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

This week Robert invites Joe Kassabian to the guest seat and regales him with the thrilling story of Mark Fuhrman, the most famous racist in LAPD history.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
This is Behind the Bastards, a podcast in which Sophie
misses the mysterious robot woman who I believe was murdered
and Sophie believes was never a person but was instead
just a program that Zoom used to have, and they
replaced it with a thing that tries to get you
to use AI whenever you record.

Speaker 3 (00:23):
Yeah, well, we don't use Zoom anymore, but I do
miss the little I forget what we use.

Speaker 1 (00:26):
I know I do miss the lady being like recording
in progress in progress.

Speaker 3 (00:31):
But I could just say I thought that maybe she
misses you. Probably everybody missed it.

Speaker 2 (00:35):
I never think that, James, James, You're Joe Joe Kasabian,
our god today, host of the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast,
Author of numerous works of fiction and at least one
work of nonfiction, The Hooligans of Candahar. Joe, what else
do you gotta plug for us?

Speaker 3 (00:53):
Here? Uh, My newest gunpowder fantasy novel, The Highlands Burn,
comes out May twenty ninth. It will probably be out
by the time this episode comes out, So yeah, pick
that up. I will be available ebook, audiobook, paperback wherever
you get your books.

Speaker 2 (01:09):
Awesome well check that out and check out, you know, Joe,
you can't have gunpowder fantasy without both gunpowder and people
who are willing to lie. And you know who always
has a gun and also lies a lot.

Speaker 3 (01:28):
Uh cops, Yeah, exactly, Joe. It worked.

Speaker 2 (01:32):
Okay, okay, okay, it's a better reture that I thought. Great, great,
and just in the last you know, literally the week
that we're recording this, it'll have been a couple of
weeks ago. When you good people on the internet or
at Netflix, which I guess is also on the internet,
get to listen to slash watch these episodes. But we
lost a great man and a great a great law
enforcement officer, Joe, And you know I can, let's all

(01:54):
take our hats off at a moment of silence for
a great man, officer, Mark Furman. You know, we all
we all miss him.

Speaker 3 (02:04):
We all miss him.

Speaker 2 (02:06):
It's hard. It's hard going off without Mark. You know,
I have trouble. What's the point of life without Mark Furman,
Without a really racist detective who's largely responsible for O. J.

Speaker 3 (02:17):
Simpson getting away with murder.

Speaker 1 (02:19):
I think I'm going to like garden this weekend and like,
you know, go outside, touch some grass and like not
think about Mark Furman at all, But for the next
couple hours, I guess we're.

Speaker 2 (02:31):
Gonna be thinking a lot about Mark Furman.

Speaker 3 (02:32):
To be fair, Sophie, that is something you're going to
have in common with Mark Ferman.

Speaker 2 (02:37):
He's also, Yeah, he is, he is, he is forever
and ever.

Speaker 3 (02:42):
Fun fact that we're recording.

Speaker 2 (02:47):
Yeah, the original intro that I had written out for
this started as Leo Tolstoy would have said, all great
episodes Behind the Bastards are one of two stories. A
bad person goes on a journey or a famous asshole
just died. And that's what we're doing this week, right,
we're doing We're doing our eulogy and the life and
times of former LAPD detective and OJ Simpson trial star

(03:09):
Mark Furman.

Speaker 3 (03:10):
And if you're not, if you didn't live.

Speaker 2 (03:13):
Through the OJ trial, like everybody recording the podcast right now,
or if your memories are just faded. O. J. Simpson
was really good at football. You're pretty good at being
in fucking the Naked Guy?

Speaker 3 (03:26):
Was that?

Speaker 2 (03:26):
Nor was it Airplane? He was in a couple of movies.

Speaker 3 (03:28):
Was right. I was born in eighty eight, so this
is right?

Speaker 2 (03:34):
Say, you know yeah. Uh so he's very famous, beloved
sports star, transitioning into just general star. And then his
wife and her partner, his ex wife and her partner
are found brutally murdered.

Speaker 3 (03:49):
OJ did it.

Speaker 2 (03:49):
We don't need to beat around the bush here, right, Like.

Speaker 3 (03:54):
You read a book.

Speaker 2 (03:55):
Saying if I did it, you know, but he didn't
get convicted. And if you ask people why didn't he
get convicted, obviously there's a lot of different reasons.

Speaker 3 (04:03):
Feel love.

Speaker 2 (04:05):
Basically everyone agrees that the reason why OJ ultimately and
there's a number, but the reason why OG ultimately got
acquitted is because a police detective named Mark Furman, who
was you know, part of the one of the first
guys on scene and one of the guys involved with
like the finding of that famous black glove, was revealed

(04:26):
to be a super racist because of a bunch of
tapes where he had talked about all of his racist
beliefs and his joy of doing things like planting evidence
to get black people convicted of crimes that they hadn't committed.
And this dropped into the OJ Simpson case like a
bombshell and is said to have played a major role
on why OJ got off is that Mark Furman really
muddied the waters because he was such a racist piece

(04:49):
of shit. It brought into question all of the evidence
around OJ and all of the police work that had
been done to gather that evidence, and so it ultimately
just torpedoed the case. And that's somewhat to batable. But Mark,
because of how famous the case was, and because of
how big the story went that this LAPD detective had
been talking about all these crimes that a ton of

(05:10):
LAPD cops were implemented in, it caused this huge scandal
for the department. So it was very influential on the
history of like law enforcement and very influential for the
LAPD and just with an American culture. And so that
is the story we're telling this week, the story of
Mark Ferman. Are you excited, Joe.

Speaker 3 (05:27):
I will say, for all of the episodes of but
on this show, this one has the lowest body count,
no direct debts. Did did you have me on? Because
Kim Kardashian's dad is involved in this?

Speaker 2 (05:41):
That's right, that's right, it's the Armenian angle.

Speaker 3 (05:46):
Yes, I knew it, Robert.

Speaker 2 (05:48):
Yes, yes, all because I needed to have someone who
was on OJ's side and all Armenians like inherently support A. J.
Simpson because of Robert Kardashian.

Speaker 3 (05:56):
Yes, we have no choice.

Speaker 1 (05:58):
One of Robert's favorite things to bring up constantly is
when Ross from Friends, Robert.

Speaker 2 (06:04):
Robert, that was weird, a Belie, It was really not
It was really weird casting.

Speaker 3 (06:10):
Yeah, they kind of put him in brown face in
a way. It was strange that. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (06:16):
I just love the way he kept saying juice. Okay,
let's begin our episodes, Okay. Mark James Furman was born
on February fifth, nineteen fifty two, in Eatonville, Washington. Now

(06:38):
that's not that far from where Sophie and I live
right now up here in the Pacific Northwest. Today, Eatonville
is about seventy five percent white.

Speaker 3 (06:46):
I think it's a little.

Speaker 2 (06:46):
Bit less than seventy five percent white, but not much.
And it was a lot whiter than that in the
nineteen fifties. So, you know, the PNW is a very
white place today, and it was even more so back then.
And that is definitely the kind of community that Mark
grows up in. What became Eatonville began with the homestead
of a guy named Thomas Cobb Van Eaton in eighteen

(07:07):
eighty eight, constructed very close to picturesque Mountaineer. As more
settlers arrived in the area and particularly began to advance
towards the mountain, Eaton turned his homestead into a business
selling necessities to travelers. People settled around his house, and
in nineteen oh three, a railroad connection made Eatonville a
real town and the Eatonville Lumber Company the biggest business

(07:27):
in town. Prior to that point, settlers in the area
had tended to just call the whole area Marshall's Prairie,
after a group of Niscali Indians who originally inhabited the region.
These native people had been massacred in eighteen fifty six
by a militia not as Maxon's Raiders in retaliation for
a fight with a Washington militia a few weeks earlier.
I think this is all part of the Puget Sound

(07:48):
War perthwebsite historylink dot org. Official reports claimed only eight
of the Nashall hostels were killed, but virtually all accounts
and testimonies agree that the raiders under Maxim's command killed
defenseless elderly women, children, and infants. So that's where Mark's
hometown comes from many such cases in the US, A
lot of little genocide villas out in the PNWN elsewhere.

