Mugged (23 page)

People saw the Congressional Black Caucus give Johnnie Cochran a standing ovation three days before his closing argument.
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They saw the juror who was a former Black Panther give OJ the “black power” salute after the verdict was read. And they saw blacks across the country cheering the outcome—most shockingly at the esteemed, historically black Howard University School of Law. The sight of black law students whooping and
applauding OJ’s acquittal had the same emotional impact as watching Palestinians celebrate the 9/11 attack.

In black neighborhoods throughout the country, car horns honked in victory when Simpson was acquitted.
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At a McDonald’s in Clayton, Missouri, the all-black staff burst out in cheers and high-fives, while the mostly white customers watched in disbelief.
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At one high school in St. Louis (being filmed for TV) black students cheered for five solid minutes.

At another high school, twenty black students beat, kicked and stomped a younger white student while shouting “Black power!”
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Outside the Los Angeles Criminal Courts building, a Hispanic man was assaulted by an angry crowd of blacks merely for saying he thought OJ was guilty.
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In Colorado, a black man beat up his white girlfriend because she disagreed with him about the verdict. He told her Nicole Simpson deserved it and maybe she did, too.
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White people took it all in and said: That’s it. This has drained the last reserves from the Guilt Account. Henceforth, mau-mauing appeals to white self-condemnation were futile. Accusing someone of racism suddenly stopped working, as if there were a glitch in the subway system and MetroCards didn’t open the turnstile anymore.

Okay, you got us back. I hope OJ was worth it.

The corpus delicti at the trial was Mark Fuhrman’s use of the N-word in the previous ten years. The main witness, which in a technical sense was about two murders, was screenwriter Laura Hart McKinney, who said Fuhrman had used the word in her presence nearly a decade earlier.

Whether Mark Fuhrman had used the N-word became an issue because, despite its monumental irrelevance to Simpson’s guilt or innocence, defense attorney F. Lee Bailey had been allowed to ask Fuhrman if he had “addressed any black person as a nigger or spoken about black people as niggers in the past ten years.” Bailey’s query commingled two very different questions: 1) whether Fuhrman had called an actual person the N-word (no); or 2) whether he had ever
used
the N-word (yes).

A normal person would hear that question and assume it meant: “Have you personally referred to blacks with the N-word?” and not “Has the word passed your lips, perhaps because you were repeating a Chris Rock joke, singing along with a Tupac song or reading Joseph Conrad’s
Nigger of ‘Narcissus’
?”

The media was thrilled by this development. It was just a few years since Rodney King and the Los Angeles riots and there were a lot of reporters sitting around, bored, waiting for another America-is-racist story. These
overblown racism incidents, with their flood-the-zone coverage, were as good for ratings as dead-pretty-white-girl stories are today.

There were some dubious claims about Fuhrman using the N-word. Kathleen Bell said she heard Fuhrman use the N-word in a marine recruiting station, whereupon she fled the room, crying. Three other marines who were present remembered no such thing. Also casting doubt on Bell’s story was the fact that, soon after Fuhrman drove her to tears, she tried to set him up on a date with a friend of hers.
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So McKinney was the star witness for the most important charge in the trial of the century. She had taped Fuhrman years earlier when he used the N-word while proposing dialogue for her screenplay. Fuhrman was trying to impress the screenwriter with his gritty street language. Apparently, it worked. The two had had a sexual relationship.

Fuhrman was inventing dialogue, not, he said, using “my own words, my own experiences, or my own sentiments.”
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As he put it, he “had to exaggerate things to make the screenplay dramatic and commercially appealing.” Hollywood producers, he surmised, were not going to want a “nice warm and fuzzy movie about good cops.” So in his make-believe dialogues, Fuhrman played a racist cop who used the N-word a lot.

McKinney admitted on the stand that Fuhrman had never used the N-word, except when they were working on the screenplay. No one testified that Fuhrman had referred to any actual black person with the N-word. Rather, he had used the N-word the exact same way Bailey had: by putting it in someone else’s mouth; in his case, an imaginary cop (to be played by Gene Hackman).

