The Run of His Life

by Jeffrey Toobin

  Copyright © 1996 by Jeffrey Toobin

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Random House website address: http://www.randomhouse.com/

  eISBN: 978-0-307-82916-0

  v3.1

  Nicole:

  Well, it seems that the worst part is behind us.

  I want you to know that whatever you might think

  to the contrary I’v taken full responcibility for this.

  It happen and I’m doing everything possible to assure

  it doe’nt happen agan. But sooner or later we must

  starte with our future. I love our time last weekend.

  I know to you it may not have been much but it

  showed we can get along.

  I love you and losing you is the only thing that

  madder to me. So lets not forget the past. Let’s work

  together (for the first time) to improve the futurr

  live together. Know manner what I love you.

  O.J.

  Letter from O.J. Simpson to Nicole Brown Simpson,

  following his plea of no contest to domestic violence

  charges in 1989

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue: What the Lawyers Knew

  1 Drop Dead Gorgeous

  2 Parker Center

  3 Being O.J.

  4 “I Cannot Promise Justice”

  5 “Mr. Simpson Has Not Appeared”

  6 Hairsplitting

  7 The Race Card

  8 Horrible Human Event

  9 Mr. Cochran Wants to Know

  10 Group Therapy

  11 The Dream Team

  12 A Visit from Larry King

  13 Blaming Faye

  14 Thank You, Carl

  15 A Dirty, Filthy Word

  16 “I Can’t Be Here, Your Honor”

  17 “In the Past Ten Years, Detective Fuhrman …”

  18 The Best Trial Lawyer

  19 Stockholm Syndrome

  20 Too Tight

  21 “Sounded Black”

  22 Manna from Heaven

  23 “Free O.J.”

  Epilogue: “Now I Can Tell You”

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Sources and Bibliography

  Others Books By Author

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE:

  WHAT THE LAWYERS KNEW

  One after another, the Jaguars, the BMWs, and the odd Porsche pulled off the Avenue of the Stars and slipped into the nearly deserted underground parking garage. The owners of these cars, about two dozen of the top lawyers in West Los Angeles, greeted each other with slightly embarrassed smiles. All white, virtually all men, and mostly in their early fifties, they reflected the culture in which they had thrived, one where workaholism was no virtue and a weekend in the office anathema. Yet here they were, on a glorious summer Saturday afternoon, June 25, 1994, forsaking golf and family for a meeting in a Century City tower. They came because everyone wanted a piece of this case—the defense of Orenthal James Simpson against charges that he had murdered his ex-wife Nicole and her friend Ronald Goldman.

  Besides, they came because Robert Shapiro, Simpson’s lead lawyer, had asked them. Many of these lawyers, who were among those closest to Shapiro, never knew precisely what to make of their friend. They could quickly catalogue his faults: his outsize ego; his self-obsession; his excessive comfort with the moral ambiguities of his profession. “Bob would have cocktails with Hitler,” the wife of one of the lawyers at the meeting used to say. They chuckled at his endless socializing; Shapiro owned three tuxedos. He had once declined a lunch date with one of the lawyers, Alvin Michaelson, by explaining, without a touch of humor, “I only have lunch with people who can help me. It’s part of my workday. I eat with clients, judges, and prosecutors.” But so, too, these lawyers knew another side of Shapiro, that of the generous friend. When the wife of Roger Cossack, another lawyer at the meeting, had died a few years earlier after a terrible bout with cancer, Bob Shapiro had been the first person to arrive at Cossack’s house to offer comfort after the funeral. When the Internal Revenue Service had begun investigating scores of professional athletes for evading taxes on the income they made from appearing at autograph shows, many had come running to Shapiro for assistance. He in turn had referred much of that business to his friends and, consequently, had paid for the additions to more than a few lawyers’ houses. They remembered that. So they answered his call.

