Fuhrman’s arrival: She-and her office-were protecting him.

In the flesh, Mark Fuhrman was an imposing figure, a muscular six foot three inches, the first man in the courtroom who appeared a physical match for the defendant. He fit perfectly into his blue suit, and his white shirt and red-print tie made a handsome match to his freshly cut dirty-blond hair. The room perked up when Fuhrman walked in, and even O.J. Simpson looked a touch startled by the detective’s commanding physical presence.

Marcia Clark stepped to the podium, cocked her head to one side, and asked her first question as if it had just popped into her head. (It was, in fact, carefully planned.)

“Detective Fuhrman, can you tell us how you feel about testifying today?”

“Nervous,” Fuhrman said, not at all nervously.

“Okay,” Clark prompted.

“Reluctant,” Fuhrman continued.

“Can you tell us why?” she asked.

“Throughout-since June thirteenth, it seems that I have seen a lot of the evidence ignored and a lot of personal issues come to the forefront. I think that is too bad.”

“Okay,” Clark said. “Heard a lot about yourself in the press, have you?”

“Daily,” Fuhrman said gravely.

“In light of that fact, sir, you have indicated that you feel nervous about testifying,” Clark went on. “Have you gone over your testimony in the presence of several district attorneys in order to prepare yourself for court and the allegations that you may hear from the defense?”

“Yes.”

Clark asked if this preparation session concerned the events at Bundy and Rockingham.

“No,” said Fuhrman.

“It dealt with side issues, sir?”

“Yes, it was… It seems that the issues we were concerned with weren’t evidentiary in nature or about the crime; mostly of a personal nature.”

Clark paused, soaking up the answers from her witness, and then turned to her pad and the beginning of the conventional portion of her direct examination. “Can you tell us how you are employed right now?…”

Seen on its own terms, Clark’s unorthodox introduction of Fuhrman to the jury succeeded. Under her sympathetic questioning, Mark Fuhrman presented himself as an earnest civil servant who tried to do his job in the face of unwarranted and irrelevant personal attacks. Clark’s message to the jury could not have been clearer: Here before you is a good man.

Seen in retrospect-indeed, even in light of what Clark knew at the time-her examination of Fuhrman stands as her biggest miscalculation of the trial.

This critical set piece in the Simpson trial-the testimony of Mark Fuhrman-represented another illustration, in microcosm, of why the trial ended the way it did. The prosecution’s arrogance led it to disaster. The defense’s obsession with race led it to victory.

There was no mystery in the nature of the defense’s line of attack on Fuhrman. More than seven months before he took the stand, my story in The New Yorker had shown that the defense would attempt to portray the detective as first and foremost a racist but also, more speculatively, as the man who had planted the right-hand glove on Simpson’s property. But that story was only the beginning. As often happened in the Simpson case, a disclosure in the media flushed out additional people with similar stories to tell. In the case of Mark Fuhrman, my story provoked several people to come forward with tales of his racist behavior-a reaction that should have served as a warning to the prosecution.

After “An Incendiary Defense” hit the newsstands on Monday, July 18, 1994, one person who saw a television report about it was Kathleen Bell. The report so startled her that she was moved to write a letter to Simpson’s attorneys.

“I’m writing to you in regards to a story I saw on the news last night,” Bell wrote to Johnnie Cochran on July 19, 1994. “I thought it was ridiculous that the Simpson defense team would even suggest that their [sic] might be racial motivation in the trial against Mr. Simpson. I then glanced up at the television and was quite shocked to see that Officer Ferman [sic] was a man that I had the misfortune of meeting. You may have received a message from your answering service last night that I called to say that Mr. Ferman may be more of a racist than you can even imagine.”

Bell went on to write that she had worked as a real estate agent in Redondo Beach in 1985 and 1986. Her office was above a marine recruiting station where Fuhrman sometimes visited friends. “I remember him distinctly because of his height and build,” Bell wrote. Talking about his police work one day, “Officer Ferman said that when he sees a ‘nigger’ (as he called it) driving with a white woman, he would pull them over. I asked would if [sic] he didn’t have a reason, and he said that he would find one. I looked at the two Marines to see if they knew he was joking, but it became obvious to me that he was very serious. Officer Ferman went on to say that he would like nothing more than to see all ‘niggers’ gathered together and killed. He said something about burning them or bombing them. I was too shaken to remember the exact words he used…” Bell gave Cochran her name and number, and her story surfaced in the news media as well, several months before the trial began.

On that same day-July 19, 1994-a deputy district attorney named Lucienne Coleman was going about her business in the Criminal Courts Building when she happened to run into LAPD detective Andy Purdy. Having seen the same reports Bell had seen, Coleman mentioned in passing that she thought it was absurd that the defense was alleging Fuhrman had planted evidence. “I don’t think it’s ridiculous at all,” Purdy answered. “I wouldn’t put it past him.” Purdy went on to say that shortly after he married a Jewish woman a few years before, Fuhrman had painted swastikas on Purdy’s locker. A few weeks after receiving this news, Coleman ran into some other officers who said they had heard Fuhrman making remarks about Nicole Brown Simpson’s “boob job.” Coleman did the responsible thing. In early August 1994, she brought these remarks to the attention of Marcia Clark and Bill Hodgman.

