The Run of His Life

by Jeffrey Toobin

  Despite these similarities, the two black families were separated by a gap that is no less real for being mostly invisible to white Americans, who tend to regard African-Americans as a single struggling social unit. To be sure, the Cochrans were no aristocrats and the Dardens no paupers, but still, the difference between them was class. Johnnie Cochran, Sr., bolted the blue-collar world as soon as Japan surrendered. His first son came of age with not just a hope but an expectation that he would surpass the considerable success of his father. Eddie Darden, in contrast, had a blowtorch in his hand until the day he retired, decades later. His son Chris, the third of eight children, had no family guide in the hunt for entree into the professional world.

  Richmond itself conferred few advantages. A sleepy community of 21,000 at the outbreak of the war, it became a veritable metropolis of 100,000 within a year. Kaiser, Southern Pacific Railways, and Bethlehem Steel—not to mention the great military shipyards of Port Chicago and Mare Island—inhaled new workers as quickly as they could settle into the flimsy shacks that were being thrown up along treeless streets every day. But unlike Oakland, where black folks eventually gained political power comparable to their numbers, Richmond remained for years under the control of a small white elite. Services were poor. Richmond had no superior court, no county hospital. “It was a plantation,” according to one of the few prominent black lawyers in Richmond, “the Mississippi of the West.”

  In Eddie Darden’s case, that racism extended to the workplace as well. He toiled as a civilian employee in the vast naval shipyard at Mare Island, in nearby Valeo. The better-paying and higher-skilled positions at Mare Island were called journeymen jobs; they were for welders, pipefitters, sandblasters, and the like. Those jobs went overwhelmingly to whites. For many years, the black workers, like Chris’s father, were allowed to work only as helpers, the lower-paid assistants to the journeymen. It was only with the birth of affirmative-action practices in the 1960s and 1970s that blacks like Eddie Darden became journeymen in any significant numbers. In addition to raising her eight children, Chris’s mother, Marie, worked in a school cafeteria—another typical dead-end occupation traditionally filled by the African-Americans of Richmond.

  The Dardens had enough money to buy a small, two-story frame house in the working-class south side of Richmond, but there was no money for luxuries, or even such basic necessities as dentist visits for all the children. An absence of early care sentenced Chris to a lifetime of dental miseries.

  The Darden family did have, however, similar attitudes about education to the Cochrans’. Mr. and Mrs. Darden believed that only schools with significant numbers of white children received adequate resources, so those would be the schools for their children. Here the Dardens were fortunate, because John F. Kennedy High School opened within a few blocks of their home just as their first children were coming of age. A modern building, with a pool and several athletic fields and a fully integrated student body of about two thousand, Kennedy High drew the city’s most motivated students. Edna, the oldest Darden child, served as student body president in 1972; Chris’s beloved older brother, Michael, came next and was a standout on the track team, though he later succumbed to a life of drug addiction. Never the favored son like Johnnie Cochran, Chris Darden took his place in the Kennedy High class of ’74 with something to prove.

  A quiet kid, with a temper that heated and cooled quickly, Darden worked hard in school, made a mark as both a student and an athlete, and held down a job in a liquor store besides. His passion was football, where he played wide receiver. (He neither wore number 32 nor especially idealized O.J. Simpson; like most people in Richmond, Darden rooted for the Oakland Raiders.) Darden never had much of a chance to shine on the football field because he played behind Robert “Spider” Gaines, who went on to the University of Washington, where he would win the most valuable player award in the Rose Bowl. More dogged than especially talented, Darden shifted his energies to track, where he ran the quarter mile and served as captain of the cross-country team. A National Honor Society student, he scraped together the money for junior college and then, a year later, for San Jose State.

  The mid-1970s were a dramatic time to be a young track athlete at San Jose State. In the 1968 Olympic games in Mexico City, Tommie Smith and John Carlos—who were students at San Jose State—won the gold and bronze medals in the 200-meter dash. During the awards ceremony, the two young men shocked the world by giving black power salutes during the playing of the national anthem. Smith and Carlos had left the university by the time Darden arrived, but their fiery spirit still resonated on the track team and, indeed, among black students there in general. Yet even more than the track team, the formative experience of Darden’s college years came from his membership in the Alpha Psi Alpha fraternity.

