…Bill
Pavelic was especially proud of his street sense. He had been one of the few
(LAPD) Caucasian cops; he liked to tell friends, who understood how things
really worked in the black community. He got so deep into it that he saw
things, he was certain, through nonwhite eyes. He discovered that
African-Americans and dark-skinned immigrants of all backgrounds had a lot to
fear from the LAPD. When the department
couldn’t prove something, some cops had no problem framing people who couldn’t
fight back. Pavelic complained loudly, and soon enough he was seen as disloyal.
Before long, he was out…
“…I
know (LAPD) Robbery-Homicide Division. I’ve actually seen them frame innocent
people. You can’t take anything for
granted…”
…Pavelic
studied the LAPD’s crime-scene logs. He called friends at LAPD to see what else
he could learn. He put in twenty-hour days, and finally what happened in the
early hours of June 13 started to come together…
…Pavelic
got a call from an officer on another matter. As they spoke, he realized that
the cop was connected to the Simpson investigation. He said the department
thought there was more than one killer. The wounds suggested each victim was
murdered with a different weapon. Goldman’s injuries indicated he had fought
fiercely before he died…
…Pavelic
felt that there was no private investigator in town better at living inside the
collective mind of the LAPD than himself. He was an expert on the department’s
rules and procedures. He’d been on the force for eighteen years, won hundreds
of medals, commendations, favorable incident reports…
…It was
Pavelic who gave them their first real hope, however elusive: He saw corruption
in the police casework…
…Under
any circumstances, Pavelic would have looked for it. His career with the LAPD
had ended in angry protest. In 1984,
Pavelic had testified against fellow officers who killed a fleeing suspect. One
cop was fired, another suspended for six months. Pavelic assumed he was stigmatized forever.
But by 1990, he’d made it to supervising detective in the Southwest Division.
Then he got in trouble again.
His men
were investigating a date rape at USC when their bosses began showing a
heavy-handed interest. Pavelic, his
partner, and their immediate supervisor eventually concluded that then-chief
Daryl Gates and a deputy chief were listening to the suspect’s father, a
prominent lawyer with influence inside the department.
Pavelic and
his men protested publicly. And Bill raised similar charges again before a
“people’s tribunal” when activist groups held hearings on the LAPD
after the Rodney King beating. Pavelic
told the crowd that lying and covering up were the norm in the department. That earned him a desk job. In 1992, he and
the brass reached an accommodation. He
took a disability pension for asthma and chest pains. He told one doctor he’d
rather spend time in a gulag than go back to work…
…When Shapiro called, Zvonko “Bill”
Pavelic was in his basement office at home in Glendale, cut off from everything. Pavelic
finished his investigations that way. He isolated himself with his computer and
his tapes from mid-morning till midnight or later. He allowed himself only one
break, for dinner with Maria and the kids. He was proud of his tight, loyal
family. That was one reason he worked at
home in the big house that Maria kept so well…
…Robert Shapiro called just before eleven P. If you are you looking for more information about บาคาร่า stop by the web site. M.
They’d worked together three years. Pavelic liked the lawyer’s
style-intellectual, highly organized, well prepared. Shapiro’s particular
genius, he thought, was laying a foundation so solid that the case was a winner
no matter who presented it. They had won every case they’d worked on…
…Would Pavelic like to join the defense team in
the Simpson case? Shapiro asked. “Are you available?” Naturally
Pavelic said yes. He apologized because he couldn’t make Shapiros first
meeting the next day. But he shifted into gear mentally while he was still
talking. He’d need Maria to clip newspapers. He knew he had to identify the
documents already being generated in the case. The prosecution’s discovery file
would undoubtedly be voluminous…”
…Bill Pavelic met Robert Shapiro at his office in
Century City. Elegantly appointed with original
art, Baccarat and Lalique crystal. Polished and expensive, like its occupant.
Then they moved to a conference room. Their forty-five-minute meeting ranged
over the entire case. Nothing would be
easy, Shapiro said. An arrest might be coming soon. He needed the investigator
to do what he did best, run parallel with the police detectives and figure out
how they saw things; then, as soon as possible, move their own investigation
ahead of them. As always, the first days were the most important…
…His one experience with O.J. Simpson was part of
his police history. When Simpson was one of the runners carrying the Olympic
torch before the 1984 games in Los
Angeles.
