Court Magic

Two weeks before Christmas, when preparations for O.J. Simpson's trial were reaching fever pitch, Johnnie Cochran Jr. took a few hours off from his star client's case. He went down to Watts, climbed into the back of a white Cadillac convertible and rode through the streets as a star in his own right, the grand marshal of the Watts Christmas parade. The crowds adored him, and Cochran, resplendent in a purple blazer, black turtleneck and gold-rimmed designer shades, loved them back. He flashed his Eveready smile and waved with the panache of a big-city mayor. He told a television reporter that he was there as a role model: "Children in this community," he said, "need to know they can be anything they want to be." As his Caddy cruised by, some onlookers called, "Hey, Johnnie! Hey, Johnnie!" and others shouted, "Free O.J.! O.J. must be freed!"

All of this was to be expected, given Simpson's status as a national fetish and Cochran's status as the nation's top black lawyer. What Cochran did not expect was an encounter with a woman in her 70s who came up to his car and told him warmly, "You used to be my insurance man."

He could hardly believe it. That was almost 40 years ago, when he was a student at UCLA, working part-time for his father, Johnnie Cochran Sr., an agent with the black-owned Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Co. and a silver-tongued superachiever. Every Friday night, when people were home watching the fights on TV, Johnnie Jr. would go into the old Palm Lane housing project in South Central to collect premium payments and sell new policies. "That's amazing!" Cochran thought to himself as he shook the woman's hand. "I'm a child of this community myself."

A few weeks later, Johnnie Cochran was again the focus of attention when O.J. Simpson shook up his defense team. Cochran emerged on top, in a position of prominence that bespoke his client's unqualified confidence--and his peers' admiration. Robert Shapiro, one of the shaken, called Johnnie Cochran "the best lawyer on the planet" to try the case before a jury.

For astute O.J. watchers, this was no surprise. Indeed, the only surprise was how long it had taken Cochran to join the defense lineup. Lawyers in Los Angeles considered him the most plausible pick from the start--first, because he's so good and so experienced, and then, for reasons of obvious but essential symbolism, because he's black. The guessing was that O.J. had wanted him from the start, but that Cochran had resisted because of conflicts stemming from their friendship.

"I did resist," Cochran says. "It's true. He called me a bunch of times over the weekend he got arrested. I had gone to give a speech to the NAACP Legal Section in Chicago, and I got all these calls through my answering service. But I had some real reluctance."

Cochran is talking with me in the sun-drenched den of his home in the Hollywood Hills, a white, hard-edged, ultramodern affair perched on a hillside just below Griffith Park Observatory. It's a hot Monday morning, the day after Christmas. "I've known O.J. since he went to USC," he continues. "We didn't go out and party together, we weren't best friends. We knew each other, knew each other's families. I knew Marguerite, his first wife. I didn't know Nicole that well. His daughter and the daughter of one of my dear friends graduated from Howard University in 1992, and O.J. and I threw a graduation party for them.

"So we would see each other, but I didn't go out with him and Al Cowlings and the guys, that sort of thing. Still, I knew him better than I've known anybody else who has been charged with homicide, and that was why I wondered if I could be objective.

"Then I knew, because of all the media attention, that people would say, 'Gee, Shapiro's (continued on page 144)Jehnnie Cechrrn(continued from page 104) on the case and that's going to cause problems.' Shapiro was there by the fourteenth night, it happened that fast. Once Shapiro had surfaced and Howard [Weitzman] stepped back, I called Shapiro and said, 'Look, this man's an acquaintance of mine and I don't want to cause problems with what you're trying to do,' and we agreed that we would wait until the preliminary hearing was over. That was on July 8, and then O.J. really stepped up the pressure and I had to make a decision. At that point I was pleased with what I was doing in terms of TV commentary on the case. I was on the sidelines and was somewhat enjoying it. I have a heavy caseload, and Michael Jackson was still very much pending, but here's O.J. saying, 'I need your help.' I talked with my minister, William Epps of the Second Baptist Church of Los Angeles, and I talked with my father. I prayed over it, and then I went to New York to talk with Michael Jackson. He said, 'Well, look, I love O.J., but I want you to be available when I need you,' and I told him I would be. And here's how it finally came down: In this world, if you can't help an acquaintance or somebody you care about, someone you know, who can you help?"

