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Behind the Bastards
Part Two: Mark Fuhrman: The Most Racist Cop, or Merely Normal Racist Cop?
00:54:43
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- [00:02]
Robert
Call Zone Media. Welcome back to behind the Bastards, a podcast about the very worst people in all of history. This week we're on part two of our episodes on the recently and lamentably departed Mark Fuhrman, who now that we've gotten to know, you know, the mood has turned somber here in the behind the Bastards studio because Sophie and our guest for today, Joe Kasabian, are all overwhelmed with grief at the titan that we've lost. You know, that is no longer with us. The great mind, the great heart, the great law enforcement officer, Mark Fuhrman. You know, I don't know, it almost feels pointless to go on. Why are we here?
- [00:48]
Joe Kasabian
I'm really happy, though, that in death that he can be, you know, the United States newest gender neutral bathroom.
- [00:57]
Robert
That's right. That's right. Yeah. Find out where they put him. Somewhere in Idaho.
- [01:02]
Joe Kasabian
Yeah.
- [01:02]
Robert
The only gender neutral bathroom in Idaho.
- [01:05]
Joe Kasabian
Just if you see a grave in Idaho, piss on it. It might be Mark Fuhrman. It might not be.
- [01:10]
Robert
No way to know. You gotta roll the dice somehow. Our hearts will go on and on and on. Let's talk about this shit, Robert. Talk about the O.J. trial. I'm excited. Yeah, let's talk about. We love the OJ trial. Again, folks, if you want to watch the documentary starring Ross from Friends as Robert Kardashian, you know, we' for you. But I can replicate the best parts. Just imagine Ross from Friends saying Juice over and over again and you pretty much got the important bits. You know,
- [01:43]
Joe Kasabian
I'm really happy that Ross from Friends career could go so well. He ends up doing Brownface to play an Armenian guy because Serge from System of down one answer his phone.
- [01:54]
Robert
I do think what is really funny to me about that is they had Cuba play OJ. Cuba Gooding Jr. And it's a weird case of, like, the casting, doing a lot of the acting, because I can believe that OJ's evil because Cuba Gooding
- [02:11]
Joe Kasabian
Jr. S really evil. That's true.
- [02:14]
Robert
It was a very, like, fascinating, like, oh, wow. A lot of the lifting's just being done by, like, I know who Cuba Gooding Jr. Is.
- [02:21]
Joe Kasabian
Yeah, yeah. They nailed it on that one. They just had no idea.
- [02:24]
Robert
Great idea. Yeah. This is an I heart podcast. Guaranteed human.
- [02:33]
Joe Kasabian
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- [02:37]
Robert
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Joe Kasabian
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Robert
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Robert
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Joe Kasabian
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- [03:06]
Robert
John Impact Awards podcast, available on June 1st on the iHeartRadio app. And everywhere podcasts are heard. Number one hits, millions of records sold, awards sold out tours. You think the Jonas Brothers are satisfied? Nope. It's podcast time. We get to ask other people questions because we're sick and tired of being asked questions. A Jonas is available now and their first guest is a big one. Paul Rudd.
- [03:28]
Joe Kasabian
You know star Steve Carell is a great singer. Didn't he tell you not to audition at the office or something? I told him, whoa, we were filming Anchorman. Clearly I was the idiot. Thank God he didn't listen to me right.
- [03:38]
Robert
Listen to hey Jonas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [03:44]
Joe Kasabian
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- [04:44]
Robert
This week at Safeway and Albertsons. Six to 16 ounce selected varieties of strawberries, raspberries or blackberries are $1.99 each. Limit three member price with and extra meaty pork back ribs or St. Louis style spare ribs. Bone in previously frozen are $2.99 per pound limit for member price with coupon plus medium avocados, colored bell peppers or English cucumber sold by the each or tomatoes on the vine or sweet onions sold by the pound are $0.99 Member Price Visit safewayoralbertsons.com for more deals and ways to save. So let's talk about Mark Fuhrman. By the early 1990s, Mark Fuhrman was a veteran LAPD detective who seems to have been somewhat popular and influential among, like, his. At least his clique in. In the department. Mark was known for making racist and sexist jokes and for his. He's got a hobby. What. What kind of hobby do you think a guy who, like, joined the Marines because he, like, idolized violence and never got over not getting to go to war and then became a cop. What kind of. What do you think, like, one of his hobbies is? What do you think he collects
- [05:53]
Joe Kasabian
shit? Stamps. I'm going to go. Stamps.
- [05:55]
Robert
No, it's. It's mem. It's military memorabilia.
- [05:58]
Joe Kasabian
It's got military memorabilia.
- [06:01]
Robert
I was going. Coins. I was going coins.
- [06:05]
Joe Kasabian
I know these guys. I fucking know these guys. I am a historian by trade, and every time you meet a guy, every fucking time, every day, oh, I collect some military memorabilia. I'm like, it's Nazi shit, isn't it? It's always. It's always Nazi shit.
- [06:20]
Robert
And they'll always tell you, like, you don't even have to come on to them because they're so defensive. And that's true with Mark because I'd read, like, two articles that had said that, oh, he got into collecting old military uniforms and awards. And so I'd wondered. But that's all they said. They didn't say anything, accuse anything. But in his own book, when Mark sang and like, yeah, I liked collecting old military stuff, quote, some of which happened to be German, I was like, no one even said that, Mark. No one was even asking. And you just brought it up because you knew. Because, like, you knew what we knew, you know, and you had to confirm it for us. That's very funny.
- [07:01]
Joe Kasabian
To me, it's A direct A to B. Like, no cop is collecting. Like, you know what? I got really into the Imperial Japanese Navy, which, to be fair, is not that much of a. Better of a choice. Not still, like, they're going to. One thing specifically.
- [07:14]
Robert
There's not an LAPD detective who's like, yeah, I'm just really interested actually in, like, the differences between the Austro Hungarian military proper and then, like, the actual, like, Hungarian military and the ways in which these kind of, like, differing, like, forces within the same state clashed. And I like to collect items that sort of embody that clash. And like, no, it's always just Nazi shit.
- [07:38]
Joe Kasabian
No, you misunderstand Me, sir, I am simply a enthusiast of the honved militaria is all. It's me. I'm the only one in the world.
