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

Robert concludes the story and, thankfully, the life of Mark Fuhrman, after discussing his most famous moment: the OJ Simpson trial.

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Episode Transcript

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

Speaker 2 (00:05):
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

(00:25):
Behind the Bastard's studio because Sophie and our guest for today,
Joe Kasabian, are all overwhelmed with grief.

Speaker 3 (00:33):
At the Titan that we've lost.

Speaker 2 (00:35):
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.

Speaker 3 (00:46):
Why are we here?

Speaker 4 (00:47):
I'm really happy though, that in death that he can
be you know, the United States' newest gender neutral bathroom.

Speaker 2 (00:57):
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.

Speaker 4 (01:05):
Just if you see a graven an Idaho, piss on it,
it might be Mark Furman.

Speaker 3 (01:09):
It might.

Speaker 1 (01:12):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:20):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:31):
But I can.

Speaker 2 (01:32):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:40):
You know.

Speaker 4 (01:42):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:54):
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.

Speaker 5 (02:13):
That's true.

Speaker 2 (02:14):
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.

Speaker 4 (02:21):
H Yeah, they nailed it on that one. They just
had no idea, great idea.

Speaker 5 (02:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:33):
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.

Speaker 3 (02:45):
In the department.

Speaker 2 (02:47):
Mark was known for making racist and sexist jokes and.

Speaker 5 (02:50):
For his.

Speaker 3 (02:52):
He's got a hobby.

Speaker 2 (02:53):
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.

Speaker 5 (03:07):
Ship stamps. I'm gonna go stamps.

Speaker 2 (03:09):
I no, it's it's memory, it's military memorabilia.

Speaker 3 (03:15):
I was going to I was going.

Speaker 4 (03:18):
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.

Speaker 2 (03:34):
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

(03:55):
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.

Speaker 3 (04:14):
That's very funny.

Speaker 4 (04:15):
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.

Speaker 5 (04:24):
Not like you're still like you're going to one thing specifically.

Speaker 2 (04:28):
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

(04:50):
Nazi shit.

Speaker 4 (04:51):
Oh no, you misunderstand to me, Sir, I am simply
a enthusiast of the Hanvent Militari.

Speaker 2 (05:00):
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.

Speaker 3 (05:15):
This is relevant because when the O. J.

Speaker 2 (05:18):
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,

(05:38):
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

(06:00):
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,

(06:21):
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

(06:44):
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

(07:06):
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.

Speaker 3 (07:19):
Mark is mad.

Speaker 2 (07:20):
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.

Speaker 4 (07:29):
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.

Speaker 5 (07:47):
Yeah, I don't know, kind.

Speaker 2 (07:50):
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

(08:14):
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,

(08:37):
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.

Speaker 5 (08:56):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (08:57):
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

(09:20):
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

(09:40):
officers would not provide backup if they requested it in
the field.

Speaker 3 (09:43):
The report said.

Speaker 2 (09:44):
Further, there was evidence that the Men against Women officers
would ostracize male officers who did not support their boycott
against female officers.

Speaker 5 (09:52):
That's kind of what I would expect.

Speaker 4 (09:54):
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

(10:14):
dude that had been called slurs by him or been treated.

Speaker 2 (10:18):
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

(10:39):
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.

Speaker 4 (10:49):
Same with him, you know, casually saying the N word
all the time constantly.

Speaker 2 (10:56):
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

(11:18):
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?

(11:40):
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.

Speaker 3 (11:49):
No way to know, sir.

Speaker 5 (11:49):
Impossibly they're connected.

Speaker 2 (11:54):
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.

Speaker 3 (12:10):
Quote from the.

Speaker 2 (12:11):
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.

(12:34):
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

(12:57):
rules in order to accommodate Mark and other people like him.

Speaker 5 (13:01):
Yeah, Mark One, I.

Speaker 2 (13:02):
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

(13:22):
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

(13:43):
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

(14:05):
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

(14:26):
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

(14:49):
working with him? Again, Like, don't trust that format, you know.

Speaker 4 (14:54):
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.

Speaker 5 (15:10):
That he then says he was bullshing about.

