Part One: Mark Fuhrman: The Most Racist Cop, or Merely Normal Racist Cop?

This week Robert invites Joe Kassabian to the guest seat and regales him with the thrilling story of Mark Fuhrman, the most famous racist in LAPD history. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Robert Evans?

  This is Behind the Bastards, a podcast in which Sophie misses the mysterious robot woman who I believe was murdered and Sophie believes was never a person, but was instead just a program that Zoom used to have and they replaced it with a thing that tries to get you to use AI whenever you record.

• 0:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, we don't use Zoom anymore, but I do miss the little.

• 0:25Robert Evans?

  I forget what we use.

• 0:26Speaker 01

  I know, I do miss the lady being like, "Recording in prog-" so I'm-

• 0:30Robert Evans?

  In progress.

• 0:31Speaker 01

  But I could just say it.

• 0:32Speaker 02

  Have you thought that maybe she misses you?

• 0:34Speaker 01

  Probably. Everybody misses me.

• 0:36Robert Evans?

  I never think that, James. Not James, you're Joe. Joe Kasabian, our guest for today.

• 0:42Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 0:42Robert Evans?

  Host of the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast, author of numerous works of fiction and at least one work of nonfiction, The Hooligans of Kandahar. Joe, what else do you got to plug for us here?

• 0:54Speaker 02

  Uh, my newest gunpowder fantasy novel, The Highlands Burn, comes out May 29th. It will probably be out by the time this episode comes out. So yeah, pick that up. It'll be available ebook, audiobook, paperback, wherever you get your books.

• 1:09Robert Evans?

  Awesome. Well, check that out and check out, you know, Joe, you can't have gunpowder fantasy without both gunpowder and people who are willing to lie. And you know who always has a gun and also lies a lot?

• 1:28Speaker 02

  Uh, cops?

• 1:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah, cops. Exactly. Joe, that worked. Okay, okay, okay. This is a better intro than I thought. Great, great. And just in the last, you know, literally the week that we're recording this, it'll have been a couple of weeks ago, when you good people on the internet or at Netflix, which I guess is also on the internet, get to listen to slash watch these episodes. But we lost a great man and a great, a great law enforcement officer, Joe. And, you know, I can, let's all take our hats off, have a moment of silence for, for a great man, Officer Mark Fuhrman, you know?

• 2:02Speaker 02

  Oh, god damn it.

• 2:03Robert Evans?

  We all miss him. We all miss him.

• 2:05Speaker 01

  Welcome to the pod, Joe.

• 2:06Robert Evans?

  It's hard going on without Mark, you know? I have trouble. What's the point of life without Mark Fuhrman? Without a really racist detective who's largely responsible for OJ Simpson getting away with murder?

• 2:18Speaker 01

  I think I'm gonna like garden this weekend and like, you know, go outside, touch some grass and like, not think about Mark Fuhrman at all, but for the next couple hours, I guess.

• 2:31Robert Evans?

  We're gonna be thinking a lot about Mark Fuhrman.

• 2:32Speaker 02

  To be fair, Sophie, that is something you're gonna have in common with Mark Fuhrman. He's also touching grass.

• 2:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he is, he is, he is, forever and ever.

• 2:42Speaker 01

  Fun fact, he tagged the week that we're recording this.

• 2:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah, the original intro that I had written out for this started, as Leo Tolstoy would have said, "All great episodes of Behind the Bastards are one of two stories. A bad person goes on a journey, or a famous asshole just died." And that's what we're doing this week, right? We're doing, we're doing our eulogy in the life and times of former LAPD detective and OJ Simpson trial star, Mark Fuhrman. And if you're not, if you didn't live through the OJ trial, like everybody recording the podcast right now, or if your memories have just faded, OJ Simpson was really good at football and pretty good at being in fucking The Naked Guy, I think it was that, no, was it Airplane? He was in a couple of movies.

• 3:28Speaker 02

  He was in Airplane, I think, right? I don't know, I was born in 88, so this is right about on my line, you know?

• 3:35Robert Evans?

  Yeah, so he's a very famous, beloved sports star, you're transitioning into just general star, and then his wife and her partner, his ex-wife and her partner are found brutally murdered. Um, OJ did it, we don't need to beat around the bush here, right?

• 3:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, he wrote a book saying, "What if I did it?"

• 3:54Robert Evans?

  He wrote a book saying, "If I did it," you know? Um, but he didn't get convicted. And if you ask people, "Why didn't he get convicted?", obviously, there's a lot of different reasons.

• 4:03Speaker 01

  If the glove doesn't fit.

• 4:05Robert Evans?

  Basically, everyone agrees that the reason why OJ ultimately, and there's a number, but the reason why OJ ultimately got acquitted is because a police detective named Mark Fuhrman, who was, you know, part of the, one of the first guys on scene, and one of the guys involved with like, the finding of that famous black glove, was revealed to be a super racist because of a bunch of tapes where he had talked about all of his racist beliefs and his joy of doing things like planting evidence to get black people convicted of crimes that they hadn't committed. And this dropped into the OJ Simpson case like a bombshell and is said to have played a major role on why OJ got off, is that Mark Fuhrman really muddied

• 4:46Robert Evans?

  the waters. Because he was such a racist piece of shit, it brought into question all of the evidence around OJ and all of the police work that had been done to gather that evidence. And so it ultimately just torpedoed the case. And that's somewhat debatable, but Mark, because of how famous the case was, and because of how big the story went, that this LAPD detective had been talking about all these crimes that a ton of LAPD cops were implemented in, it caused this huge scandal for the department. So it was very influential on the history of like, law enforcement, and very influential for the LAPD, and just within American culture. And so that is the story we're telling this week, the story of Mark Fuhrman. Are you excited, Joe?

• 5:27Speaker 02

  Uh, I will say, for all of the episodes I've been on this show, this one has the lowest body count.

• 5:35Robert Evans?

  No direct deaths.

• 5:37Speaker 02

  Did, did you have me on? Because Kim Kardashian's dad is involved in this.

• 5:41Robert Evans?

  That's right, that's right. It's the Armenian angle.

• 5:43Speaker 01

  We did not racially profile you.

• 5:46Speaker 02

  I fucking knew it, Robert.

• 5:47Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes. All, I, because I needed to have someone who was on OJ's side, and all Armenians, like, inherently support OJ Simpson because of Robert Kardashian.

• 5:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, we have no choice.

• 5:58Speaker 01

  One of Robert's favorite things to bring up constantly is when Ross from Friends played Robert Kardashian in that series.

• 6:05Speaker 02

  That was weird.

• 6:06Robert Evans?

  Yes, ably.

• 6:07Speaker 01

  It was really, it made no sense.

• 6:08Robert Evans?

  It was really weird casting.

• 6:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:10Speaker 01

  I loved it.

• 6:12Speaker 02

  They kind of put him in brown face in a way. It was strange.

• 6:15Robert Evans?

  A little bit.

• 6:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:16Robert Evans?

  I just love the way he kept saying, "Juice?"

• 6:18Speaker 01

  Juice!

• 6:23Speaker 03

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• 6:28Robert Evans?

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• 6:59Speaker 04

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• 7:33Robert Evans?

  Okay, let's begin our episodes.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 7:37Robert Evans?

  Mark James Furman was born on February 5, 1952, in Eatonville, Washington. Now, that's not that far from where Sophie and I live right now, up here in the Pacific Northwest. Today, Eatonville is about 75% white. I think it's a little bit less than 75% white, but not much. And it was a lot whiter than that in the 1950s. So, you know, the PNW is a very white place today, and it was even more so back then. And that is definitely the kind of community that Mark grows up in. What became Eatonville began with the homestead of a guy named Thomas Cobb Van Eaton in 1888, constructed very close to picturesque Mount Rainier. As more settlers arrived in the area and particularly began to advance towards the

• 8:20Robert Evans?

  mountain, Eaton turned his homestead into a business selling necessities to travelers. People settled around his house, and in 1903, a railroad connection made Eatonville a real town. And the Eatonville Lumber Company, the biggest business in town. Prior to that point, settlers in the area had tended to just call the whole area Mashal's Prairie, after a group of Niskali Indians who originally inhabited the region. These native people had been massacred in 1856 by a militia known as Maxon's Raiders in retaliation for a fight with a Washington militia a few weeks earlier. I think this is all part of the Puget Sound War. Uh, per the website historylink.org, official reports claimed only eight of the Mashal hostels were killed, but virtually all accounts and testimonies agree that the Raiders under

• 9:03Robert Evans?