Coleman had once been among Clark’s closest friends in the office. The two women and their husbands had socialized together for several years. But as often happens in divorces, the Clarks’ friends had taken sides in their divorce, and Lucienne had taken Gordon’s. That, inevitably, cooled her relationship with Marcia, so Lucienne Coleman was a messenger Clark was only too pleased to shoot.

“This is bullshit!” Clark cried when Coleman mentioned the reports about Fuhrman. “This is bullshit being put out by the defense!” Hodgman reacted less passionately, but he also appeared to pay Coleman’s report little mind. Clark told Coleman to take her complaints to the LAPD’s Internal Affairs Division.

In fact, Fuhrman’s reputation was such that it almost reached into my own family. On the Friday after my story about Fuhrman came out, my wife called me from her office at the large corporation in Manhattan where she worked. One of her colleagues, a young African-American business-school graduate named Jarvis Bowers, had noticed the publicity about my story and sought advice about reporters who were now calling him about his link to Fuhrman. Jarvis had grown up in Los Angeles, and one day in 1984, when he was eighteen, he and his father had gone to a movie in Westwood. Officer Mark Fuhrman stopped Jarvis for jaywalking, put him in a choke hold, and threatened to kill him. Bowers was so outraged that he filed an official complaint against Fuhrman, which was sustained; the officer was docked one day’s pay.

Clearly, then, there was not just smoke but fire in Fuhrman’s past. Clark, though, had her own method of determining whether Fuhrman was telling the truth: She simply asked him about the charges. He confessed that the psychiatric reports revealed in The New Yorker were genuine, but he said those problems were long in the past. Kathleen Bell? A liar. Swastikas? Never happened. Fuhrman even had an impressive character witness within the district attorney’s office. In recent years, the detective had worked closely with a prosecutor based in Santa Monica named Danette Meyers, a black woman. (Fuhrman had actually called Meyers to warn her that the New Yorker story was coming out and to make the case that he was a changed man.) Meyers told the Simpson prosecutors that Mark Fuhrman had never showed her the slightest hint of racism, and she gave him high marks as a detective and as a person.

There were several ways the prosecution could have taken the middle ground with respect to Mark Fuhrman. Clark could simply have avoided calling him. She could have introduced the glove found at Rockingham through Lange or Vannatter, who had both seen it in its untouched state on the path behind Kaelin’s room. That strategy would have prompted some mockery from the defense-“They’re hiding him!”-but such criticism wouldn’t have amounted to much, because Simpson’s attorneys could always have called Fuhrman themselves. Similarly, Clark could have called Fuhrman but shown the jury-through both verbal and nonverbal signals-that the prosecution was not embracing the detective. A brief, chilly direct examination would have sufficed.

But it was not in Marcia Clark’s nature to equivocate. It was, after all, her job to tell the good guys from bad guys, and she had no doubts about her ability to do it. Faced with a problematic witness like Fuhrman, many prosecutors would insist at a minimum that he undergo many hours of grueling mock cross-examination. Such an approach both tests the witness’s veracity and prepares him for what is to come. Clark and her team decided not to bother. Their preparation amounted to about a half an hour of Fuhrman fielding questions while he ate a sandwich. He spent much of the time complaining about the press. The prosecutors commiserated. They stood by their man.

In court, Clark took Fuhrman briefly through his background and then had him tell the jury about the time he responded to a domestic-violence call at Simpson’s home in 1985, when O.J. shattered a Mercedes-Benz window with a baseball bat. Then she moved to a new topic.

“Now, back in 1985 and 1986, sir, can you tell us whether you knew someone or met someone by the name of Kathleen Bell?”

“Yes, I can tell you,” Fuhrman said evenly. “I did not.”

Clark displayed Bell’s original letter to Cochran on the overhead projector. The jurors had the opportunity to study the precise, awful words that Bell said Fuhrman had uttered: that, among other things, Fuhrman wanted “all ‘niggers’ gathered together and killed.” It was one thing for Fuhrman to issue a general denial, but Clark pushed these ugly sentiments right in the jurors’ faces. This gesture was a measure of her confidence in her witness.

Clark then established that Fuhrman had been instructed to watch (what else?) Larry King Live when Bell had appeared on the program about a month earlier.

“Did you recognize her?” Clark asked.

“No, I did not.”

Clark continued, “Did the conversation Kathleen Bell describes in this letter occur?”

“No, it did not.”

This entire exchange was little short of madness on Clark’s part. Bell was a credible witness. She had no ax to grind with the defense or the prosecution; indeed, as she had told Larry King, she thought Simpson was guilty. More important, Clark knew that the defense could corroborate Bell’s story with people she had told of Fuhrman’s comments at the time he made them. The psychiatric records established that at least at one time Fuhrman had claimed to harbor similar sentiments. Clark thus had to know that Kathleen Bell was almost certainly telling the truth. Yet still Clark went with her gut-and Fuhrman.