Speaker 3 (08:10):
I love that this whole town just started because a
bunch of dudes squatted on another dude's front lawn. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (08:16):
Yeah, after wiping out the people who had previously lived there.

Speaker 3 (08:20):
Yes, that's the classic Pacific Northwest straight.

Speaker 2 (08:23):
Very tale as old as well the paw and Mark
would have grown up. He wouldn't have been grown up
being taught that like Maxim's raiders had killed all of
these people's like kids, right like.

Speaker 3 (08:33):
They would have been taught.

Speaker 2 (08:34):
And there was a battle, you know, and they killed
eight of these braves right as opposed to it, and
then a genocide was done.

Speaker 3 (08:41):
They killed one hundred warriors. Yeah, parenthesperies, women and children,
the original military aged males.

Speaker 2 (08:48):
Ye. So he would have been raised, as I stated,
in a community that was nearly all white and in
which legends of Indian hunters like Maxon's Raiders would have
been celebrated in school and in the popular culture of
the day. Racism would not have been weird for him.
I've never read Mark discuss any of this history, not
even in his books. Does he really talk a lot

(09:08):
about his childhood, but he wouldn't have been able to
avoid this kind of stuff growing up in the region.
His dad, Ralph, was a truck driver and a carpenter,
and would be described later by Mark as insensitive and irresponsible,
as well as a braggart who doesn't mind hurting his
loved once. His mom, Billy, was a waitress. Their marriage

(09:28):
was not a love match, and the two divorced when
Mark was just seven years old.

Speaker 3 (09:34):
How their kid ended up being a cop? Yeah, yeah, shocking.

Speaker 2 (09:38):
This guy who talks about what an asshole, what a violent,
angry asshole his dad was, turns into a violent, angry asshole.
It does happen. Sometimes it's a bummer.

Speaker 3 (09:48):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (09:49):
I actually hate that this happens. But it's not good.
So Mark stays mostly with his mom, who remarries once,
but not for very long as she has a hell
is drinking problem and for those who knew her, could
be a mean drunk. So again, Mark doesn't just grow
up with his dad being this like very abrasive kind
of figure. His mom, who largely raises him, is like

(10:10):
an abusive drinker at some times. Mark thus grows up
this same person alleged very mistrustful and paranoid. Right, this
is something you'll hear from people who are close to him,
as he's just kind of a paranoid kid who has
trouble being at ease with people, which is not an
uncommon reaction to growing up in an abusive household.

Speaker 3 (10:29):
Right, Yeah, this is all tracking so far.

Speaker 2 (10:32):
Yeah, it's all tracking so far. An article in the
New York Times review of books by Fox Butterfield notes
this about Mark's level of we'll call it racial awareness
as a child, only a few Yeah, only a few
black families lived in Eatonville, and mister Furman and his
younger brother Scott had run ins with two boys, and
one of them the Blues. They'd see you coming down

(10:52):
the street and say, here come the in words, recalled
Daniel Blue, now a truck driver Intocoma, Washington. So that's
this claim you'll get. The Blues will say that like
Mark and his brother, would use racial slurs, target them
with racial slurs, would make fun of them, you know,
would mock them. We're like bullies, we're racist bullies.

Speaker 3 (11:08):
Right now.

Speaker 2 (11:10):
For his part, Marc has denied these allegations, right, or
at least he denied them back in the late nineties,
and he writes a book after the O. J. Simpson
trial because everybody does, called murder in Brentwood, and he
addresses the allegations from the Blue Brothers during this book.
And this is again, this is while he's like right
after the case, so he's been essentilly revealed as a

(11:32):
racist to the entire world. So he has to address that.
And his book Mark says that although Dan like, basically
this is a lie, I never said that to anybody.
You know, Dan says that we played football together, but
we weren't even at high school at the same time,
so we couldn't have played football together. And I guess
that's probably true. But also I can see Dan like
mixing up who he played football with and win but

(11:53):
remembering accurately somebody called him a slur, you know, like people.

Speaker 3 (11:57):
Use them today. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (12:00):
Yeah, but Mark did say, the truth is I never
heard either brother called anything other than their name by
me or anyone else.

Speaker 3 (12:07):
And that's the thing.

Speaker 2 (12:08):
If before Mark saying like, well, we weren't even in
high school together, you know, this is a big story
at the time, I'd be willing to believe maybe somebody
would like life or attention, you know, to have a
little moment in the biggest news story of all time
at this point. But Mark is like, I never heard
anyone call those boys a name. I'm sorry you guys
grew up. These are like the only two black kids
in town. You grew up in the fifties in rural Washington,

(12:28):
and you never heard anyone call them anything but their name.

Speaker 3 (12:32):
I don't believe that. I don't like them for a second,
No for a second. And like even like the idea like,
oh well, we couldn't have played football together. We weren't
even in the same grade. Yeah, because nobody who lives
in the neighborhood a small town plays pick up football games.

Speaker 2 (12:49):
Ever, would ever have played any kind of pickup football game, right,
And it's the or would have mistaken like you for
younger brother.

Speaker 3 (12:57):
Maybe I don't know, like the the whole, the whole.

Speaker 2 (13:00):
Thing idea that like he never heard any racism against
these kids in small town washing like growing up in
rural Oklahoma in the nineties, I heard black kids in
my school get called slurs, you know, like and number one,
it was a lot more diverse like rural Oklahoma, way
more diverse than rural Washington, but just the whole fucking
like that. I just like that from the jump Mark

(13:21):
You're lyon. So I don't know how racist he was,
but he grew up with a lot of racism. Mark
moved around as an adolescent and attended high school, first
in gig Harbor and then Belfair. In nineteen seventy, he
graduated high school. By this point, Mark had come to
be known for something besides his racism. He was an
artsy kid. Weirdly enough, like he is, he really likes art.

(13:44):
He wants to be a creative. He wants to like be,
you know, pursue a creative vocation. That seems to be
his passion. And he will always and also the people
who are close to Hi will always say that, like
Mark at his core wanted to be an artist. And
I think there's a version of this story that's like
also the tragic tale of like a kid who, because

(14:05):
of the time and place and his ideas about like
macho stuff, couldn't do the thing that would have made
him happy, and so kept forcing himself to do these
like aggressive masculine things that he didn't really want because
he just wants to be an artist, but in nineteen
seventy he graduated enlisted in the Marines, because that's what
you do, right And yeah.

Speaker 3 (14:25):
Was he also turned down by an art school in
Austria or is this a weirdness? He doesn't even apply,
doesn't even know why.

Speaker 2 (14:35):
But he does kind of do the Hitler right, like
where he volunteers for the stupid war that he didn't
necessarily need to volunteer for, and so instead of continuing
or doing anything to further the art thing, he winds
up going to No. Now he serves, I should say
during the Vietnam War. He is a Vietnam era veteran.
I guess he is a veteran of the Vietnam. He's

(14:56):
deployed the Vietnam, but he doesn't. He's not a combat veteran, right,
like she never actually fights, and he will claim otherwise
most peoples relevant, Yeah, that's most people, most people. Yeah,
And but he and the only again there's no shame
in that, but he does. He will lie about this, right,
and that's why that's really relevant. Mark service came late
in the war and was in reality quite boring. He

(15:17):
doesn't actually get to do any of the stuff that
like you get the thing. He really wants to fight, right, Like,
this is a kid who, like as a lot of
young men do, wants to prove himself in combat, like
feels like he wants to wants to have that experience,
and he's not going to get it. He gets trained
as an MP and a machine gunner and rises to
the level rank of sergeant. During his four years in
the cores, Uh, he could have been deployed to combat,

(15:40):
but it never quite happened. That times, that New York
Times Review of Books article claims that quote the closest
he got to the ground war was aboard a ship
in the South China Sea. The ship he's on is
the USS New Orleans and it's an amphibious transport ships
and Mark is basically like living there and like on call,
like if we need to, you might get sent into
combat at any point in time, but it never actually

(16:03):
quite happens. So Mark spins a period of time just
kind of living for months on like the edge of
maybe going into battle. But he never gets to like
consummate this act that really does seem to mean a
lot to him. And this this act is like the
fact that this gets interrupted that he never gets his
baptism of fire is going to bother him the rest
of his life. Like, I get the feeling he never

(16:24):
fully gets over not being tested in this way, and
he seems to really want that.

