The Run of His Life

by Jeffrey Toobin

  Shapiro and Kardashian woke O.J. and told him that they would be taking him to Parker Center to surrender. Again, they did not force him to leave. Instead, they explained that Doctors Huizenga and Faerstein were on their way to examine him before they had to leave for jail. Within moments, the house was buzzing with people. First Faerstein arrived, followed by Huizenga, who was accompanied by an entourage of assistants. Then came Henry Lee and Michael Baden. Kardashian’s girlfriend, Denice Shakarian Halicki, who also lived at the house, suggested that Al Cowlings be called, and he was summoned to join the group as well. Huizenga wanted to evaluate some swollen lymph nodes he had noticed in his initial examination of Simpson, particularly because O.J. had a family history of cancer. (Later tests showed no malignancy.) In addition—incredibly—Huizenga took the time to do some additional examinations to bolster Simpson’s defense, taking more photographs to demonstrate that Simpson had no significant wounds. Granted the privilege of being allowed to surrender, Simpson was missing his deadline so that he could, in effect, conduct his defense.

  Shapiro was on the phone every fifteen minutes to the LAPD—stroking, consoling, explaining that these things take time and that Simpson would be on his way shortly. Patiently, but with some indignation, Shapiro gave a series of increasingly high-level officers the same message: “I have always had a good relationship with the police department. I’ve always kept my word. You have to trust me here. I will be there when I say I can be there.” After all, Shapiro told the cops, what difference did it make if Simpson surrendered at 11:00 A.M. or 1:00 P.M.?

  Simpson, too, had his demands. In the hour or so after Shapiro’s arrival, the entire group gathered in a large second-floor study just off the master bedroom. When Huizenga finished taking blood and hair samples there, O.J. said he wanted to take a shower, then talk to his mother and his children. Simpson, Barbieri, and Cowlings went back down to O.J.’s bedroom on the first floor. When he arrived, Faerstein had wanted to keep a close eye on Simpson to make sure he wouldn’t harm himself. But he had no qualms about Cowlings monitoring O.J.; the psychiatrist assumed that Cowlings, too, would make sure Simpson remained safe.

  Finally, Vannatter and Lange grew fed up waiting for the lawyer to drive the defendant to Parker Center. They had been reaching Shapiro on his cellular phone, so they did not even know where he and Simpson were. (Marcia Clark, who was beginning the grand-jury proceedings against Simpson that day, took a break from those labors to have her own indignant conversation with Shapiro.) At around noon, the detectives said they would wait no longer for Simpson to surrender. They wanted to send a squad car to pick him up. As always, the LAPD was concerned about the media. A news conference had been scheduled for noon, and now that had to be put off. It was just after noon when Shapiro put Faerstein on the phone with an LAPD commander, in an effort to explain the reasons for the delay.

  “There is a warrant for this man’s arrest,” the commander said, “and we have to come get him. Now, where are you?”

  Faerstein stalled. “I don’t think I’m at liberty to tell you where we are.”

  “I don’t think you understand, Doctor. There are laws relating to aiding and abetting fugitives. Now, you tell me where you are—”

  “Just a minute,” Faerstein said, and then handed the phone to Shapiro, who finally agreed to provide Kardashian’s address. Ever the negotiator, Shapiro secured the commander’s promise that Shapiro and Faerstein could accompany Simpson on his trip downtown.

  Moments later, at about 12:10 P.M., a squad car arrived at Kardashian’s, and a police helicopter began circling overhead. Shapiro and Faerstein answered the door. Even then, after all the delays, the lawyer had another request. Shapiro and his professional colleagues—Faerstein, Huizenga, Lee, Baden, and Kardashian—had been gathered upstairs. O.J. was in a back bedroom talking with Barbieri and Cowlings. Shapiro asked the officers if Faerstein, the psychiatrist, could break the news to O.J. that the police had arrived. (Simpson had not even been told that the police were coming to get him.) The officers, who at that point had every right to barge in and take Simpson away, agreed. Faerstein walked back to the bedroom where O.J. and A.C. were talking. A moment later Faerstein returned, alone. “He must be somewhere else,” Faerstein told the officers.