The remainder of her direct examination was uneventful, underlining how minor a role Fuhrman had played in the overall investigation. As Clark intended, Fuhrman’s testimony mostly repeated what the jurors had already heard from Lange and the officers who discovered the bodies. Ultimately, a half dozen police officers made the same point: There was only one glove at the murder scene on Bundy Drive. With Fuhrman, the idea was to show (correctly) that there never was a second glove to move to Rockingham and, furthermore, that even if he had wanted to, Fuhrman never had the opportunity to move or plant any evidence. Clark also had the opportunity to finish the week with a flourish. Fuhrman testified that while he was examining the Bronco on the sidewalk outside Simpson’s home, he saw through a window a large heavy-duty plastic bag and a shovel. With great ceremony, Clark presented Fuhrman with a package wrapped in brown paper and police-evidence tape. She asked Fuhrman to unseal it, and he ripped the bag open and described what he saw.

“It appears to be a bag that’s approximately three foot by four or five feet,” Fuhrman said.

“And is that the plastic that you recall seeing in the rear cargo area?” Clark asked.

“Yes, it is.”

Fuhrman held it up. No one needed to point out that it looked like a human being could fit right inside-a sinister image for the jurors to savor all weekend long.

Over that weekend, thanks to the televised broadcast of the trial, Bronco owners arose. They made telephone calls to the prosecution, the defense, even to the judge. Clark’s demonstration had suggested quite a bit more than the facts allowed. She had to begin the following week with a rather important, and sheepish, clarification.

“Now, that plastic,” Clark said. “Do you happen to know whether it belongs in a Bronco or anything about it?”

“Well, now I do,” Fuhrman replied.

“And what is that?”

“The spare-tire bag”-standard equipment that comes with all Ford Broncos. (And O.J. generally used the shovel as a pooper-scooper for his dog.)

On that anticlimactic note, Clark turned over Mark Fuhrman to F. Lee Bailey.

“Good cross-examination,” Bailey once wrote, “suffers at the hands of public misunderstanding. This achieves serious proportions because it is the public that fills our jury boxes. Too many jurors are waiting for Perry Mason; they expect the lawyer to bring the witness to the point where he cries out that the defendant is innocent, that he’s the one who killed the go-go dancer. Well, it happens-on television.”

There was just such a public expectation when Bailey rose to cross-examine Fuhrman, but it was largely Bailey’s own fault. He was so hungry for the spotlight-and so embarrassed by his meager role to date in the trial-that he held a series of press conferences in the courthouse lobby during Fuhrman’s direct examination to announce how much he was looking forward to cross-examination. “Any lawyer in his right mind who would not be looking forward to cross-examining Mark Fuhrman is an idiot,” Bailey said, adding that he thought Fuhrman was comparable to Hitler. Bailey built expectations so high that even Perry Mason himself couldn’t have matched them.

In a display of brooding courtroom machismo, Bailey had not objected a single time during Clark’s direct examination, preferring instead to smirk silently as Fuhrman told his story. But when his turn came, Bailey rushed to the podium in a burst of manic energy. He bounced on the balls of his feet as he asked questions.

He began by driving home Clark’s folly with the plastic sheet. “After nine months of investigation, you discovered on Saturday that this important piece of evidence was perfectly innocuous, is that right?”

Clark objected, but the point was made.

Bailey, however, was so pumped with adrenaline that he couldn’t focus on any subject for more than a few moments. He talked about Fuhrman’s educational background-a high school dropout, Fuhrman later received an equivalency degree-and then the lawyer jumped to the domestic-violence incident at the Rockingham house in 1985. Bailey returned to Fuhrman’s activities on the night of the murder, and then he was off to the marine recruiting station where Kathleen Bell used to visit. As Bailey meandered on, Fuhrman grew confident enough to venture a little joke. Asked about Bell, the detective said, “The name Bell does not ring a bell.”

Bailey grew frustrated, and by the end of the day, he was ready for a desperate lunge.

“Did you wipe a glove in the Bronco, Detective Fuhrman?”

This surprised the witness. Since Fuhrman did not know whether O.J. Simpson was even in the United States at the time of the murders, it was preposterous enough to suggest that he would take a bloody glove to plant at his house. But the idea that Fuhrman, or anyone for that matter, would use the glove as a sort of paintbrush to spread incriminating evidence-well, it was actually kind of amusing. (In the age of AIDS, the health risks alone to the glove planter would seem to render the suggestion absurd.) Yet there was an insidious cleverness to Bailey’s conjecture. If Fuhrman had wiped the glove in the Bronco, it would explain how Goldman’s blood wound up there. (In fact, after the trial, several jurors mentioned this as a possibility.)

Fuhrman gave a small smile, a faint chuckle of perverse admiration. But all he said was, “No.”

“You did not?” Bailey asked again.