Speaker 3 (16:30):
I've been a lot of guys like that over the years. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
they want it so much. They enlist as like infantry dudes,
and then they end up on like a massive forward
operating base that might have a rocket fired at it,
and they want to sound like the most high speed

(16:51):
Green Beret ass motherfucker for the rest of their life.
And they probably wear hats about where exactly they were,
where exactly they whatever? Yeah, like Camp Liberty, Like that's
the lamest fucking shit. My my favorite was Cold War
veteran hat. I've seen that. One's a classic man that's

(17:13):
like the ultimate dude who never did shit.

Speaker 2 (17:15):
Yeah, I love a And it's the like I feel,
I feel like I have a level understanding, because like
there is our society does like idolize the experience of
being a combat veteran to such an extent for young
men that like, I get why he's obsessed with this.

Speaker 3 (17:33):
Of course he.

Speaker 2 (17:33):
Is right, it's not an unfamiliar thing, and you know,
I'm not like no one's like very few people are
immune entirely to that feeling of like, oh, there's got
to be like something to this experience that's like special
and powerful.

Speaker 3 (17:49):
And about it. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (17:52):
Yeah, and that when somebody believes that and buys into
that and goes as far as getting on the assault
boat next to the coast, it never quite gets to
have it. There's like a degree of failure to launch
almost syndrome that I think is just going to spark
in him the rest of his life. He never gets
over this, you know.

Speaker 3 (18:10):
And he doesn't even go into the country, right, Like
he's living on this boat. So it's like he's living
on the boat. Yeah, that's like even worse because even
if you go to one of these bases, it's very
similar to any other irregular conflict where you might get ambushed, still,
you might get artillery, might get mortared, whatever, something could
still happen that you can kind of grab onto that
you did something. But he's just sitting on a boat.

Speaker 2 (18:32):
He's just sitting on a boat, and it's just not
the thing he wants it to be. Now again, he
does this is he's not a draftee, So he's not
just doing his like you know, one quick, you know,
in and out. He does a full four years. During
his time as a sergeant. He develops a reputation for
what that Times journalist Butterfield calls a reputation as a
macho officer. And again, he's not an officer. That's that's

(18:54):
Butterfield using the wrong terminology. He's a non commissions. Yeah,
he's an oncom and not specifically a macho. Quote in
the Clint Eastwood Dirty Harry mold and Mark's kind of
love this movie when it comes out not long after,
and he is going to deliberately like try to play
act as Dirty Harry like people are, especially early in

(19:15):
his career. He's like often kind of LARPing specifically as
Dirty Harry. And he'll compare himself to Dirty Harry a lot.

Speaker 3 (19:22):
He really it's really dork serious.

Speaker 2 (19:27):
Man, come on, bro, come on, like yeah, it's it's
it's sad. And it's just the the number of like
toxic men like this who you could just you really needed,
like an older brother who would be like, hey, man,
I know you've like gotten a lot of picked up

(19:47):
a lot of shit from like comic books and like
movies about like what men are supposed to do, and
like like and that's all wrong. You need to like
calm down, comfortable in your own skin, like you're not
missing anything because you didn't get shot at, like there
were he didn't have any I really get the feeling
there was not There was not any kind of positive
male influence in his life who could have like modeled

(20:08):
proper behavior. So he's he's doing these things like, well,
I guess I go to the Marines, and that'll make
me a man, you know, And then later it's gonna
be I guess I've become a cop, and that'll make
me a man.

Speaker 3 (20:17):
And you get the feeling.

Speaker 2 (20:18):
This is a guy who doesn't know who he is
and who has some who it's not even that this
is a guy who knows a little of who he is.
He knows he wants to be an artist, but he
can't do that, and so he never gets to find
out like more of the person that he might otherwise
be as he falls into pretending to be this violent,
macho asshole and gradually that becomes him more and more.

(20:41):
Is kind of the thing that I take out of this.
This is a guy I don't think had to go
down this route, but chose to over time because he
was scared to try to portray himself as anything else.

Speaker 3 (20:51):
What's the chaotic evil version of a glow up.

Speaker 2 (20:55):
Right right exactly? So Mark's second wife, Janet Hackett later
told reporters he loved art, but he joined the Marines
and the police as if he was trying to prove himself.
On the outside, Mark is very poised, but inside he
had the lowest self esteem. You can't imagine. So that's
one of his three ex wives. I'm not making all
of this up myself, you know. This isn't just like

(21:16):
my head canon. That's at least someone who was close
to him saying pretty much the same thing. So after
he does his four years with the Marines, Mark decides
to see if joining another heavily armed group of men
working for the government might stop him from feeling insecure,
so he joins the LAPD in nineteen seventy five. He
excels at police academy and he graduates second in his
class with widespread praise from his instructors. When he becomes

(21:39):
a rookie cop, his bosses were all impressed by his appearance.
Mark is in great shape. His uniform is always spotless.
He like looks really good. He looks like the perfect cop.
He's like tall, blonde haired, blue eyed, and you know,
his shit's always like really like locked down his.

Speaker 3 (21:55):
Back friends and marines taught him to do that.

Speaker 2 (21:58):
Yep, yep, yep. And he's also he's kind of a
fastidious dude. His background as an art NERD shows through
here too. His superiors noted that his penmanship was quote
almost a work of art, right, like that's one of
his like la like his superiors in the ilbed is
like his his writing was beautiful, like being writing.

Speaker 3 (22:17):
Just like finger painting. Yeah yeah, they could barely read.

Speaker 2 (22:22):
Yeah, you know who else can barely read?

Speaker 3 (22:24):
Joe? Who's that?

Speaker 2 (22:26):
The sponsors of this podcast all nearly illiterate thanks to
America's broken public education system, and we're back. I was
that wasn't even really a joke. There's a good cho
to sponsor this podcast. Are illiterate. A shocking number of

(22:49):
Americans functionally are any.

Speaker 3 (22:51):
Time to be writing a book, Robert, let me tell you.

Speaker 2 (22:53):
Yeah, yeah, the pain in my laugh mm hmm.

Speaker 3 (22:59):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (23:00):
So in his first days as an LAPD, rookie, Mark
seems to have been very eager to please and impress.
He would often show up to work like a half
hour to an hour early. This commitment to going above
and beyond the job description was recognized by his bosses,
and in nineteen seventy seven, he was assigned to a
dangerous but prominent assignment, working with a sexy new unit

(23:20):
in East LA targeting Hispanic street gangs. Per an article
in the La Times, quote in nineteen seventy seven, with
black gangs emerging as a formidable criminal element in Latino,
gangs continuing to pose problems, department administrators received a one
year federal grant for a special forty four man unit
to concentrate on neighborhoods where gang crime was heaviest. Based
at the Hollandbeck Division in East Los Angeles. The unit

(23:42):
was dubbed Total Resources against Street Hoodlums trash, but civic
leaders thought the acronym disparaging Total resources against street hoodlums hoodlums.

Speaker 3 (23:53):
Come on, guys, I love to use my fifties slang. Yeah,
now it is the seventies, but yeah, it still seems outdated. Ultimately,
the trash, get those roustabouts.

Speaker 2 (24:02):
Yeah, get the roustabouts out of air, and people probably
haven't heard about the Trash program, but a lot of
Angelinos have heard about the Crash program, and the c's.