- [07:48]
Robert
Yeah, yeah. So one of his favorite cartoons, because he also likes. He loves to collect political cartoons, like newspaper cartoons. He's a big cartoon guy, and he has, like, a lot, a bunch of them displayed at his desk at any point in time. This is relevant because when the O.J. simpson case blows up and whether or not Mark Fuhrman's a racist becomes an important matter for reasons we'll discuss later, people are like, he always had a swastika at his desk. Like a cartoon swastika, like, displayed prominently, like taped and, like, displayed or something up, like, pasted up at his workplace. And people thought that was weird. And so in his autobiography, Mark had to be like, that's bullshit. I didn't have a drawing of a swastika. I mean, yes, there was a swastika in a drawing, but it was from a political cartoon by an artist called Paul Conrad. And the cartoon was like a swastika rising up out of the ashes of the recently collapsed Berlin Wall. I haven't actually been able to find this cartoon, but here's. This is Furman's explanation for what Conrad was going for with the cartoon. Conrad was asking whether we were making a mistake by allowing a country with the power and history of Germany to be reunified. So that's. That's why Furman was like. And that's why I liked the cartoon. As you know, I thought it was asking a poignant question. And this is obviously what it meant. And that's why there was a swastika at my desk. And I don't buy it. I don't buy it. And also, that's not what the cartoon was about. Okay, again, because Google's so fucked up, I didn't find that cartoon, but I did find an article that interviewed Paul Conrad about that cartoon because it came up during the Simpson trial. And the New York Times reached out to Paul Conrad and asked for comment. And Paul gave a very different explanation for what that comic meant. So again, Mark is like, obviously it means that, you know, maybe reunifying Germany is a mistake because of the Nazis. Here's why Paul said he made that comic. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Spanish, Italian, and other European workers were sent back to their home countries to create jobs for the East Germans. Out of this came the rising up of the neo Nazis, the skinheads, or whoever you wish to refer to them. My Statement was in protest and anger that the downing of the Wall, hopefully producing freedom for all of Germany, had in fact, given rise to the tortured thinking of the past. That's not the same.
- [09:57]
Joe Kasabian
That's not the same at all.
- [09:59]
Robert
Yeah, he is talking about, like, the visible rise of the skinheads and how that, like, upset him and stuff. And Mark is being like, no, when the Wall fell, people were just worried the Nazis were coming back. And there's just a difference between those two things. I guess it doesn't matter much in the context of the court case, but it's interesting to me.
- [10:15]
Joe Kasabian
And think of the mental pathways that lead a sergeant, I guess, in the LAPD to look at that and be like, this is something that needs to be on my desk. Because it says something so poignant and powerful about the reunification of Germany.
- [10:32]
Robert
Germany, Yeah. I don't know.
- [10:35]
Joe Kasabian
Nobody believes.
- [10:36]
Robert
Kind of weird, Mark. Kind of weird. So probably the thing that Mark's peers at the station knew best about him is that he had some issues with women. He'd lied about much of what he told that journalist, you know, McKinney, and the tapes that we talked about last episode. But Men Against Women, the group that, like, he talked about founding, was a real organization within the LAP that has been, like, independently reported on. Now, it was never an officially recognized group, obviously, but it did appeal to a large number of male officers. And there's internal documentation that not only did the department brass know that Men Against Women existed, but that they knew Fuhrman was the ringleader behind starting it. So the group began with Mark and several other older male cops complaining about split tails, which was a cop slur for female cops. And I don't know when it started. Most of the Mark, we usually say, like, 85, which is, like, right when he got back onto patrol, which is weird that he's got, like, the social clout that he's, like, starting this group, but maybe this is him distracting from his own disgrace by, like, trying to rally everyone to attack the lady cops. I don't know. Prior to 1997, the only evidence that this group existed was those taped interviews of Mark Fuhrman. And initially Marked claimed that these had been lies. Bluster to feel cool. But after the O.J. simpson case, the LAPD conducted an investigation into the tapes and into, you know, sexism and racism within the lapd, and they came to some shocking conclusions about the group Men Against Women. Per an LA Times summary of that investigation, members of the group believed there was no place for women in the lapd. Members would act aloof to female officers, ignore them, and try to get them into trouble during their probationary periods after joining the department. In some cases, the actions of the group inhibited some women from safely and effectively performing their duties and created fear in many women that these male officers would not provide backup if they requested it in the field, the report said. Further, there was evidence that the men against women officers would ostracize male officers who did not support their boycott against female officers.
- [12:38]
Joe Kasabian
That's kind of what I would expect. It's the same thing of, like, whenever we talk about black or. Or Latino, cops, be like, no, Mark Furman isn't a racist. It's like, think of the blowback that they would get if they didn't say that. You know, I mean, like, this is how these institutions work. Yeah. Even I'm sure there's a fair amount of dudes who came forward and said, no, Mark Fuhrman's a standup dude that had been called slurs by him or been treated like shit.
- [13:06]
Robert
But they were like, same with this then. Blue line. Yeah. And that's why. Because they bring in a woman cop who had nice things to say about him and that. Like, no, I always trusted him. And the fact of the matter is, like, this is a guy who inside the lapd was known and had been repeatedly investigated for, like, being a sexist asshole. And the fact that nobody did anything about it is proof of the fact that it wasn't weird. Right, Right. Like, it wasn't that weird.
- [13:35]
Joe Kasabian
Same with him, you know, casually saying the N word all the time.
- [13:40]
Robert
Constantly. Yeah. So that 97 report revealed that men against women. The existence of this group, founded in the mid-80s, was exposed to the top brass to like, the. The people running the department in 1986 when they held like the LAPD holds a closed investigation. So their investigating this because women have complained about this group within the department, but they're not like telling anyone and they're not gonna publish the results of the investigation. Cause that might.
- [14:07]
Joe Kasabian
Cause they already know how it's gonna inform people.
- [14:10]
Robert
Yeah, exactly. After this closed investigation, the department chose to take no action and continued their investigation into why women were being harassed in their department for almost a decade. So there's a wider investigation, like, why are women in the LAPD unhappy? And there's also an investigation into the group Men Against Women. And the department's like, well, there's nothing to do there, but it's gonna take at least another 10 years to find out why lady cops are unhappy. No way to know. Impossible.
- [14:36]
Joe Kasabian
Certainly these two things are interconnected.
- [14:40]
Robert
So investigators would later conclude that a major reason that all of this went down was that most police supervisors did not consider female officers being harassed as a problem. Right. This isn't an issue. And often these superiors are members of Men Against Women themselves. Quote from the report. Supervisors had such close relationships with the officers who were harassing the women that it made it difficult for the women to lodge complaints. The report said in some cases, the supervisors worked with or for subordinate male officers on off duty business ventures. Furman supervisors not only allowed him to act out his prejudices, but they accommodated him by allowing him to select his partners and other separatist working conditions, the report said. So again, this is. Mark is racist. This group is racist. His supervisors support it. It's widely popular with a lot of men who react to Mark forming this male supremacist group by letting him avoid working with women. Like, the department isn't just allowing this. They're actually modifying their rules in order to accommodate Mark and other people like him.
- [15:47]
Joe Kasabian
Yeah, Mark won.
