From: Solitairea1
Date: April 13, 2006
Time: 08:55:36 AM
Star-Telegram.com Posted on Thu, Aug. 29, 2002 ========================= Mark Fuhrman The former Los Angeles police detective, known as "the man who let O.J. Simpson go free," now writes bestselling books and hosts a radio talk show. But he'd still prefer to have his old life back. By JEFF GUINN Star-Telegram Staff Writer ===================== NORTHERN IDAHO - Eight years after two bodies were discovered in the exclusive Los Angeles enclave of Brentwood, and seven years after his name became an especially reviled household word, former Los Angeles police detective Mark Fuhrman has a simple message for those who still despise and/or malign him: You're wasting your time. Strangers' bad opinions of Fuhrman mean absolutely nothing to him. He got on with his life. Get on with yours. "From the beginning of the [O.J.] Simpson thing, there were people who were close to me and whose feelings about me were something I cared about," says Fuhrman, now 50 years old and living in the small mountain hamlet of Sandpoint in northern Idaho. "They knew who I really was, and they never lost faith in me. All the others, the name-callers, just want somebody else to point out as evil, which they're doing to make it seem like they're not so bad themselves. I couldn't give a damn what they call me. Racist. Liar. The man who let O.J. Simpson go free." These days, whatever else Mark Fuhrman might be labeled, it's accurate to call him a bestselling author; a popular Spokane, Wash., radio talk-show host; an in-demand national commentator on prominent trials; a running buddy of celebrities such as author Dominick Dunne; and a contented family man whose two children are thriving in the bucolic country life far away from smoggy, media-saturated Los Angeles. ======================== It didn't happen because Mark Fuhrman got lucky. The revelation during the Simpson trial of his worst moments unexpectedly resulted in chances to demonstrate unexpected talents - the guy could write well, he was articulate on TV and radio. But immediately post-O.J., Fuhrman had reason to believe there was very little in his future besides public scorn. In the wake of Simpson's exoneration in his state murder trial (he lost a subsequent civil suit to the families of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman), Fuhrman pleaded no contest to a charge of perjury and was placed on probation for two years. His career in law enforcement ended abruptly. After moving to Idaho, he had to support his family by working as an electrician's apprentice. ==================== Fuhrman believes he managed to survive, then thrive, for two reasons. The first is that "I didn't have a choice. You get dropped in the middle of the ocean and you either swim or you drown. I had a wife and kids. I was going to swim." Second was his experience as an LA detective. "You have to realize what I did for a living," Fuhrman says, grinning. "Being a cop is not a popularity contest. People forget that, when they're slinging mud at me. I'd already been called every name possible and learned to shrug it off. If you've tried to spend your life doing good things, and you know that, then you know you're a good person and nothing anybody says should change that. Understand, when I say 'good person,' I also mean 'human.' And being human means that you've made mistakes, too. I never denied that." Mark Fuhrman's actions during the Simpson investigation have been endlessly dissected in print and over the airwaves, usually to Fuhrman's discredit. But he believed then and now that, no matter what anyone else says or thinks, he was a good cop trying to do the right thing. ========================== Fuhrman was off-duty on June 13, 1994; about 1 a.m. he got a call from his supervisor in the West Los Angeles homicide division. There had been a double homicide, one of the victims was the wife of O.J. Simpson, and the boss wanted to know if Fuhrman would head out to the Brentwood site and take a look around. He didn't have to do it; he agreed "because my boss wouldn't have asked if it wasn't important." Fuhrman and his partner, Brad Roberts, examined the crime scene and Simpson's nearby Rockwood mansion, discovered various items of evidence, took copious notes and eventually turned these over to the investigative team officially assigned to the case. ======================= Later, Fuhrman was called to testify to the grand jury; he did so at the request of prosecutor Marcia Clark, who wasn't pleased with the testimony of the lead case detective and hoped Fuhrman's more organized recollections would persuade the grand jury to indict Simpson in the slayings. That, in turn, brought Fuhrman to the attention of the media and Simpson's "dream-team" defenders - Johnnie Cochran, F. Lee Bailey and others. Information reached the defense that Fuhrman was a virulent