But the man the lawyers referred to simply as "the client" wasn't there. O.J. Simpson remained at home that night, at his now landmark Brentwood residence, surrounded by family and friends. He was, according to Patrick McKenna, a private investigator for the defense team who had visited the mansion earlier in the day, "a mixture of emotions. He was somber. He was ecstatic. His mind was blown. He was all sorts of things."
Also missing that night was Robert Shapiro, the lawyer to the stars, who put the Dream Team together last summer. But as the trial wore on, the dream turned nightmarish for Shapiro, and he barely waited for Tuesday's verdict before taking to national television to denounce the courtroom tactics of both Cochran and Bailey. As he sipped his drink at the victory party, Bailey mused about Shapiro's attacks.
"My God, Shapiro wanted O.J. to plead guilty!" Bailey boomed. "In fact he tried to have him plead guilty to manslaughter in which Bob Kardashian would be an accessory. Bob, come over here."
He gestured to Kardashian, the longtime O.J. intimate who had just been described by Cochran in his toast as "the best friend a man could ever have." Indeed, the prosecution had strongly implied that he had been involved in disposing of O.J.'s bloody clothes.
Bailey put his arm around Kardashian, who had shed his suit in favor of a navy T-shirt and light slacks. "That's right, I was going to do it," he said in disbelief. "I was going to plead with him."
"You see, all Shapiro knew how to do was plead," Bailey went on. "He was not a trial lawyer."
"Right," added Kardashian. "He just knew how to plead, and we almost got stuck. But it ended up all right in the end."
Shapiro denies offering any such strategy and has vowed never to talk to Bailey or work with Cochran again. "From day one, O.J. told me he was innocent, and I never doubted it," he says. "I never asked him to plead anything—other than not guilty."
The bitter feelings on the defense team had been brewing for months, but Shapiro brought them sharply into focus in an interview with PEOPLE two days before the verdict. At dinner at a luxurious, dimly lit Beverly Hills restaurant, he could barely contain his contempt for his fellow lawyers. "I was disgusted by Cochran's style and the way he twisted things," he said over his favorite dish, spaghetti with diced chicken. "He took the solid substance of our defense and, with his inflammatory style, he distorted it. Even O.J. couldn't control him."
Shapiro was particularly incensed by Cochran's conduct during closing arguments. "When Johnnie did the hat trick"—putting on a wool cap similar to the one found at the crime scene—-"I was appalled," he says. "It was stupid." He also found Cochran's attempt to draw a moral parallel between Simpson and the victims of Nazism repugnant—and risky. "I think that the closing argument patronized the jury, and they are a lot smarter than that," he said. In fact, two nights before the verdict, he thought Cochran had blown it altogether: "I think the jury's gonna give it to the defense up the wazoo."
As for Bailey, Shapiro began to suspect that his old friend, whom he had helped beat a drunk driving charge 13 years earlier, was bad-mouthing him to Simpson, to the other lawyers and, on a background basis, to the media, supposedly to gain more influence in the trial. Increasingly uneasy, Shapiro complained to Simpson early in the year. But Simpson, who was grateful for Shapiro's shrewdness—he had, for instance, ordered that O.J.'s body be photographed for bruises he presumably would have picked up during an attack on Nicole and Ron Goldman—did nothing. "What could O.J. do?" asks Shapiro. "He was in jail. Cochran wasn't talking to Shapiro. Shapiro wasn't talking to Bailey. O.J. just wanted us all to get along."
Except things only got worse. PEOPLE has learned there was a major wrangle over who first got wind of the Mark Fuhrman tapes. Private investigator Patrick McKenna, who works closely with Bailey, maintains he was the one who uncovered their existence. When he did, he says, there was a stampede by all the lawyers to take credit. "McKenna is so full of it," says Shapiro, who insists he got the tip about the tapes from a freelance journalist and passed it along to McKenna, a claim the P.I. denies. "You can check my effing phone records," McKenna says.
Shapiro is so unhappy that he actually talks wistfully of the early days of the case. "I was called by Robert Kardashian because they were in a terrible mess," he says. Simpson's attorney at the time, Howard Weitzman, had allowed his client to talk to the police. "That was such a mistake, because that meant O.J. could never testify," he says. "There were sure to be inconsistencies."
Shapiro says Simpson later asked him to form a defense team. As he was assembling lawyers, "Bailey kept calling me, trying to get into the case," Shapiro complains. "He was an uninvited guest."