- [15:48]
Robert
I love the lapd. Yeah, well, for now, Mark won. It's not gonna be a lasting victory, Joe, as we'll talk about. So here's where I gotta do something, though, and I gotta say something I don't normally say on this show, which is that I don't know if Mark is as responsible for this group as this report makes it sound. Cause Mark would claim to have founded the group, and the report says he founded the group. And I don't know that. I doubt that in particular. I just really don't want that to lead you to think that Mark is the ringleader here, because this makes. Their angle is Mark is manipulating everyone. Everyone falls into line around Mark as opposed to. I think Mark is servicing a need and desire by his peers, and that's why they accommodate him, because he's giving them what they wanted. Right. And I think that's an important caveat. So that 97 report doesn't make the LAPD look good, but again, it does kind of portray Mark specifically as a guy whose unique toxicity warped the environment around him. In fact, as much as this report portrays Fuhrman as a deeply poisonous influence, the same year it was released, 1997, Mark puts out his own book, Murder in Brentwood, which I've quoted from a few times. And in that book, he includes a letter that LAPD Chief Daryl Gates sent his mom in 1995 during the O.J. simpson trial. And here's a line from that Letter. I, too, am very proud of Mark, and I know he has done his job proudly and properly and very effectively, perhaps too effectively for the O.J. defense lawyers. And so if Mark is this uniquely toxic individual who warped the environment around him, why is the police chief saying he's a great detective who did his job perfectly? Why is everyone accommodating and working with him again? Like, don't trust that format, you know?
- [17:40]
Joe Kasabian
Yeah, I think there could be a few things to it. Like you said, and I. It's the thin blue line at work where he. He can be on video or tape. Like, he is routinely saying slurs admitting to crimes that he then says he was bullshitting about. Like, but every cop's gonna line up and be like, no, he's perfect. He's our perfect little boy. It doesn't matter what the evidence says.
- [18:04]
Robert
Yep.
- [18:05]
Joe Kasabian
So I think. I think there's a little bit of that. A little bit of him being, you know, a misogynistic, racist piece of shit, and a little bit of him servicing an organizational, institutional need for someone to take the reins to lead the misogynistic, piece of shit club.
- [18:21]
Robert
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And someone like, I can see also why his bosses might have wanted someone deniable to lead the harassing club. That makes women want to quit the job. Like, they want less women cops, too. They like it being there because it makes them want to leave, but they don't want to be. Get in trouble. They don't want that stank on them, you know, Let Mark.
- [18:38]
Joe Kasabian
Yeah, the chief of police can't be doing that shit. He has actual work to do. Hypothetically.
- [18:41]
Robert
Let Mark do it. Yeah. So that LAPD report concluded the type of sexual harassment used in West Los Angeles was about power, pure and simple. In short order, Furman exerted that power over the younger, less experienced, and therefore more vulnerable female officers. Furman's power grew every time he made an unchallenged sexist comment and roll call, every time he blatantly ignored a female officer, every time he resolved a field situation. Female officer. And every time his behavior was reinforced by his supervisors, such as deploying him with only male partners. As his power rose, his inability to influence the peer group grew until it was Furman who set the tone for the watch, not the supervisors. And, oh, shit. Is that because he was just so powerful, or is that because the supervisors, again, figured it's better to let Fuhrman take the heat for making. Doing these things that we want done, but I don't want to be responsible for doing that's my contention.
- [19:36]
Joe Kasabian
I think it's probably both. Like, I think the supervisors, the, the, the higher ranking people want him in those positions to be the fall guy, but also kind of like we've already said, he's a bit of a charismatic dude. People do like him, and he isn't altogether terrible at his job. Of being an lapd.
- [19:55]
Robert
Of being an LAPD Officer. Yeah, so, exactly.
- [19:59]
Joe Kasabian
I think the two things are kind of, you know, it's like a remora on a shark. You know what I mean?
- [20:05]
Robert
Yeah.
- [20:05]
Joe Kasabian
Like the, that one leads to the other, one feeds the other. Like the supervisors want him to do this, but at the same time, the supervisors wouldn't pick him unless he was popular enough to pull it off.
- [20:17]
Robert
Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. Unless, like, he was really liked and respected widely, which is, you know, something you just have to, to realize as you go through this. And the other thing you have to realize is that life is completely meaningless and just absolutely devoid of joy or light without the sponsors of this podcast and the many products and services that they provide.
- [20:40]
Joe Kasabian
Many people are saying this.
- [20:44]
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- [22:02]
Robert
Hey, sweetie. Your mother showed me this Carvana thing for selling the car. I'm going to give it a try. Wish me luck. Me again. I put in the license plate. It gave me an offer. Unbelievable. Okay. I accepted the offer. They're picking it up Tuesday from the driveway. I haven't even left my chair. It's done. The car is gone. I'm holding a check anyway. Carvana, give it a whirl. Love ya.
- [22:24]
Jennie Garth
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- [22:27]
Robert
Sell your car today on Carvana. Pickup fees may apply. Hey, it's us, the Jonas Brothers.
- [22:33]
Joe Kasabian
And guess what? We have some big news.
- [22:34]
Robert
What's the news?
- [22:35]
Joe Kasabian
Huge news. We created our own podcast called hey Jonas.
- [22:39]
Robert
We invented a podcast. Well, we didn't invent it.
- [22:42]
Joe Kasabian
We.
- [22:42]
Robert
We.
- [22:42]
Joe Kasabian
We just contributed to it.
- [22:43]
Robert
First people to do podcasts. Pretty. Yeah, pretty wide range of podcasts, but this one's extra special. So how did we. How do we actually come up with the name hey Jonas? Guys, I honestly don't remember. I think it was on a call about what we should call it and what we were thinking. I'm originally calling it one of the early names of our band before Jonas Brothers. This is how you guys remember it going down? Yes. I have a very different memory of this. We were talking about a thing a
- [23:12]
Joe Kasabian
bit for the podcast.
- [23:13]
Robert
People could call in and say, hey, Jonas. And then I wrote down on my little notepad, hey, Jonas. And offered it up as a potential
- [23:20]
Joe Kasabian
title for the podcast.
- [23:22]
Robert
But thanks for remembering that.
- [23:23]
Joe Kasabian
Guys, listen to hey Jonas on the
- [23:24]
Robert
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Just listen. We don't care where you hear it. Keith Giamanca seemed like a mild mannered suburban dad, but secretly he became someone else, a master of disguise who went on a crime spree. At the time, did it seem like a crazy idea? It seemed very crazy, but I felt so desperate that I felt it was the quickest, easiest way out. Did you allow yourself to think about how it could go wrong and what that might look like? No, I didn't want to manifest that. I was trying to manifest success. Every family has its secrets. But what happens when you discover that your dad has been living a double life? That is not the look of an innocent man. This is gonna change my life and my family dynamic forever. Because everything that had existed prior in my reality is now untrue. Listen to Deep Cover the Family man on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. Thank God life matters again. You know, without ads, what do we have? Nothing. You know, that's. That's it. That's the only reason to be that. And hearing about Mark Fuhrman I don't know.
- [24:59]
Joe Kasabian
That's very important to me personally. I love hearing about dead cops.