Speaker 4 (15:12):
Like, but every cop is going to line up and
be like, no, he's perfect, He's our perfect little boy.

Speaker 5 (15:16):
It doesn't matter what the evidence says.

Speaker 3 (15:18):
Yep.

Speaker 4 (15:18):
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.

Speaker 2 (15:35):
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.

Speaker 3 (15:55):
Yet Mark do it?

Speaker 2 (15:56):
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

(16:19):
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

(16:41):
heat for making doing these things that we want done,
but I don't want to be responsible for doing That's
my contention.

Speaker 4 (16:50):
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.

Speaker 3 (17:09):
Of being an LAPD officer. Yeah, so exactly.

Speaker 4 (17:13):
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.

Speaker 2 (17:31):
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

(17:52):
and services that they provide.

Speaker 5 (17:54):
Many people are saying this.

Speaker 2 (18:02):
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.

Speaker 4 (18:18):
That's very important to me personally. I love hearing about
dead cuts.

Speaker 5 (18:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (18:23):
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.

(18:46):
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

(19:08):
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

(19:29):
have had one hundred and forty five members in five
out of eighteen of the department's police divisions.

Speaker 3 (19:34):
So there's one hundred and forty five cops.

Speaker 2 (19:36):
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.

Speaker 5 (19:49):
I can't imagine they did.

Speaker 2 (19:51):
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

(20:14):
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.

Speaker 5 (20:33):
So I wanted to know.

Speaker 2 (20:37):
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

(20:57):
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.

Speaker 4 (21:12):
Uh uh, frat now, Joe way worse Joe.

Speaker 2 (21:17):
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.

Speaker 3 (21:29):
And she's bet again.

Speaker 2 (21:31):
He compares it to a KKK rally.

Speaker 1 (21:34):
These losers.

Speaker 2 (21:36):
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

(21:59):
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?

Speaker 5 (22:12):
What you brought? He brought his own hood to work.
I brought your gun.

Speaker 3 (22:18):
No, that's the sheriff's apartments and.

Speaker 5 (22:21):
The LAPD A bunch offer b yo wah.

Speaker 3 (22:26):
Everybody knows that. Yeah, yeah, that's that.

Speaker 2 (22:30):
After Biden cut the budget, they had to had the
trim those.

Speaker 4 (22:33):
So this is what they met by defund the police. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 (22:38):
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

(23:00):
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.

Speaker 4 (23:20):
I believe him because we know this happens today with
the LAPD and the la SD.

Speaker 2 (23:26):
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.

Speaker 5 (23:34):
They probably have an even more horrible name. And like
the badge bending thing as well. Uh yeah, all this
shit still happens.

Speaker 2 (23:43):
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.

Speaker 3 (24:08):
Morning.

Speaker 1 (24:09):
The nineteen eighties version of locker room talk.

Speaker 5 (24:12):
Is that what you say?

Speaker 1 (24:13):
Jesus?

Speaker 4 (24:14):
Yep, yeah, because cel phone. So he couldn't just like
sit around playing candy Crush all day.

Speaker 2 (24:21):
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.

Speaker 5 (24:40):
Again falling back to calling them jokes.

Speaker 3 (24:43):
Man old, Yeah, the clan rallies were just.

Speaker 2 (24:47):
A bit.

Speaker 5 (24:49):
Ironic, Robert, it's fine.

Speaker 2 (24:51):
Yeah, Yeah, they were joke comedy clan rallies. That's what
the case. The three K stand for the comedy clan rally.

Speaker 5 (24:59):
I think that's what Joe new club.

Speaker 3 (25:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (25:03):
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

(25:23):
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

(25:47):
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,

(26:10):
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

(26:31):
pretty bad situation.

Speaker 3 (26:32):
Right. OJ was an abusive guy.

Speaker 2 (26:34):
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

(26:54):
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

(27:15):
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

(27:37):
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

(27:59):
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

(28:22):
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

(28:42):
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

(29:03):
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.

(29:23):
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

(29:45):
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

(30:06):
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

(30:29):
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.

Speaker 4 (30:42):
Yeah, that's a great way to sprinkle in reasonable doubt.

Speaker 5 (30:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (30:46):
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.