  Predominantly black fraternities play an important role in African-American life. Denied access to many of the networks that whites take for granted, many black college men form lifelong attachments to these institutions, whose influence stretches well beyond campus walls. It is a far cry from the Animal House model of many white frats, especially at Alpha Psi Alpha, the oldest and most prestigious black fraternity (Martin Luther King, Jr., and Thurgood Marshall were members). Alphas at San Jose State had an activist, even militant, cast. (In a characteristic difference, Johnnie Cochran belonged to the UCLA chapter of Kappa Alpha Psi, which was known as the “playboys,” the most social of the black frats.) The Alphas didn’t even have a building on the San Jose State campus, so they met in classrooms, where they devoted themselves to organizing projects like a tutoring program for kids in the city’s poorer neighborhoods.

  Darden’s frat name was Sugar D—because, it is said, he was sweet. He led quietly, more by example than exhortation, but his passionate commitment to his fellow African-Americans stood out even in that politicized era. At the stylized interrogation sessions for prospective Alphas, Darden always had the same question for pledges: “What are you going to do for your people?” Even before Chris Darden became famous in the Simpson case, a younger Alpha had saved for many years a note that Darden had written to him upon his joining the fraternity: “It matters not who you are, where you come from, or how you think—what matters is whatever the hell you do with it.” Signed, Sugar D.

  He quit track suddenly. A history professor in Afro-American studies, Gloria Alibaruho, had become a mentor to him. Darden later wrote that when he studied the world of his ancestors, “my eyes opened like slipped blinds and all of a sudden my own life was explained to me. Martin Luther King had taught me what was fair; the Black Panther newspapers screamed at me what was unjust; but it was Gloria Alibaruho who taught me who I was. It was like discovering gravity. It explained the universe to me. So, this is why people treat me the way they do. This is why women grab their handbags when I get on an elevator.”

  Alibaruho sat Darden down and appealed to his growing political consciousness. Speaking both metaphorically and literally, she asked him, “When are you going to stop running in circles?” He did just that and, soon after, applied to law school. He took an apartment in Richmond and commuted across the Bay Bridge to Hastings law school, in San Francisco. His passage was anything but smooth. As Darden later admitted, he shoplifted regularly through college, and he fathered a child out of wedlock while a student at Hastings. He graduated in 1980 and took a job with the National Labor Relations Board for $17,000 a year. A few months later, he moved to Los Angeles and the district attorney’s office. The money was better—$24,000 a year—and, as he said at the time, “I want people like me making the decisions.”

  Darden had come farther and overcome more than any of the principal lawyers in the Simpson trial, and probably bore the best intentions as well. But he was also different from Cochran, Shapiro, and Marcia Clark in another way. Chris Darden was not, alas, an especially talented trial lawyer.

  For one thing, Darden had tried relatively few cases. After the customary few years of working minor cases, Darden spent the bu
lk of his fifteen years as a prosecutor in the Special Investigations Division of the district attorney’s office. SID has the most politically sensitive duty on the D.A.’s staff: the investigation of public officials, most notably officers in the LAPD. The lawyers at SID, including Darden, approached their work meticulously. In light of the difficulties of prosecuting the D.A.’s usual ally, the cops, the lawyers in SID filed charges only in the strongest cases. It was not unusual, for example, that Darden had only one major trial at SID during his tenure there. As it turned out, though, he was the prosecutor in one of the most notorious episodes in the modern history of the LAPD, the 1988 police raid on apartments at Thirty-ninth Street and Dalton Avenue. It was supposed to be a rather minor drug bust, but the eighty LAPD officers who went to the scene wreaked havoc that had lasting repercussions. The raid eventually cost the city more than $3 million in civil settlements to the victims, and Darden investigated and prosecuted the three top police officials responsible. “Chris felt very strongly that we needed to hold the command level responsible, and at that point Daryl Gates got involved,” Ira Reiner, who was the district attorney at the time, said later. The police chief wrote Reiner a letter claiming that Darden was pushing too hard, being too aggressive. “Anyone else would have laughed it off,” Reiner continued, “but not Chris. He wanted to fire back a letter. This was a classic case of police misconduct, and of course we went ahead with it. Chris handled it with commitment and emotion. That’s just the way he operates.” In the case Darden tried, all three officers were acquitted.