  Maxon's command killed defenseless elderly women, children, and infants. So, that's where Mark's hometown comes from. Many such cases in the US. A lot of little genocide villages out in the PNW and elsewhere.

• 9:16Speaker 02

  I love that this whole town just started because a bunch of dudes squatted on another dude's front lawn.

• 9:22Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, after wiping out the people who had previously lived there.

• 9:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's the classic Pacific Northwest trait.

• 9:29Robert Evans?

  Very, tale as old as well the PNW. And Mark would have grown up, he wouldn't have been grown up being taught that like Maxon's Raiders had killed all of these people's like kids, right? Like, they would have been taught, and there was a battle, you know? And they killed eight of these Braves, right? As opposed to, and then a genocide was done.

• 9:46Speaker 02

  They killed 100 warriors, parentheses, women and children.

• 9:51Robert Evans?

  The original military aged males.

• 9:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:55Robert Evans?

  So, he would have been raised, as I stated, in a community that was nearly all white, and in which legends of Indian hunters like Maxon's Raiders would have been celebrated in school and in the popular culture of the day. Racism would not have been weird for him. I've never read Mark discuss any of this history, not even in his books does he really talk a lot about his childhood, but he wouldn't have been able to avoid this kind of stuff growing up in the region. His dad, Ralph, was a truck driver and a carpenter, and would be described later by Mark as insensitive and irresponsible, as well as a braggart who doesn't mind hurting his loved ones. His mom, Billy, was a waitress. Their marriage was not a love match, and the two divorced when Mark was just seven years old.

• 10:38Speaker 02

  I can't imagine how their kid ended up being a cop.

• 10:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, shocking, shocking. This guy talks about what an asshole, what a violent, angry asshole his dad was, turns into a violent, angry asshole. It does happen sometimes. Um, it's a bummer. I don't know. I, I, I actually hate that this happens, but it's not, it's not good. So Mark stays mostly with his mom, who remarries once, but not for very long, as she has a hellish drinking problem. And per those who knew her, could be a mean drunk. So again, Mark doesn't just grow up with his dad being this like very abrasive kind of figure. His mom, who largely raises him, is like an abusive drinker at some times. Um, Mark thus grows up, this same person alleged, very mistrustful and paranoid, right? This is something you'll hear from people

• 11:26Robert Evans?

  who are close to him, is he's just kind of a paranoid kid who has trouble being at ease with people, which is not an uncommon reaction to growing up in an abusive household, right?

• 11:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is, this is all tracking so far.

• 11:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's all tracking so far. An article in the New York Times Review of Books by Fox Butterfield notes this about Mark's level of, um, we'll call it racial awareness as a child.

• 11:48Speaker 02

  Oh, no.

• 11:49Robert Evans?

  Only a few, yeah, only a few black families lived in Eatonville, and Mr. Fuhrman and his younger brother Scott had run-ins with two boys and one of them, the Blues. They'd see you coming down the street and say, here come the N-words, recalled Daniel Blue, now a truck driver in Tacoma, Washington. So that's this claim, you'll get, both the Blues will say that like Mark and his brother would use racial slurs, target them with racial slurs, would make fun of them, you know, would mock them. We're like bullies, we're racist bullies, right?

• 12:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:15Robert Evans?

  Now, for his part, Mark has denied these allegations, right? Or at least he denied them back in the late 90s. Um, and he, he writes a book after the OJ Simpson trial, because everybody does, called Murder in Brentwood, and he addresses the allegations from the Blue Brothers, uh, during this book. And this is, again, this is while he's like right after the case, so he's been essentially revealed as a racist to the entire world. Um, so he has to address that. And in his book, Mark says that although Dan, like, basically, this is a lie, I never said that to anybody, you know, Dan says that we played football together, but we weren't even at high school at the same time. So we couldn't have played football together. Um, and I guess that's probably true, but also I can see Dan, like, mixing up who he played football with and when, but remembering accurately, somebody

• 13:00Robert Evans?

  called him a slur, you know?

• 13:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, it'd be pretty easy to do, growing up in the media.

• 13:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah, uh, but Mark did say, "The truth is, I never heard either brother called anything other but than their name by me or anyone else." And that's the thing, if before you're Mark saying like, "Well, we weren't even in high school together." You know, this is a big story at the time, I'd be willing to believe maybe somebody would like lie for attention, you know, to have a little moment in the biggest news story of all time at this point. But when Mark is like, "I never heard anyone call those boys a name." I'm sorry, you guys grew up, these are like the only two black kids in town, you grew up in the 50s in rural Washington, and you never heard anyone call them anything but their name. I don't believe that.

• 13:39Speaker 02

  I don't believe that for a second. Not for a second. And, and like, even like the idea like, "Oh, well, we couldn't have played football together. We, we weren't even in the same grade." Uh, yeah, cuz nobody who lives in the neighborhood, a small town, uh, plays pickup football games ever.

• 13:55Robert Evans?

  Would ever have played any kind of pick pickup football game, right? And the, it's the, or would have mistaken like you for your younger brother, maybe? I don't know, like the, the-

• 14:04Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 14:05Robert Evans?

  The whole, the whole thing, idea that like, he never heard any racism against these kids in small town Washington, like, growing up in rural Oklahoma in the 90s, I heard black kids in my school get called slurs, you know?

• 14:17Speaker 02

  Definitely.

• 14:18Robert Evans?

  And that, number one, it was a lot more diverse, like rural Oklahoma, way more diverse than rural Washington, but just the whole fucking like, that, I just, like, that from the jump, Mark, you're lying.

• 14:27Speaker 02

  Um, yeah.

• 14:28Robert Evans?

  So I don't know-

• 14:29Speaker 02

  No fucking way.

• 14:30Robert Evans?

  -how racist he was, but he grew up with a lot of racism. Uh, Mark moved around as an adolescent and attended high school first in Gig Harbor and then Belfair. In 1970, he graduated high school. By this point, Mark had come to be known for something besides his racism. He was an artsy kid, weirdly enough, like he is, he really likes art. He wants to be a creative. He wants to like, uh, be, you know, pursue a creative vocation. That seems to be his passion. And he will always, and also the people who are close to him will always say that like, Mark at his core wanted to be an artist. And I think there's a version of this story that's like, also the tragic tale of like a kid who, because of the time and place and his ideas about like macho stuff, couldn't

• 15:15Robert Evans?

  do the thing that would have made him happy, and so kept forcing himself to do these like aggressive masculine things that he didn't really want, cuz he just wants to be an artist. But in 1970, he graduated and enlisted in the Marines, because that's what you do, right?

• 15:29Speaker 02

  Right.

• 15:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 15:30Speaker 02

  Was he also turned down by an art school in Austria? Or is this just a weird connection?

• 15:36Robert Evans?

  No, no. He doesn't even apply. Doesn't even apply.

• 15:41Robert Evans?

  But he does kind of do the Hitler, right? Like where he volunteers for the stupid war that he didn't necessarily need to volunteer for. And so instead of continuing or doing anything to further the art thing, he winds up going to Nam. Now, he serves, I should say, during the Vietnam War. He is a Vietnam era veteran. I guess he is a veteran of the Vietnam. He's deployed to Vietnam, but he doesn't, he's not a combat veteran, right? Like he never actually fights and he will claim otherwise. I'm only bringing that up because it's relevant. Yeah, that's most people.

• 16:10Speaker 02

  That's most people, yeah.

• 16:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And but he, and the only, again, there's no shame in that, but he did, he will lie about this, right? And that's why that's really relevant. Mark's service came late in the war and was in reality quite boring. He doesn't actually get to do any of the stuff that like, you get the feeling he really wants to fight, right? Like this is a kid who like, as a lot of young men do, wants to prove himself in combat. Like feels like he wants to, wants to have that experience and he's not going to get it. He gets trained as an MP and a machine gunner and rises to the rank of sergeant during his four years in the Corps. He could have been deployed to combat, but it never quite happened. That Times, that New York Times Review of Books article claims that, quote, "The closest he got to the ground war was aboard a ship in the South China Sea."