racist. This was based on taped conversations between him and a woman who used Fuhrman as a source for a movie script depicting "real-life" police procedures. After denying on the stand that he had used "the n-word" in the past 10 years, Fuhrman was confronted with the tapes. Simpson's defense team used that contradiction as the basis of its theory of a setup, with racist Fuhrman leading an equally racist LAPD plot to frame Simpson for murder by planting evidence. The jury bought it. Simpson went free. ======================= All most people remember of Mark Fuhrman then is a huddled figure on the witness stand endlessly invoking his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination. Now, he says he was taking one for his team - the Los Angeles police department. "I showed loyalty to a department that wasn't loyal to me," he says. Fuhrman's version of events involves the assigned detectives in the Simpson case bungling everything and, in particular, not including key evidence discovered by Fuhrman and his partner on the night of the murder. But neither Fuhrman nor his partner, Roberts, ever testified about that. "If Brad testified, he'd have told things that would show the other detectives f--- up," Fuhrman says. "Marcia Clark and the rest of them knew what the truth was. They just preferred to let me hang and keep the chance the jury would convict O.J. anyway. Because if Brad had testified, and if I'd testified to what I knew, Simpson was going to walk even though he was guilty as hell." (The detectives criticized by Fuhrman have stated they handled the case correctly and that he is making up his allegations.) =================== Simpson walked anyway, and Fuhrman became America's most publicly reviled racist. In her closing remarks to the jury, Clark declared, "Is [Mark Fuhrman] a racist? Yes. Is he the worst LAPD has to offer? Yes. ... In fact, do we wish there were no such person on the planet? Yes." OK, Fuhrman admitted afterward, he did use the "n-word." But only once, he says, and even then he didn't really mean it. Years before the Simpson trial, Fuhrman met a woman who wanted to write a screenplay involving a big-city police department. They collaborated on a script and, briefly, became lovers. "At that time I was disgusted with the movies and TV shows about cops because they were all so made-up," Fuhrman says. "Later on, that changed ================== - I like NYPD Blue and some other shows now, because they're realistic - but I wanted to make this girl see it was really harder-edged than what was being shown then. So I said things. I used words I never used otherwise, but ones lots of other cops normally did. No, I shouldn't have done that. And it came back to get me, didn't it? What people don't understand is that you can't take the Fifth for some questions and not for others. Answer one question, you have to answer them all. If I'd explained in court why I said the things on the tape, I would have had to answer everything else." ============== If anything, Fuhrman says, he's the antithesis of a racist. "After the Simpson trial, after all the bad things Cochran was claiming, I became the most investigated officer in the history of the LAPD," Fuhrman says. "Not one thing like that was found in my record. No one ever filed a complaint claiming they'd heard me say anything like that, let alone mistreat a black prisoner in any way. That's because I never did. Am I a racist? No. That simple. And if that's not good enough for you, too bad." ============ After Simpson's acquittal, Fuhrman had his own legal problems. The D.A.'s office, yielding to public pressure, announced it would charge Fuhrman with perjury. He didn't have the money for a drawn-out trial, so he pleaded no contest, got two years' probation and a small fine (the verdict was later dismissed after Fuhrman exhibited court-mandated good behavior), and moved his family out of Los Angeles as soon as he could. He and his wife had planned relocating to the Northwest anyway. "I wanted to get 20 years in on the force, and I had 18," Fuhrman says. "I'd been raised in the Northwest, and I wanted to bring up my kids in that same kind of country atmosphere. So my wife and I had been looking around up there, and we'd found Sandpoint, this beautiful little town. After I pleaded no contest, that's where we moved. I wanted to live around real people, ones who accept you for who you are and who protect their neighbors." ================================== Sandpoint, population 6,800, is a small village nestled on the shore of northern Idaho's massive Lake Pend Orielle. It is about 70 miles northeast of Spokane, Wash., and 60 miles south of the Canadian border. The location couldn't be more beautiful; surrounding mountains are freckled with towering green fir trees. Horses, cattle and even buffalo wander in fenced pastures beside the state roads leading into and out