So why didn’t we just refuse to call Fuhrman as a witness? Simple. Leaving him out would have been worse.
What would have happened if we hadn’t called him? It’s not as if he’d have disappeared from the case. The defense would ask every witness, at every opportunity, why Mark Fuhrman wasn’t at this trial. “Is he beyond subpoena power? Is he refusing to testify? No? I see.” Net result? We’d look like we were hiding him. Why would we do that? Because we
had
something to hide. And then, this theme would be sure to reach its crescendo during closing arguments, where the law explicitly permits either side to comment on the failure of the other to call a logical witness. The defense would blow us away.
Or, even worse, they might have called Fuhrman themselves! Gerald Uelmen had already announced their intention to do precisely that. Back in January, he’d made a not-so-veiled threat: if we didn’t present Fuhrman, “he will make another appearance in this case, being called as a hostile witness by the defense.” If that happened, they could really go crazy on us.
“Did the prosecution ever subpoena you?” they’d ask him. “Did they tell you why they didn’t? You found the glove at Rockingham, right? Would you agree that was a pretty important piece of evidence? Isn’t it true the prosecution didn’t call you because you’d be forced to admit that you planted that glove?”
Of course, we’d object. And our objections might have been sustained. But the damage would have been done.
Look, if I could have thwarted the race card by not calling Fuhrman, I would have crossed him off the witness list in a heartbeat. But failure to produce him would simply have aggravated the controversy. The only course open to us was to call Fuhrman and try to block the kicks.
I was guardedly optimistic about the possibilities for damage control. We had in our possession only three pieces of evidence to suggest that Mark had ever used the N-word: the Joseph Britton civil case against the city; the statements Fuhrman had made as part of his disability claim against the city; and, of course, the letter from Kathleen Bell. Only one of those three had a chance of getting admitted into court, and even that one had some pretty big credibility problems.
Britton, you’ll recall, was the African-American robbery suspect who’d been shot leaving an automated teller machine back in 1987. He’d claimed that the cop who shot him then planted a weapon at his feet to justify the shooting. On top of it all, the cop supposedly shouted, “You stupid nigger. Why did you run?” Fuhrman was one of the policemen who had apprehended Britton. Now the defense wanted to present Britton as a witness, apparently to finger Fuhrman as his tormentor. But once we checked them out, those allegations fell apart. In a deposition after the fact, he’d described the officer who’d shot him as having “red hair and a mustache.” Not our Fuhrman. And in an interview with CBS News in October 1994, Britton was asked point-blank if Fuhrman had said anything racial to him.
“At this point—no,” he replied. “I can’t say that he did.”
What the heck does that mean? At some point in the future, you’ll decide that he did?
Ito found the value of Britton’s testimony to be “highly speculative” and dismissed it out of hand.
Fuhrman’s disability claim was more complicated. There seemed to be no question that Mark had popped off to his shrinks about “Mexicans and niggers,” but even the doctors who examined him concluded that he was exaggerating, perhaps lying outright, about the degree of racial hostility he felt. The suit was dismissed after the examiners concluded that Mark was faking.
I could believe this. It is no secret around law enforcement that cops will tell whoppers to get an early pension. A pension can be quite a windfall. What troubled me was the nature of the lie. Why had he chosen to portray himself as a raving racist? I knew Mark had been assigned to some pretty rough neighborhoods. Gangs, dope, poverty—in South-Central and East L.A., all conspired to produce one of the highest rates of violence in the nation. A cop who butts heads with hoods day after day after day can suffer a nasty case of burnout. But Mark’s anger seemed directed at criminals in general—not minorities in particular.
Back in July, after I’d gotten the lowdown on Mark’s disability claim, I’d placed a confidential call to Ron Phillips to get his reading on Fuhrman. Ron wasn’t a close friend of Mark’s, but he’d supervised him. Ron told me that at the time Mark had made those statements to the shrinks, his first marriage had just fallen apart and he’d gone into an emotional tailspin. When Ron started working with Mark a few years later, he found him a hot dog: arrogant, mouthy, easily provoked to anger.
But over the next few years, Ron explained to me, Mark went through a sea change. The hostility subsided. His performance improved. Making detective gave him a world of confidence. His new marriage also seemed to stabilize him. Ron felt Mark Fuhrman had matured a good deal and had turned out to be not only a decent guy but one damned fine cop.
