On Tape, Fuhrman Describes Incident Similar to ’78 Event : Simpson trial: Sources say LAPD has records of a Boyle Heights confrontation that led to a brutality suit, which matches many details given by the detective.

In graphic passages from the tapes that have come to dominate O.J. Simpson’s murder trial, former LAPD Detective Mark Fuhrman said he and other officers went on a bloody beating spree and “basically tortured” suspects after two policemen were shot in 1978, then lied to Internal Affairs investigators about the incident, according to a portion of the transcript made available to The Times on Thursday.

Sources say the Los Angeles Police Department has now uncovered records of a Nov. 18, 1978, incident in Boyle Heights that matches many details described by Fuhrman in that audiotape, which along with tape transcripts has been provided to the prosecution and defense in Simpson’s trial.

Official departmental corroboration of even some significant details could lend credibility to the grisly account that Fuhrman gives in the 1985 interview, and might bolster the contention of Simpson’s lawyers that the recently retired detective was telling the truth in the interviews, not making up details to impress a would-be screenwriter.

Beyond the Simpson trial, the tapes may hold profound implications for the LAPD, of which Fuhrman was a member until earlier this month. If the department’s re-examination of the 17-year-old incident determines that Fuhrman’s account was factual, there could be profound political and social fallout from a case that the LAPD acknowledges has become a public relations nightmare.

In the transcript shared with The Times, Fuhrman said he was the primary suspect in an 18-month Internal Affairs Division investigation that resulted from the 1978 incident, but that he escaped any punishment.

“They knew damn well I did it,” he said, according to the transcript. “But there was nothing they could do about it. Most of the guys worked 77th [Street Division] together. We were tight. I mean, we could have murdered people. We all knew what to say.”

Fuhrman was briefly assigned to the Simpson murder case and reported finding a bloody glove on the grounds of the former football great’s estate, but prosecutors have forcefully argued that the defense’s attack on Fuhrman’s character and credibility does not prove that he planted evidence and is intended to distract the jury from the question of Simpson’s guilt or innocence.

Simpson has pleaded not guilty to the June 12, 1994, murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman.

“Whatever [Fuhrman’s] personal beliefs may be,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Marcia Clark said Wednesday, “the truth of the matter is that he could not have done what they’re trying to prove he did.”

In the transcript, Fuhrman tells screenwriter and professor Laura Hart McKinny about the investigation of a shooting at a housing project in the Hollenbeck Division, which includes Boyle Heights.

“Two of my buddies were shot and ambushed, policemen,” Fuhrman said, according to the transcript. “Both down when I arrived. I was first unit at the scene. Four suspects ran into a second-story apartment, and we kicked the door down, grabbed the girl, one of their girlfriends, by the hair, stuck a gun to her head, and used her as a barricade.”

McKinny interrupted Fuhrman at one point during the interview and asked whether she could include those details in her work. Fuhrman objected, saying it had not been a full seven years since the incident and therefore the statute of limitations would not protect him.

Fuhrman’s attorney, Robert H. Tourtelot, has said his client was not speaking as himself on the tapes but rather as a character in a fictional work. Fuhrman’s attention to the statute of limitations could undermine that argument.

Nevertheless, Tourtelot said Thursday that he had no knowledge of the events reportedly described on the tapes and he believed that his client was “inflating, exaggerating an incident that may have had some relationship to reality for the purpose of impressing a screenwriter.”

According to the transcript, Fuhrman said the beating continued until “we had them begging that they would never be gang members again” and included throwing some of them down two flights of stairs.

“We basically tortured them,” Fuhrman said in the transcript. “There was four policemen, four guys. We broke ‘em. Their faces were just mush. They had pictures of the walls with blood all the way to the ceiling and finger marks of trying to crawl out of the room.”

Afterward, “we went downstairs with the garden hose,” he continued, the transcript said. “We had blood all over our legs, everything. With the dark blue uniform in the dark, you can’t see, but you get in the light, and it looks like somebody took red paint.”

Once they were cleaned off, Fuhrman said, he and his colleagues went outside and began directing traffic.

The bottom line, he said: “You don’t shoot a policeman. That’s all there is to it.”

LAPD Discovers Parallels

LAPD officers have been scouring Police Department records since details of the tapes began leaking out last week. Although Police Chief Willie L. Williams has said the department’s ability to investigate is hampered by the district attorney’s unwillingness to share the tapes until the end of the trial, sources say the LAPD’s hunt turned up records of an incident with many parallels to the one described by Fuhrman.

On Nov. 18, 1978, Officers Dean Brinker and Alf R. Andersen, both of whom worked in the Hollenbeck Division, were patrolling near a housing project when they spotted a group of young men, some of them fighting.

According to a press report at the time, the officers tried to break up the fight, but were blocked by Juan Ramirez, a 22-year-old man. They scuffled with Ramirez and arrested him, but in the process were surrounded by the crowd, and each officer was shot with a small-caliber handgun.