• 16:56Robert Evans?

  The ship he's on is the USS New Orleans and it's an amphibious transport ships. And Mark is basically like living there and like on call, like if we need to, you might get sent into combat at any point in time. But it never actually quite happens. So Mark spends a period of time just kind of living for months on like the edge of maybe going into battle. But he never gets to like consummate this act that really does seem to mean a lot to him. And this, this act is like, the fact that this gets interrupted, that he never gets his baptism of fire is going to bother him the rest of his life. Like I get the feeling he never fully gets over not being tested in this way. And he seems to really want that.

• 17:36Speaker 02

  I've met a lot of guys like that over the years.

• 17:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 17:41Speaker 02

  They want it so much. They enlist as like infantry dudes. And then they end up on like a massive forward operating base that might have a rocket fired at it. And they want to sound like the most high speed Green Beret ass motherfucker for the rest of their life. And they probably wear hats about where exactly they were stationed.

• 18:04Robert Evans?

  Where exactly they got mortared.

• 18:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, like Camp Liberty. Like, that's the lamest fucking shit. My favorite was Cold War Veteran hat I've seen. That was a classic, man. That's like the ultimate dude who never did shit.

• 18:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I love it. And it's the like, I feel, I feel like I have a level of understanding because like there is, our society does like idolize the experience of being a combat veteran to such an extent for young men that like, I get why he's obsessed with this. Of course he is, right? It's not an unfamiliar thing. And, you know, I'm not like, no one's like, very few people are immune entirely to that feeling of like, oh, there's got to be like something to this experience that's like special and powerful.

• 18:55Speaker 02

  Wrote a whole book about it.

• 18:57Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. And when somebody believes that and buys into that and goes as far as getting on the assault boat next to the coast, but never quite gets to have it, there's like a degree of failure to launch almost syndrome that I think is just going to spark in him the rest of his life. He never gets over this, you know?

• 19:15Speaker 02

  And he doesn't even go into the country, right? Like, he's living on this boat. So it's like

• 19:20Robert Evans?

  Living on the boat.

• 19:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's like even worse, because even if you go to one of these bases, it's very similar to any other irregular conflict where you might get ambushed still, you might get artillery, might get mortared, whatever. Something could still happen that you can kind of grab on to that you did something. But he's just sitting on a boat.

• 19:37Robert Evans?

  He's just sitting on a boat and it's just not the thing he wants it to be. Now, again, he does, this is, he's not a draftee, so he's not just doing his like, you know, one quick, you know, in and out. He does a full four years during his time as a sergeant. He develops a reputation for what that Times journalist Butterfield calls a reputation as a macho officer. And again, he's not an officer. That's Butterfield using the wrong terminology.

• 20:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's a non-commissioned officer.

• 20:03Robert Evans?

  He's in, yeah, he's a non-com. And specifically a macho, quote, "in the Clint Eastwood Dirty Harry mold." And Mark's gonna love this movie when it comes out, not long after. And he is going to deliberately like try to play act as Dirty Harry. Like people are, especially early in his career, he's like often kind of LARPing specifically as Dirty Harry. And he'll compare himself to Dirty Harry a lot. He really wants you to think he's cool.

• 20:30Speaker 02

  That's some dork shit, Robert.

• 20:30Robert Evans?

  It's really dorky.

• 20:32Speaker 01

  Some serious dweeb shit.

• 20:35Robert Evans?

  Come on, bro.

• 20:36Speaker 02

  Fucking lame, bro.

• 20:37Robert Evans?

  Come on.

• 20:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's sad and it just the, the number of like toxic men like this who you could just, you really needed like an older brother who would be like, hey, man, I know you've like gotten a lot of, picked up a lot of shit from like comic books and like movies about like what men are supposed to do. And like, and that's all wrong. You need to like calm down, get comfortable in your own skin. Like you're not missing anything because you didn't get shot at. Like there were, he never, he didn't have any, I really get the feeling there was not, there was not any kind of positive male influence in his life. Who could have like modeled proper behavior. So he's, he's doing these things like, well, I guess I go to the Marines and that'll make me a man, you know? And then later it's gonna be, I guess I'll become a cop and that'll make me a man.

• 21:22Robert Evans?

  And you, you get the feeling this is a guy who doesn't know who he is and who, who has some, it's not even that. This is a guy who knows a little of who he is. He knows he wants to be an artist, but he can't do that. And so he never gets to find out like more of the person that he might otherwise be. As he falls into pretending to be this violent macho asshole. And gradually that becomes him more and more. It's kind of the thing that I take out of this. This is a guy I don't think had to go down this route, but chose to over time because he was scared to try to portray himself as anything else.

• 21:57Speaker 02

  What's the chaotic evil version of a glow up?

• 22:00Robert Evans?

  Right, right, exactly. So, Mark's second wife, Janet Hackett, later told reporters, "He loved art, but he joined the Marines and the police as if he was trying to prove himself. On the outside, Mark is very poised, but inside, he had the lowest self-esteem you can imagine." So that's his, one of his three ex-wives. I'm not making all of this up myself, you know? Um, this isn't just like my headcanon. That's at least someone who was close to him saying pretty much the same thing. So after he does his four years with the Marines, Mark decides to see if joining another heavily armed group of men working for the government might stop him from feeling insecure. So he joins the LAPD in 1975. He excels at police academy and he graduates second in his class with widespread praise from his instructors.

• 22:44Robert Evans?

  When he becomes a rookie cop, his bosses were all impressed by his appearance. Mark is in great shape, his uniform's always spotless, he like, looks really good. He looks like the perfect cop. He's like, tall, blond-haired, blue-eyed, and, you know, his shit's always like, really, like, locked down.

• 23:00Speaker 02

  Right.

• 23:01Robert Evans?

  His background's an art nerd.

• 23:02Speaker 02

  Makes sense, sure the Marines would've taught him how to do that.

• 23:03Robert Evans?

  Yep, yep, yep. And he's also, he's kind of a fastidious dude. Um, his background as an art nerd shows through here, too. His superiors noted that his penmanship was, quote, "almost a work of art." Right? Like, that's one of his, like, LA, like, his superiors in the LAPD is, like, his, his writing was beautiful. Like, his fan writing is gorgeous.

• 23:22Speaker 02

  Look at his competition, they're just like, finger painting.

• 23:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, they could barely read.

• 23:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah, you know who else can barely read? Joe.

• 23:31Speaker 02

  Who's that?

• 23:32Robert Evans?

  The sponsors of this podcast, all nearly illiterate, thanks to America's broken public education system.

• 23:43Robert Evans?

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• 24:42Robert Evans?

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• 25:24Robert Evans?

  And we're back. That wasn't even really a joke. There's a good chance to sponsor this podcast or illiterate. A shocking number of Americans functionally are.

• 25:33Speaker 02

  It's a good time to be writing a book, Robert, let me tell you.

• 25:35Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  Do you feel the pain in my laugh?

• 25:39Robert Evans?

  Mm-hmm.

• 25:40Speaker 01

  Oh, America.

• 25:42Robert Evans?

  So, in his first days as an LAPD rookie, Mark seems to have been very eager to please and impress. He would often show up to work like a half hour to an hour early. This commitment to going above and beyond the job description was recognized by his bosses. And in 1977, he was assigned to a dangerous but prominent assignment, working with a sexy new unit in East LA targeting Hispanic street gangs. Per an article in the LA Times, quote, "In 1977, with black gangs emerging as a formidable criminal element and Latino gangs continuing to pose problems, department administrators received a one-year federal grant for a special 44-man unit to concentrate on neighborhoods where gang crime was heaviest. Based at the Hollenbeck Division in East Los Angeles, the unit was dubbed 'Total Resources Against Street Hoodlums',

• 26:27Robert Evans?

  trash, but civic leaders thought the acronym disparaging."

• 26:32Robert Evans?

  Total resources against street hoodlums? Hoodlums? Come on, guys.

• 26:36Speaker 02

  I love to use my 50s slang.

