Gates Rejects Fuhrman Account of Beating : Police: Former LAPD chief says 1978 incident was ‘fully investigated’ and calls taped version of it an exaggeration. He terms evidence in O.J. Simpson case ‘overwhelming.’

Former Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl F. Gates on Sunday dismissed as exaggeration former LAPD Detective Mark Fuhrman’s audiotaped description of a brutal beating of suspects in a 1978 police shooting, saying that the LAPD’s own findings in the case don’t match Fuhrman’s account.

“That was fully investigated, thoroughly investigated, and the department did not find any of that to be true. So this is an exaggeration,” Gates said on ABC’s “This Week With David Brinkley.”

Fuhrman’s graphic accounts, taped by a North Carolina professor as background material for a screenplay about police officers, have become a central focus of the O.J. Simpson murder trial as the defense tries to portray Fuhrman as a rogue cop who may have planted evidence to incriminate the former football great.

Simpson attorney F. Lee Bailey, also appearing on the television interview program, asserted that if Fuhrman--and the evidence he handled--is discredited, the prosecution’s case against Simpson would be destroyed.

Countered Gates: “The evidence that has been presented by the Los Angeles Police Department and the prosecution is overwhelming in this case.”

Gates, who was police chief at the time of the 1978 Boyle Heights incident, said he wasn’t sure why Fuhrman would have exaggerated. “I guess the more provocative you are today, the better . . . television sells, the better books sell. It’s the only thing I can see as a motive for Mark having done all of this.”

Gates noted that an LAPD sergeant on the scene in 1978, now retired, also recently denied that Fuhrman’s taped account is an accurate rendering of the incident. Asked if the scenario Fuhrman describes on tape could have occurred and then been covered up, Gates said, “Oh, absolutely not.”

The controversial Fuhrman audiotapes, the admissibility of which Superior Court Judge Lance A. Ito has not ruled on, were recorded by screenwriter and professor Laura Hart McKinny. In transcripts shared with The Times, Fuhrman describes investigating a shooting at a housing project in the Hollenbeck Division, which includes Boyle Heights. In the transcript, Fuhrman talks about a bloody beating by police of suspects in the 1978 shooting of two police officers.

“We basically tortured them,” Fuhrman said in the transcript. “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.”

In the tapes, Fuhrman said that 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. “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.”

Defense attorneys have said they believe Fuhrman was telling the truth in the tapes; Fuhrman’s attorney, Robert H. Tourtelot, has said his client was not speaking as himself on the tapes but as a fictional character.

In his segment on the ABC show, Simpson defense attorney Bailey said that if jurors hear the Fuhrman tapes, they will have a visceral reaction.

“I think that the jury is going to have to have very strong doubts as to how that evidence got where it was claimed to have been found,” he said. “And if they believe that some evidence was planted, I think they will equate that with an innocent defendant, and I think their deliberations will be swift.”

Earlier this year, Fuhrman testified that he found a bloody glove on the grounds of Simpson’s Brentwood estate. Prosecutors have argued that the defense’s attacks on Fuhrman’s character and credibility do not prove he planted evidence and are intended to distract the jury from whether Simpson is guilty or innocent. Simpson has pleaded not guilty to the June 12, 1994, murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman.

The Simpson jury, which had been scheduled to visit the crime scene Sunday night, instead had the evening off after prosecutors, according to a source, withdrew their request for the field trip because they were dissatisfied with the lighting at the site.