It was a sight many in America have longed to see: OJ Simpson wearing a blue jail-issue jumpsuit, his hands cuffed at his waist, being led before a judge by police officers.
Simpson looked tired and forlorn in a courtroom packed with members of the media and curious public onlookers, all come to see the man most Americans believe brutally murdered his ex-wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ron Goldman in 1994. But if justice delayed is justice denied, then Americans must wait longer for real satisfaction. For the hearing, in January this year, was no replay of his infamous 1995 murder trial. Simpson was in a Las Vegas court for violating bail conditions in a new case by leaving a threatening voicemail for a witness. Her voice rising angrily, Judge Jackie Glass stared at the defendant and said: ”I don’t know, Mr Simpson, what the heck you were thinking?”
It was a good question. What does OJ Simpson think? Surely no one in America can have lived a life like his since he was acquitted 13 years ago of two brutal killings. Since then he has had a surreal existence, golfing and partying in a country where he is widely believed to have got away with murder. His court case was a cultural landmark for America, giving birth to the era of mass-media celebrity trials. In many ways the trial created the modern media landscape of 24-hour news coverage, cameras in court and a belief that anyone can grab 15 minutes of fame.
And now the Simpson trial is back. But this time he faces a most unexpected second act, set against the sleazy backdrop of Vegas glitz and glamour. Accused of orchestrating a bizarre armed robbery in a Las Vegas hotel room, he is again faced with the possibility of spending the rest of his life in jail. It is a freakish tale of greed and conmen — and sports memorabilia.
Like all good sequels, the trial, which is scheduled to begin on 7 April, is set to run and run. Some news executives are worried it will impact on coverage of the Beijing Olympics and even the presidential nomination conventions. Many observers are aghast at a return to one of the American justice system’s lowest moments.
”People lost sight of what justice was meant to be about. It made the televised trial part of our culture,” says Fred Fenster, a lawyer at top LA firm Rutter, Hobbs and Davidoff.
Now that media culture is returning to consume its parent. The journalists, cable shows and star names that Simpson’s original trial helped create have set the stage for the latest unfolding drama. Simpson will star in a new series of the best reality TV show America ever watched. Last time around 150-million Americans tuned in. ”Here comes the Simpson trial again,” says Professor Chris Bracey, an expert on race relations and the law at Washington University in St Louis. ”Prepare yourself.”
OJ Simpson’s second brush with major crime began on 13 September 2007 in room 1203 in the Palace Station Hotel and Casino. The hotel stands about a kilometre from Vegas’s Strip, lying in the shadows of more famous hotels like Caesar’s Palace and the Bellagio, but still boasting the usual slot machines, poker tables and endless buffets. It is a place for tourists seeking Vegas on a budget; all pastel shades and motel-like rooms with an almost Midwestern feel. Yet it was here that Simpson, along with five cronies, barged into a room and held up two people at gunpoint. Then he brazenly walked out of the room, led his posse back through the hotel lobby, and headed back to his own suite at the jet-set Palms. He was arrested three days later as he settled down to watch golf on his hotel room TV.
The crime is bizarre. Simpson is one of the most recognisable faces in America and indeed the world. Getting away with such a brazen act — in the early evening, at a mainstream hotel packed with tourists — is almost unimaginable. But when the police came for Simpson at the Palms he held court with the arresting cops, joshing with the officers that this sort of thing happened in Sin City. ”Look what happened, I got arrested,” the police report quoted Simpson as saying.
The two men in Room 1203 were Alfred Beardsley and Bruce Fromong, both of whom knew Simpson from selling sports memorabilia. They had been hawking various Simpson-related items, rumoured to include the suit he wore on the day he was found not guilty of murder. Simpson had apparently come to Las Vegas for a friend’s wedding. But, before he left, he had been tipped off about Beardsley and Fromong’s whereabouts by his friend Tom Riccio, a shady character who also worked in sports memorabilia, but had a criminal record for arson and grand larceny. Riccio told Simpson where the two men were selling the goods and Simpson decided to go to the Palace Station to confront them. Apparently, Simpson saw the incident as no more than getting his own stuff back.
The posse Simpson assembled was hardly made up of Vegas’s brightest and best. It included Riccio, golfing buddies from Florida and Nevada and even a barman Simpson had met just hours earlier. Most of the men gathered in room 1203 — both victims and robbers — had a criminal record.