- [25:04]
Robert
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So as good a case as all of this makes, you know, especially that LAPD report makes remark being a bastard. Again, I don't buy the centrality of just him quite as much as they want to put it out. Right. Cause he's not just a poisonous worm. He's a worm who's been poisoned by the other, I don't know, sick worms in the apple or. This analogy was a mistake. Whatever. I just want to highlight because after the OJ trial, the LAPD has a strong vested interest in cutting Furman off like a tumor. They're going to blame a lot of their culture problems on him, as many of them as possible. And that's not really accurate or fair. You know, he's a symptom. He's not the cause. Environmental audits performed on the LAPD in the 1990s uncovered symptoms. Systemic gender bias issues, not just in west la, but across the entire department. Penny Harrington of the national center for Women in Policing said this at the time. Widespread sexual harassment, intimidation and threats against women on the force remain a serious problem on the lapd. A problem made worse by the apparent complicity of the top command. So during the mid-1980s, men against women was said by Furman to have had 145 members in five out of 18 of the department's police divisions. So there's 145 cops in the he men woman haters club of the LAPD in like, 87. And maybe he's lying. I don't know what the real numbers were. I don't even know if they had, like, a roll call or whatever.
- [26:30]
Joe Kasabian
I can't imagine they did.
- [26:32]
Robert
Yeah, and it's kind of. It's hard for me to tell. Cause he's just getting back to patrol duty in the mid-80s. I don't know how much of this he's judging up. I will read. I'll read a quote from the Christian Science Monitor, kind of summarizing his claims about how this group worked and, like, what they did. Cause as I said, they're holding TR trials. They have, like, tribunals for male officers who are, like, nice to girls. Like, it's the saddest fucking. I'm just gonna read this quote.
- [26:57]
Joe Kasabian
Oh, God. These guys are fucking pathetic.
- [27:00]
Robert
He also reveals that it held mock trials of male officers who were accused of fraternizing with women. Such tribunals often occurred after midnight in parking lots where participants would drink beer and sentence Fellow officers to silent treatment and other means of ostracization. So I wanted to know. It's so sad. And it's so sad that I had to know more. I want to know more about these fucking tribunals. And so thankfully it turns out that back in 1997, the New York Daily News got access to some unreleased cut parts of the tapes that referenced these tribunals. Oh my God. And they like posted or they published an article including quotes from that. And so I'm gonna quote from that article. This is like explaining what these looked like. And by God you're gonna be. What would you guess is the aesthetic inspiration for these nighttime trials of cops who are nice to girls?
- [27:54]
Joe Kasabian
Frat.
- [27:55]
Robert
No pledging kind. Way worse, Joe. Okay, great. I'm gonna quote from that article. On a 1988 tape, Furman described tribunals as a cross between criminal trials and Ku Klux Klan rallies where members would drink beer and conduct. Again, he compares it to a AKK rally. These losers. Here's Mark standing around in a dark parking lot of a baseball diamond at 3:30 in the morning. And I put my hood on and I am calling a tribunal. And we get in a circle with Tony standing in the middle. Okay? The charges are as follows. You were seen having a coffee with one of the enemy. Furman said male officers found guilty of fraternizing with females were sentenced to punishments like a week of silence treatment or silent treatment or the back where other male officers would turn their backs on the offender. Like my God, first off your clan rally, your anti girl clan. And you got a hood.
- [28:52]
Joe Kasabian
What you brought? He brought his own hood to work. I brought you the LAPD issued those with your gun?
- [28:59]
Robert
No, that's the sheriff's department. You gotta buy your own hood in the lapd.
- [29:04]
Joe Kasabian
Budget cuts are a motherfucker.
- [29:06]
Robert
Byoh. Everybody knows that. Yeah, yeah, that's that. After Biden cut the budget, they had to had the trim nose.
- [29:14]
Joe Kasabian
So this is what they meant by defund the police.
- [29:17]
Robert
Yeah, exactly. Many of the claims Mark made in Those interviews with McKinney focused around what he would call kill parties. These were, if you believe Mark, both parties where cops celebrated and praised other officers who'd killed citizens. And a term for times when officers might just like kill someone for fun during a call. Like they show up and there's a guy that they don't like or think is an asshole and they like kill him so they can have a kill party. Like he's kind of claiming that like sometimes we just like murder people that we either Know are bad or don't like for fun and hold parties celebrating it. And he brought this up in part to point out that women were not invited to maws kill parties. When, like the men against women guys would hold a kill party, they didn't invite any of the girls to their cool kill parties.
- [30:01]
Joe Kasabian
I believe him because we know this happens today with the LAPD and the lasd.
- [30:07]
Robert
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [30:09]
Joe Kasabian
I don't think these things are confirmed.
- [30:11]
Robert
You know, stuff like this is happening. I don't know if they call them this, but they're happening.
- [30:15]
Joe Kasabian
They probably have an even more horrible name. And like the badge bending thing as well. Like all this shit still happens.
- [30:24]
Robert
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Variants of it at least. So for his part, Mark always denied that men against women was anything more than, quote, a tongue in cheek beer drinking joke used by officers to blow up steam, make us laugh and try to forget the impossible job we had in front of us. Being a cop so hard. Sometimes you gotta dress up like a Klansman to hold trials for having coffee with a girl in the parking lot outside of work. You just do the night. 3:30 in the morning. The 1980s version of locker room talk. Is that what just happened? Jesus.
- [30:54]
Joe Kasabian
Pretty much.
- [30:55]
Robert
Yep, yep.
- [30:55]
Joe Kasabian
Cool guy just blowing off steam because cell phones hasn't been invented yet. So he couldn't just like sit around playing Candy Crush all day.
- [31:01]
Robert
That's right, that's right. Or deep fake porning his co workers. Which is the kind of guy Mark would have been in 2026. He claims that after that investigation in the mid-1980s, Internal affairs investigated him, but found no evidence of discrimination. Just a few bad jokes on the tape.
- [31:21]
Joe Kasabian
Once again, falling back, calling them jokes.
- [31:24]
Robert
Man, this shit's old as hell. Yeah, the Klan rallies were just a bit.
- [31:30]
Joe Kasabian
They were ironic, Robert, it's fine.
- [31:33]
Robert
Yeah, yeah, they were joke. Comedy clan rallies. That's what the 3K stand for, the comedy clan rally.
- [31:39]
Joe Kasabian
I think that's what Joe Rogan's navig his new club.
