Behind the Bastards - Part One: Mark Fuhrman: The Most Racist Cop, or Merely Normal Racist Cop?

Episode Date: June 2, 2026

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

World Zone Media. 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. Yeah, well, we don't use Zoom anymore. But I do miss the little... I forget what we use. I do miss the lady being like, recording in progress.

In progress. But I could just say it. But you thought that maybe she misses you. Probably. Everybody misses me. I never think that, James. Not James. You're Joe.

Joe Kasabian, our guest for 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 Kandahar. Joe, what else do you got a plug for us here? My newest gunpowder fantasy novel, The Highlands Burn, comes out May 29th. It will probably be out by the time. this episode comes out. So yeah, pick that up. I'll be available e-book, audiobook, paperback, wherever you get your books. 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? Uh, cops? Yeah, cops. Exactly, Joe, it worked. Okay, okay, okay. This is a better intro 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 law enforcement officer, Joe. And, you know, I can, let's all take our hats off. Have a moment of silence for a great man, Officer Mark Furman, you know. Oh, God, damn. We all miss him.

We all miss him. Welcome to the pod. It's hard going on 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. Simpson getting away with murder. I think I'm going to, like, garden this weekend and, like, you know, go outside, touch some

grass and not think about Mark Furman at all, but for the next couple hours, I guess. We're going to be thinking a lot about Mark Furman. To be fair, Sophie, that is something you're going to have in common with Mark Furman. He's also touching grass. Yeah, he is, he is, he is, forever and ever. Fun fact. He died the week that we're recording this. Yeah.

The original intro that I had written out for this started, as Leo Tolstoy would have said, All great episodes of 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 our eulogy and the life and times of former LAPD detective and O.J. Simpson trial star Mark Furman. And if you're not, if you didn't live through the OJ trial like everybody recording the podcast right now, or if your memories have just faded, OJ Simpson was really good at football and pretty good at being.

fucking the naked guy. I think it was that, no, was it airplane. He was in a couple of movies. He was an airplane. Right? I was born in 88, so this is right about

on my line, you know? Yeah. 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. O.G. did it. We don't need to beat around the bush here, right? Yeah, he wrote a book saying, what if I did it? He wrote a book 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. If the glove doesn't fit. Basically, everyone agrees that the reason why OJ ultimately, and there's a number, but the reason why OJ 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 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 of shit.

It brought into question all of the, 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 debatable. 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 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 told this week, the story of Mark Furman. Are you excited, Joe? I will say for all of the episodes I've been on this show, this one has the lowest body count. No direct deaths.

Did you have me on because Kim Kardashian's dad is involved in this? That's right, that's right. It's the Armenian angle. We did not racially profiling you. I fucking knew it, Robert. Yes, yes. I needed to have someone who was on

on OJ's side and all Armenians, like, inherently support O.J. Simpson because of Robert Kardashian. Yes. We have no choice. One of Robert's favorite things to bring up constantly is when Ross from Friends played Robert Kardashian in that series. That was weird. Abelie.

It was really, she made no sense. He was really weird casting. Yeah. I love it. They kind of put him in brown face in a way. It was strange. A little bit. Yeah. I just love the way he kept saying juice.

Juice. Juice. This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Hey guys, it's us. The Jonas Brothers. I'm Joe. I'm Kevin.

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And these are just a few of the stunning stories I'll be exploring on the 14th season of family secrets. He kind of shoved me out of the way and said, move. And he went out the front door and he jumped in a car and drove off. and that was the last time I saw him. Listen to season 14 of Family Secrets on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. June is Black Music Month,

