Speaker 1: All Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the
Speaker 2: very worst people in all of history. This week, we're
Speaker 2: on part two of our episodes on the recently and
Speaker 2: lamentably departed Mark Furman, who, now that we've gotten to know,
Speaker 2: you know, the mood has turned sober here in the
Speaker 2: Behind the Bastard's studio because Sophie and our guest for today,
Speaker 2: Joe Kasabian, are all overwhelmed with grief.
Speaker 3: At the Titan that we've lost.
Speaker 2: You know that that is no longer with us, the
Speaker 2: great mind, the great heart, the great law enforcement officer,
Speaker 2: Mark Furman. You know, I don't know, it almost feels
Speaker 2: pointless to go on.
Speaker 3: Why are we here?
Speaker 4: I'm really happy though, that in death that he can
Speaker 4: be you know, the United States' newest gender neutral bathroom.
Speaker 2: That's right, that's right, Yeah, find out where they put him.
Speaker 2: We're in Idaho, Yeah, the only gender neutral bathroom in Idaho.
Speaker 4: Just if you see a graven an Idaho, piss on it,
Speaker 4: it might be Mark Furman.
Speaker 3: It might.
Speaker 1: Somehow, our hearts will go on and on and on.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about the ship, Robert, talk about the oj trial.
Speaker 1: I'm excited let's.
Speaker 2: Talk about We Love the oj Trial. If you want
Speaker 2: to watch the documentary starring Ross from Friends as Robert Kardashian,
Speaker 2: you know, we'll wait for you.
Speaker 3: But I can.
Speaker 2: I can replicate the best parts. Just imagine Ross from
Speaker 2: Friends saying juice over and over again, and you pretty
Speaker 2: much got the important bits.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 4: I'm I'm really happy that Ross from Friend's career could
Speaker 4: go so well. He ends up doing brown face to
Speaker 4: play an Armenian guy because surge from system of down
Speaker 4: one answers phone.
Speaker 2: I do think what is really funny to me about
Speaker 2: that is they they had Cuba play oj Gooding Jr.
Speaker 2: And it's a weird case of like the casting doing
Speaker 2: a lot of the acting because I can believe that
Speaker 2: Ojy's evil because Cuba Gooding Junior is really.
Speaker 5: That's true.
Speaker 2: It was a very like like, oh wow, a lot
Speaker 2: of the liftings just being done by like, I know
Speaker 2: who Cuba Gooding Junior is.
Speaker 4: H Yeah, they nailed it on that one. They just
Speaker 4: had no idea, great idea.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So let's talk about Mark Furman. By the early nineteen nineties,
Speaker 2: Mark Furman was a veteran LAPD detective who seems to
Speaker 2: have been somewhat popular and influential among like his at
Speaker 2: least his clique.
Speaker 3: In the department.
Speaker 2: Mark was known for making racist and sexist jokes and.
Speaker 5: For his.
Speaker 3: He's got a hobby.
Speaker 2: What what kind of hobby do you think a guy
Speaker 2: who like joined the Marines because he like idolized violence
Speaker 2: and never got overnock to go to war and then
Speaker 2: became a cop, what kind of what do you think?
Speaker 2: Like one of his hobbies is what do you he collects.
Speaker 5: Ship stamps. I'm gonna go stamps.
Speaker 2: I no, it's it's memory, it's military memorabilia.
Speaker 3: I was going to I was going.
Speaker 4: On, I know these guys. I fucking know these guys.
Speaker 4: I am a historian by trade. And every time you
Speaker 4: meet a guy, every fucking time, every time, oh I
Speaker 4: collect some military memorabilia, I'm like, it's Nazi shit, isn't it.
Speaker 4: It's always it's always, and.
Speaker 2: They'll always tell you like you don't even have to
Speaker 2: come on to them because they're so defensive. And that's
Speaker 2: true with Mark, because I I noted I'd read like
Speaker 2: two articles that had said that, oh, he got into
Speaker 2: like collecting like military old military uniforms and awards and
Speaker 2: so I wondered. But that's all they said, Like they
Speaker 2: didn't like say anything like accuse anything. But in his
Speaker 2: own book, when Mark's saying and like, yeah, I liked
Speaker 2: collecting old military stuff quote some of which happened to
Speaker 2: be German, I was like, no one even said that, Mark,
Speaker 2: no one was even asking, And you just brought it
Speaker 2: up because you knew, because like you knew what we knew,
Speaker 2: you know, and you had to confirm it for us.
Speaker 3: That's very funny.
Speaker 4: That's a direct A to B Like no pop is collecting,
Speaker 4: like you know what, I got really into the Imperial
Speaker 4: Japanese Navy, which, to be fair, is not that much
Speaker 4: of a better of a choice.
Speaker 5: Not like you're still like you're going to one thing specifically.
Speaker 2: There's not an LAPD detective who's like, yeah, I'm just
Speaker 2: really interested actually in like the differences between the prop
Speaker 2: like the Austro Hungarian military proper and then like the
Speaker 2: actual like Hungarian military, and the ways in which these
Speaker 2: kind of like differing uh, like forces within the same
Speaker 2: state clashed and I like to collect items that sort
Speaker 2: of embody that clash and like, no, it's always just
Speaker 2: Nazi shit.
Speaker 4: Oh no, you misunderstand to me, Sir, I am simply
Speaker 4: a enthusiast of the Hanvent Militari.
Speaker 2: Sure, yeah, yeah, so one of his favorite cartoons because
Speaker 2: he also likes he loves to collect political cartoons, like
Speaker 2: newspaper cartoons. He's a big cartoon guy, and he has
Speaker 2: like a lot, a bunch of them displayed at his
Speaker 2: desk at any point in time.
Speaker 3: This is relevant because when the O. J.
Speaker 2: Simpson case blows up, and whether or not Mark Forman's
Speaker 2: a racist becomes an important matter for reasons we'll discuss later.
Speaker 2: People are like, he always had a swastika at his desk,
Speaker 2: like a cartoon of swastika, like displayed prominently, like a
Speaker 2: taped and like displayed or something up like paste it
Speaker 2: up at his his workplace, and people thought that was weird,
Speaker 2: and so in his autobiography Mark had to be like,
Speaker 2: that's bullshit. I didn't have a drawing of a swastika.
Speaker 2: I mean, yes, there was a swastika in a drawing,
Speaker 2: but it was from a political cartoon by an artist
Speaker 2: called Paul Conrad, and the cartoon was like a swastika
Speaker 2: rising up out of the ashes of the recently collapsed
Speaker 2: Berlin wall. I haven't actually been able to find this cartoon,
Speaker 2: but here's this is Furman's explanation for what Conrad was
Speaker 2: going for with the cartoon. Conrad was asking whether we
Speaker 2: were making a mistake by allowing a country with the
Speaker 2: power and history of Germany to be reunified. So that's
Speaker 2: that's why Furman was like, and that's why I liked
Speaker 2: the cartoon, As you know, I thought it was asking
Speaker 2: a poignant question, and this is obviously what it meant.
Speaker 2: And that's why there was a swastika at my desk
Speaker 2: and I don't buy it. I don't buy it. And also,
Speaker 2: that's not what the cartoon was about. Okay, again, because
Speaker 2: Google so fucked up the I didn't find that cartoon,
Speaker 2: but I didn't find an article that interviewed Paul Conrad
Speaker 2: about that cartoon because it came up during the Simpson
Speaker 2: trial and the New York Times reached out to Paul
Speaker 2: Conrad and asked for comment, and Paul gave a very
Speaker 2: different explanation for what that comic meant. So again, Mark
Speaker 2: is like, obviously it means that, you know, maybe reunifying
Speaker 2: Germany is a mistake because of the Nazis. Here's why
Speaker 2: Paul said he made that comic. Following the fall of
Speaker 2: the Berlin Wall in nineteen eighty nine, Spanish, Italian and
Speaker 2: other European workers were sent back to their home countries
Speaker 2: to create jobs for the East Germans. Out of this
Speaker 2: came the rising up of the Neo Nazis, the Skinheads,
Speaker 2: or whoever you wish to refer to them. My statement
Speaker 2: was in protest and anger that the downing of the wall,
Speaker 2: hopefully producing freedom for all of Germany, had in fact
Speaker 2: given rise to the tortured thinking of the past. That's
Speaker 2: not the same that's not the same same statement. Yeah,
Speaker 2: he is talking about like the visible rise of the
Speaker 2: Skinheads and how that like upset him and stuff, and.
