Newton, Cleaver, Simpson

...Johnnie Cochran did not want O.J...

...But it was actually a political trial whose antecedents are Charles Garry's defense of Huey Newton and William Kunstler's defense of Larry Davis, the drug king who shot nine policemen attempting to arrest him but was acquitted because Kunstler convinced the jury that the police had been out to "get" yet another black man who was only acting in "self-defense...

...In Lionel Cryer's black power salute was exactly the message Cochran wanted to send to the white world: It's payback time...

...In the complex background of the Simpson trial lies Cleaver's hallucinatory voice and the gestural politics it was part of, and another trial which took place nearly 30 years ago that troubled the American judicial system even more profoundly-and permanently-than O.J.'s did...

...The theory did not play as well as it would a generation later, when racial paranoia was more widespread and Cochran had a more mediagenic client and a more vulnerable enemy in the LAPD...

...couldn't get a fair trial...

...Fuhrman's treatment of O.J...

...defense in a way that was not possible when he took the case of Geronimo Pratt...

...This fateful decision, which determined the outcome of the case, was followed by Garcetti's capitulation to a pretrial delegation of black leaders (including Johnnie Cochran), who demanded that the death penalty, itself a presumed symbol of institutional racism, not be invoked...

...to have a jury of his peers-Brentwood millionaires-because he wanted to create a myth for his client as a crossover artist who had tried to play in the white world but ultimately failed, for all his charisma, because when push came to shove, race trumped even the power that comes from wealth and celebrity...

...In putting the System on trial, instead of the defendant, Garry joined up with the zeitgeist and invented the wheel which would be rolled adroitly by a generation of legal demagogues from William Kunstler to Leonard Wineglass...

...Cochran says he told O.J...

...The defendant was Cleaver's co-conspirator Huey Newton, charged with murdering a white policeman in Oakland...

...But the idea that he and his star-struck pals could have conceived an on-the-spot conspiracy to frame Simpson-a plot then ratified by the highest levels of the LAPD in the few minutes allotted-is about as credible as the notion that AIDS is a Jewish doctors' plot against black Americans, that the government intentionally funnels crack into the ghetto, or any of the other lurid theories that spread like Ebola in the radicalized black subculture...

...in his repeated assaults against Nicole...

...County DA's office behaved like the character in The Manchurian Candidate who enters a state of mesmerized suggestibility when shown a playing card...

...There was no question that Newton was present at the scene, or that he had threatened to kill a policeman in the past...

...But the experience stayed with him...

...About time a brother got away with something around here...

...was repeated by the red carpet initially rolled out for him after the murders by the LAPD itself...

...The tragedy of the outcome is that they were right...

...It was the threat of black riots like those that followed the Simi Valley trial of the policemen who beat Rodney King that caused District Attorney Gil Garcetti to file the case downtown-a world apart from Brentwood and O.J.'s life...

...Fuhrman might indeed burn all blacks if given half a chance...

...was guilty, "but Fuhrman...

...They currently work with the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, in Los Angeles...

...The System had been put on trial continually since 1967, most recently in the riot following the Rodney King verdict, and Cochran saw it could be put on trial again in what, on the surface, was a less promising case even than Geronimo Pratt's...

...Newton feared a jury of black peers because he knew they would recognize him for the street hustler he was...

...Send a message," he urged the jury in his summation-not "seek the truth" or "make justice prevail"-but do the right thing and "send a message" to the System and to the LAPD, which is the System's most visible symbol...

...The police failed to make him an immediate suspect and left him free and unwatched- after notifying him of his arrest!-so that he could attempt an escape...

...about Geronimo Pratt shortly after coming on the defense team and pledged, "I will not let this happen to you...

...Sam Shepard or Bruno Hauptmann, who kidnapped the Lindbergh baby...

...The killer was caught with the murder weapon and the blood of Rosenbaum on his person...

...But taking the Garry-Kunstler-Cochran line of defense, his lawyers argued that Lemrick Nelson was the victim of a police conspiracy and frame-up...

...a black power salute right after the verdict, was a onetime member of the Black Panther Party, the Simpson trial found its context...

...Cochran entered the case and offered a defense based on the assertion that his client had been set up by FBI agents who had maliciously corrupted evidence and suborned witnesses...

...Afterwards, the jurors gave a party for the murderer to celebrate his release, in their version of Lionel Cryer's black power salute...

