The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson (16 page)

“Okay, I have an official announcement from the Los Angeles Police Department,” Gascon said.

“This morning,” Gascon said, his voice unsteady, “detectives from the Los Angeles Police Department, after an exhaustive investigation which included interviews with dozens of witnesses, a thorough examination and analysis of the physical evidence both here and in Chicago, sought and obtained a warrant for the arrest of O.J. Simpson, charging him with the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman.

“Mr. Simpson, in agreement with his attorney, was scheduled to surrender this morning to the Los Angeles Police Department. Initially, that was 11:00. It then became 11:45. Mr. Simpson has not appeared.”

The room stirred.

“The Los Angeles Police Department right now is actively searching for Mr. Simpson.”

An experienced group of reporters were gathered in that room, and yet none of them could ever recall having heard the sound they issued at that moment: a sort of collective gasp. And then one journalist, name lost to history, let out a long and very astonished whistle.

“Mr. Simpson is out there somewhere,” Gascon said, “and we will find him.”

Shortly after it became clear that Simpson and Cowlings were really gone, Kardashian materialized in the foyer of his house with an envelope that contained a letter. Shapiro and Faerstein sat on the bottom step of the winding marble staircase and read it. They agreed that it seemed like a suicide note written by O.J. Meanwhile, the cops asked the assembled group where they thought Simpson had gone.

Someone suggested Nicole’s grave, near her parents’ home in Orange County. Someone else said the Los Angeles Coliseum, site of O.J.’s greatest moments of football glory at USC. “He might kill himself in the end zone,” Faerstein said.

In fact, no one had any idea where he was.

After Shapiro and Kardashian spoke to the officers on the scene and recounted the events of the morning to their satisfaction, the two men left for Shapiro’s office in Century City. (They also determined that Paula Barbieri had left the house shortly before O.J. and A.C., but not with them.) “The two Bobs,” as they were sometimes known, asked the officers if Faerstein could leave with them, but the police weren’t yet finished talking to the psychiatrist. Though the letter was clearly important evidence of Simpson’s state of mind and his possible plans, Kardashian took it with him rather than mentioning it, much less giving it to the police, who were looking for O.J.

From the moment Simpson vanished, Robert Shapiro focused on his top priority: Robert Shapiro. He knew immediately how furious the police and prosecutors were about Simpson’s disappearance, and he knew they would hold him responsible. Shapiro had embarrassed them in front of the entire country. Worse, Shapiro didn’t like what the cops were insinuating about his role in Simpson’s flight. Even though Shapiro had committed no crime in harboring Simpson for the morning, the mere fact that he might be investigated worried him. Shapiro decided he was finished dealing with underlings—Lange, Clark, and the like. Shapiro decided to call the district attorney himself, Gil Garcetti.

Everything had been shaping up so well for Gil Garcetti. Elected overwhelmingly in 1992, he had an ideal ethnic and political résumé. The son of Mexican immigrants and the grandson of an Italian, the fifty-three-year-old politician had spent his entire professional career in the D.A.’s office. (He was, in fact, a neighbor of O.J.’s in Brentwood, thanks not to his civil-service earnings but rather to the wherewithal of his wealthy wife.) Even his steely-gray hair came with an uplifting tale: It had changed color after Garcetti underwent chemotherapy in a successful battle with lymphoma in 1980. As a tough-on-crime prosecutor and yet a Democrat, he had a promising political future. One problem hovered—his
office’s remarkable record of futility in high-profile cases. The D.A. had failed to obtain convictions against the proprietors of the McMartin Preschool in a lengthy child abuse case; against several motion picture industry figures in connection with the deaths of two people on the set of
Twilight Zone—The Movie;
against the Menendez brothers for killing their parents; and, most notoriously, against the police officers who beat Rodney King—acquittals that set off the riots of 1992. As Garcetti would frequently (and correctly) point out over the course of the Simpson case, evaluating an office of nearly a thousand prosecutors on the basis of how they did in a few “big ones” was pretty unfair. (Still, in his campaign against his predecessor, Ira Reiner, Garcetti himself hadn’t hesitated to play the can’t-win-the-big-one card.) These murders presented Garcetti with a case that was likely to dwarf the other “big ones” in media attention. Suddenly, though, he had a bigger problem than trying to
convict
O.J. Simpson—he couldn’t even
find
the guy.

So Garcetti focused on
his
top priority: Gil Garcetti. When Shapiro got on the phone with the D.A., the defense attorney began reciting a version of the same speech he had been giving the cops all day: You know me, Gil, I don’t pull this kind of stuff. I arranged Erik Menendez’s surrender from Israel. Name-dropping even at a time like this, Shapiro then became nearly unhinged, practically weeping over the phone: “I didn’t know he would run, Gil. You have to believe me.” The two men were old acquaintances; Shapiro had even contributed $5,000 to Garcetti’s campaign. But at this moment Garcetti addressed Shapiro with barely controlled rage: “Just get him in here, Bob. That’s all we’re thinking about now.”

At 3:00
P.M.
, just after he got off the phone with Shapiro, Garcetti went to give his own press conference, on the eighteenth floor of the Criminal Courts Building. Flanked by Marcia Clark and David Conn, Garcetti looked even more distraught than Gascon had in his briefing an hour earlier. He looked right at the cameras, which were broadcasting his words live.

“I want to say something to the entire community,” Garcetti said. “If you in any way are assisting Mr. Simpson in avoiding justice, Mr. Simpson is a fugitive of justice right now. [His feelings were garbling his usually adequate syntax.] And if you assist him in any way,
you are committing a felony. Think about it. And I’ll guarantee you that if there is evidence establishing that you’ve assisted Mr. Simpson in any way to avoid his arrest, you will be prosecuted as a felon.

