Legacy of Deception: An Investigation of Mark Fuhrman & Racism in the LAPD

By Stephen Singular

A behind the scenes look at the O.J. Simpson case that explains why the blood evidence fell apart at trial. Veteran true crime writer, Stephen Singular, a two-time New York Times bestselling author, details his involvement with Simpson's defense team and updates his 1996 book about one of America's notorious crimes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stephen Singular
• Release date: May 5, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311276780

Stephen Singular

Stephen Singular is a two-time "New York Times" bestselling author of twenty-two non-fiction books, many of them about high-profile crimes. His work also includes sports and business biographies.

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Legacy of Deception

An Investigation of Mark Fuhrman & Racism in the LAPD

Stephen Singular

Copyright 2016 by Stephen Singular

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Contents

Introduction

Preface

Part One: The Stick, The Bag, and The Blood

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Part Two: A Respectable Face

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Thirty-One

Thirty-Two

Thirty-Three

Thirty-Four

Thirty-Five

Thirty-Six

Thirty-Seven

Thirty-Eight

Thirty-Nine

Forty

Forty-One

Forty-Two

Part Three: Connections

Forty-Three

Forty-Four

Epilogue

Introduction

For many reasons it’s difficult to go back and read a book you wrote, while typing its pages into a computer because you no longer have the electronic file. It’s frustrating to find little mistakes in something you put together more than two decades ago — after you’ve decided to leave them in and let the manuscript now stand on its own as an e-book. If I could re-write Legacy of Deception, it would come out better. Its tone would be less hesitant and it would contain more information than it did in 1996. Back then, I published what I could publish and sent it out into the world. The manuscript was put together under all manner of restrictions and uncertainties, starting with the thought that at any moment Michael Viner of Dove Books would pull the plug on the project, even though we had a signed contract. Viner was known for making sudden, erratic decisions and in early October 1995, when O.J. Simpson was acquitted by a jury that had deliberated for only a few hours, Viner, like so many other Americans, was in a state of anger and shock. He called and told me he was killing the book, which by now was all but written.

I told him that I was getting on the next plane to L.A. and would be in his office soon after the flight had landed. We were going to have this out face to face.

I don’t think it had ever occurred to him that Simpson would be found not guilty of the two murders he was accused of committing. Or, that the information I’d provided to his defense team would be successfully used to help produce this legal result. To Viner (and to other people I knew), my involvement in the case and my book were novelties and nothing more. Viner could publish the book as long as Simpson was convicted and everyone could agree that this was the right outcome. When O.J. was set free, people were suddenly confronted with two choices: they could either examine their own views, prejudices, and assumptions about the case or they could blame the jury for being stupid and wrong-headed. The great majority of white Americans, including Michael Viner, chose the latter course.

When I arrived at his office to fight for Legacy’s publication, he did what many bullies do: he quickly backed down (I also don’t think that he actually thought I’d take the trouble to show up on his doorstep this fast). After caving in, he then did something odd, but completely in character for such a strange and unpredictable creature. At that time, he was considering doing a book with Mark Fuhrman’s initial lawyer, Robert Tourtelot, and the attorney had given him confidential information in the form of the Los Angeles Police Department’s 1995 Internal Affairs investigation of Fuhrman. The report contained damning accounts of Fuhrman’s behavior and racism, as well as the efforts of some very decent L.A. County District Attorney lawyers, who’d tried to come forward before the Simpson trial began and tell the prosecutors that Fuhrman was toxic and his testimony about evidence could not be trusted. No one in a position of authority paid any attention to them.

Viner, without telling me where the Internal Affairs report had come from, handed it over and said I could use it when finishing up the final draft of Legacy. The report was pure gold and I started working in his office each day, feeding the material into the book. A year later, I was named in a lawsuit filed by Tourtelot, which was when I learned where the report had originated. When I told the person who’d introduced me to Viner that both the publisher and I were being sued, he shrugged and said, So what? Everyone sues Michael. Fortunately, a judge threw me out of the case and left Viner and Tourtelot to slug it out. I don’t remember who won.