Speaker 3 (24:11):
Where I thought you were going. I was like, of
course this guy was a fucking crash unit. That's where
I am going. Because the trash unit is the immediate
precursor to the crash unit. So they start to crashing it.

Speaker 2 (24:21):
In like seventy seven, and I think it's seventy nine,
they changed the name to crash. They're like, oh, you
know what, trash is a bad acronym. But if we
throw a C in there, you know, the changes everything.
That sounds a lot better.

Speaker 3 (24:32):
Right. It's what we're doing on the streets is not
the problem, Robert. It's what we're calling ourselves to put
out a really cool challenge coin.

Speaker 2 (24:39):
Right right, total tea for total that's bad. See for
community that's good. So the Crash Program becomes the cornerstone
of Chief Daryl Gates's anti gang initiative. The goal here
was to counter gang activity by treating the battle against
organized crime as if it were a literal war, to
use the lessons of insurgent conflict in Vietna in order

(25:01):
to defeat street crime. Now, one major early measure adopted
by the LAPD was the use of stop and frisk tactics,
which they referred to as jamming. So, you know, a
lot of racism, a lot of like targeting of black
and Hispanic men, and a lot of like targeting in
a way that leads to violence when there doesn't need

(25:21):
to be. So a lot of people are gonna get
beaten and arrested and killed who don't need to be
because this program is basically built in order to ensure
there are additional unnecessary violent interactions between law enforcement and
the community.

Speaker 3 (25:34):
Yeah, they had to name it crash because it was
really hard to find an acronym for the word boomerang. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (25:40):
Yeah, So the city government judged the CRASH program a
success and took over funding it in seventy nine. And
again that's when it becomes crash instead of trash. And
I'm not sure by what metric you'd call crash success
in nineteen seventy nine, As that article noted, from seventy
nine to eighty one, the number of major gangs related

(26:00):
crimes in Los Angeles more than doubled from two thousand
and eighty eight to fivey one hundred and fifty eight
during the first like four years or so that the
crash program, I mean for during the second two years
of it. But like, yeah, from like seventy nine to
eighty one, it doubles more than now. What's funny is
that around that time the Sheriff's department had a program

(26:20):
with a similar goal that worked much better. Like the
Sheriff's anti gang program is a lot more effective than
the LAPDS, But the LAPD just kind of keeps ballsing
their way through crash, which critics say spread out police
attention far too widely. A large part of the problem
with these antigang units is that they had very little
effective oversight and a ton of incentive to lock people

(26:40):
up for bullshit reasons and carry out acts of extreme
violence against them. These programs would ultimately culminate and the
shattering LAPD ramparts scandal. This keeps getting worse and worse
until it blows up in a major way that causes
massive problems, like all LAPD scandals, because that's how the
LAPD works, you know, like we're always building to something

(27:00):
that's going to like blow up. In the City of
Los Angeles's face, they had to.

Speaker 3 (27:07):
Create their own gangs, to fight gangs with tattoos and colors,
and you know, especially the Sheriff's department.

Speaker 2 (27:12):
Ironically enough, the only way to be the bad guy
with a gang is a bad guy also with a gang.
That's right, that's right, but one is paid by the government.
But yeah, one of them has official badges. So at
the same time as Crash is making the gang problem worse,
it contributes to this ever growing sense of unease and

(27:33):
this building racial tension in Los Angeles. This is all,
like the whole all of the bad things about this
program are going to help cause and lead to the
LA riots. Right, this all feeds into Rodney King and
and you know the reaction to that. Why everyone is
so fucking pissed at the LAPD, you know, before that
even happens. For his part, Mark does not seem to

(27:56):
have liked anti gang work. He described his mission to
his second wife, who he was married to during this period,
as to quote, harass anyone who looked like a gang
member and obliterate them. Yeah, he does not. Per the times,
the job put enormous pressure on mister Furman. Missus Hackett

(28:16):
said that's his ax. He was blonde and blue eyed,
six foot three, and he stood out in a crowd
in the largely Hispanic neighborhood. She said he became a
lot more on the edge, moody and depressed because of
the job. Missus Hackett recalled sometimes he refused to talk
or smile for days, and like, you don't need to
be there. No one's making you do this job. I'm
not surprised it's miserable. It sounds awful.

Speaker 3 (28:37):
Bro, you have a job you could just quit. You're
not the Marines anymore. Just he just hit the bricks.

Speaker 2 (28:42):
She doesn't tell us a lot, like I don't have
a ton of detail inside their marriage, but you get
a lot from the fact that she's like, yeah, he
seemed miserable.

Speaker 3 (28:49):
So I left him. I got out of there.

Speaker 2 (28:52):
Like she divorces him because of his moodiness, like right
around this dive. So Mark winds up alone and has
to like live with a fellow cop and in an apartment.
This does not make him less depressed.

Speaker 3 (29:03):
I think the.

Speaker 2 (29:04):
Cause of his deep and like the cause of his
sadness should be pretty obvious. He wants to like be
an artist. He doesn't like this job, but his need
to prove himself as a man has forced him into
a series of brutal, dangerous, and pointless jobs that make
him miserable and make him miserable to be around, and
he seems to have recognized this as well. In nineteen

(29:27):
eighty one, the LAPD had just opened a Behavioral Science
Service section, which hosted the first police psychological counselor unit
in the country. So there aren't any police psychological counselors
officially until nineteen.

Speaker 3 (29:42):
Eighty one, which explains a lot. That's fun, right, they
do so well nowadays. Yeah, yeah, it helps so much today. Yeah. Anyway,
it changed American policing obviously.

Speaker 2 (29:53):
Yeah, after this, there were no more problems.

Speaker 3 (29:55):
Yeah, solved it.

Speaker 2 (29:57):
So it actually this actually explains maybe why the counseling
doesn't help and even can contribute to making things worse
within within like the construct of these police departments, because marlogy,
it's called. It's a little worse than that. Actually it's weird.
So Mark sits down. He has a counseling session with

(30:17):
a psychiatrist or psychologist named Susan sas Clifford, and she
talks to him and he goes through because he's he's
trying to get. He wants to quit. He wants to
get like a like a medical pension, basically like a
disability pension. So he starts telling her this elaborate story
about how he has uncontrollable urges to commit acts of
violence on suspects, sometimes choking and beating them, because he's

(30:40):
just like overwhelmed by a desire to do like murderous
violence to them as a result of his military training.
He tells this to the department psychologist, and Susan's like,
I think you should turn into your gun.

Speaker 3 (30:52):
But two things you're true.

Speaker 2 (30:54):
Number one, that's a very reasonable response on Susan's part.
I love doing violence to suspects. But it's also kind
of why programs like this are doomed to fail or
make the problem worse, because if you're gonna have and
apparently we are organizations in every city where a bunch

(31:15):
of guys are given guns and the ability to use
them with almost impunity to stop quote unquote crime, and
you don't have any way for those guys when they're
having a psychological problem to like say hey, I'm having
a psych problem and have it not ruined their career.
You might cause a lot of worse problems, right, Like,
if that's how they see it, sure, yeah.

Speaker 3 (31:34):
Then they're just not going to say anything. Or like
also when she's like, I think you should turn in
your gun, yeah, obviously he remains a cop, right, Like,
he remains a cop. So it's not like there's any
force in you know, it's like the concept of international law, right,
Like it's all just a list of suggestions, yeah, with

(31:57):
no meaningful enforcement, right.

Speaker 2 (32:00):
And with with this thing set up almost to like
encourage guys not to talk about stuff. Now that said,
I would go more into like, oh, the psychological issues here,
except for I think he's lying from the jump. I
think he just doesn't want to do this job anymore, right,
So I don't even want to treat this like it's
a serious psych issue that he's actually coming to them with.

(32:21):
But I can see how this would make guys like
that less willing to talk about their problems too.

Speaker 3 (32:28):
Sure.

