A Measure Of Fame, A Bigger Slice Of Infamy
Mark Fuhrman stands as rigid as a gun barrel.
The O.J. Simpson trial’s second-most famous bad boy is sternly laying down the law to an oily, half-pint Englishman named Tony.
“Here’s the long and short of it,” says Fuhrman, who is lean and muscular and easily a head taller than the little bloke. “I’m sick and tired of O.J. If you say one thing about him I’m out.”
Tony is a reporter for one of those smarmy tabloid TV news magazines that should provide free soap and towels after viewing. Tony has come from Los Angeles to Spokane’s KXLY studios, where Fuhrman recently began co-hosting a weekly 920 AM radio chat show on crime.
Tony wants to interview the disgraced former L.A.P.D. detective about … what else?
All things O.J. have been news fodder again after the man himself speculated about the murder of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson. Had he killed her, O.J. recently told an Esquire magazine writer, “it would have to have been because I loved her very much, right?”
But the ex-cop who told bald-faced lies under oath about having never uttered the N-word - thereby harpooning the prosecution side of the so-called murder trial of the century - is astride his high horse.
O.J. is behind him. O.J. is yesterday’s news.
No more O.J. End of story!
Tony’s unctuous smile is becoming queasier by the second. Like every other journalist on the planet, he knows the sad truth about Fuhrman:
Without O.J. the guy’s a nobody.
O.J. fallout sent Fuhrman packing to North Idaho, where he relocated his family in Sandpoint. It cursed him with a criminal record for perjury. It blessed him with a lucrative book deal.
O.J. brought Fuhrman a measure of fame and a bigger slice of infamy. Now he has a Thursday afternoon Spokane talk show, all thanks to O.J.
And despite the no more O.J. blather he hands Tony, Fuhrman is still very much consumed with the case.
Minutes after the encounter with Tony, I sidle up to the ex-cop in the KXLY lobby and casually bring up the past unpleasantness.
“He’s not smart enough to be a purse snatcher,” snaps Fuhrman of his nemesis.
O.J.’s suspicious remark to Esquire? A Freudian slip, concludes the retired gumshoe.
Fuhrman’s O.J. ban apparently doesn’t extend to columnists. During a later sit-down interview, he is a fountain of facts and observations. He paints himself both as an unfortunate victim of shameless defense tactics and the crack investigator who handed the Simpson case to prosecutors on a platinum platter.
“He’s a murderer,” says Fuhrman of O.J., adding that there was “enough evidence to convict 100 defendants.”
Fuhrman is steely eyed, ruggedly handsome and annoyingly self-assured. It’s easy to see why some Simpson jurors sized him up as a “cocky jerk” and an “egotistical, opportunistic” cop.
Yet there’s also a tragic air about him. You could feel almost sorry for him were it not for all the loot he’s raked in off his best-selling book, “Murder in Brentwood,” now out in paperback.
There was probably nothing wrong with Fuhrman’s investigation on June 12, 1994. The glove-planting malarkey offered by O.J.’s defense dream team was a laughable load.
O.J. should have gone down. Big time.
It was Fuhrman’s character, not his police work, that failed. He gave Johnnie Cochran and his wormy gang an opening to exploit and then lied on the stand, to boot.
Unforgivable. Inexcusable.
“It’s a silly question,” says Fuhrman, when I ask him if he’s a racist. “Of course I’m not.”
Can this man ever find an identity outside the ugly shadow of Brentwood? Probably not in this lifetime.
“I’m as happy as I can be,” says the O.J. Simpson trial’s second-most famous bad boy, “considering the last 3-1/2 years.”
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo