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Star lawyer with star client: F. Lee Bailey (left) and OJ Simpson (1995)
Photo: KEN LUBAS / AFP
It was his biggest show in court - and should be his last, at least as a criminal defense attorney.
It was 1995 when F. Lee Bailey was part of the legendary "Dream Team" that represented the black ex-football player OJ Simpson, who was accused of double homicides.
Simpson was acquitted in the sensational trial, despite substantial evidence of his guilt.
Bailey was instrumental in this.
He did so by exposing detective Mark Fuhrman, one of the main prosecution witnesses, as a racist and a liar - and thus not only discredited all of Fuhrman's statements against Simpson, but also the evidence of the police, as conclusive as it was.
It was a questionable victory for a suspicious client, typically Bailey: Shortly after the acquittal, another US court, this time a civil court, declared Simpson liable for the two murders, who later spent nine years behind bars for armed robbery.
Even the “Dream Team” had run out of time.
Except for Bailey.
"I don't think he was treated fairly," he said of Simpson, whom he declared innocent in 2019, as the last to follow suit.
Because he could identify with him personally: "We have the OJ curse in common," Bailey found, as if he himself was often a victim of the judiciary or at least a victim of the public opinion court.
Not that it bothered him.
The real victims, the murdered, betrayed and robbed, were of little interest to him because they promised no fame.
F. Lee Bailey, who died Thursday aged 87, was one of America's most prominent and controversial lawyers.
He had a soft spot for defendants who were guilty (or acting) and for cases that no one else wanted to touch - an antihero like a Hollywood movie that featured on the covers of "Time" and "Newsweek" and for good money got involved for "the demons of society", according to Steven Brill, the founder of the court broadcaster Court TV.
Beefy, hard-drinking, cowboy boots, gun holsters: Bailey was not only theatrical in court.
His personal life was also a melodrama that kept him in the headlines.
His parquet was the "
twilight zone
of justified doubt," as the New York Times wrote.
That legal shadow world, in which guilt and innocence are only silhouettes, the meaning of which can be interpreted at will.
And Bailey was long the cleverest of all shadow players - often imitated, seldom matched.
Quiz candidates at the polygraph
He was one of the first to make the case for a crime thriller, including the cliffhanger. Before he helped Simpson out of the noose, he represented a serial killer, a drug lord, and a range of celebrity clients such as the dynasty heiress Patty Hearst and Dr. Sam Sheppard, whose case is said to have inspired the thriller "On the Run" with Harrison Ford. On the side, he wrote books, flew private jets, bought villas, renovated yachts, toddled through talk shows, even had one himself for a short time - as well as a quiz in which he strapped candidates to a polygraph.
His business was the flaws of others.
Also the flaws of colleagues and rivals in court, with whom he repeatedly got into the compound, the loudest in the Simpson trial with prosecutor Marcia Clark and co-defense attorney Johnnie Cochran.
He only remained blind to his own flaws, which is why in the end, when he lost everything, hardly anyone stood by him.
"I enjoy being F. Lee Bailey," he wrote in 1971, when he had already had several sensational trials.
Dr.
Sheppard on the run
In 1960, right after graduating from law school, he defended George Edgerly, charged with wife murder.
The press dubbed Edgerly the "torso killer" because his wife's body had been found without a head or limbs.
Bailey obtained an acquittal by undermining a witness testimony, an early foretaste of the Simpson strategy.
It wasn't until years later that Edgerly ended up in jail for another murder.
In 1966, Bailey obtained the overturning of the sensational murder sentence against Dr.
Sam Sheppard, arguing that the "fair atmosphere" of the original trial influenced the court.
Sheppard was acquitted in the second round, married the half-sister of Magda Goebbels and died in 1970 of complications from alcoholism.
His next client, Albert DeSalvo, on the other hand, the "Boston Strangler," was found guilty of murdering 13 women in 1967, despite Bailey's tricks.
DeSalvo had confessed, Bailey pleaded insanity in vain.
He did not even shy away from alleged war criminals.
In 1971, Bailey obtained the acquittal of a US soldier who was believed to have been involved in the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War, in which American GIs murdered 104 civilians.
Fidgety and often hungover
But time and again he was chased by personal problems.
In 1973 Bailey had to defend himself against allegations of fraud, 1982 for being drunk driving, in both cases he got away with a black eye but lost almost all of his fortune.
In 1976 he took over the Patty Hearst case, hoping for professional and financial rehabilitation. The granddaughter of press czar William Randolph Hearst had been kidnapped by left-wing extremists and taken part in a bank robbery with them. Bailey claimed Hearst had been coerced into it, but he didn't seem right in court, looked nervous and, as Hearst later complained in her memoir, often hungover. Hearst was sentenced to seven years in prison. Jimmy Carter set her free in 1977, and Bill Clinton pardoned her entirely in 2001.
After that, it was almost 20 years before Bailey got his biggest - and final - VIP case: the "Trial of the Century" against OJ Simpson. Bailey's live cross-examination by Fuhrman stunned millions of TV viewers. He asked him repeatedly and in an increasingly louder voice whether he had ever used the "N-Word" to abuse black people, Fuhrman denied it under oath - until five months later tape recordings came out on which he said exactly what he had denied. The credibility of the prosecution was ruined.
Bailey triumphed, but his own past had long since caught up with him.
At the same time as the Simpson trial, he represented drug lord Claude DuBoc.
He paid him in shares, but when his fortune was confiscated by the judiciary, Bailey did not want to - could not - repay his share because most of it had already been spent.
For disregarding the court, he was behind bars for six weeks and then lost his license to practice law.
An attempt to buy it again failed.
He filed for bankruptcy in 2016 and spent the past few years in a small apartment in Maine.
Nevertheless, he was not familiar with remorse or self-criticism.
"I lived my life and let the candle burn because you never know when it will be blown out," he said in 2017. "Some would call it indulgence, but I had a lot of fun."