• 26:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Now, it is the 70s, but yeah, it still seems outdated. Ultimately, the trash-

• 26:43Speaker 02

  I gotta go get those roustabouts.

• 26:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah, get the roustabouts out of here. And people probably haven't heard about the trash program, but a lot of Angelenos have heard about the crash program.

• 26:52Speaker 02

  Right, that's where I thought you were going. I was like, of course this guy was in the fucking crash unit.

• 26:57Robert Evans?

  That's where I am going, because the trash unit is the immediate precursor to the crash unit. So they start the crashing in like 77, and I think it's 79, they changed the name to crash. They're like, oh, you know what? Trash is a bad acronym, but if we throw a C in there, you know?

• 27:13Speaker 02

  It changes everything.

• 27:13Robert Evans?

  That sounds a lot better, right?

• 27:15Speaker 02

  It's what we're doing on the streets is not the problem, Robert. It's what we're calling ourselves to put under a really cool challenge coin.

• 27:22Robert Evans?

  Right, right. Total, T for total, that's bad. C for community, that's good. So the crash program becomes the cornerstone of Chief Daryl Gates's anti-gang initiative. The goal here was to counter gang activity by treating the battle against organized crime as if it were a literal war, to use the lessons of insurgent conflict in Vietnam, in order to like defeat street crime. Now, one major early measure adopted by the LAPD was the use of stop and frisk tactics, which they referred to as jamming. So, you know, a lot of racism, a lot of like targeting of black and Hispanic men, and a lot of like targeting in a way that leads to violence when there doesn't need to be.

• 28:05Robert Evans?

  So a lot of people are gonna get beaten and arrested and killed who don't need to be, because this program is basically built in order to ensure there are additional unnecessary violent interactions between law enforcement and the community.

• 28:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, they had to name it Crash, because it was really hard to find an acronym for the word boomerang.

• 28:22Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 28:25Robert Evans?

  So the city government judged the Crash program a success and took over funding it in 79. And again, that's when it becomes Crash instead of Trash. And I'm not sure by what metric you'd call Crash a success in 1979. As that article noted, from 79 to 81, the number of major gang-related crimes in Los Angeles more than doubled from 2088 to 5,158 during the first like four years or so that the Crash program, I mean, for the, during the second two years of it, but like, yeah, from like 79 to 81, it doubles more than. Now, what's funny is that around that time, the Sheriff's Department had a program with a similar goal that worked much better, like the Sheriff's Anti-Gang Program is a lot more effective than the LAPD's. But the LAPD just kind of keeps ballsing

• 29:10Robert Evans?

  their way through Crash, which critics say spread out police attention far too widely. A large part of the problem with these anti-gang units is that they had very little effective oversight and a ton of incentive to lock people up for bullshit reasons and carry out acts of extreme violence against them. These programs would ultimately culminate in the shattering LAPD Rampart scandal. This keeps getting worse and worse until it blows up in a major way that causes massive problems. Like all LAPD scandals, because that's how the LAPD works, you know? Like, we're always building to something that's going to, like, blow up in the city of Los Angeles's face.

• 29:47Speaker 02

  They had to create their own gangs to fight gangs with tattoos and colors and, you know, especially the Sheriff's Department, ironically enough.

• 29:56Robert Evans?

  The only way to beat a bad guy with a gang is a bad guy also with a gang.

• 30:00Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 30:01Robert Evans?

  That's right.

• 30:02Speaker 02

  But one is paid by the government.

• 30:03Robert Evans?

  But yeah, one of them has official badges. So at the same time, as Crash is making the gang problem worse, it contributes to this ever-growing sense of unease and this building racial tension in Los Angeles. This is all, like, the whole, all of the bad things about this program are going to help cause and lead to the LA riots, right? This all feeds into Rodney King and, and, and, you know, the reaction that why everyone is so fucking pissed at the LAPD, you know, before that even happens. For his part, Mark does not seem to have liked anti-gang work. He described his mission to his second wife, who he was married to during this period, as to, quote, "harass anyone who looked like

• 30:47Robert Evans?

  a gang member and obliterate them." That sounds like police work. Yeah, he does not, per the Times. "The job put enormous pressure on Mr. Fuhrman," Mrs. Hackett said. That's his ex. "He was blond and blue eyed, six foot three, and he stood out in a crowd in the largely Hispanic neighborhood," she said. "He became a lot more on the edge, moody and depressed because of the job," Mrs. Hackett recalled. "Sometimes he refused to talk or smile for days." And, like, you don't need to be there. No one's making you do this job. I'm not surprised it's miserable. It sounds awful.

• 31:19Speaker 02

  Bro, you have a job. You could just quit. You're not the Marines anymore. Just hit the bricks.

• 31:24Robert Evans?

  She doesn't tell us a lot. Like, I don't have a ton of detail inside their marriage, but you get a lot from the fact that she's like, yeah, "He seemed miserable, so I left him. I got out of there." Like, she divorces him because of his moodiness, like, right around this time. So Mark winds up alone, has to, like, live with a fellow cop in an apartment. This does not make him less depressed. I think the cause of his deep- And it, like, the cause of his sadness should be pretty obvious. "He wants to, like, be an artist. He doesn't like this job, "but his need to prove himself as a man has forced him into a series of brutal, dangerous, and pointless jobs "that make him miserable and make him miserable to be around." And he seems to have recognized this as well.

• 32:08Robert Evans?

  In 1981, the LAPD had just opened a Behavioral Science Service section, "which hosted the first police psychological counseling unit in the country." So, there aren't any police psychological counselors officially until 1981, which probably explains a lot.

• 32:27Speaker 02

  That's fun, right? They do so well nowadays.

• 32:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, it helps so much today.

• 32:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, it changed American policing, obviously.

• 32:35Robert Evans?

  Yeah, after this, there were no more problems.

• 32:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, solved it.

• 32:39Robert Evans?

  So, and actually, this actually explains maybe why the counseling doesn't help and even can contribute to making things worse within, like, the construct of these police departments.

• 32:49Speaker 02

  Because I've read this book called Killology, or whatever it's called.

• 32:54Robert Evans?

  It's a little worse than that, actually. It's weird. So Mark sits down. He has a counseling session with a psychiatrist or psychologist named Susan Sax Clifford. And she talks to him and he goes through, because he's trying to get, he wants to quit. He wants to get like a, like a medical pension, basically, like a disability pension. So he starts telling her this elaborate story about how he has uncontrollable urges to commit acts of violence on suspects, sometimes choking and beating them, because he's just like overwhelmed by a desire to do like murderous violence to them as a result of his military training. He tells this to the department psychologist. And Susan's like, I think you should turn in your gun. Which, two things are true. Number one, that's a very reasonable response on

• 33:39Robert Evans?

  Susan's part.

• 33:40Speaker 01

  Shout out Susan.

• 33:41Speaker 02

  Surprisingly, surprisingly so.

• 33:43Robert Evans?

  I love doing violence to suspects. But it's also kind of why programs like this are doomed to fail or make the problem worse. Because if you're gonna have, and apparently we are, organizations in every city where a bunch of guys are given guns and the ability to use them with almost impunity to stop quote unquote crime, and you don't have any way for those guys, when they're having a psychological problem, to like say, hey, I'm having a psych problem and have it not ruin their career, you might cause a lot of worse problems. Right? Like, if that's how they see it.

• 34:16Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 34:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, then they're just not gonna say anything. Or like, also, when she's like, I think you should turn in your gun. Obviously, he remains a cop, right? Like, he remains a cop. So it's not like there's any force in, you know, it's like the concept of international law, right? Like, it's all just a list of suggestions?

• 34:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 34:39Speaker 02

  With no meaningful enforcement?

• 34:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 34:42Robert Evans?

  With no, and with, with this thing set up almost to like encourage guys not to talk about stuff. Now that said, I would go more into like, oh, the psychological issues here, except for I think he's lying from the jump. I think he just doesn't want to do this job anymore. Right? So I don't even want to treat this like it's a serious psych issue that he's actually coming to them with. But I can See how this would make guys like that less willing to talk about their problems, too.

• 35:10Speaker 02

  For sure.

• 35:10Robert Evans?

