A Cause Celebre

Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. likes to say he’s the same man now as he was before the O.J. Simpson trial.

Ridiculous. His life is almost unimaginably different. He has been super-sized. His yearlong exposure on TV has inflated almost everything about him: his lifestyle, his goals and his opportunities to achieve them.

Before the trial, Cochran had a single Los Angeles office. Today he is the Cochran Firm, with 120 lawyers in eight states--and growing. His web of informal legal alliances extends nationwide, in a structure so complex that even Cochran cannot easily explain it. He may expand to the Caribbean, he says.

Cochran now works on about 50 cases at any one time, often in as many different locations. His private jet facilitates such a workload.

Before the trial he was a well-known figure in certain Southern California legal circles. Now his face and name are known everywhere there is CNN. He may be the first private citizen in history to have such a huge worldwide recognition factor. Strangers send champagne to his table, he is whisked to the front of movie lines, he is parodied on TV, referred to in films. In Soweto, South Africa, little children saw him and sang “The Johnnie Cochran Song.” At the Louvre in Paris, he was swarmed by well-wishers. On his first New York subway trip, riders greeted him, and one woman asked him to autograph her Bible.

Cochran’s attempts to grapple with this new Imax-sized public image--and to make worthwhile use of it--may ultimately be more interesting to cultural historians than the trial that made him so famous.

Meanwhile, he’s written a legal memoir, “A Lawyer’s Life” (St. Martin’s Press, with David Fisher), out next month. It’s his second book since the infamous trial and in it, he weaves together his pre- and post-Simpson cases, to show why he should not be defined by that one case.

On a recent day in his glass-walled Wilshire Boulevard offices, Cochran emphasized that the Simpson case, although it had the sexy plot points of a box office blockbuster, was routine for him in a legal sense. Just one more example of an accused man receiving as much justice as he could pay for.

“If Simpson had been poor, he’d be in jail right now, whether he was innocent or guilty,” Cochran says. “In this system, you are innocent until proven broke. When you are broke, you are pretty much finished. That’s the way it is, not the way it’s supposed to be.”

He knows many people think he’s “some kind of one-shot, flash-in-the-pan lawyer who used legal mumbo-jumbo and got this guy off that they thought was guilty.”

But it was neither his bad rhymes nor his passionate prose that won the case, he says. Simpson could afford the best DNA legal experts (Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck) and detectives to find evidence like the Mark Fuhrman tapes. “Fuhrman swore under oath he’d never used the word ‘nigger.’ On the tapes he used it frequently. He committed perjury in a murder trial. It destroyed his credibility.” There are people, Cochran says, who say the prosecution lost its case because the police tried to frame a guilty man.

Does Cochran think Simpson did it? “Nobody knows but the murdered and the murderer,” he says. “But if the timeline is correct, it would be pretty impossible.”

The case was important to Cochran’s career mostly for the wave of opportunities that flowed from it, he says. He was 57 at the time. For 30 years before that, he had been taking on police departments and the municipalities that funded them. He was so successful and proud of his work long before the Simpson trial that he had been considering retirement. He had enough money, he says. He also had two homes in Los Angeles (Los Feliz and Marina del Rey), multiple cars (including a Rolls-Royce)--and the satisfaction that he had found justice for many clients.

Long before Simpson, he was well known for lawsuits that alleged police abuse against his mostly minority clients--and for winning large settlements from local municipalities that allowed such abuse to exist. It was a controversial tactic. Many accused him of earning his living by fleecing taxpayers, who ultimately paid the money that Cochran won.

Charles Ogletree, professor and associate dean at Harvard Law School, says Cochran may not have been well known before the so-called “trial of the century,” but decades before Simpson he was revered in the black community, an inspiration to aspiring black lawyers.

“They all knew there was a lawyer from Louisiana that would fight for justice. The cases he took weren’t about money. They focused on aspects of law enforcement that were known to be brutal, abusive and often unfair to black suspects.” He was trying to correct injustice long ago when, as a young lawyer, he took the case of Elmer “Geronimo” Pratt. (Cochran lost that case; Black Panther leader Pratt was convicted in 1972 of murdering a schoolteacher and sentenced to 25 years to life. But Cochran never stopped working to free Pratt, whose conviction was overturned 27 years later, in 1997.)