Michael Viner was a very mixed bag. He took things out of my manuscript — about the drug world in L.A. and how its money tendrils reached into the Simpson case – because he considered them too dicey to publish. In November 1994, three months before the O.J. trial commenced, he’d badly betrayed me, as he’d later do with Tourtelot. I’d given him a book proposal with STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL: DO NOT DUPLICATE UNTITLED ON THE O.J. SIMPSON CASE written across the cover page and within a week he’d passed it along to the L.A. DA’s office and from there it was distributed to the Simpson defense team and to several major media outlets, including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and Vanity Fair magazine. I was enraged with him for leaking these pages, but it turned out to be the best possible thing he could have done. It legitimized my participation in the case and brought to the forefront critical evidence that otherwise might have remained buried.

Viner, of all people, did something foundationally important in the O.J. Simpson case, something that no one else would do, and something that needed to happen. But dealing with him was like picking up a hand grenade. You knew it would go off, but you didn’t know when or whom it would harm the most. He was utterly convinced that Simpson was guilty of these crimes — yet his actions helped set the man free.

The thing to keep in mind when reading this book is that when the actions described below were unfolding, I had no way of knowing where my involvement in the case would lead or that O.J. would be acquitted. I didn’t know if anything I’d been told at the start of this legal process would turn out to be true, and everything I initially took to the defense could have been false. The opposite took place. For me and my wife, Joyce, who was a far larger part of the book than I wrote about in Legacy, it was all an act of faith.

At the same time, I acknowledge that the book is somewhat incomplete and has a few holes in it, as its critics have pointed out. I worked hurriedly to get the book finished, concerned that if Viner had threatened to kill it once, he might do so again on a whim.

Why put Legacy of Deception into electronic form and send it back out now, while keeping the original text intact? First of all, a number of people have asked me to do this so I finally decided to take their cue. More significantly, the Simpson case continues to raise issues and questions that are about as disturbing as a society can raise. These are not at all the issues and questions that most Americans think they are. It’s deeply upsetting that 22 years after the murders, and 21 years after the O.J. trial ended, the basic narrative of the case has never gone forward and much of the evidence has never been understood or accepted. The case has always been framed by the media as being mostly about race. It is every bit as much about evidence, some of which has been ignored or misunderstood for decades. When I wrote Legacy, I was trying to advance the story and underscore that evidence, and I’m still trying to do that now [so I’ve added a few necessary Footnotes to the original manuscript, which will appear in brackets, along with an Epilogue designed to fill in some of those holes.]. During the Simpson trial, the deepest lesson I learned was that no one serving the public interest in this case, in terms of the legal and media institutions that we think are supposed to play that role. I published Legacy with that in mind.

This book was written well before the Rampart scandal in L.A. in the late 1990s, which revealed how commonplace police abuse was in criminal cases. It was written long before the shooting deaths of Trayvon Martin in Florida, Michael Brown in Missouri, Freddie Gray in Baltimore, other recent police violence across America, and the Black Lives Matter movement. We remain painfully divided as a nation over race and that will not change until we understand more about the O.J. Simpson case. Based on the current state of affairs, that understanding has not yet begun.

One final thought: Legacy was never intended to be a brief for Simpson himself. His behavior before the murders and his arrest in Las Vegas following his acquittal reveal a man not in control of himself and a potential danger to others. From the beginning of my involvement in the O.J. saga, I was encouraged to look at the larger, social issues around the criminal justice system and at our collective response to these murders. That was where my own education about this subject began and what I hoped to convey to readers.

I hope, more strongly than ever, to be able to convey that now.

Preface

Our first meeting took place in Denver, one hot afternoon in August of 1994, and the conversation left me feeling put off and stunned. The information I’d been given about the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman was too inflammatory for my taste, and I don’t like conspiracy theories. They’re difficult to substantiate and often generate more confusion than clarity. But this individual wasn’t talking about a conspiracy or a theory. He was talking about hard physical evidence and scientific facts, about objects that could be located and a test that could be run in a laboratory. If these details were accurate, they had the power to free O.J. Simpson, who had been charged with committing these murders, and to uncover the greatest scandal in the history of the Los Angeles Police Department. If they were inaccurate, there could be trouble.