Pavelic was assigned to protect VIPs. He and Simpson had talked briefly
in the special seating section. Around that time, the International Olympic
Committee’s Life President, Lord Killenin, nearly died choking on his food.
Pavelic had saved his life and he thought Simpson might remember the
incident…
… He put his background to work as a private
investigator and learned to make his computer think like a cop. That was why he
was so concerned with early discovery material. If you took the documents, the
crime reports, the logs, the affidavits and connected them to each piece of
evidence, then considered how each cop might view it, then you could make a
pretty good guess where the department was going with the case. You could see
who’d like one thing, who favored another. Sometimes you could see their
destination and arrive there ahead of them…
…As an ex-cop, he drew on his knowledge of what
the police do at a crime scene. They don’t always go by the book. They cut
corners-some officers more than others-but their reports make them sound like
Boy Scouts. Pavelic knew how to read
between the lines of police verbiage and find the hidden stories in the
photographs the D.A. had turned over…
..Pavelic knew that Robbery-Homicide, the elite
corps of detectives from LAPD, would be assigned the case when it became known
that Simpson’s ex-wife was involved…
…As a private investigator, Pavelic was
particularly good at following law enforcement paper trails. He was immediately
suspicious of the lack of specifics in the Bundy and Rockingham reports.
Pavelic’s red alert signals flashed as he studied Phil Vannatter’s affidavit
for the Rockingham search warrant.
No indication who found the bloody glove. Nothing
about going into Kato Kaelin’s room. Very little information about the murders
at Bundy. Nothing about climbing the wall. Vannatter’s affidavit said they
learned, after talking to Arnelle and Kato, that Simpson had left on an
“unexpected” trip to Chicago.
More important, the information about Arnelle and Kato was a handwritten
addition to the typed affidavit. Had the judge or someone else asked a question
during the hearing that prompted Vannatter’s addendum? Bill knew they’d called
Cathy Randa and learned from her that Simpson’s trip was a planned business
trip. The detective had misrepresented the facts about the departure in order
to obtain the search warrant. O.J.’s departure was not “unexpected.”
Vannatter knew that. Pavelic knew then that Vannatter had been forced into a
further material omission, the omission of the fact that they had scaled the
wall at Rockingham before obtaining the search warrant. He also noticed that the affidavit said that
Simpson took the flight “in the early morning hours of June 13, 1994.”
That expanded the window available for the killings. The cops further
“observed” the glove on the back walkway “during the securing of
the residence.” Whether intentional or not, the language suggested that
the LAPD investigators had assumed at once they had a crime scene.
Vannatter wrote that “scientific
investigation” confirmed that human blood was found on the Bronco. Pavelic
knew that at the time he wrote the affidavit, only a routine presumptive test
had been done.
Detective Vannatter had more than twenty years on
the force, but his affidavit was amateurish. Why had he omitted so many
damaging details? Pavelic suspected that the LAPD was rearranging things and
embellishing information. Vannatter and Lange, for example, had failed to log
themselves out of Bundy when they went to Rockingham. The police logs showed
them signing out at ten A.M. as if they’d never left Nicole’s condo.
He also noticed that the criminalists didn’t list
how many samples of each bloodstain were taken. A deliberate omission? No doubt
in Pavelic’s mind.
A few days before the preliminary hearing, Shapiroreceived a twenty nine-page memo outlining every mistake Pavelic saw…
…The week before, only two days after the Bronco
chase, Pavelic had put together a memo for Shapiro asking for sixty-eight
pieces of LAPD paperwork, ranging from communication tapes and follow-up
investigative reports to the watch commander’s daily reports. He also requested
the table of contents for the murder books, which contained virtually
everything the detectives had…
…Earlier in the week, when Mark Fuhrman said he
had found the glove, Pavelic was stunned. This was the guy who found the glove?
