The Run of His Life

by Jeffrey Toobin

  The case file amounted to a miniature autobiography of Mark Fuhrman: born February 5, 1952; grew up in Washington State; a brother died of leukemia before Mark was born; father a truck driver and carpenter; parents divorced when he was seven. In 1970, Fuhrman joined the marines, then served in Vietnam as a machine gunner. He thrived in the service until his last six months there. As Fuhrman later explained to Dr. Ronald R. Koegler, a psychiatrist, he stopped enjoying his military service because “there were these Mexicans and niggers, volunteers, and they would tell me they weren’t going to do something.” As a result of these problems, in 1975 Fuhrman left the marines and went almost directly to the Los Angeles Police Academy.

  Fuhrman excelled at the academy, finishing second in his class, and his career at the LAPD had a promising start. His early personnel ratings were high. One superior wrote, “His progress is excellent and with continued field experience he would progress into an outstanding officer.” But in 1977, Fuhrman’s assignment was changed to East L.A., and his evaluators began to show some reservations. “He is enthusiastic and demonstrates a lot of initiative in making arrests,” a superior wrote at the time. “However, his overall production is unbalanced at this point because of the greater proportion of time spent trying to make the ‘big arrest.’ ” Dr. Koegler wrote, “After a while he began to dislike his work, especially the ‘low-class’ people he was dealing with. He bragged about violence he used in subduing suspects, including chokeholds, and said he would break their hands or face or arms or legs, if necessary.”

  Fuhrman was moved into the pursuit of street gangs in late 1977, and while his job ratings remained high, he reported that the strains of the job affected him. “Those people disgust me, and the public puts up with it,” he told Dr. John Hochman, another psychiatrist, referring to his gang work. Fuhrman said that he was in a fight “at least every other day” and that he had to be “violent just to exist.” In just one year, he said, he was involved in at least twenty-five altercations while on duty. “They shoot little kids and they shoot other people,” he told Dr. Hochman. “We’d catch them and beat them, and we’d get sued or suspended.… This job has damaged me mentally. I can’t even go anywhere without a gun.” Fuhrman explained, “I have this urge to kill people that upset me.”

  The stress of police work took such a toll that in the early 1980s, Fuhrman sought to leave the force. His lawyers asserted that in the course of his work, Fuhrman “sustained seriously disabling psychiatric symptomatology” and as a result should receive a disability pension from the city. To get that pension, Fuhrman waged a protracted legal battle. The extensive case file documenting his efforts, replete with detailed psychiatric evaluations of the officer, was paradoxical. In all of Fuhrman’s own briefs, he was portrayed as a dangerously unbalanced man; as one of them put it, Fuhrman was “substantially incapacitated for the performance of his regular and customary duties as a policeman.” In the city’s answers, however, he was called a competent officer, albeit one involved in an elaborate ruse to win a pension. Dr. Hochman observed, “There is some suggestion here that the patient was trying to feign the presence of severe psychopathology. This suggests a conscious attempt to look bad and an exaggeration of problems which could be a cry for help and/or overdramatization by a narcissistic, self-indulgent, emotionally unstable person who expects immediate attention and pity.” In either case—whether Fuhrman was a psychotic or a malingerer—the picture of him was an unattractive one. Fuhrman lost his case and, as a result, remained on the force.

  As I studied the file, its implications were obvious. The Fuhrman disability case had the potential to thrust the specter of Rodney King into the middle of the Simpson case. The officer depicted in this battle over a pension seemed the archetype of the bigoted, bullying L.A. cop. If Simpson’s lawyers chose to use this file—and I wondered at the time whether they even knew about it—it could transform the case, which to that point had been regarded as largely apolitical. Would that change? Having seen Fuhrman’s file, I decided it was now all the more important that I speak to Shapiro.

  It turned out that Simpson’s lawyers did know about Fuhrman’s disability-case file. Several months after I located the documents, I learned how the defense had found out about them.