“No.”

Bailey made no progress that day in budging Fuhrman from his story about his activities on the night of the murders; indeed, he never would. So the following morning, Bailey sought greener pastures: Fuhrman’s racial views. In a pretrial ruling, Judge Ito had held that the defense could question Fuhrman about his alleged statements to Kathleen Bell but not his comments to the psychiatrists in his disability case; those remarks, Ito ruled, were too remote in time to be relevant. On the morning of March 14, however, Bailey asked Ito to allow him to cross-examine Fuhrman about additional examples of his hostility to blacks. Bailey was willing to plumb the most obscure corners of Fuhrman’s life to shift the focus away from the bloody corpses at Bundy. Using Kathleen Bell as his wedge, Bailey sought to turn the Simpson trial into an examination of the social life at a marine recruiting station ten years earlier. Bailey wanted to ask about a statement that Fuhrman allegedly made in the presence of Andrea Terry, a friend of Kathleen Bell’s, at a bar in Redondo Beach. Terry said Fuhrman had asserted that for a black man and a white woman to be together was a “crime against nature.” According to Bailey, another witness, a former marine named Maximo Cordoba, would testify that at the recruiting station, Fuhrman had called him a nigger.

Clark couldn’t refute the Terry remark, and Ito let Bailey ask about it. But the prosecutor professed amazement at the Cordoba request. “We have interviewed Max Cordoba a long time ago,” Clark said. “He never made such a statement, and he never alleged that Mark Fuhrman ever made such a statement.”

Bailey loved twitting Clark, and he spoke in a near shout when he rose to refute her. Cordoba, Bailey vowed, would indeed say that Fuhrman had called him a nigger. “Your Honor,” Bailey said gravely, “I have spoken with him on the phone personally, marine to marine. I haven’t the slightest doubt that he will march up to that witness stand and tell the world what Fuhrman called him on no provocation whatsoever.” In light of this disagreement about what Cordoba would say, Ito ruled that Bailey could ask Fuhrman about it only after the prosecution had had a chance to interview Cordoba again.

Another fruitless day of cross-examination followed. Bailey tried to impeach Fuhrman with his testimony from the preliminary hearing. At one point in that testimony, Fuhrman had appeared to refer to more than one glove at the murder scene, using the plural “them.” But Fuhrman easily turned aside this line of questioning, pointing out that he was referring to the glove and cap as “them.” Bailey asked about Bell’s friend Andrea Terry, whom the height-obsessed Bailey referred to as “attractive but tall.” Fuhrman claimed never to have met her. But she’s “over six feet high”? Still Fuhrman claimed no memory-and still Bailey made no progress.

That night, March 14, the NBC program Dateline broadcast an interview with Max Cordoba in which the ex-marine asserted that Fuhrman had called him a nigger ten years ago. It was all so ludicrously distant from the issues at hand, like a situation comedy playing on another channel: Max and the wacky crew of a beachfront marine recruiting station meet the flirty real estate agent from upstairs, Kathleen, who tries to fix up the handsome cop, Mark, with her excessively tall friend, Andrea. (Bailey even wanted the man who ran “the ladies’ wear shop next door” to testify.) Curiously, Cordoba also asserted on Dateline that he had never spoken to Bailey-marine to marine, or otherwise. Clark played that excerpt from the broadcast the first thing the next morning in court.

Bailey was even more red-faced than usual, furious. He said that he had spoken to Cordoba, he just hadn’t discussed the facts of the case with him; Bailey had left that to Pat McKenna. In a phone call late the previous night, Bailey said, Cordoba had acknowledged to him that he had been mistaken on Dateline.

Now it was Clark who had the spring in her step when she took to the podium. She wasn’t buying Bailey’s subtle distinctions. “This is the kind of nonsense that gives lawyers a bad name, Your Honor,” she said. “He was intending to convey to the court that he had personal knowledge of what this man said because this man said it to him personally”-and here Clark puffed up her chest and parodied Bailey-“ ‘marine to marine,’ and now he is standing up and hairsplitting with us.”

Bailey looked as if he might expire right there in the courtroom. His hands shaking, his face a map of tiny blood vessels, he kept trying to edge Clark off the podium. Clark noticed and didn’t give an inch. She pointedly turned her back on Bailey and told Ito, “Mr. Bailey-you can see how agitated he is-has been caught in a lie, and you know something? Not in this case. You don’t get away with that. There are just too many people watching.”

Clark started to play more from Dateline, and Bailey stood up with his hand on the podium. “I object to that, Your Honor,” he said, “and I ask that you put a stop to it.” Her face inches from his, Clark chastised Bailey as if he were a naughty child. “Excuse me, Mr. Bailey. Stand up and speak when it is your turn.” Bailey looked like he might take a swing at her-but he restrained himself, and this confrontation, like so many during the trial, burned itself out without a clear resolution.

