He's a Sole Man

By Rick Horowitz

Those guys think of everything.

The guys who are out to get O.J., I mean. Just when you think they can't possibly come up with another way to trick everyone into thinking that O.J. did it, when everyone knows O.J. didn't have a single thing to do with it, they come up with something else anyway. This time it's pictures. Pictures of shoes.

It was bad enough when the thing happened in the first place, when the guys who are out to get O.J. took over the LAPD from the guys who used to cut him slack all the time. The new guys had nothing better to do than try to frame the man for murder -- who knows why? Then they went and roped the media into it, too, until you couldn't pick up a paper or turn on the TV or the radio without hearing how O.J. did this and O.J. did that.

They had nothing. I mean, if you put aside motive and opportunity and access and capacity, if you don't get hung up on how he used to beat her, if you forget about the blood on the ground and the blood in the Bronco and the cuts on his hands and the alibi he can't keep straight, if you ignore the freeway chase and the hair and the fibers and the gloves and the cap and the exercise suit, what do you have?

You have nothing -- nothing at all. So naturally they're starting in on the shoes.

All because the perps, whoever they were, left some footprints in the blood around the bodies. Distinctive footprints, the FBI said, with an unusual pattern on the sole. Bruno Magli shoes, the FBI said, size 12. So O.J.'s a size 12 -- big deal. Lots of people wear size 12. So Bruno Maglis are rare Italian shoes. Rich-guy shoes. Big deal. O.J. says he never owned any Bruno Maglis. Never did, never would. That's good enough for me.

Except that the guys who are out to get him don't know when to quit. They bring in some guy who took a picture of O.J. at a Buffalo Bills game back in 1993, and they say the picture shows O.J. wearing Bruno Maglis.

"It's a fraud," O.J. says, and then his lawyers bring in some photo technician who agrees with him: The picture's been doctored, he says. So that's the end of it, right?

I told you: These guys don't know when to quit. They go find themselves another photographer who was at the same game as the first photographer. This other photographer, though, he doesn't have just one picture of O.J. supposedly wearing the Bruno Maglis. He's got 30, and O.J.'s wearing the Bruno Maglis in every one of them. The photo technician on O.J.'s side, he still thinks that first picture's a fake, but he's not quite sure what to make of the other 30 pictures, with O.J. wearing the exact same shoes in the exact same place.

Isn't it obvious? The guys who are out to get O.J. went and doctored those 30 pictures, too. Or somebody did it for them. And not only that: Just to make it harder for O.J. to prove that all the pictures are fakes, they went and got one of those 30 pictures published in the Buffalo Bills' official newsletter in November of '93, which is a good seven months before the murders ever happened.

Talk about setting the man up: Nobody's even been killed yet and they're already planting evidence against him!

Of course, the picture in the Bills' newsletter wasn't really sharp, so you can't even be 100 percent sure O.J.'s wearing the Bruno Maglis to begin with, but that's what they want you to think.

And they won't stop there, that's for sure. The guys who are out to get him, they'll do whatever they have to do. Lie once, or lie 30 times: What difference does it make as long as you win?

O.J. certainly knows how that game is played.

1/7/97

©1997 Rick Horowitz. All rights reserved.