Speaker 2 (32:28):
For her part, doctor sax Clifford later said I wouldn't
remove someone from duty unless I had very serious concerns.
The very fact that he had said these things to
a doctor shows bad judgment. And I gotta say, I
think that's a bad way to phrase it that, like, well,
but shouldn't he say things to a doctor if he's
feeling them?

Speaker 3 (32:45):
Like this? Is that that judgment?

Speaker 2 (32:48):
Yeah, I think it's good if you are if legit
if you were really if a cop was legitimately feeling
uncontrolled or just to murder people and he decided as
a result, I need to go to a therapist.

Speaker 3 (32:59):
That that's actually good judgment. I'd say, right, yeah, right,
really right, Like well, if you know, if he was
really troubled, he wouldn't have told me, So that's fine.
I think that's a bad psych Maybe I think this
might be a bad therapist. Yeah, I think this she
she might not be good at her chop Yeah, University

(33:21):
of Phoenix or some ship. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (33:23):
And like that said, I don't think Mark's telling the
truth here, right, Because Furman wants out of the force
and he wants to get a permanent disability pension by
arguing that his experiences in the gang unit fucked him
up too badly to go on. Uh, he does get
placed on temporary workers comp leave, and so he's getting
paid to not work and he's able to go take
art classes. So he goes to like Long Beach City College.

(33:44):
He starts taking art courses. He's like happy for like
a year or so while this process is going on,
as he's trying to like get cashiered out on disability
because he gets to take his art classes.

Speaker 3 (33:55):
The hand turkey the university has ever.

Speaker 2 (33:57):
Seen exactly, Yeah, weeping with beauty at it.

Speaker 3 (34:02):
Yea.

Speaker 2 (34:03):
Now here's the thing. The cops don't want to the cops.
They don't want to do that. They don't want to
like pay him forever to not work. They would like
him to either return to duty or to quit without
a permanent pension because he hasn't really served very long.
And they think this is bullshit too, But Mark really
wants that disability pension, and so later in nineteen eighty one,
he applies for one, telling his superiors that he's just

(34:23):
been too damaged by the job to go on. So
this point you're probably wondering, how do I know that
he's lying.

Speaker 3 (34:29):
One reason would.

Speaker 2 (34:30):
Be Mark Furman's mouth was moving throughout all of this,
and that's a pretty good indicator to tell if he's lying. However,
I have other evidence. Mark told the doctors at the
time that who had been assigned to evaluate him for
his disability claim that he loved his time in Vietnam
and had fond memories of becoming a trained killer. He
lied about his actual deployment, regaling them with stories of

(34:51):
heavy combat and near death experiences. At the same time,
per doctor Ronald Koegler, he quote bragged that he never
had any second thoughts about what he did in Vietnam,
never had any flashbacks. And I guess that's true because
he just sat on a boat. Why would you second
guess that?

Speaker 3 (35:07):
But that's not what he means, right, you know. But
I think the one moral thing that Furman ever tried
to do, hear me out here, is steal a pension
from the lap.

Speaker 2 (35:19):
It is it is, This is him at the moral
height of his life. Absolutely, we would all have been
better off if he'd stolen a pension from the LAPD.
So I think Furman's plan was to try and argue
that because the Marine Corps had made him into such
a lethal killing machine, he was unsafe to be a
cop because he couldn't see suspects without wanting to beat

(35:40):
and maim them, And per doctor Kogler, he traces his
feelings about violence to his experiences in the Marines. Mark
told another panel of doctors who evaluated him. I'm really
capable of violent things. I feel like I'm out on
a limb and someone's sawing it off. I have this
urge to kill people. And again, I think these are lies.
But it could have worked if it weren't for the

(36:01):
fact that Mark was like the millionth LAPD cop to
realize that a permanent disability pension sounded way better than
working for a living. The department was noted nationwide as
having a number one, an usually good pension plan that
promised officers with a psych disability up to half their
pay tax free for life. And so from nineteen eighty
to nineteen.

Speaker 3 (36:21):
Yeah, not a bad deal. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (36:24):
From nineteen eighty to nineteen eighty five, one hundred and
seventy five LAPED officers were granted stress disability pensions, which
became known as psycho pensions. That's like the term within
the department for this. Now. The fact that these kind
of disability pensions were weirdly common just in LA was
noted in a nineteen eighty five Los Angeles Times article
by Robert Welkes and Claire Spiegel. Quote, although stress pensions

(36:47):
have risen dramatically in the LAPD during the last five years.
They are rare in many other major law.

Speaker 3 (36:52):
Enforcement agencies outside of California, so no one else does this,
and it's weird.

Speaker 2 (36:57):
Only LAPD cops are getting these because they.

Speaker 3 (37:01):
Just don't want to don't want to do the thought
like the biggest department in the country, the best institutional corruption,
Like are you between them and their own sheriff's department
and give it a way out to cash out early?
They fuck yeah, they're gonna take it. Let them just
steal all their overtime like they normally.

Speaker 2 (37:19):
Absolutely, I consider this probably a net benefit, you know, yeah, Like,
let's get these dudes off the fucking streets.

Speaker 3 (37:28):
I support this.

Speaker 2 (37:29):
You know who else we should get off the streets?

Speaker 3 (37:31):
Joe? Who's that? Robert?

Speaker 2 (37:33):
The sponsors of this podcast, all of whom are walking
the streets.

Speaker 3 (37:39):
I don't know. I don't know what I'm doing it.
And we're back.

Speaker 2 (37:51):
We're back, and we're talking about Mark Furman's attempt to
get a psychicability pension from the la b ED. So
this doesn't work out for him ultimately. Psychiatrist John Hackman
concluded that Furman was not legitimately disabled by his work.
Hawkman wrote, there is some suggestion here that the patient
was trying to feign the presence of severe psychopathology. This

(38:14):
suggests a conscious attempt to look bad and an exaggeration
of problems. In a presentation to the pension board, he
noted that Furman had failed a standard psychological test as well.
The board voted six to zero to deny Mark's disability
pension ouch.

Speaker 3 (38:29):
Nice to go steal ot and backup vacation days like
a normal LAPD officer. That's right.

Speaker 2 (38:37):
You have to be a corrupt, lazy bastard, the normal cobway. Now,
the fact that Mark had completely invented his combat experiences
and Nam wasn't caught at the time, but the pension
board did note that police records found no complaints of
excessive force had been filed against Furman. If he were
dangerously unhinged, the argument went, he probably would have fucked

(38:59):
somebody up by now. I don't know if that's the
best way to go about this is the LAPED, but
that's how they do it.

Speaker 3 (39:05):
I would expect nothing less from the LAPD to be
fair like well, he was trually insane, he would have
murdered someone by now.

Speaker 2 (39:11):
We have a ton of cops who have trust us.
We know what the murder cops look like, and we
keep them on the job too.

Speaker 3 (39:17):
We would promote him.

Speaker 2 (39:19):
Yeah, he'd be cheap by now. So Mark doesn't take
this denial lying down.

Speaker 1 (39:24):
Though.

Speaker 2 (39:24):
He appealed to a county judge, which made his court
records public, which is why we know all of this now.
In September of nineteen eighty three, the judge upheld the
board's ruling and Mark Furman's brief break for the artistic
life was over. He'd either have to quit the LAPD
and find a real job or go back to work,
probably as something of a pariah within the department. Mark's

(39:47):
not willing to get a real job, so he goes
back to the LAPD, and sure enough, he spends most
of his first year back on active duty writing a desk. Now,
I don't have a lot of detail on this period
of time in his life, but it's interesting to me.
It's just eight months before he gets back to active
duty work as a patrolman in May of nineteen eighty four.
And this is interesting because you would assume, after having

(40:09):
tried to get out and like saying all this bullshit,
he would be kind of unpopular and people would be
making fun of him. I think he's actually like really
charming and charismatic within sort of an organization like this,
because he seems to have friends in the department. He
gets his gun and patrol route back pretty quickly, and
in short order he's actually assigned to a better location.