Speaker 3: Mark is mad.
Speaker 2: I know when the wall fell, people were just worried
Speaker 2: the Nazis were coming back. And there's just a difference
Speaker 2: between those two things. I guess it doesn't matter much
Speaker 2: in the context of the court case, but it's interesting
Speaker 2: to me.
Speaker 4: And then think of the the the mental pathways that
Speaker 4: lead a sergeant, I guess and the LAPD to look
Speaker 4: at that and like, this is something that needs to
Speaker 4: be on my desk because it says something so ponia
Speaker 4: and powerful about the reunification of Germany.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I don't know, kind.
Speaker 2: Of weird, Mark, kind of weird. So probably the thing
Speaker 2: that Marx Piers at the station knew best about him
Speaker 2: is that he had some issue with women. He'd lied
Speaker 2: about much of what he told that journalist, you know,
Speaker 2: McKinney and the tapes that we talked about last episode.
Speaker 2: But Men against Women, the group that like he talked
Speaker 2: about founding, was a real organization within the LAPD that
Speaker 2: has been like independently reported on now. It was never
Speaker 2: an officially recognized group, obviously, but it did appeal to
Speaker 2: a large number of male officers, and there's internal documentation
Speaker 2: that not only did the department brass know that Men
Speaker 2: against Women existed, but that they knew Furman was the
Speaker 2: ring leader behind starting it. So the group began with
Speaker 2: Mark and several other older male cops complaining about split tales,
Speaker 2: which was a cop slur for female cops. And I
Speaker 2: don't know when it started. Most of the Mark we
Speaker 2: usually say like eighty five, which is like right when
Speaker 2: he got back onto patrol, Which is weird that he's
Speaker 2: got like the social cloud that he's like starting this group.
Speaker 2: But maybe this is him distracting from his own disgrace
Speaker 2: by like trying to rally everyone to attack the lady cops.
Speaker 5: I don't know.
Speaker 2: Prior to nineteen ninety seven, the only evidence that this
Speaker 2: group existed was those taped interviews of Mark Furman, and
Speaker 2: initially Marked claim that these had been lies, blustered to
Speaker 2: feel cool. But after the oj Simpson case, the lapd'd
Speaker 2: conducted an investigation into the tapes and into sexism and
Speaker 2: racism within the LAPD, and they came to some shocking
Speaker 2: conclusions about the group Men against Women. Per an la
Speaker 2: time summary of that investigation, members of the group believe
Speaker 2: there was no place for women in the LAPD. Members
Speaker 2: would act aloof to female officers, ignore them, and try
Speaker 2: to get them into trouble during their probationary periods after
Speaker 2: joining the department. In some cases, the actions of the
Speaker 2: group inhibited some women from safely and effectively performing their
Speaker 2: duties and created fear in many women that these male
Speaker 2: officers would not provide backup if they requested it in
Speaker 2: the field.
Speaker 3: The report said.
Speaker 2: Further, there was evidence that the Men against Women officers
Speaker 2: would ostracize male officers who did not support their boycott
Speaker 2: against female officers.
Speaker 5: That's kind of what I would expect.
Speaker 4: It's the same thing of like whenever we talk about
Speaker 4: black or Latino cops. I feel like, no Mark Furman
Speaker 4: is an a racist? Is I think of the blowback
Speaker 4: that they would get if they didn't say that, you
Speaker 4: know what I mean, Like, this is how these institutions work. Yeah,
Speaker 4: even I'm sure there's a fair amount of dudes who
Speaker 4: came forward. So no, Mark Furman is a stand up
Speaker 4: dude that had been called slurs by him or been treated.
Speaker 2: Like shit, but they were like this than blue line. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and that's why they because they bring in a woman
Speaker 2: cop who had nice things to say about him, and
Speaker 2: that like, no, I always trusted him. And the fact
Speaker 2: of the matter is like, this is a guy who
Speaker 2: inside the LAPD was known and had been repeatedly investigated
Speaker 2: for like being a sexist asshole, and the fact that
Speaker 2: nobody did anything about it is proof of the fact
Speaker 2: that it wasn't weird, right, right, It wasn't that.
Speaker 4: Same with him, you know, casually saying the N word
Speaker 4: all the time constantly.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So that ninety seven report revealed that men against Women,
Speaker 2: the existence of this group found in the mid eighties
Speaker 2: was exposed to the top brass to like the people
Speaker 2: running the department in nineteen eighty six when they held
Speaker 2: it like the LAPD holds a closed investigation. So they're
Speaker 2: investigating this because women have complained about this group within
Speaker 2: the department, but it's they're not like telling anyone, and
Speaker 2: they're not going to publish the results of the investigation
Speaker 2: because that might be how to inform people. Yeah, exactly
Speaker 2: after this closed investigation, the department chose to take no
Speaker 2: action and continued their investigation into why women were being
Speaker 2: harassed in their department for almost a decade. So there's
Speaker 2: a wider investigation like why are women in the LAPD unhappy?
Speaker 2: And there's also an investigation into the group men against women,
Speaker 2: And the Department's like, well, there's nothing to do there,
Speaker 2: but it's going to take at least another ten years
Speaker 2: to find out why lady cops are unhappy.
Speaker 3: No way to know, sir.
Speaker 5: Impossibly they're connected.
Speaker 2: So investigators would later conclude that a major reason that
Speaker 2: all of this went down was that most police superviss
Speaker 2: did not consider female officers being harassed as a problem. Right,
Speaker 2: this isn't an issue, and often these superiors are members
Speaker 2: of men against women themselves.
Speaker 3: Quote from the.
Speaker 2: Report, supervisors had such close relationships with the officers who
Speaker 2: are harassing the women that it made it difficult for
Speaker 2: the women to lodge complaints. The report said. In some cases,
Speaker 2: the supervisors worked with or for subordinate male officers on
Speaker 2: off duty business ventures. Furman's supervisors not only allowed him
Speaker 2: to act out his prejudices, but they accommodated him by
Speaker 2: allowing him to select his partners and other separatist working conditions.
Speaker 2: The report said, So again, this Mark is racist. This
Speaker 2: group is racist. His supervisors support it. It's widely popular
Speaker 2: with a lot of men who react to Mark forming
Speaker 2: this male supermacist group by letting him avoid working with women. Like,
Speaker 2: the department isn't just allowing this, They're actually modifying their
Speaker 2: rules in order to accommodate Mark and other people like him.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Mark One, I.
Speaker 2: Love the laped Yeah. Well for now, Mark One, it's
Speaker 2: not gonna be a lasting victory. Joe as to talk about.