  Darden’s first important moment in the Simpson trial came shortly before opening statements, when Ito was weighing whether to allow the defense to cross-examine Mark Fuhrman about his prior use of the word “nigger.” Other prosecutors had conducted the bulk of the legal argument on the issue, but Darden rose on January 13 as a sort of expert witness on the subject.

  “It is a dirty, filthy word,” Darden said. “It is not a word that I allow people to use in my household. I’m sure Mr. Cochran doesn’t. And the reason we don’t is because it is an extremely derogatory and denigrating term, because it is so prejudicial and so extremely inflammatory that to use that word in any situation will evoke some type of emotional response from any African-American within earshot of that word.”

  Darden said allowing use of the word “will do one thing. It will upset the black jurors. It will issue a test … and the test will be, Whose side are you on? The side of the white prosecutors and the white policemen, or on the side of the black defendant and his very prominent black lawyer? That is what it is going to do: Either you are with the Man or you are with the Brothers. That is what it does. That is exactly what it does.”

  Darden’s speech was about evenly divided between text and subtext. In part, he simply meant what he said; “nigger” is a uniquely offensive epithet, and Darden thought Ito should exercise caution before he allowed anyone to utter it in court. But Darden’s words also reflected his frustration at how the defense had seized the racial high ground in the trial from the beginning. The strategy Shapiro advocated from practically the day Simpson was arrested—which Cochran embellished even beyond the original conception—called for placing race at the center of the defense. That strategy started with Fuhrman and went on to include the focus on race in jury selection, the defense obsession with police misconduct, and the trashing of Nicole. As a prosecutor who had devoted his career to ferreting out genuine police racism, Darden seethed to see O.J. Simpson—who had done precisely nothing for his fellow African-Americans over the course of his lifetime—capitalizing on his race. In his frustration, Darden started to ramble.

  “Mr. Cochran and the defense, they have a purpose in going into that area, and the purpose is to inflame the passions of the jury and to ask them to pick sides not on the basis of the evidence in this case. And the evidence in this case against this defendant is overwhelming,” he went on. “I don’t have to educate the Court on this point, but we have a right to a fair trial just like the defendant has. We are not running around or talking about or seeking to introduce to the jury the notion that this defendant has a fetish for blond-haired white women. That would be inappropriate. That would inflame the passions of the jury. It would be outrageous.”

  It was Darden at this point who was outrageous, in floating the white-women obsession for the benefit of the television cameras. After nearly twenty minutes of stream-of-consciousness babbling, Darden finally sat down.

  Johnnie Cochran had planned to leave court early that day, but he remained to respond to Darden’s monologue on the “n-word.” Cochran walked slowly to the podium. Bigger, older, stronger, wiser, Cochran dominated Darden in both physical and intellectual terms. “I have a funeral to attend today, [and] there are few things in life more important than attending the funeral … where you have been asked to speak, but I would be remiss were I not at this time to take this opportunity to respond to my good friend Mr. Chris Darden.”

  “Good friend”—that was a tip-off to the assault to come.

  “His remarks this morning are perhaps the most incredible remarks I’ve heard in a court of law in the thirty-two years I have been practicing law. His remarks are demeaning to African-Americans as a group. And so I want, before I go to this funeral, to apologize to African-Americans across this country. Not every African-American feels that way. It is demeaning to our jurors to say that African-Americans who have lived under oppression for 200-plus years in this country cannot work within the mainstream, cannot hear these offensive words.… I am ashamed that Mr. Darden would allow himself to become an apologist for this man [Fuhrman].”

  Darden was beside himself. He stood up and walked in a tiny circle behind his chair, as if he were weighing whether to walk out. Finally, he sat down and swiveled his chair away from the podium in symbolic, if rather childish, protest.