  Shapiro greeted his colleagues on this Saturday with his trademark bear hugs and ushered them into a conference room. If you looked carefully out the window, you could make out Bundy Drive, in Brentwood, just three miles west. Thirteen days before this meeting, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman had been murdered near the front steps of her home on Bundy. A pair of late-night dog walkers had discovered the grisly scene: Nicole, at the foot of the front steps, her throat slashed down to the vertebrae; Ron, in a heap nearby, his torso and neck both savaged by fatal wounds. The following week, Shapiro had been retained to represent the prime suspect in the case, O.J. Simpson, who was Nicole’s ex-husband as well as a very famous man. On June 17, the day Shapiro had agreed that Simpson would surrender to police, the former football star vanished. With virtually the entire nation watching on television, Simpson’s friend Robert Kardashian read what sounded like a suicide note that Simpson had left behind. In the end, Simpson did not take his own life. He eventually turned himself in later that day, following a surreal, televised chase on the freeways of Southern California.

  Technically, the space where the attorneys gathered was not really Shapiro’s at all. Because he didn’t have a conference room of his own, Shapiro had borrowed one from the large law firm where he rented space. Under the pressures of the Simpson case, Shapiro would come to use it so often that he eventually broke down and added the conference room to his sublet arrangement. Like most criminal defense attorneys, even the best known, Shapiro ran a lean business operation. He had a secretary and two young lawyers as associates. Every month, Shapiro wrote out by hand all the checks to cover his office expenses, including payroll. In recent years, he had had no trouble meeting that payroll—business was good—but Shapiro was ever mindful of the criminal defense attorney’s dilemma: Successful though one may be, one can never count on repeat business. An unending supply of new clients must always be found. The quest for clients—his own and his friends’—was an important subtext for the gathering he had assembled this summer afternoon.

  Summoning the participants by telephone earlier in the week, Shapiro had said he wanted to discuss the Simpson case. The preliminary hearing would begin the following Thursday, June 30. Shapiro said he wanted to pick the brains of the best in the business beforehand. Please help me, he said. I need your advice.

  The lawyers came running, as Shapiro knew they would, for he understood that the invitation itself was a gift. The Simpson case was already a national sensation. In the gossipy, competitive Los Angeles legal world, Shapiro discerned that his conclave would be (in fact, already was) the talk of the city. Any lawyer would treasure the opportunity to mention the fact that Bob Shapiro had called to talk about the O.J. case. Friends, fellow lawyers, and, especially, clients (and even more especially prospective clients) would be impressed. The high end of criminal defense law operates almost entirely on a referral basis—that is, lawyers are hired because other lawyers recommend them—and Shapiro knew that his guests on this Saturday would not soon forget he had included them in this extraordi
nary session. A profitable referral to Shapiro would be the appropriate gesture of gratitude.

  After the lawyers had settled in around the large oval table, Shapiro began the proceedings with a question.

  “So,” he said. “How many of you think O.J. did it?”

  Everyone froze. After a moment, a few lawyers chuckled nervously and others rolled their eyes. In a flash, Shapiro had brought home just how strange this meeting was. Defense lawyers talk to each other about their cases all the time, often with brutal candor. Does my guy take a plea or not? Is my case triable? Winnable? In these discussions, guilt is a given; experienced criminal lawyers—the successful ones—harbor few illusions. These chats are private; the cases are usually unknown to the public. But Shapiro was talking about what was well on its way to becoming the most sensational legal proceeding in American history. This was not the kind of question—or so it seemed—that an experienced criminal defense attorney would want answered in a quasi-public setting.

  But Shapiro’s question made a point. Though he was now, as Simpson’s attorney, more famous than any of his friends around the conference table, he was still one of the boys. He still knew the score. He had no more illusions about this client than any other. The spotlight would never blind him to reality.