(40:31):
He gets sent to West LA. West Los Angeles is
the wealthiest part of town and thus the easiest beat
to walk, right, Like a lot less of the crime
and gang stuff that Mark was clearly scared by. And
despite Mark's claims that he suffered from uncontrollable bloodlust, he
excelled at working in West LA, where tact and charm
were significantly more valuable than violence, which also maybe suggests

(40:55):
that he was never actually all that violent of a guy.
The fact that he does really well once there's a
job where he could just be charming to other white people,
he suddenly is a good cop, like quote unquote right,
And if he was, you.

Speaker 3 (41:08):
Know, handicapped by an uncontrollable urge to savage every single
person he ever met, Yeah, wouldn't he want to just
ride the desk instead? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (41:20):
Why does he want to be back in the street, Like, dude,
just file paper, you get paid the same amount of money.

Speaker 3 (41:27):
Yep.

Speaker 2 (41:29):
So again I think he's lying about being this like
violent maniac. As Brian Bentley, a black police officer who
was Freman's partner during this period, told a journalist in
West LA you can't even yell at people. There are
movie stars who know the president of the United States
and they write everyone they can. Basically like, Mark was
really great at like being a cop who has to

(41:49):
interact with celebrities sometimes. You know, I know from personal
experience that's a slight exaggeration, but the basic point is
pretty sound. What's Furman moves to an area where he's
in no real days. He seems to like being a cop,
and his semi annual evaluations back this up. He gets
positive reviews from his superiors in the August of nineteen
eighty seven. He's described by one as highly motivated and

(42:11):
having a bias for action. He was described somewhat differently
by civilians who encountered him at the time. Natalie Singer
met Mark and his partner at the in during this
period in a hospital emergency room in nineteen eighty seven.
She claims that he told her the only good inward
is a dead inward, So cra it's not what a

(42:32):
great to hear.

Speaker 3 (42:34):
Yeah, and knowing him, he just brings it up like, hey,
by the way, that's what she says it.

Speaker 2 (42:40):
Yeah now, and actually kind of how Mark says it,
because in his book Murder in Brentwood, he does kind
of deny this, but he gives a very different story
of his relationship with this woman.

Speaker 3 (42:49):
Quote.

Speaker 2 (42:49):
I met Natalie Singer in nineteen eighty seven because my
partner was dating her roommate. I can't recall exact incidents,
but I won't say we didn't argue. I do remember
that we did not get along, and I tried hard
to irritate and anger her. He's like he's saying, oh,
I wouldn't have said that, but I did say stuff
just to piss her off.

Speaker 3 (43:06):
So his defense is straight out of twenty twenty six, Like, no,
you don't understand. I was simply trolled. It was a bit,
It was a bit. Yeah, that's yeah, fuck off. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (43:19):
So here's the thing, And like, I don't know that
either of them are lying about the basic facts, by
which I mean I believe that Mark said what Natalie
said that he said because we have him recorded saying
almost identical things. I also believe that Mark when when
Mark said that, like, well, I would often just say
shit to piss her off. I think that's true, and
I think he might have said that, he might have

(43:40):
said racist shit just to piss her off. I think
his motivation in that might have been just to troll her,
which doesn't make it not racist, right.

Speaker 3 (43:48):
Right, I believe every side of the story simultaneously. That's possible.

Speaker 2 (43:53):
Yeah, yeah, these are all and then if these are
in conflict. Another contact of Marx during this period who
would later be asked to testify about his racism was
Roderick Hodge, who he arrested on drug charges also in
nineteen eighty seven. Hodge was acquitted of these charges and
claims that the cop Furman who arrested him per time,
as quote, snarling from his patrol car. I told you

(44:15):
we'd get you in word right, So Hodge says, when
this guy arrested me, he snarls this to me, and
then I'm acquitted because they were bullshit charges. Here's what
Mark writes later about this interaction with Roderick. I came
to know Rodrick Hodge while working a Gang narcotic unit
as a uniformed officer in West Los Angeles from nineteen
eighty five to nineteen eighty seven, Hodge was under investigation
for dealing narcotics. I had many contacts with Hodge and

(44:37):
arrested him twice. During both arrests, he made complaints about
his handling by both arresting officers and wanted to speak
with a sergeant. There was no merit to his charges,
and he never claimed I used racial epithets. He was
just complaining in an attempt to draw attention away from
his own arrests. Now, I don't know who this is,
who's telling the truth.

Speaker 3 (44:54):
I have no idea.

Speaker 2 (44:55):
The fact that Hodge was acquitted certainly makes me more
inclined to take a side maybe than Mark's here. But
I don't actually know what happened.

Speaker 3 (45:02):
That's the whole book. Him just trying to explain all.

Speaker 2 (45:05):
The shocking a lot of it because he says it
a lot. He's used those words that weren't a lot.

Speaker 3 (45:13):
I'm gonna go on a limb here, and suggests he
might not be the most trustworthy motherfucker. Might be a racist, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (45:20):
It might be racist, might be a horrific racist.

Speaker 2 (45:24):
It is noteworthy that there are allegations of racism from
Mark that also come from within the LAPD one of
Mark's office.

Speaker 3 (45:33):
Yeah, yeah, that's wild. How are you so racist that
the lapd is like? Whoa WHOA great question, Joe.

Speaker 2 (45:41):
How Let's let's explore that one of Mark's co workers,
officer James Perty, married a Jewish woman around nineteen eighty
five and would later testify that after his marriage, Mark
Furman painted a swastika on his locker.

Speaker 3 (45:55):
Now, oh my god, Mark.

Speaker 2 (45:57):
Denies this, and Mark is like, I would ever have
done anything that hateful, Oh my swap painter a swastika
on an officer's you know, locker just because he married
a Jewish one. I would never do anything like that.
And then Mark continues with a line of argument that's
almost like craft in a lab to make me doubt him. Well,
Perty was hardly popular in West LA. There were so

(46:20):
many people who either didn't care for him or flat
out couldn't stand him, that it would be difficult to
speculate who might have defaced his locker if that incident
ever really occurred. The whole apartment wanted to paint a
swastika on that guy's locker?

Speaker 3 (46:33):
Why do you think it was me? People cops were
lighting up to paint a swastika on this guy's locker.
And the fact that when the swastika was painted on
his locker and the cop in quest was like, this
had to be Furman. Tyah, that there's like a chain
of events that led to the point where someone looked
at him like that's a cop would paint a swastika

(46:54):
on the motherfuck his locker, you know what I'm saying?
Like how many things did he do to get there?

Speaker 2 (46:59):
The fact that this guy defaulted to assuming it was Furman,
if that's what he did right, right, is says almost
more than like if we knew for a fact Furman
had painted the swastika, just people like it had to
have been him. It literally has to have been him, right.

Speaker 3 (47:13):
The other cop was like, yeah, this has Furman written
all over it.

Speaker 2 (47:18):
It sounds like Mark. Yeah, it sounds like Mark. So
it's one of those things like it's such a like saying, oh,
I would never have like done something that bad, But
also this guy sucks that almost anyone could have done it,
so like why is he blaming me? It's such perfect
bully logic, and I think that's the correct comparison to draw,
like a high school bully if you want to understand

(47:40):
the social role that Mark Furman held in the LAPD
hierarchy by the late nineteen eighties, like the mid to
late eighties, he is like a kind of popular bully.
He's like popular specifically with like the cool kids in
the LAPD who are like the white guy officers, right.
Like that kind of seems to be his position in
the way department. He's like, you know, and again, he's

(48:04):
obviously capable of being charming when he wants to be
and being likable when he wants to be. It's also
worth noting that as comfortable as he is with racism,
and as like natural as it is for him to
use racism in humor and slurs in humor, I think
it's largely because he likes the edgy trolling. Because Mark
is at least capable of forming genuine friendships and working

(48:26):
well with non white officers, right, which makes me think, again,
he's capable of viewing individuals as people. He's obviously racist,
but the racism also comes out, not just the racism
is not coming out uncontrollably. He lets his racism out
when he thinks it's funny and will be socially beneficial,

(48:47):
and he's more than capable of like not letting it
out when he either is with like an like a
black or Hispanic officer that he gets along with, or
that he recognizes as popular and that he doesn't want
to be like unol. Right, Like, he's able to do that,
He's able to calculate when he lets the racism out.