Speaker 4 (31:01):
Fuck yeah, that's itunds like getting a gift on a platter.

Speaker 3 (31:05):
Oh god. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (31:07):
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.

Speaker 3 (31:26):
That to believe it.

Speaker 2 (31:27):
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.

Speaker 5 (31:48):
Case at least.

Speaker 2 (31:49):
And the most damning thing they find during this process
of digging up all the dirt they can on Mark Furman,
is these tapes.

Speaker 3 (31:57):
Right.

Speaker 2 (31:57):
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.

Speaker 4 (32:15):
It's so weird that he knows, Like, oh, well I
haven't said it like ten years, Like, but you did.

Speaker 5 (32:19):
Yeah, he's specifying ten years.

Speaker 4 (32:22):
You remember this happened specifically ten years ago. That's a
really weird thing to remember.

Speaker 2 (32:27):
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

(32:49):
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

(33:12):
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

(33:33):
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.

Speaker 5 (33:46):
I'm sorry, it just is I call this Destroy My
Testimony mixtape.

Speaker 2 (33:52):
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

(34:13):
sort of the highlights. This is like a worst of
the Ferment tapes.

Speaker 1 (34:17):
Vulgar, the White Steaine General five for June, Wandering jew Clod,
Web Show knows sexist.

Speaker 5 (34:26):
How do you arrest a violent suspect? I yell and
have a man DoD disturbing.

Speaker 4 (34:35):
You've got to be a quartalized source you have.

Speaker 3 (34:37):
You got to be a violin cool.

Speaker 2 (34:42):
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.

Speaker 3 (34:53):
He was just lying. There's no evidence of it.

Speaker 2 (34:56):
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.

Speaker 4 (35:11):
So yeah, best key scenario, he is just a liar.

Speaker 3 (35:17):
Yeah, yeah, So.

Speaker 2 (35:19):
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

(35:40):
is a guy judge edo Captain Yorke was his wife.

Speaker 4 (35:45):
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.

Speaker 2 (35:59):
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,

(36:22):
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.

Speaker 4 (36:34):
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,

(36:58):
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.

Speaker 5 (37:08):
It's amazing, It's so funny. That's fun. Great.

Speaker 2 (37:13):
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

(37:33):
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

(37:54):
cop and they're like, oh great, yeah, this guy looked
good on stand next to OJ's just a horrible concision.

Speaker 1 (38:01):
He looks a TV cop guy.

Speaker 2 (38:03):
He looks like a TV cop, right, and he'll be
a great witness. He should never have been there.

Speaker 1 (38:08):
Like.

Speaker 4 (38:09):
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.

Speaker 2 (38:20):
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.

Speaker 6 (38:30):
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.

Speaker 2 (38:40):
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

(39:03):
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.

Speaker 3 (39:16):
What do you think it is? What do we think
is the explanation here?

Speaker 4 (39:21):
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.

Speaker 5 (39:28):
That's right, because right, the LAPD is racist as fuck.

Speaker 2 (39:32):
And you know who, well no, mmm, no, nobody, nobody, No,
here's ads fuck.

Speaker 3 (39:45):
And we're back.

Speaker 2 (39:48):
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.

Speaker 3 (40:07):
That, you know, don't you must quit blood didn't fit.

Speaker 2 (40:10):
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.

Speaker 5 (40:30):
Simpson case. Which is really funny to me, is a detective.
He shows up in his house.

Speaker 2 (40:36):
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

(40:57):
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.

Speaker 4 (41:13):
At least they all have the same hobbies. Like you
guys want to compare Nazi uniform.

Speaker 5 (41:17):
Collections, collecting swastikas. I want to see my concerning German
political cartoons.

Speaker 3 (41:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (41:25):
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.

Speaker 1 (41:47):
That was what my face was for the.

Speaker 5 (41:51):
Guys.

Speaker 2 (41:53):
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

(42:14):
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.

Speaker 5 (42:24):
Damn you, Mark.

Speaker 3 (42:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (42:26):
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

(42:47):
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.

(43:10):
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,

(43:30):
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.

Speaker 4 (43:49):
What if we told you he was lying? He was
also a violent psycho and institutionally we are incapable of
doing our jobs.