But Shapiro ultimately brought him onto the team because Bailey had investigators, computer scanners and sophisticated databases that were important in mounting a graphics-laden defense. Bailey scoffs at this. "You can check my phone records," he says. "Shapiro was a one-man office with one secretary who knew only WordPerfect—the old WordPerfect—and he was in over his head."
Shapiro, a keen negotiator who had been phasing out his criminal practice, also realized that he needed the assistance of a seasoned criminal defense lawyer. "It was between Gerry Spence and Johnnie Cochran," he says. "Unfortunately, Cochran was chosen."
But when Shapiro took a vacation in Hawaii at Christmastime, he was, he says, double-crossed. O.J. made Cochran the lead attorney. "I was told that O.J. wanted the team to have a new look," Shapiro says. "I was supposed to be his Joe Ferguson"—Simpson's onetime quarterback teammate with the Buffalo Bills—"and he needed an O.J. Simpson for me to pass the football to."
Bailey and Cochran argue that Shapiro's criticisms are just spitballs from an envious man who was pushed out of the limelight. And Cochran bristles at Shapiro's accusation that he trivialized Jewish suffering. "Nobody who is not an African-American can tell me that our people have not been through Hades," says Cochran, sitting in his spacious white living room, full of African and Muslim art, high in the Hollywood Hills. "You don't see me sniping about people."
The nearly constant infighting only added to the already enormous physical and psychological toll exacted by the trial. Both Shapiro and Barry Scheck, the defense DNA specialist from New York City, received harsh criticism from their respective Jewish communities after black-suited, bow-tied Nation of Islam guards started providing protection for Cochran—compliments of its controversial leader, Louis Farrakhan, frequently charged with anti-Semitism. Even Shapiro was upset. "It was dangerous," says Shapiro, whose grandfather was a cantor. "And it was wrong."
All of the lawyers took heat from groups opposing domestic violence, but the criticism was especially painful for Scheck, who represented the abused Hedda Nussbaum in 1988. "I am tired of being on television," says Scheck. "I am tired of this whole thing."
Standing in Bailey's nearly emptied Los Angeles rental apartment on the Saturday before the verdict, Scheck ran his hands through his rumpled hair and shook his head morosely. "Judge Ito was so outrageous that I had to talk to the jury by using objections. He might as well have taken a seat at the prosecution table."
Bailey chuckled. "Remember, Ito's wife is a cop," he said. "She will give him hell when there's an acquittal."
Scheck often appears to be all nose and sneer on television, yet in person he is startlingly sweet and soft-spoken. "Can you believe that Ito was going to keep jurors from deliberating on Yom Kippur?" he asked. "How many Jews were on that jury? You didn't see me opening my summation with, 'Did you have a good Rosh Hashanah?' "
By several accounts, Scheck is the lawyer who kept the latest hours, often staying up until 2 or 3 in the morning preparing for the next day's court session. He has been living in rented digs in California since joining the Dream Team, away from his wife and children in Brooklyn. "I never dreamed I'd be here almost a year," he says. "I've missed a year of my children's development, my wife has been threatened, and my life has been really disrupted."
The defense team also has money worries—or at least some of them do. While Scheck has been fully paid, Bailey has not. Nor have various investigators, secretaries and other support personnel. "O.J. is living on a line of credit," Bailey says. "You can't produce money where there is no money." Legal costs were high, Bailey says, because there were too many lawyers. "We had more than two dozen lawyers, and most everybody sat on their asses most of the time," he says. "This case should have been tried with just two lawyers and two specialists. The arguments were god-awful and redundant, and Ito let everyone run wild—like kindergartners."
During some of the trial, Bailey, a pilot who took the aerial photos of the Bundy and Rockingham areas himself, worked for other clients and promoted a line of small planes called the Bailey Bullet. Many of the other lawyers, though, were in court every day. "I've not had any private life," says Shapiro. "I haven't seen my children. I've been separated from my family, and it's been an unbelievable stress on my wife." Shapiro's one diversion was boxing, which he does three times a week. "It's the only thing I managed to keep doing, and it saved me because it is such a focused, individual and artful sport," he says. "You have to think on your feet, and you can't have any fear."
Shapiro tries to be philosophical about the divisions in the Dream Team. "Even though football players may hate each other," he says, "they come together to win." But for some, like Barry Scheck, it's a game not worth playing. "The California criminal justice system is a mess," he says. "Anywhere else, I would have been home in three months."
"Oh come on, cheer up, Barry," says Bailey. "It's only 1995. So we still have time for another trial of the century."
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