Bailey had one more request before he resumed his cross-examination. He wanted to use a brown leather glove, which he had placed in a Ziploc bag, in questioning Fuhrman. “Detectives frequently, as we have seen in this case, collect evidence in plastic bags,” Bailey explained. “Marines tend to carry things in their socks, the same way some detectives carry an ankle holster for a backup weapon. This package could easily have been kept in a man’s sock, short or tall… I think it fair to ask Detective Fuhrman if it would have been possible for him to put a glove in a plastic bag to which he had access and to stick it in his sock and to later pull it out and dispose of the plastic bag.” This speculation (outside the presence of the jury) was as close as the defense ever came to articulating a theory for how Fuhrman might have transported a second glove from Bundy to Rockingham.

Clark again was outraged by this suggestion, which had not a shred of evidentiary support. “With respect to this plastic bag, this is ridiculous,” she said. “There is no connection to this case. A leather glove of a different size, a different color, a different make, a different style, that has no relevance to this case either… This has no part in any search for the truth. This is a fantasy woven by the defense for which there is no evidentiary basis, no logical or factual connection to this case.”

Rising from his torpor, Ito asked to examine the glove Bailey proposed to use, then handed it back to Clark.

“Let me ask you this,” the judge said. “What is the glove size that is on the glove that was recovered at Bundy?”

“Extra-large,” said Clark.

“The glove there is a Brooks Brothers size small,” Ito observed.

“Right,” said Clark.

“They are out of extra-large,” Bailey interjected. (Pat McKenna had done the shopping.)

“Not only that,” Clark continued, “but the glove in issue is an Aris, and it is not a Brooks Brothers. I can’t even tell if it is a man’s or woman’s glove.”

Clark fondled the glove for a moment in silence. Then she said, “Size small-I guess it is Mr. Bailey’s.”

There was a slight pause as everyone in the courtroom registered that Marcia Clark was referring to the folklore about the inferences to be drawn from the dimensions of a man’s hand. At one level, Clark’s comment was a pretty funny line; but it was a nadir of sorts, too-a symbol of just how out of control Ito had allowed the proceedings to get. The judge said nothing, though he did slip his own hands under his desk when Clark made her quip.

Bailey didn’t pick up on what Clark had implied until a few moments later. Then, out of the blue, he held up his right hand for the court (and the camera) to see. “Let me state very clearly, and I should point out,” Bailey said, “that if Miss Clark thinks that hand and this glove would ever work together, her eyesight is as bad as her memory.”

That is the kind of courtroom it was: one where there was not just a stray comment, but actual repartee, about the size of F. Lee Bailey’s penis.

Bailey had failed to budge Fuhrman on his story about his role in the investigation. All he wanted now was to leave the sound of the word “nigger” ringing in the ears of the jurors.

Bailey knew better than most lawyers the power that word exerted over a jury, especially one that included African-Americans. When Bailey had defended himself against fraud charges in Florida in 1973, the government’s first witness in the trial was a man named Jimmie James. A former executive at Glenn Turner’s Koscot Interplanetary company, James testified that the operation was little more than a Ponzi scheme. Though all of Bailey’s fellow defendants were white, Bailey knew a surefire way to inject race into the case. During his cross-examination of James, Bailey asked him if he had ever said, “I hate niggers.” James denied it.

Recalling the scene in his book For the Defense, Bailey wrote that the atmosphere in the courtroom “changed noticeably when I used the word ‘niggers.’ I had barked out the word, trying to give it as much meanness and venom as I could. It hung in the air, an all but palpable accusation.”

Continuing, Bailey had asked James, “You say that you did not. You do not use that word at all, do you?”

Bailey knew it was the perfect question on cross-examination. As he explained in the book, “I knew that if James denied using the word, I could put the investigator on the stand to refute him, thereby impeaching that statement and casting doubt on the rest of his testimony as well.” James tried to wiggle out of a firm commitment on the issue, but Bailey never forgot the reaction of a black woman juror on hearing the “nigger” testimony. “The juror next to her, another woman, kept patting her on the knee the whole time, saying what even an amateur lip reader could recognize as ‘Calm down now, calm down.’ ”

Moments after his confrontation with Clark on March 15, Bailey sought to re-create almost word-for-word his cross-examination of Jimmie James with Mark Fuhrman. “Do you use the word ‘nigger’ in describing people?”

“No, sir,” said Fuhrman.

“Have you used that word in the past ten years?”

“Not that I recall, no.”

Bailey was too clever to let Fuhrman plead a failure of recollection. “You mean if you called someone a nigger you have forgotten it?”

“I’m not sure I can answer the question the way you phrased it, sir.”

Bailey was going to make sure he had Fuhrman’s denial down cold. What followed was perhaps the most quoted exchange in the entire trial. “Are you therefore saying that you have not used that word in the past ten years, Detective Fuhrman?”

“Yes,” Fuhrman said with just a touch of nervousness, “that is what I’m saying.”

“And you say under oath that you have not addressed any black person as a nigger or spoken about black people as niggers in the past ten years, Detective Fuhrman?”

“That’s what I’m saying, sir.”