That night Pavelic went to his computer. By now he had a program in place that
tracked every individual involved in the case: what evidence each person looked
at, what reports each one filed…
He couldn’t find a single LAPD report identifying
Fuhrman as the cop who found the glove. Not even the search warrant affidavit.
As far as you could see in the paperwork, Fuhrman hadn’t noticed the blood on
and in the Bronco. He hadn’t gone over the wall, hadn’t interrogated Kato
Kaelin. In fact, he hadn’t been at Rockingham that morning.
The Bundy crime-scene log listed Fuhrman arriving at
2:10 A.M., leaving at ten A.M. Period. At Rockingham, he was logged in at 5:l5
the following afternoon and left at 7:10 P.M.
If the logs were to be believed, Fuhrman had never
left Bundy to go to Rockingham with Vannatter, Lange, and Phillips. He hadn’t
returned to point at the Bundy glove while a police photographer snapped a
picture. He didn’t take a Polaroid of the Bundy glove to Rockingham so
Vannatter could make a comparison. The man who wasn’t there.
Pavelic started to put the facts together. Robert
Deutsch, a lawyer Pavelic knew, called him that night. “Bill, do you
realize who this Fuhrman is?” “I guess I don’t.” Fuhrman had
been part of the Britton case, which Deutsch and Pavelic had worked together. A
black man armed with a knife had robbed and brutally beaten people at automatic
teller machines on L.A.’s West
Side in 1988. Fuhrman was part of a CRASH Unit stakeout team that
spotted Joseph Britton threatening someone with a knife at an ATM. Britton ran.
He claimed he tossed the knife over a hedge before the cops chased him down.
The CRASH team said Britton waved the knife at them.
They shot him six times. Most of the bullets came
from Mark Fuhrman’s gun. Britton claimed that Fuhrman walked back to the hedge
to get the knife and dropped it beside him. “Are you still alive,
nigger?” he sneered at the wounded man. Britton went to prison and sued
the LAPD for using excessive force. Fuhrman was that cop. Once reminded of the
connection, Pavelic remembered that the Britton incident was just one item in a
hefty dossier.
Years earlier, Pavelic had checked out everyone on
the CRASH team and found pure gold under Fuhrman’s name. The detective had
filed for a disability pension in September 1981. He wanted out because of
stress. The records said that a department psychiatrist had given him a
temporary medical leave a month before he filed. The detective complained that
he was getting angrier and angrier at “low-class” people, notably
Latino and black gang members-angry enough to kill someone. In one of the
interview summaries, a doctor reported that Fuhrman used the word
“nigger.”
Pavelic knew that in April 1982 the Workers Compensation
Appeals Board had judged Fuhrman temporarily disabled and given him time off.
But a year later the Board of Pension Commissioners looked at a thick stack of
contradictory psychiatric reports and concluded Fuhrman should go back to work.
“I’m going to need the pension reports and
Fuhrman’s psychological profiles,” Bill told his friend. Deutsch was happy
to send them to Shapiro.
Some therapists wrote that Fuhrman shouldn’t carry a
gun. Others felt he was exaggerating the street trouble he saw in hopes of
bailing out of a job he didn’t like with a golden parachute. The LAPD had an
unusually large number of officers applying for stress pensions in those days.
It was getting expensive. The force wasn’t about to let anyone out easily.
Fuhrman appealed the Pension Board judgment to Superior Court. That put his
psychiatric evaluations on the public record.
Bill also began hearing from LAPD friends who had
watched the preliminary hearings. “Please be advised that several LAPD
police officers and detectives have contacted me and are eager to help
O.J.,” he wrote in a memo to Shapiro. “If there is one common
denominator in these phone calls, it is that Mark Fuhrman is a pathological
liar.”
Of course, nothing is ever simple in an
investigator’s life. Pavelic began to suspect that the LAPD was sending him
disinformation. Anything to make the defense waste time and money.
A letter signed “Blue” from a writer
claiming to be a black LAPD lieutenant advised O.J. to hire Johnnie Cochran,
and concluded: All stops are being pulled in your case. Strings are being
pulled across the country. The L.A.P.D.
and the D.A. do not want to lose your case, so beware. I know for a fact that
lies are being blended into your case.”