  For her part, Dr. Sacks Clifford later said, "I wouldn't remove someone from duty unless I had very serious concerns. The very fact that he had said these things to a doctor shows bad judgment." And I gotta say, I think that's a bad way to phrase it, that like, well, but shouldn't he say things to a doctor if he's feeling them like this?

• 35:28Speaker 02

  I think she might be a bad therapist.

• 35:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah. I think it's good ju- if you're, if you are, if legit, if you were really, if a cop was legitimately feeling uncontrolled or just to murder people, and he decided, as a result, I need to go to a therapist, that's actually good judgment, I'd say. Right?

• 35:45Speaker 02

  Right?

• 35:45Robert Evans?

  Like, really? Right?

• 35:47Speaker 02

  Well, if, you know, if he was really troubled, he wouldn't have told me, so it's fine.

• 35:52Robert Evans?

  Yeah. I think that's a bad psych, maybe.

• 35:56Speaker 02

  I think this might be a bad therapist.

• 35:58Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I think this, she, she might not be good at her job.

• 36:02Speaker 02

  Starting to think she went to University of Phoenix or some shit.

• 36:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And like that said, I don't think Mark's telling the truth here, right? Because Fuhrman wants out of the force, and he wants to get a permanent disability pension by arguing that his experiences in the gang unit fucked him up too badly to go on. He does get placed on temporary workers' comp leave, and so he's getting paid to not work, and he's able to go take art classes. So he ta- he goes to like Long Beach City College, he starts taking art courses. He's like happy for like a year or so while this process is going on, as he's trying to like get cashiered out on disability, because he gets to take his art classes.

• 36:36Speaker 02

  Painting the finest hand turkey the university has ever seen.

• 36:40Robert Evans?

  Exactly. Yeah. Weeping with beauty at it, yeah. Now, here's the thing, the cops don't wanna, the cops, they don't want to do that. They don't want to like pay him forever to not work. They would like him to either return to duty or to quit without a permanent pension, because he hasn't really served very long, and they think this is bullshit, too. But Mark really wants that disability pension, and so later in 1981, he applies for one, telling his superiors that he's just been too damaged by the job to go on. So at this point, you're probably wondering, how do I know that he's lying? One reason would be, Mark Fuhrman's mouth was Moving throughout all of this. And that's a pretty good indicator to tell if he's lying. However, I have other evidence. Mark told the doctors at the time, uh, who had been assigned to evaluate him for his disability

• 37:24Robert Evans?

  claim, that he'd loved his time in Vietnam and had fond memories of becoming a trained killer. He lied about his actual deployment, regaling them with stories of heavy combat and near-death experiences. At the same time, per Dr. Ronald Kogler, he quote, bragged that he never had any second thoughts about what he did in Vietnam, never had any flashbacks. And I guess that's true, because he just sat on a boat. Why would you second guess that? But that's not what he means, right? You know?

• 37:52Speaker 02

  But I think the one moral thing that Fuhrman ever tried to do, hear me out here, is steal a pension from the LAPD.

• 38:01Robert Evans?

  It is, it is. This is him at the moral height of his life. Absolutely. We would all have been better off if he'd stolen a pension from the LAPD. So I think Fuhrman's plan was to try and argue that because the Marine Corps had made him into such a lethal killing machine, he was unsafe to be a cop because he couldn't see suspects without wanting to beat and maim them. And per Dr. Kogler, he traces his feelings about violence to his experiences in the Marines. Mark told another panel of doctors who evaluated him, "I'm really capable of violent things. I feel like I'm out on a limb and someone's sawing it off. I have this urge to kill people." And again, I think these are lies, but it could have worked if it weren't for the fact

• 38:44Robert Evans?

  that Mark was like the millionth LAPD cop to realize that a permanent disability pension sounded way better than working for a living. The department was noted nationwide as having a, number one, an unusually good pension plan that promised officers with a psych disability up to half their pay, tax-free for life. And so from 1980 to 1985, yeah, not a bad deal. Yeah. From 1980 to 1985, 175 LAPD officers were granted stress disability pensions, which became known as psycho pensions. That's like the, the term within the department for this. Now, the fact that these kind of disability pensions were weirdly common just in LA was noted in a 1985 Los Angeles Times article by Robert Welks and Claire Spiegel.

• 39:28Robert Evans?

  Quote, "Although stress pensions have risen dramatically in the LAPD during the last five years, they are rare in many other major law enforcement agencies outside of California." So no one else does this? And it's weird, only LAPD cops are getting these.

• 39:43Robert Evans?

  Because they just don't want to do the job.

• 39:45Speaker 02

  Who would have thought, like, the biggest department in the country, the best at institutional corruption, like arguably between them and their own sheriff's department, is giving it a way out to cash out early. They, fuck yeah, they're gonna take it.

• 39:57Robert Evans?

  The epic corruption struggle.

• 39:59Speaker 02

  It's probably cheaper than letting them just steal all their overtime like they normally do.

• 40:02Robert Evans?

  Absolutely. I consider this probably a net benefit, you know?

• 40:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:07Robert Evans?

  Like, let's get these dudes off the fucking streets.

• 40:11Speaker 02

  I support this.

• 40:12Robert Evans?

  You know who else we should get off the streets, Joe?

• 40:14Speaker 02

  Who's that, Robert?

• 40:16Robert Evans?

  The sponsors of this podcast, all of whom are walking the streets. I don't know. I don't know what I'm doing here.

• 40:27Robert Evans?

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• 41:26Robert Evans?

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• 42:07Robert Evans?

  And we're back. We're back and we're talking about Mark Fuhrman's attempt to get a psych disability pension from the LAPD. So this doesn't work out for him. Ultimately psychiatrist John Hockman concluded that Fuhrman was not legitimately disabled by his work. Hockman wrote, "There is some suggestion here that the patient was trying to feign the presence of severe psychopathology. This suggests a conscious attempt to look bad and an exaggeration of problems." In a presentation to the pension board, he noted that Fuhrman had failed a standard psychological test as well. The board voted six to zero to deny Mark's disability pension. Ouch.

• 42:47Speaker 02

  Nice. You have to go steal OT and rack up vacation days like you have a normal LAPD officer.

• 42:54Robert Evans?

  That's right. You have to be a corrupt lazy bastard the the normal cop way. Now, the fact that Mark had completely invented his combat experiences and wasn't caught at the time, but the pension board did note that police records found no complaints of excessive force had been filed against Fuhrman. If he were dangerously unhinged, the argument went, he probably would have fucked somebody up by now. I don't know if that's the best way to go about this as the LAPD, but that's how they do it.

• 43:22Speaker 02

  I would expect nothing less from the LAPD, to be fair. Like, well, if he was truly insane, he would have murdered someone by now.

• 43:29Robert Evans?

  We have a ton of cops who have, trust us. We know what the murder cops look like, and we keep them on the job, too.

• 43:35Speaker 02

  We would promote him.

• 43:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he'd be chief by now. So Mark doesn't take this denial lying down, though. He appealed to a county judge, which made his court records public, which is why we know all of this now. In September of 1983, the judge upheld the board's ruling, and Mark Fuhrman's brief break for the artistic life was over. He'd either have to quit the LAPD and find a real job, or go back to work, probably as something as of a pariah within the department. Mark's not willing to get a real job, so he goes back to the LAPD. And sure enough, he spends most of his first year back on active duty riding a desk. Now, I don't have a lot of detail on this period of time in his life, but it's interesting to me.

• 44:18Robert Evans?

  It's just eight months before he gets back to active duty work as a patrolman in May of 1984. And this is interesting because you would assume after having tried to get out and like saying all this bullshit, he would be kind of unpopular and people would be making fun of him. I think he's actually like really charming and charismatic within sort of an organization like this. Cause he's seems to have friends in the department. He gets his gun and patrol route back pretty quickly. And in short order, he's actually assigned to a better location. He gets sent to the to West LA. West Los Angeles is the wealthiest part of town and thus the easiest beat to walk. Right? Like a lot less of the crime and gang stuff that Mark was clearly scared by.

• 45:02Robert Evans?