Speaker 2: So here's where I got to do something though, And
Speaker 2: I gotta say something I don't normally say on this show,
Speaker 2: which is that I don't know if this if Mark
Speaker 2: is as responsible for this group as this report makes
Speaker 2: it sound, because Mark would claim to have founded the group,
Speaker 2: and the report says he founded the group, and I
Speaker 2: don't know that. I doubt that in particular. I just
Speaker 2: really don't want that to lead you to think that
Speaker 2: Mark is the ringleader here, because this makes their angle
Speaker 2: is Mark is manipulating everyone. Everyone falls into line around Mark,
Speaker 2: as opposed to I think Mark is servicing a need
Speaker 2: and desire by his peers, and that's why they accommodate him,
Speaker 2: because he's giving them what they wanted, right, And I
Speaker 2: think that's an important caveat. So that ninety seven report
Speaker 2: doesn't make the LAPED look good, but again it does
Speaker 2: kind of portray Mark specifically as a guy unique toxicity
Speaker 2: warped the environment around him. In fact, as much as
Speaker 2: this report portrays Furman as a deeply poisonous influence. The
Speaker 2: same year it was released, nineteen ninety seven, Mark puts
Speaker 2: out his own book, Murder in Brentwood, which I've quoted
Speaker 2: from a few times. And in that book he includes
Speaker 2: a letter that LAPD chief Daryl Gates sent his mom
Speaker 2: in nineteen ninety five during the OJ Simpson trial. And
Speaker 2: here's a line from that letter, I too, am very
Speaker 2: proud of Mark, and I know he has done his
Speaker 2: job proudly and properly and very effectively, perhaps too effectively
Speaker 2: for the oj defense lawyers. And so if Mark is
Speaker 2: this uniquely toxic individual who warped the environment around him,
Speaker 2: why is the police chief saying he's a great detective
Speaker 2: who did his job perfectly. Why is everyone accommodating and
Speaker 2: working with him? Again, Like, don't trust that format, you know.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think there could be a few things to it,
Speaker 4: like you said, and I it's the thin blue line
Speaker 4: at work where he can be on video or tape,
Speaker 4: like he is routinely saying slurs, admitting to crimes.
Speaker 5: That he then says he was bullshing about.
Speaker 4: Like, but every cop is going to line up and
Speaker 4: be like, no, he's perfect, He's our perfect little boy.
Speaker 5: It doesn't matter what the evidence says.
Speaker 3: Yep.
Speaker 4: So I think I think there's a little bit of that,
Speaker 4: a little bit of him being you know, a misogynistic,
Speaker 4: racist piece of shit, and a little bit of him
Speaker 4: servicing an organizational institutional need for someone to take the
Speaker 4: reins to lead the misogynistic piece of shit club.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, exactly, And someone like I can see also,
Speaker 2: wise bosses might have wanted someone deniable to lead the
Speaker 2: harassing club that makes women want to quit the job,
Speaker 2: like they want less women cops to. They like it
Speaker 2: being there because it makes them want to leave, but
Speaker 2: they don't want to be get in trouble. They don't
Speaker 2: want that stank on him. You know, Mark, the chief
Speaker 2: of police may be doing that shit. He has actual
Speaker 2: work to do.
Speaker 3: Yet Mark do it?
Speaker 2: Yeah, So that LAPD report concluded the type of sexual
Speaker 2: harassment used in West Los Angeles was about power, pure
Speaker 2: and simple. In short order, Furman exerted that power over
Speaker 2: the younger, less experienced, and therefore more vulnerable female officers.
Speaker 2: Furman's power grew every time he made an unchallenged sexist
Speaker 2: comment and role call, every time he blatantly ignored a
Speaker 2: female officer, every time he resolved a field situation for
Speaker 2: a female officer, and every time his behavior was reinforced
Speaker 2: by his supervisors, such as deploying him with only male partners.
Speaker 2: As his power rose, his ability to influence the peer
Speaker 2: group grew until it was Furman who set the tone
Speaker 2: for the watch, not the supervisors. And shit is that
Speaker 2: because he was just so powerful? Is that because the
Speaker 2: supervisors again figured it's better to let Furman take the
Speaker 2: heat for making doing these things that we want done,
Speaker 2: but I don't want to be responsible for doing That's
Speaker 2: my contention.
Speaker 4: I think it's probably both, Like I think the supervisors,
Speaker 4: the the higher ranking people want him in those positions
Speaker 4: to be the fall guy, but also kind of, like
Speaker 4: we've already said, he's a bit of a charismatic dude.
Speaker 4: People do like him, and he isn't altogether terrible at
Speaker 4: his job of being an LAPE.
Speaker 3: Of being an LAPD officer. Yeah, so exactly.
Speaker 4: I think the two things are kind of, uh, you know,
Speaker 4: it's like a remor on a shark, you know what
Speaker 4: I mean. Yeah, Like the one leads to the other
Speaker 4: one feeds the other. Like the supervisors want him to
Speaker 4: do this, but at the same time, the supervisors wouldn't
Speaker 4: pick him unless he was popular enough to pull it off.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly, unless like he was really liked
Speaker 2: and respected widely, which is you know, something you just
Speaker 2: have to realize as you go through this, And the
Speaker 2: other thing you have to realize is that life is
Speaker 2: completely meaningless and just absolutely devoid of joy or light
Speaker 2: without the sponsors of this podcast and the many products
Speaker 2: and services that they provide.
Speaker 5: Many people are saying this.
Speaker 2: And we're back. Thank god, life matters again. You know,
Speaker 2: without ads, what do we have nothing? You know, that's
Speaker 2: that's it, that's the only reason to be that. And
Speaker 2: hearing about Mark Furman, I don't know.
Speaker 4: That's very important to me personally. I love hearing about
Speaker 4: dead cuts.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so as good a case as all of this makes,
Speaker 2: you know, especially that laped report makes remark being a
Speaker 2: bastard again, I don't buy the centrality of just him
Speaker 2: quite as much as they want to put it out right,
Speaker 2: because he's not just a poisonous worm. He's a worm
Speaker 2: who's been poisoned by the other I don't know, sick
Speaker 2: worms in the apple or this analogy was a mistake, whatever.
Speaker 2: I just want to highlight because after the oj trial,
Speaker 2: the LAPD has a strong vested interest in cutting firm
Speaker 2: and off like a tumor. They're going to blame a
Speaker 2: lot of their culture problems on him, as many of
Speaker 2: them as possible, and that's not really accurate. Or you know,
Speaker 2: he's a symptom, he's not the cause. Environmental audits performed
Speaker 2: on the LAPD in the nineteen nineties uncovered systemic gender
Speaker 2: bias issues, not just in West la but across the
Speaker 2: entire department. Penny Harrington of the National Center for Women
Speaker 2: in Policing said this at the time. Widespread sexual harassment, intimidation,
Speaker 2: and threats against women on the force remain a serious
Speaker 2: problem on the LAPD, a problem made worse by the
Speaker 2: apparent complicity of the top command. So during the mid
Speaker 2: nineteen eighties, Men against Women was said by Furman to
Speaker 2: have had one hundred and forty five members in five
Speaker 2: out of eighteen of the department's police divisions.
Speaker 3: So there's one hundred and forty five cops.
Speaker 2: In the he meant woman haters club of the LAPD
Speaker 2: in like eighty seven. And maybe he's lying. I don't
Speaker 2: know what the real numbers were. I don't even know
Speaker 2: if they had like a roll call or whatever.
Speaker 5: I can't imagine they did.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And it's kind of it's hard for me to
Speaker 2: tell because he's just getting back to patrol duty in
Speaker 2: the mid eighties. I don't know how much of this
Speaker 2: he's judging up. I will read I'll read a quote
Speaker 2: from the Christian Science Monitor kind of summarizing his claims
Speaker 2: about how this group worked and like what they did, because,
Speaker 2: as I said, they're holding trials. They have like tribunals
Speaker 2: for male officers who are like nice to girls, Like
Speaker 2: it's the saddest fuck it. I'm just gonna read this
Speaker 2: quote pathetic. He also reveals that it held mock trials
Speaker 2: of male officers who were accused of fraternizing with women.
Speaker 2: Such tribunals often occurred after midnight and parking lots where
Speaker 2: participants would drink beer and sentenced fellow officers to silent
Speaker 2: treatment and other means of ostracization.
Speaker 5: So I wanted to know.
Speaker 2: It's so sad, and it's so sad that I had
Speaker 2: to know more. I want to know more about these
Speaker 2: fucking tribunals. And so thankfully, it turns out that back
Speaker 2: in nineteen ninety seven, the New York Daily News got
Speaker 2: access to some unreleased cut parts of the tapes that
Speaker 2: reference these tribunals, and they like post it or they
Speaker 2: published an article including quotes from that, and so I'm
Speaker 2: going to quote from that article. This is like blaming
Speaker 2: what these looked like. And by god, you're gonna be
Speaker 2: what would you guess is the esthetic inspiration for these
Speaker 2: night time trials of cops who were nice to girls.