  The name Mark Fuhrman rang a bell with Zvonko Pavelic, but he couldn’t remember how. Bill Pavelic, as he is known, was born in Croatia in 1949, and after more than three decades in the United States, he still retained a slight residue of Central Europe in his speech. His family came to Cleveland in 1961 and to Los Angeles two years later, when Pavelic was fourteen. In 1974, when he was twenty-five, Pavelic became an officer with the LAPD. Looking back, he regarded it as important that he was a little older than many other cops were when they joined the force; he felt it made him more independent, more trusting of his own judgments. Pavelic worked South Central L.A. for almost his entire career. Early on, he prospered, moving quickly up the ranks to detective. But his career stalled when he began speaking out against what he saw as the pervasive racism in the department. He investigated other cops, including those involved in the infamous 1988 raid on the apartments at Thirty-ninth Street and Dalton Avenue, in which homes were trashed and residents terrorized. Eventually Pavelic made a name for himself as an in-house critic, which is a difficult role in any police department and was a nearly impossible one in the LAPD. His profile is a fairly common one for whistle-blowers: He is regarded as courageous and honorable by some, egocentric and bizarre by others.

  After the Rodney King beating in 1991, Pavelic began speaking out in public against the LAPD, and it then became clear that his days on the force were numbered. He quit after eighteen years, in 1992, with a stress-and-asthma-disability pension, telling a doctor he would “rather go to the gulag” than return to work. According to a doctor Pavelic consulted for his disability application, he said he had “prior thoughts of homicide toward LAPD management.” (Pavelic later denied making that statement.) In any case, after leaving the force Pavelic hired himself out as a “consultant” to those with grievances against the LAPD. His work resembled that of a private investigator, but Pavelic, ever prickly, did not want to register as a private eye and subject himself to any regulation by the state. So he did what he called “biopsies” of both criminal and civil cases, looking for lapses by the LAPD that his clients might exploit. Robert Shapiro had called Pavelic to do just that the day after he himself had been hired to work on the Simpson case. So Pavelic had watched the preliminary hearing with more than passing interest.

  Mark Fuhrman piqued Pavelic’s interest, but the ex-cop couldn’t figure out why. Pavelic knew they had never been assigned together. They certainly weren’t friends. But Fuhrman did look familiar. Pavelic was still puzzling about the detective after the prelim concluded: How did he know Mark Fuhrman? Then, suddenly, the name hit him.

  Johnny Carson.

  Shortly before he left the force, Pavelic, like many LAPD officers, had moonlighted as a security guard. He had done some work for the host of The Tonight Show, and so, Pavelic remembered, had Mark Fuhrman (as had Fuhrman’s boss, Ron Phillips). The Carson memory triggered another one in Pavelic. In the spring of 1993, Pavelic had done a bit of work for a civil lawyer named Robert Deutsch in a case for a client, Joseph Britton. In 1988 Britton had robbed a man at an automatic teller machine where Fuhrman and his partner had set up a stakeout. In the chase after the robbery, Britton was shot. He ultimately pleaded guilty to the robbery, but he later filed a civil suit alleging that the police—Fuhrman and his partner—had used racial epithets in the course of the arrest and had placed a knife at Britton’s feet to justify the shooting. In the course of pretrial discovery in Britton’s civil case, Deutsch had uncovered the matter of Fuhrman v. City of Los Angeles Fire and Police Pension System, Number C 465,544—the same case I had found in the archived files. A few days after he was hired in the Simpson case, Pavelic, through Deutsch, rediscovered the case file and mentioned it to his new boss, Robert Shapiro.


  On the day I discovered the Fuhrman file, I had no appointment with Shapiro. I was not expected or, I imagine, much wanted. But I decided the best thing I could do at that moment was simply to arrive at Robert Shapiro’s office. I drove from downtown L.A. to Century City.

  The directory in the lobby of Shapiro’s office tower indicated his office was on the nineteenth floor. I went to the elevator and pressed the button. No response. I tried another elevator. Same thing. The floor had obviously been blocked off. I assumed this must have been because of Shapiro. I had read about how inundated he was with callers; he must have decided that he would not admit anyone unless he first summoned them. I figured there was no way I could talk his secretary into letting me upstairs without an appointment, and I prepared to leave in disappointment. But since I was in the building anyway, I figured I would satisfy my curiosity about a rumor I had heard.