Riccio first entered the room at 7.38pm. Beardsley and Fromong had already laid out their wares. He told them he had brought a client along who might want to buy the goods. Then he went back outside. When he returned it was with an outraged Simpson and his friends. At this moment the incident turned into something out of a Quentin Tarantino movie. We know this because — unbelievably — there is an audiotape of the incident. Simpson’s language could have come from the mouth of Samuel L Jackson in Pulp Fiction. ‘Don’t let nobody out of here! Motherfucker, you think you can steal my shit?’ Simpson yelled. He repeated the line several times, evidently as a stunned Fromong and Beardsley were walked up against a wall. ”Backs to the wall!” shouted another assailant. Simpson could also be heard screaming at Fromong: ”You know this shit ain’t over with though! It ain’t over with! I’ll fuck you, fucker!”
At some stage at least one gun was allegedly produced by one of Simpson’s posse, who then claimed to be a cop. Simpson denies knowing about any guns, but some of those present have said Simpson had asked them to bring ”heat”. Whatever the truth, Simpson’s friends then packed the memorabilia into cardboard boxes and pillow cases, and the whole gang walked out of the hotel as oblivious tourists fed quarters into slot machines around them. Once they were gone, a stunned Beardsley phoned 911. In what must have been one of the most bizarre phone calls ever made, Beardsley told police that he had just been robbed by OJ Simpson.
It seems an open-and-shut case. But with OJ Simpson nothing is ever simple. How, for example, did the robbery come to be recorded? The astonishing answer is that Riccio had bugged room 1203. It was he who booked the room, put in secret recording equipment and then invited Beardsley and Fromong to set up shop in it. Riccio then collected the audiotape of the robbery and sold it to celebrity gossip website TMZ, ensuring the world got to hear it. Riccio also struck an immunity deal with the police. And amazingly, it has emerged that Riccio warned the FBI that Simpson was planning a robbery several weeks before the Vegas trip. The FBI has not commented on why its agents met Riccio, or why they did not act.
Suddenly, there is a whiff of a set-up. Certainly a jury might see it that way. ”With a jury trial there is no predicting their reaction to this sort of stuff,” says Professor Bracey. Even the staunchest of Simpson’s critics must be looking at the grisly cast of lowlife characters and wondering exactly who was the villain here. Anyone betting on a quick and simple outcome of the OJ Simpson Trial Part II would be looking to lose their money.
So where has Simpson been all these years? The answer seems to be golfing and having fun. After he walked free from his murder trial Simpson’s dream of a return to his celebrity life did not last long. The family of Ron Goldman sued him in the civil court over the deaths. Simpson was found guilty and ordered to pay a huge sum in compensation that now totals $38-million. America suddenly had a legal verdict to back up its gut feeling.
That verdict effectively bankrupted Simpson, yet he is far from impoverished. He fled to Florida, where local laws prevent either his house or his ample pension funds from being confiscated. Thus Simpson — unable to earn money — lives in a ranch-style home complete with pool in the Miami suburb of Kendall. His house is worth $1,1-million and his pensions provide an income of $400 000 a year. He has spent that cash sending his kids to good schools, golfing with people who will play with him and dining in the many restaurants and malls around his house. He has a fondness for chains such as Hooters and local sports bars like the Kendall Ale House, where he watches gridiron. His visible attempts at earning cash have been stepped on by the Goldman family, who monitor his every public move.
It is all a long way from his life before the murder trial. For the British, Simpson’s fame has always been hard to grasp because he was little known in Europe before the murders. But in America he was one of the country’s most loved celebrities. His childhood was marked by poverty and a struggle with rickets, but he overcame his hardships to become an athletic superstar. His prowess on the American football field won him a place in the Hall of Fame while his off-the-field charisma carved out a second career in Hollywood. His relationship with Nicole Brown struck a precious note of public interracial bliss. They were a golden couple. ”How could someone with so much let it go through their fingers like that?” asks Gayl Murphy, a celebrity interviewer. In British terms it is as if David Beckham — after turning to a successful acting career — slashed Posh’s throat, got away with it and then moved to Essex to play golf.