- [31:42]
Robert
Yeah. So on the tape and in the book, Fuhrman repeatedly blamed police Captain Margaret York for a lot of his issues. He hates this lady Margaret York. He says that she bullied him over Ma and over a bunch of other stuff, and that when she arrived in the West LA department, quote, she immediately singled me out and tried to make my life miserable. And he, like, accused, I think, of like, sleeping to the top. He says a lot of awful stuff about this lady and it's gonna be really funny later on because of who she's Married to. But we'll talk about that in a second. So McKinney would later use what she'd gotten from Mark to write a screenplay called Men Against Women, about, like, female cops dealing with bigotry in the LAPD. Basically. It gets optioned for $1,000 by John Flynn, but it's never turned into a. Tragically, I don't know that it was a good screenplay. I haven't had a chance to read it yet. After her last talk with Mark in 1993, that's the last of her recorded interviews with him. She filed them away until about a year or so later she saw something crazy on the news. And this is what leads us to the OJ Simpson trial. Right now we're finally into the story everybody knows Mark for. So by the time of the murders in 1994, Mark had already been to OJ's Rockingham estate in Brentwood once before, in the mid-1980s. I think it was 85 or 86, because there'd been a domestic dispute between OJ and Nicole. Right? And so Mark had shown up once and he'd seen, you know, a pretty bad situation. Right. OJ was an abusive guy. This is not like a fun. Like, he had reason to. Not like OJ Simpson, like, going into this. Previously, in 1992, he had been deployed on the streets during the unrest and rioting over the Rodney King beating and its aftermath when the cops who beat Rodney King got off. Right. So he's there for the LA riots. Mark doesn't write much about this other than to say that he was on the streets at the time. But the fact that the LA riots had happened, like, two years earlier is really relevant to everything that happens with oj. And I know everyone who grew up at the time knows it, but, like, that's a big fear running through this, is that, like, well, if he's convicted, is there going to be like, another massive uprising? Because LA had just boiled over like that, and people were really angry again about the police and police misconduct because of everything that Mark. Everything I've told you about Mark comes out during this case, Right? So that's all also in the mix here, too. You know, I'm not going to linger crazy long on the details of the trial itself, because that's been litigated everywhere in the world. I'm just going to talk about Mark's role in it. On the night of June 12, 1994, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were brutally murdered. And we all know it was oj, right? Like, nobody's ever. You know, nobody's ever posited any other realistic thing. OJ wrote a book called if I Did It Afterwards. You know, I don't think that's. We don't need to hop around here. So after doing it, OJ goes to the airport and he flies to Chicago, right? And the bodies are discovered. Around 12:10am on the 13th, Detective Mark Fuhrman arrives at O.J. simpson's house. Cause, you know, once they know this has happened, they're obviously gonna go to OJ's place. Furman had been there before. So he and his partner drive to the Rockingham estate at around 5am and he finds an apparent blood stain on Simpson's Bronco parked outside. Now, from this point forward, things proceed fairly normally for a while. There's an investigation that commences, and Mark is not the main detective on it, but he's playing a role. He's at OJ's house, he's looking for evidence, and he is the guy who first locates the bloody glove, right? That's going to be like this major thing in the case. He is that he sees it behind the Simpson home, right? And he finds it, but he does not pick it up. And this is important, and he doesn't introduce it into evidence, so remember that for later. But he does find it, right? And because he finds it, once this goes to trial, the prosecutors decide to put Mark on the stand to walk everyone through when he found the glove. Because this is an important piece of evidence that connects O.J. to the murder, right? And so they need Mark to talk about it. And it just so happens that when Mark goes on the stand the first time to talk about having found this glove, there's another lawyer watching on tv. Because this is a big deal from the beginning. Obviously, OJ goes on the run briefly, and like, that's all filmed. So by the time this goes to trial, public interest is as a fever pitch. And so while Mark is talking about finding this glove on the stand, a lawyer named Robert Deutsch is watching the evening news, right? And he sees Mark and he tells his wife, that's the guy who found the bloody glove. And his wife is like, yeah. And I'm going to quote now from a New York Times article from 1996, Mr. Deutsch happened to be familiar with the detective from a case in which police officers shot a black robbery suspect, and then Mr. Deutsch believes planted evidence against him. After the newscast, Mr. Deutsch put in a call to Robert El Shapiro on the Simpson legal Team. He reported that the detective had once applied for a stress disability pension and had told psychiatrists that he had tortured suspects and hated N word. So this other lawyer who's been involved in a case with Furman where a black man was, like, abused. Right. Has, because of everything that happened to that case, found out about Furman's backstory, because it's public, and it came out during that other case. And he calls Simpson's defense attorney one of them, and he's like, hey, I know something really important, because the glove is the most important piece of physical evidence that the prosecutors have. And if you can say, well, this is the guy who found it and he's a racist who planted evidence and talked about planting evidence, you can get the whole thing thrown out. Right?
- [37:23]
Joe Kasabian
Yeah. That's a great way to sprinkle in reasonable doubt.
- [37:27]
Robert
Yeah. And Shapiro. As soon as this guy calls Shapiro and says, I know this guy is a racist who talked about framing black men, Shapiro's like, ding, ding, fucking ding, baby. Like, say less. You know, I know how I'm earning my salary, right?
- [37:42]
Joe Kasabian
Fuck, yeah. I mean, that's like getting a gift on a platter.
- [37:46]
Robert
Oh, God. Yeah. So the Juices legal team were looking for absolutely any angle that they could play to keep their client from spending the rest of his life behind bars. And given the recent LA riots and the filmed, brutal beating of Rodney King, which the officers responsible for had gotten off for committing, many Angelenos were not only willing to believe that a bad cop had set OJ up up, they didn't even need to be convinced of that to believe it. Right. Because the bloody glove was bad for Simpson. Anything that impugned it as evidence was a priority, which meant Mark Fuhrman was a priority. And once they start digging into the past, the stuff that Deutsch has told them, they found plenty of valid reasons to believe that, like, oh, this guy really might have set O.J. up. Right? Like, it's a believable case, at least. And the most damning thing they find during this process of digging up all the dirt they can on Mark Fuhrman is these tapes, right? And basically somebody tells someone who knows. McKinney informs Shapiro, hey, there's a lady who was, like, interviewing this guy, and he said some crazy shit. And I think he said the N word a bunch. Cause by this point, Mark has said on stage under testimony, oh, I never said the N word. Like, not in the last 10 years have I used that.
- [38:56]
Joe Kasabian
It's so weird that he knows. Like, oh, well, I Haven't said it in, like, 10 years. Like, but you did. Yeah, he's specifying 10 years.
- [39:03]
Robert
Yeah.
- [39:03]
Joe Kasabian
You remember this happening specifically 10 years ago. That's a really weird thing to remember.
- [39:08]
Robert
Yeah. And so it becomes really important to be able to prove that that's a lie, and the tapes will prove it's a lie.
- [39:15]
Joe Kasabian
So.