Cochran has come downstairs after working out in his private gym; he might easily be taken for a man in his early 40s. He wears an embroidered khaki jumpsuit, a gold Movado watch and the same smoked, gold-rimmed glasses he wore in the Watts parade--bifocals, they turn out to be, and the only indication that he is 57 years old. His voice can mislead you, too. It is inflected with lots of tonal italics and modulated with a dramatic restraint in the lower register that gives way to sudden, almost ecstatic swoops. Close your eyes and he's an ebullient youngster, barely able to contain his excitement about life.

In truth, his enthusiasm can be a bit daunting; it's like the sun blazing, this winter day, in a relentlessly blue sky. He swears it's no act, though. "Most times I'm this buoyant. There are down days, of course. We'll have battles over strategy in the Simpson case or whatever, but I've found that I rarely have two down days in a row. In my life there are more up days than down days, and when the record is written, I believe the up days will be many more, and I look forward to those days. I got that from my father. He's an eternal optimist. He's sitting in the hospital this week, recovering from an automobile accident he had a while ago, and he sees something bright about it: 'Gosh, these nurses are wonderful!' He sees something good in everything."

Clearly, Cochran got a lot from his father: his salesman's gift of gab, his pleasure in pressing the flesh, his emphasis on achievement and his eagerness to fire up those around him: "In my father's business they'd have these contests, and everybody wanted to be top agent. Now, in my own law practice, we have lawyer of the quarter, lawyer of the year. A lot of it goes back to what my father was doing--motivating people to be the best they could be."

In this sense, Johnnie Cochran Jr. fits an American archetype, the hugely energetic, eternally hopeful salesman who turns up in works as diverse as Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt and Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie; with slower pacing he could play the Gentleman Caller. When he describes a glass as half full rather than half empty, it's with blithe disregard for cliché (or maybe fondness for cliché, since it's the familiar that connects with juries, and Cochran plays to every conversational partner as if to a juror). When he speaks of silver linings, he sounds as if he has minted the silver.

Yet George Babbitt, for all his inchoate yearnings, was a shallow striver, while Johnnie Cochran's roots go deep into family and religion. He's been a member of the Second Baptist Church since the age of 11 and recently bought his church new carpet, new pews and a new van to pick up shut-in members of the congregation. On Christmas, as soon as services were over, he went to the family plot in Inglewood, where his mother is buried. "We have about eight crypts there. We are all real close in the family. My mother's there now, my grandmother's two over from her. The rest of us will be there someday. We'll all be together again."

Born in Shreveport, Louisiana, Cochran was six years old when he, his parents and his two sisters boarded a train for California. At first the family lived in the Alameda housing project in northern California, then moved to San Diego before settling in Los Angeles, where he was one of no more than 30 blacks in his class at Los Angeles High. (One classmate, and a friend, was Dustin Hoffman.) After UCLA he went to Loyola Law School and graduated in 1962. Since then, Cochran has practiced many kinds of law in many venues. When the Watts riots exploded in 1965, he had just crossed over into private practice after working nearly three years as a deputy city attorney. A year later he represented the family of Leonard Deadwyler, a young black man who had been shot and killed by police as he drove his pregnant wife to the hospital. Charges were never filed against the police, and Cochran's firm eventually lost a civil suit. But the city allowed the coroner's inquest to be televised, thus handing Cochran his first star turn on TV.

Thanks to his virtuosity as a trial attorney, Cochran became the opposite of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, became an African American who was widely noticed, and almost universally admired, by whites and blacks alike. (It's difficult to find anyone who has an unkind word about Cochran. A leading plaintiff's lawyer who prides himself on being a skeptic said he viewed Johnnie Cochran "with reverence," then changed it to "with profound respect" because he didn't want to sound gushy.) Cochran learned to work not only both sides of the street--in the late Seventies he crossed over once again to become the number three man in the Los Angeles County district attorney's office for several years--but every street in town. For poor clients, he has won stunning victories, mostly in suits charging police with excessive force. Estimates of the total settlements he has obtained in the past ten years alone are as high as $45 million. For wealthy and powerful clients, his very presence in court or in the conference room serves as an insurance policy that has yielded settlements to seemingly intractable disputes and acquittals in the face of horrendously damaging facts.