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Okay, let's begin our episodes. Okay. Mark James Furman was born on February 5, 1952 in Eatonville, Washington. Now, that's not that far from where Sophie and I live right now up here in the Pacific Northwest. Today, Eatonville is about 75% white. I think it's a little bit less than 75% white, but not much. And it was a lot whiter

than that in the 1950s. So, you know, the P&W 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 1888, constructed very close to picturesque Mount Rainier. 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 1903, a railroad connection made Eatonville a real town, and the Eatonville lumber company the biggest business in town. Prior to that point, settlers in the area had tended to just call

the whole area Mashel's Prairie, after a group of Nisgali Indians who originally inhabited the region. These native people had been massacred at 1856 by a militia known as Maxin'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 War. Per the website, HistoryLink.org, official reports claimed only eight of the national hostels were killed, but virtually all accounts and testimonies agree that the Raiders under Maxens Command killed defenseless elderly, women, children, and infants. So that's where Mark's hometown comes from, many such cases in the U.S.

A lot of little genocide villas out in the P&W and elsewhere. I love that this whole town just started because a bunch of dudes' scum. squad on another dude's front lawn. Yeah, yeah, after wiping out the people who had previously lived there. Yeah, that's the classic Pacific Northwest Strait. Very, tail as old as, well, the P and W. And Mark would have grown up, he wouldn't have been grown up being taught that, like, Maxon's Raiders had killed all of these people's like kids, right?

Like, they would have been taught. And there was a battle, you know, and they killed eight of these Braves, right? As opposed to, and then a genocide was done. They killed a hundred warriors, uh, parentheses. Warriors. Women and children. The original military aged males. Yeah. 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 Maxins 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 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 ones. His mom, Billy, was a waitress.

Their marriage was not a love match, and the two divorced when Mark was just seven years old. I can't imagine how their kid ended up being a cop. Yeah, yeah, shocking. Shocking. 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.

I don't know. I actually hate that this happens, but it's not good. It's not good. So Mark stays mostly with his mom who remarries once, but not for very long, as she has a hellish drinking problem. And per those who knew her, could be a mean drunk. So again, Mark doesn't just grow up with his dad being this very abrasive kind of figure. His mom, who largely raises him, is like an abusive drinker at sometimes. 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, is 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, right? Yeah, this is all tracking so far. 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. Oh, no. Only a few black families lived in Eatonville, and Mr. Furman and his younger brother, Scott, had run-ins with two boys in one of them, the Blues.

They'd see you coming down the street and say, here come the inwards, recalled Daniel Blue, now a truck driver in Tacoma, Washington. So that's this claim. Both 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, right?

Yeah. Now, for his part, Mark has denied these outlets. allegations, right? Or at least he denied them back in the late 90s. 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 essentially revealed as a 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 he 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 remembering accurately somebody called him a slur, you know? Yeah, it would be pretty easy to do growing up in the area. Yeah. But Mark did say, the truth is I never heard either brother called anything other than their name by me or anyone else. And that's the thing. If before Mark's saying like, well, we weren't even in high school together.

whether, you know, this is a big story at the time. I'd be willing to believe maybe somebody would like lie for 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 50s in rural Washington.

And you never heard anyone call them anything but their name. I don't believe that. I don't believe that for a second. No. Not for a second. And like even like the idea like, oh, well, we couldn't have played football. all together. We weren't even in the same grade. Yeah, because nobody who lives in the neighborhood, a small town plays pickup football games ever. Would ever have played any kind of pickup football game,

right? And it's the, or would have mistaken, like, you if your younger brother, maybe, I don't know. Like the, the whole, the whole idea that, like, he never heard any racism against these kids in small town washing, like, growing up in rural Oklahoma in the 90s, I heard black kids in my school get called slurs, you know? Definitely. 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, you're lying.

Yeah. 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 Belfare. In 1970, 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.

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 him 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 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 1970, he graduates and enlist in the Marines because that's what you do, right? Right. And, yeah. Was he also turned down by an art school in Austria? Or is this just a weird connection? He doesn't even apply.

Doesn't even apply. But he does kind of do the Hitler, right? 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 Nam. Now, he Serbs, I should say, during the Vietnam War. He is a Vietnam era veteran. I guess he is a veteran of the Vietnam. He's deployed to Vietnam, but he's not a combat veteran, right?