Cochran’s goal, he says, is to take only those cases involving significant issues, where he can effect change for whole groups of people. He wants nothing less, he says, than peaceful revolution.

On this sweltering summer morning, Cochran has been talking nonstop for 20 minutes, at a pace so fast his words are jumbled together, his sentences half finished. He cannot seem to get his thoughts out fast enough.

His voice rises continually as he approaches a crescendo of zeal: “Let me tell you the bottom line. Whether it’s New York, Cleveland, Memphis, Chicago, Atlanta or D.C.--or wherever I have offices--I want to change the culture. I want to reverse things so the bad cops fear the good cops. The way it is now, the bad cops have the run of the place. There is this blue wall of silence. Nobody will tell on anybody. Nobody will testify.

“Imagine sodomizing a man in a relatively small police station, where everybody’s within earshot. And it takes five days before an officer comes forward to talk about it. And that’s only ‘cause he talked with his mother and she told him he had to do the right thing.” Cochran was retained by Abner Louima, who was sodomized by a New York police officer with a plunger. The civil case has been settled for a total of about $9 million and brought about major changes in police procedures.

He has been involved in the cases of Amadou Diallo, shot 41 times by New York police who mistook his wallet for a gun (the officers were acquitted); and of Gideon Busch, 31, a Brooklyn Hasidic Jew killed by police for allegedly wielding an 8-inch hammer (a civil suit charging civil-rights violations is pending). This month, he and associates settled a case for $900,000 on behalf of Michigan firefighters who claimed their chief denied rights to women and blacks. Locally, he currently is representing Maria Paz, whose husband, Mario, was killed in their bedroom by a SWAT team looking for drugs, which they never found.

Within just the past few months, Cochran won $4.4 million in a Nashville police abuse case; $15 million in a Georgia wrongful-death case and a settlement against a Buffalo, N.Y., mall that prohibited buses from minority neighborhoods from unloading passengers at its curb. But for all his successes, Cochran is not without his detractors. He has a palimony case pending against him in state Superior Court by his former companion of 18 years, Patricia Cochran, who is the mother of his adult son. (He has been married to Dale Cochran, with whom he has two daughters, since 1985.)

He was recently accused by Pasadena attorney Joe Hopkins of stealing cases from other attorneys. Cochran says the same claims have been levied at him in New York and Chicago. “It happens everywhere. People say, ‘Here he comes, he’s going to take the case away.’ That’s not my goal. These people call me and ask me to represent them. I would never solicit a case. I don’t have to.”

Hopkins replies that Cochran doesn’t play by the usual rules. “He’s supposed to say, ‘Look, it sounds to me like the lawyer you have is doing a good job. Why not go ahead and stay with him?’ He doesn’t do that. It sounds like flat-out greed to me.”

Cochran’s doesn’t dwell on such claims. He has added huge corporations to his hit list: He has instituted class-action lawsuits alleging racial or gender discrimination in the workplace against Johnson & Johnson in New Jersey, Alcoa in Cleveland, Hershey in Pennsylvania and BellSouth in Atlanta.

He has formed Cochran Florida as a separate entity with lawyers there, “to deal in mass torts nationwide” against drug companies who sell products that are proved to cause severe injury or death.

The mere mention of Cochran’s name is now enough to get some opponents to discuss policy reforms and financial settlements in situations where they might otherwise have let the case go to trial.

In the Battle Creek, Mich., firefighters’ case, for example, Cochran is proudest not of the financial settlement, but of the mandatory reforms that will ensure that African Americans and women will henceforth be allowed to drive firetrucks and perform all other regular duties that they’d been denied. In his book, Cochran says the cases that made the most profound impressions and altered the course of his career were not always big cases and not always winners. “If one case could be said to have shaped my career, it was the investigation into the death of Leonard Deadwyler,” he writes.

In 1970, Barbara Deadwyler, eight months’ pregnant, thought she was going into labor. Her husband, Leonard, tied a white cloth to their car antenna, which in their home state of Georgia was a signal to police that a driver needed assistance. The husband sped toward the hospital, was stopped by police, and “only when he saw a gun pointed at him did he understand that he was being pursued, not assisted.”

In his book, Cochran recounts the tale Deadwyler’s wife later told: Her husband pulled off the road, an officer approached with gun drawn and leaned into the car. Her husband asked him to lead them to General Hospital. The gun went off at point-blank range. Leonard Deadwyler said, “But she’s having a baby,” fell into his wife’s lap and died. (The officer said his gun went off when Deadwyler’s car lurched forward, and the case was determined an accidental homicide.)