  I wandered over to the security guard and asked, “Is it true that Ronald Reagan has his office here?” Yes, this friendly fellow responded immediately, and then he volunteered the floor number. I figured I might as well push my luck. So I asked, “The elevator seems to be giving me some trouble. How do you get up to nineteen?”

  “Reception is on eighteen,” he said. “Just go there, and they’ll direct you.”

  I took the elevator to eighteen and looked around. There was a spiral staircase between floors. I put my head down and, trying to look like I belonged, hustled past the front desk and up the stairs one flight. It was a big building, but as it happened, Shapiro’s office was right near the stairs. He was sitting at his desk. Susan Mercandetti had told me his secretary’s name was Bonnie Barron.

  “Hi, Bonnie!” I said, with perhaps excessive enthusiasm, to the middle-aged woman outside Shapiro’s office. “I’m Jeff Toobin with The New Yorker, but I have to confess that I don’t have a cake with me.”

  In the course of courting Shapiro for the photo, Susan had sent a cake to his office as a joke. Susan told me she had been surprised by how enthusiastically it was received. Barron smiled—my new best friend. In a rather pathetic effort to justify my unannounced arrival, I had put a copy of my cash-for-trash article in an envelope, on the theory that I could say I was merely “delivering” it to Shapiro. (Never mind that he hadn’t asked for it, and probably didn’t want it.) I told Barron, “I have something for Bob, and I thought I might drop it off for him.”

  Shapiro looked out to see who was talking to his secretary. I thought I had one chance.

  Standing in the doorway, I introduced myself and said, “I had a very interesting morning looking at Mark Fuhrman’s employment records.”

  “You saw those?” Shapiro asked.

  “Yeah, about how he hates blacks and all that. It’s pretty interesting.”

  “Jesus, you’re the only guy who’s found those. Come in here and sit down.” I did. “Where did you say you were from?”

  “The New Yorker.”

  “The New Yorker?”

  “Yes,” I answered.

  “That’s different from New York?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “Son of a bitch!” He pounded his fist into his palm. “That Susan Mercandetti is the nicest woman. I wanted to do her a favor, so I talked to this guy from New York. I got them mixed up.” (I checked New York magazine for the next several weeks, but never found anything that looked like it could have come from Shapiro.)

  “Well, anyway,” I said, “here I am.”

  Shapiro was full of energy, excited. Unshaven, he was wearing a work shirt and blue jeans. His messy office was long and narrow, distinguished only by his stunning desk, which appeared to be a genuine Napoleonic antique, full of inlaid woods and brass ornamentation.

  I asked him what he made of the Fuhrman records. “There’s worse stuff, too,” he told me. “This is a guy who used to wake up every day and say to his ex-wife, ‘I’m going to kill some niggers this morning.’ ” He paused. “You understand this stuff. I want to work with you on this.”

  I asked what he thought Mark Fuhrman meant for the Simpson defense effort. “Just picture it,” he said, growing more animated as he spoke. “Here’s a guy who’s one of the cops coming on the scene early in the morning. They have the biggest case of their lives. But an hour later you’re told you’re not in charge of the case. How’s that going to make that guy feel? So now he’s one of four detectives heading over to O.J.’s house. Suppose he’s actually found two gloves at the murder scene. He transports one of them over to the house and then ‘finds’ it back in that little alleyway where no one can see him.” Discovering the glove would turn Fuhrman into “the hero of the case.”

  “This is a bad cop,” Shapiro said a few moments later. “This is a racist cop.”

  I was stunned. The thought that Fuhrman might have planted the glove at Rockingham had never occurred to me. But I immediately realized how clever the suggestion was as a defense tactic. It was what some lawyers call a “judo defense,” in that it seeks to turn the strength of the prosecution’s case against the prosecution. The idea was to transform the gloves from strong evidence of Simpson’s guilt—who else but Simpson could have been at both Nicole’s house and his own that night?—to evidence of a police conspiracy. If Fuhrman had transported the glove, then the bloody gloves became, for the defense, harmless at worse and exculpatory at best. I immediately realized that Shapiro’s theory, while ingenious, was also monstrous. In a criminal trial, the defense has no burden of proof, so it looked like the defense would attempt to persuade a jury of Los Angeles citizens—largely through innuendo—that one of their own police officers, acting out of racial animus, had planted evidence to see an innocent man convicted of murder and, potentially, sent to the gas chamber.