Like, he never actually fights, and he will claim otherwise. And that's most people. That's most people. Yeah. That's most people. Yeah. Yeah. And again, there's no shame in that, but he will lie about this, right? And that's why that's really relevant. Mark's service came late in the war and was in reality quite boring. He 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 rank of sergeant.

during his four years in the core. He could have been deployed to combat, 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 quite happens. So Mark spends 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 fully gets over not being tested in this way. And he seems to really want that. I've met 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 Ford operating base that might have a rocket fired at it. And they want to sound like the most high speed greenberry ass motherfucker for the rest of their life. And they probably wear hats about where exactly they were stationed in Iraq or whatever. Yeah. Like Camp Liberty. Like that's the. Famous fucking shit.

My favorite one is Cold War veteran hat I've seen. That one's a classic, man. That's like the ultimate dude who never did shit. Yeah, I love a... And it's the, like, I feel, I feel, like, I have a level of 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. Of course he 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.

Wrote a whole book about it. Yeah, yeah. And when somebody believes that and buys into that and goes as far as getting on the assault boat next to the coast but never quite gets to have it, there's like a degree of. failure to launch almost syndrome that I think it's just going to spark in him the rest of his life. He never gets over this, you know? And he doesn't even go into the country, right? Like he's living on this boat.

So it's like even... 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 ambush 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.

He's just sitting on a boat. And it's just not the thing he wants it to be. Now, again, he does. He's not a draftee, so he's not just doing as 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 Butterfield using the wrong terminology here.

Yeah, he's a non-comm. Yeah, he's a non-com. And specifically a macho officer. quote, in the Clint Eastwood dirty hairy 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 who are, especially early in his career, he's, like, often kind of larping specifically as dirty Harry. And he'll compare himself to dirty Harry a lot.

God, that's really, wants you to think he's cool. That's really dork. Seriously. Some serious. Dweeat shit. Come on, bro. Like, lame, Ron. Like, yeah, it's, it's, it's sad.

And it 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, picked up 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 and comfortable in your own skin. Like, you're not missing anything because you didn't get shot at. Like, there were, he never.

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 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 going to be, I guess I'll become a cop and that'll make me a man. And you get the feeling this is a guy who doesn't know who he is and who has some, 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 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.

What's the chaotic evil version of a glow up? 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 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 my head cannon.

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 1975. He excels at Police Academy, and he graduates second in his class with widespread praise from his instructors. When he becomes a rookie cop, his bosses were all impressed by his appearance. Mark is in great shape.

His uniform's 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 shits always, like, really, like, locked down. Right. His backgrounds and art nerd. The Marines of have taught him I'd do that.

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 superiors in the LAPD is like, like, his writing was beautiful.

Like his fan writing is gorgeous. They're just like finger painting. Yeah, yeah, they could barely read. Yeah, you know who else can barely read, Joe? Who's that? The sponsors of this podcast, all nearly illiterate thanks to America's broken public education system. Pride is like love. You feel it in your heart.

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A shocking number of Americans functionally are. That's a good time to be writing a book, Robert. Let me tell you. Yeah. Did you feel the pain in my laugh? Yeah. 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 or to an hour early.

This commitment to going above and beyond the job description was recognized by his bosses. And in 1977, he was assigned to a dangerous but prominent assignment, working with a sexy new unit in East L.A. targeting Hispanic street gangs. Per an article in the LA Times, quote, In 1977, 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 44-man unit to concentrate on neighborhoods

where gang crime was heaviest. Based at the Holland Beck Division in East Los Angeles, the unit was dubbed Total Resources Against Street Hoodlums. Trash, but civic leaders thought the acronym disparaging. Total resources against street hoodlums? Hoodlums? Come on, guys. I love to use my 50s slang.