I’d been told precisely how and why Detective Mark Fuhrman had planted evidence against Simpson. I’d been told what the legal system had done in response to Fuhrman’s actions, and how the media and the American public had been terribly misled. My initial meeting with my source lasted about thirty minutes. On later occasions, I’d be told many other things. The most disturbing piece of information concerned the first book I’d written, Talked to Death: The Life and Murder of Alan Berg. This book, which became the basis of Oliver Stone’s 1988 movie, Talk Radio, chronicled the assassination of a talk show host in Denver by a small band of neo-Nazis from Washington State. The killers were members of a fringe group known as the Order who had decided to start a white power revolution by murdering Jews, African Americans, and other minorities. Their first Jewish target, gunned down in June of 1994, was Berg.

Now, in the fall of 1994, I was being told the neo-Nazis were no longer operating just on the edges of American society, but had moved much closer to the mainstream. In some cases, they were inside the system itself and had become deeply disruptive. Initially, I had difficulty seeing how any of this was connected to the O.J. Simpson case. Why was I being given information about a double homicide that had occurred several states away from my home in Denver? And what was I, a total outsider to the Los Angeles legal system, supposed to do with all this?

For months, almost nothing made sense.

Part One

The Stick, The Bag, and The Blood

One

At nine a.m. on August 8, 1994, the plane landed at Los Angeles International Airport, where I was picked up and driven to the Brentwood office of a film producer. Four days earlier, when I’d called this producer and said that I was coming to L.A., he’d insisted that I have a lawyer at my side when I walked into the meeting at three o’clock that afternoon. After arriving at his office, he quickly introduced me to two of them. One was Jerry Rubin, his personal attorney for many years, and the other was Stan Handman, a longtime Beverly Hills entertainment lawyer. Both men were survivors of all kinds of Hollywood wars and both had the weary, doubtful eyes you find on attorneys who’ve seen and heard too much.

At 1 P.M. Rubin drove me over to Handman’s residence, which is located just down the hill from where the Charles Manson murders occurred in 1969. The house was spacious and revealed a fetish for images of an old animated movie star: Betty Boop. There were Betty Boop pictures, Betty Boop plates, Betty Boop dolls, even an eager cocker spaniel named Betty Boop.

When I began telling the lawyers why I was in L.A., they looked more than skeptical; they looked downright disbelieving. Who was the source of my information? they wanted to know. Was this some kind of a joke? How was it possible that anyone living a thousand miles away in Denver could know something about the murders of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman that the city’s best investigators and police detectives hadn’t already uncovered? What was my real motive for coming the California? Was I looking for publicity? For fame and notoriety? Was I after the $500,000 reward that an incarcerated O.J. Simpson was now offering for a tip that would lead to the arrest of someone other than himself?

The money would be great, I said, but right now I’m after something else.

Like what? Rubin asked.

Just some facts. I want to find out if several things I’ve been told are the truth.

The lawyers glanced at one another, clearly uncertain what to make of me.

Well, Rubin said. You don’t look that crazy. But who knows?

Handman nodded and gave me a gently indulgent frown, as if he were humoring an out-of-town visitor to the big city. I thought he may have been bored. But then I mentioned a couple of things that changed his expression.

Originally, only Handman had planned to accompany me to the three o’clock meeting, but Rubin now wanted to go with us. I was pleased with his decision: Under these circumstances, the only thing better than having one successful lawyer on my arm was having two of them. On the way to our appointment, Rubin drove through Beverly Hills. The attorneys, having relaxed a little in my presence, began to bicker.

At two-fifty we arrived at our destination: a huge shiny office tower, the one featured in the first Die Hard movie. Rubin pulled into the underground garage and turned off the engine, slipping the parking voucher into his pocket. We stepped from the car and walked out into the stark afternoon sunlight. Los Angeles was very clear and dry, with a hot wind blowing across the pavement, searing the skin and eyes. I glanced at the lawyers beside me; they looked nervous.

I was jumpy inside, amazed that in the past five days I’d gone from leaving futile messages on answering machine to attending this meeting.

As we approached the tower’s front door, Rubin said, We’ll be lucky if we get fifteen minutes with these people.

—

At the eighteenth floor, we stepped off the elevator and walked over to the receptionist’s desk, where I announced our arrival to an attractive young woman. She reached for the telephone while the three of us took in our surroundings. The lobby was vast, the ceiling was high, and through a glass wall to our left we could see a spacious room. It held a round, polished conference table that must have measured twenty-five feet in diameter. I noticed the attorneys staring at it.