Fuhrman was right about what Hollywood wanted. Quentin Tarantino was showered with awards for his movie
Pulp Fiction
, in which the N-word is used approximately one billion times, including an Oscar for best original screenplay awarded in March 1995, the very month Fuhrman took the stand.

The date was important in another way. It was March 1995 when Fuhrman testified that he had not used the N-word “in the past ten years” and McKinney’s tapes were from 1985. This was a case of perjury by calendar: If the trial had taken place just a few months later, there would be no possible claim of perjury, even under the racism-hunters’ Fuhrman-specific definition of the crime.

As the nation would hear over and over again in defense of President Bill Clinton’s actual perjury a few years later—generally from the same people demanding a life sentence for Fuhrman—a lie under oath must be
“material” to the outcome of a case in order to constitute perjury. To take one completely random example, questions about a president’s sexual relationship with a White House intern are material to a sexual harassment claim against him by another subordinate—as was specifically ruled by a federal court. A cop in the OJ case who lied under oath about what his wife made him for dinner the night before would be strange, but not perjurious.

It’s quite a stretch to argue that Fuhrman’s “lie” about using the N-word was material to whether OJ killed Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman. The defense’s theory was that if Fuhrman had used the N-word in the previous decade, he might have planted evidence against OJ. But this requires one to assume, first, that use of the N-word in any context proves racism, making F. Lee Bailey, George Carlin, Ice Cube and Quentin Tarantino racists; and, second, that it was possible for Fuhrman to plant the evidence against OJ.

Philosophers may debate whether any use of the N-word proves racism, but it was established to everyone’s satisfaction that Fuhrman couldn’t have planted the glove—to Judge Lance Ito, California attorney general Dan Lungren and even Simpson defense lawyer Alan Dershowitz. A half dozen other detectives were swarming all over Nicole’s condo before Fuhrman even arrived. They saw only one glove at the scene of the crime. Another half dozen were with him at OJ’s estate when Fuhrman saw the matching glove in the yard and pointed it out to them. And there were the bushels of other evidence, such as bloody footprints leading away from the murder scene, consistent with the rare and expensive, size-twelve Bruno Magli shoes, which OJ had been photographed wearing, despite his denying he owned the “ugly-ass” shoes.

But the country was crazy. About the same time as the OJ trial, a black man sued a computer encyclopedia company for emotional distress because when he was looking up the Niger River, he mistyped and got the encyclopedia’s entry on the N-word.
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In court, OJ’s defense lawyer, Johnnie Cochran, summarized the N-word accusations by calling Fuhrman “this perjurer, this racist, this genocidal racist.” He told the mostly black jury that Fuhrman wanted to “take all black people out and burn them, or bomb them. That’s genocidal racism.”

Spurning subtlety, Cochran said Fuhrman was similar to “another man not too long ago in the world, who had those same views, who wanted to burn people, who had racist views and ultimately had power over people
in his country.…This man, this scourge became one of the worst people in the world, Adolf Hitler, because people didn’t care, didn’t try to stop him.”
Only the jury could stop this incipient Adolf Hitler! Fred Goldman, Ron’s father, may have been the only person who took exception to Cochran’s comparing a Los Angeles detective to Adolf Hitler.
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It was the same argument Jim Jones had made: White America wants to do to black people what Hitler did to the Jews. It must be a mesmerizing accusation: With that claim, Jones got nine hundred people to commit suicide and Cochran got twelve people to acquit a murderer.

No one in the media considered it ironic that in a trial of a black man for the slaying of two white people, the only person called a “genocidal racist” was a cop who had used an ugly word in a nine-year-old screenplay. Cochran said Fuhrman was “America’s worst nightmare.” Evidently, having a large black man sneak up to your house late at night and cut your throat to the spinal cord is just an unpleasant dream. Maybe we should check with Nicole and Ron on their worst nightmare…oh no, we can’t.

The defense team had hired OJ’s accomplice, Robert Kardashian, as a lawyer solely to prevent him from being asked about the bulging Louis Vuitton garment bag he was seen carrying away from OJ’s residence the day after the murder, leading to speculation that the bag contained bloody clothes and the murder weapon. This constituted the second worst thing he ever did after spawning the Kardashian sisters.