- [39:15]
Robert
Right. Once Shapiro finds out these exist, he's going to move heaven and earth to get them introduced into evidence. And part of that is going to be making sure that the media finds out that there's tapes. Right. And starts getting clips of the tapes because they. That creates buzz and brings up news. And soon there are news articles quoting segments of these tapes, of these clips. Some get leaked by the defense team after they get access to the tapes. And, you know, it's bad stuff. You know, I quoted earlier a brief summary. But other things in those tapes from. It admits to brutality, to police, to beating people. He admits to sexually harassing female colleagues and civilian women. He repeatedly uses the N word. Portions of the tapes are ultimately admitted into evidence and shown to the jury because one of Mark's favorite stories to tell McKinney were all the ways that, like, cops planted evidence on people. And that's incredibly relevant, right? Yeah. Like, and it's again, this is often framed as like, oh, the shitty media. And, oh, these tapes never should have been introduced. No. If the detective on a case who found a key piece of evidence has 13 hours of talking about how much he loves framing black guys by planting evidence that's actually super relevant. Even if he's lying, that's super relevant. I'm sorry, it just is.
- [40:29]
Joe Kasabian
I call this Destroy My Testimony mixtape.
- [40:33]
Robert
Yeah. Yeah. And we're gonna play a clip from the Destroy My Testimony mixtape. This is a clip I found from the Kyra Phillips show on CNN that was part of a recent special on the Furman tapes that played some bits that had not been previously revealed. I'm gonna play you a clip that just tosses out the, like, three of these quotes so you can kind of hear what he sounded like and get like, an idea of sort of the highlights. This is like a Worst of the Furman Tapes. Vulgar Weinstein. She had a little fight with Jew. We called her the Wandering Jew. Little plow wick. She had a big nose. Sexist. How do you arrest a violent suspect? I yell out, have a man do it. Disturbing. You've gotta be a borderline sociopath. You gotta be a violent. Cool. So that's the kind of shit he's saying, right? I didn't include him saying the N word repeatedly, but he does, you know, and the LA would claim then and after that most of these allegations had no real world backing. He was just lying. There's no evidence of it. And, you know, he was lying a lot. But that also makes it impossible to trust Mark Fuhrman. You know, even if he never planted evidence on anyone, the fact that he has 13 hours of pretending it. It does impugn his reliability, I would say.
- [41:52]
Joe Kasabian
So, yeah, best case scenario, he is just a liar.
- [41:58]
Robert
Yeah. Yeah. So many legal experts agree that the Furman tapes in specific and Mark's whole existence as a detective and involvement with the glove may well be why OJ Walked away a free man. It didn't help that he'd repeatedly shit talked Captain York on the tapes. I mentioned this earlier. He talks a lot. She slept her way to the top. She's always mean to me. The judge on the OG Simpson case is a guy, Judge Ito. Captain York was his wife.
- [42:26]
Joe Kasabian
Oh, my God.
- [42:28]
Robert
Wow.
- [42:29]
Joe Kasabian
I mean, it does bring up. I mean, as. As funny as that is. Poor Lance, at a certain point should have the judge, like recused himself from
- [42:39]
Robert
the situation or there was a big debate and I think it was just because things had gone like they, that was. They didn't want to deal with that nightmare. But no, that was a major topic of discussion. Like that had to be ruled on. Another judge had to come in and say, it's ok, like, I don't think this will cut some stuff out, but I don't think this will like make it, make it be an issue. But no, they did have to get a ruling on that. And this is one of the reasons why everyone's so pissed at Mark is because like, this trial's already hell, already incredibly expensive, already a fucking circus. And then now we have to stop it to figure out if we've got to find a new judge. Because you fucking shit talked his wife a bunch on tapes to a journalist, you idiot.
- [43:14]
Joe Kasabian
Like, what are the fucking odds too, man? Like, like Furman is a great example of a dipshit just tripping over his own feet constantly. Like statistically almost impossible ways.
- [43:30]
Robert
He tripped over his own dick so hard the whole LAPD fell.
- [43:36]
Joe Kasabian
Like, yeah, like, of all the judges, of all the people in the lapd, he manages to go on tape for hours, shit talking the wife of the guy that's gonna destroy him.
- [43:48]
Robert
It's amazing. It's so funny.
- [43:52]
Joe Kasabian
It's fucking great.
- [43:54]
Robert
So the stupidest part of all this is Mark never even needed to be involved in the O.J. trial in the first place. There was no good reason for him to have been on under oath at all. Yes, he had found the glove, but that just means he spotted it with his eyes and he pointed it out to the other detectives. But he never touched it. It was another detective who introduced it into the chain of custody. And you could have just had that guy testify. Right? The DA's office never needed to call on Mark. I've read reporting that says prosecutors did because they interviewed him and they found him impressive and trustworthy. Cause he's, like, tall and, like, looks like the statuesque ideal of a cop. And they're like, oh, great. Yeah, this guy will look good on stand next to oj. He looks like just a horrible decision. He looks like TV cop guy. He looks like a TV cop, right? And they're like, he'll be a great witness. He should never have been there like this.
- [44:49]
Joe Kasabian
I love that the LAPD did this. Having full access to his personnel records. Like a PR fucking landmine. Like, no, put him up there. We're gonna step right on this motherfucker.
- [45:00]
Robert
And knowing because I know that you're posting me might be like, oh, well, this wasn't like. How could they have known this wasn't a normal case? Because it was already the most famous case in the history of. Of American law enforcement before R.J. simpson. The trial starts.
- [45:12]
Joe Kasabian
A massive celebrity.
- [45:13]
Robert
He's a huge celebrity. They knew this was going to be under an enormous amount of scrutiny. And they knew this guy's history, and they had no excuse to make a decision that stupid. It's really fucking stupid.
- [45:25]
Joe Kasabian
Impressive.
- [45:26]
Robert
So I wanna read a quote from the author of that New York Times Review of Books article, quoting Peter Aranella, a professor of law at ucla, critiquing the decision to have Furman on the stage. If a person creates a fantasy life once, they are going to do it again. Professor Aranella said there are only two plausible explanations for the prosecutor's decision. Professor Aranella speculated One is that the prosecution was overwhelmed by the defense team's blizzard of motions. The other, he said, is that prosecutors had gotten away with using racist cops in other trials. What do we think that is? What do we think is the explanation here?
- [46:02]
Joe Kasabian
I think there's a very good chance, Robert, that the LAPD has been using a lot of racist cops. Cops and trials and getting away with it. That's right, because the LAPD is racist as fuck.
- [46:13]
Robert
And you know who else? No. No, Nobody. Nobody. No. Here's ads. Fuck. And we're back. So back when he'd been cross examined, Mark Fuhrman had testified that he had not made any anti black racial slurs in the land last decade. The recordings prove that that was a lie. Mark had to retire in shame from the LAPD in the wake of the trial. Obviously O.J. is acquitted. Right. We all know that don't fit. You must acquit. The glove didn't fit. They had to acquit. Right, Sorry.
- [46:53]
Joe Kasabian
And he caught charges later on.
- [46:55]
Robert
But he did.
- [46:56]
Joe Kasabian
It took a while.
