At the time it must have seemed like a great idea. For weeks, a seething OJ
Simpson had been planning an Ocean’s Eleven-style sting in Las Vegas over
September 12 and 13. Simpson was furious that some sports-memorabilia
dealers – who were old friends and business associates of his – were
planning to sell off personal items he believed had been stolen from him.
These included the green-grey suit – the “acquittal suit” – Simpson had been
wearing in an LA courtroom on October 3, 1995, the day he was cleared of the
brutal murders of his ex-wife, Nicole, and her friend Ron Goldman. They were
also planning to hawk other items, including Simpson’s NFL Hall of Fame
certificate, three ties Simpson had worn during the trial, and a photograph
of Simpson with J Edgar Hoover. Simpson had been tipped off about the sale,
which was being handled by the memorabilia dealers Alfred Beardsley and
Bruce Fromong. A rival dealer, Thomas Riccio, had tipped him off about the
sale.
“Beardsley called me and said he had some unbelievable OJ Simpson stuff,”
Riccio said.
“He came right out and said the stuff was stolen.” Riccio told Simpson the
items could be worth as much as $100,000, more if the “acquittal suit”,
which had been valued at anywhere between $25,000 and $100,000, was included.
Ever since Simpson had been charged with double murder in 1994, it had been
impossible for him to earn a living as a spokesman, actor and product
endorser, which is how he had made money after he retired from his American
football career in the late 1970s. Before the trial, Simpson had realised
that his main asset now was his notoriety, and he cashed in by selling
almost anything he could make money from by sticking his autograph on it.
After the second, civil trial in 1997, when Simpson was found liable for the
wrongful death of Ron Goldman and ordered to pay the families of his victims
$33.5m, only cash he could earn under the table from autograph and
memorabilia signings was not likely to be seized by the Goldman family
lawyers. Simpson had made it absolutely clear that he had no intention of
satisfying the judgment by doing legitimate work. “If I have to work to pay
them, I won’t work,” OJ insisted. “It’s that simple. I’ll play golf.”
Riccio had helped Simpson in the past by arranging autograph signings. Riccio,
44, like many of the people involved in the $2-billion-a year memorabilia
business, had a shady past. Riccio had spent a total of eight years in jail
for arson, felony grand larceny, selling stolen property and escaping from a
minimum-security prison. But his chief claim to fame was that he had
arranged the sale of the handwritten diaries of the model Anna Nicole Smith
shortly after her death, for more than $500,000. This was quite a coup
because the diaries were, for the most part, ridiculously banal. “It was a
okay day,” she wrote of June 11, 1992. “I had lunch with Howard [Marshall,
her elderly husband]. Someone ran over my cat yesterday. I was real sad.”
Simpson had known both Bruce Fromong and Al Beardsley, who were selling the
memorabilia in Vegas, for years. Fromong, 53, had testified on Simpson’s
behalf during the civil trial. Fromong told the court that Simpson had
become such a pariah after the murder trial that he would be able to earn
very little in the future from memorabilia sales. Despite this testimony,
Fromong, at first in partnership with Mike Gilbert, Simpson’s erstwhile
business associate, had continued very profitably selling Simpson
memorabilia for years after the trial, most recently on eBay under the name
Superbowl Kid.
Beardsley, 46, had also been peddling Simpson memorabilia. He also had a
substantial criminal record: in 2000 he was convicted of assault with a
deadly weapon when he slammed his car into a newspaper reporter. In October
2003 he was arrested for threatening to kill the family of a California
highway patrol officer after he was arrested for urinating in public. In
2004 he was convicted of stalking a waitress. The same year, according to
court records, Beardsley said he “heard voices” urging him to run for mayor
of Burbank; Burbank city residents, Beardsley claimed, communicated with him
“by various signals, letting him know what they want him to do based upon
their actions”, such as turning their lights on and off. Beardsley later
stood for mayor of Burbank. He was not elected.