Yeah. Now, it is the 70s, but yeah, it still seems outdated. Ultimately, the trash group. I got to go get those roustabouts. Yeah, get the roustabouts out of here. And people probably haven't heard about the trash program, but a lot of Angelinos have heard about the crash program. Right, that's where I thought you were going.

I was like, of course this guy was in the fucking crash unit. That's where I am going, because the trash unit is the immediate precursor to the crash unit. So they start the crash unit in like 77, I think it's 79. they change 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, that sounds a lot better, 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. Right, right. T for total, that's bad. C 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 Vietnam in order to like 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 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 to be. So a lot of people are going to 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. Yeah, they had to name it crash because it was really hard to find an acronym for the word boomerang. Yeah, yeah.

So the city government judged the crash program a success and took over funding it in 79. 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 1979. As that article noted from 79 to 81, the number of major gang-related crimes in Los Angeles more than doubled from 2008 to 5,158 during the first like four years or so that the crash program, I mean, during the second two years of it, but like, yeah, from like 79 to 81, it doubles more than. Now, what's funny is that around that time, the Sheriff's Department had a program with a similar goal that worked much better,

like the sheriff's anti-gang program is a lot more effective in the LAPDs, but the LAPD just kind of keeps balsing their way through crash, which critics say spread out police attention far too widely. A large part of the problem with these anti-gang units is that they had very little effective oversight and a ton of incentive to lock people up for bullshit reasons and carry out acts of extreme violence against them.

These programs would ultimately culminate in the shattering LAPD rampart 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 that's going to, like, blow up in the city of Los Angeles's face. They had to create their own gangs to fight gangs with tattoos and colors and, you know, especially the sheriff's department, ironically enough. The only way to beat a 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 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 you know the reaction that White everyone is so fucking pissed at the LAPD, you know, before that even happens. For his part, Mark does not seem to 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.

That sounds like police work. Yeah. He does not, per the times, the job put enormous pressure on Mr. Furman, Mrs. Hackett said. That's his ex. 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, Mrs. 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. Bro, you have a job. You could just quit. You're not the Marines anymore.

Just hit the bricks. 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, so I left him. I got out of there. 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 in an apartment. This does not make him less depressed.

I think the cause of his deep... 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 1981, the LAPD had just opened a behavioral science service section, which hosted the first police psychological counseling unit in the country.

So there aren't any police psychological counselors officially until 1981, which probably explains a lot. That's fine, right? They do so well nowadays. Yeah, yeah, it helps so much today. Yeah, it changed American policing, obviously. Yeah, after this, there were no more problems. Yeah, solved it. 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 Mark sits down. Have you tried to read this book called Killology or whatever it's called? It's a little worse than that, actually. It's weird. So Mark sits down. He has a counseling session.

with a psychiatrist or psychologist named Susan Sacks Clifford. And she talks to him and he goes through because he's trying to get, he wants to quit. He wants to get 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 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. Which two things are true. Number one, that's a very reasonable response on Susan's part.

Shout out, Susan. Surprisingly. 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 going to have, and apparently we are, organizations in every city where a bunch 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 ruin their career.

You might cause a lot of worse problems, right? Like if that's how they see it. Sure. Yeah, then they're just not going to say anything. Yeah. Also when she's like, I think you should turn in your gun. Yeah. Obviously, he remains a cop.

Right? 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 no meaningful enforcement. Right. With no.

And 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. But I can see how this would make guys like that less willing to talk about their problems, too. For sure. For her part, Dr. Sacks 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 got to 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? like this? I think she might be a bad therapist. Yeah. I think it's good. If you are, if legit, if you were really,

if a cop was legitimately feeling uncontroll or just a murder people. And he decided, as a result, I need to go to a therapist. That's actually good judgment, I'd say. Right?

Yeah. Right. Like, really. Right? Well, if, you know, if he was really troubled, he wouldn't have told me. So it's fine.

