Wow-worthy moments from Part 3 of ‘O.J.: Made in America’
ESPN’s five-part documentary, “O.J.: Made in America” continued with Part 3 on Wednesday night. Here are some wow moments from the third installment (and our review of the entire series is here):
Had they never done this before? I am not now nor will I ever be a police officer, but the detectives who questioned O.J. Simpson once he was determined to be the prime suspect in the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman did a terrible job. As noted, police had one chance – one – to interview Simpson, and he was cooperative, going to headquarters without a lawyer. But as we hear in the recording of the interview conducted by Philip Vannatter and Tom Lange (Lange sat down for director Ezra Edelman’s cameras; Vannatter died in 2012), they never pin Simpson down on where he was at the time of the murders, why his blood was on the outside and inside of his white Ford Bronco if, as Simpson said, he cut his left middle finger while in Chicago (he flew to the city at 11:45 p.m. the night of the murders), or really any of the major details. And then they just released him, another favor from the LAPD to O.J.
Robert Kardashian was on reality TV long before his now-ubiquitous children. On June 17, 1994, the day Simpson was to turn himself in to the LAPD, he was sequestered at the home of his longtime friend, attorney Robert Kardashian. Hours after Simpson hadn’t shown to LAPD headquarters, Kardashian read a letter in front of cameras purported to have been written by Simpson. The letter sounded a lot like a suicide note – “I can’t go on,” “don’t feel sorry for me,” “I’ve had a great life” were among the things written, with Simpson asserting he had nothing to do with Nicole’s death. At the same press conference, lawyer Robert Shapiro says Al “A.C.” Cowlings was with Simpson “for the last few minutes, alone.”
June 17, 1994 remains one of the strangest days in recent American history. Seeing it from the inside, so to speak, hearing the 9-1-1 tape of Cowlings talking to dispatchers, the way LAPD just let Cowlings, with Simpson in the Bronco with a gun to his head, drive on the freeway and around the city with the police following them at a respectable distance like a Presidential motorcade…even 20-plus years later, it’s surreal.
“If O.J. Simpson were black, none of that…would have happened.” The second-most astonishing line in Part 3 (we’ll get to the most astonishing in a minute), and so emblematic of the way Simpson presented himself and the way others saw him. Pilot and reporter Zoey Tur, who covered the “chase” (it’s so hard to call it that) from a helicopter, said this, and she’s right. Simpson may have been black in terms of his skin color, but at no point, whether in the multiple times the LAPD came to his house when Nicole called because he was beating her, or when he was questioned at the headquarters, or during the “chase”, was Simpson ever treated the way many African-Americans in Los Angeles were treated by police.
Mike Albanese is a boss. Albanese, who was then a SWAT team supervisor with the LAPD, provides comic relief as he recounts the insanity of whole thing. He tells us that when he arrived at Simpson’s infamous house on Rockingham Avenue, members of Simpson’s family were inside, eating, while 95 million people were watching Simpson and the world’s slowest police pursuit. “Nutty,” Albanese deadpans.
And the most astonishing line of the night: Over the course of the evening, hundreds and hundreds of fans flocked to Simpson’s ritzy Brentwood neighborhood, holding signs saying “We love O.J.” and chanting, “Free O.J.!” Many of them were black. Simpson is finally arrested outside of his house and is placed in an unmarked police car with, among others, SWAT officer Peter Weireter, who had been on the phone with Simpson, negotiating with him to put down the gun he was holding under his chin and surrender. According to Weireter, as the car is pulling down the street, Simpson was in awe of the crowds but says, “What are all these niggers doing in Brentwood?” Jaw. Dropped.
Oh, Mark Fuhrman. He may well have found the glove on Simpson’s property and not planted it, as the defense tried to assert, but he does not come off well in this movie. In Part 2, he says that the Rodney King situation would have been avoided had LAPD officers still been able to use choke holds, and in the lead-up to the trial, we learn that he had a history of calling African-Americans “niggers” and held a prejudice against them. Fuhrman says those feelings were part of a bad time for him and he came out of it.
The African-American community stood fervently by Simpson even though he’d turned his back on it for decades. A poll taken before the trial began showed that just 10 percent of black respondents believed it was “very likely” that Simpson was guilty. And three-quarters of the eventual seated jurors were black.
With his freedom and life on the line, suddenly Simpson was black. Simpson’s high-priced defense team pounced on the idea that Fuhrman was another white LAPD officer intent on framing a black man for a crime he didn’t commit, and when Judge Lance Ito surprisingly let the jury pool into Simpson’s house on Rockingham Avenue, where no part of the crime occurred (they also saw the murder scene, at Nicole’s house), Simpson’s lawyers replaced many of the pictures on the walls of Simpson with his white friends and associates with pictures of Simpson with African-Americans and with artwork depicting African-Americans.
Part 4 of “O.J.: Made in America” airs Friday at 9 p.m. EST on ESPN.
