Simpson Case Catches Up to D.A.’s Race

A month before the March primary, the O.J. Simpson case has caught up with the district attorney’s race.

This is, in fact, the perfect arena for debate of the trial, with its huge expenditure of taxpayer dollars. Here, in the rowdy forum of local politics, Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti’s challengers hope to force him to defend his legal team’s most famous loss.

The challengers include private practice lawyers Harold Greenberg and Steve Zand and Deputy Dist. Attys. Malcolm Jordan, John Lynch and Sterling Norris. All are underfunded and considered underdogs in the March 26 election.

But if the Simpson case becomes a major campaign issue, Garcetti may find himself fighting for his political career in a contest that has so far been pretty well ignored by the media.

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A key supporter of candidate Lynch, Deputy Dist. Atty. Peter Bozanich, raised the issue when I interviewed him last week. Bozanich is a former member of Garcetti’s high command who was demoted to head of the Compton office after a beef with the D.A., partly over the handling of the Simpson case.

After interviewing Bozanich, I talked to Garcetti and William Hodgman, a co-prosecutor in the Simpson case. Garcetti, in particular, strongly disagreed with Bozanich’s version of events.

It’s not unusual for deputy D.A.s to be attacking the boss. The D.A.’s office is traditionally a snake pit of backbiting and rivalries. In fact, Garcetti, then a deputy D.A., defeated Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner in 1992.

Bozanich’s criticism, however, goes far beyond the deputies’ usual Monday morning quarterbacking.

In June 1994, when Simpson was arrested, Bozanich was one of Garcetti’s two directors of branch offices. “Whenever there were big policy questions, I was in the room,” he said. “Whenever there was an important case to be discussed, I was in the room.”

Bozanich was in the room one evening about a week after the unforgettable chase when prosecutor Marcia Clark presented her case, as it stood at that point, to the D.A. and his top echelon. Bozanich said he and prosecutor Brian Kelberg were struck by her discussion of a key piece of evidence, the glove found at Simpson’s Brentwood estate.

At the meeting with Clark, Bozanich raised a question that was later brought up by the defense when it claimed the glove had been planted. “I said there is something wrong with that glove. . . . What’s it doing there? That doesn’t make any sense,” Bozanich said. “How did the glove get there? Was there any evidence of blood along the path [where the glove was found]. . . . There were no answers for me and by the time we got to the trial, there were still no answers.”

Later, I asked Hodgman about this. He said, “I don’t recall Brian or Peter making a point about the glove.” He added, “Because I don’t recall it doesn’t mean it wasn’t raised.”

Bozanich’s next involvement was when the New Yorker and Newsweek magazines published stories about how Fuhrman had cited his own racist feelings in applying for a disability pension package a few years before.

After reading the stories, Bozanich said he told Hodgman he was concerned about using Fuhrman as a witness.

Bozanich said he told Hodgman that the stories were obviously leaked to the magazines, indicating “somebody clearly knows there is something bad about Fuhrman. . . . The disability package shows that Fuhrman either has a serious problem or he is a liar. One way or another, if he’s that way in ‘83, he’s probably that way in ’94 and somebody probably knows about it. . . . And we aggressively put him on there as if he were a wonderful policeman.”

Again, when I talked to Hodgman about the incident, he told me he didn’t recall the conversation but “I’m not saying he didn’t say it.”

Bozanich said he also had a long, private talk with Garcetti about the case in its very early stages. When Simpson was arrested, Bozanich said, he warned Garcetti against discussing the case in the media.

“We had a discussion as to who O.J. Simpson was and what a big presence he was to America,” Bozanich said. He said he told Garcetti “we should go cautiously on this and, if indeed there was a case, you shouldn’t take part in the media splash. If we have a case, try the case. . . . We shouldn’t jump to conclusions and raise peoples’ expectations until we have a chance to see the evidence.”

The following weekend, Garcetti appeared on national television doing exactly what Bozanich had warned against--discussing what the D.A. considered Simpson’s guilt.

Garcetti told me that he didn’t remember the conversation with Bozanich. He said the only reason he went on television was to discuss domestic violence, an issue in the case. “That is what I have been talking about the last 10 years and now I have the opportunity to push it real hard,” he said.

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By necessity, my conversation with Garcetti was short. He was attending a conference in San Francisco on jury reform, and we talked before he rushed to a plane home.

But as the campaign continues, the D.A. may very well be forced to spend more time answering questions about a case that could turn a sleeper of an election into one hot enough even for television news.