“So that anyone who comes to this court and quotes you as using that word in dealing with African-Americans would be a liar, would they not, Detective Fuhrman?”

“Yes, they would.”

“All of them, correct?”

“All of them.”

“All right,” said Bailey. “Thank you.”

Bailey had closed every possible escape hatch.

Marcia Clark could have cried in frustration. She knew without knowing-knew without being told-that Fuhrman had probably said “nigger” in the past decade. At that point, there was nothing she could do. After embracing Fuhrman during his direct testimony, there was no way she could distance herself from him at this point. When it came time to conduct a redirect examination, she tried-with a growing sense of futility-to focus the jury on what mattered in his testimony.

“The first time you walked out to the south pathway at 360 South [sic] Rockingham, did you know the time of death for Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown?”

“No,” said Fuhrman.

“Did you know whether Mr. Simpson had an alibi for the time of their murders?”

“No.”

“Did you know whether there were any eyewitnesses to their murders?”

“No.”

“Did you know whether anyone had heard voices or any sounds or any words spoken at the crime scene at the time of their murders?”

“No.”

“Did you know whether Kato had already gone up the south walkway before you got there?”

“No.”

“Did you know whether any fibers from the Bronco would be found on that glove that you ultimately found at Rockingham?”

“No.”

“And did you know the cause of death?”

“No.”

That was Clark’s entire redirect examination of Fuhrman-seven questions. Brevity is bravery in a courtroom, and Clark made her point as strongly as she could. Whatever Mark Fuhrman’s character defects, it would have been sheer irrationality for him to plant that glove.

With the Fuhrman testimony behind them, Shapiro and Bailey were free to return to their top priorities: themselves.

Bailey, who for many years had lived by the sword of public acclaim, was now dying by the sword of “expert” condemnation of his cross-examination of Fuhrman. Despite his public mask of bravado, this criticism wounded Bailey, and he set off on a rather desperate attempt to pump up his reputation. Like an actor promoting a movie, Bailey did the rounds of interviews to praise his own performance. Bailey hosted an elegant dinner party on Friday, March 17, at the Beverly Hills home of a friend. At the appropriate hour, television sets were wheeled before the guests so Bailey could watch himself being interviewed on ABC’s 20/20. Correspondent Cynthia McFadden asked Bailey if O.J. had been pleased with his cross-examination of Fuhrman. “He was extremely pleased,” Bailey said. “And the reason was that Carl Douglas and Johnnie Cochran and O.J. himself all felt that it was very successful from the perspective of jury reaction. They did not feel that Mark Fuhrman had been bought by this jury, and that was the only issue. They really didn’t care what you people thought.”

Bailey was so desperate for approval that he even invoked his nemesis Marcia Clark as a witness in his own behalf. Bailey told David Margolick of The New York Times that he “received a very nice compliment from Ms. Clark” about his cross. To Bryant Gumbel, on Today, Bailey said, “We met the objectives that we set out to meet. But we dug [Fuhrman] in the hole that we wanted to dig and he jumped into it.” To Time magazine, Bailey boasted, “Johnnie Cochran and O.J. Simpson understand that jury the way no white lawyer will. Days 2 and 3 of Fuhrman’s cross, we got very good vibes… Norman Mailer called me and said it was flawless. So I feel good.”

Shapiro had his own strategy for reputation overhaul. After Fuhrman left the stand on March 16, Shapiro issued an extraordinary public statement from the steps of the courthouse, in which he essentially denounced his colleague’s cross-examination of the detective. “My preference,” Shapiro told a flock of cameras, “was that race was not an issue in this case and should not be an issue in this case, and I’m sorry from my personal point of view that it has become an issue in this case.” This was an especially shameless display by Shapiro, considering that he had launched the race-based defense onslaught against Fuhrman in the first place. But times had changed. With Simpson’s defense in other hands, Shapiro now cared more about ingratiating himself with West Los Angeles (i.e., white) society. This statement was a public step in that direction.

After court broke the following day, March 17, Shapiro spent the rest of the afternoon hanging around Larry King’s room at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. (Of course, the Shapiros were pointedly not invited to Bailey’s soirée that evening.) Shapiro and King had become friends over the course of the case, and Shapiro confided that he was miserable. He told King that he loathed both Bailey and Cochran and wanted nothing more than to get off the case. Shapiro tagged along when King went to the CNN studio on Sunset Boulevard to do his show. King’s guests that night were Alan Dershowitz and Dennis Zine, the head of the Los Angeles police union. Dershowitz had caused a minor storm the previous week when he asserted that many cops were trained to lie on the witness stand, and the professor reiterated his attacks on police in general, and the LAPD in particular, over the course of the broadcast. At the end of the show, which he watched from just off camera, Shapiro greeted Dershowitz with a single observation that summed up his alienation from his colleagues on the defense team.

“You’re going crazy, Alan,” Shapiro said.