He had recently been trying to sell Simpson’s “acquittal suit” for as much as
$100,000. In May he even called David Cook, a lawyer for the Goldman family,
offering to sell it on their behalf. “He said, ‘I have access to it and I
can get it for you,’ ” Cook recalled Beardsley telling him. “But when people
say, ‘I can get it for you,’ that’s a tip-off to big trouble. That means
they haven’t got it. I said, ‘How do I know it’s genuine?’ And he said to
me, ‘There’s a blood stain on it because OJ was shaving that day, so Fred
Goldman can have it tested for DNA.’ I said, ‘I think Fred Goldman has had
enough of DNA testing!’ I asked Beardsley for provenance and he gave me a
signed statement from Mike Gilbert that says, ‘I got it because OJ owed me
money and it was to pay off the debt.’ ”
So in September this year, OJ Simpson finally thought he had a chance of
recovering his “acquittal suit” and other personal items in Las Vegas. It so
happened that Simpson, 60, who has lived in Miami, Florida, since 1990, was
in Las Vegas over September 12/13, with his girlfriend Christie Prody, 32,
to be the best man at a friend’s wedding. Arnelle Simpson, his daughter from
his first marriage, a wedding planner, was arranging the catering for the
wedding. Simpson and Prody were staying at the swanky Palms hotel. Simpson
arranged with Riccio that he would come to a $35-a-night room in the Palace
casino and hotel where Beardsley and Fromong had laid out the memorabilia,
on a bed, pretending he was a “collector”. “It was a little wacky,” Riccio
admitted. “He wanted to do it that way. He didn’t seem to trust the police
much. He did say if push came to shove, he’d call the police in, but he
felt the items might be confiscated.”
Of course, the real reason he didn’t want the police involved was that
anything they confiscated would most likely be turned over to the Goldmans,
who could claim anything he earned, except his $400,000-a-year pension, and
any of his assets, except his $1.2m Florida home.
Before Simpson headed to the Palace casino and hotel, though, he put together
a ragtag posse of hoodlums for muscle. According to a report in one American
newspaper, Simpson, high on alcohol and cocaine, recruited some of his posse
after he started ranting at the Palms hotel bar that some people were trying
to rip him off. These were the kind of small-time lowlifes Simpson had been
spending his time with in the years since his trials. His accomplices
included Walter Alexander, 46, who had been a golfing partner of Simpson for
years. Alexander had been arrested in 1987 for kidnapping and assault with a
deadly weapon. Clarence “C J” Stewart, 53, who calls himself a mortgage
broker, was also a golfing buddy of Simpson. He pleaded guilty to trying to
sell cocaine to an undercover cop in Louisiana in the late 1980s. Charles
Ehrlich, 53, a real-estate agent, knew Simpson from Miami, where he also
lives. Ehrlich’s criminal record includes a cocaine-trafficking conviction
in the 1990s and a 2004 charge of defrauding investors in a Florida
stock-buying scheme. Charles Cashmore, 40, had bounced around Las Vegas for
15 years, sometimes as a DJ, a bartender and a chef. In 1996 he pleaded
guilty to a theft charge in an embezzlement case. He had met Simpson a
couple of hours earlier, tending the bar at the pre-wedding dinner. The last
man was Michael McClinton, 49, a Las Vegas resident who had pleaded guilty
in 1999 to a drug-possession charge.
Simpson and the five other men headed to the Palace around 7.30pm on September
13, after the pre-wedding dinner at the Palms. Simpson called Riccio and met
him in the lobby. Riccio then led the gang through the hotel to a
ground-floor room, 1203. Once there, Simpson and the other men stormed into
the room. According to police reports, two of the men were brandishing guns.
On an audio recording secretly made by Riccio – a recording the enterprising
hustler sold just a few hours later for thousands of dollars to the
tabloid-news website TMZ – one yelled: “I’m a cop and you’re lucky this
ain’t LA or you’d be dead.” Simpson can be heard yelling: “Don’t let nobody
out of here.” Then he shouts at Fromong: “I thought you were my friend! Give
me my shit back! Think you can steal my shit and sell it?”
