THE O.J. SIMPSON MURDER TRIAL : No Hubbub at Pub : Bar’s Patrons Are Unfazed by Mention at Simpson Trial

F. Lee Bailey made Hennessey’s Tavern the most famous neighborhood watering hole in America on Monday--but the regulars barely noticed.

Most customers were aware that Bailey had identified the shamrock-bedecked bar and restaurant in Redondo Beach to millions of television watchers as the spot where Los Angeles Police Department Detective Mark Fuhrman allegedly made racist remarks almost a decade ago to a woman with whom he was drinking.

But those who clustered at Hennessey’s bar and dining tables Monday night seemed more interested in the beer, the food, the Los Angeles Kings hockey game on the overhead screens and the local gossip.

“It didn’t faze me at all,” Larry Scott, 36, a local auto detailer who eats three to four meals a week at Hennessey’s, said of the bar’s sudden notoriety.

“People . . . gotta socialize somewhere,” Scott said.

One employee, who gave his name only as Mark, said he had seen Fuhrman at the bar once or twice.

Mark also said racist comments are not unheard of at the bar, in Redondo Beach’s Riviera Village section.

“The people in here do have that attitude--there are people who make their little racist remarks,” he said. “I guess that comes with the territory,” he said.

The sudden attention seemed to irk Hennessey’s owner, Paul Hennessey, who instructed his manager to politely ask news reporters to stay away from the folks at the bar and from the patrons dining on corned beef and cabbage and shark with rice and salad.

Emerging from Hennessey’s, Mike Torres and a friend, house painter Jim Murphy, said the place wasn’t the only apparent Redondo Beach connection to the O.J. Simpson trial.

Torres, a 32-year-old disc jockey at parties and weddings, said he went to Palos Verdes High School with a girl named Kathleen Bell--although he wasn’t sure it is the same person who has accused Fuhrman of the racist remarks at Hennessey’s.

And just the other day, Murphy said, his sister spotted Fuhrman at a local church service.

“It really shows you what a small world it is,” Torres said.

They were followed by Chris Hardwick, 44, who had just polished off a couple of beers after a volleyball game. Hardwick predicted that the bar’s flame of publicity would soon flicker out.

“It’ll be news another three or four days,” he said. “Then everybody will forget about it.”