That opinion was shared by other officers, even black ones. When the charges of evidence-planting first surfaced, several black cops called our office to put in a good word for him. We got a memo from one guy from the West L.A. Division who told how he and other African Americans played early-morning basketball with Mark. “At no time,” he wrote, “have I heard him disrespect me or any other African American. Not even in jest.”
Prosecutors who’d had the opportunity to work with Mark in the past were also favorably impressed. Hank could vouch for the fact that Mark never pushed questionable filings. Any case he brought was well investigated and carefully prepared. My friend and fellow D.A. Lynn Reed, who worked in the West L.A. office, recalled how thoughtful Fuhrman had always been to her black rape victims. Once he’d gone to bat for a black suspect who, on the basis of witness reports and other evidence, seemed to have committed murder. Mark was the lead investigator; he could easily have ignored the suspect’s claims of innocence. But he was willing to check out the guy’s story, and after putting in some decent overtime, he wound up clearing him of all charges. These were hardly the actions of a dedicated racist.
Fuhrman also had an enthusiastic supporter in Danette Meyers, the African-American deputy D.A. he’d worked with in West L.A. During my brief turn in management I’d been her supervisor, and I admired the hell out of her. She was tough and hard-hitting—a trial junkie like me. She and Fuhrman often went out to lunch and dinner together. Danette had even baby-sat for Mark’s kids.
After the
New Yorker
piece appeared, I’d given her a call for a character reading on Fuhrman.
“Mark’s a good cop,” Danette told me. “He wouldn’t frame anyone.” She paused for a moment. “Don’t let them get you down, girl.”
Coming from Danette, this endorsement carried a lot of weight. It reinforced my own conviction that Mark, if he had ever had been a racist, had reformed. People do change.
In any case, the statements Fuhrman had made to the shrinks weren’t going to find their way into court. Ito did not find “a direct link between comments made in approximately 1980 and credibility in 1994.”
Another bullet whizzing past our ears.
That left Kathleen Bell.
Back in July, shortly after the
New Yorker
article appeared, someone dropped a facsimile of a letter on my desk. It was one page, typed all in caps.
“DEAR MR. COCHRAN…” it began. “OFFICER FERMAN [
sic
] WAS A MAN THAT I HAD THE MISFORTUNE OF MEETING… . MR. FERMAN MAY BE MORE OF A RACIST THAN YOU COULD EVEN IMAGINE.”
The writer, Kathleen Bell, went on to explain how, between 1985 and 1986, she’d worked in a real estate agency located above a marine recruiting station near Mark’s neighborhood in Redondo Beach. She’d drop down to say hi to the marines working there. On a couple of occasions she’d seen Mark Fuhrman. She’d remembered him “distinctly” because of his height and build.
“OFFICER FERMAN SAID THAT WHEN HE SEES A ‘NIGGER’ (AS HE CALLED IT) DRIVING WITH A WHITE WOMAN, HE WOULD PULL THEM OVER,” Bell wrote. “BUT I ASKED WOULD [
sic
] IF HE DIDN’T HAVE A REASON. AND HE SAID THAT HE WOULD FIND ONE.” Fuhrman, Bell went on to say, would like nothing more than to see all niggers gathered together and killed. She was “almost certain” that she’d called the LAPD to complain about “Ferman” even though she did not know his last name at that time.
A couple of weeks after writing this letter Bell gave a longer statement to the defense, claiming that Fuhrman had told her, “If I had my way, they would take all the niggers, put them in a big group, and burn them.”
Kathleen Bell’s allegations struck me unlikely. First off, the comments about the black man and white woman in the car fit too neatly into the defense’s case. That is, Fuhrman is enraged when he sees Simpson with a Caucasian wife, so when he gets the chance he plants evidence to frame him. But the slurs Bell attributed to Fuhrman were mighty improbable, especially in the mid-eighties. A racist cop might talk trash in a locker room, but you would never hear that kind of bald, incendiary stuff in a public place—for the very reason Bell’s letter suggests. Somebody might call in a complaint, triggering an investigation by Internal Affairs. She seemed to recall Fuhrman’s remarks with suspicious particularity, given that they were ten years old.
