Mark Fuhrman’s On-Air, on Crime

That’s the news, ladies and gentlemen. It’s seven minutes past the hour here at KXLY, 85 degrees in downtown Spokane, and now it’s time for “All About Crime” and . . . Mark Fuhrman!

Look out, cops. Somebody gave Fuhrman a microphone and 5,000 watts of broadcasting power.

Twice a week, the Los Angeles Police Department’s most famous ex-detective goes on the air with his two-hour news radio call-in program on crime, and if the world’s criminals think they’re in for it, wait till you hear what he has to say about the police.

This week’s program: the Chandra Levy case and U.S. Rep. Gary A. Condit. “Washington, D.C.--It’s not the place you want to be investigated if you’re dead,” Fuhrman declares. “A homicide clearance rate that’s so bad that most big agencies could make that on domestic violence and suicides when you get there and the gun’s still smoking!” As for Condit: “What’s he hiding? I think a better way of putting it is, what isn’t he hiding?”

Don’t ask Spokane County Sheriff Mark Sterk what he thinks of Fuhrman. Fuhrman irritates him so much he won’t give any more interviews about how much he irritates him, saying he doesn’t want to help Fuhrman sell his book.

Of course, Fuhrman doesn’t think much of the Spokane County Sheriff’s Department, either, regularly scoring them over the air as lazy, undertrained, investigatively inept and taking long lunches.

“You know,” said Fuhrman, “I love cops. Most of these guys aren’t cops. They’re not doing the job. You know a good rule of thumb is, watch ‘NYPD Blue.’ Would Andy Sipowicz tolerate this [stuff]? He’d go ballistic.”

Since retiring from the LAPD under a perjury charge during the O.J. Simpson case for his past use of racial epithets, Fuhrman could have quietly joined the dozens of ex-Los Angeles police officers who have retreated to rural northern Idaho, a stone’s throw from Spokane and a world away from Parker Center and Brentwood. He could have shot deer and caught trout like the rest of them, tended horses on his 20-acre ranch north of Sandpoint, Idaho.

Instead, Fuhrman, 49, has a whole new career in an arena he once seemed to disdain--the media--taking on law enforcement as a prolific and locally popular critic of the profession that paid his salary for 20 years.

Spokane Police Get Vocal, Local Critic

His newest controversy is centered in his adopted hometown, this one over Spokane serial killer Robert L. Yates Jr., who pleaded guilty earlier this year to 13 murders, most of them prostitutes and drug addicts picked up in Spokane’s seamy East Sprague neighborhood.

In a series of radio broadcasts and a new book on the case, “Killer in Spokane,” Fuhrman claims the police blew it--that Yates could have been arrested two years earlier, saving nine women’s lives, if homicide detectives had been doing their jobs right.

Fuhrman accuses the serial killer task force of leaving important clues unpursued, hiding key facts that should have been shared with the public and failing to do timely processing of murder scenes.

Police, for their part, have alleged there are numerous inaccuracies in Fuhrman’s book, and say the former detective is holding a grudge because he was given a cold shoulder when he had expected to be welcomed as an insider into their investigation.

“He was a police officer who had taken an oath to protect his community and he lied on the stand under oath. Which part of ‘Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth’ did Mr. Fuhrman not understand?” Sheriff Sterk told the Spokane Republican Women’s Club.

A local paper characterized the exchanges that have played out over the past several months: Fuhrman calls Sterk fat. Sterk calls Fuhrman a liar. Sterk calls Fuhrman a racist. Sterk calls Fuhrman a convicted felon. Fuhrman says Spokane detectives are lazy. Fuhrman calls detectives incompetent. Sterk says Fuhrman fabricated descriptions. Fuhrman says detectives bungled the Corvette clue, the fingerprint, the eyewitness. Sterk says Yates being in prison speaks for itself.

Turning Tables, Relishing Spotlight

The sheriff, when asked about Fuhrman last week, declared himself spent on the subject. “We find no merit in Mr. Fuhrman’s book or his allegations. We have been open with the facts of this case in our community and with other media sources in the past, but we have reached the point where we are no longer going to revisit the opinions and allegations directed at this investigation by Mr. Fuhrman,” he said in a statement. “We stand by the end result, that Mr. Yates was found, was arrested and [pleaded] guilty because of the overwhelming evidence against him in this case.”

