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

22. MANNA FROM HEAVEN

Shortly after three in the afternoon on July 7-the day after the prosecution rested its case-a secretary in Johnnie Cochran’s office said she had a phone call to patch through to Pat McKenna’s cubicle. The caller, the secretary said, did not want to give his name.

McKenna, as the lead private investigator for the defense, rarely came to the courthouse. Instead, he worked out of Cochran’s office, chasing down witnesses, following up leads, and handling the endless number of tipsters who called with purported information about the case. McKenna’s notes from most of these telephone calls wound up in a thick manila folder that bore the heading LOONIES.

The caller on this day sounded saner than most of the others, and he offered unusually specific information. He said he was a lawyer from San Francisco and he had a client who had a friend named Laura. The caller said that Laura had in her possession about a dozen audiotapes of Mark Fuhrman talking about his police work. Scribbling as the caller talked, McKenna noted what the caller said Fuhrman had discussed on the tapes:

– Plant Evidence

– Get Niggers

– So. Africa-Niggers-Apartheid

The caller gave McKenna a phone number for Laura with a 910 area code-North Carolina. McKenna, as he sometimes did with the more credible tipsters, gave this one a code name, in case he wanted to get back in touch. “You’re Brian,” McKenna told the voice on the phone.

McKenna put down the phone with “Brian” and dialed Laura. A man answered; he said Laura was out but would be returning in about fifteen minutes. McKenna left his name and number-but not his affiliation-and Laura called him back in about thirty minutes.

“This is Laura Hart McKinny,” she said.

“I’m a private investigator working for O.J. Simpson,” McKenna told her, with an edge of nervous pleading in his voice. “We really believe our client is innocent, and we understand you have some tapes of Mark Fuhrman that we think could help us very much.” Polite but noncommittal, McKinny told McKenna her lawyer would give him a call. Fifteen minutes later, a lawyer named Matthew Schwartz, who was based in Los Angeles, rang McKenna. Schwartz confirmed that the tapes existed and that they were authentic. He said that McKinny had interviewed Fuhrman for a screenwriting project. Schwartz said he thought if the defense subpoenaed the tapes, they could probably work out a way for them to be turned over.

At 5:08 P.M., less than two hours after he first heard of the tapes, McKenna faxed Schwartz a letter formally requesting them. It was only then that McKenna realized that, as he had been talking on the phone, he had traced and retraced the same words from his original notes:

– Plant Evidence

– Get Niggers

In the struggle over the Fuhrman tapes, the last great drama of the Simpson trial, it was as if the id of the case had been unleashed. All the smoldering passion, anger, and resentment shot directly to the surface. The Fuhrman tapes gave the defense the opportunity it had sought since the day of the murders to change the subject from the culpability of its client to the sins of the LAPD. But this time there was a twist. Of course, Cochran and company went about their work of exploiting racial tensions with their usual shady cynicism, but the tapes controversy gave the defense something it never had in earlier battles: the truth. About Mark Fuhrman’s character, the defense was right and the prosecution wrong. The tapes thus forced the prosecutors to confront squarely the cost of their arrogance. Having had full warning about Fuhrman’s twisted soul, Clark had embraced him nonetheless. With McKinny’s tapes, Clark and her colleagues paid the price.

The roots of the final crisis went back more than a decade. Laura Hart McKinny had met Mark Fuhrman on a pleasant late morning in February 1985, at an outdoor café in Westwood. McKinny was sipping a drink and typing on a laptop computer, a novelty in those days, and Fuhrman came over to inquire about it. The two of them, both good-looking and in their mid-thirties, sat down to chat. Fuhrman asked what she was working on. She said it was a screenplay about female police officers. Funny, he said. He was an LAPD officer himself.

In the early 1980s, under political and legal pressure, the LAPD had dramatically expanded the number of women on the force. McKinny said she was writing about the stresses these women faced. Fuhrman smiled. He could be a charming man, especially around an attractive woman, so he decided to taunt McKinny a little bit and, at the same time, flirt with her. He said he didn’t think women belonged as police officers, that they couldn’t handle the job, and that the recruitment efforts for them were going to lead to disaster. In fact, Fuhrman told her, he belonged to a clandestine organization within the LAPD known as Men Against Women, or MAW, which was dedicated to resisting the encroachment of women onto this traditionally male turf. McKinny immediately recognized Fuhrman as a potential resource-an insider who could give her the perspective of the hostile, sexist LAPD traditionalist. Perhaps, they agreed that first day, they could talk some more about the subject.