We got wind that Bell would be putting in an appearance on
Larry King Live
. We asked Mark to watch it on the off chance he might say, “Yeah. I remember her.” Afterward, he called me to say, “Look, I may have met her. But she doesn’t look familiar. I really can’t say that I did.”
I assigned Cheri and an investigator to scope out the scene in Redondo Beach and get the lowdown on Bell. One of the marines described her as a “pudgy” woman who would come down to the recruiting station to flirt and invite marines out to lunch. Sometime during 1985 or 1986, Mark Fuhrman had visited the recruiting station to inquire about going into the reserves. A former marine pilot, Joseph Foss, recalled standing in front of the office with Fuhrman when Bell approached them. Foss introduced them. Then, he claimed, Bell apparently hit on Fuhrman, but he rebuffed her advances with what Foss described as a “gracious” rejection. Foss said he never heard Fuhrman make racially charged comments to Kathleen Bell or anyone else.
Two other marines assigned to the recruiting station had also been around when Fuhrman came in. One of them, a black man named Maximo Cordoba, was questioned by a private eye working for Mark. Neither marine ever saw him with Kathleen Bell—but we hadn’t heard the last of Max Cordoba.
We tried repeatedly to reach Kathleen Bell, but she’d gotten herself a lawyer and he was refusing our requests to speak with her. He charged that we were just trying to dig up something to impeach her with. So? This woman writes a letter to Johnnie Cochran of her own free will. Now, when no one else can corroborate her story, she doesn’t want to be questioned?
I’d suspected from the outset that Bell wasn’t motivated by a good citizen’s desire to blow the whistle on racism. We received a package of discovery material that lent weight to those suspicions. It contained a memo dated August 31, 1994, in which a defense investigator recounts a conversation with Ms. Bell’s lawyer:
I was contacted today by… an attorney who is representing Kathleen Bell… . He told me that Ms. Bell has talked to the tabloids but no deal has been struck. He went on to say that he has known Ms. Bell a long time and that she is a credible and truthful person. However, she is “not a wealthy woman” and if a large sum of money was offered, she would consider it… .
Could the message be any clearer? It sounded to me like she was saying, “I’ll go to the highest bidder.” We would have loved to use this material to impeach her when she appeared at trial. (And we knew she would; Ito had ruled that the Redondo Beach incidents were not too remote in time to be ruled inadmissible.) Unfortunately, we were in a bind. The more evidence we used to discredit Bell, the more latitude the defense would be given to introduce
other
evidence of the N-word in order to shore up Bell’s credibility. In the end, we had to cut our losses and go easy on Kathleen Bell.
In the frenzy of Monday-morning quarterbacking that followed the trial, pundits would soberly characterize Bell as a credible witness with no ax to grind. Give me a break. This woman was looking for a payday and, very possibly, for payback. What more satisfying revenge could you take on a man who has rejected you than to humiliate him before an entire nation? The supreme irony was that Mark Fuhrman didn’t even remember her. But we’d all have to deal with her in court, when Kathleen Bell would have a chance to savor her few minutes of fame.
The relationship between Chris and Mark continued to deteriorate. Chris would not spend more than five minutes in Mark’s company if he could help it. And Chris made it clear that he intended to treat Mark as a hostile witness. He didn’t intend to object to anything the defense said on cross.
Just great
, I thought.
If it looks like we despise Fuhrman, the jury will not only feel free to hate him, but will conclude that
we
don’t believe him, and that we think he planted evidence
.
The Sunday of Presidents’ Day weekend, I’d come into the office to fine-tune my direct of Kato Kaelin. I was plowing through a mountain of binders, on my fifth cigarette of the day, when Cheri knocked on the door.
“What’s up?” I asked her, grateful for a break. I leaned back and put my feet on the desk. I was wearing my usual weekend uniform: leggings, sneakers, and a sweatshirt. Cheri looked worried.
“I don’t know if you know what’s going on,” she said. “But Chris had Mark down in the grand jury room. There were about ten other deputies and law clerks firing questions at him.”
I shot forward in my chair and slammed my feet onto the floor. Why the grand jury room? Why the cast of thousands? If you want to act out a cross realistically, only one person should be doing the questioning.
Alan Yochelson, one of our deputies who was a good bud of Chris’s, stuck his head in the door.