Speaker 4: Uh uh, frat now, Joe way worse Joe.
Speaker 2: Okay, great, I'm going to quote from that article. On
Speaker 2: a nineteen eighty eight tape, Furman described tribunals this is
Speaker 2: a cross between criminal trials and ku Klux Klan rallies
Speaker 2: where members would drink beer.
Speaker 3: And she's bet again.
Speaker 2: He compares it to a KKK rally.
Speaker 1: These losers.
Speaker 2: Here's Mark standing around in a dark parking lot of
Speaker 2: a baseball diamond at three thirty in the morning, and
Speaker 2: I put my hood on, and I am calling a
Speaker 2: tribunal and we get in a circle with Tony standing
Speaker 2: in the middle. Okay, the charges are as follows. You
Speaker 2: were seen having a coffee with one of the enemy,
Speaker 2: Furman said. Male officers found guilty of fraternizing with females
Speaker 2: were sentenced to punishments like a week of silence treatment
Speaker 2: or silent tree or the back where other male officers
Speaker 2: would turn their backs on the offender, like my god,
Speaker 2: first off, your rally, your anti girl clan, and you
Speaker 2: got a hood?
Speaker 5: What you brought? He brought his own hood to work.
Speaker 5: I brought your gun.
Speaker 3: No, that's the sheriff's apartments and.
Speaker 5: The LAPD A bunch offer b yo wah.
Speaker 3: Everybody knows that. Yeah, yeah, that's that.
Speaker 2: After Biden cut the budget, they had to had the
Speaker 2: trim those.
Speaker 4: So this is what they met by defund the police. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2: Many of the claims Mark made in those interviews with
Speaker 2: McKenny focused around what he would call kill parties. These were,
Speaker 2: if you believe Mark, both parties were cops celebrated and
Speaker 2: praised other officers who'd killed citizens, and a term for
Speaker 2: times and officers might just like kill someone for fun
Speaker 2: during a call, Like they show up and there's a
Speaker 2: guy that they don't like or think is an asshole,
Speaker 2: and they like kill him so they can have it
Speaker 2: kill party. Like he's kind of cleaning that, like sometimes
Speaker 2: we just like murder people that we either know are
Speaker 2: bad or don't like for fun and hold parties celebrating it.
Speaker 2: And he brought this up in part to point out
Speaker 2: that women were not invited to maw's kill parties when
Speaker 2: like the men against women guys would hold a kill party,
Speaker 2: they didn't invite any of the girls to their cool
Speaker 2: kill parties.
Speaker 4: I believe him because we know this happens today with
Speaker 4: the LAPD and the la SD.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah, I don't think they are confirmed. You know,
Speaker 2: stuff like this is happening. I don't know if they
Speaker 2: call them this, but they're happening.
Speaker 5: They probably have an even more horrible name. And like
Speaker 5: the badge bending thing as well. Uh yeah, all this
Speaker 5: shit still happens.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, variants of it, at least so. For
Speaker 2: his part, Mark always denied that min against women was
Speaker 2: anything more than quote, a tongue in cheek beer drinking
Speaker 2: joke used by officers to blow up steam, make us
Speaker 2: laugh and try to forget the impossible job we had
Speaker 2: in front of us. Being a cop so hard sometimes
Speaker 2: you got to dress up like a clansman to hold
Speaker 2: trials for having coffee with a girl.
Speaker 3: Morning.
Speaker 1: The nineteen eighties version of locker room talk.
Speaker 5: Is that what you say?
Speaker 1: Jesus?
Speaker 4: Yep, yeah, because cel phone. So he couldn't just like
Speaker 4: sit around playing candy Crush all day.
Speaker 2: That's right, that's right, or deep fake porning his co workers,
Speaker 2: which is the kind of guy Mark would have been.
Speaker 2: In twenty twenty six, he claims that after that investigation,
Speaker 2: the mid nineteen eighties Internal Affairs investigated him but found
Speaker 2: no evidence of discrimination, just a few bad jokes on
Speaker 2: the tape, and.
Speaker 5: Again falling back to calling them jokes.
Speaker 3: Man old, Yeah, the clan rallies were just.
Speaker 2: A bit.
Speaker 5: Ironic, Robert, it's fine.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Yeah, they were joke comedy clan rallies. That's what
Speaker 2: the case. The three K stand for the comedy clan rally.
Speaker 5: I think that's what Joe new club.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So on the tape and in the book, Furman repeatedly
Speaker 2: blamed police Captain Margaret York for a lot of his issues.
Speaker 2: He hates this lady, Margaret Yorke. He says that she
Speaker 2: bullied him over maw and over a bunch of other stuff,
Speaker 2: and that when she arrived in the West LA department quote,
Speaker 2: she immediately singled me out and tried to make my
Speaker 2: life miserable. And he like, he's I think of like
Speaker 2: sleeping to the top. He says a lot of awful
Speaker 2: stuff about this lady, and it's going to be really
Speaker 2: funny later on because of who she's married to. But
Speaker 2: we'll talk about that in a second. So McKinney would
Speaker 2: later use what she'd gotten from Mark to write a
Speaker 2: screenplay called Men Against Women about like female cops dealing
Speaker 2: with bigotry in the LAPD. Basically it gets optioned for
Speaker 2: one thousand dollars by John Flynn, but it's never turned
Speaker 2: into a movie. Tragically. I don't know that it was
Speaker 2: a good screenplay. I haven't had a chance to read
Speaker 2: it yet. After her last talk with Mark in nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety three, that's the last of her recorded interviews with him,
Speaker 2: he filed them away until about a year or so
Speaker 2: later she saw something crazy on the news. And this
Speaker 2: is what leads us to the OJ Simpson trial. Right now,
Speaker 2: we're finally into the story. Everybody knows Mark four. So
Speaker 2: by the time of the murders in nineteen eighty four,
Speaker 2: Mark had already been to OJ's Rockingham estate in Brentwood
Speaker 2: once before, in the mid nineteen eighties. I think it
Speaker 2: was eighty five or eighty six, because there'd been a
Speaker 2: domestic dispute between OJ and Nicole, right, and so Mark
Speaker 2: had shown up once and he'd seen, you know, a
Speaker 2: pretty bad situation.
Speaker 3: Right. OJ was an abusive guy.
Speaker 2: This is not like a fun like he had reason
Speaker 2: to not like OJ Simpson, like going into this previously
Speaker 2: in nineteen ninety two. He had been deployed on the
Speaker 2: streets during the unrest and rioting over the Rodney King
Speaker 2: beating and its aftermath when the cops who beat Rodney
Speaker 2: King got off, right, So he's there for the LA riots.