Speaker 3 (43:58):
Yes, couldn't have done anything.

Speaker 2 (44:00):
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.

Speaker 5 (44:21):
We threw all the complaints out.

Speaker 4 (44:23):
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

(44:46):
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

(45:09):
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

(45:29):
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.

Speaker 2 (45:39):
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.

Speaker 3 (45:53):
Is like, he's the only one who's seen in this
secret report.

Speaker 2 (45:56):
You know that he's become credible to these like reactsary
like paranoid conservative sources.

Speaker 3 (46:03):
Kind of Now on this point, it's interesting.

Speaker 4 (46:05):
It becomes a true crime guy. Yeah, it's perfect for it.

Speaker 3 (46:09):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (46:10):
Now, and no reason to explain why he's a former
yeah lapdh Yeah, former.

Speaker 2 (46:16):
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

(46:38):
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

(46:58):
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

(47:20):
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.

Speaker 5 (47:35):
Right.

Speaker 2 (47:36):
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

(47:56):
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

(48:17):
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

(48:39):
and sexy and like a lady died like a girl.

Speaker 5 (48:42):
And came to me publicity.

Speaker 2 (48:45):
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.

Speaker 5 (48:57):
It's just like true crime shit.

Speaker 4 (48:59):
Like he he missed out on the wave of podcasts.

Speaker 2 (49:02):
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

(49:24):
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

(49:45):
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.

Speaker 5 (49:58):
That's just an autobiography, Mark. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (50:01):
My favorite part of his JFK book is how he
came to the conclusion is that JFK's had just did that.

Speaker 3 (50:07):
Yeah, that's right, that's right.

Speaker 4 (50:08):
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.

Speaker 3 (50:19):
That's right.

Speaker 2 (50:19):
I mean, well, it's it's wrong because it was Bernie
Montgomery Sanders. But we'll continue to move right past that.

Speaker 5 (50:25):
Uh agreed to disagree.

Speaker 2 (50:28):
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.

Speaker 3 (50:44):
Has like a show where he goes through.

Speaker 2 (50:47):
Famous crimes and talks about them as the great detective
who got oj acquitted Mark on Fox.

Speaker 5 (50:54):
He was destined for that job.

Speaker 3 (50:56):
He was.

Speaker 2 (50:56):
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.

Speaker 3 (51:14):
Yeah, for other people to die on.

Speaker 2 (51:17):
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

(51:39):
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.

Speaker 4 (51:58):
See, if they simply didn't ban choke holds, like six
dudes wouldn't have to beat an unresisting person.

Speaker 2 (52:05):
Yeah, exactly. It's like I wouldn't have stabbed him if
you don't let me shoot him, you know, like.

Speaker 3 (52:10):
Exactly, man.

Speaker 2 (52:12):
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.

Speaker 3 (52:25):
Of days ago.

Speaker 2 (52:26):
And that's the Mark Furman story, like a couple of
weeks ago by the time you hear this.

Speaker 5 (52:31):
But what a guy.

Speaker 4 (52:32):
You know, I kind of did expect to come onto
the side of cancer on this one.

Speaker 5 (52:38):
But you're in.

Speaker 4 (52:39):
Yeah, I'm wear in my tumor jersey, you know, big
foam fingers saying cancer number one.

Speaker 3 (52:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (52:46):
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.

Speaker 5 (53:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (53:02):
Yeah, it's like the the mortality version of al Capone
getting caught for tax cheating.

Speaker 5 (53:07):
Right right, Eventually you get the tumors.

Speaker 3 (53:09):
Eventually it'll get you.

Speaker 5 (53:10):
Yeah. Yeah, well at least he's dead. He's not on
the Fox Street.

Speaker 4 (53:16):
He's dead like a streaming platform.

Speaker 1 (53:19):
Oh man, Joe, you want to plug your pluggables at
the end here.

Speaker 5 (53:24):
Yeah. Uh so.

Speaker 4 (53:26):
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

(53:46):
One technology and magic, there's a book for you.

Speaker 5 (53:49):
Now.

Speaker 2 (53:51):
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.

Speaker 1 (54:08):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia
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(54:30):
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