Long before Cochran signed on as one of Simpson's attorneys, his list of celebrity clients included another football great, Jim Brown, for whom he won a dismissal of rape charges, as well as singer Lou Rawls and teen television star Todd Bridges. In December 1993, Cochran took on representation of the beleaguered Michael Jackson and, one month later, helped settle his civil case.

Now, of course, because of Simpson's travails, the entire nation, and indeed the world, is able to see Cochran in action and can savor the courtroom style for which he is famous--a smooth, unflappable civility coupled with a cobra's coiled power, focus and flash.

"He's very much himself in front of a jury," says Bob Jordan, the assistant head deputy district attorney in Nor-walk, California, who, as a Los Angeles county prosecutor, tried cases with Cochran. "He tries a clean, straightforward case, and juries like and trust him."

"He's superb," says Los Angeles criminal lawyer Paul Geragos. "He doesn't wilt under fire. There are lawyers who are very good when everything goes their way, who have great control and a command of the scene. But when things go awry, their facade cracks and they tremble. Johnnie doesn't do that. And it isn't even his facade. It's his persona."

When I talk about Cochran's reputation for being unflappable and ask if there aren't times when he gets a little flustered, like all the rest of us, Cochran says he doesn't think so, and connects that to his religion. "I have this inner strength," he replies in a matter-of-fact way that manages not to be boastful. "That's what it boils down to, a belief in God. So I'm never going to fall apart or crack, no matter what happens. I'm going to remain unflappable because I have that belief.

Cochran does show some irritation when the subject turns to Vincent Bugliosi, the veteran prosecutor who said in the December 1994 issue of this magazine: "Johnnie is a good lawyer, and very well liked and respected. But, although I might be wrong, I'm not sure he has ever won a murder case before a jury."

"I have a whole list of murder cases I've won over the years," Cochran notes. "I've probably tried in excess of 30 and won 80 percent of them. By winning, I mean walking the client right out the door. It's funny Vincent should have said that, because he and I have a good relationship. We were on Larry King Live together, and I was surprised: He's not at all at ease before a camera. You know, Larry King's in Washington or somewhere and he's asking the questions--I was doing a lot of that sort of thing at the time and enjoying it--but somebody walked past our camera and as soon as there's a break Vincent says, 'Will you stop? Stop distracting me. You walked past the camera!' He's a nervous wreck. I was amazed. This guy has written all these books and he's a nervous wreck, he's sweating and he's dabbing. It was really interesting."

Is this the Johnnie Cochran who's reputed to be so disarmingly generous toward his adversaries? For a moment it's hard to tell, but he ends up saying, with a smile, "I've had murder cases he's never heard of. But I just accept those things. I haven't seen Vincent since that show, but when I see him I'll just say, 'You know, you're wrong. I've tried a lot of murder cases. I've tried more murder cases than you have, Vincent.'"

On the coffee table in Cochran's den are several elegant books, the most interesting of which celebrates the work of Ernie Barnes, the former NFL player who has become an acclaimed figurative artist. Several of Barnes' paintings hang on Cochran's walls, and it's easy to see why: Both men are African Americans who move easily in diverse worlds. Johnnie Cochran's career has been so diverse that a long, admiring piece in last May's issue of The American Lawyer called him "tough to pigeonhole"; another profile, in The Washington Post, started out by calling him a paradox, though the writer never got around to explaining why.

Freely interpreted, such terms mean he's a top dog who looks out for the underdog, a defender of the rich and famous who also stands up for poor victims of police abuse. He's a black man who is hugely successful in white America; a black man who, on O.J. Simpson's behalf and for reasons unconnected with race, tried to have another black man, deputy district attorney Christopher Darden, taken off the prosecution team; a black man who defended a prestigious and predominantly white university against a black man (Marvin Cobb, a former USC assistant athletic director) who claimed he was denied a promotion because of racial bias. And, most intriguing of all, he's a black man representing a white man, Reginald Denny, who was beaten almost to death by blacks in the 1992 South Central riots.