  And despite Mark's claims that he suffered from uncontrollable bloodlust, he excelled at working in West LA, where tact and charm were significantly more valuable than violence, which also maybe suggests that he's was never actually all that violent of a guy. The fact that he does really well, once there's a job where he could just be charming to other white people. He suddenly is a good cop, like quote unquote, right?

• 45:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. And if he was, you know, handicapped by an uncontrollable urge to savage every single person he ever met.

• 45:33Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 45:33Speaker 02

  Wouldn't he want to just ride the desk instead?

• 45:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 45:37Speaker 02

  Rather than like get back out on patrol.

• 45:38Robert Evans?

  Why does he want to be back in the street?

• 45:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, like you had it made, dude. Just file paperwork. You get paid the same amount of money.

• 45:45Robert Evans?

  Yep. So again, I think he's lying about being this like violent maniac. As Brian Bentley, a black police officer who was Fuhrman's partner during this period, told a journalist. In West LA, you can't even yell at people. There are movie stars who know the president of the United States and they write everyone they can. Basically like Mark was really great at like being a cop who has to interact with celebrities sometimes, you know?

• 46:11Robert Evans?

  I know from personal experience, that's a slight exaggeration, but the basic point is pretty sound. Once Fuhrman moves to an area where he's in no real danger, he seems to like being a cop. And his semi annual evaluations back this up. He gets positive reviews from his superiors in August of 1987. He's described by one as highly motivated and having a bias for action. He was described somewhat differently by civilians who encountered him at the time. Natalie Singer met Mark and his partner at the, in the, during this period in a hospital emergency room in 1987. She claims that he told her, "The only good N-word is a dead N-word." So, that's not great to hear.

• 46:51Speaker 01

  What a great guy. Jesus.

• 46:53Speaker 02

  And knowing him, he just brings it up. Like, hey, by the way.

• 46:56Robert Evans?

  That's how she says it. Yeah. Now, and actually, kind of how Mark says it, because in his book Murder in Brentwood, he does kind of deny this, but he gives a very different story of his relationship with this woman. Quote, "I met Natalie Singer in 1987 because my partner was dating her roommate. I can't recall exact incidents, but I won't say we didn't argue. I do remember that we did not get along, and I tried hard to irritate and anger her." So he's like, he's saying, "Oh, I wouldn't have said that, but I did say stuff just to piss her off."

• 47:24Speaker 02

  So his, his defense is straight out of 2026, like, "No, you don't understand. I was simply trolling."

• 47:31Robert Evans?

  It was a bit, it was a bit, yeah.

• 47:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:33Robert Evans?

  That's, yeah.

• 47:34Speaker 02

  Fuck off.

• 47:35Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So, here's the thing, and like, I, I don't know that either of them are lying about the basic facts, by which I mean, I believe that Mark said what Natalie said that he said, because we have him recorded saying almost identical things. I also believe that Mark, when, when Mark said that like, "Well, I would often just say shit to piss her off," I think that's true, and I think he might have said that, he might have said racist shit just to piss her off. I think his motivation in that might have been just to troll her, which doesn't make it not racist, right?

• 48:06Speaker 02

  Right. I, I believe every side of the story simultaneously, if that's possible.

• 48:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. These are all, none of these are in conflict.

• 48:13Speaker 02

  No.

• 48:14Robert Evans?

  Um, another contact of Mark's during this period, who would later be asked to testify about his racism, was Roderick Hodge, who he arrested on drug charges, also in 1987. Hodge was acquitted of these charges, and claims that the cop, Fuhrman, who arrested him, per time, as, quote, "Snarling from his patrol car, I told you we'd get you," N-word. Right? So Hodge says, "When this guy arrested me, he, he snarls this to me, and then I'm acquitted, because there were bullshit charges." Here's what Mark writes later about this interaction with Roderick. "I came to know Roderick Hodge while working a gang narcotic unit as a uniformed officer in West Los Angeles from 1985 to 1987. Hodge was under investigation for dealing narcotics. I had many contacts with Hodge and arrested him twice. During both arrests, he made complaints

• 48:57Robert Evans?

  about his handling by both arresting officers and wanted to speak with a sergeant. There was no merit to his charges, and he never claimed I used racial epithets. He was just complaining in an attempt to draw attention away from his own arrests." Now, I don't know who's, this is, who's telling the truth. I have no idea. The fact that Hodge was acquitted certainly makes me more inclined to take his side, maybe than Mark's here, but I don't actually know what happened. Um, that's-

• 49:21Speaker 02

  It's the whole book, him just trying to explain all the N-words he's ever said.

• 49:24Robert Evans?

  A lot of it. A shocking, a lot of it, because he says it a lot. He's used those word, that word a lot.

• 49:31Speaker 02

  I'm gonna go out on a limb here and suggest he might not be the most trustworthy motherfucker.

• 49:36Robert Evans?

  Might be a racist.

• 49:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, might be racist.

• 49:39Speaker 01

  He might be a horrific racist.

• 49:42Robert Evans?

  It is noteworthy that there are allegations of racism from Mark that also come from within the LAPD. One of Mark's coworkers-

• 49:50Speaker 02

  Oh my god.

• 49:50Robert Evans?

  Office, yeah, yeah, and that's wild.

• 49:53Speaker 02

  How are you so racist that the LAPD is like, whoa, whoa?

• 49:57Robert Evans?

  Great question, Joe. How? Let's, let's explore that. One of Mark's coworkers, Officer James Purdy, married a Jewish woman around 1985, and would later testify that after his marriage, Mark Fuhrman painted a swastika on his locker. Now-

• 50:14Speaker 02

  Oh my god.

• 50:14Robert Evans?

  Mark denies this. And Mark is like, "I would never have done anything that hateful." "Oh my, a swat, painted a swastika on an officer's, you know, locker just because he married a Jewish one? I would never do anything like that." And then Mark continues with a line of argument that's almost like crafted in a lab to make me doubt him.

• 50:35Robert Evans?

  Purdy was hardly popular in West LA. There were so many people who either didn't care for him or flat out couldn't stand him, that it would be difficult to speculate who might have defaced his locker. If that incident ever really occurred. The whole department wanted to paint a swastika on that guy's locker. Why do you think it was me? People, cops were lining up to paint a swastika on this guy's locker.

• 50:58Speaker 02

  And the fact that when the swastika was painted on his locker and the cop in question was like, this had to be Fuhrman. Tells me that there's like a chain of events that led to the point where someone looked at him, was like, that's a cop would paint a swastika on a motherfucker's locker. You know what I'm saying? Like, how many things did he do to get there?

• 51:17Robert Evans?

  The fact that this guy defaulted to assuming it was Fuhrman, if that's what he did, right?

• 51:21Speaker 02

  Right.

• 51:22Robert Evans?

  Is, says almost more than like if we knew for a fact Fuhrman had painted the swastika. It's just that people are like, it had to have been him. It literally has to have been him, right?

• 51:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, the, the other cop was like, yeah, this, this has Fuhrman written all over.

• 51:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it sounds like Mark. Yeah, it sounds like Mark. So, it's one of those things, like, it's such a, like, saying, oh, I would never have, like, done something that bad, but also this guy sucks that almost anyone could have done it. So like, why is he blaming me? It's such perfect bully logic. And I think that's the correct comparison to draw, like a high school bully. If you want to understand the social role that Mark Fuhrman held in the LAPD hierarchy by the late 1980s, like the mid to late 80s, he is like a kinda popular bully. He's like popular specifically with like the cool kids in the LAPD who are like the white guy officers, right? Like, that's kinda seems to be his position in the West LA department.

• 52:20Robert Evans?

  He's like, you know, and again, he's obviously capable of being charming when he wants to be and being likable when he wants to be. It's also worth noting that as comfortable as he is with racism and as like natural as it is for him to use racism and humor and slurs and humor, I think it's largely because he likes the edgy trolling. Because Mark is at least capable of forming genuine friendships and working well with non-white officers, right? Which makes me think, again, he's capable of viewing individuals as people. He's obviously racist, but the racism also comes out not just, it, it, the racism is not coming out. Uncontrollably, he lets his racism out when he thinks it's funny and will be socially beneficial.

• 53:05Robert Evans?

  And he's more than capable of like not letting it out when he either is with like a non, like a black or Hispanic officer that he gets along with, or that he recognizes is popular and that he doesn't want to be like uncool around, right? Like, he's able to do that. He's able to calculate when he lets the racism out.