That first meeting set the tone for a relationship that would last almost a decade. Their story was, in its way, a paradigmatic tale of modern Los Angeles, a city with an unproduced screenplay in many a desk drawer. Fuhrman and McKinny met again on April 2, 1985, and this time she brought her tape recorder so she could preserve his sexist (and, secondarily, racist) rants. They agreed that McKinny would give Fuhrman a $10,000 fee as a technical consultant if the movie was ever produced. Because McKinny was obviously working on a fictional screenplay, she and Fuhrman never really dealt with the question of whether everything he told her-all of his opinions, all of his war stories-was literally true. He was obviously drawing on his own experiences, but he was also trying to jazz them up for her cinematic purposes. There was a personal dimension to their relationship as well. A dreamy 1960s throwback with a taste for liberal politics and natural foods, McKinny was a perfect foil for the right-wing Fuhrman. He delighted in shocking her with his preening, even exaggerated, bigoted braggadocio.

McKinny worked hard. She would carefully transcribe the text of their meetings, send copies to Fuhrman, and then arrive at their next encounter with a list of new questions. Ultimately, they had twelve sessions together, yielding about twelve hours of interviews. McKinny also went on drive-arounds with female police officers, and interviewed them as well. According to a producer who knew her, “Laura did everything a writer was supposed to do. She really got to know her subject, really did her homework. There was just one problem: She didn’t write a very good screenplay.”

McKinny produced the first draft of her screenplay in the late 1980s. She called it Men Against Women, after the organization Fuhrman had discussed with her. McKinny’s tale concerned a rookie female officer who falls in love with her partner, who turns out to be a member of MAW. Shopped around to various studios, McKinny’s work, like most screenplays, found no takers. Over the years, McKinny would serve as a rather extreme example of the difficulties of entering the screenwriting industry. In her entire career, she had never sold a single movie script, yet she continued to plug away. She taught part-time at UCLA and in the Malibu school district, all the while pursuing her research on the police project. However, she didn’t meet with Fuhrman at all between 1988 and 1993, when she took time off to raise her two small children.

It was during this fallow period that her screenplay nearly came to life as a commercial project. McKinny’s children attended a progressive school in Santa Monica called PS 1-short for “Pluralistic School number one.” Her children played with the kids of another parent at the school, a producer named John Flynn, who took an interest in McKinny’s project. Obviously, after all these years, there were no competing bidders, so in 1992 Flynn paid McKinny a token $1,000 for a two-year option on selling the script to a production company.

The early 1990s were a difficult period in McKinny’s life. Her husband, Daniel, was a cinematographer who sometimes found work as a grip on movie sets. Laura worked part-time tutoring UCLA athletes. In 1993, owing $80,000 in credit card bills and back taxes, the McKinnys declared bankruptcy. They decided to pick up stakes and sign up as professors at the fledging North Carolina School of the Arts. Notwithstanding her own lack of success in the field, Laura taught screenwriting. Still, she never gave up on Men Against Women. In the middle of 1994, with the option about to expire, Flynn had a nibble on the project. He had spoken to a representative of Fred Dryer, the handsome ex-football star who had starred in the archetypical LAPD television series Hunter. Flynn was going to meet with Dryer, so he called on McKinny and Fuhrman to join him in a strategy session to prepare the pitch.

The date of their meeting was July 28, 1994-six weeks after the murders and ten days after my New Yorker story about Fuhrman appeared. At the meeting, which McKinny taped, Fuhrman was still fuming about the story, vowing to sue Shapiro, who he assumed had leaked it. Fuhrman said he had even talked with an attorney who might represent him. “Well, the funny thing about it is,” Fuhrman told his colleagues, “just like the attorney said, ‘For the rest of your life, this is you: You’re Bloody Glove Fuhrman, that’s it.’… He says, ‘You might as well make it pay off; all you’re doing is going through this heartache for nothing. Go for Shapiro, he’s an asshole.’ ” In the end, though, Fuhrman felt confident that the LAPD would stand behind him in the growing controversy about his racial views. “I’m the key witness in the biggest case of the century,” Fuhrman boasted. “And if I go down, they lose the case. The glove is everything. Without the glove-bye-bye.”