  Trying to process all those thoughts, I briefly found myself at a loss for words. Shapiro, too, suddenly seemed to withdraw from the conversation. He picked up a stack of mail he had been reading—mostly letters to Simpson in jail—and for a moment I watched him read. Shapiro then tossed me a handwritten note from Larry King requesting that Shapiro appear on his show. “He writes me every day,” Shapiro said.

  We had never discussed ground rules for our interview. Technically, since nothing had been said to the contrary, I could quote him directly. But I felt I owed him the right to clarify his understanding of the terms of our talk. I make it a point never to use the phrases off the record or on background with sources, because most people—including most journalists—don’t really understand what those terms mean. So I asked, “Can I quote you by name?”

  “No,” he said. “That’s too much like an interview.”

  “So it’s okay if I say ‘a member of the defense team,’ ” I said.

  “Something like that.”*

  And then, simple as that, our conversation was over. It had lasted no more than fifteen minutes. Not only was I having trouble keeping up my end, but I realized I was, at that very moment, due in Culver City to conduct a radio debate about the propriety of tabloids’ paying for interviews. (My adversary was the National Enquirer’s Mike Walker, who would go on to play his own curious role in the Simpson story.) We said our goodbyes, and Shapiro and I agreed to keep in touch.

  After my belated appearance on the radio show, I drove to The New Yorker’s L.A. office to write up a draft of my article and fax it to the editors in New York. I spent the next day, Thursday, July 14, conferring with other members of the defense team, polishing the story and filling in holes. That night I took the TWA red-eye home to New York. (The in-flight movie was Naked Gun 33 1/3, starring, among others, O.J. Simpson.)

  Friday morning, back in my office to close the piece, I realized that one issue still gnawed at me. This would be, I realized, a very damaging story to write about someone. I had called the public-affairs office of the LAPD and had been told that it would have no comment on any matter relating to the Simpson case. And no, I certainly could not interview Mark Fuhrman. That bothered me. I called around the LAPD to try to find a p
hone number for Fuhrman. It didn’t take more than five minutes to locate it. I dialed.

  “Fuhrman,” a man answered.

  “Is this Mark Fuhrman?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said.

  I figured this conversation would not last long, so I identified myself and got right to the point. I explained that I was working on a story that said the defense was planning to charge that Fuhrman had planted the glove on Simpson’s property. I asked him if he had planted the glove.

  Fuhrman paused, then said, “That’s a ridiculous question.”

  I found that answer curious. Indulging, perhaps, in a taste for overdramatization, I thought of what Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein used to call “nondenial denials.” During Watergate, White House spokesmen like Ron Ziegler would answer reporters’ questions by assailing the queries as “preposterous,” “absurd,” and “ridiculous”—but would not really address the underlying facts.

  So, following up, I asked Fuhrman again straight out if he planted the glove.

  “Of course it didn’t happen.”

  So much for Ron Ziegler. Fuhrman said he couldn’t talk any more and hung up.

  My story appeared on Monday, July 18. All through the editing process, the title had been “Playing the Race Card.” But at the last moment, someone at The New Yorker thought that was too similar to another headline in the issue, so mine was changed to “An Incendiary Defense.” I wrote that in a series of conversations the previous week, “leading members of Simpson’s defense team floated [a] new and provocative theory. Those conversations revealed that they plan to portray [Mark Fuhrman] as a rogue cop who, rather than solving the crime, framed an innocent man.” Though I summarized the defense hypothesis and explained its basis in the court records from Fuhrman’s pension case, I did not suggest that the theory was true—that is, that Fuhrman did indeed plant the glove. And, of course, I included Fuhrman’s denial prominently.