Speaker 2: Mark doesn't write much about this other than to say
Speaker 2: that he was on the streets at the time. But
Speaker 2: the fact that the LA riots had happened like two
Speaker 2: years earlier is really relevant to everything that happens with
Speaker 2: OJ And I know everyone who grew up at the
Speaker 2: time knows it. But like, sure, that's a big fear
Speaker 2: running through this is that like, well, if he's convicted,
Speaker 2: is there going to be like another massive uprising because
Speaker 2: LA had just boiled over like that and people were
Speaker 2: really angry again about the police and police misconduct because
Speaker 2: of everything that Mark. Everything I've told you about Mark
Speaker 2: comes out during this case, right, So that's all also
Speaker 2: in the mix here too. You know, I'm not going
Speaker 2: to linger crazy long on the details of the trial itself,
Speaker 2: because that's been litigated everywhere in the world. I'm just
Speaker 2: going to talk about Mark's role in it. On the
Speaker 2: night of June twelfth, nineteen ninety four, Nicole Brown Simpson
Speaker 2: and Ronald Goldman were brutally murdered, and we all know
Speaker 2: it was OJ, right, like nobody's ever you know, nobody's
Speaker 2: ever posited any other realistic thing. Oji wrote a book
Speaker 2: called If I Did It afterwards, you know, I don't
Speaker 2: think that's we don't need to hop around here. So
Speaker 2: after doing it, OJ goes to the airport and he
Speaker 2: flies to Chicago, right, and the bodies are discovered at
Speaker 2: around twelve ten am on the thirteenth, Detective Mark Furman
Speaker 2: arrives at OJ Simpson's house because you know, once they
Speaker 2: know this has happened, they're obviously going to go to
Speaker 2: OJ's place. Furman had been there before, so he and
Speaker 2: his partner drive to the Rockingham estate at around five
Speaker 2: am and he finds an apparent bloodstain on Simpson's bronco
Speaker 2: parked outside. Now, from this point forward, things proceed fairly
Speaker 2: normally for a while. There's an investigation that commences, and
Speaker 2: Mark is not the main detective on it, but he's
Speaker 2: playing a role. He's at OJ's house, he's looking for evidence,
Speaker 2: and he is the guy who first locates the bloody glove. Right,
Speaker 2: that's going to be like this major thing in the
Speaker 2: case is that he sees it behind the Simpson home, right,
Speaker 2: and he finds it, but he does not pick it up,
Speaker 2: and this is important and he doesn't introduce him too evidence,
Speaker 2: so remember that for later. But he does find it, right,
Speaker 2: And because he finds it. Once this goes to trial,
Speaker 2: the prosecutors decide to put Mark on the stand walk
Speaker 2: everyone through when he found the glove, because this is
Speaker 2: an important piece of evidence that connects OJ to the
Speaker 2: murder right, and so they need Mark to talk about it.
Speaker 2: And it just so happens that when Mark goes on
Speaker 2: the stand the first time to talk about having found
Speaker 2: this glove, there's another lawyer watching on TV. Because this
Speaker 2: is all this is a big deal from the beginning.
Speaker 2: Obviously OJ goes on the run briefly, and that's all films.
Speaker 2: So by the time this goes to trial, public interests
Speaker 2: as a fever pitch. And so while Mark is talked
Speaker 2: about finding this glove on the stand, a lawyer named
Speaker 2: Robert Deutsch is watching the evening news right, and he
Speaker 2: sees Mark and he tells his wife that's the guy
Speaker 2: who found the bloody glove, and his wife is like, yeah,
Speaker 2: and I'm going to quote now from a New York
Speaker 2: Times article from nineteen ninety six. Mister Deutsch happened to
Speaker 2: be familiar with the detective from a case in which
Speaker 2: police officers shot a black robbery suspect, and then mister
Speaker 2: Deutsch believes planted evidence against him. After the newscast, mister
Speaker 2: Deutsch put in a call to Robert el Shapiro on
Speaker 2: the Simpson legal team. He reported that the detective had
Speaker 2: won supplied for a stress disability pension and had told
Speaker 2: psychiatrists that he had tortured suspects and hated inwards. So
Speaker 2: this other lawyer who's been involved in a case with
Speaker 2: Furman where a black man was like abused, right, has
Speaker 2: because of everything that happened to that case, found out
Speaker 2: about Furman's backstory because it's public and it came out
Speaker 2: during that other case. And he calls Simpson's defense attorney.
Speaker 2: One of them is like, hey, I know something really important,
Speaker 2: because the glove is the most important piece of physical
Speaker 2: evidence that the prosecutors have. And if you can say, well,
Speaker 2: this is the guy who found it, and he's a
Speaker 2: racist who planted evidence and talked about planting evidence, you
Speaker 2: can get the whole thing thrown out right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's a great way to sprinkle in reasonable doubt.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And Shapiro as soon as this guy called Shapiro says,
Speaker 2: I know this guy is a racist who talked about
Speaker 2: framing black men, Shapiro's like ding ding, fucking ding, baby,
Speaker 2: say less, you know, I know how I'm earning my
Speaker 2: salary right.
Speaker 4: Fuck yeah, that's itunds like getting a gift on a platter.
Speaker 3: Oh god. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So the Juices legal team were looking for absolutely any
Speaker 2: angle that they could play to keep their client from
Speaker 2: spending the rest of his life behind bars. And given
Speaker 2: the recent La riots and the film brutal beating of
Speaker 2: Rodney King, which the officers responsible for had gotten off
Speaker 2: for committing, many Angelino's were not only willing to believe
Speaker 2: that a bad cop had said oj up, they didn't
Speaker 2: even need to be convinced of.
Speaker 3: That to believe it.
Speaker 2: Right, Because the bloody glove was bad for Simpson, anything
Speaker 2: that impugned it as evidence was a priority, which meant
Speaker 2: Mark Furman was a priority. And once they start digging
Speaker 2: into the past, the stuff that Deutsch's told them, they
Speaker 2: found plenty of valid reasons to believe that, like, oh,
Speaker 2: this guy really might have set oj up right, Like,
Speaker 2: it's a believable.
Speaker 5: Case at least.
Speaker 2: And the most damning thing they find during this process
Speaker 2: of digging up all the dirt they can on Mark Furman,
Speaker 2: is these tapes.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: And basically somebody tells someone who knows McKinney. It informs Shapiro, Hey,
Speaker 2: there's a lady who was like interviewing this guy and
Speaker 2: he said some crazy shit and I think he said
Speaker 2: the inward a bunch because by this point Mark is
Speaker 2: set on stage on under testimony. Oh, I never said
Speaker 2: the inWORD, like not in the last ten years have
Speaker 2: I used that.
Speaker 4: It's so weird that he knows, Like, oh, well I
Speaker 4: haven't said it like ten years, Like, but you did.
Speaker 5: Yeah, he's specifying ten years.
Speaker 4: You remember this happened specifically ten years ago. That's a
Speaker 4: really weird thing to remember.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And so it becomes really important to be able
Speaker 2: to prove that that's a lie, and the tapes will
Speaker 2: prove it's a lie. So, right, once Shapiro finds out
Speaker 2: these exist, he's going to move heaven and earth to
Speaker 2: get them introduced into evidence, and part of that is
Speaker 2: going to be making sure that the media finds out
Speaker 2: that there's tapes, right, and starts getting clips of the
Speaker 2: tapes because that creates buzz and brings up news, and
Speaker 2: soon there are news articles quoting segments of these tapes.
Speaker 2: Of these clips, some get leaked by the defense team
Speaker 2: after they get access to the tapes, and you know
Speaker 2: it's bad stuff. You know I quoted earlier a brief summary,
Speaker 2: but other things in those tapes from it. Admits to
Speaker 2: brutality to police, to beating people. He admits to sexually
Speaker 2: harassing female colleagues and civilian women. He repeatedly uses the
Speaker 2: N word. Portions of the tapes are ultimately admitted to
Speaker 2: evidence and shown to the jury because one of Mark's
Speaker 2: favorite stories to tell McKinney were all the ways that
Speaker 2: like cops planted evidence on people, And that's incredibly relevant, right, yeah,
Speaker 2: like and it's again this is often framed as like, oh,
Speaker 2: the shitty media and oh, these tapes never should have
Speaker 2: been introduced. Though, if the detective on a case who
Speaker 2: found a key piece of evidence has thirteen hours of
Speaker 2: talking about how much he loves framing black guys by
Speaker 2: planting evidence, that's actually super relevant, even if he's lying,
Speaker 2: that's super relevant.
Speaker 5: I'm sorry, it just is I call this Destroy My
Speaker 5: Testimony mixtape.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, And we're gonna play a clip from the
Speaker 2: Destroy My Testimony mixtape. This is a clip I found
Speaker 2: from the Kyra Phillip Show on CNN that was part
Speaker 2: of a recent special on the Fermin Tapes that played
Speaker 2: some bits that had not been previously revealed. I'm going
Speaker 2: to play you a clip that just tosses out like
Speaker 2: three of these quotes so you can kind of hear
Speaker 2: what he sounded like and get like an idea of
Speaker 2: sort of the highlights. This is like a worst of
Speaker 2: the Ferment tapes.