These were the people who wanted the book thrown at Fuhrman for allegedly perjuring himself about using the N-word.

When it was over and Simpson was set free, the media was ravenous for payback—not against the man who had carved up two human beings and walked away, but against the person accused of using the N-word.

Fuhrman apologized to the nation, to the Goldmans, to the Browns and to the prosecutors. He apologized on
Oprah
, on Diane Sawyer’s
Dateline NBC
, on ABC and on the
Geraldo Rivera Show
. Say, how many years has it been since Al Sharpton hasn’t apologized for foisting the Tawana Brawley hoax on the nation and accusing an innocent man of rape?

Fuhrman was subsequently investigated by the FBI, the Los Angeles County Public Defender’s Office, the California Attorney General and the Los Angeles Police Department for any infraction in his twenty years on the force.
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Who could survive such a career autopsy? Yet the investigations turned up nothing against Fuhrman—nothing except rave reviews, including from his minority partners, colleagues and friends.

Months after the verdict the
New York Times
reported that one former Fuhrman partner, a black man named Carlton Brown, praised Fuhrman as “a consummate detective.” He scoffed at the McKinney tapes, saying he himself might have invented stories of beating up white people if he had been talking to a screenwriter. Another partner, Roberto Alaniz, a Hispanic officer, said Fuhrman “exemplified exactly what a police officer should be.”
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One of Fuhrman’s best friends in the department was a black female assistant district attorney, Danette Meyers. She called Fuhrman “one of the best detectives in the city.” Meyers said that if a suspect was hungry, Fuhrman would sometimes take him to lunch. She said Fuhrman invited her home to dinner with his wife and children. Once, after she received a death threat, he offered to be her personal bodyguard on his own time.

None of Fuhrman’s black and Hispanic colleagues, the
Times
reported, ever heard him make a racist remark. Fuhrman was part of an early-morning department basketball league composed of mostly black officers, one of whom remarked: “If you really hate African Americans, why would you get up at 5:40 to play basketball with me?”

The investigation into Fuhrman’s life and work performed by the Los Angeles public defender’s office—which, as the
Times
noted, was likely to be “aggressive”—found “virtually no complaints against him.” In all major cases Fuhrman worked from 1988 to 1995, there was not a single accusation of racial misconduct, nor of planting evidence. Indeed, the public defender’s office found “some compliments paid to Fuhrman by arrestees,” including minorities.
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The Los Angeles Police Department’s investigation turned up about a half dozen complaints that had been lodged against Fuhrman between 1984 and 1990. Almost all were ruled groundless, though he did receive disciplinary actions twice, once for grabbing a pedestrian’s wrists and once for leaving a note with an “improper remark” on a car windshield.

About a year after OJ had gotten off scot-free for two brutal murders, California’s Republican attorney general, Dan Lungren, hauled Fuhrman back from his new home in Idaho to charge him with perjury for denying that he had used the N-word in the prior ten years, when in fact he had not used it for only the previous nine and a half years.

Although Fuhrman would likely have won in court, he decided to forego a criminal trial—against the vehement advice of his lawyer—and accepted a plea of no contest to a felony charge of perjury. He was sentenced
to three years parole and ordered to pay a $200 fine. Unlike OJ, Fuhrman was now a convicted felon, unable to vote or own a gun.

Editorial boards across the nation erupted in rage, demanding that Lungren justify himself—not to explain why he had brought charges at all, but rather why Fuhrman was given such a light sentence.
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The mob demanded jail time for the man who used the N-word while OJ hit the golf course.

The full demagnetizing of the race card would take time, because our stupidest fellow citizens write the news. As the country stared in disbelief, the elites acted as if nothing had changed. Their America-is-still-racist stories were always a scam and Simpson’s acquittal didn’t change that. The multitude is foolish, Edmund Burke said, but “the species is wise, and when time is given to it, as a species, it always acts right.”

Eventually, even liberals would catch on to the fact that Americans were done with treating blacks like children. But not yet.