- [46:57]
Robert
He did. And Mark doesn't. Obviously, Mark's not the only reason. You know, the glove doesn't get. Gets O.J. off, but he's part of why O.J. gets off, you know, and because he's perjured himself on the stand, he becomes the only person who actually gets convicted in the O.J. simpson case, which is really funny to me, is the detective who shows up at his house. Mark gets charged with perjury, and he pleads no contest. In 1996, he receives a slap on the wrist before he and his family move to the small town of Sandpoint, Idaho, which at the time was famous because a bunch of Nazis and far right apocalypse weirdos had moved into the area. There's, like, articles that are including, like, the Aryan nations and like, Almost Heaven and Bo Gryitz and like, his fucking militia weirdos and Mark Fuhrman all in the same list of, like, reasons that Idaho's scary. It's really funny. But he's like. It's like Mark Fuhrman is listed alongside all of the Nazis as, like, reasons that Idaho is a hub of the far right. It's really funny.
- [47:54]
Joe Kasabian
At least they all have the same hobbies. Like, you guys want to compare Nazi uniform collections?
- [47:58]
Robert
There you go. Collecting swastikas.
- [48:00]
Joe Kasabian
Yeah. Want to see my. Concerning German political cartoons.
- [48:04]
Robert
Yeah. So Mark moves there and there's articles about it, you know, and he, you know, is kind of settles into normal life. He's initially saying that I just want to be like a quiet, normal person. I found an article that describes him as having grown a mustache and started training to be an electrician's helper. I don't know why it specifies that he grew a mustache first, but it does. That was what my favorite face was for the Netflix viewers. I was like, why is that a thing? So now that he's free, Mark's artistic bent reasserted itself. And with the. The fact that he's now getting to kind of indulge his creative side is helped by a fat advance from a publisher that wanted him to write a book on the trial. Everyone involved with the O.J. simpson trial got a book deal. If you were in any way involved and you wanted to get a bunch of money, you could write a book about the O.J. simpson trial. They were handing those out to like fucking hotcakes. And Mark's was a bestseller. It does very well. I think he makes a lot of money off of it.
- [49:04]
Joe Kasabian
God damn you, Mark.
- [49:06]
Robert
Yeah. In fact, it works well enough that he stops training to be an electrician and he never winds up having to work a real job again. Instead, he settles into life in Sandpoint and continues writing. While Mark worked on his first book, the LAPD performed another in depth analysis of his claims. In the tapes. They did find that many were provably untrue. Per the LA Times, summarizing a few of these. Furman and other officers tortured and beat four suspects faces to just mush. After a 1978 officer involved shooting in East Los Angeles, Furman and his partner rammed a suspect's vehicle during a pursuit April 24, 1986, and struck and kicked him. After he was apprehended, Furman's partner named Tom tore up driver's licenses and used racist slurs. Police investigators identified the officer, but found the statements about him were unfounded. So again, again, all those are things that, like, he claims to have done in the tapes that they found, that they said, we proved he didn't do right or we couldn't prove that he had done right. However, per that article, investigators found that the department's handling of some of those incidents, dating back 10 to 20 years, does not hold up to the LAPD's current standards. In fact, investigators found the handling of some cases to be grossly deficient. So the LAPD says we couldn't prove he did any of this. Also, our records keeping was really bad. And we like, literally weren't taking notes at all about the complaints people made against officers. So who knows? What happened is kind of what they say.
- [50:30]
Joe Kasabian
What if we told you he was lying? He was also a violent psycho and institutionally we are incapable of doing our jobs.
- [50:39]
Robert
Yeah, couldn't have done anything. And it's very interesting too, because like, like, if you read the news articles from the time, a lot of them are like, well, it turns out the Furman tapes were all lies. The LAPD looked into it and they were able to show it was all untrue. And that's not really what the report says. Some things were Untrue. But a lot of things were like, well, we can't prove it because our records are shitty. And that's not the same as showing it didn't happen.
- [51:02]
Joe Kasabian
We threw all the complaints out.
- [51:04]
Robert
Yeah, that's very different.
- [51:06]
Joe Kasabian
In fact, we can't prove any of this happened because we made sure we couldn't.
- [51:11]
Robert
Yes. Yeah. That said, other important claims made in the tapes were true, as I've already gone into men against women was real and documented by the lapd. Sexual harassment was also found to be just as widespread as Mark claimed. And multiple witnesses have reported seeing Mark Fuhrman use racial slurs just as he himself used them in the tapes. Mark's next book, published in 1998, was Murder in Greenwich. This covered a murder that we've discussed on this show in our RFK Jr. Episodes, the 1975 unsolved murder of Martha Moxley. Now, Mark theorized that the killer was Michael Skakel, and a lot of people had previously. Michael was the nephew with Ethel Kennedy and childhood friend of RFK Jr. And there'd long been suspicion on behalf of Michael's brother and then Michael. But no one is ever able to prove anything. In the early 1990s, the Skakel family hired a PI firm to look into the risk to Michael and his brother Thomas. We were both publicly suspected of the crime, per an article on oxygen.com, and I'll talk about why I'm using Oxygen as a source in a little bit. Bit. The agency's highly confidential report was leaked to the Press in 1995, and it revealed that both Michael and Tommy had lied to Greenwich police during their initial interviews 20 years earlier. One of the few people who has seen the report is former Los Angeles police detective and writer Mark Fuhrman, the author of Murder in who Killed Martha Moxley. So I included Oxygen, not because it's a good source, because it shows how Mark's involvement in the case is used and reported on by them. Is like, he's the only one who's seen this secret report. You know, that he's become credible to these, like, reactionary, like, paranoid, conservative sources kind of. Now, in this point in time, it's interesting.
- [52:46]
Joe Kasabian
He becomes a true crime guy.
- [52:48]
Robert
Yeah.
- [52:48]
Joe Kasabian
He's perfect for it.
- [52:50]
Robert
Yeah.
- [52:51]
Joe Kasabian
Now, and no reason to explain why He's a former LAPD detective.
- [52:56]
Robert
Former. And RFK Jr. For himself, because he writes an article about Mark's book, and he blames writer Dominic Dunn for bringing Furman into the matter. Dunn had been accusing the Skakel family of covering up the crime and trying, trying to get the brothers prosecuted for years. Right. And is kind of responsible for keeping suspicion on the Skakel brothers alive in the media during this time. And so he reaches out to Mark Fuhrman and furnishes him with, like, documents he's gathered during his own investigations and is like, I need you to, like, make this publicized because you're famous now. And despite Mark's perjury conviction, after his book success and due to the regret in the wake of O.J. s acquittal, Mark had a lot of credibility in some circles, more than you'd expect. And he was seen by too many conservatives as a wronged truth teller and good cop. So Mark puts out this book that Dunn has basically paid him to write, arguing that Michael Skakel did this murder. And it does build a lot of support for that belief. In an article for The Atlantic in 2003, RFK Jr. Would later claim. On July 10, 1988, one month after its publication, Connecticut authorities convened a one man grand jury consisting of Judge George Tim, The State's Attorney, Jonathan Benedict took over the Moxley case and began a multimillion dollar effort to convict Michael Skakel. Right. That's how RFK Jr looks at it. That's not unfair. The question is whether or not Michael was guilty. Right. If you believe Michael's guilty, then it's not bad that Mark did this. If Michael's innocent, then he destroyed an innocent man's life. Right? Now, in 2002, Michael was convicted of the murder of Martha Moxley. And that same year, Mark's book was adapted for a TV movie and Mark Fuhrman was played Christopher Maloney. This may seem like a redemption arc for Mark, but it turns out the prosecution of Michael Skakel was dog shit. And it was later overturned. Michael spends like 10 years in prison, but he gets out because he's found it was bad. They didn't do a good job prosecuting him. Mark's gonna go to his grave insisting Michael was guilty. I don't actually know who's guilty of this crime. So whether or not this goes in the bastard column depends on what you believe about Martha Moxley's murder. That said, I don't think Mark knows or cares who really did it. He writes in his book on her murder. In the intro, he's like, I was interested in Martha's murder because of, quote, money, power, celebrity deceit and corruption. Basically like, oh, because this is a famous family involved in this murder. I thought it was cool and sexy and like, a lady died Like a girl.