Brinker remains with the Police Department, assigned to the narcotics division. Reached Thursday, he declined to answer questions about the 1978 incident, which landed him in the hospital for 20 days.

“I know what you’re getting at,” he said. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Andersen has left the department, but he too declined to comment: “I’d just as soon not talk about it [the shooting]. The events of that [Simpson] trial don’t relate to me.”

The Boyle Heights shooting resembles the one described by Fuhrman in many respects, sources said: It involves two shot officers, it took place near a housing project, the suspects were not immediately apprehended, Fuhrman was working in Hollenbeck Division at the time, and charges of brutality were leveled against the Police Department in its wake.

Ramirez, who was booked for felony resisting arrest by the officers who were shot, filed a lawsuit against the arresting officers and the city of Los Angeles on Sept. 24, 1979, alleging false imprisonment and assault and battery, among other things. Court records do not make clear how that lawsuit was resolved, and Ramirez’s attorney said Thursday that he could not recall the case. Court records do not indicate that Ramirez was ever charged with a felony.

The allegations of brutality also reached the LAPD, which, as Fuhrman claims in the interview, launched an Internal Affairs investigation to determine whether any of its officers had committed wrongdoing. Scores of interviews were conducted as part of that inquiry, sources said, but Fuhrman’s personnel evaluations from the period do not reflect any discipline for excessive force.

Trouble on Evaluations

Those same evaluations, however, show that Fuhrman began struggling with personal and professional problems soon after the Boyle Heights shooting.

Before 1978, his evaluations were glowing. Supervisors praised him for intelligence, calm, keen tactical senses and proficiency in combatting gang crime, and his outstanding evaluations continued through late that year.

“Officer Fuhrman is an intelligent officer who is well-liked by his peers,” his supervisors said in early 1979, soon after the Boyle Heights incident. “He is dependable and always arrives at work early.”

Later that year, however, his next evaluation recorded an admonishment for using improper tactics and faulted him for arrogance, defensiveness and irritability.

“When confronted with antagonistic or uncooperative suspect or arrestee, Fuhrman becomes easily aggravated and argumentative with that person and responds with antagonism,” that evaluation states. “Fuhrman’s attitude has affected his job performance, relations with the citizens he deals with and relations with his supervisors.”

Despite a “self-initiated weightlifting program,” Fuhrman took off five sick days and 22 days for injuries during the six-month period the evaluation covered.

In early 1980, another evaluation credited him with improvement but noted that he had confronted a “family problem,” the nature of which was not explained.

His supervisor stressed that Fuhrman handled that matter with common sense and good judgment.

Fuhrman’s lawyer, Tourtelot, said his client had wrestled with problems in those days. “He was a pretty angry guy,” he said, but added that he found it difficult to believe the incidents that Fuhrman allegedly described on the tapes.

“If a guy’s face was beaten in so badly, you would think that would have gotten out,” Tourtelot said. “I view that with a great deal of suspicion.”

Defense Motion

The Police Department would not comment on the matter; nor would attorneys for the prosecution or the defense.

However, Simpson’s attorneys filed a motion with Superior Court Judge Lance A. Ito on Thursday seeking to play for the jury dozens of excerpts from the Fuhrman tapes, which were recorded over a nine-year period that ended in July. McKinny conducted the interviews as research for a screenplay about police work called “Men Against Women.”

The defense motion was immediately sealed by Ito, who spent part of the day reading the transcripts and listening to the tapes in order to judge for himself their contents. Those tapes have been edited to remove references to Ito’s wife, LAPD Capt. Margaret York, who once supervised Fuhrman and whom he criticized on the tapes, according to lawyers on both sides of the Simpson case.

Although the motion was sealed, Simpson lawyer Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. has said defense attorneys want the jury to hear at least 30 instances in which Fuhrman used the word nigger. On the witness stand in March, Fuhrman denied ever using the word during the past 10 years.

In addition, Cochran and other members of the defense team have cited numerous instances in which Fuhrman boasts on the tapes of tampering with evidence, singling out blacks for arrest, manufacturing probable cause to make arrests and committing other offenses.

How much of that the jury will get to hear is a question for Ito to decide. Prosecutors have argued that some passages are irrelevant to the issues in the Simpson case.

“There [are] a lot of relevance issues here, obviously,” Clark said during a hearing in Ito’s chambers Monday. “We are not talking about a use-of-force case here.”

Under that reasoning, prosecutors would almost surely object to the jury hearing Fuhrman’s description of the beatings after the police shooting. But defense sources say Simpson’s team has asked Ito to admit that evidence under the theory that it demonstrates Fuhrman’s willingness to lie in order to cover up his own wrongdoing.

Moreover, if defense attorneys could uncover reports from the time in which Fuhrman represented the facts of that incident differently than he does on the tapes, it could further strengthen their contention that the jury should disregard his testimony altogether.

Ito has not said when he plans to rule on the admissibility of the Fuhrman tapes.