Yeah. I think that's a bad psych, maybe. I think this might be a, bad therapist. Yeah, I think she might not be good at her shop. Starting to think she went to University of Phoenix or some shit. Yeah. 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. 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. 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. Pating the finest hand turkey the university has ever seen. Exactly. Yeah. Weeping with beauty at it. Yeah. 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 been too damaged by the job to go on so at this point you're probably wondering how do i know that he's lying one reason would be mark firman'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 uh who had been assigned to evaluate him for his disability 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 heavy combat and near-death experiences. At the same time, per Dr. Ronald Kogler, 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? 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 LAPD. 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 one of the United States. wanting to beat and maim them. And per Dr. Cogler, 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 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, number one, an unusually good pension plan that promised officers with a psych disability up to half their pay, tax-free for life. And so from 1980 to- Yeah, not a bad deal. Yeah. From 1980 to 1985, 175 LAPD 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 L.A. was noted in a 1985 Los Angeles Times article by Robert Welk and Claire Spiegel.

Quote, although stressed pensions have risen dramatically in the LAPD during the last five years, they are rare in many other major law enforcement agencies outside of California. So no one else does this, and it's weird, only LAPD cops are getting these because they just don't want to do the job. Who would have thought? Like the biggest department in the country, the best. At institutional corruption, like arguably between them and their own sheriff's department, is giving it a way out to cash out early. They fuck yeah, they're going to take it.

It's probably cheaper than letting them just steal all their overtime like they normally do. Absolutely. I consider this probably a net benefit, you know? Yeah. Like, let's get these dudes off the fucking streets. I support this. You know who else we should get off the streets, Joe? Who's that, Robert?

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Number one hits, millions of records sold, awards, sold out tours. You think that Jonas brothers are satisfied? Nope, it's podcast time. We get to ask other people questions because we're sick and tired of being asked questions. Hey, Jonas is available now and their first guest is a big one. Paul Rudd. You know, Steve Carell is a great singer. Can you tell you not to audition at the office or something?

I told him. Whoa. We were filming Anchor Man. Clearly, I was the idiot. Thank God he didn't listen to me, right? Listen to Hey Jonas on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Mainstream media is full of cruel depictions of the unhoused, stories that shame and blame and paint the unhoused as a monolith. We The UnHouse is the podcast that's changing that.

I'm Theo Henderson, creator and host, and for years I've created a space where the Un-House. un-housed and their advocates can tell their own stories. In the last few months alone, I've interviewed unhoused parents, immigrants, mutual aid organizers, veterans, the LGBTQTIA plus community, and the policymakers who make the laws that impact the unhoused existence. Woody and Houses a two-time Webby and Signal Award-winning show with many exciting guests on the horizon. Tune in this week for my interview with Dr. Jill Whitcher, a street doctor turned influencer

whose work with the unhoused community has made a huge impact online and in her community. Listen to Weezy &House on the IHard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Here's something that should not be as complicated as it is, getting a racist statue removed.

And here's something that should be a whole lot easier than it is, getting a new one put up in its place. As long as there's a politics of race in America, there's going to be a politics of remembering the Civil War. To get to school, I had to go down Robert Lee Boulevard. Get to the grocery store. I had to go down Jefferson Davis Parkway. If you're an historian and you leave out half of what the history is, you're not doing your job. I'm Akila Hughes. In Rebel Spirit, season two, goes deep on both of those things. The fights, the politics, the people who won, and my personal

campaign to add something to the Kentucky State House that's actually worth the wall space. We are more than our bodies. We contain essence. We contain spirit. How do you write? represent that. They are just fueling a fire that is really catching. You'll see what I mean. Listen to Rebel Spirit Season 2 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. We're back and we're talking about Mark Furman's attempt to get a psych disability pension from the LABD.

So this doesn't work out for him. Ultimately, psychiatrist John Hockman 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 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. Nice. You have to go steal OT and rack up vacation days like in a normal LAPD office. That's right. You have to be a corrupt, lazy bastard, the normal cop way. 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 somebody up by now. I don't know if that's the best way to go about this is the LAPD, but that's how they do it. I would expect nothing less from the LAPD to be fair.

