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