Speaker 1: Vulgar, the White Steaine General five for June, Wandering jew Clod,
Speaker 1: Web Show knows sexist.
Speaker 5: How do you arrest a violent suspect? I yell and
Speaker 5: have a man DoD disturbing.
Speaker 4: You've got to be a quartalized source you have.
Speaker 3: You got to be a violin cool.
Speaker 2: So that's the kind of shitt he's saying, right. I
Speaker 2: didn't includehim saying the inn word repeatedly, but he does,
Speaker 2: you know. And the LA would claim then and after
Speaker 2: that most of these allegations had no real world backing.
Speaker 3: He was just lying. There's no evidence of it.
Speaker 2: And you know he was lying a lot. But that
Speaker 2: also makes it impossible to trust Mark Furman. You know,
Speaker 2: even if he never planted evidence on anyone, the fact
Speaker 2: that he has thirteen hours of pretending it does impune
Speaker 2: his reliability, you know.
Speaker 4: So yeah, best key scenario, he is just a liar.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, So.
Speaker 2: Many legal experts agree that the Firman tapes in specific,
Speaker 2: and Mark's whole existence is a detective an involvement with
Speaker 2: the glove may well be YOJ walked away a free man.
Speaker 2: It didn't help that he'd repeatedly shit talked Captain York
Speaker 2: on the tapes. I mentioned this earlier. He talks a lot.
Speaker 2: She slept her way to the top. She's always mean
Speaker 2: to me. The judge on the uh OHJ. Simpson case
Speaker 2: is a guy judge edo Captain Yorke was his wife.
Speaker 4: Oh my god, I mean it does bring up I mean,
Speaker 4: as funny as poor Lance is at a certain point,
Speaker 4: should have the judge like procused himself from the situation.
Speaker 2: That there was a big debate, And I think it
Speaker 2: was just because things had gone like they was. They
Speaker 2: didn't want to deal with that nightmare. But no, that
Speaker 2: was a major topic of discussion, like that had to
Speaker 2: be ruled on. Another judge had to come in and
Speaker 2: say it's okay, like I don't think this will cut
Speaker 2: some stuff out, but I don't think this will like
Speaker 2: make it make it be an issue. But no, they
Speaker 2: did have to get a ruling on that. And this
Speaker 2: is one of the reasons why everyone's so pissed at
Speaker 2: Mark is because like this trial's already hell, already incredibly expensive,
Speaker 2: already a fucking circus, and then now we have to
Speaker 2: stop it to figure out if we've got to find
Speaker 2: a new judge because you fucking shit talked his wife
Speaker 2: a bunch on tapes to a journalist, you idiot, like.
Speaker 4: One of the fucking odds too man like Firma is
Speaker 4: so funny. Is a great example of a dipshit just
Speaker 4: trooping over his own feet constantly, like statistically almost impossible
Speaker 4: ways he trips over his own dick so hard the
Speaker 4: whole LAPD fell like, yeah, like of all the judges,
Speaker 4: of all the people in the LAPD, he manages to
Speaker 4: go on tape for hours shit talking the wife of
Speaker 4: the guy that's going to destroy him.
Speaker 5: It's amazing, It's so funny. That's fun. Great.
Speaker 2: So the stupidest part of all this is Mark never
Speaker 2: even needed to be involved in the OJ trial in
Speaker 2: the first place. There was no good reason for him
Speaker 2: to have been on under oath at all. Yes, he
Speaker 2: had found the glove, but that just means he spotted
Speaker 2: it with his eyes and he pointed it out to
Speaker 2: the other detectives. But he never touched it. It was
Speaker 2: another detective who introduced it into the chain of custody,
Speaker 2: and you could have just had that guy testify, right.
Speaker 2: The DA's office never needed to call on Mark. I've
Speaker 2: read reporting that says prosecutors did because they interviewed him
Speaker 2: and they found him impressive and trustworthy because he's like
Speaker 2: tall and like looks like the statuesque ideal of a
Speaker 2: cop and they're like, oh great, yeah, this guy looked
Speaker 2: good on stand next to OJ's just a horrible concision.
Speaker 1: He looks a TV cop guy.
Speaker 2: He looks like a TV cop, right, and he'll be
Speaker 2: a great witness. He should never have been there.
Speaker 1: Like.
Speaker 4: The LAPD did this having full access to his personnel records.
Speaker 4: He's just like a pr fucking landmine, Like, not put
Speaker 4: him up there. We're gonna step right on this motherfucker.
Speaker 2: And knowing because I know that you're posted to me,
Speaker 2: it might be like, oh, well, this wasn't Like how
Speaker 2: could they have known this wasn't a normal case because
Speaker 2: it was already the most famous case in the history
Speaker 2: of American law enforcement before.
Speaker 6: J Simpson the trials as celebrity, he's a huge They
Speaker 6: knew this was going to be under an enormous amount
Speaker 6: of scrutiny, and they knew this guy's history, and it
Speaker 6: was like they had no.
Speaker 2: Excuse to make a decision that stupid. It's really fucking
Speaker 2: stupid impressive. So I want to read a quote from
Speaker 2: the author of that New York Times Review of Books article,
Speaker 2: quoting Peter Aronella, a professor of law at UCLA, critiquing
Speaker 2: the decision to have Furman on the stand. If a
Speaker 2: person creates a fantasy life once, they are going to
Speaker 2: do it again, Professor Aaronella said, there are only two
Speaker 2: plausible explanations for the prosecutor's decision. Professor Aaronella speculated one
Speaker 2: is that the prosecution was overwhelmed by the defense team's
Speaker 2: blizzard of motions. The other, he said, is that prosecutors
Speaker 2: had gotten away with using racist cops and other trials.
Speaker 3: What do you think it is? What do we think
Speaker 3: is the explanation here?
Speaker 4: I think there's a very good chance, Robert, that the
Speaker 4: LAPD has been using a lot of racist cops and
Speaker 4: trials and getting away with it.
Speaker 5: That's right, because right, the LAPD is racist as fuck.
Speaker 2: And you know who, well no, mmm, no, nobody, nobody, No,
Speaker 2: here's ads fuck.
Speaker 3: And we're back.
Speaker 2: So back when he'd been cross examined, Mark Furman had
Speaker 2: testified that he had not made any anti black racial
Speaker 2: slurs in the last decade. The recordings proved that that
Speaker 2: was a lie. Mark had to retire in shame from
Speaker 2: the LAPD in the wake of the trial. Obviously, OJ
Speaker 2: is acquitted, right, we all know.
Speaker 3: That, you know, don't you must quit blood didn't fit.
Speaker 2: They had to acquit, right, and they caught charges later on.
Speaker 2: But he did, he took he did, and and Mark doesn't.
Speaker 2: Obviously Mark's not the only reason, you know, the glove
Speaker 2: doesn't get gets OJ off. But he's part of YOJ
Speaker 2: gets off, you know. And because he's perjured himself on
Speaker 2: the stand, he becomes the only person who actually gets
Speaker 2: convicted in the O. J.
Speaker 5: Simpson case. Which is really funny to me, is a detective.
Speaker 5: He shows up in his house.
Speaker 2: Mark gets charged with perjury and he pleads no contest.
Speaker 2: In nineteen ninety six, he receives a slap on the
Speaker 2: wrist before he and his family moved to the small
Speaker 2: town of Sandpoint, Idaho, which at the time was fameless
Speaker 2: because a bunch of Nazis and far right apocalypse weirdos
Speaker 2: had moved into the area. There's like articles that are
Speaker 2: including like the Aryan Nations and like almost Heaven and
Speaker 2: bo writes and like his fucking militia weirdos and Mark
Speaker 2: Furman all in the same list of like reasons that
Speaker 2: Idaho is scary. It's really funny that he's like it's
Speaker 2: like Mark Furman is listed alongside all of the Nazis.
Speaker 2: It's like reasons that Idaho is a high of the
Speaker 2: far right. It's really funny.
Speaker 4: At least they all have the same hobbies. Like you
Speaker 4: guys want to compare Nazi uniform.
