We had to face it-it really didn’t matter at this point whether Laura McKinny was going to say that Fuhrman was acting on those tapes. The issue was the tapes themselves. We absolutely had to try to keep them out of evidence. We could argue, with God and Truth firmly on our side, that Fuhrman’s boasts had nothing to do with the deaths of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown. But Lance, through his insupportable error of allowing in the N-word in the first place, had opened the floodgates to travesty.
We worked hard to stop the inevitable. It was a horrible time. I was fighting a low-grade flu that had plagued me for weeks. But hearing those tapes just did me in. After that, I was flat-out sick. During the worst, most feverish part of it, I had to drag myself into the office at 6:30 A.M. one Saturday to work with Bill on our motion. Scott Gordon worked right alongside us, pulling up more cases in which racial epithets had been deemed inadmissible because of their inflammatory impact. I didn’t get home until three in the morning.
And if all that weren’t enough, by the end of the weekend a new problem had emerged. Cheri Lewis had been going over the transcripts with a fine-tooth comb, filing Fuhrman’s utterances under different categories: by racial epithet; by description of misconduct; etc. We realized that there was another issue raised by the tapes.
One that Lance Ito could never rule on.
At one point in the tapes, Fuhrman complained vociferously and pejoratively about a female captain who had supervised him several years earlier in the West L.A. Station. He described her like this:
Dyed, real white blond hair… with one-inch roots… This woman is forty years old. She’s got braces on, slumped shoulder. Only marsupial lieutenant on the job. She has a pouch big enough to hide two cats. Under the lower belt it looks like she’s hiding a soccer ball. She’s not pregnant. And she’s never worked the field. Ever. She sued… to get the job.
He was talking about Peggy York-Lance Ito’s wife.
Mark had described two run-ins with her, including one during which she upbraided the squad for writing “KKK” on the calendar entry for Martin Luther King Day. Mark had snickered, and when she called him on it in private, he claimed, he belittled her to her face. In another dustup, he refused an assignment from her, supposedly saying, “I don’t talk to anybody that [sic] isn’t a policeman, and you’re as far from a policeman as I’ve seen-and as far as that goes, you’re about as far from a woman as I’ve seen.”
This was going to be a source of major grief for Ito, in more ways than one. Earlier the preceding fall, it had come out that York had known Fuhrman as someone under her command. Those of us on the prosecution side felt that Lance had surely looked into this matter privately-at the very least, had asked, “Honey, what do you know about this?”-and had concluded that there was no personal animus between his wife and Detective Fuhrman. Had there been any, Ito should have recused himself right then and there. He didn’t. So we all assumed the matter was under control.
In October, I had even met Peggy York. Her lawyer, my old sparring partner-cum-buddy Barry Levin, had introduced us. Captain York struck me as a smart, classy lady. York had given a deposition in which she stated she had no memory of ever having reprimanded Fuhrman. In short, she had no information to offer.
But if you believed what Mark Fuhrman had said about her in the McKinny tapes, it became more difficult to take her assurances at face value. The encounters Mark described were sufficiently hostile that, had they occurred, Captain York would most likely have remembered them. And, if she remembered them, it was hard to believe she wouldn’t have told her husband about them-if not at the time, then when his name came up on the short list of judges for the Simpson case.
To state the obvious, if Mark’s problems with York were true and Ito knew of them, he should never have taken the case.
But I decided that, although there was certainly a kernel of truth in his stories, Fuhrman was likely distorting whatever had happened between himself and York, just as he had exaggerated other incidents. During the McKinny interviews, Mark described several incidents of racism and brutality, the most graphic being a scene in which he and other officers chased some suspected cop-killers into an apartment.
“We basically tortured them…” he reported swaggeringly to his adoring Boswell. “We broke ‘em… Their faces were just mush…”
Afterward, he said, he and his colleagues had been so bloody that they had to hose down their uniforms. As he returned to this incident later in the tapes, the brutality became even more intense, and in his final version of the tale the cops actually killed one of the suspects.
This smelled like Fantasyland. Sure enough, when the FBI and other agencies set out to verify Mark’s stories, they found no basis in truth. Later on, a former partner of Fuhrman’s, Tom Vettraino, would opine that Mark’s stories came from old TV cop shows. Fuhrman had been bullshitting, right down to his boast that he was a big bad marine who’d seen all sorts of bloody action in ‘Nam-in fact, he never got off some old tub of a ship.
But if the McKinny tapes were admitted, we might have to prove that Fuhrman’s stories of police misconduct were unfounded. Our best witness might have been York, who was named on the tapes and might be able to refute Mark Fuhrman’s tales. As awkward as it was, we would have to call her to the stand. Quite obviously, Ito could not preside while his wife testified. And there was a broader issue: how could he even make a determination on the admissibility of tapes in which his wife was trashed by a witness?
Ito held a hearing on August 15. He still hadn’t heard the tapes, which, he opined, “is a good state of affairs at this point.” He framed the issue simply. If his wife was called, he’d disqualify himself from the case. Sounded fair, but it left me trapped: how could I know whether to call York until I knew which parts of the tapes would be admitted as evidence? If Lance allowed in the incidents of police brutality, York’s observations of Fuhrman’s work would be crucial.
On the other side of the courtroom, they were also in a tactical bind. The defense was pushing like crazy to get the police-brutality stuff into the record, but they didn’t want to lose Lance. Who could blame them? A replacement judge might not be so tolerant of their underhanded tricks.
We recessed for a while to research the issue. And when we returned, it was clear that Johnnie had figured out that I had hung a sword over Lance’s head: if Ito admitted Mark’s nasty statements about police brutality, we’d call York, and Ito would be off the case. Johnnie should have gracefully conceded that someone else should rule on the limited matter of the tapes. I, too, was leaning toward partial recusal, and would have gone with it. But Johnnie was so fixated upon keeping Lance on the bench that he argued against it.
Keep in mind that all of this was going on in open court. The jurors weren’t present, but the proceedings were being broadcast, so their families could hear and see it all. I shuddered to think what information they were imparting to their sequestered loved ones during visiting hours at the Inter-Continental. Johnnie took the opportunity to do all he could to convey to the media and the public what was in those tapes. He knew he could get away with it, too-because Lance was almost comatose from the stress of having to deal with his wife’s sudden visibility in the case.
I was steaming. Johnnie had found a surefire distraction from all the evidence confirming the guilt of O. J. Simpson. “This is a bombshell!” he crowed. “This is perhaps the biggest thing that has happened in any case in this country and they know it.” But, Johnnie, there’s a more immediate horror at the center of this case, lying all but forgotten: two young people with their throats cut.