Authors: Steve Bogira
Now, with Simpson on the stand and Mandeltort questioning him, Simpson’s backup plan has quickly become evident. Was he in Caruso’s
Jeep on the night in question? Did they drive past three minority youths? Did Caruso say, “Let’s beat these motherfuckers up?”
“I don’t recall.”
The prosecutors aren’t concerned at all about Simpson’s amnesia, in fact, they couldn’t be more pleased. His forgetfulness allows them to confront him with the statement he gave police, and with the testimony he gave to a grand jury, about what Caruso said and did on the night of the beating. So the jury hears all the details, and they’re emphasized all the more by Simpson’s professed inability to remember them. “This happens in tons of cases,” Berlin says later. “A witness flips, and we put in his prior statement. Juries are real smart—they know what’s going on.” As Simpson continues to not recall, it’s Caruso’s lawyers who are cringing. “We’re dead,” Genson whispers to Adam.
An investigator who works for Genson interviewed Simpson before trial. Simpson told him he was on 33rd Street at the time of the attack, and he saw people running in different directions, but he never saw anybody hit anyone—he was too busy talking with Mike Cutler, who was standing next to him. He acknowledged that he and Cutler were in Caruso’s Jeep before the attack, but he maintained that Caruso didn’t say anything about wanting to beat up any black kids. He said he incriminated Caruso in his statement, and in his grand jury testimony, because the police were threatening to send him back to prison if he didn’t. Genson will say later he doesn’t know why Simpson chose to rely in court on a failed memory.
Mandeltort asks Simpson how Caruso reacted when he and Cutler, who was also in the Jeep, told Caruso they didn’t want to beat up the black kids.
“I don’t recall,” Simpson says.
“Well, in your handwritten statement, sir, did you say that ‘Frankie acted like he was disgusted with Tom and Mike for not wanting to beat the kids’?”
“That’s what it says,” Simpson replies. His tone is sarcastic and a smirk is fixed on his face. He’s draped an arm across the back of the witness chair as he fields Mandeltort’s questions.
“Did you further state, sir, that ‘Frankie has a problem with the idea of blacks coming into his neighborhood, and this is what set him off’?”
“That’s what it says in the statement.”
“There came a time when the Jeep stopped at about Thirty-third and Princeton, is that correct?”
“I don’t recall.”
“Well, looking at your statement—‘Frankie stopped the Jeep at Princeton and Thirty-third and said to Tom and Mike, “You guys are pussies” ’—do you remember that, sir?”
“I don’t recall.”
The jury learns that according to the Simpson statement to police, Caruso then got out of the Jeep and headed west on foot toward Shields, while Simpson and Cutler stayed near the Jeep. Simpson saw Victor Jasas and Michael Kwidzinski—the other codefendants—walking toward Shields from the west. Then he saw “Victor or Frankie” take a swing at a black kid at 33rd and Shields. The black kid—Lenard—ran east on 33rd, with Caruso and Jasas in pursuit. Simpson lost sight of the three when they rounded the corner onto Princeton. Then he heard an old man yelling. When Caruso and Jasas returned to 33rd shortly thereafter, they were flushed and breathing hard. A little later, Simpson was in the Jeep with Caruso, Jasas, Kwidzinski, and Cutler, heading to a party. Caruso and Jasas bragged about the attack. “We beat the fuck out of him,” Jasas said. “They think they can come in the neighborhood and talk shit.” And Caruso added, “Yeah, I punched the fuck out of them. They shouldn’t have been walking through this neighborhood.” Caruso had rap music playing in the Jeep, Simpson said in the statement, because “Frankie doesn’t hate black people, Frankie just hates niggers.”
Sam Adam handles the cross after lunch. Adam is renowned at 26th Street for his talent on cross, and he prizes the memories of the legion of witnesses he’s irritated in thirty-seven years. “One time a woman came down from the stand and threw the [witness’s] microphone at me! Right in the middle of the cross!” he once told me proudly. “There was almost a riot right there in the courtroom! I enjoyed it; it was very exciting.”
But Adam’s strength is flustering hostile witnesses, and Simpson isn’t that. Simpson’s smirk is gone now, he’s sitting up straight, and his memory cells have regenerated. He recalls being picked up by police a few hours after the beating, two blocks away from where it occurred. They brought him in because he matched the description of one of the assailants given by Jaramillo, and because a computer check showed an outstanding warrant for a parole violation. Adam asks Simpson about his time in custody and his treatment by police, deftly leading him to Adam’s desired theme: that Simpson succumbed to the coercion of police and incriminated Caruso to save his own neck.