Well, if he was truly insane, he would have murdered someone by now. 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. We would promote him. Yeah. He'd be cheap by now.

So, Mark doesn't take this denial lying down, though. He appealed to a county judge, which made his court records public, which is why we know all of this now. In September of 1983, 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 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 riding 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 1984. And this is interesting, because you would assume, after having 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. He gets sent to West L.A. 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 L.A. where tact and charm were significantly more valuable than violence, which also maybe suggests 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 know, handicapped by an uncontrollable urge to savage every single person he ever met, wouldn't he want to just ride the desk instead? Yeah, rather than, like, get back out on patrol. Wait does he want to be back in the street.

Yeah, like, you had it made, dude, just file paperwork. You get paid the same amount of money. Yep. So, again, I think he's lying about being this, like, violent maniac. as Brian Bentley, a black police officer who was Furman's partner during this period, told a journalist, in West L.A., 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 interact with celebrities sometimes, you know?

I know from personal experience, that's a slight exaggeration, but the basic point is pretty sound. Once Furman moves to an area where he's in no real danger, he seems to like being a cop. and his semi-annual evaluations back this up. He gets positive reviews from his superiors in August of 1987. He's described by one as highly motivated and 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 during this period in a hospital emergency room in 1987. She claims that he told her, the only good inward is a dead inward.

So, that's not. What a great guy. Jesus. And knowing him, he just brings it up. Like, hey, by the way. That's how she says it. 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. Quote, I met Natalie Singer in 1987 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. So he's like, he's saying, oh, I wouldn't have said that. But I didn't say stuff just to piss her off. So his, his defense is straight out of 2026. Like, no, you don't understand.

I was simply trolling. It was a bit. It was a bit. Yeah. That's, fuck off. Yeah. 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 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 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? Right. I believe every side of the story simultaneously if that's possible.

Yeah, yeah. These are all, none of these are in conflict. No. Another contact of Marks during this period, who would later be asked to testify about his racism, was Roderick Hodge, who he arrested on drug charges also in 1987. 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 we'd get you inward. Right? So Hodge says when this guy arrested me, he snarls this to me, and then I'm acquitted because there were bullshit charges. Here's what Mark writes later about this interaction with Roderick.

I came to know Roderick Hodge while working a gang narcotic unit as a uniformed officer in West Los Angeles from 1985 to 1987. Hodge was under investigation for dealing narcotics. I had many contacts with Hodge and 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's telling the truth. I have no idea.

The fact that Hodge was acquitted certainly makes me more inclined to take his side maybe than Mark's here, but I don't actually know what happened. It's the whole book, him just trying to explain all the N words he's ever said. A shocking, a lot of it, because he says it a lot. He's used that word a lot. I'm going to go out in a limb here and suggest he might not be the most trustworthy motherfucker. Might be a racist. Yeah, it might be racist. He might be a horrific racist.

It is noteworthy that there are allegations of racism from Mark that also come from within the LAPD. One of Mark's co-workers office, yeah, yeah, and that's wild. How are you so racist that the LAPD is like, whoa, whoa. Great question, Joe. How? Let's explore that. One of Mark's co-workers, Officer James Purdy, married a Jewish woman around 1985 and would later testify that after his marriage. Mark Furman painted a swastika. on his locker.

Now, Oh my God. Mark denies this. And Mark is like, I would never have done anything that hateful. Oh, my, a swat, painted 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 crafted in a lab to make me doubt him. Quote, Purdy was hardly popular in West L.A.

There were so 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 department wanted to paint a swastika on that guy's locker. Why do you think it was me? People, cops were lining up to paint a swastika on this guy's locker. And the fact that when the swastika was painted on his locker, the cop in quest was like, this had to be Furman.

Tells me 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 to motherfucker's locker. You know what I'm saying? Like, how many things did he do to get there? 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 swastika. It just said people were like it had to have been him.