Dryer passed on the project. But in anticipation of the negotiations with Dryer’s company, McKinny had hired an agent, Jim Preminger, the son of the famed director Otto Preminger, as well as another parent at PS 1. Preminger never heard the tapes, but he had a general idea of what was on them. When the trial heated up the following spring, he called McKinny and told her she probably should get a lawyer. McKinny asked a colleague in North Carolina for a recommendation, and he suggested Matt Schwartz, a young lawyer with whom the colleague had recently attended UCLA film school. (In Los Angeles, everyone writes screenplays, but what they really want to do-even the lawyers-is direct.) In late May 1995, McKinny called Schwartz and explained what the tapes were and how she and Fuhrman had come to make them.

McKinny was in a quandary. Her fondest hope was that some company would finally buy and produce Men Against Women, but Schwartz recognized that the tapes with Fuhrman’s voice were the more valuable commodity. Schwartz proposed-and McKinny agreed-that he “test the waters,” to check out the market for the tapes. In June, Schwartz contacted several outlets in the cash-for-trash industry-London newspapers, supermarket and television tabloids, and Faye Resnick’s publisher, Dove Books. Several expressed interest, and Schwartz faxed them nondisclosure agreements-documents that said the media outlets could examine the tapes, but only for the purpose of determining what to pay for them. Schwartz said later that he received a bid of $250,000 for the tapes, but McKinny turned it down.

Not surprisingly, Schwartz’s testing of the waters started the rumor mill working-and set off another feud within Simpson’s defense team. In early July, right around the time McKenna received the call from “Brian,” McKenna’s rival fellow investigator from the Shapiro camp in the defense team, Bill Pavelic, also heard about the tapes from a friend. This friend, a disbarred lawyer from near Oakland, told Pavelic that Schwartz was shopping the Fuhrman tapes to the tabloids, asking them to pay $10,000 just to listen to excerpts. (Schwartz later denied this.) Thus, Pavelic and McKenna both claimed to have “discovered” the tapes. In truth, McKenna had located the first direct route to McKinny, but Shapiro (who loathed McKenna, along with his allies Bailey and Cochran) wanted his own fingerprints on the discovery. Shapiro later went so far as to arrange for Skip Taft, Simpson’s business manager, to send the disbarred lawyer $1,500 (of O.J.’s money) for “your remarkable services in connection with the discovery of the Fuhrman tapes”-just to establish that Shapiro had played a role in tracking them down.

It was, in all likelihood, Schwartz’s proto-auction that prompted the call from “Brian” to Pat McKenna as well as the tip to Pavelic. In any event, when word of the tapes’ existence spread around the defense team during the second week in July, there was outright jubilation. “If this is real,” Barry Scheck said at a defense meeting, “it could mean an acquittal-flat out.” Gerry Uelman told McKenna, “This is manna from heaven.”

But it was Cochran who was moved the most deeply. He took an almost mystical joy in the subject of the McKinny tapes. Though nominally appalled by their contents, Cochran at one point told Judge Ito that the tapes were “like Lay’s potato chips-you can’t put them down, and you can’t eat just one.” Cochran had spent his entire professional career both fighting and exploiting racism in the LAPD. Now there was, it appeared, tangible proof of that racism, and it had surfaced in the most important case of Cochran’s career. Cochran could be bawdy, irreverent, and profane, but he displayed an unfeigned spiritual side in private as well. In all sincerity, Cochran told at least one colleague on the defense team that he believed God had brought the McKinny tapes to him. Cochran talked about, and seemingly thought about, the tapes all the time.

But Cochran had yet to get his hands on them. On July 12, the day of Cochran’s “sounds black” outburst during Robert Heidstra’s testimony, Cochran and Shapiro went to Matthew Schwartz’s office to try to get a commitment that they could have access to the tapes. In the meeting, Schwartz put them off. McKinny was on vacation at the time, and Schwartz wanted to play out his “testing the waters” project. (Later, both Schwartz and McKinny ascribed a great deal of significance to the semantic, and possibly meaningless, distinction between “testing the waters” and actually trying to sell the tapes.) Schwartz did at least promise Simpson’s lawyers that McKinny would not destroy the tapes. A week passed, and Schwartz finally said that McKinny would not surrender the tapes voluntarily. Schwartz now said McKinny regarded herself as a “journalist” in her meetings with Fuhrman, and she did not wish to share the fruits of her reporting. Frustrated, Cochran sent Carl Douglas to appear in secret before Judge Ito on July 20 and explain the situation to him. Ito agreed that the tapes were material to the Simpson case and signed a subpoena-which the defense team would now have to enforce in McKinny’s home state of North Carolina.

All the defense lawyers, of course, wanted to be the ones to travel to North Carolina to argue that the tapes should be turned over. Cochran would go-that much was settled. Shapiro wanted Gerry Uelman to handle the legal issues. Bailey said that Uelman was a nice guy but he always lost his arguments. Bailey wanted… Bailey to go. In the end, Cochran decided to take Bailey. Usually, in the many briefs the defense filed over the course of the case, a secretary in Cochran’s office signed the lawyers’ names. But in a bizarre measure of how seriously the defense team took the McKinny issue, all the lawyers insisted on signing their own names to the North Carolina brief. (It was thus especially ironic that the true authors of that brief, Bailey’s law partners in Boston, Ken Fishman and Dan Leonard, preferred to remain behind the scenes and did not have their names on it.)

So on Friday, July 28, Cochran and Bailey appeared before Judge William Z. Wood, Jr., in Forsyth County, North Carolina, to ask him to enforce the subpoena to McKinny. Since Ito, the trial judge in the case, had ruled that the material was relevant, Wood’s approval should have been just a formality. In his chambers, Judge Wood let Cochran see transcripts of the tapes for the first time. They were worse (and, thus, from Cochran’s perspective, better) than even he had imagined. Fuhrman used the crudest slurs imaginable, and “nigger” repeatedly. When McKinny took the stand in front of the North Carolina judge (and the waiting press corps), Cochran couldn’t wait to work a few quotes from the tapes into his questions. For example, Cochran asked McKinny, “Did Detective Fuhrman say to you during this first interview, when you were getting his attitude-quote-that ‘we’ve got females and dumb niggers and all your Mexicans that can’t even write the name of the car they drive. And you think I’m kidding? We have people who aren’t even citizens on the department.’ Did he say that to you?” McKinny said he did.

Yet Judge Wood-unaccountably-ruled against Cochran and Bailey, asserting that the tapes were not material to the Simpson defense case. This was a shattering blow, and Bailey immediately set his law partners in Boston to work on an emergency appeal. But as devastated as Cochran was by the ruling, he knew he had accomplished something important in getting at least a few of Fuhrman’s words out via the North Carolina court hearing. The public quickly became more interested in the Fuhrman-tapes sideshow to the Simpson spectacle, especially since the trial itself had degenerated into a droning series of defense experts. In light of the growing public obsession with the tapes, Cochran changed his approach to the Simpson case. For the final month of the case, Johnnie Cochran would campaign for acquittal not just in the courtroom but in the country at large-and not just as a lawyer, but as a self-appointed civil rights leader.

After an extraordinary effort by Bailey’s law partners, the North Carolina Court of Appeals overturned Judge Wood’s plainly incorrect ruling on August 7. The McKinny tapes arrived at last in Cochran’s office on August 9. Media interest in their contents grew even more fevered.

The loss in North Carolina, even though it was later rectified, rattled Cochran. Confident from the beginning that he could win a hung jury for his client, Cochran felt the tapes represented the ammunition he needed to push the jurors toward an outright acquittal. At the most basic level, of course, the tapes proved that Fuhrman had lied in answering Bailey’s carefully phrased questions about whether the detective had used the word “nigger” in the previous ten years. But more than that, the tapes allowed Cochran to make Fuhrman’s irrefutable bigotry stand as a proxy for the racism of the LAPD as a whole. The choice in the case would come down to exactly the one Darden had predicted seven months earlier in his original debate with Cochran over what became known in the trial as the “n-word”: “Whose side are you on?… Either you are with the Man or you are with the Brothers.”

But Cochran couldn’t trust that Ito wouldn’t, like Judge Wood, thwart him at the last moment. Like most of the lawyers on both sides, Cochran assumed that some news about the trial was filtering back to the sequestered jurors. He also thought that general public agitation about the tapes fed the prosecution’s insecurity and growing sense of panic. All in all, then, Cochran needed a public airing of the tapes. In other words, he needed their contents leaked to the press.

The prosecutors, for their part, could tell what Cochran was thinking, and they tried to counter his strategy. If they could confine the McKinny controversy and limit public exposure of the tapes, they had a chance of preventing the case from evolving into a referendum on police racism. Therefore, the prosecutors were only too happy when Schwartz, McKinny’s attorney, insisted before Ito that the tapes be governed by a tightly worded protective order. (Schwartz still entertained hopes of selling them.) On August 10, Ito directed that the audiotapes should “remain under seal” until he ordered otherwise. Ito’s order permitted only the lawyers on the case and their direct assistants access to the tapes and the transcripts. Ito’s order built a wall of secrecy around the tapes-until or unless the judge himself ordered them to be played in court.