Speaker 3 (49:06):
So we have like another classic example of some dickhead
racist troll you deploying racism as something is a barb Yeah,
slowly over time, simply becoming a racist, right, Yeah, Robert
heard this civilian Yes, tale is all his time.

Speaker 2 (49:26):
So when the oj Simpson trial came out, and like
the recordings of Mark being a racist that we'll talk
about later came out, several of his former partners who
were black and Hispanic men were brought forward by the
LAPD to talk about the fact that, oh no, Mark
wasn't a racist, and they all expressed seemingly genuine sentiment
that Mark had not been racist around them. These guys
are all cops, so I won't say I believe them entirely,

(49:48):
but I could also see individual guys not having had
that experience with Mark for the reasons that I just explained.
And again, racism is a thing for Mark, but it's
not the only thing. Social state and comforted work matters,
and he's capable of like taking people's individuals and forming
relationships with them based on that, especially if it's advantageous
to his social standing. One of his first partners was

(50:10):
referred to Allance, an Hispanic officer, who said that Furman
exemplified exactly what a police officer ought to be. We
take it to the bad guys, and Mark was very
good at it. However, it's just as clear to me
that in the normal course of daily life, dealing with
people he saw as civilians and not colleagues, Mark defaulted
to violence and to bigotry. For The New York Times,

(50:30):
from nineteen eighty four to nineteen ninety, at least half
a dozen complaints were made against mister Furman, including several
contending that he threatened or beat suspects, but most of
them were ruled groundless by the department for lack of
independent witnesses. In nineteen eighty four, he lost a day
off for seizing a pedestrian's wrists. In nineteen eighty six,
he received a one day suspension for leaving an improper
remark on our motorist's windshield.

Speaker 3 (50:52):
So again, and what did he write on someone's witch shield?

Speaker 2 (50:55):
I wish I'd found out. I could not find that anywhere.
I did look, but I didn't find like that specified anywhere.
But I you want to keep because when the tapes
that include him claim and talking about all the crimes
he pretended to have committed or claimed to have committed,
the LAPD will be like, well, he was lying. We
didn't find any evidence, So it's braggadocio. Some of it

(51:16):
certainly was. But also every time he got accused of
a violent crime, it usually got ignored because there were
no independent witnesses, which means, in my head, Mark probably
just beats someone up and it was his word versus
that guy. And Mark was a cop, right, yeah, Because
we do know he did beat some people. He got
in trouble for it several times, which means I assume
a lot of these other cases were just Yeah, the

(51:38):
LAPD was able to ignore it anyway.

Speaker 3 (51:40):
It's not like a cop gets caught beating someone the
first time. You know once they start fucking people up,
it's because they've built up, been doing it all over time.
You know that they know they can get away with it.
The their bros, their coworkers are going to lie for them.
They know the departments in internal investigations is never going
to find them. Yep, exactly. You know they're imus.

Speaker 2 (52:03):
And part of what has given Mark that sense of
impunity is experience. And a lot of his experience is
in being bigoted against female LAPD officers. And I want
to quote again from that New York Times article, the
most serious blemish on mister Furman's work in the West
Los Angeles Division was the hostile views he sometimes expressed
about minorities and women. His performance evaluation in August of

(52:24):
nineteen eighty five, which was made available to the New
York Times by a member of the Simpson Defense, noted
he has outspoken and critical in his perception of the
department's application of affirmative action. He's been counseled to leave
his personal feelings at home and to make every effort
to adhere to the affirmative action guidelines. And that that
says a little bit right there. And I think the

(52:45):
first and most important thing for me to note as
a result of that is that while all this comes
out during the trial because the oj Simpson defense team
needs to paint Furman as a particularly toxic racist officer,
that's not true. Mark is toxic and racist, but his
racism and sexism are pretty normal among his colleagues. One
LAPD officer during this period told The Times that when

(53:06):
he was assigned to West LA, he was warned there
are a bunch of old white guys who hate blacks
and women at West LA. That's the department that Mark
is transferred to. Because he's a racist and a bigot,
you know, right, and.

Speaker 3 (53:18):
A lot of the eighties. Of course he's a misogynist.
And this isn't like a defense of Furman. If nobody's confused,
it would be really weird if there was a cop
in nineteen eighty five he's like, no, I would love
to work with all That guy doesn't exist.

Speaker 2 (53:35):
And the reason this is relevant is not that like
and so that makes it okay that he was a
normal level of racist for the LAPD kind of It
just means that, like, don't take the defense seriously, and
don't take the LAPD seriously when they try to position
Mark as a particular outlier. Mark's a normal cop and
a normal detective, and that racism is normal, you know,

(53:58):
Like that's the thing to take it out of this, Yeah,
the problem right, Like, no, he is just indicative of
the LAPD as a whole, and he's not. When I
say normal, doesn't mean every cop says the same shit,
because he does stand out sometimes. But what I mean
is that that even even though he was noted as like, oh,
Mark is more of a bigot than a lot of
other he speaks out more. No one noted and that's

(54:19):
crazy that a cop would say this. Nobody fired him,
nobody didn't want to work with him. He was like
maintained his position in the LAPD because it just wasn't
that weird that he was that kind of guy. Yeah,
he just stuck out exactly. So that nineteen eighty five
performance evaluation of Marx continued. He was also counseled by
this rating Lieutenant and Captain regarding his very strong expression

(54:41):
of his personal views regarding women and minorities and police work.
He was not receptive. He stated he felt as an
American citizen he had a right to express his views.

Speaker 3 (54:50):
Of course, this isn't about me being a racist, Robert,
It's about my freedom.

Speaker 2 (54:55):
Speaks about my freedom to be a racist. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 3 (54:59):
Now.

Speaker 2 (54:59):
By way of defe fending Mark. His supervisor from nineteen
eighty nine to nineteen ninety four, Gary Fullerton, told The
New York Times that Furman joined a basketball league made
up in largely of black LAPD officers who had to
meet up at six thirty am, and was like, who
would do that if they were racists? The Times talk
to one of these players, Sergeant Ed Palmer, who is

(55:19):
a black officer, and told them that he saw no
signs of racism from Furman in their basketball games. If
you really hate African Americans, why would you get up
at five point forty to play basketball with me? And like,
I don't know, Mamber, racists do all sorts of crazy shit, dude,
Like you know that, Like you actually do know that, Ed?

Speaker 3 (55:36):
Yeah, And again these are only dudes who are cops
as well. Yeah, exactly. This is the classic US versus
them of American policing, where like, yeah, yes he's a racist,
but he's totally fine to hang out black people who
are also.