Cochran was young, it was the first of many such cases he was to handle--beatings, chokings, murders--almost all committed under color of police self-protection, with attorneys having to prove that the accused did not resist arrest, did not threaten violence. Starting as a young lawyer in the L.A. city attorney’s office, he began to see patterns in the testimonies of police against defendants he was trying to convict. “Too often, defendants arrived in court bruised, beaten, with broken bones,” he writes. Cochran’s job was to prosecute them for resisting arrest or interfering with an officer performing his duties. “It was the same script on a daily basis. The officers always claimed they’d used reasonable force. A system was working, just not the legal system.”

He writes that he soon realized if a defendant was proved to have resisted, the city would not be liable for any injuries as a result of LAPD actions. “I couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t go along to get along.” He soon left to join a law firm, then started his own practice.

Many cases from the 1960s through the ‘80s he cites in his book have a startling similarity to current cases. In 1981, for example, Cochran represented the family of college football star Ron Settles, who police said committed suicide in his Signal Hill jail cell. But evidence pointed to the use of a police chokehold. Cochran won the largest police abuse settlement in the state at the time.

“On Jan. 10, 1963, I was sworn in” as a member of the bar, he says. “Here it is 2002, and I am hearing the very same stories. It is the same situation. These guys expect us to believe them? I am seeing history repeat itself almost every day.” He mentions his current client in Inglewood, 16-year-old Donovan Jackson, who was handcuffed by Inglewood officers who were videotaped slamming his head down on a car, allegedly because he tried to grab the officer’s testicles. Two officers face criminal trial: one is charged with assault, another with false report writing. All charges have been dropped against Jackson, whom Cochran describes as “docile, slow to process things,” and “the least likely person you could meet” to try and grab an officer. “We call it creative report writing, creative testifying. Or, as my colleague Alan Dershowitz calls it, testilying. The only reason that officer has been charged is because there’s a videotape of the incident. And even with a video, the officers usually say that something happened before the video started to make them behave the way they did.” Cochran’s voice is veering toward soprano. He soon realizes he is sounding antagonistic toward police, which is not his intention. “I need police; I respect them. If something goes wrong, I want to call them. I believe most police are good. My own son, Jonathan Eric Cochran, is a California Highway Patrol officer.” His son’s work in law enforcement is mentioned on the first page of his new book, as if to alert readers that what follows is not an indictment of all police, just those he considers rotten apples.

Cochran now spends most of his time in New York, where he owns homes in Manhattan and Long Island, and where he is active in Harlem civic affairs, and in the Abyssinian church.

When he first got to Manhattan in 1997 to launch a Court TV show, he recalls, he knew nothing about it. He’d been there only as a visitor. “I learned where to get a good haircut, who to call for a toothache; I discovered the corned beef sandwiches at Carnegie Deli.” He also discovered that pastel suits were not the usual legal attire, and Rolls-Royce not a preferred vehicle. On the East Coast, he has a Jeep and is ordering a Lincoln Navigator. He has teamed with new good friends Neufeld and Scheck in a partnership called Cochran, Neufeld & Scheck that takes only civil-rights cases. He likes their passion, their ethics, their character, their sense of humor, their love of sports, their lack of concern for money. “It’s not important to them. They are only concerned about working to make a positive change in society. I love these guys.” Neufeld returns the compliment. Talking by phone, he says that Cochran, Scheck and he “all share the same passion, to do the most meaningful work possible. In the aftermath of the Simpson case, we had access to legislators, to courts, to leaders. People would listen. We want cases that can result in significant changes to make better a flawed system.” A visitor points out to Cochran that Neufeld and Scheck are Jewish and that the tension between blacks and Jews in New York has been widely reported. Has Cochran encountered any antagonism from his African American colleagues because he is so close to the pair?

“Relations are strained between the two groups,” he says. “I think we all need to take another look, try to understand one another. When I took the case of Reginald Denny, people said, ‘How could you? He’s white, and you’re going against black guys.’ I said those black guys who bashed Denny’s head in are thugs. They are black thugs. I have fought all my career for some kind of equality, and then you tell me not to represent Reginald Denny because he’s white? You have to be crazy.”