  By overstating his own case about the “n-word” so dramatically, Darden had opened the door for Cochran’s righteous indignation. “All across America today, believe me, black people are offended at this very moment,” Cochran went on, “and so I have to say this was uncalled for, it is unwarranted, and most unfortunate for somebody that I have a lot of respect for—and perhaps he has become too emotional about this.” Which Darden certainly had.

  When Cochran finally finished this peroration, he pushed to an even greater theatrical height, emotionally embracing Simpson and all the other lawyers at the defense table. Leaving at last for the funeral, he had time only to whisper a brief word to Darden—the classic rebuke: “Nigger, please…”

  Darden never really recovered his composure. In repartee among the lawyers at the sidebar, he often revealed an astonishing lack of professionalism. One day early in the trial, Darden suggested that Ito should make an instruction clearer to a witness, then added, “I’m not criticizing you, Judge. You’re my bud.” A shocked Cochran interrupted: “It’s not a question of him being your bud. I move to strike that.” Sometimes Darden’s humor misfired. On another occasion at the sidebar, he protested that Cochran “has stepped on my shined Ferragamos. You know, I think he should have to buy me another pair of Ferragamos.” The ever tolerant Ito answered, “Come on, guys.” More seriously, Darden wore his emotions on his sleeve in front of the jury, alternately mugging and scowling to telegraph his reactions to the testimony. Sometimes he jangled his keys in irritation. Whatever the message Darden intended to send with these gestures, the jury only picked up on his nervousness and immaturity.

  Of course, the jury had been excused when Darden had his showdown with Ito on February 23, during Lange’s cross-examination. After a third invitation to apologize—and several more agonizing moments of silence—Darden broke down and offered the most grudging words of conciliation.

  “Your Honor,” he said. “Thank you for the opportunity to review the transcript of the sidebar. It appears that the Court is correct, that perhaps my comments may have been or are somewhat inappropriate. I apologize to the Court. I meant no disr
espect.”

  Ito, in contrast, was far more gracious than Darden had any right to expect. “Mr. Darden,” the judge said, “I accept your apology. I apologize to you for my reaction as well. You and I have known each other for a number of years, and I know that your response was out of character, and I’ll note it as such.”

  Ito then invited the jury back to the courtroom, and Cochran resumed his cross-examination of Detective Lange. It didn’t last long, however, because a new and even more bizarre crisis erupted. The star of Johnnie Cochran’s opening statement—Rosa Lopez, the maid in the house next door to O.J.’s—was threatening to return to her native El Salvador.

  16. “I CAN’T BE HERE,

  YOUR HONOR”

  In her opening statement, Marcia Clark had surprised Johnnie Cochran by declaring so emphatically that the murders had occurred at precisely 10:15 P.M. Talking with his colleagues on the defense team, Cochran learned from investigator Bill Pavelic that he had a witness who said she saw Simpson’s Bronco outside his house at 10:15 P.M. That was Rosa Lopez, the maid at 348 North Rockingham, next door to O.J.’s house. Responding to Clark in his own opening statement, Cochran leaned heavily on Lopez’s expected testimony, though he himself had never spoken to Lopez. Cochran made the point repeatedly that if the murder took place at 10:15 and the Bronco was still at Rockingham at 10:15, O.J. could not have done it.

  No one was more surprised to hear this than Rosa Lopez. From her base with the Salinger family just south of Simpson’s estate, the fifty-seven-year-old maid followed the case closely on television, and even told several friends and family members in Los Angeles of her memories of the night in question. What Lopez told them, however, was that she had seen the Bronco at around 10:00 P.M., not 10:15. When Cochran said her name in his opening on January 25, reporters quickly learned where she lived and began staking out her home. That was nerve-racking enough for Lopez, but it was the disparity between her memories and Cochran’s characterization of them that caused her real dread. As she well knew, a 10:00 sighting was neutral at best and incriminating at worst for O.J., because the murder scene was only a five-minute drive from his house. Lopez had told several other maids in the neighborhood that she remembered seeing the Bronco at 10:00. Word began circulating in the neighborhood that Rosa was lying or had been paid off or was otherwise in thrall to the defense camp. Lopez had also told her daughter, who lived in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles, about seeing O.J.’s car at 10:00. The reporters, the rumors, the scolding looks from her friends and family—they all combined to turn her misery to panic.