The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson - [2]

Summoning the participants by telephone earlier in the week, Shapiro had said he wanted to discuss the Simpson case. The preliminary hearing would begin the following Thursday, June 30. Shapiro said he wanted to pick the brains of the best in the business beforehand. Please help me, he said. I need your advice.

The lawyers came running, as Shapiro knew they would, for he understood that the invitation itself was a gift. The Simpson case was already a national sensation. In the gossipy, competitive Los Angeles legal world, Shapiro discerned that his conclave would be (in fact, already was) the talk of the city. Any lawyer would treasure the opportunity to mention the fact that Bob Shapiro had called to talk about the O.J. case. Friends, fellow lawyers, and, especially, clients (and even more especially prospective clients) would be impressed. The high end of criminal defense law operates almost entirely on a referral basis-that is, lawyers are hired because other lawyers recommend them-and Shapiro knew that his guests on this Saturday would not soon forget he had included them in this extraordinary session. A profitable referral to Shapiro would be the appropriate gesture of gratitude.

After the lawyers had settled in around the large oval table, Shapiro began the proceedings with a question.

“So,” he said. “How many of you think O.J. did it?”

Everyone froze. After a moment, a few lawyers chuckled nervously and others rolled their eyes. In a flash, Shapiro had brought home just how strange this meeting was. Defense lawyers talk to each other about their cases all the time, often with brutal candor. Does my guy take a plea or not? Is my case triable? Winnable? In these discussions, guilt is a given; experienced criminal lawyers-the successful ones-harbor few illusions. These chats are private; the cases are usually unknown to the public. But Shapiro was talking about what was well on its way to becoming the most sensational legal proceeding in American history. This was not the kind of question-or so it seemed-that an experienced criminal defense attorney would want answered in a quasi-public setting.

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.