In light of the protective order, Cochran couldn’t simply hand the transcripts over to a friendly reporter. Same with the other defense lawyers-the risk of exposure was simply too great. The question thus became who on the defense team could do it. Who wouldn’t mind taking the chance of directly violating a court order? Who had contacts among the reporters on the press corps? Whose ethics permitted him to do a job like that? All signs pointed to one man:

Larry Schiller.

O.J. Simpson’s literary amanuensis, the coauthor of I Want to Tell You, had spent the entire trial ingratiating himself with reporters as well as gathering material from inside the defense camp for his next, still inchoate, ghostwritten version of Simpson’s story. Schiller loved being at the center of the action, so he was only too happy to share the McKinny largesse with his journalist friends, and they were likewise pleased with their scoops. For the next week or so, Schiller leaked hate-filled tidbits to reporters. (Schiller denies doing this.) The ensuing outcry from the public against Fuhrman added immeasurably to the pressure on Ito to admit the tapes into evidence, just as Cochran knew it would.

When lawyers from both sides finally sat down to listen to the tapes, they were struck by something besides Fuhrman’s bigotry. Everyone also noticed the references to Margaret York, who was Fuhrman’s onetime commander in the West Los Angeles division and Lance Ito’s wife. York had been one of the early female recruits to the LAPD (and, in true Los Angeles fashion, a model for the television series Cagney and Lacey). In keeping with his role in McKinny’s project, Fuhrman had excoriated women police officers in general but also, it turned out, York in particular. Among other things, Fuhrman said on the tape that the judge’s wife had “sucked and fucked her way to the top.”

The lawyers brought this to Ito’s attention in chambers on August 14. The issue was further clouded by the fact that earlier in the case, York had filed a declaration in the Simpson trial saying that she remembered little about Fuhrman except that he was once one of the officers under her command. As Cochran put it gently to Ito, “This is a very delicate issue… It is going to have to do with credibility, because you know, her declaration-this guy, unless he is absolutely lying-and Marcia will back me up on this-the contacts he has with Lieutenant York are the kind that are very hard to forget him.” In other words, as some lawyers on both sides came to believe, York may have lied in her sworn statement that she didn’t remember Fuhrman.

The tapes issue thus quickly became one of daunting complexity-as were the parties’ motives. The judge went right to the heart of the issue when he asked, in chambers, “Is there a conflict for me to hear this issue?”

“Right,” said Clark.

“Which is a significant legal issue,” Ito continued, “because we may be talking mistrial.”

With the tapes in hand, the defense felt the best thing it could do was press on for a verdict in front of this judge and this jury. The prosecutors did not want to prompt a mistrial that might potentially, under the double-jeopardy clause of the Constitution, prevent a retrial, but Clark in particular had come to loathe Ito with a passion. By coincidence, right around this time Clark and I were chatting in the hallway and she launched into a lengthy tirade about the judge: “The worst judge I’ve ever been in front of-and the worst possible judge for this case. Totally intimidated by Johnnie, a total starfucker…” But she and the other prosecutors also realized that it was almost impossible to bring a new judge into such a complex case at this late date.

And then there was Ito. A decent man, he mostly wanted to do the right thing under the law (though it was far from clear what that was). He had come to have an almost schizophrenic reaction to the media attention that the case had brought him. True, at times he reveled in it. But at the same time Ito suffered at the many (and ever increasing) critiques of his performance. Now his wife was being dragged into the mess. The pressure nearly drove him to snap.

After devoting nearly the entire next morning, August 15, to listening in silence to Clark and Cochran’s rancorous arguments about how to handle the issue of his wife’s involvement, Ito made up his mind. Staring at his notes, he said, “When a concern is raised regarding a Court’s ability to be fair and impartial, it is not the actual existence of impartiality or partiality that is the issue. It’s the appearance.” Ito paused, gathering himself, the silence a reminder of how wrenching the experience had become for him. When he resumed, his voice was thick with emotion. “I love my wife dearly.” He struggled to collect himself. “And I am wounded by criticism of her, as any spouse would be. And I think it is reasonable to assume that that could have some impact. As I mentioned, women in male-dominated professions learn to deal with this. And those who are successful, I think we all observe, are tougher than most.” (Ito implied, winningly, that they are tougher than their husbands, too.) Ito did not recuse himself from the case-at least not yet. He said, in effect, that another judge should review the tapes and determine if Ito could still preside.