“Now,” Garcetti added, stumbling again a bit, “you can tell that I am a little upset, and I am upset. This is a very serious case. Many of us, perhaps, had empathy to some extent. We saw, perhaps, the falling of an American hero. To some extent, I viewed Mr. Simpson in the same way. But let’s remember that we have two innocent people who have been brutally killed.… It’s a serious case. We will continue to treat it seriously.”

Through more than a half hour of hostile questions, Garcetti had nothing but polite things to say about the LAPD, but his frustration did surface toward the end.

Rewording a question that had already been asked approximately twenty times at the press conference, one reporter ventured, “The question so many people are asking—and perhaps this needs to be addressed to the LAPD, and it already has—is how can this possibly happen? The entire world is focused on this man. Is there any way to answer that?”

“I can’t,” Garcetti said simply.

“Surely you’re wondering that yourself.”

“Aren’t we all?” said the district attorney.

Garcetti’s press conference did nothing to ease Shapiro’s anxiety. He knew he remained the villain in the minds of the Los Angeles law enforcement establishment. So Simpson’s lawyer decided, in effect, to take his case to the public. He told reporters that he would be making a statement about the day’s events at 5:00
P.M.
, which was barely an hour after Garcetti’s briefing ended. Unlike every other event that had been planned for June 17, this press conference started right on time. Robert Shapiro was anxious to go. He stepped to a podium in a makeshift briefing room on the ground floor of his Century City office building and spoke calmly and methodically, with no notes.

Shapiro, too, started with a plea to the camera. But he was aiming for an audience of one. “For the sake of your children,” he told O.J., “please surrender immediately. Surrender to any law enforcement
official at any police station, but please do it immediately.” There was an odd calm about Shapiro, a lack of affect to his presentation. For all the turmoil of the day—and the sheer strangeness of all the occurrences—he spoke without passion or even inflection. In retrospect, his agenda at the press conference appears utterly transparent: Whatever else had happened today, this mess was not going to drag him down with it.

Shapiro began by summarizing the day’s events: the early morning call from the detectives, his journey to Kardashian’s home, his passing the news of the arrest warrant to Simpson, and the defendant’s sudden disappearance. “I have on numerous occasions in the past twenty-five years made similar arrangements with the Los Angeles Police Department and the district attorney’s office and Mr. Garcetti. All of them have always kept their word to me, and I have always kept my word to them. In fact, I arranged the surrender of Erik Menendez from Israel on a similar basis. We are all shocked by this sudden turn of events.”

It was an extraordinary tale, and the reporters, along with the national television audience, listened with rapt attention. Shapiro’s account was also highly incriminating of his client. Simpson’s actions, as described by Shapiro, did not seem to be those of an innocent man. In light of Simpson’s escape, Shapiro might have had an obligation to recount this story to the police, but the lawyer was certainly under no obligation to share it with the public at large. Indeed, by some reckonings, much of what had gone on that morning at Kardashian’s house may have been protected by the attorney-client privilege—a privilege that only Simpson had the right to waive. Yet Shapiro told all. He had hung his client out to dry in order to save himself.

Yet Shapiro’s statement was only the beginning of the proceedings at this press conference. “Now,” Shapiro continued, “I would like to introduce to you Mr. Robert Kardashian, who is one of Mr. Simpson’s closest and dearest friends, who will read a letter that O.J. Simpson wrote in his handwriting today. Thank you.”

He became one of the most familiar, if least known, figures in the Simpson saga: loyal friend Robert Kardashian, the one with the
white stripe in his hair. Heir to a meat-packing fortune in Los Angeles, Kardashian attended USC a couple of years before Simpson and served there as the student manager of the football team, the prototypical hanger-on position. He graduated from law school but quickly dropped practice for the business world. He started a music magazine and sold his share for $3 million in 1979. At the time of the murders he was running Movie Tunes, a company that played music in movie theaters between shows.

For many years Simpson and Kardashian shared lively and similar social lives. In 1978, Kardashian met his future wife, Kristen, when she was seventeen and he thirty-four; Kardashian had been there the previous year when O.J., then thirty, met Nicole Brown, then eighteen. Bob and Kristen Kardashian would ultimately have four children (Kourtney, Kimberly, Khole, and Robert, Jr.), and they often joined O.J. and Nicole for vacations. The two couples separated around the same time, too, and Kardashian’s divorce papers suggest that his marriage was beset by some of the same troubles as O.J. and Nicole’s. During the divorce, Kristen Kardashian obtained a restraining order that barred either party from “molesting, attacking, striking, threatening, sexually assaulting, battering, or otherwise disturbing the peace of the other party.”

Strangely, Kardashian seemed to have an attack of poverty during his divorce. In an affidavit filed on January 11, 1991, he wrote that he had been terminated from his job the previous December. “
I AM NOW UNEMPLOYED AND HAVE NO INCOME
,
” the document stated. Yet at the time of the murders, Kardashian was living in the vast house in Encino, and from the moment Simpson was arrested, Kardashian suspended all other work, reactivated his law license, and toiled full-time on O.J.’s defense for more than a year. His Rolls-Royce became a fixture at the county jail. His devotion to Simpson had a desperate, frantic quality. In September 1994, he placed a full-page advertisement in
Hits
magazine, a trade publication, bearing the words
JUSTICE FOR THE JUICE
. In the ad Kardashian used the name of Movie Tunes’ executive vice-president, Michael Ameen, without Ameen’s permission. Ameen promptly quit, telling
The Hollywood Reporter
, “Robert’s commitment to this case has overwhelmed every other corner of his life.”