There is a school of thought that says Simpson must have spent the past 13 years living in a kind of hell. Most Americans believe he committed double murder. It is tempting to see a real-life parallel with the Jean-Paul Sartre play Huis Clos, where hell turns out to be spending eternity with other people, specifically those who know your sins. But there are signs that Simpson himself is entirely ignorant of how his fellow Americans see him. One of the few people to have interviewed Simpson at length in recent years is Kate Delaney, a radio talk show host. She sat down in Dallas with Simpson last summer for a news website. The result was a remarkable series of interviews in which a complete picture of the modern Simpson emerged.
It was of a man obsessed with fame, convinced he has an on-air career awaiting him and still capable of charming everyone he meets. He was seemingly convinced of his own innocence and baffled about why no one believes him, even though he recently published a book virtually confessing to the crime. ”He knows how to knock you off your guard. He’s a real charmer,” Delaney says. He also believes he is the victim of his trial. He is convinced that the media, not ordinary Americans, are responsible for his public image. The public, he thinks, are on his side. Simpson told her of his plans to host a sports chat show, perhaps on satellite radio. That echoed a recent failed attempt to shoot a TV pilot in which Simpson played practical jokes on people, including one in which he posed as a car salesman selling a white Bronco identical to the one in which he famously fled across LA after the murders.
Such obliviousness seems staggering. ”This is a narcissist. This is a person who thinks the world revolves around him,” says psychiatrist Dr Stanley Kapuchinski. That diagnosis would certainly explain why Simpson has refused to fade out of the public eye. Indeed he has rubbed America’s face in his freedom. His girlfriend of the past 10 years has been a blonde ex-waitress half his age called Christie Prody. They have been involved in numerous domestic fights and arguments to which the police have been called.
In fact, the one thing that seems to have bothered Simpson is not being in the public eye enough. Perhaps that explains the decision he took last year to write the book If I Did It. The tome was aimed at putting Simpson’s side of the story and portrays his ex-wife as a drug-addled, sexually promiscuous woman. It contains an extraordinary chapter that — claiming to be hypothetical — goes into intense detail on what ”might” have happened if he had committed the murders. ”It is an astonishing and appalling thing to do. I believe he killed his ex-wife and Mr Goldman. I believed it then and I certainly believe it now,” says Michael Shapiro, a defence lawyer who provided legal commentary on the original Simpson trial.
Simpson’s retelling of the murders is stunning. In the book he describes heading over to see Nicole after a previously unknown friend ”Charlie” gossiped about her seeing other men. Charlie grabbed a knife he kept in his car and confronted Nicole on her doorstep just as Goldman pitched up, returning a pair of sunglasses she had left at a restaurant. Simpson then got in a struggle with Nicole and she slipped and hit her head on the ground. Goldman adopted a karate stance as the woman lay unconscious. Simpson then described ”what happened next”: ”I noticed the knife in Charlie’s hand and in one deft move I removed my right glove and snatched it … then something went horribly wrong and I know what happened, but I can’t tell you exactly how.” Simpson then blacked out. When he regained consciousness he was standing above the mutilated bodies of Nicole and Goldman, knife in hand and blood covering his clothes. ”I had never seen so much blood in my life. It didn’t seem real and none of it computed. What the fuck happened here?” He says Charlie disposed of his clothing and the knife.
After a national outcry the HarperCollins deal — complete with TV tie-ins — collapsed before the book could be published. But the ever watchful Goldman family pounced, snapping up the copyright and publishing it themselves. The proceeds go to charity and the ”If” in the title has been reduced to a tiny font. The book for all intents and purposes is now called I Did It. For good measure it bears the subheading: Confessions of the Killer. No wonder so many Americans are keen to see Simpson in the dock again. When he takes the stand in Las Vegas few people will see him as on trial for robbing memorabilia salesmen. They will see it as a second chance at a murder conviction.
Last time round, it was race that dominated the Simpson trial. His attorney Johnny Cochran succeeded in putting the LA Police Department on trial as much as Simpson. The trial became less about the killings and more about a city’s terrible relations with its black population. Occurring not long after the Rodney King riots of 1992, Simpson became a symbol for black power in the face of white authority. But what held true in the Los Angeles of 1995 will not hold true in the Las Vegas of 2008.
There has been a fundamental shift in racial attitudes to Simpson. Once, 71% of black Americans believed he was innocent. That’s fallen to 40%. It is likely to have collapsed further in the wake of his book. ”A lot of black people have changed their minds. Afterwards he did not try to reach out to them. He just moved to Florida and played golf,” says Manny Otiko, a black cartoonist and comedian.