“They kept pushing you to tell a story that they were going to give to you, is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“And they told you that, in fact, if you didn’t go along with the story that they were going to give you, that you yourself would be charged with the beating of Lenard Clark, is that correct?”
“Yes. Actually, they told me they would charge me with attempted murder,
and that there was a possibility that Lenard might die. So they might wait and then charge me with first-degree murder.”
“But on the other hand, they said, did they not, ‘If you say what we want you to say, then we won’t even charge you’?”
“They said if I agree, that if I cooperated, that I wouldn’t be charged, and that I would actually go home that day.”
Simpson’s selective recall is eliciting dubious expressions from some of the jurors. Genson is studying the jurors and thinking, as he’ll say later, that with a friend like Simpson, Caruso doesn’t need enemies.
On redirect, Mandeltort asks Simpson whether he’d had “some sort of memory-enhancing” ingredient in his lunch. Simpson says he doesn’t understand.
“Well, this morning, sir, you said, ‘I do not recall’ approximately one hundred times. Would that be correct?”
“I don’t recall,” Simpson replies.
DETECTIVE STANLEY TURNER
takes the stand the following day to refute Simpson’s accusations of coercion, many of which were aimed at him, the case’s primary detective.
Turner has a strong athletic build, though at forty-nine a paunch has set in. An African American, he has a receding hairline, glasses, and a mustache. He joined the police department as a cadet straight out of high school. His childhood on the south side left him with a distaste for bullies. He has vivid memories of older kids in his neighborhood jumping younger ones for their money, and the bullying involved in the attack on Lenard bothered him more than the racism, he says later.
It’s not as if Turner evaded racism as he was growing up, however. There was the grade-school basketball play-off game that was stolen from his all-black team by an all-white one, thanks to the white referee who looked the other way while Turner and his teammates were tripped and low-bridged. “The cheating was just so blatant, I never forgot it. You look at it and say, ‘Well, how do I prevent this from occurring?’ And you prepare yourself so you won’t get beat again.”
His mother sent him to a Catholic high school, a school he wouldn’t have picked since it was nearly all white. He ended up liking it except for “some fools who didn’t want to accept the fact that there were blacks there.” They’d cut into the lunchroom line in front of him. “It was, ‘Look, we come first.’ Well, I’m not gonna accept that. So you end up knocking a person on his ass.”
He’s sensed racial prejudice as a detective—particularly a perception,
both inside and outside the department, that black detectives are inferior to white ones. He told himself during the Bridgeport probe that if the attackers weren’t caught and convicted, some would see the outcome as more evidence of the mediocrity of black detectives.
Turner is dressed in a gray suit today, with a dark tie and a gold tie clasp. Under Mandeltort’s questioning he matter-of-factly denies all of Simpson’s allegations. He didn’t threaten to charge Simpson with the beating; he didn’t feed him a story. He didn’t ignore Simpson’s repeated requests to speak with a lawyer, as Simpson claimed; Simpson never asked for one.
Mandeltort turns the subject to the two lineups the detective helped conduct. Turner tells the jury that suspects are allowed to pick their position in lineups. Jasas and Caruso just so happened to pick the same spot in their respective lineups, the one on the far left. Yes, he made Caruso take off the dress shirt he wore to the station (leaving Caruso in a plain white T-shirt, like Jasas in the first lineup). But that was because the other lineup participants were dressed casually, and he didn’t want Caruso to stand out. For the same reason, he had Caruso remove his dress shoes, he says, and he gave him a pair of green sneakers to wear. Jasas’s sneakers.
Mandeltort asks Turner if he noticed anything about Clevan Nicholson when Clevan entered the room to view the second lineup. The lineup members were on the other side of a one-way mirror. Turner says he recollects Clevan walking up to the glass and then instantly retreating. He “went into almost like a frightened mode when he first looked through the glass and saw Mr. Caruso,” the detective says. After each of the five lineup members approached the glass individually, Turner says, Clevan pointed at Caruso and said, “That’s the one. That’s the one.” Clevan then said his earlier identification of Jasas had been a mistake.