• 53:23Speaker 02

  So we have like another classic example of some dickhead racist troll deploying racism as something as a barb, slowly over time, simply becoming a racist. Damn, Robert, where have we heard this a billion times?

• 53:41Robert Evans?

  Tale as old as time. So when the OJ Simpson trial came out and like the recordings of Mark being a racist that we'll talk about later came out, several of his former partners, who were black and Hispanic men, were brought forward by the LAPD to talk about the fact that, oh, no, Mark wasn't a racist. And they all expressed seemingly genuine sentiment that Mark had not been racist around them. These guys are all cops, so I won't say I believe them entirely, but I could also see individual guys not having had that experience with Mark for the reasons that I just explained. And again, racism's a thing for Mark, but it's not the only thing. Social standing and comfort at work matters, and he's capable of like taking people as individuals and forming relationships with them based on that, especially if it's advantageous to his social standing.

• 54:26Robert Evans?

  One of his first partners was Roberto Alonso, an Hispanic officer who said that Fuhrman exemplified exactly what a police officer ought to be. We take it to the bad guys, and Mark was very good at it. However, it's just as clear to me that in the normal course of daily life, dealing with people he saw as civilians and not colleagues, Mark defaulted to violence and to bigotry, per the New York Times. From 1984 to 1990, at least half a dozen complaints were made against Mr. Fuhrman, including several contending that he threatened or beat suspects, but most of them were ruled groundless by the department for lack of independent witnesses. In 1984, he lost a day off for seizing a pedestrian's wrists, and in 1986, he received a one-day suspension for leaving an improper remark on a motorist's windshield. So again, and when-

• 55:11Speaker 02

  What did he write on someone's windshield?

• 55:13Robert Evans?

  I wish I'd found out. I could not find that anywhere. I did look, but I didn't find like that specified anywhere. But I, you'll want to keep, uh, cause when the tapes that include him claiming, talking about all the crimes he pretended to have committed or claimed to have committed, the LAPD will be like, well, he was lying. We didn't find any evidence. So it's braggadocio. Some of it certainly was, but also every time he got like accused of a violent crime, it usually got ignored because there were no independent witnesses, which means in my head, Mark probably just beat someone up and it was his word versus that guy and Mark was a cop, right?

• 55:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:48Robert Evans?

  Cause we do know he did beat some people. He got in trouble for it several times, which means I assume a lot of these other cases were just, yeah, the LAPD was able to ignore it. Um, anyway.

• 55:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's not like a cop gets caught beating someone the first time, you know?

• 56:02Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 56:03Speaker 02

  Once they start fucking people up, it's because they've-

• 56:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 56:06Speaker 02

  -built up-

• 56:06Robert Evans?

  Been doing it a while.

• 56:07Speaker 02

  -over time, you know, that they know they can get away with it. Their, their bros, their coworkers are going to lie for them. They know the department's, uh, in, internal investigations is never going to find them.

• 56:18Robert Evans?

  Yep.

• 56:19Speaker 02

  They'll be, you know, they're immune.

• 56:21Robert Evans?

  And part of what has given Mark that sense of impunity is experience and a lot of his experience is in being bigoted against female LAPD officers. And I want to quote again from that New York Times article. "The most serious blemish on Mr. Fuhrman's work in the West Los Angeles division was the hostile views he sometimes expressed about minorities and women. His performance evaluation in August of 1985, which was made available to the New York Times by a member of the Simpson defense noted, 'He is outspoken and critical in his perception of the department's application of affirmative action. He's been counseled to leave his personal feelings at home and to make every effort to adhere to the affirmative action guidelines.'" And that, that says a little bit right there.

• 57:02Robert Evans?

  And I think the first and most important thing for me to note as a result of that is that while all this comes out during the trial, because the OJ Simpson defense team needs to paint Fuhrman as a particularly toxic racist officer, that's not true. Mark is toxic and racist, but his racism and sexism are pretty normal among his colleagues.

• 57:20Speaker 02

  Definitely.

• 57:21Robert Evans?

  One LAPD officer during this period told the Times that when he was assigned to West LA, he was warned, "There are a bunch of old white guys who hate blacks and women at West LA." That's the department that Mark is transferred to because he's a racist and a bigot, you know?

• 57:35Speaker 02

  Right.

• 57:36Robert Evans?

  And a lot of guys are.

• 57:37Speaker 02

  He's a cop in the mid 80s, of course he's a misogynist. Like, this isn't like a defense of Fuhrman, like if anybody's confused. It would be really weird if there was a cop in 1985 who's like, "No, I would love to work with a woman."

• 57:51Robert Evans?

  A woke cop.

• 57:52Speaker 02

  That guy doesn't exist.

• 57:53Robert Evans?

  And the reason this is relevant is not that like, and so that makes it okay that he was a normal level of racist for the LAPD, kind of. It just means that like, don't take the defense seriously and don't take the LAPD seriously when they try to position Mark as a particular outlier. Mark's a normal cop and a normal detective.

• 58:14Speaker 02

  That is true.

• 58:15Robert Evans?

  And his racism's normal, you know? Like, that's the thing to take out of this.

• 58:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's the problem, right? Like, no, he is just indicative of the LAPD as a whole.

• 58:23Robert Evans?

  And he's not, when I say normal, doesn't mean every cop says the same shit, because he does stand out sometimes. But what I mean is that, even though he was noted as like, "Oh, Mark is more of a bigot than a lot of other guys. He speaks out more," no one noted, and that's crazy that a cop would say this. Nobody fired him. Nobody didn't want to work with him. He was like, maintained his position in the LAPD because it just wasn't that weird that he was that kind of guy.

• 58:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, he just stuck out.

• 58:49Robert Evans?

  Exactly. So, that 1985 performance evaluation of Mark's continued. "He was also counseled by this raiding lieutenant and captain regarding his very strong expression of his personal views regarding women and minorities in police work. He was not receptive. He stated he felt, as an American citizen, he had a right to express his views."

• 59:08Speaker 02

  Of course. This isn't about me being a racist, Robert. It's about my freedom of speech.

• 59:13Robert Evans?

  It's about my freedom to be a racist. Yeah, exactly. Now, by way of defending Mark, his supervisor from 1989 to 1994, Gary Fullerton, told the New York Times that Fuhrman joined a basketball league made up largely of black LAPD officers who had to meet up at 6:30 a.m. and was like, "Who would do that if they were racist?" The Times talked to one of these players, Sergeant Ed Palmer, who is a black officer, and told them that he saw no signs of racism from Fuhrman in their basketball games. "If you really hate African Americans, why would you get up at 5:40 to play basketball with me?" And like, I don't know, remember racists do all sorts of crazy shit, dude. Like, you know that. Like, you actually do know that, Ed.

• 59:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, and again, these are only dudes who are cops as well.

• 59:58Robert Evans?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 59:58Speaker 02

  This is the classic us versus them of American policing, where like, "Yes, he's a racist, but he's totally fine to hang out with black people who are also cops."

• 1:00:08Robert Evans?

  That's right. And all of these accounts are coming out during the trial when Mark, when the trial, it's become clear that the trial hinges largely in whether or not Mark's a racist. And so like, the LAPD gets everyone they can who's not white in the department to say something nice about Mark, and every woman that they can.

• 1:00:25Robert Evans?

  Now, that fact leads to a lot of like seesaw moments when you're reading about Fuhrman, particularly during the Simpson trial, because you'll read like one series of quotes about how this is these allegations of awful things he said, and then you'll read a very heartfelt quote about someone saying something nice about Mark. And this is all a result of a coordinated campaign within the LAPD, you know, in order to kind of buttress Mark's reputation, because he was sort of standing in for the department at that point. One person who definitely saw the racist side of Mark was Laura Hart McKinney, a screenwriter who in the spring of 1985 got interested in writing a movie about female cops. So she starts interviewing several real LAPD officers for like texture and research purposes.

• 1:01:08Robert Evans?

