Now a lawsuit?
“We checked it out,” Chris reassured me. “Rejected for prosecution.”
That was acceptable damage. Every officer has complaints in his file. If he’s out there in the neighborhood making arrests, somebody’s going to try and sue to get the city to fork over a few bucks in a settlement. If SID had investigated and rejected the complaint, that was good enough for me.
“And the public records request?” I asked him.
“The L.A. Times has a right to get the file in ten days. I’ll probably give it to them on day nine and a half.”
Totally on top of things. I really liked this guy.
I knew that Chris had solid ties to the ‘hood. He also knew Downtown juries. I wanted his opinion on Fuhrman.
“Everybody’s going nuts on this planting thing,” I told him. “What do you think?”
Chris was silent for a moment.
“Well, people in the ‘hood think he [Simpson] was framed,” he said finally.
“Well, what do you think?”
“I doubt it,” came his reply.
Chris knew cops. He investigated them on a regular basis. He could tell a legitimate complaint from a fairy tale. The kind of elaborate evidence-planting and conspiracy that the defense was suggesting just didn’t ring true.
“Black people won’t want to convict Simpson,” Chris warned me. “But if you’ve got the evidence, you can overcome that. You’ll make it.”
I found that reassuring.
After he’d left my office, it dawned on me. “My God… Chris! Why didn’t I think of it before? He’d be perfect to handle Cowlings.”
Since the day after the Bronco chase, we’d had A. C. Cowlings under charges for aiding and abetting a fugitive. Gil and the brass had talked it over and decided the best way to investigate him would be through a separate grand jury. This would have to be handled with great sensitivity because the law strictly prohibits the district attorney from using evidence gathered from one grand jury to assist in the investigation of a case already filed. It’s called “commingling.”
There were other complications. Whoever took the assignment would have to be prepared to subpoena Simpson’s own attorneys, at least two of whom had been present in the house from which he’d escaped. It meant we had to give Cowlings to someone who was strong enough to push through an investigation in the face of monumental stonewalling.
Chris would be perfect. He was tough and tenacious and he seemed eager for the action. We knew, even at this point, that the Simpson case was shaping up to be the biggest one ever tried by our office. You couldn’t blame a deputy for wanting to be part of it. The beauty of Cowlings, from Chris’s perspective, was that it was a limited engagement. He could be a member of the team in an important but low-profile part of the case. And as soon as it was over, he’d get his life back.
And so, in late July 1994, Chris took over the Cowlings investigation, which, as I had predicted, turned out to be the ultimate dead end. Cooperative witnesses were almost impossible to find. Simpson’s personal assistant, Cathy Randa, had shredded documents pertaining to domestic violence. She sure as hell wasn’t talkin’. Paula Barbieri appeared before the grand jury wearing a prim, high-buttoned shirt with a cross dangling from her neck, and wouldn’t even own up to being Simpson’s girlfriend. Robert Kardashian, Simpson’s wealthy pal, who hadn’t practiced law for years, ducked each of Chris’s queries about Simpson’s departure from his house with a smug “That’s privileged.” O. J. Simpson’s cadre of loyalists had closed ranks tightly around him.
When it became clear that we weren’t going to have enough evidence to indict, we thanked the jury and sent them home. I was left with a clear conscience. Chris and the D.A. investigators had gone to extraordinary lengths pursuing leads. Later, Chris regaled us with tales of these exploits. His favorite concerned a trip he and two investigators had made to the Bahamas in search of the Miss Turnbury. She was a yacht that supposedly figured in one of the Simpson escape scenarios. What Chris had hoped would be an exotic trek to paradise turned into the junket from hell. Mosquitoes the size of bats, inflated tourist prices, five bucks for a bottle of beer, a hundred bucks for dinner. And, of course, nothing but dead ends on the investigation. Each time he told that story it got funnier: the mosquitoes got larger, the price of beer rose to ten dollars a bottle. Chris made me laugh until the tears ran down my cheeks. I hated the idea of letting him go.
Bill and I had been talking about bringing on another attorney as a special “case manager.” Someone to coordinate the work of the law clerks and junior deputies who were being assigned to do research for us. Even before we dismissed the charges against Cowlings in early November, I called Chris into my office to make him a proposition.
“Bill and I are so balled up arguing these stupid motions that we don’t have any time to do any of the organization,” I told him. “We don’t have the time to do any creative thinking. I guess what I’m saying is that I’d like you to be part of the first string.”
He looked down. Then he looked away. There were a few beats. I knew-or at least I thought I knew-what he was thinking: They need some color at that Clorox-white counsel table.
“I’d be honored,” he told me. It was a strangely formal reply. But Chris had a chivalrous streak, and I found that endearing.
It’s been said that we recruited Chris because he was black. But that isn’t true. At the time he popped his head in my door, we had no scouts out beating the bushes for minority talent. A good lawyer presented himself. I knew him. I trusted him. He happened to be black. Now, did I think his race would help us with a predominantly black jury? Possibly. But there was also a risk that those jurors might reject him as an Uncle Tom. At the very least, the D.A.‘s office would almost certainly be charged with race pandering. Sure enough, a day or so after Chris’s appointment was made public, Johnnie Cochran went around telling reporters that we’d hired ourselves a token black man. Even after the dirty tricks I’d seen him pull during the voir dire, I would still have believed Johnnie had more class than that.
To me, Chris’s race was a wash. My only thought was He’s strong. He’s smart. Can he handle the beating we’re gonna take? And I knew the answer: Yeah, he can.
I found Chris a cubicle in the middle of the Planning and Training Unit. I also handed him a big chunk of the case, a part that needed a lot of catch-up work.
Nicole and O. J. Simpson’s private life was still a mystery to me. We had police reports, but these were encoded in cop-speak, a militaristic argot that imparts no warmth, no human dimension to the events recounted. It seemed that no one could supply the key to the code. That is, until the publication of Faye Resnick’s book. I had let Faye slip through my fingers in the first go-round. Not this time. I told Chris to reel her in. No excuses. The evidence she’d been withholding was motive for murder.
I’m not sure what kind of tactics Chris used to flush Faye out of hiding in Vermont or wherever the hell she was holed up. I know he talked to her lawyer, who claimed that she was spooked over the sensation the book had caused. If we wanted her to come in to see us, he said, we’d have to assign her a security detail. I found this a little dramatic, particularly in light of the fact she’d invited her former boyfriend-an O.J. loyalist who was probably in contact with the Simpson camp-to her hotel room for a visit. What was the point of telling the enemy where you were and then asking for security?