  After his initial query brought only awkward silence, Shapiro moved quickly to introduce two of the guests—Skip Taft and Robert Kardashian, who were, for Shapiro’s purposes, the most important audience for the meeting. Taft and Kardashian were lawyers, too, but that wasn’t the point. Taft was O.J. Simpson’s business manager, the man who would decide, among other things, how much Shapiro would be paid. Kardashian had known Simpson for thirty years, and in the days since the murders he had emerged as the defendant’s closest friend and adviser. The gossip had already made the rounds that these two men had been instrumental in replacing Simpson’s original lawyer, Howard Weitzman, with Shapiro. Attention had to be paid. It was for them that Shapiro had assembled this show of legal strength.

  Almost everyone else knew one another. This was, as they sometimes joked, the West L.A. Jewish mafia. (Taft and Kardashian were among the very few non-Jews in the room.) In fact, as the group settled in, Alvin Michaelson whispered to his neighbor, “This is what it must have been like at Apalachin”—the infamous gathering of mob chieftains in upstate New York in 1957. It was a famously inbred group, and their connections to one another often stretched back decades. Among Shapiro’s oldest friends in the room was Roger Cossack, who had pledged with Shapiro to the Zeta Beta Tau fraternity at UCLA in the early 1960s. (The Simpson case would transform Cossack’s life as much as it did Shapiro’s; Cossack became CNN’s local expert on the trial, and when it was over, he quit the law altogether and moved to Washington to begin his own daily legal-affairs broadcast on the cable network.) When prosecutors began examining Kardashian’s behavior in the aftermath of the murders, he hired Michaelson as his attorney. When Shapiro was later sued for libel in connection with the Simpson case, he asked another attendee, Larry Feldman, to represent him. (Feldman was ribbed mercilessly that Saturday because, due to go to a wedding, he came to Shapiro’s office in black tie; for his part, Shapiro presided in an all-white designer sweat suit.) One of the few civil litigation specialists at the meeting was Patricia Glaser, a partner at the large law firm then known as Christensen White Miller Fink and Jacobs. A year and a half later, when the Simpson trial was over, her name would be added to the firm’s name along with that of the newest partner—Robert Shapiro. Another of Shapiro’s ZBT brothers, Mike Nasatir, was there, too, along with his longtime partner, Richard Hirsch. About fifteen years earlier, they had employed a Southwestern law student by the name of Marcia Kleks as an intern. (She later married Gordon Clark and took his name.) Johnnie Cochran, who was not part of Shapiro’s social set, was not invited.

  “I’ve asked you all here today because you all know how to try a case,” Shapiro said, “and I’m not afraid to ask for your help.”

  But Shapiro actually asked few questions, and though he was pleased to have collected all these fine lawyers together, he didn’t listen much to what they had to say. Shapiro’s confidence was astonishing: He had the answer for O.J. Simpson. His client, he vowed, would go to trial and be acquitted. The strategy was set. Shapiro was caught up short only once. Michael Baden, the eminent medical examiner whom Shapiro had retained as an expert in the case, mentioned at the meeting that the autopsy results on the victims showed the possibility that more than one person had killed Nicole and Ron. Robert Shapiro paused to consider the implications. “So,” he asked the group, “that means O.J. and who else did it?”

  This remark, too, drew stunned silence, and the meeting soon broke up. Shapiro took several of the participants out to dinner at Nicky Blair’s, a venerable (and now defunct) Hollywood hangout. A few hardy souls concluded the evening with drinks at the Beverly Hills estate of Shapiro’s friend and former client Robert Evans, the movie producer whom Shapiro had steered clear of formal charges in the infamous Cotton Club murders of 1983.

  Among the guests at Shapiro’s meeting most pleased to have been invited was Marshall Grossman. Though he had enjoyed considerable success in the world of civil litigation, Grossman had never tried a criminal case, and the glamour and excitement of the Simpson case appealed to him. However, as Grossman later pondered what he had heard at the meeting, he hesitated. Grossman had tried cases for high stakes before, but he realized that this case, as Shapiro planned to defend it, would become something much bigger than the trial of a single defendant. If Shapiro had his way, it would come to involve (and possibly consume) the whole city of Los Angeles. Ultimately, Grossman decided this kind of public spectacle would not be for him.