  One at a time, the people in the house fanned out. A few walked upstairs. With each passing second, the pace of everyone’s steps increased. O.J. wasn’t upstairs. Chests constricted. There was a brief ray of hope when they realized they had not checked the garage. Maybe O.J. went to get something out of the trunk of his car. But there was no one in the garage. Panic. They talked to Otto “Keno” Jenkins, Bob Shapiro’s chauffeur. He hadn’t seen O.J. And then the realization dawned on them that no one had seen Barbieri or Cowlings, either.

  “No one leaves,” one officer said when he realized what had happened. “This is a crime scene.”

  As he had done when the officers came for him in 1989 for beating Nicole, so he did when they came for him in 1994 for killing her: O.J. Simpson disappeared.

  The LAPD’s considerable press apparatus had put out the word early in the morning: There would be an announcement regarding the Simpson case at noon. Reporters drifted in to Parker Center over the course of the morning and then learned that the briefing had been delayed. This was no great surprise, because most such events start late. Then there was a bomb scare at police headquarters, and the media people were told they could vacate the building if they wanted. No one left—media machismo. At 1:53 P.M., the reporters got the two-minute warning: The briefing was about to begin.

  Commander David Gascon was the chief spokesman for the LAPD. With his neat black hair, obligatory mustache, and tight-fitting uniform, Gascon cut a typical figure for the department he represented. He was also fairly relaxed and approachable, and he had a good rapport with most of the reporters who covered the LAPD. They noticed, when he stepped to the podium, that he looked … different. He seemed shaken, and his voice quavered slightly.

  “Okay, I have an official announcement from the Los Angeles Police Department,” Gascon said.

  “This morning,” Gascon said, his voice unsteady, “detectives from the Los Angeles Police Department, after an exhaustive investigation which included interviews with dozens of witnesses, a thorough examination and analysis of the physical evidence both here and in Chicago, sought and obtained a warrant for the arrest of O.J. Simpson, charging him with the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman.

  “Mr. Simpson, in agreement with his attorney, was scheduled to surrender this morning to the Los Angeles Police Department. Initially, that was 11:00. It then became 11:45. Mr. Simpson has not appeared.”

  The room stirred.

  “The Los Angeles Police Department right now is actively searching for Mr. Simpson.”

  An experienced group of reporters were gathered in that room, and yet none of them could ever recall having heard the sound they issued at that moment: a sort of collective gasp. And then one journalist, name lost to history, let out a long and very astonished whistle.

  “Mr. Simpson is out there somewhere,” Gascon said, “and we will find him.”

  Shortly after it became clear that Simpson and Cowlings were really gone, Kardashian materialized in the foyer of his house with an envelope that contained a letter. Shapiro and Faerstein sat on the bottom step of the winding marble staircase and read it. They agreed that it seemed like a suicide note written by O.J. Meanwhile, the cops asked the assembled group where they thought Simpson had gone.

  Someone suggested Nicole’s grave, near her parents’ home in Orange County. Someone else said the Los Angeles Coliseum, site of O.J.’s greatest moments of football glory at USC. “He might kill himself in the end zone,” Faerstein said.

  In fact, no one had any idea where he was.

  After Shapiro and Kardashian spoke to the officers on the scene and recounted the events of the morning to their satisfaction, the two men left for Shapiro’s office in Cen
tury City. (They also determined that Paula Barbieri had left the house shortly before O.J. and A.C., but not with them.) “The two Bobs,” as they were sometimes known, asked the officers if Faerstein could leave with them, but the police weren’t yet finished talking to the psychiatrist. Though the letter was clearly important evidence of Simpson’s state of mind and his possible plans, Kardashian took it with him rather than mentioning it, much less giving it to the police, who were looking for O.J.

  From the moment Simpson vanished, Robert Shapiro focused on his top priority: Robert Shapiro. He knew immediately how furious the police and prosecutors were about Simpson’s disappearance, and he knew they would hold him responsible. Shapiro had embarrassed them in front of the entire country. Worse, Shapiro didn’t like what the cops were insinuating about his role in Simpson’s flight. Even though Shapiro had committed no crime in harboring Simpson for the morning, the mere fact that he might be investigated worried him. Shapiro decided he was finished dealing with underlings—Lange, Clark, and the like. Shapiro decided to call the district attorney himself, Gil Garcetti.