That removes the biggest single weapon in Simpson’s armoury. ”He does not have Johnny Cochran this time around,” says Shapiro. But it does not mean he is going to be convicted. Riccio’s role in the case could easily be portrayed as ”setting up” Simpson. It is not hard to imagine a defence in which once again Simpson is the fall guy for other people resentful of a rich, black American. It was Riccio who appears to have arranged the whole deal. It was Riccio who bugged the hotel room. It was Riccio who then sold the tape to the media. It was Riccio talking to the FBI. No one appears to come out of this well. Even Beardsley, who dialled 911, was himself arrested a few days later when cops discovered he had broken bail conditions. He had been convicted of stalking a woman and told to stay in California.
There is one other key factor: Simpson is still rich. ”The rich and famous get the best defence. We all focus on the famous bit, but it’s actually the rich bit that gets overlooked,” says Fred Fenster, of Rutter, Hobbs and Davidoff. That is true. The list of the wealthy who have walked free from seemingly unpromising trials includes Claus von Bulow, Phil Spector and Bob Durst. The latter — a billionaire real estate mogul — even admitted to beheading his neighbour. But top-notch lawyers got him off. ”The world operates by the golden rule,” says Levine. ”He who has the gold, makes the rules.” Simpson still has a lot of gold.
When the Simpson trial finally begins it will take place among a now familiar media landscape of celebrity obsession and 24-hour news. Yet it was his original trial that created it. When Simpson was found innocent in 1995 it happened at the same time as president Bill Clinton was delivering a State of the Union address. Some networks offered viewers a split screen. It was the least-watched State of the Union speech ever.
That helped give birth to a media where the lines of news, entertainment and the law have blurred. When Simpson appeared at his bail hearing in Las Vegas, sitting in the press gallery was Marcia Clark, his prosecutor 13 years before. But Clark is a lawyer no longer. She doubled up her fame with a gig on the TV show Entertainment Tonight. She will be covering the second Simpson trial as a celebrity in her own right.
The Simpson trial laid the basis for a long succession of ”trials of the century” in which the famous — or just plain gruesome — were given blanket coverage. The nadir was the inquest of actress Anna Nicole Smith. ”Simpson’s trial was unbelievable in terms of its impact on the press,” says Fred Fenster. ”The result was that a decade later Anna Nicole Smith was front page of the LA Times while the Iraq war was on page 14.”
The effect of celebrity on the justice system has been corrosive. Now lawyers entering the profession know that a big case can lead to a second career on TV. Simpson already has his side lined up. His lawyer is Yale Galanter. He is tall, firm-jawed and made for TV. He loves the spotlight and already acts as a legal consultant on cable shows. Far from being long-awaited justice for two terrible murders, the new Simpson trial is likely to muddy even further the murky waters where law, celebrity and media collide. One recent pre-trial hearing in Las Vegas resembled a media freak show. Two hundred journalists attended, and crowds of people turned up. They ranged from a roller-skating woman in a rabbit suit to an estate agent wearing a top advertising Simpson coffee mugs. ”I’m like, hey, how can I make a buck off this happening four miles from my house?” he said. Another man wore a T-shirt that read simply: ”I love famous people.”
The grim fact is that the Simpson trial — even now — says more about money, fame and media than actual justice. For Simpson does not live in a world where everyone reviles him. He has avoided Sartre’s vision of hell. No one has witnessed that better than Kate Delaney. When she interviewed Simpson there was one thing above all else that shocked her: ordinary people flocked to him. Security had to be called because of the number of people asking for autographs or wanting photographs. He was mobbed in nightclubs, including by young women. Simpson even boasted to Delaney of how easy he found it to get women into bed.
While America may well believe that Simpson is a double-killer, it still worships him for his infamy. He may be a narcissist, but even a narcissist needs a mirror. That mirror is everyone else he meets and they confirm his world view: OJ Simpson is still a star.
That star is about to shine brightly in the media heavens once more. In Las Vegas the old gang will reconvene: the network reporters and cable news anchors. They will cover his celebrity trial as more serious issues — including, perhaps, the 2008 presidential election — are relegated to the back burner. Whether Simpson walks free or finally goes to jail does not really matter. The cameras will be there either way. The magic drug of fame will provide everyone with another powerful, mind-numbing hit. This is still OJ Simpson’s world. The rest of us are just living in it. – guardian.co.uk Â