Shapiro brought his petulance into the courtroom the following week. He made only his second appearance of the case (questioning Denise Brown was the first) when he cross-examined Philip Vannatter. Under direct examination by Darden, Lange’s partner and the co-lead detective on the case did little more than corroborate what Phillips, Lange, and Fuhrman had told the jury earlier. Shapiro did a competent job of cross-examining Vannatter, focusing on his false statements in the search-warrant affidavit for Simpson’s home and the detective’s decision to carry O.J.’s blood sample all the way from Parker Center to Simpson’s house in Brentwood. (Rather than reflecting conspiratorial behavior, Vannatter’s delivery of the blood merely illustrated his own laziness; by giving the blood to Dennis Fung at O.J.’s house, Vannatter spared himself the headache of stopping at another location and doing the paperwork on the evidence.)

What was striking about Shapiro that day was his appearance. The lawyer conducted the questioning while wearing a blue ribbon on his lapel. The chief of the LAPD, Willie Williams, had started a campaign for citizens to wear these lapel pins in support of the police. Williams had very explicitly stated that the pins stood for defending police officers against the accusations leveled at them by O.J. Simpson’s lawyers. Shapiro never made clear just why-other than perhaps sheer perversity-he had decided to wear one. (To mock Shapiro around Cochran’s office, investigator Pat McKenna also took to wearing a blue pin-on the fly of his pants.)

Shapiro’s blue-pin gesture nearly drove his client over the top. Coming right after Shapiro attacked Bailey’s cross-examination of Fuhrman, the lapel pin was too much. Simpson gave Shapiro an ultimatum: One more stunt and you’re off the team.

This would have been Shapiro’s opportunity to flee-that is, if he had really wanted off. But in his heart Shapiro loved the attention that came to him as a result of the Simpson case-the knowing winks from celebrities, the autograph seekers. Shapiro also knew even before the trial had started that he wanted to write a book about it. He couldn’t give it all up now. Better, he decided, to spend the remainder of the trial as a guest at the Thanksgiving from hell: stuck at a table with people you can neither abide nor escape.

Marcia Clark was suffering, too. Bad enough that she was beset by the tabloids and a vengeful ex-husband; worse yet, she was watching the Simpson case become more racial morality play than murder trial. Clark had a gift for surviving on very little sleep, but so, alas, did her two sons, and they did not always choose the same five hours as each other or as their mother. Red-eyed, she would complain in the morning, “I got double-teamed again last night.” All of that, plus her incessant smoking, gave her a cold marked by a persistent, hacking cough and watery, bulging eyes. She was sick for weeks.

And then she had to deal with Kato Kaelin. His life was the antithesis of Clark’s-carefree, aimless, without plan or responsibility. In fact, Kaelin’s cuddly image obscured a darker personal history. He may have looked and acted like a teenage slacker, but he was a lot closer to forty than twenty, and his perpetual freeloading was viewed with scorn by his ex-wife, the mother of their daughter, whom Kaelin intermittently supported. For that and any number of other reasons, Marcia Clark loathed him. But she needed him. Whatever else he did, Kaelin circumscribed O.J.’s alibi; the two men had arrived home from their famous trip to McDonald’s at about 9:40 P.M. on June 12. Kaelin had also heard the thumps near the air conditioner, which had prompted Fuhrman’s expedition to the pathway behind the house. Clark needed Kaelin to place those facts in front of the jury.

When Kaelin took the stand-twitching, tieless, in black jeans and, of course, his unruly mop of greasy blond hair-everyone, including the usually deadpan jury, had to smile at his bravura goofiness. On the night of the murders, the jury learned, Kaelin spent from 7:45 to 8:30 P.M. in O.J.’s Jacuzzi-a marination of almost superhuman duration. At one point, Clark asked him about the clock in Simpson’s Bentley, the vehicle they drove to McDonald’s.

“Was this a digital clock?”

“No,” Kaelin said, and he then began waving his arms in a sort of cretinous attempt to act out the hands of a watch. “It was a numbered clock. Well, I mean numerals.” He stumbled along. “A digit would be that, too, but you know what I’m saying.”

Ito finally ended the agony. “Analog,” he said.

Clark did get an interesting new fact out of the witness. It was always the prosecution’s theory that Simpson, while planning the murder, had tried to use Kaelin to set up his alibi. After Simpson returned from Sydney’s dance recital, he did something he had never done before-knocked on Kaelin’s door and said he only had hundred-dollar bills on him and needed a five to tip the skycap at the airport later that night. Kaelin didn’t have a five either, but he did give Simpson a twenty-dollar bill. Also during that visit, Simpson told Kaelin he was going to get something to eat. Had all gone according to Simpson’s plan, Kaelin would have reported this conversation to the police later. However, to Simpson’s surprise, Kaelin invited himself along. They had never gone to dinner together previously. Simpson agreed to take Kaelin, and the two men made a quick trip together to McDonald’s-a time when, according to Kaelin, Simpson was brooding about Nicole’s inappropriately sexy attire at the recital.