The entire courtroom then picked up and moved in a motley caravan up two flights to the courtroom of Judge James Bascue, the chief criminal judge of the superior court. Bascue assigned the case to Judge John Reid, in the courtroom next door. (There was a revealing moment in Bascue’s brief tenure on the case. Though famously tough on crime in ordinary circumstances, Judge Bascue couldn’t resist trying to banter a little with Simpson about football-striking, and distasteful, evidence of the effect of sports celebrity on middle-aged men.) Judge Reid, in turn, agreed to examine the tapes, and then sent the case back to Ito to continue the trial. This extraordinary merry-go-round-three judges in an hour, with the jury all the while sitting around and doing nothing-underlined just how anarchic the case had become.

The following morning, in an off-the-record session in Judge Ito’s chambers, the prosecution’s frustrations surfaced. Sitting around Ito’s desk with the defense attorneys, Darden said, “Judge, I haven’t vented in a long time, and I’d like to vent.” He complained that the judge had interrupted and embarrassed prosecution lawyers in front of the jury. “We don’t like that,” Darden said. With the issue of Ito’s recusal still hanging in the air, it looked like Darden was trying to intimidate the judge. After Darden’s tirade, the defense lawyers bolted out of chambers and asked to go on the record in open court. There, Shapiro recounted the episode and said he was going to complain to the state bar. Such a remedy might have been excessive, but Shapiro’s complaint about Darden certainly did have merit.

Now it was Darden’s turn to become nearly unhinged. “Your Honor,” Darden said, voice quavering, “I’m so offended at Mr. Shapiro’s remarks-remarks that I’m sure are being fed to him by Mr. Cochran-I’m so offended by those remarks that I would rather not stand at the same podium at which he stood a few moments ago.” Like a child fearing cooties, Darden kept his distance from the wooden stand. “Now, if Mr. Shapiro or Mr. Cochran want to refer me to the state bar, fine. Because when this case is over, I’m going to be referring the defense attorneys to the United States Attorney’s Office.” Cochran laughed audibly at this preposterous suggestion. “And he chuckles now,” Darden went on, “but will he be chuckling later on? It won’t be so funny later on. They don’t know everything that I know.”

One can scarcely imagine more reckless behavior by a law enforcement official than Darden’s empty threats (based on secret information) to report an adversary for a crime. Yet the defense did not even complain, because Darden was so obviously just posturing. (Needless to say, Darden never reported anything to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Notwithstanding the questions about the ethics of the defense lawyers in this case, no one could say that they had committed any federal crimes.) And all this distress for the prosecution came even before the judge decided when, or if, to play the tapes in public.

Cochran kept the pressure on. His experience told him that organized political pressure to release the tapes had to accompany general public outrage about them. When Cochran’s client Michael Jackson was under investigation in February 1994, the lawyer had orchestrated a news conference of black ministers to call on Gil Garcetti to conclude his investigation of the singer. On August 28, 1995, much the same coalition was reassembled-this time to call for Judge Ito to release the Fuhrman tapes to the public. The heavily attended media event was spearheaded by Danny Bakewell, head of the Los Angeles civil rights organization known as Brotherhood Crusade. (This was the same Bakewell who had, less than a year earlier, bestowed on Cochran his organization’s annual award, hailing the lawyer as “a tireless warrior against those who would deny justice for all.”) Commenting on the Fuhrman tapes, Bakewell predicted dire results if the tapes were not released. “This community is a powder keg,” Bakewell said, “capable of repeating the actions of 1992”-that is, the riots that had followed the acquittal of the LAPD officers who beat Rodney King. Bakewell’s rhetoric was pure racial extortion: Release the tapes-or else.

The political maelstrom left Ito little choice when the issue was finally posed to him the next day, August 29. The prosecution had entertained a vain hope that Ito would at least decide the tapes issue without first playing them in public. But when weighing that decision, Ito addressed the general outcry about the tapes directly. “I think that there is an overriding public interest in the nature of the offer that you are making,” Ito told the defense in a hearing before the television cameras but outside the presence of the jury, “and I don’t want this Court to ever be in a position where there is any indication that this Court would participate in suppressing information that is of vital public interest.” The judge allowed the defense to play the portions of the tapes they wanted the jury to hear. With that decision by Ito, all of the defense work-from Schiller’s leaks to Bakewell’s threats-had paid off.

