Petrocelli Plans Low-Key ‘Life After O.J.’

Cut the guy some slack. He’s holed up in a hotel room seven days a week for months on end, ferreting out every contradiction in every word O.J. Simpson ever said, grinding his way to a stunning courtroom victory, and you expect him to remember to pay his phone bill?

Daniel M. Petrocelli may well deserve every accolade he’s been getting since he engineered the civil trial triumph over Simpson, but even he is not that good.

Flush with victory, Petrocelli can now admit his failings: Despite repeated reminders from his wife, he never quite got around to paying that overdue phone bill . . . at least, not until the phone company cut off service in mid-trial. And then there was that little matter of the mortgage payments. “I was getting foreclosure notices on my home,” Petrocelli confessed.

His obsession with the Simpson case paid off in a big way this week, when a civil jury ordered Simpson to pay $25 million in punitive damages to the heirs of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman. Petrocelli and his partners had already won a judgment of $8.5 million in compensatory damages to be split between their client, Fred Goldman, and his ex-wife, Sharon Rufo.

The plaintiffs’ victory catapulted Petrocelli, 43, to instant fame. This week, he found his photo on the cover of Time magazine and his sound bites in demand from news outlets around the world. One camera crew after another trooped into his war room in the Santa Monica Doubletree Hotel--a room used for such top-secret strategizing during the trial that it was routinely swept for bugging devices.

Quite a coup for a guy who once aspired to be a trumpet player in a jazz band.

Still riding his verdict-night adrenaline rush Tuesday, Petrocelli was having a hard time grasping his status as the latest man of the hour. He knows people recognize him. And he also knows people support him--he’s been getting up to 60 go-get-’em calls on his voice mail each day, not to mention letters awarding him instant promotions by addressing him as “Judge Petrocelli.” But he has not yet taken a break from the media crush to sample the spotlight.

“I haven’t really gone out in the world to experience life after O.J.,” he said.

He does know, however, what life after O.J. does not entail. There will be no book deal, he vows. No television show. Not even more wrongful death cases. In fact, he’s plotting an altogether low-key encore:

He’s going back to his office in the West L.A. law firm of Mitchell, Silberberg & Knupp. He’s going to dig into the details of a contract dispute now pending in federal court. And he’s going to do his best to find a lunchtime alternative to the Caesar salad with chicken that was his staple for so many months at the Doubletree--though he may be tempted to sneak back now and then for some fries.

“I’m going to get back in the saddle and get back to doing what I’ve been doing for the past 17 years,” Petrocelli said.

Lawyers on both sides of the Simpson case heartily endorse that sentiment. Most, in fact, already have new cases cooking.

Lead defense attorney Robert C. Baker has a breach of contract trial looming in the same Santa Monica courthouse where anti-Simpson demonstrators booed and hissed at him day after day. And the defense DNA expert, Robert Blasier, is pressing a civil-rights case on behalf of inmates who allege that they were beaten by guards at Corcoran state prison.

“After being away for two years, I’m just trying to revive my practice,” said Blasier, a veteran of Simpson’s criminal and civil defense teams.

During much of the civil trial--before he was sidelined with back surgery--Blasier lived in Simpson’s guest house, the one made famous as Kato Kaelin’s digs. His wife and teenage children in Sacramento got a few “crank calls and death threats” because of his role defending Simpson, but “nothing too oppressive,” he said. “It goes with the territory.”

Maybe. But the Simpson case was territory like no other.

Petrocelli and his partners--Peter Gelblum, Thomas Lambert and Edward Medvene--spent hours every evening in Suite 205, plotting strategy over fistfuls of peanuts and swigs of beer. They got to know the happy hour menu at the Doubletree by heart because they raided the freebies for dinner. (Best night: Tuesday’s pepperoni pizza. Worst night: Monday’s hot dogs.)

“It was just all-consuming,” said Medvene, who handled the police, coroner, hair, fiber, footprint and bloody sock testimony. Before the case, Medvene said, “I didn’t even know where my liver was.” After giving himself a crash course in anatomy, he knew enough to challenge a veteran pathologist about blood flow into the retroperitoneal cavity and slice wounds to the aorta.

Like most of his colleagues, however, Medvene does not have any compulsion to work on cases that make use of the specialized knowledge he acquired during the Simpson trial. Nor does he seek further celebrity--though he had to admit, he was tickled by the free bagels and cream cheese he picked up while making the rounds of TV morning shows Tuesday.

“We’ll all be happy to return to what we did before,” agreed Lambert, who presented the blood evidence in the Simpson trial but more typically works on securities fraud and antitrust cases.

Among the partners, only Gelblum acknowledged that the cases piling up on his desk now don’t have quite the sizzle of the Simpson trial. He’s got a probate matter to untangle and some complicated business litigation to handle. They’re interesting, he said, and important. “But there’s nothing for excitement like a good jury trial.”

Nonetheless, Gelblum said, he is confident that once the Simpson frenzy fades out, he will welcome the anonymity--not to mention the shorter hours--of his regular practice. This weekend, for the first time in a year, he had the time to read the Opinion section of the Sunday newspaper and to take his dog for a hike in the mountains.

And Petrocelli had time to pay his bills.