Speaker 5: Collections, collecting swastikas. I want to see my concerning German
Speaker 5: political cartoons.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So Mark moves there and there's articles about it, you know,
Speaker 2: and he, you know, is kind of settles into normal life.
Speaker 2: He's initially saying that I just want to be like
Speaker 2: a quiet, normal person. I found an article that describes
Speaker 2: me as having grown a mustache and started training to
Speaker 2: be an electricians helper. I don't know why it specifies
Speaker 2: that he grew mustache first, but it does.
Speaker 1: That was what my face was for the.
Speaker 5: Guys.
Speaker 2: So now that he's free, Mark's artistic bent reasserted itself,
Speaker 2: and with that the fact that he's now getting to
Speaker 2: kind of indulge his creative side. Is helped by a
Speaker 2: fad advance from a publisher that wanted him to write
Speaker 2: a book on the trial. Everyone involved with the O. J.
Speaker 2: Simpson trial got a book deal. If you were in
Speaker 2: any way involved and you wanted to get a bunch
Speaker 2: of money, you could write a book about the OJ
Speaker 2: Simpson trial. They were handing those out like fucking hot cakes,
Speaker 2: and Mark's was a best seller. It does very well,
Speaker 2: and he makes a lot of money off of it.
Speaker 5: Damn you, Mark.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: In fact, it works well enough that he stops training
Speaker 2: to be an electrician and he never winds up having
Speaker 2: to work a real job again. Instead, he settles into
Speaker 2: life in Sandpoint and continues writing while Mark worked on
Speaker 2: his first book, The LAPD, and performed another in depth
Speaker 2: analysis of his claims in the tapes. They did find
Speaker 2: that many were provably untrue. Per the LA Times, summarizing
Speaker 2: a few of these, Furman and other officers tortured and
Speaker 2: beat four suspects faces to just mush after a nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy eight officer involved shooting in East Los Angeles. Furman
Speaker 2: and his partner rammed a suspects vehicle during a pursuit
Speaker 2: April twenty fourth, nineteen eighty six, and struck and kicked
Speaker 2: him after he was apprehended from his partner named Tom,
Speaker 2: tore up driver's licenses and used racist slurs. Police investigators
Speaker 2: identified the officer but found the statements about him were unfounded.
Speaker 2: So again, all those are things that like he claims
Speaker 2: to have done in the tapes that they found that
Speaker 2: they said, we proved he didn't do right, or we
Speaker 2: couldn't prove that he had had done right. However, per
Speaker 2: that article, investigators found that the department's handling of some
Speaker 2: of those incidents dating back ten to twenty years does
Speaker 2: not hold up to the laped's current standards. In fact,
Speaker 2: investigators found the handling of some cases to be grossly deficient.
Speaker 2: So the LAPED says, we couldn't prove he did any
Speaker 2: of this. Also, our records keeping was really bad, and
Speaker 2: we like literally weren't taking notes at all about the
Speaker 2: complaints people made against officers. So who knows what happened
Speaker 2: is kinda what they say.
Speaker 4: What if we told you he was lying? He was
Speaker 4: also a violent psycho and institutionally we are incapable of
Speaker 4: doing our jobs.
Speaker 3: Yes, couldn't have done anything.
Speaker 2: And it's very interesting too, because, like if you read
Speaker 2: the news articles from the time, a lot of them
Speaker 2: are like, well, it turns out the Firman tapes were
Speaker 2: all lies. The LPD looked into it and they were
Speaker 2: able to show it was all untrue. And that's not
Speaker 2: really what the report says. Some of things were untrue,
Speaker 2: but a lot of things were like, well, we can't
Speaker 2: prove it because our records are shitty, And that's not
Speaker 2: the same as showing it didn't happen.
Speaker 5: We threw all the complaints out.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's very different. In fact, we can't prove any
Speaker 4: of this happened because we made sure we can. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 4: that said. Other important claims made in the tapes were true,
Speaker 4: as I've already gone into men against women was real
Speaker 4: and documented by the laped. Sexual harassment was also found
Speaker 4: to be just as widespread as Mark claimed, and multiple
Speaker 4: witnesses have reported seeing Mark Furman use racial slurs just
Speaker 4: as he himself used them in the tapes. Mark's next book,
Speaker 4: published in nineteen ninety eight, was Murder in Greenwich. This
Speaker 4: covered a murder that we've discussed on this show in
Speaker 4: our RFK Junior episodes, the nineteen seventy five unsolved murder
Speaker 4: of Martha Moxley. Now Mark theorized that the killer was
Speaker 4: Michael Skakeel, and a lot of people had previously Michael
Speaker 4: was the nephew with Ethel Kennedy and childhood friend of
Speaker 4: RFK Junior, and there'd long been suspicion on behalf of
Speaker 4: Michael's brother and then Michael, but no one is ever
Speaker 4: able to prove anything. In the early nineteen nineties, the
Speaker 4: Skeayholl family hired a PI firm to look into the
Speaker 4: risk to Michael and his brother Thomas, were both publicly
Speaker 4: suspected of the crime. Per an article on oxygen dot com.
Speaker 4: And I'll talk about why I'm using oxygen as a
Speaker 4: source in a little bit. The agency's highly confidential report
Speaker 4: was leaked to the press in nineteen ninety five, and
Speaker 4: it revealed that both Michael and Tommy had lied to
Speaker 4: Greenwich Police during their initial interviews twenty years earlier.
Speaker 2: One of the few people who had seen the report
Speaker 2: is former Los Angeles police detective and writer Mark Furman,
Speaker 2: the author of Murder and Grinwich Who Killed Martha Moxley.
Speaker 2: So I included Oxygen not because it's a good source,
Speaker 2: because it shows how Mark's involvement in the case is
Speaker 2: used and reported on by them.
Speaker 3: Is like, he's the only one who's seen in this
Speaker 3: secret report.
Speaker 2: You know that he's become credible to these like reactsary
Speaker 2: like paranoid conservative sources.
Speaker 3: Kind of Now on this point, it's interesting.
Speaker 4: It becomes a true crime guy. Yeah, it's perfect for it.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Now, and no reason to explain why he's a former
Speaker 4: yeah lapdh Yeah, former.
Speaker 2: And I fk Junior for himself because he writes an
Speaker 2: article about Mark's book and he blames writer Dominic Dunn
Speaker 2: for bringing Furman into the matter. Done had been accusing
Speaker 2: the scalhol family of covering up the crime and trying
Speaker 2: to get the brothers prosecuted for years, right, and it's
Speaker 2: kind of responsible for keeping suspicion on the Scahold brothers
Speaker 2: alive in the media during this time. And so he
Speaker 2: reaches out to Mark Furman and furnishes him with like
Speaker 2: documents he's gathered during his own investigations and is like,
Speaker 2: I need you to like make this publicized because you're
Speaker 2: famous now. And despite Mark's perjury conviction, after his book
Speaker 2: success and due to the regret in the wake of
Speaker 2: OJ's acquittal, Mark had a lot of credibility in some circles,
Speaker 2: more than you'd expect, and he was seen by too
Speaker 2: many conservatives as a wrong truth teller and good cop.
Speaker 2: So Mark puts out this book that done is basically
Speaker 2: paid him to write, arguing that Michael Skeakell did this murder.
Speaker 2: And it does build a lot of support for that belief.
Speaker 2: In an article for The Atlantic in two thousand and three,
Speaker 2: RFK Junior would later claim on July tenth, nineteen eighty eight,
Speaker 2: one month after its publication, Connecticut authorities convened a one
Speaker 2: man grand jury consisting of Judge George tim The state's attorney,
Speaker 2: Jonathan Benedict, took over the Moxley case and began a
Speaker 2: multimillion dollar effort to convict Michael Skegell. Right, that's how
Speaker 2: RFK Junior looks at it. That's not unfair. The question
Speaker 2: is whether or not Michael was guilty.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 2: If you believe Michael's guilty, then it's not bad that
Speaker 2: Mark did this. If Michael's innocent, then he destroyed an
Speaker 2: innocent man's life. Right now, In two thousand and two,
Speaker 2: Michael was convicted of the murder of Martha Moxley. In
Speaker 2: that same year, Mark's book was adapted for a TV movie,
Speaker 2: and Mark Furman was played by Christopher Maloney. This may
Speaker 2: seem like a redemption arc for Mark, but it turns
Speaker 2: out the prosecution of Michael Skaikl was dog shit and
Speaker 2: it was later overturned. Michael spends like ten years in prison,
Speaker 2: but he gets out because he's found it was bad.