In the courtroom that day, the first few examples from the tapes were fairly straightforward-brief sentence fragments of Fuhrman’s familiar voice: “You do what you’re told, understand, nigger?” Female officers, he said, “don’t do anything. They don’t go out there and initiate a contact with a six-foot-five nigger that’s been in prison for seven years pumping weights.” And: “These niggers, they run like rabbits.” Of course, these snippets were bad enough, but then, late in the morning session, Uelman began to play the tape of what appeared to be Fuhrman’s recounting of an incident that had happened to him in the field. It was, according to Fuhrman on the tape, “a real heavy investigation… sixty-six allegations of brutality… assault and battery under color of authority. Torture, all kinds of stuff.” Then Fuhrman’s disembodied voice described for the silent courtroom what had happened.

Two of my buddies were shot and ambushed, policemen. Both alive, and I was the first unit on the scene. Four suspects ran into a second story in an apartment project-apartment. We kicked the door down. We grabbed a girl that lived there, one of their girlfriends. Grabbed her by the hair and stuck a gun to her head and used her as a barricade. Walked up and told them: “I’ve got this girl; I’ll blow her fucking brains out if you come out with a gun.” Held her like this-threw the bitch down the stairs-deadbolted the door. “Let’s play, boys.”

On the tape, McKinny interrupted to ask whether she could use this incident in the movie.

“It hasn’t been seven years, statute of limitations,” Fuhrman cautioned. “I have 300 and something pages of Internal Affairs investigation just on that one incident. I got several other ones. I must have about 3,000 or 4,000 pages Internal Affairs investigations out there.” Then Fuhrman resumed his narration of the event.

Anyway, we basically tortured them. There was four policemen, four guys. We broke ’em. Numerous bones in each one of them. Their faces were just mush. They had pictures on the walls, there was blood all the way to the ceiling with finger marks like they were trying to crawl out of the room. They showed us pictures of the room. It was unbelievable, there was blood everywhere. All the walls, all the furniture, all the floor. It was just everywhere. These guys, they had to shave so much hair off, one guy they shaved it all off. Like seventy stitches in his head. You know, knees cracked, oh, it was just-We had ’em begging that they’d never be gang members again, begging us. So with sixty-six allegations, I had a demonstration in front of Hollenbeck station, chanting my name. Captain had to take them all into roll call, and that’s where the Internal Affairs investigation started. It lasted eighteen months. I was on a photo lineup, suspect lineup. I was picked out by twelve people. So I was pretty proud of that. I was the last one interviewed. The prime suspect is always the last one interviewed. They didn’t get any of our unit-thirty-eight guys-they didn’t get one day [of docked pay]. I didn’t get one day. The custodian, the jailer of the sheriff’s department, got five days, since he beat one of the guys at the very end…

Immediately after we beat those guys, we went downstairs to the garden hose in the back of the place. We washed our hands. We had blood all over our legs, everything. With a dark blue uniform, you know, and in the dark, you can’t see it. But when you get in the light and it looks like somebody took red paint and painted it all over you. We had to clean our badges off with water; there was blood all over ’em. Our faces had blood on them. We had to clean all that. We checked each other, then we went out, we were directing traffic. And the chiefs and everything were coming down because two officers were shot-“Where are the suspects?”… And they took them to the station. Somehow nobody knows who arrested them. We handcuffed them and threw them down two flights of stairs, you know. That’s how they came. That’s where a lot of people saw, you know, “Look out! Here comes one! Oh my God, look out, he’s falling!” I mean, you don’t shoot a policeman. That’s all there is to it…

When this taped excerpt ended, Lance Ito’s courtroom was as quiet as it had ever been over the previous year. Then there was a sound: Kim Goldman started to cry.

At last Gerry Uelman asked McKinny, “Do you have a particularly vivid memory of that account?”

“Of course,” she said.

“Why is that?”

“It’s, um, it’s vividly described.”

Judge Ito broke for lunch.

Cochran’s colleagues had never seen him behave the way he did when Lance Ito’s ten-page ruling slipped out of the fax machine on August 31. Cochran was distraught, speechless, despairing. In what seemed to be a shocking blow to the defense, Ito ruled that he would allow only two brief excerpts of the Fuhrman tapes to be played: “We have no niggers where I grew up,” and “That’s where niggers live.” In lieu of playing the tapes, he would allow McKinny to tell the jury that Fuhrman had said “nigger” forty-one times on the tapes. Ito found that everything else on the tapes was either irrelevant to the Simpson case or unduly prejudicial to the prosecution.