It literally has to have been him, right? Yeah, the other cop was like, yeah, this has Furman written all over. Yeah, 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 the social role that Mark Furman held in the LAPD hierarchy by the late 1980s, like the mid to late 80s, he is like a kind of popular bully. He's 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 West L.A. department. He's like, you know, and again, he's 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 and humor, I think it's, largely because he likes the edgy trolling,

because Mark is at least capable of forming genuine friendships and working 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. And he's more than capable of like not, letting it out when he either is with like a non like a black or Hispanic officer that he gets along with or that he recognizes as popular and that he's wasn't doesn't want to be like uncool around right like he's able to do that he's able to calculate when he lets the racism out so we have like another classic example of some dickhead racist troll deploying racism as something as a barb slowly over time simply becoming a racist Damn, Robert, where have we heard this, the Billy?

Tale as old as time. So when the O.J. 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. but I could also see individual guys not having had that experience with Mark, for the reasons that I just explained. And again, racism's a thing for Mark, but it's not the only thing. Social standing and comfort at work matters, and he's capable of like taking people as individuals and forming relationships with them based on that, especially if it's advantageous to his social standing. One of his first partners was Roberto Alonz, 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. Per the New York Times, from 1984 to 1990,

at least half a dozen complaints were made against Mr. 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 1984, he lost a day off for seizing a pedestrian's wrists. And in 1986, he received a one-day-one, suspension for leaving an improper remark on a motorist's windshield. So again, and when...

What did he write on someone's windshield? 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 a... Because when the tapes that include him claim, 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. That's braggadocio. Some of it certainly was. but also every time he got like accused of a violent crime it usually got ignored because there were no independent witnesses, which means in my head, Mark probably just beat someone up and it was his word versus that guy and Mark was a cop, right? Yeah, it's classic, right? 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 LAPD was able to ignore it.

It's not like a cop gets caught beating someone the first time. You know, once they start fucking people up, it's just. because they've built up been doing it a while. You know, that they know they can get away with it. Their bros, their coworkers are going to lie for them.

They know the department's internal investigations is never going to find them. Yep, exactly. You know, they're immune. 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 blitz, on Mr. 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 1985, 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 says a little bit right there. And I think the first and most important thing for me to do.

a note as a result of that is that while all this comes out during the trial because the O.J. 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 L.A.P.D. officer during this period told the times that when he was assigned to West L.A., he was warned, there are a bunch of old white guys who hate blacks and women at West L.A. That's the department that Mark has transferred to, because he's a racist and a bigot. You know? Right. And a lot of guys are.

Of course he's a misogynist. Like this isn't like a defense of Furman. No, if anybody's confused. It would be really weird if there was a cop in 1985. It's like, no, I would love to work with a woman. That guy doesn't exist. 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 his racism's normal, you know? Like that's the thing to take out of this. Yeah, that's 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 even though he was noted as like, oh, Mark is more of a bigot than a lot of other guys. He speaks out more. No one noted, and that's 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 1985 performance evaluation of Marx continued. He was also counseled by this rating lieutenant and captain regarding his very strong expression 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. Of course. This isn't about me being a racist, Robert.

It's about my freedom of speech. It's about my freedom to be a racist. Yeah, exactly. Now, by way of defending Mark, his supervisor from 1989 to 1994, Gary Fullerton, told the New York Times that Furman joined a basketball league made up largely of black LAPD officers who had to meet up at 6.30 a.m. and was like, who would do that if they were racist? The Times talked to one of these players, Sergeant Ed Palmer, who is 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 540 to play basketball with me?

And like, I don't know, but racist do all sorts of crazy shit, dude. Like, you know that. Like, you actually do know that, Ed. Yeah, and again, these are only dudes who are cops as well. Yeah, exactly. This is the classic us versus them of American policing. We're like, yes, he's a racist, but he's totally fine to hang out black people who are also cops. That's right.