Yet there's another way to look at this that requires editing out all references to black and white. Cochran is simply a lawyer of formidable talents who goes wherever those talents take him and does what his clients need. Like other prominent, well-connected lawyers, he builds success upon success, attracting individuals and corporations who are willing, often eager, to pay him large amounts of money. Like all great lawyers, however, he operates from a moral and ethical base, so there's always room in his caseload for his convictions, and for his gleeful, almost boyish delight in new ideas. ("You go to Rome and look at the Sistine Chapel and you think, Why couldn't somebody do that today? We know so much more today, but nobody does those kinds of things because people think all the good ideas have passed.")

From this perspective, the paradoxical becomes plausible--Denny versus Los Angeles is the obverse of Cobb versus USC. Why shouldn't a black defense lawyer rag on a black prosecutor on behalf of a black client? The pigeon, far from nesting in a single hole, flies the coop any time he chooses.

Between trials, strategy sessions, staff meetings, settlement conferences and recreational jetting around the world with his wife, Dale, a marketing analyst with a Ph.D., Johnnie Cochran sometimes gives inspirational speeches to young people. When he gets to the part about making a difference in people's lives, he likes to tell them about the Ron Settles case, and the difference he made in the life of a family and a community.

Ron Settles was a Cal State--Long Beach football star who, in 1981, was picked up for speeding in Signal Hill, a small, white, working-class enclave in Los Angeles County. Shortly after his arrest, Settles, an African American, was found hanged in his jail cell. The police wrote it off as a suicide, and that would have seemed to be the end of it. Settles was already buried back home in Tennessee by the time his parents asked Cochran to represent them in a lawsuit. "People told me that I was crazy to take the case," Cochran recalls. "All the witnesses were police witnesses, and the one other guy who was in jail at the time was mysteriously taken off to court [when the body was found]." But Cochran, in a dramatic roll of the dice, persuaded Ron Settles' parents to have their son's body exhumed and to take their chances on the outcome of an autopsy.

"The exhumation took 13 hours, and it was horrible. I'd never experienced anything like it. If water gets to a body, it turns, like, to soup, and the smell is unbelievable. We had to put on smocks, because if we didn't take off our clothes we'd have to throw those clothes away. But the one thing his parents said was, 'Please stay with our son's body until this is over, and let us know what the results are.' When I was in law school I would never have dreamed I would be faced with such a situation. But I did it, I stayed there, and it was tough."

Cochran has told this story many times, but he's such an accomplished raconteur that he seems to lose himself, once again, in the horror and solemnity of the moment. "The body was well-muscled, but looking at it, after a while, was like looking at an empty house. There was no spirit or anything in there. And watching the coroners cut away--one of them cut himself. I'll never forget this, that he said, 'Oh, don't worry, nothing can live in there anyway,' so he kept on going and then they had lunch. They were having sandwiches while they were doing this! There was a big crowd, and a CBS news crew was waiting outside. Then we finally got the results. He had died from esophageal hemorrhaging. His esophagus had been pushed against his spinal cord, and you can get that only from the bilateral compression of a chokehold. We had 'em!"

On the basis of the autopsy, the Settles family was awarded $760,000, at the time the largest settlement in a jail-death case in California. Beyond that, Signal Hill underwent a revolution. "This was the worst community," Cochran says. "They would never investigate police abuse. It was just terrible. Everybody knew about it and they kept turning a deaf eye! But then they did a management study that said, 'You either have to shut down this police department and bring the sheriff's department in here, or you have to make these changes,' which meant spending a lot of tax money. By the time we were finished, the police chief had been fired."

As the Simpson trial approaches its climax, Cochran is polishing his closing argument. He had indicated, during the time we met late in 1994, that O.J. would not testify on his own behalf--"His only opportunity to express what he is thinking will be through me or whoever is making these arguments"--so the summation will carry a special significance. "When I stand up to deliver it," Cochran says, "I'll be speaking from the heart. You may remember Leslie Abramson's closing argument in the Menendez case. She was great. She got up there and stuck those pins in the pictures and it was wonderful. Then Lester Kuriyama, the deputy district attorney, stood up and read his argument. You can't do that. You have to give of yourself. Sure, you might glance down at some notes, but you don't read them. What does that say about your knowledge and your commitment to the case?"