Cochran proceeded to an impromptu news conference on the ground floor of his office building on Wilshire Boulevard. Wearing an electric-blue sports jacket over a black shirt buttoned at the neck with a jeweled clasp, Cochran denounced Ito in a most personal way. Surrounded by nearly a dozen colleagues on the defense team (but not Shapiro), Cochran called Ito’s ruling “perhaps one of the cruelest, unfairest decisions ever rendered in a criminal court.” He declared, “The cover-up continues… This inexplicable, indefensible ruling lends credence to all those who say the criminal justice system is corrupt.” And in a lightly veiled reference to Bakewell’s incendiary threats of earlier in the week, Cochran said, “So all of the citizens in Los Angeles, they should remain calm.”

Having stung Cochran in print, Ito still could not stand up to him in person. The next day in court, Friday, September 1, Cochran essentially went on strike. The defense was supposed to continue to call witnesses, but Cochran simply refused to continue the trial, in protest against the judge’s ruling on the tapes. A tougher judge might simply have declared the defense case concluded and moved on to the prosecution rebuttal. But Cochran intimidated Ito too much for that. The judge simply and meekly informed the jury, which had heard scarcely any evidence in a week because of the tapes controversy, that the trial was breaking early for Labor Day weekend.

By this point, Fuhrman had retained a criminal defense lawyer, who wisely advised him to take the Fifth Amendment rather than answer any more questions in the case. The tapes had raised a real possibility that he might be prosecuted for perjury-or even for the crimes he had told McKinny he committed. When Fuhrman returned to the courthouse to take the witness stand once again, he answered each of Uelman’s queries with invocations of his right to remain silent. (As was customary, Ito did not allow the jury to see Fuhrman take the Fifth.) Darden and his student clerks, the only African-Americans on the prosecution team, were not present when Fuhrman returned to appear before Judge Ito.

At long last, on September 6, the jury heard McKinny and the two short excerpts from the tapes. Ironically, the highlight of the day for the defense was not the playing of the tapes-which the jurors absorbed impassively-but rather Darden’s inept cross-examination of McKinny. Darden belittled McKinny’s credentials, questioned her motives, and generally treated her as if it were she-and not prosecution witness Fuhrman-who had done something wrong. Stung by Darden’s hostility, McKinny blurted out at one point, “Why are we having this adversarial relationship?” Several jurors nodded, apparently wondering the same thing.

After the trial, most of the jurors said that the McKinny tapes had had little impact on their verdict. Even if one accepts this at face value, the tapes still had an enormous influence on the trial. The entire gestalt of the case was transformed. Because the tapes established definitively that Fuhrman had lied about using the word “nigger,” the prosecution had to abandon its categorical defense of him. This was true even after Ito’s unduly restrictive ruling regarding playing the tapes in front of the jury. Fuhrman’s damaged credibility, in turn, made it that much harder for the prosecution to argue that all the other LAPD officers were telling the truth. In terms of the courtroom chess match, the damage to the prosecution from the tapes was probably as great as from Darden’s glove demonstration.

The tapes also loom as an important historical artifact beyond the give-and-take of this trial. It may never be possible to sort out how much of Fuhrman’s narrative was literally true. In the aftermath of the case, the LAPD and the United States attorney in Los Angeles launched investigations based on the tapes. Fuhrman’s extraordinary account of the beating of suspects following the shooting of two police officers did appear to be loosely based on a real event that occurred in 1978, but his version had fictional aspects as well. However, the tapes also pointed to larger truths. MAW existed. Mark Fuhrman-and others like him-thrived in the LAPD. Ultimately, it is not surprising that black jurors decide to punish the police for its sorry past and that, alas, O.J. Simpson turned out to be the undeserving beneficiary of this ignoble tale.

After McKinny’s brief turn on the stand, the defense closed its case with three more witnesses who testified that they had heard Fuhrman use the word “nigger.” As if this were not enough, the defense team decided to send one final nonverbal message. When Ito said he would not tell the jury that Fuhrman had refused to testify further, Cochran arranged for the entire defense team to wear ties made from African kente cloth in protest-in front of the jury, no less.

Ito could have stopped them. Very early in the trial, the judge had told the prosecutors that they could not wear angel pins in solidarity with the victims of the case, even though, unlike the kente-cloth ties, the pins bore no provocative message. But on the day the defense team wore the ties, Judge Ito had only this to say to the first defense lawyer to appear before him:

“Nice tie.”