- [55:23]
Joe Kasabian
And they came to me to get publicity.
- [55:26]
Robert
Like, come on, dude. Like, if you really think this guy murdered her, sure, absolutely. Do the right thing. But like, don't just write that. Oh, oh, it's a sexy trend. A girl got murdered, man. Come on.
- [55:38]
Joe Kasabian
It's just like true crime shit. He missed out on the wave of podcasts.
- [55:43]
Robert
Yes, yes. He would have made a lot of. And he does actually kind of. He makes it into a little bit of that wave.
- [55:48]
Joe Kasabian
Oh, God damn it.
- [55:49]
Robert
So Mark keeps writing. Over the next few years, he publishes a mix of books, a lot of serial killer books. He publishes an expose of Oklahoma's death row. He's actually anti death row, I think, kind of. He does publish a book on the death of Terri Schiava, a brain dead coma patient who was taken off of life support after a mass. This is a huge culture war moment. Right? This poor woman is in a coma because he believes she was murdered. What, he thinks this is murder? Yes, exactly. A lot of people do. He's that kind of guy. In 2006, he puts out a book about the JFK assassination that honestly had nothing interesting to say. And in 2009, he hilariously wrote a book titled the Murder how the Media Turns Crime into Entertainment and Subverts Justice. That's you, Mark. You're the media.
- [56:39]
Joe Kasabian
That's just an autobiography, Mark. Yeah, my favorite part of his JFK book is how he came to the conclusion is that JFK's head just did that.
- [56:48]
Robert
Yeah, that's right. That's right.
- [56:49]
Joe Kasabian
That's the highest he was ever shot. His head just did that. It runs in the Kennedy family. That's why RFK's face is so red all the time. He's fighting back the natural urge for the Kennedys head to explode.
- [57:00]
Robert
That's right. I mean, well, it's wrong because it was Bernie Montgomery Sanders, but we'll continue to move right past that.
- [57:07]
Joe Kasabian
Agree to disagree.
- [57:09]
Robert
Mark spends the Aughts and teens as a forensic and crime scene expert for Fox News. He also hosts a radio show and a TV history show on the Fox Nation streaming platform. I don't think it still exists. It was like Fox's answer to Netflix and the Aughts. And Mark has like a show where he goes through famous crimes and talks about them as the great detective who got O.J. acquitted.
- [57:33]
Joe Kasabian
Of course he ended up on Fox. He was destined for that job.
- [57:37]
Robert
He was. And he becomes an activist in his old age, even though he actually, in the early 2000s, is permanently barred from ever being A law enforcement officer in California. Again, he becomes an advocate for police chokeholds because they keep people safe. You know, the chokeholds are important.
- [57:53]
Joe Kasabian
It's a critical tool to. Well, I wanna say.
- [57:56]
Robert
For other people to die on.
- [57:58]
Joe Kasabian
Yeah, A hill for other people to die on.
- [57:59]
Robert
Yeah. Yeah. He repeatedly denied the relevance of chokeholds in investigations to deaths in police custody. And I found a good example of this in a 2016 Raw Story article, quote. While examining the history that led up to the O.J. simpson case, ESPN's 30 for 30 documentary series, O.J. made in America recalled how the 1991 beating of Rodney King opened the nation's eyes to the LAPD's treatment of the black community. But Fuhrman, whose racist language is often blamed for derailing the case against Simpson, argued that King's beating could have been prevented if the chokehold procedure had not been banned in the early 1980s. If they could have choked him, you know, the whole Rodney King beating wouldn't have been a problem if only they would have gotten to choke him. They had to beat him because they couldn't choke him.
- [58:39]
Joe Kasabian
See, if they simply didn't ban chokeholds, like, six dudes wouldn't have to beat an unresisting person.
- [58:46]
Robert
Yeah, exactly. It's like, I wouldn't have stabbed him if you'd have let me shoot him, you know, like, man. And it's perhaps ironic, given his love of chokeholds, that Mark Fuhrman's end would come at the hands of throat cancer, which took him out of this world at age 74 not a moment too soon, like a couple of days ago. And that's the Mark Fuhrman story, like a couple of weeks ago by the time you hear this. But what a guy.
- [59:13]
Joe Kasabian
You know, I kind of didn't expect to come out of the side of cancer on this one, but here I am, I'm wearing my tumor jersey, you know, big foam finger saying, cancer number one.
- [59:27]
Robert
Yeah, that's the fucked up thing about cancer is, you know, especially when it comes for you or people you care about, it's this, like, relentless nightmare monster. But the other flip side of it is that it's the thing that guarantees no dictator or Fox News personality stays around forever.
- [59:42]
Joe Kasabian
Yeah, yeah. It's like the mortality version of Al Capone getting caught for tax cheating.
- [59:47]
Robert
Right, right. Eventually you get the tumors, eventually it'll get you. Yeah.
- [59:52]
Joe Kasabian
Yeah. Well, at least he's dead.
- [59:55]
Robert
At least he's dead.
- [59:56]
Joe Kasabian
He's not on the fox tree. He's dead. Like his streaming platform.
- [60:00]
Robert
Oh, man. Joe, you want to plug your pluggables at the end here?
- [60:05]
Joe Kasabian
Yeah. So I am the host of the Lion's Head by Donkeys podcast. We're a military history podcast. We talk about all eras of. We try to make things funny and interesting. I'm also the author of the book the Highlands Burn. You can get it wherever you get your books. It's military gunpowder fantasy. So if you like World War I technology and magic, there's a book for you now.
- [60:32]
Robert
Excellent. All right, everybody. Well, that's going to be it for us here at behind the Bastards. And that's going to be us for it at here podcast. I don't know why I'm doing the aphasia thing anyway. We're done. Go home, Be gone. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes of behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit remind me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips in our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, YouTube.com behindthebastards. We love about 40% of you. Statistically speaking, this is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.