The key new testimony concerned payment at the drive-through window. Kaelin had handed Simpson a twenty-dollar bill with which to pay, and after paying, Simpson had handed all of the change back to Kaelin. So, even though Simpson went to Kaelin’s room with the stated purpose of getting a five-dollar bill from him, he never took it even when he had the chance at McDonald’s-interesting circumstantial evidence that Simpson had tried to use Kaelin to set up an alibi for a premeditated murder.

Simpson had dictated a memo from jail advising Shapiro how to cross-examine Kaelin, urging the lawyer to establish that on the night of the murders his attitude was “just kicking back, was tired, and that was his frame of mind.” Shapiro followed his client’s advice, and Kaelin did portray Simpson’s demeanor as more matter-of-fact than tense. In the prelim, Kaelin had suggested Simpson was in a dark mood that evening, and the shift in his testimony enraged Clark. She displayed great impatience with Kaelin during his redirect testimony and even had Ito declare him a “hostile witness,” which entitled her to ask him leading questions. Ultimately, Clark did get the bare minimum she needed out of him, but her hostility, combined with Kaelin’s vapidity, made this witness ultimately a lost opportunity for the prosecution.

Not so Allan Park, who represented one of the rare occasions when fortune smiled on the prosecutors. Poised, intelligent, with a record of cellular telephone calls to corroborate his story about the night in question, the man who drove Simpson to the airport in a limousine proved a devastatingly incriminating witness.

Nervous about picking up a celebrity for the first time, Park had arrived for his 10:45 P.M. pickup about twenty minutes early. He drove up Rockingham at about 10:25 P.M, and-this was crucial-Simpson’s Bronco was not there. He made a right turn onto Ashford and waited. He rang Simpson’s bell at about 10:40 P.M. No answer. He went around the corner to the Rockingham gate. No signs of life-and still no Bronco parked there. Park began to panic. He didn’t want Simpson to miss his 11:45 P.M. flight to Chicago. Using the limo’s cell phone, Park called his boss. He even called his mother. He kept ringing the bell to the house. Peering through the gate, he saw that the house was dark, except for a single light upstairs. At 10:52 P.M., Park’s boss called him in the limo. A minute or two later, two sights caught the driver’s eye. First, a man (Kaelin) emerged briefly from the shadows near the back of the house. Second, in front of the house, a 6-foot, 200-pound black person walked into the front door of the house from outside. Park buzzed again. For the first time, the lights went on downstairs, and O.J. Simpson answered the intercom, then opened the gate by remote control.

“I overslept,” Simpson said. “I just got out of the shower, and I’ll be down in a minute.”

Clark knew how to milk a moment in the courtroom, so she asked Simpson to rise from his seat at the defense table. “Can you tell us,” she asked Park, “if that appears to be the size of the person that you saw enter the front entrance of the house at Rockingham?”

Cochran objected. Ito overruled him. Simpson winced as if in physical pain.

“Yes, around the size,” said Park.

Simpson spent about five minutes rooting around in the now fully lit house and rushed downstairs with a few bags, Park said. Kaelin and Park helped him load them into the car, although Simpson insisted that only he touch a small black duffel bag. (Prosecutors argued that this bag held the clothes Simpson wore during the murders.) When Park drove his limo down the driveway and made a left onto Rockingham, he noticed something that was different from when he had arrived. The Rockingham curb had been empty at 10:25, but at this point, shortly after 11:00, “something was obstructing my view” on the right-apparently, the Bronco. In other words, O.J. Simpson’s Bronco was not parked by his house at the time of the murders, but it was there after Simpson materialized back at his house. It was startling evidence of Simpson’s guilt. Cochran made scarcely a whit of progress on cross-examination.

James Williams was the skycap who had checked Simpson’s bags through to Chicago at Los Angeles International Airport. In brief testimony after Park’s, Clark had Williams explain that there was a big trash can on the sidewalk in the area where Simpson got out of Park’s limousine. The implication, which Clark never stated directly before the jury, was that Simpson might have discarded, in that trash can, the small black duffel bag he had insisted on handling back at his house.

Carl Douglas rose to cross-examine, full of bluster. Clark’s insinuations about the trash can were so vague that a more confident lawyer might simply have ignored them. But Douglas would not be deterred.

“Mr. Williams,” Douglas barked out, “you don’t recall ever seeing Mr. Simpson anywhere near that trash on June the twelfth, do you, sir?”

Williams didn’t hesitate. “Yes, he was standing near the trash can.”

Douglas looked like he had been clubbed with a two-by-four. Clark stifled a smile.

Williams stepped down on the afternoon of March 29, and on that rare happy note for her in Department 103, Marcia Clark effectively disappeared from the case. She did not examine another witness for nearly three full months, until June 21. Preoccupied with her divorce case, she rarely even made it to court on time. Over the following weeks, it was often 9:30 A.M. or later when Clark burst through the courtroom double doors and, juggling purse, files, and food, settled noisily into her seat. The jurors, who as near prisoners had to rise daily at 5:30 A.M. and thus had no choice about being on time, regarded Clark’s entrances with long, cold stares.