  McKinney's noted as being like a pretty dedicated researcher, when she like lived as a homeless person in Santa Monica for like a week, I think, to like research a screenplay at one point. Um, and so she's like, really talks to a lot of people. And one of the people she meets is Mark Fuhrman. They like meet kind of casually earlier that year and become friends. And so she starts sending out and like taping Mark, talking about his experiences on the job. And McKinney would ultimately interview Mark several times between 1985 and 1994. And depending on who you read, McKinney is either, again, a very diligent screenwriter, trying to do research to do the best work she can, or basically a hack who like can't quite make it. And, uh, you know, is largely during this period, once it comes out that

• 1:01:53Robert Evans?

  Mark's the center of this case, is trying to like profit off of it. That's certainly what some people will argue about her. I don't think that's really fair. Um, but she has all of these tapes with Mark. She winds up having hours and hour, I think it's 13 hours of recorded interviews with him, with him just kind of talking. And here's how Elizabeth Gleek, writing for Time Magazine, described the contents of these tapes. According to partial transcripts and comments by the lawyers in court, Fuhrman describes engaging in police misconduct of the most damning kind, beating suspects bloody, coercion and badgering minorities. Contrary to his sworn testimony last March that he had not used the N-word in the past 10 years, Fuhrman's blustering talk on the tapes is laced with that word and contains other terms offensive to African Americans, Hispanics, women and

• 1:02:36Robert Evans?

  Jews. In a portion of the transcripts obtained by Time, for instance, he tells Martha Laurie Diaz, a friend of McKinney's, that women cops are ineffectual because they don't do anything. They don't go out and initiate contact with some six foot, five inch N-word that's been in prison for seven years pumping weights. And

• 1:02:53Speaker 02

  God.

• 1:02:54Robert Evans?

  These tapes are bad and remarkable. That's not even the, that's the least of the crazy awful.

• 1:03:00Speaker 02

  And he knows he's being recorded.

• 1:03:02Robert Evans?

  He knows this is intentional. Now, he does not, when the Simpson case comes up, because this has been going on since 85. And when the fucking Simpson case starts in 94, he's not thinking, oh, there's tapes of me with the N word on them that could become part of this case. He doesn't assume anyone's gonna ever hear anything from McKinney. Right? Like, why would McKinney? Because he's not, there's never been a case that blows up like the OJ Simpson case. Right? So Mark would have had no way to expect, oh, well, maybe I'll be all over every news station in the country and there will be potentially a lot of money in having a bunch of incriminating info about me. Right? He doesn't, he doesn't think about that at all as he's sitting down for these tapes. And I don't think McKinney is either, to be fair. Like, she's trying to write a screenplay. She's not trying to like, gotcha, Mark Fuhrman.

• 1:03:45Robert Evans?

  And if you want to critique her for something, it's the fact she's listening to this guy say this awful shit about the crimes he's committed inside of the LAPD and it's just like, cool stuff from the screenplay.

• 1:03:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. This will be, this will be very useful for me. Thank you.

• 1:03:59Robert Evans?

  Like, if I were to sit down with an active LAPD detective who were to admit to me blithely about all of the crimes and torture that he commits, I would try to get him imprisoned. That would be my, as a journalist, like, that's what I do.

• 1:04:12Speaker 02

  I love to casually sit down and create the LAPD version of the act of killing and then just use it for my drama.

• 1:04:20Robert Evans?

  Weird. But it is, I don't want it being really good for OJ Simpson that McKinney has these tapes. And once these tapes and the audio in them comes out, Mark's basic audio, argument in defense of himself is going to be that like, well, none of this was, I had lied in the tapes. I was putting on a show, a character. That's not really me. I was trying to impress this outsider. And so none of it was true. I just wanted to sound cool so that her script would be cool. Right? I was trying to give her what she needed to make an entertaining movie. Some of that is true. Mark is definitely judging things up to sound more exciting because he thinks maybe it'll wind up in a movie. Right? Like, that's absolutely a part of what's going on.

• 1:04:59Speaker 02

  I do buy that.

• 1:05:01Robert Evans?

  And, yeah, and it's not hard to buy. And Mark tells several specific stories of specific incidents of violence and racism that can't be documented and several more that have been documented as having not happened. That like, we know this didn't happen. We know this didn't happen. And there's a bunch more where it's like, we don't know if it happened or not. There's no evidence one way or the other. Right? Um, however, within kind of that mix of things that definitely didn't happen and that we can't prove happened, there are some things that we know happened, that there's outside evidence of and that are proven to have happened. And probably the most important thing that we know was real that Mark talked about was a club that he started inside the Los Angeles Police Department called Men Against Women. And we will talk about that.

• 1:05:43Speaker 02

  What the?

• 1:05:44Robert Evans?

  And the OJ Simpson trial in part two. How you doing, Joe?

• 1:05:49Speaker 02

  This is like some.

• 1:05:50Speaker 01

  Joffe.

• 1:05:53Speaker 02

  This is like the Little Rascals He-Man Woman Hater Club for cops.

• 1:05:57Robert Evans?

  It is, it is. He makes the He-Man Woman Hater Club for cops. He does do that. He's, he's the alfalfa of the LAPD.

• 1:06:04Speaker 02

  I hate that so much. Thank you.

• 1:06:06Robert Evans?

  It's, it's really funny. I mean, it's not like the horrible things that he does, but it's like funny in a like, like a cosmic sense, you know?

• 1:06:13Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:06:14Robert Evans?

  Or if you're just a fan of the Little Rascals.

• 1:06:16Speaker 02

  It's funny because it's fucking pathetic, you know, like everything about this man is so pathetic.

• 1:06:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:23Robert Evans?

  It's, it's, that's the thing, right? And, and, and I, I, this is, that was the surprise to me as like, growing up as a young man, who also grew up like with a bunch of different like misogynistic and sexist beliefs. But I fundamentally missed the whole like, oh, we're supposed to like hate women? I thought you like wanted to have like, like a wife or a girl. Like, I thought like that was like the goal was to like, uh, like have women in your life as opposed to like people like Mark where it's like, oh, is the goal to like, not ever have any contact with them? Like what is, what is, what is masculinity? Like, do you want to be liked by women or do you want to hide from them? Like, I don't understand which we're supposed to do.

• 1:07:03Speaker 02

  I was, I was raised by like, uh, my dad was a pretty misogynistic piece of shit. And it all, that all kind of confused me as well because he kind of fell into the Fuhrman kind of things. He was also a racist. And it always confused me because I was like, I thought that you wanted to attract women, right? And mind you, I'm like 10.

• 1:07:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:25Speaker 02

  And now you're leading me down a path where you're going to be Mark Fuhrman, which is divorced, living with a shitty cop for a roommate.

• 1:07:34Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and we don't want to spend any time around girls. I thought the goal was to be liked by them. And was I wrong? Like, obviously, that's not, shouldn't be your life goal, but like,

• 1:07:43Speaker 02

  Not at all.

• 1:07:44Robert Evans?

  As a kid, realizing that, like, oh, a lot of, like, guys just, like, hate being around women. I didn't realize that. I thought, like, that doesn't make any sense.

• 1:07:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:52Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I, I, this is, we're gonna have some fun talks about, uh, uh, gender politics in the Los Angeles Police Department. But first, let's talk about gender politics and Joe Kasabian's bibliography? Sorry, Joe, that wasn't a great way to lead to your books, but you have books.

• 1:08:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I'm the host of the Lions That Bite Donkeys podcast. We talk about military history, which I make things interesting and funny. And I am the author of the book The Highlands Burn, uh, which is a military gunpowder fantasy novel. And you can get it wherever it is you get your books, ebook, audiobook, read by me, paperback, uh, stoned tablet, whichever you'd like.

• 1:08:35Robert Evans?

  Excellent. Well, I personally approve of the fact that you, you have stone tablet, uh, publications of your book, Joe. That's, that's a good idea. All of my books are about to be re-released in the form of an old man telling the story around a fire.

• 1:08:50Speaker 02

  Oh, that's good.

• 1:08:51Robert Evans?

  Which, yeah, yeah, no, yeah, that's, that's all we, that's a real proud moment in the author's life, when, when you get your old man around a fire edition. Anyway, the episode's over, we should probably be done. Buy Joe's books.

• 1:09:01Speaker 01

  Buy Joe's books. 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 and our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards. We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking.

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