  Everything had been shaping up so well for Gil Garcetti. Elected overwhelmingly in 1992, he had an ideal ethnic and political résumé. The son of Mexican immigrants and the grandson of an Italian, the fifty-three-year-old politician had spent his entire professional career in the D.A.’s office. (He was, in fact, a neighbor of O.J.’s in Brentwood, thanks not to his civil-service earnings but rather to the wherewithal of his wealthy wife.) Even his steely-gray hair came with an uplifting tale: It had changed color after Garcetti underwent chemotherapy in a successful battle with lymphoma in 1980. As a tough-on-crime prosecutor and yet a Democrat, he had a promising political future. One problem hovered—his office’s remarkable record of futility in high-profile cases. The D.A. had failed to obtain convictions against the proprietors of the McMartin Preschool in a lengthy child abuse case; against several motion picture industry figures in connection with the deaths of two people on the set of Twilight Zone—The Movie; against the Menendez brothers for killing their parents; and, most notoriously, against the police officers who beat Rodney King—acquittals that set off the riots of 1992. As Garcetti would frequently (and correctly) point out over the course of the Simpson case, evaluating an office of nearly a thousand prosecutors on the basis of how they did in a few “big ones” was pretty unfair. (Still, in his campaign against his predecessor, Ira Reiner, Garcetti himself hadn’t hesitated to play the can’t-win-the-big-one card.) These murders presented Garcetti with a case that was likely to dwarf the other “big ones” in media attention. Suddenly, though, he had a bigger problem than trying to convict O.J. Simpson—he couldn’t even find the guy.

  So Garcetti focused on his top priority: Gil Garcetti. When Shapiro got on the phone with the D.A., the defense attorney began reciting a version of the same speech he had been giving the cops all day: You know me, Gil, I don’t pull this kind of stuff. I arranged Erik Menendez’s surrender from Israel. Name-dropping even at a time like this, Shapiro then became nearly unhinged, practically weeping over the phone: “I didn’t know he would run, Gil. You have to believe me.” The two men were old acquaintances; Shapiro had even contributed $5,000 to Garcetti’s campaign. But at this moment Garcetti addressed Shapiro with barely controlled rage: “Just get him in here, Bob. That’s all we’re thinking about now.”

  At 3:00 P.M., just after he got off the phone with Shapiro, Garcetti went to give his own press conference, on the eighteenth floor of the Criminal Courts Building. Flanked by Marcia Clark and David Conn, Garcetti looked even more distraught than Gascon had in his briefing an hour earlier. He looked right at the cameras, which were broadcasting his words live.

  “I want to say something to the entire community,” Garcetti said. “If you in any way are assisting Mr. Simpson in avoiding justice, Mr. Simpson is a fugitive of justice right now. [His feelings were garbling his usually adequate syntax.] And if you assist him in any way, you are committing a felony. Think about it. And I’ll guarantee you that if there is evidence establishing that you’ve assisted Mr. Simpson in any way to avoid his arrest, you will be prosecuted as a felon.

  “Now,” Garcetti added, stumbling again a bit, “you can tell that I am a little upset, and I am upset. This is a very serious case. Many of us, perhaps, had empathy to some extent. We saw, perhaps, the falling of an American hero. To some extent, I viewed Mr. Simpson in the same way. But let’s remember that we have two innocent people who have been brutally killed.… It’s a serious case. We will continue to treat it seriously.”

  Through more than a half hour of hostile questions, Garcetti had nothing but polite things to say about the LAPD, but his frustration did surface toward the end.

  Rewording a question that had already been asked approximately twenty times at the press conference, one reporter ventured, “The question so many people are asking—and perhaps this needs to be addressed to the LAPD, and it already has—is how can this possibly happen? The entire world is focused on this man. Is there any way to answer that?”

  “I can’t,” Garcetti said simply.

  “Surely you’re wondering that yourself.”

  “Aren’t we all?” said the district attorney.

  Garcetti’s press conference did nothing to ease Shapiro’s anxiety. He knew he remained the villain in the minds of the Los Angeles law enforcement establishment. So Simpson’s lawyer decided, in effect, to take his case to the public. He told reporters that he would be making a statement about the day’s events at 5:00 P.M., which was barely an hour after Garcetti’s briefing ended. Unlike every other event that had been planned for June 17, this press conference started right on time. Robert Shapiro was anxious to go. He stepped to a podium in a makeshift briefing room on the ground floor of his Century City office building and spoke calmly and methodically, with no notes.