Speaker 2: They didn't do a good job prosecuting him. Mark go
Speaker 2: to his grave insisting Michael was guilty. I don't actually
Speaker 2: know who's guilty of this crime. So whether or not
Speaker 2: this goes in the bastard column depends on what you
Speaker 2: believe about Martha Moxley's murder. That said, I don't think
Speaker 2: Mark knowser cares who really did it. He writes me
Speaker 2: in his books on her murder and the intro, He's like,
Speaker 2: I was interested in Martha's murder because of quote money, power, celebrity, deceit,
Speaker 2: and corruption. Basically like, oh, because this is a famous
Speaker 2: family involved in this murder. I thought it was cool
Speaker 2: and sexy and like a lady died like a girl.
Speaker 5: And came to me publicity.
Speaker 2: Like, come on, dude, like like, if you if you
Speaker 2: really think this guy murdered her, sure, absolutely do the
Speaker 2: right thing, but like, don't just write that, Oh it's
Speaker 2: a sexy look girl, a girl got murdered, man, Come on, No.
Speaker 5: It's just like true crime shit.
Speaker 4: Like he he missed out on the wave of podcasts.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, he would have made a lot of and
Speaker 2: he does actually kind of make he makes it into
Speaker 2: a little bit of that wave. So Mark Mark keeps writing.
Speaker 2: Over the next few years, he publishes a mix of books,
Speaker 2: a lot of like serial killer books. He publishes an
Speaker 2: exposee of Oklahoma's death row. He's actually anti death row,
Speaker 2: I think kinda. He does publish a book on the
Speaker 2: death of Terry Schivo, a brain dead coma patient who
Speaker 2: was taken off of life support after a math. This
Speaker 2: is a huge culture war moment, right, This poor woman
Speaker 2: is because he believes she was murdered. What he thinks
Speaker 2: this is murder? Yes, exactly a lot of people do.
Speaker 2: He's that kind of guy. In two thousand and six,
Speaker 2: he puts out a book about the JFK assassination that
Speaker 2: honestly had nothing interesting to say. And in two thousand
Speaker 2: and nine he hilariously wrote a book titled The Murder
Speaker 2: of Business, How the media turns crime into entertainment and
Speaker 2: subverts justice. That's you, Mark, You're the media.
Speaker 5: That's just an autobiography, Mark. Yeah.
Speaker 4: My favorite part of his JFK book is how he
Speaker 4: came to the conclusion is that JFK's had just did that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's right, that's right.
Speaker 4: That's he never shot, had just said that. It runs
Speaker 4: into Kennedy family. That's why rfk's face is so read
Speaker 4: all the time. He's fighting back the natural urge for
Speaker 4: the Kennedy's head to explode.
Speaker 3: That's right.
Speaker 2: I mean, well, it's it's wrong because it was Bernie
Speaker 2: Montgomery Sanders. But we'll continue to move right past that.
Speaker 5: Uh agreed to disagree.
Speaker 2: Mark spins The Aughts and Teens as a forensic and
Speaker 2: crime scene expert for Fox News. He also hosts a
Speaker 2: radio show and a TV history show on the Fox
Speaker 2: Nation streaming platform. I don't think it still exists. It
Speaker 2: was like Foxes Answered and Netflix and The Oughts, and Mark.
Speaker 3: Has like a show where he goes through.
Speaker 2: Famous crimes and talks about them as the great detective
Speaker 2: who got oj acquitted Mark on Fox.
Speaker 5: He was destined for that job.
Speaker 3: He was.
Speaker 2: And he becomes an activist in his old age, you know,
Speaker 2: even though he actually in the early two thousands is
Speaker 2: permanently barred from ever being a law enforcement officer in California. Again,
Speaker 2: he becomes an advocate for police choke holds because they
Speaker 2: keep people safe. You know, the choke holds are important.
Speaker 2: It's incredible shill.
Speaker 3: Yeah, for other people to die on.
Speaker 2: Yeah, hell, for other people to die yeah yeah. He
Speaker 2: repeatedly denied the relevance of choke holds in investigations to
Speaker 2: deaths and police custody. And I found a good example
Speaker 2: of this in a twenty sixteen Raw Story article. Quote
Speaker 2: while examining the history that led up to the O. J.
Speaker 2: Simpson case. ESPN's thirty for thirty documentary series OJ Made
Speaker 2: in America recalled how the nineteen ninety one beating of
Speaker 2: Rodney King opened the nation's eyes to the LAPD's treatment
Speaker 2: of the black community. But Furman, whose racist language is
Speaker 2: often blamed for derailing the case against Simpson, argued that
Speaker 2: King's beating could have been prevented if the choke hold
Speaker 2: procedure had not been banned in the early nineteen eighties.
Speaker 2: If they could have choked him, you know, that whole
Speaker 2: Rodney King beating wouldn't have been a problem if only
Speaker 2: they would have gotten to choke him. They had to
Speaker 2: beat him because they couldn't choke him.
Speaker 4: See, if they simply didn't ban choke holds, like six
Speaker 4: dudes wouldn't have to beat an unresisting person.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. It's like I wouldn't have stabbed him if
Speaker 2: you don't let me shoot him, you know, like.
Speaker 3: Exactly, man.
Speaker 2: And it's it's perhaps ironic, given his love of choke holds,
Speaker 2: that Mark Furman's end would come at the hands of
Speaker 2: throat cancer, which took him out of this world at
Speaker 2: age seventy four. Not a moment too soon, like a couple.
Speaker 3: Of days ago.
Speaker 2: And that's the Mark Furman story, like a couple of
Speaker 2: weeks ago by the time you hear this.
Speaker 5: But what a guy.
Speaker 4: You know, I kind of did expect to come onto
Speaker 4: the side of cancer on this one.
Speaker 5: But you're in.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm wear in my tumor jersey, you know, big
Speaker 4: foam fingers saying cancer number one.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: That's the fucked up thing about cancer is, you know,
Speaker 2: especially when it comes for you or people you care about,
Speaker 2: it's this like relentless nightmare monster. But the other flip
Speaker 2: side of it is that it's the thing that guarantees
Speaker 2: no dictator or Fox News personality days around forever.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's like the the mortality version of al Capone
Speaker 4: getting caught for tax cheating.
Speaker 5: Right right, Eventually you get the tumors.
Speaker 3: Eventually it'll get you.
Speaker 5: Yeah. Yeah, well at least he's dead. He's not on
Speaker 5: the Fox Street.
Speaker 4: He's dead like a streaming platform.
Speaker 1: Oh man, Joe, you want to plug your pluggables at
Speaker 1: the end here.
Speaker 5: Yeah. Uh so.
Speaker 4: I am the host of the Lines That by Donkeys
Speaker 4: podcast or a military history podcast. We talk about all
Speaker 4: eras of history. We try to make things funny and interesting.
Speaker 4: I'm also the author of the book The Highlands Burn.
Speaker 4: You can get it wherever you get your books. It's
Speaker 4: a military gunpowder fantasy. So if you like World War
Speaker 4: One technology and magic, there's a book for you.
Speaker 5: Now.
Speaker 2: Excellent, all right, everybody, Well, that's going to be it
Speaker 2: for us here at Behind the Bastards, And that's going
Speaker 2: to be us for it at here podcast. I don't
Speaker 2: know why I'm doing the aphasia thing. Anyway, We're done,
Speaker 2: Go home, be Gone.
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