Speaker 2 (55:49):
Cops, that's right. And all of these accounts are coming
out during the trial when Mark. When the tri it's
become clear that the trial hinges largely in whether or
not Mark's a racist, and the LAPED gets everyone they
can who's not white in the department to say something
nice about Mark, and every woman that they can. Now
that fact leads to a lot of like seesaw moments

(56:11):
when you're reading about Furman, particularly during the Simpson trial,
because you'll read like one series of quotes about how
this is these allegations of awful things he said, and
then you'll read a very heartfelt quote about someone saying
something nice about Mark, and this is all a result
of a coordinated campaign within the LAPD, you know, in
order to kind of buttress Mark's reputation because he was

(56:31):
sort of standing in for the department at that point.
One person who definitely saw the racist side of Mark
was Laura Hart McKinney, a screenwriter who in the spring
of nineteen eighty five got interested in writing a movie
about female cops, so she starts interviewing several real LAPD
officers for like texture and research purposes. McKinney's notice being
like a pretty dedicated researcher when she lived as a

(56:54):
homeless person in Santa Monica for like a week I think,
to like research a screenplay at one point. And so
she's like really talks to a lot of people, and
one of the people she meets is Mark Furman. They
like meet kind of casually earlier that year and become friends.
And so she starts sitting out and like taping Mark
talking about his experiences on the job. And McKinney would
utimately interview Mark several times between nineteen eighty five and

(57:17):
nineteen ninety four, and depending on who you read, McKinney
is either again a very diligent screenwriter trying to do
research to do the best work she can, or basically
a hack who like can't quite make it. And you know,
is largely during this period once it comes out that
Mark's the center of this case, is trying to like
profit off of it. That's certainly what some people will

(57:39):
argue about her. I don't think that's really fair. But
she has all of these tapes with Mark. She winds
up having hours an hour, I think it's thirteen hours
of recorded interviews with him, with him just kind of talking.
And here's how Elizabeth Gleek writing for Time magazine, described
the contents of these tapes. According to partial transcripts and
comments by the lawyers in court, Furman descript engaging in

(58:00):
police misconduct of the most damning kind, beating suspects of
bloody coercion, and badgering minorities. Contrary to his sworn testimony
last March that he had not used the in word
in the past ten years, Furman's blustering talk of the
tapes is laced with that word and contains other terms
offensive to African Americans, Hispanics, women, and Jews. In a
portion of the transcripts obtained by Time, for instance, he

(58:21):
tells Martha Loriie Diaz, a friend of McKinney's, that women
cops are ineffectual because they don't do anything. They don't
go out and initiate contact with some six foot five
inch inWORD that's been in prison for seven years, pumping weights.
And God, these tapes are bad and remarkable. That's not
even the that's the least of the crazy, awful. And

(58:42):
he knows it's being reed. He knows this is intentional.
Now he does not when the Simpson case comes up,
because this has been going on since eighty five, and
when the fucking Simpson case starts in ninety four, he's
not thinking, Oh, there's tapes of me with the inWORD
on him that could become part of this case. He doesn't.
I don't see anything from McKinny, right, Like why would

(59:03):
m ckinny because he's not There's never been a case
that blows up like the OJ Simpson case, right, So
Mark would have had no way to expect, Well, maybe
I'll be all over every new station in the country
and there will be potentially a lot of money in
having a bunch of incriminating info about me. Right. He
doesn't think about that at all as he's sitting down
for these tapes. And I don't think McKinney is either

(59:23):
to be fair, like she's trying to write a screenplay.
She's not trying to like, gotcha, Mark Furman. And if
you want a critiquer for something, it's the fact she's
listening to this guy say this awful shit. But the
crimes he's committed inside the lapd and it's just like
cool stuff from a screenplay.

Speaker 3 (59:38):
This will be very useful for me, thank you.

Speaker 2 (59:41):
Like if I were to sit down with an act
of laped detective who were to admit to me blithely
about all of the crimes and torture that he commits,
I would try to get him imprisoned.

Speaker 3 (59:51):
Like that would be my as a journalists, Like, that's
what I do. I love to casually sit down and
create the LAPD version of an act of kill and
then just.

Speaker 2 (01:00:00):
Raise it from drama. Weird, But it is why I
kind of wind up being really good for Ojo Simpson.
That McKinny has these tapes, and once these tapes in
the audio in them comes out, Mark's basic audio argument
and defense of himself is going to be that, like, well,
none of this was I had lied in the tapes.
I was putting on a show a character that's not

(01:00:21):
really me. I was trying to impress this outsider, and
so none of it was true. I just wanted to
sound cool so that her script would be cool, right,
I was trying to give her what she needed to
make an entertaining movie. Some of that is true. Mark
is definitely judging things up to sound more exciting because
he thinks maybe it'll wind up in a movie, right,
Like that's absolutely a part of what's going on. I

(01:00:42):
do buy that and yeah, and it's not hard to buy.
And Mark tells several specific stories of specific incidents of
violence and racism that can't be documented, and several more
that have been documented as having not happened, that like,
we know this didn't happen. We know this didn't happen,
and there's a bunch more where it's like we don't
know if it happened or not. There's no evidence one
way or the other. Right, However, within kind of that

(01:01:05):
mix of things that definitely didn't happen and that we
can't prove happened, there are some things that we know
happened that there's outside evidence of them that are proven
to have happened. And probably the most important thing that
we know was real that Mark talked about was a
club that he started inside the Los Angeles Police Department
called Men Against Women, And we will talk about that

(01:01:25):
the theoj Simpson trial in part two.

Speaker 3 (01:01:28):
How you doing, Joe? This is like some Jophie. This
is like the Little Rascals. He man woman hater club
for cops. It is it is. He makes the human
woman hater club for cops. He does do that. He's
the Alfalfa of the lapd I so much. Thank you.
It's it's really funny.

Speaker 2 (01:01:49):
I mean it's not like the horrible things that he does,
but it's like funny and like a cosmic sense, you know, sure,
or if you're just a fan of the little rascals.

Speaker 3 (01:01:58):
It's funny because it's fucking pathetic, you know, like everything
about this man is so pathetic.

Speaker 2 (01:02:05):
Yeah, it's it's that's the thing, right, And and I
I this is that was the surprise to me as
like growing up as a young man who also grew
up like with a bunch of different like misogynistic and
sexist beliefs, but I fundamentally missed the whole like, Oh,
we're supposed to like hate women. I thought you, like,
what did to have like like a wife or a girl? Like?

(01:02:25):
I thought like that that was like the goal was
to like, h like have women in your life as
opposed to like people like Mark where it's like, oh,
is the goal to like not ever have any contact
with them? Like what is what is what is masculinity?
Like do you want to be liked by women or
do you want to hide from them? Like I don't
understand which we're supposed to do.

Speaker 3 (01:02:45):
I was I was raised by Like my dad was
a pretty misogynistic piece of shit, and that all kind
of confused me as well, because he kind of fell
into the furmin kind of things. He was also a racist,
and it always confused me because I was like, I
thought that you wanted to attract women, right, and I'm

(01:03:05):
like ten, and now you're leading me down a path
where you're going to be Mark Furman, which is divorced,
living with the shitty cop for a roommate.

Speaker 2 (01:03:16):
Yeah, we don't want to spend any time around girls.
I thought the goal was to be liked by them,
And but was I wrong? Like, obviously that's not shouldn't
be your life goal. But like as a kid, realize like, oh,
a lot of like guys just like hate being around women.
I didn't realize that. I thought, like, that doesn't make
any sense. Yeah, this is We're gonna have some fun

(01:03:37):
talks about h gender politics in the Los Angeles Police Department.
But first let's talk about gender politics and Joe Casabian's bibliography. Sorry, Joe,
way to lead to your books, but books.

Speaker 3 (01:03:53):
Yeah, yeah, I'm the host of the Lines Up by
Donkeys podcast. We talked about military history, which I had
to make things interesting and fun. And I am the
author of the book The Highlands Burn, which is a
military gunpowder fantasy novel, and you can get it wherever
it does. You get your books ebook, audiobook, read by me, paperback,

(01:04:14):
stoned tablet, whichever you'd like. Excellent.

Speaker 2 (01:04:18):
Well, I personally approve of the fact that you have
stone tablet publications of your book, Joe, that's a good idea.
All of my books are about to be rereleased in
the form of an old man telling the story around
a fire, Let's go, which yeah, yeah, no, yeah, that's
that's always That's a real proud moment in any author's
life when you get your old band around a fire edition. Anyway,

(01:04:40):
the episodes over was probably Dead by Joe's Books.

Speaker 3 (01:04:43):
By Joe's Books.

Speaker 1 (01:04:48):
Behind the Bastard is a production of cool Zone Media.
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(01:05:09):
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dot com.

Speaker 3 (01:05:13):
Slash at Behind the Bastards.

Speaker 1 (01:05:16):
We love about forty percent of you, statistically speaking,