  Shapiro, too, started with a plea to the camera. But he was aiming for an audience of one. “For the sake of your children,” he told O.J., “please surrender immediately. Surrender to any law enforcement official at any police station, but please do it immediately.” There was an odd calm about Shapiro, a lack of affect to his presentation. For all the turmoil of the day—and the sheer strangeness of all the occurrences—he spoke without passion or even inflection. In retrospect, his agenda at the press conference appears utterly transparent: Whatever else had happened today, this mess was not going to drag him down with it.

  Shapiro began by summarizing the day’s events: the early morning call from the detectives, his journey to Kardashian’s home, his passing the news of the arrest warrant to Simpson, and the defendant’s sudden disappearance. “I have on numerous occasions in the past twenty-five years made similar arrangements with the Los Angeles Police Department and the district attorney’s office and Mr. Garcetti. All of them have always kept their word to me, and I have always kept my word to them. In fact, I arranged the surrender of Erik Menendez from Israel on a similar basis. We are all shocked by this sudden turn of events.”

  It was an extraordinary tale, and the reporters, along with the national television audience, listened with rapt attention. Shapiro’s account was also highly incriminating of his client. Simpson’s actions, as described by Shapiro, did not seem to be those of an innocent man. In light of Simpson’s escape, Shapiro might have had an obligation to recount this story to the police, but the lawyer was certainly under no obligation to share it with the public at large. Indeed, by some reckonings, much of what had gone on that morning at Kardashian’s house may have been protected by the attorney-client privilege—a privilege that only Simpson had the right to waive. Yet Shapiro told all. He had hung his client out to dry in order to save himself.

  Yet Shapiro’s statement was only the beginning of the proceedings at this press conference. “Now,” Shapiro continued, “I would like to introduce to you Mr. Robert Kardashian, who is one of Mr. Simpson’s closest and dearest friends, who will read a letter that O.J. Simpson wrote in his
handwriting today. Thank you.”

  He became one of the most familiar, if least known, figures in the Simpson saga: loyal friend Robert Kardashian, the one with the white stripe in his hair. Heir to a meat-packing fortune in Los Angeles, Kardashian attended USC a couple of years before Simpson and served there as the student manager of the football team, the prototypical hanger-on position. He graduated from law school but quickly dropped practice for the business world. He started a music magazine and sold his share for $3 million in 1979. At the time of the murders he was running Movie Tunes, a company that played music in movie theaters between shows.

  For many years Simpson and Kardashian shared lively and similar social lives. In 1978, Kardashian met his future wife, Kristen, when she was seventeen and he thirty-four; Kardashian had been there the previous year when O.J., then thirty, met Nicole Brown, then eighteen. Bob and Kristen Kardashian would ultimately have four children (Kourtney, Kimberly, Khole, and Robert, Jr.), and they often joined O.J. and Nicole for vacations. The two couples separated around the same time, too, and Kardashian’s divorce papers suggest that his marriage was beset by some of the same troubles as O.J. and Nicole’s. During the divorce, Kristen Kardashian obtained a restraining order that barred either party from “molesting, attacking, striking, threatening, sexually assaulting, battering, or otherwise disturbing the peace of the other party.”

  Strangely, Kardashian seemed to have an attack of poverty during his divorce. In an affidavit filed on January 11, 1991, he wrote that he had been terminated from his job the previous December. “I AM NOW UNEMPLOYED AND HAVE NO INCOME,” the document stated. Yet at the time of the murders, Kardashian was living in the vast house in Encino, and from the moment Simpson was arrested, Kardashian suspended all other work, reactivated his law license, and toiled full-time on O.J.’s defense for more than a year. His Rolls-Royce became a fixture at the county jail. His devotion to Simpson had a desperate, frantic quality. In September 1994, he placed a full-page advertisement in Hits magazine, a trade publication, bearing the words JUSTICE FOR THE JUICE. In the ad Kardashian used the name of Movie Tunes’ executive vice-president, Michael Ameen, without Ameen’s permission. Ameen promptly quit, telling The Hollywood Reporter, “Robert’s commitment to this case has overwhelmed every other corner of his life.”