In fact, the detective who spent the last months of his career being hounded by the media seems to enjoy turning the tables and takes a special pleasure in knowing intimately all the ways in which good cops can do lousy work.

His second book (after the inevitable O.J. reprise), “Murder in Greenwich,” accused the Greenwich, Conn., police of bungling the investigation into 15-year-old Martha Moxley’s death and pointed the finger at Michael Skakel of the Kennedy family.

His book has been credited by some for helping revive the investigation and lead to criminal charges against Skakel in the 1975 case, which is still pending.

Every Tuesday and Thursday, Fuhrman and his co-host, veteran Spokane radio newsman Mark Fitzsimmons, take their listeners on a journey across the criminal headlines of the day, often apparently unrestrained by the irksome necessities of evidence and proof.

On the Robert Blake case, for which Fuhrman is preparing an article for Talk magazine: “I think LAPD feels like I do. This is not a whodunit. It’s turned into a how can we prove it? That’s it in a nutshell.”

On Levy, the Washington intern who had an affair with Condit before abruptly disappearing: “They want to walk very softly because a congressman is involved. They should have had [Condit] . . . in there, talking about his relationship right away. . . . At this point, the D.C. police can call him anything they want. Anyone you interview four times is a witness to a crime, or a suspect. What else is there? Why is it so damaging to call a congressman a suspect?”

Last week, Fuhrman had true crime writer Ann Rule on his show as a guest, talking about the apparent parallels between the Levy case and the events behind her book “And Never Let Her Go,” about the 1996 disappearance of 30-year-old Anne Marie Fahey, then secretary to the governor of Delaware, and the subsequent conviction of Thomas Capano, a powerful, well-connected attorney, who was her lover and her killer.

“Everything started exactly like the Chandra Levy case and it’s eerie what went on in this case,” Fuhrman told his listeners.

“It’s deja vu, but it’s more than that,” Rule agreed. “We had a young woman who was having a clandestine affair with a very respected, popular married man involved in politics, who just disappeared. . . . It’s almost like you could take my book and change the names.”

They go on to discuss Condit’s demeanor, the way he dresses (Fuhrman: “You ever look at his shirts? They’re really sharply pressed . . . and they’re always pastel, too, do you notice that? I don’t like that.”), the fact that some of Condit’s aides have hired lawyers (Fuhrman: “There’s two aides that are lawyered up in the Condit camp, and that is a mackerel under the cushion, in my view.”)

Just how far Fuhrman has crossed to the other side may be evident in his next book project, a look at the death penalty.

Something’s wrong, Fuhrman says, if 93 death sentences have been overturned since 1976 and only eight of them are a result of new DNA evidence. “What about the other cases?” he says.

“I have a feeling I’m going to come away with a kind of funny opinion about the death penalty. It’s probably going to be if we can’t do it right, let’s not do it at all. If there’s a confession, there’s got to be a polygraph. And the defense has got to have access to their own DNA lab--I mean, it’s a guy’s life,” he said. “I believe in the death penalty, but I don’t believe in killing the wrong person.”

‘NYPD Blue,’ Just Like Old Times

Don’t ask Fuhrman if he was glad to leave Los Angeles behind, aside from the O.J. Simpson affair. That gets a guffaw. “You mean, except for the assassination, how did you enjoy the play, Mrs. Lincoln?”

He has a lot to say about the LAPD and how it is no longer the department he once worked for, about the Rodney G. King case and the Rampart Division scandal and the fact that when young Idaho police officers tell him the LAPD is recruiting, he tells them not to answer the phone.

“I say, run as fast as you can in the other direction,” Fuhrman says. “The place is imploding. They’ve got problems they’re never going to get rid of and it breaks my heart.”

So Fuhrman most of the time doesn’t even read the local newspaper. He gets up at 5, makes coffee, feeds the animals, turns on the TV at 6 for reruns of “NYPD Blue.”

“I need my Sipowicz fix every morning,” he explains. “It seems a little childlike, but it’s as close as you can get to being in a police department. Andy Sipowicz, he’s my hero. I mean, he’s classic. Black humor, tragedy, sarcasm. I mean, this is the way it is, you know.

“I miss that.”