Jeffrey Toobin: The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson

But Shapiro’s question made a point. Though he was now, as Simpson’s attorney, more famous than any of his friends around the conference table, he was still one of the boys. He still knew the score. He had no more illusions about this client than any other. The spotlight would never blind him to reality.

After his initial query brought only awkward silence, Shapiro moved quickly to introduce two of the guests-Skip Taft and Robert Kardashian, who were, for Shapiro’s purposes, the most important audience for the meeting. Taft and Kardashian were lawyers, too, but that wasn’t the point. Taft was O.J. Simpson’s business manager, the man who would decide, among other things, how much Shapiro would be paid. Kardashian had known Simpson for thirty years, and in the days since the murders he had emerged as the defendant’s closest friend and adviser. The gossip had already made the rounds that these two men had been instrumental in replacing Simpson’s original lawyer, Howard Weitzman, with Shapiro. Attention had to be paid. It was for them that Shapiro had assembled this show of legal strength.

Almost everyone else knew one another. This was, as they sometimes joked, the West L.A. Jewish mafia. (Taft and Kardashian were among the very few non-Jews in the room.) In fact, as the group settled in, Alvin Michaelson whispered to his neighbor, “This is what it must have been like at Apalachin”-the infamous gathering of mob chieftains in upstate New York in 1957. It was a famously inbred group, and their connections to one another often stretched back decades. Among Shapiro’s oldest friends in the room was Roger Cossack, who had pledged with Shapiro to the Zeta Beta Tau fraternity at UCLA in the early 1960s. (The Simpson case would transform Cossack’s life as much as it did Shapiro’s; Cossack became CNN’s local expert on the trial, and when it was over, he quit the law altogether and moved to Washington to begin his own daily legal-affairs broadcast on the cable network.) When prosecutors began examining Kardashian’s behavior in the aftermath of the murders, he hired Michaelson as his attorney. When Shapiro was later sued for libel in connection with the Simpson case, he asked another attendee, Larry Feldman, to represent him. (Feldman was ribbed mercilessly that Saturday because, due to go to a wedding, he came to Shapiro’s office in black tie; for his part, Shapiro presided in an all-white designer sweat suit.) One of the few civil litigation specialists at the meeting was Patricia Glaser, a partner at the large law firm then known as Christensen White Miller Fink and Jacobs. A year and a half later, when the Simpson trial was over, her name would be added to the firm’s name along with that of the newest partner-Robert Shapiro. Another of Shapiro’s ZBT brothers, Mike Nasatir, was there, too, along with his longtime partner, Richard Hirsch. About fifteen years earlier, they had employed a Southwestern law student by the name of Marcia Kleks as an intern. (She later married Gordon Clark and took his name.) Johnnie Cochran, who was not part of Shapiro’s social set, was not invited.

“I’ve asked you all here today because you all know how to try a case,” Shapiro said, “and I’m not afraid to ask for your help.”

But Shapiro actually asked few questions, and though he was pleased to have collected all these fine lawyers together, he didn’t listen much to what they had to say. Shapiro’s confidence was astonishing: He had the answer for O.J. Simpson. His client, he vowed, would go to trial and be acquitted. The strategy was set. Shapiro was caught up short only once. Michael Baden, the eminent medical examiner whom Shapiro had retained as an expert in the case, mentioned at the meeting that the autopsy results on the victims showed the possibility that more than one person had killed Nicole and Ron. Robert Shapiro paused to consider the implications. “So,” he asked the group, “that means O.J. and who else did it?”

This remark, too, drew stunned silence, and the meeting soon broke up. Shapiro took several of the participants out to dinner at Nicky Blair’s, a venerable (and now defunct) Hollywood hangout. A few hardy souls concluded the evening with drinks at the Beverly Hills estate of Shapiro’s friend and former client Robert Evans, the movie producer whom Shapiro had steered clear of formal charges in the infamous Cotton Club murders of 1983.

Among the guests at Shapiro’s meeting most pleased to have been invited was Marshall Grossman. Though he had enjoyed considerable success in the world of civil litigation, Grossman had never tried a criminal case, and the glamour and excitement of the Simpson case appealed to him. However, as Grossman later pondered what he had heard at the meeting, he hesitated. Grossman had tried cases for high stakes before, but he realized that this case, as Shapiro planned to defend it, would become something much bigger than the trial of a single defendant. If Shapiro had his way, it would come to involve (and possibly consume) the whole city of Los Angeles. Ultimately, Grossman decided this kind of public spectacle would not be for him.

The notion that Grossman might play a part in the Simpson case had generated excitement at his law firm, and he felt he owed his colleagues an explanation for his decision. At 11:12 A.M. on July 6, 1994, he sent an E-mail message around his firm that said, “I am sending a letter to the lead trial lawyer in the case this morning informing him of my decision” not to join the defense effort. The Simpson case, Grossman went on, “carries with it a high risk of racial divisiveness for our community, a situation which I don’t wish to contribute to and would rather reserve the opportunity for a healing role if need be.”

Johnnie L. (just “L”) Cochran, Jr., loved appearing on Nightline -as well as the Today show, the CBS Evening News , and the NBC Nightly News . In the days immediately after the murders in Brentwood, he did them all, and the programs’ producers were happy to have him, too. Cochran was a poised, accomplished, telegenic African-American lawyer, the answer to a network booker’s dreams. Within a week of the murders, the Today show even made him a paid consultant.

As it happened, on the evening of June 17, 1994-the day Al Cowlings led the nation on the low-speed chase down the Los Angeles freeways-Cochran was booked to analyze the events of the day on Nightline . Though television viewers never knew it, Cochran’s position in the case was considerably more complicated than that of the other legal experts who were surfacing in the media to analyze the case. Cochran had personal knowledge of what was going on behind the scenes. He was a friend of O.J. Simpson’s-not, in normal circumstances, an intimate confidant, but certainly a long-term acquaintance. Since the day of the murders, Simpson had been on the phone with Cochran talking about his plight and asking the attorney to join in his defense efforts. On the air, Cochran was cautious and only mildly pro-defense. His comment that evening on Nightline was typical of what he was saying on all the programs: “I think that the important thing for all Americans to understand is that this is a tragic, tragic case, but at this point he’s still presumed to be innocent.”

Off camera, though, Cochran, like Shapiro, could afford to be more blunt. For example, during a break in the broadcast of Nightline on June 17 in ABC’s studios in Los Angeles, Cochran sized up the situation very differently from the way he did for the program’s viewers. “O.J. is in massive denial,” Cochran told a friend. “He obviously did it. He should do a diminished-capacity plea and he might have a chance to get out in a reasonable amount of time.” When, the following week, Cochran traveled to Burbank for his early-morning duty to the Today show, he expressed the same sentiments-likewise to friends, off camera.