  The notion that Grossman might play a part in the Simpson case had generated excitement at his law firm, and he felt he owed his colleagues an explanation for his decision. At 11:12 A.M. on July 6, 1994, he sent an E-mail message around his firm that said, “I am sending a letter to the lead trial lawyer in the case this morning informing him of my decision” not to join the defense effort. The Simpson case, Grossman went on, “carries with it a high risk of racial divisiveness for our community, a situation which I don’t wish to contribute to and would rather reserve the opportunity for a healing role if need be.”

  Johnnie L. (just “L”) Cochran, Jr., loved appearing on Nightline—as well as the Today show, the CBS Evening News, and the NBC Nightly News. In the days immediately after the murders in Brentwood, he did them all, and the programs’ producers were happy to have him, too. Cochran was a poised, accomplished, telegenic African-American lawyer, the answer to a network booker’s dreams. Within a week of the murders, the Today show even made him a paid consultant.

  As it happened, on the evening of June 17, 1994—the day Al Cowlings led the nation on the low-speed chase down the Los Angeles freeways—Cochran was booked to analyze the events of the day on Nightline. Though television viewers never knew it, Cochran’s position in the case was considerably more complicated than that of the other legal experts who were surfacing in the media to analyze the case. Cochran had personal knowledge of what was going on behind the scenes. He was a friend of O.J. Simpson’s—not, in normal circumstances, an intimate confidant, but certainly a long-term acquaintance. Since the day of the murders, Simpson had been on the phone with Cochran talking about his plight and asking the attorney to join in his defense efforts. On the air, Cochran was cautious and only mildly pro-defense. His comment that evening on Nightline was typical of what he was saying on all the programs: “I think that the important thing for all Americans to understand is that this is a tragic, tragic case, but at this point he’s still presumed to be innocent.”

  Off camera, though, Cochran, like Shapiro, could afford to be more blunt. For example, during a break in the broadcast of Nightline on June 17 in ABC’s studios in Los Angeles, Cochran sized up the situation very differently from the way he did for the program’s viewers. “O.J. is in massive de
nial,” Cochran told a friend. “He obviously did it. He should do a diminished-capacity plea and he might have a chance to get out in a reasonable amount of time.” When, the following week, Cochran traveled to Burbank for his early-morning duty to the Today show, he expressed the same sentiments—likewise to friends, off camera.

  But in the days to come, as Cochran continued to listen to Simpson’s entreaties, the lawyer learned that the defendant had no interest in pleading guilty. He wanted to go to trial and win—and he wanted Cochran to represent him. Cochran was torn. He enjoyed the broadcasting work; it was easy, flattering, low-stress, and, at several hundred dollars per appearance on Today, the money wasn’t bad, either. But how could he turn down what was shaping up to be the trial of the century? Unlike Shapiro, Cochran’s métier was trying cases, working before juries in a courtroom. Questioning Cochran on the June 20 edition of the Today show, Bryant Gumbel made note of the differences in the two men’s reputations. “Mr. Shapiro has a great reputation as a plea bargainer,” Gumbel said. “Do you think him the best man to represent O.J. in a criminal trial?” Cochran’s response was a study in condescension toward Shapiro—and nothing less than an advertisement for himself.

  “Well, again,” Cochran told Gumbel, “I think there are lawyers and there are lawyers. He is a fine lawyer, but if the matter is to be tried, I think one needs one who is very well experienced and skilled in trying cases—a litigator, if you will. And I would not be surprised if you didn’t see a lawyer—another lawyer, trial lawyer—come in and do that.” Cochran, of course, did not let on that he was in fact at that very moment weighing whether to step in and take that trial lawyer role.

  After the preliminary hearing ended on July 8 and Simpson was ordered to stand trial in sixty days, Cochran knew he had to make up his mind. He had a large circle of friends, and often liked to talk himself into (or out of) ideas by bouncing them off others. Cochran worked the phones.