This is hardly the first time Genson has heard a detective recall at trial an eyewitness’s startled response upon seeing the defendant. Turner hadn’t said anything about this frightened reaction by Clevan when he testified about the lineup at a pretrial hearing. On Genson’s cross, Turner acknowledges he never wrote anything in any of his reports about this frightened response by Clevan. Genson also asks the detective whether the other four participants in the Caruso lineup weren’t already seated when Caruso was brought into the lineup room and allowed to “choose” his spot. Turner concedes that “some may have been sitting down.” (Turner’s partner, Glenn Mathews, later testifies that Caruso was indeed the last to be seated.)
Turner also allows that he never noted in any of his reports that Clevan and Jaramillo had said their original identification of Jasas had been a mistake. In fact, as Genson points out, in Turner’s final report on the case, the
detective wrote that in the lineups, Clevan and Jaramillo had “identified Jasas and Caruso as two of the men who attacked each of them.”
Turner tells me later he never acknowledged in his reports that Clevan and Jaramillo had made a mistake in the first lineup because he didn’t think they did. He says
he’s convinced that a number of Bridgeport youths participated in the attack at 33rd and Shields, and that Caruso wasn’t the only one to hit Lenard and Clevan there.
But if that’s true, then both Clevan and Jaramillo lied when they testified that Caruso, and only Caruso, hit anyone on that corner. Turner couldn’t explain why they would have done so. Genson says he thinks Turner wasn’t sure what to do with the bad ID from the first lineup and wrote his report the way he did to leave his options open.
Turner tells me that while he’s sure more Bridgeport youths were involved in the attack than the ones who got charged, he’s also sure Caruso was the ringleader. When he was investigating the case and talking with people about Caruso, he got the impression that Caruso believed he could bully people without repercussions. “Little Frankie had been doing things like this for years,” the detective says. “This time he just got caught.” He recalls seeing Caruso in an interview room after he was picked out of the lineup. His dress shirt was in a heap on the floor next to him. “He had torn up his shirt, shredded it,” Turner says. “I asked him, ‘What happened to your shirt?’ He looks at me and he says, ‘I’m a Caruso.’ Well, maybe it means something in Bridgeport, but it didn’t mean shit to me.”
THE DAY TURNER TESTIFIES
a thirty-eight-year-old computer consultant named Jeffrey Gordon also takes the stand to describe the more brutal part of the attack, the stomping of Lenard on Princeton.
Gordon had been living in an apartment on the 3200 block of South Princeton for two years. On the night in question, he was leaving his apartment for the El station on 35th. He tells the jury that after he crossed to the east side of Princeton, he saw one person, who he later learned was Lenard Clark, come racing around the corner of 33rd and Princeton with three others after him. He saw the first of the chasers catch Lenard in the street and start swinging at him. Lenard “was just standing there taking the blows,” Gordon says. Then he collapsed to the pavement. Gordon was standing on the sidewalk, his view partially obstructed by parked cars, but it appeared to him that all three attackers were kicking Lenard.
Gordon says he stepped toward the men and told them to leave the victim alone. But the initial attacker persisted. “I thought he was, you know, stomping his head or something like that, and I just screamed out, I said, ‘Stop it!
Stop it!’ You know, ‘Leave him alone!’ ” Gordon says he then walked into the street, brandishing his cell phone. “I said, ‘I’m calling the police,’ and then I made the distinct motions of pushing the buttons on the cell phone.”
The first attacker gave Lenard “one last kick,” Gordon recalls, and said to Gordon, “He was breaking windows in the neighborhood.” Then the three attackers fled, south on Princeton.
Lenard was facedown in the street. Gordon called for help on his cell phone.
Gordon says he told one of the police officers who arrived that the attackers had been three white men. But then someone in the crowd told him, “ ‘You didn’t see nothing,’ ” he says. Feeling threatened, he didn’t offer police any more information, and they didn’t even ask him for his name. A month later detectives tracked him down through records of his cell phone call for help.
If Gordon can identify Caruso as one of the three attackers, Caruso might as well throw in the towel. But Gordon says he can’t. He tells the jury the three offenders appeared to be in their twenties. They were smaller than he—he’s five foot ten and weighs 205. They had dark hair. The chief attacker’s hair was parted down the middle and feathered back, he says (as is Caruso’s hair in the lineup photo). But he says he couldn’t make out their facial features.