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Mark Fuhrman-Interview-Aug.29,2002-Star-Telegram
From: Solitairea1
Date: 13 Apr 2006
Time: 08:59:23 -0400
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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. ===================================
Last changed: 08/28/11