Win, lose or draw on O.J., it's a phenomenal time of life for Johnnie Cochran, and he knows it. "At our office Christmas party, where we pass out the bonuses, I was saying how things happen that you can't anticipate. Last year started with Michael Jackson. We had the resolution in the Michael Jackson case in January 1994, and when we walked out of the Santa Monica courthouse we saw hundreds of cameras in a line and helicopters overhead; it was amazing. Then along comes O.J. Simpson. I wonder what's going to happen next year. I have no idea."

Maybe not, if he's talking about which new clients will come knocking on his door. But it's a safe bet that, starting in April or May, he'll devote himself to a case that's already in the works, one that, unlike Simpson's, may break new ground in jurisprudence: the $40 million damage suit he has filed against the city of Los Angeles on behalf of Reginald Denny and three other riot victims.

We saw what happened to Denny, live from the corner of Florence and Normandie: the truck lumbering into the intersection, the driver pulled from his cab and beaten beneath the unblinking eyes of news helicopters. Most of us felt profound horror, not only because of the savagery of the beating but because of the inexplicable absence of police.

Johnnie Cochran saw it, too, but he and Denny didn't meet until months later, after Denny was out of the hospital. "I got a call from a friend, Dominick Rubal-cava, who's a wonderful lawyer in Santa Monica. He had met Denny through Denny's family, and he said, 'I want you to go see this guy. I think it's a case that's right up your alley.' So Dom and I went to see Reginald on a Saturday in the summer of 1992. Reginald Denny is a remarkable human being."

As a matter of course, Cochran uses elevated language to describe people he likes--wonderful lawyers, great friends, fine neighbors. In the case of Reggie Denny, though, he means exactly what he says. For one thing, Denny showed no interest in bringing suit against his attackers or anyone else, and not because he lacked intelligence or imagination. "He's a man without rancor, without bitterness," Cochran says with wonder. "He'd gotten something like 30,000 letters, and some of them were hate letters, people sending checks and saying, 'This is for white people uniting,' that sort of thing. He sent the money back, he didn't want any part of it. When I first saw this guy, I was sold hook, line and sinker. He didn't see things in racial terms. He said, 'Mr. Cochran, here I was in this area, I was just driving my truck and I got beaten up by these black guys. But then black people came and saved me when the police didn't.' I said, We've got to help this guy."

To figure out how, Cochran returned to his office that same day and convened an impromptu meeting of the firm. The most obvious approach was bringing suit against the city, but this was easier said than done: A large body of law on government immunity makes it almost impossible to sue police departments for negligence in riot situations.

Then Cochran and an associate, Eric Ferrer, started kicking around some ideas about violations of civil rights. They agreed that if Denny were black he might claim he had been injured because the police had a discriminatory policy of not protecting South Central. Denny is not black, of course, a fact that at first seemed an insoluble problem. But suddenly Cochran and Ferrer saw the light. Denny's skin color didn't matter. The real issue was a violation of legal protection for all people in that area, including a white trucker who just happened to be driving through. Cochran beams as he recalls the moment: "We said, 'That's it! That's it! That's it.'"

That wasn't quite it for some of Cochran's associates. They were appalled by the idea of a black law firm representing a white victim of the riots. But Cochran stood fast. "My career wouldn't mean anything, I wouldn't like anything about myself or my firm, if I refused to represent Reginald Denny because he was beaten by some black hotheads--any more than I would refuse to represent a black person who'd been beaten by some white hotheads. It was an easy decision for me, and the lawyers all came to understand that it was the right thing to do." Since then, Cochran and Denny have bonded like the two sweet-spirited soul mates they seem to be. "I took Reggie and his daughter Ashley to Bill Clinton's inauguration," Cochran says. "He had never been to Washington, and he had the time of his life. He and his daughter went to the ball in Union Station, and then they were out on the Mall with all that wonderful singing. He's wonderful, wonderful. He's an outstanding client."

This is vintage Cochran in the buoyancy, energy and hyperbole--were he 40 years younger, he might be describing a client who had just bought a big insurance policy. But it's also Johnnie Cochran in the prime of his life, revving up for another great case, one that promises to sweep away conventional notions of race with its focus on justice. "This thing is so enthralling," Cochran says, with a fervor that could make over the Sistine Chapel.

When Johnnie Cochran speaks of silver linings, he sounds as if he has minted the silver.