of town. Downtown, mom-and-pop cafes and homey crafts shops take up most of the space. On Saturday nights, the Parida Theatre shows old movies like Casablanca. =================================== Though every pickup truck seems to feature a gun rack, a road sign notes that the "clean highway" immediately outside of town is sponsored by the Buddhist Peace Center Ltd. Mark Fuhrman and his family live on acreage its proud owner describes as "growing hay, horses, dogs, kids; a good place." Fuhrman won't say exactly where. The media and general public are pointedly not welcome. "In fact, nobody to my knowledge has even been able to take pictures of my kids," Fuhrman says. "My family is off-limits. We had to deal with the media enough. That's not going to happen in Sandpoint. I feel safe about that." When Fuhrman grants interviews - which he doesn't very often - he insists that visitors meet him in Spokane at the radio station that carries his talk show. There's no flexibility in this rule; even journalists who feel they're hitting it off with Fuhrman aren't invited back to Sandpoint to have a friendly beer and meet the wife and kids after all. ====================== Still, Sandpoint is a tiny place, and surely everybody knows where everybody else lives. A few quick queries ought to provide a visiting writer with directions right to Fuhrman's front door - except that doesn't happen. ======== On a summer Saturday afternoon in the cafes and shops of Sandpoint; at the gas stations, in front of the movie theater, in the grocery store; even down at the lakeshore, where fishing boats are being lowered into the water, locals scratch their heads and claim with practiced puzzlement that they don't even know who this Mark Furry guy is, let alone where he lives. Denial is universal. ================== Not one sandwich-munching elderly lady or beer-sipping boatman breaks ranks. In several cases, asking a second time leads to suggestions that the visitor ought to think about driving on to wherever he's going, since the local roads are tricky at night. ============== "I like living in Sandpoint," Fuhrman says two days later in Spokane. It's obvious why. Post-O.J., Fuhrman wasn't fired by the LAPD. He resigned, which meant he got his police pension. It helped pay the bills. In Sandpoint, he took a job as an electrician's apprentice: "I'm not somebody who needs to do something grand," Fuhrman says. "I was ready to do that the rest of my working life if people would have let me alone - but they didn't." ============= Everyone associated with the Simpson trial, it seemed, was writing a book. =========== "They were doing it to protect themselves," he says. "And publishers had been after me to write one, too. Seeing everybody else's books, I wanted to get my side of the story out there." Even in this, Fuhrman says, he was hamstrung by his moral code. The families of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman had brought their civil suit against Simpson. He wanted them to win it. "So if I put my book out while that was going on, I'd be revealing all the mistakes the detectives made on the case," Fuhrman says. "That might have let Simpson win a second time. So I didn't write a book until after that trial was over." ======================= Murder in Brentwood, published in 1997 by politically conservative Regnery Press, shot to the top of every bestseller list. Fuhrman wrote the book himself, with the help of a writing coach assigned by the publisher. ========= "I think it took about two weeks," he says. "I'd had time to think about exactly what I wanted to say." ============================= Murder in Brentwood was both predictably self-serving - after all, it was Fuhrman telling his side - and surprisingly well-written. Anyone who talks to Fuhrman for any length of time will recognize that his writing style mimics his speech pattern. Both orally and in print, Fuhrman likes to get to the point. Small talk is not a talent of his or, apparently, of any interest. ================================ "I'd written enough [case] reports over the years," Fuhrman says. "Why shouldn't I be able to write well?" ====================== Fuhrman may still have been despised in many public quarters, but the publishing industry lavishes love when megasales are involved. Fuhrman was offered contracts for additional books with bigger publishers; his career as an apprentice electrician was short-lived. Murder in Greenwich and Murder in Spokane, based on actual cases, both followed Murder in Brentwood to bestsellerdom. When Fuhrman did media tours to promote the titles, he proved exceptionally articulate. That, in turn, led to invitations to appear on radio and TV shows to comment on current high-profile criminal investigations and trials. The man who disdained the media became part of it, and on his own terms. From there, things got even better. ============================ Station KXLY in downtown Spokane is an ABC affiliate. A combination radio/TV broadcast site, it perches atop a hill just beyond the city's rugged, lovely river park. A receptionist buzzes "Mark" that his visitor has arrived, and moments later Fuhrman strolls into the lobby, smiling and extending a hand. ================= A massive hand. In person, Fuhrman is intimidating. He's several inches over 6 feet tall and built like a rangy pro football linebacker. Very few 50-year-old men radiate such toughness. Someday, boys showing up to take Fuhrman's daughter on dates will not feel comfortable when they're introduced to Daddy. ============================= Sipping coffee in a conference room, Fuhrman's old LAPD habits are evident. As a cop, he says, he relished the interrogation process - the idea was to ask simple questions and let the suspect try to embellish too much, resulting in inconsistencies that would establish guilt. That's the trouble with most journalists, he believes. They try to make things too complicated. If only, during the O.J. days, reporters had just asked the simple questions, like why wasn't Fuhrman's partner ever called to the stand? Why didn't some smart writer dig around to see if the so-called racist cop had any history of mistreating African-Americans? But no, that's not the way the media and its audiences work, and this is what Mark Fuhrman wants to talk about first. In the years since events at the Simpson trial made him famous, Fuhrman has devoted considerable thought to why our culture has an insatiable appetite for creating, then casting aside if not outright destroying, celebrities of every stripe. "I see these shows now, Fame for 15 on TV, things like that, and mostly I refuse to go on them because they don't have a purpose," Fuhrman says. "You get famous against your will, and when does it end? If anything, this [phenomenon] is only getting worse, with cable TV talk shows and the Internet putting someone's name and face out there instantly, and constantly, until the next person comes along. I never did anything to seek fame. It was forced on me." ===================== Most people, Fuhrman believes, want the media to create celebrities they can disdain. "See, they've got to project evil on somebody else," he says. "As a cop, you figure out some people are ghouls. They like to see car wrecks. This celebrity thing takes it further - they want people to hate. If you can point a finger at someone, if you can perceive them to be less, worse, than you, then it makes you feel better about yourself. And that's the essence of it." He survived his 15 minutes, Fuhrman repeats, "because I already had a good sense of who I really was. It comes down to whether you have self-realization about who you are and who you aren't." This is why, he says, it's sometimes easy to tell which members of the 15-minute brigade will or won't find contentment in the 16th minute that constitutes the rest of their post-celebrity lives. "There will be nothing good happening with Monica Lewinsky," he predicts. "There's just nothing there in her. Maybe she wasn't old enough after the Clinton thing to do any self-dissecting, to see what qualities she had to fall back on." =================== Of course, Fuhrman adds, the press is glad to use Lewinsky's immaturity for its own purposes of sensationalization. His own approach as a member of the media, he insists, is different: "I'm not out to get in people's faces. I just want people to think about things objectively." On afternoons from Monday through Friday, the format of Mark Fuhrman: All About Crime finds the host offering his views on current cases, the more controversial the better. Sitting amid piles of hand-scribbled notes, photocopied magazine and newspaper articles, and printouts off the Internet, Fuhrman quickly hits his verbal stride. He's an obvious natural at this; there's no studio sidekick to help him entertain listeners with little jokes and time-killing comments while the host tries to think of a cogent comment. The only dead air comes when callers pause to gather their thoughts. ======================= Far from being intimidated about discussing racism, Fuhrman begins this show with that specific topic. There's currently turmoil in Seattle, where a white police officer was shot by a black man he was trying to arrest. The suspect was standing naked in the middle of the street and waving a gun. Some members of Seattle's African-American community, Fuhrman tells his listeners, are defending the shooter by protesting that most blacks in Seattle are paranoid after suffering constant harassment from racist white cops. ======= "This black guy was naked and was waving a gun, and the officer went after him," Fuhrman says. "How is that racism? He didn't have to choose between going after a naked white man and a naked black man in Seattle." The first caller, Howard, thinks Fuhrman's absolutely right. He adds that the media inflames minorities against cops because "their reporting is anti-police." =================== But the next caller, Bob, begs to differ. He identifies himself as "a black man out of Texas," where he and every other African-American learned early that white policeman were out to get minorities. It's even true in Spokane, he says, and he offers a lengthy anecdote about how he and another black man were recently hassled by white cops just for standing on a downtown corner. ============== Fuhrman doesn't jaw back at Bob. Instead, he says there are certainly incidents sparked by racist police officers, and these are regrettable. Still, he wants to know, doesn't Bob agree that things have at least improved over the years? And, when Bob begins a lengthy segue about "the Klansmen and other racial groups who have terrorized blacks for so many years," Fuhrman cuts him off. ================ "Bob, you're a great caller," he says soothingly. "Call back again." After he has signed off and a Seattle Mariners gamecast has begun, Fuhrman remarks, "I do want people like Bob to call back. I don't think every caller has to agree with me. I hate people telling me what I ought to think. So I won't do that to callers into my show, either." ============================ In the studio, surrounded by people he has known for a while, Fuhrman is relaxed and outgoing. He slaps palms with a 10-year-old who's visiting a parent at work, jokes with Rebecca Mack, his producer, and thanks a young staffer who rushes up to tell him she saw his picture in the new issue of Vanity Fair: "You were with Dominick Dunne, and you looked really great," she gushes. "'Nick's a great guy," Fuhrman tells her. "Very friendly, very smart." ===================================== On this day, the film of journalist Daniel Pearl's execution by terrorist kidnappers has been released on the Internet. Fuhrman and Mack think this might make a good topic for his show - does the media have the right to make such footage public? Sitting in front of a computer setup, they search for the material. When they find it, Mack is appalled, but Fuhrman watches and comments with professional detachment. He has seen this sort of thing before on the Los Angeles streets. "Is he feeling all this?" Mack wants to know during the grisly moments when Pearl's throat is being slashed. ============= "No," Fuhrman says, eyes focused unblinkingly on the screen. "See that blood spurt? He'd lose consciousness immediately, because all his oxygen is gone." =================================== He decides the Pearl video will make a good subject for his show. "It's ugly, it's scary, but that's the way the world is," Fuhrman says. "The more we deny it, the more we allow it to stay that way." ======================= Here's another instance where Mark Fuhrman doesn't care whether anybody believes him. He swears he'd trade the bestselling books, the radio show, the just-announced cable TV movie based on one of his titles, the celebrity buddies, the spread in Sandpoint, all of it, for the chance to be a Los Angeles cop again. ========== "Getting my life back, the one I had because it was the one I worked for, is something that can't happen now," Fuhrman says. "My privacy is gone forever. It was taken from me. I'll tell you one thing my experiences have made me see, and that's how normal I really am. A man who loves his family, who just wanted to work to make things a little better." The perks of celebrity, he admits, are welcome: "It's nice to have a little money, to know my family's got some security that way. I've just turned in another book that'll be published; there's that TV movie coming. I'm not stupid. I'm grateful for some of the stuff that's come my way. But not to the point where I wouldn't want my privacy back and to get back in law enforcement." ======================= All Fuhrman's ruminations seem inevitably to return to the Simpson case and its other well-known participants. The emotional scars haven't faded, and neither has his bitterness. Mark Fuhrman is an expert at getting on with life, but he has neither the capacity nor the desire to forgive and forget. "Understand this - in the [Simpson] trial I did nothing I'm not proud of," he snaps. "I kept quiet when lies were told about me, and it was because I was more interested in seeing justice done for the victims than in protecting myself. Me, a racist. That's a lie. That's wrong." At one point, Fuhrman launches into a tirade about Marcia Clark, O.J. Simpson, Johnnie Cochran, F. Lee Bailey and Judge Lance Ito. He is particularly descriptive about Ito and Cochran, using crude anatomical references. In this unguarded moment - and Fuhrman is angry, not acting, with veins pulsing in his neck and his eyes glittering - he does not resort to a single racial slur. ===================================