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Since it is likely that the jury will hear at least some of the Fuhrman tapes, the most the prosecution and the police department can do now is scramble to mute their impact. Prosecutor Clark has insisted that Fuhrman is role-playing "a bad boy" on the tapes-and that, in any case, the issue of Fuhrman's racism is irrelevant to Simpson's guilt or innocence. Private investigator Anthony Pellicano, who worked for Michael Jackson during his legal troubles and now works for Fuhrman, also declared last week, echoing Clark, that the tapes just show Fuhrman "talking a lot of trash. He wanted this woman to be excited about his stories. And he was blustering and posturing and puffing himself up and making himself look macho and everything else that you could imagine." As for the matter of his sworn testimony regarding the word nigger, Pellicano insisted that Fuhrman, who retired from the force this month and now lives in Idaho, was just confused. "Did you ever hear the term mental block? I mean, when someone asks you a question like that, sometimes you don't-you block out everything except what you think you hear. That's what happened."
If Fuhrman was in fact spinning some sort of fantasy, he was also weaving real names and police incidents into it. The L.A.P.D., whose reputation has long been bruised by allegations of racism, had barely recovered from the Rodney King beating case when the Simpson trial began. And now, after months of testimony in which the defense has tried to blame sloppy police work and evidence planting for the mountains of blood-soaked evidence against their client, it may have another tough fight ahead. According to Johnnie Cochran, "these tapes have nothing to do with any screenplay. He is talking about what he did on the job...some of which, quite frankly, is criminal conduct. This man is going to have to be indicted along the way." For instance, according to transcripts obtained by the Los Angeles Times, Fuhrman talks about how, after some officers were shot in 1978, he and some other cops brutally beat four suspects. "We basically tortured them. We broke 'em," Fuhrman boasts. "Their faces were just mush. They had pictures of the walls with blood all the way to the ceiling and finger marks of [them] trying to crawl out of the room." Afterward, says Fuhrman, the officers were so bloody they cleaned themselves up with a garden hose.
According to the Times, this episode may match one that occurred in the predominantly Hispanic neighborhood of Boyle Heights in East Los Angeles. But another officer present at the Boyle Heights incident, Sergeant Michael Middleton, now retired, has denied the story, saying, "There was no bloody room. I went in there."
At a press conference last week, Police Chief Willie Williams answered a stream of Fuhrman-related questions in angry bursts. He reiterated his objections to the idea that his officers are framing Simpson, maintaining that "it is inconceivable that behind this one murder all of a sudden you're going to get 10, 20, 30 or 40 people ... from six or seven different department organizations, to plot against Mr. Simpson." As for Fuhrman's descriptions of police misconduct, Williams snapped: "We have zero tolerance for racism, sexism and any type of anti-Semitism. That is nonnegotiable."