...Ironically, the only proven victim of Fuhrman's less than admirable behavior as a cop, so far, is Nicole Brown Simpson...

...In a case that would have almost eerie resonances with the Simpson affair 26 years later, Pratt murdered a white couple in 1968 on a Los Angeles tennis court...

...It is true that Fuhrman is a despicable racist with violent intentions-but no more violent than those expressed by O.J...

...Peter Collier and David Horowitz are authors of Destructive Generation and other works...

...A beneficiary of the changes of the past 30 years, Cochran saw how these changes could be used in the O.J...

...The infamous tapes show how Fuhrman would deal with gangsters, crackheads, and low lifes in South Central...

...The race card was played again inside the D.A.'s office when the prosecution impanelled a jury with members (like Lionel Cryer) who had been revealed during voir dire to be clearly sympathetic to Simpson, although 10 of its peremptory challenges were left unused...

...That the message hit home could be seen in the reaction of Benny Davis, a black store owner in L.A.: "Yeah, he did it...

...It is true, as Robert Shapiro has said, that the race card was dealt from the bottom of the deck during the proceedings that freed his client...

...And, in fact, when Fuhrman showed up at the Rockingham estate during one of O.J.'s rampages against Nicole, he cut Simpson slack instead of taking him in, as was his duty...

...The jury closest in spirit to the one in the O.J...

...Yet it is also clear that the race card was played long before the trial began and Mark Fuhrman was brought to the stand...

...The woman's daughter said afterwards that her mother tearfully told her she thought O.J...

...A jury of color would buy this myth because of the polarization and radicalization that had overtaken the black community in the last 30 years and destroyed its center of gravity by convincing it that racism was worse than ever...

...A young attorney with wide-lapel, lime-green suits and a topiary-like Afro, Johnnie Cochran was a political fixer and aspiring member of the Tom Bradley machine in Los Angeles during the seventies...

...The Simpson trial has been treated as a great celebrity case in the tradition of the trials of Dr...

...For the past nine months, black leaders in Los Angeles and around the country kept saying that O.J...

...It is not hard to imagine what race cards were played a year later when 11 jurors of color confronted a 61-year-old white woman who was a potential holdout...

...case was the jury that decided the fate of Lemrick Nelson, who murdered a Hasidic Jew in Crown Heights four years ago...

...It is not hard to imagine O.J., his consciousness now raised by his new political advisors, thinking, if not saying, that Mark Fuhrman has paid off all his...

...There was a compelling timeline, a wealth of physical and forensics evidence, and even a black eyewitness to the crime...

...Cochran could say this with some confidence because his own "life experience" (a term he told Oprah he preferred to "race") told him how deeply the radical thinking of the sixties had penetrated southern California's black community, where racism-as his own meteoric career attests-is less onerous than at any time in American history, but is nonetheless invoked with an almost addictive fervor to explain any adverse circumstance or behavior of blacks...

...They show nothing about how he would deal with a well-connected black millionaire sports legend in Brentwood...

...he was identified by the dying man and confessed to his captors in jail...

...Then he was changed forever-by his own testimony-after taking on the case of Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt, a Vietnam vet who returned home with a knowledge of munitions and explosives and became the head of the Black Panther Party's underground "army...

...Yankel Rosenbaum was run down by a crowd of blacks chanting "Kill the Jew...

...In fact, Garry's innovation, and the radical racial themes he imported into the criminal justice system, were an inheritance that ultimately passed also to Johnnie Cochran...

...A jury of nine blacks and three Puerto Ricans acquitted him...

...But the issue as framed by Newton's attorney Charles Garry was not whether Newton did it, but whether the System had conspired to put yet another proud black male in jeopardy...

...From the outset, white officials in the L.A...

...Huey Newton had always insisted on white attorneys and juries because he knew that whites would be impressed by his self-constructed political myth as an outlaw rebel, a man in "primitive revolt" against social oppression exemplified by the guardians of that injustice, the racist police...

...That black fist called up the ghostly voice of sixties criminal-hero Eldridge Cleaver, who taunted the white world in Soul on Ice: "I'm perfectly aware that I'm in prison, that I'm a Negro, that I've been a rapist...

...Fuhrman was like Voltaire's God: If he didn't exist, Johnnie Cochran would have had to invent him...

...My answer to all such thoughts lurking in their split-level heads, crouching behind their squinting bombardier eyes, is that the blood of Vietnamese peasants has paid off all my debts...