Geez, Rubin muttered.

Now that, Handman said, is a conference table.

The place was abuzz with activity. Phones were ringing everywhere. People were moving in and out of doorways, carrying files and talking to one another with a sense of purpose. The office conveyed the feeling of both glamour and deep seriousness. You couldn’t help but be aware that some of those who worked inside these walls were becoming national, if not international, celebrities. This was a world where the line between the practice of law and show business could be easily blurred.

A tall woman appeared and told us to follow her. She led us up a flight of stairs to a conference room, where we were greeted by an attorney named Carl Douglas. He was the general manager in the law offices of Johnnie Cochran, Jr., who would be representing O.J. Simpson at his upcoming double murder trial. Thin and wiry, with a fast, clipped staccato voice, Douglas had the sad, questioning eyes I have always associated with thoughtful black men. Sometimes, you meet people and are instantly aware of their emotions, their pain. Sometimes, you sense their volatility and feel that they may explode at any time. That happened on this occasion.

Douglas grabbed my hand and thanked me for coming. He hadn’t expected me to arrive with two attorneys, but he greeted them warmly, too. As he inquired about my flight into L.A. that morning, I studied his face, which was filled with strain. Anyone in his position would have looked similar. His current position was to keep the publicity seekers, the phonies, the con artists, and the other assorted lunatics away from his boss and from O.J. Simpson’s other lead attorney, Robert Shapiro. It was up to Douglas to sift through the thousands of bizarre theories and theorists this case had attracted to the defense team and to see if any of these people had something legitimate to offer. It was an unenviable task and his eyes revealed the toll it was taking.

I glanced to my left and saw Shapiro standing twenty feet away. He was staring at us, his expression not friendly, but not exactly hostile, either. He looked frayed and deeply curious. He looked as if he thought he should know who we were and what we doing in his law offices this afternoon, but he could quite remember.

Two

The night after I received the information from my source, I’d slept badly and awoke the next morning at 5 A.M., surrounded by confusion and doubt. How could I possibly act on what I’d been told? Why had I ever considered talking to someone about it? What if it weren’t true and I was being used or set up for some impenetrable reason? And ever if it were accurate, how could any individual standing outside the legal system hope to enter a situation this vast and expect to accomplish anything? I didn’t want to be in the position of accusing anyone of anything unless I knew the facts, and how could I go about getting those facts? The situation was more than confusing; it was potentially dangerous. If I’d been younger and single and more carefree, I might have attempted to do something with the information, but not now, not when I was in my mid-forties and had a wife and a small child to think about. This was no time for wild adventures up blind alleys, no time for chasing after things that were more than explosive ...

At the same time I couldn’t stop thinking about some things my source had told me the day before.

This isn’t just about the O.J. Simpson case and a double murder, he’d said. "This is about the fragility of our legal system. This is about the power of the media and how a few well-chosen words or images can manipulate the perceptions of two hundred million people.

"We live in a society where the presumption of innocence is supposed to be a guarantee right. No one can exercise that right when the media runs opinion polls on a man’s guilt or innocence and then report that two-thirds of the citizens believe he’s guilty – before a jury had been selected and a trial had even begun. What if their opinions are not based on facts, but on assumptions that no connection at all with reality?

"In this case, one detective jumped to a conclusion and did something very wrong. He ignored what his job really is – to investigate every possible lead – and then he convinced three other policemen to do the same thing. They disregarded their duty to society, which is to scour the crime scene and collect all the evidence while it is still fresh. Their behavior set off a chain of events that no one could stop.

"The people in authority in L.A.’s legal system immediately decided who the killer had to be. The authorities told the media they had a suspect. The media ran with the story, despite the fact that they had no real evidence to substantiate anything. The media also threw away Simpson’s presumption of innocence, which they proclaim to hold so dear. The public began believing what the media was saying, as if it were the truth.

Things are out of control. This case concerns far more than the death of two people. It’s about the erosion of our legal system and our constitutional rights. Read the Bill of Rights. See how many of Simpson’s rights have already been violated. These things are not written in stone. They can be damaged or destroyed. People need to know that. We’ve lost our ability to distinguish between what is serious business and what is televised entertainment.

Why don’t you step forward and say all of these things, I’d asked him. "You know far more