And all of these accounts are coming out during the trial when Mark, when the try, it's become clear that the trial hinges largely in whether or not Mark's a racist. And so like the LAPD 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 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 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 1985 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 note as being like a pretty dedicated researcher when she did she like lived as a homeless

person in Santa Monica for like a week, I think to like research a screenplay at one point. Okay. 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 down and, like, taping Mark talking about his experiences on the job. And McKinney would ultimately interview Mark several times between 1985 and 1994. 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 profit off of it. That's certainly what some people will 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 and hour, I think it's 13 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 describes engaging in police misconduct of the most damning kind, beating suspects bloody, coercion, and badgering minorities. Contrary to his sworn testimony

last March that he had not used the N-word in the past 10 years, Furman's blustering talk on 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 tells Martha Laurie 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 N-word 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 he knows he's being recorded. He knows. This is intentional. Now, he does not, when the Simpson case comes up,

because this has been going on since 85, and when the fucking Simpson case starts in 94, he's not thinking, oh, there's tapes of me with the N-word on him that could become part of this case. He doesn't assume anyone's not ever hear anything from McKinney. Right. Like, why would McKinney? 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, oh, well, maybe I'll be all over every news 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, to be fair. Like, she's trying to write a screenplay. She's not trying to like, gotcha, Mark Furman. And if you want to critique her for something, it's the fact she's listening to this guy say this awful shit. about the crimes he's committed inside of the LAPD, and it's just like, cool stuff from a screenplay.

Yeah, like, this will be very useful for me, thank you. Like, if I were to sit down with an act of LAPD 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. Like, that would be my, as a journalist, like, that's what I do. I love to casually sit down and create the LAPD version of the act of killing, and then just use it from him. my drama.

Weird. But it is kind of wind up being really good for OJ Simpson that McKinney has these tapes. And once these tapes and the audio in them comes out, Mark's basic argument in 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 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 do buy that. Yeah, and it's not hard to buy. And Mark tells several 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 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 and 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 and the OJ Simpson trial in part two.

How you doing, Joe? This is like some... Jofy. This is like the little rascals, he man, woman hater club for cops. It is, it is. He makes the he man woman hater club for cops. He does do that.

He's the alfalfa of the LAPD. I hate that so much. Thank you. It's really funny. I mean, it's not like the horrible things that he does, but it's like funny in a like a cosmic sense, you know? Sure. Or if you're just a fan of the little rascals.

It's funny because it's fucking. Pathetic, you know? It's pathetic. It's sad. Everything about this man is so pathetic. Yeah. It's, that's the thing, right? 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, wanted to have, like, a wife or a girl. Like, I thought, like, that was, like, the goal was to, like, have, 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 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 I was I was raised by like my dad was a pretty misogynistic piece of shit and it all that all

kind of confused me as well because he kind of fell into the Furman 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 mind you, I'm like 10. Yeah. And now you're leading me down a path where you're going to be Mark Furman, which is divorced, living with a shitty cop for a roommate. Yeah, and we don't want to spend any time around girls. I thought the goal was to be liked by them. Was I wrong?

Like, obviously, that's not, shouldn't be your life goal. But like as a kid, realizing, 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. Yeah, I, I, this is, we're going to have some fun talks about, uh, gender politics in the Los Angeles Police Department. But first, let's talk about gender politics and Joe Kasabian's bibliography. Sorry, Joe, that wasn't a great way to lead to your books, but you have books. Yeah, yeah.

I'm the host of the lines that by. Donkeys podcast. We talk about military history, we try to make things interesting and funny. 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 is, you get your books, e-book, audiobook, read by me, paperback, stone tablet, whichever you'd like. Excellent. 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 re-released in the form of an old man telling the story around a fire.

Oh, that's good. Which, yeah, yeah, no, yeah. That's a real proud moment in the author's life when you get your old man around a fire edition. Anyway, the episode's over. We should probably be done by Joe's books. By Joe's books. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.

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