Spencer for Starters

The most revealing thing about Michael “Spencer” McClinton’s role as a maniac cop in Thomas Riccio’s Palace Station Hotel room is what he said about cracking Riccio in the head “with this goddamn gun.” According to everyone who participated in O.J.’s ill-fated sting operation, McClinton was putting on a show to make Bruce Fromong and Al Beardsley believe that Riccio was not one of them.

The problem with this scenario is that McClinton’s mention of the gun was out of place in a situation where the gun was visible. It’s the sort of thing that an actor says in a radio-play to identify key elements in the script that can’t be seen. The problem with the radio-play idea is that it is entirely dependent on the actors knowing that they have a listening audience. There were, however, two fixes to that problem built into the situation. Mike Gilbert’s girlfriend Christy Lutkemeier was on an open phone line with Fromong at the time and a secret recording device independent of Riccio’s figured into the case; Michael McClinton’s. McClinton purchased an analogue mini-tape recorder before the incident.

Although McClinton’s reference to the gun was omitted from every transcript of the Riccio digital recording prepared for jury and media consumption, it is on his recording.  McClinton used his tape recorder after the incident and there is evidence on his tape recording that he used it during the incident. McClinton testified that he was acting according to O.J.’s instructions to bring guns, to show his gun in the room, and to “act menacing.” His tape recorder gave him the means to “prove” that he did display the gun. By all accounts, including McClinton’s, it was McClinton’s idea to say and do specifically what he said and did in the six-minute duration of the event.

I conceived the six-minute rule as an objective way to eliminate the possibility of cherry-picking relevant clusters of data and to quantify the likelihood of finding them in close temporal proximity by chance. It now seems that McClinton also used a six-minute rule.

O.J. had no interest in taking anything from the room that wasn’t his and he was in no hurry to leave. McClinton controlled the duration of the episode. Six minutes of dramatic activity fits into the way commercial radio and TV news and talk shows like Greta and O’Reilly are segmented for commercial breaks. Every minute of sustained drama over six-minutes makes its place in the division of radio and TV broadcast time increasingly difficult. Whatever McClinton’s reasons for keeping the Palace Station drama within the six-minute time limit, that’s exactly what he did and the effect was exactly the same.

Fromong assisted in the chaos by bringing sports memorabilia to the room that Riccio told him specifically and repeatedly in the Palace Station parking lot that the O.J. memorabilia buyer he said was coming didn’t want. He brought a Joe Montana lithograph, baseball bats and baseballs, items not on the list that Beardsley sent to Riccio. While O.J. berated Beardsley and Fromong, McClinton started barking orders on his own initiative. He gave the orders to bag up everything that Fromong laid out on the bed.

If Fromong and McClinton were together in putting on a show with the intention of using McClinton’s tape for commercial broadcast, we have a model for the thinking behind it, Mark Fuhrman’s thinking. It’s in Murder in Brentwood, chapter 26: The Tapes. The comments in brackets are mine, based on documented facts that Fuhrman omitted.

Page 270: “I was creating fictional situations....Characters were developed from composites of many people [and the roles of many actors]... Page 271: The purpose of the tapes was twofold: to educate Laura about the sinister side of the world, about which she knew nothing, and to create characters and actions she might use in a screenplay.... Page 272: “I gave them (movie producers) the Dirty Harry [Clint Eastwood] meets Attila [Donald Sutherland] the Hun routine...Page 280: In some ways I think Joe Wambaugh was an unconscious mentor of my novice attempts at writing a work of fiction... Page 281: Joe wrote The Choirboys in an attempt to give the public what it seemed to want... Page 282: In the 1950s people responded to Dragnet and Joe Friday... In the 1990s people responded to NYPD Blue and Homicide and characters like Andy Sipowicz.”

Joe Friday of the ‘50s Dragnet is irrelevant. Jack Webb as Joe Friday in Dragnet 1967 is everything. When you follow up on Fuhrman connections to Dirty Harry, Attila the Hun and Andy Sipowicz you get little or nothing. When you follow actors who played characters with those names or someone else in the cast of a movie they appeared in you get a bonanza. Using Fuhrman’s formulas in the preceding paragraph you know how to move names and things around in real situations with real people the way Fuhrman did it.

That’s what’s wrong with everything Michal McClinton did in the Palace Station and what he said about it in court. He did it Fuhrman’s way. McClinton’s Randall (Randall “Tex” Cobb”/ Randall Flagg) Spencer alias is only one example, but an instructive one.

Walter Alexander, a pimp known as “Goldie,” testified in O.J.’s Las Vegas preliminary hearing that he and McClinton were friends. Yet, he said on the witness stand that he knew him only as Spencer.  Robert Urich is “Spencer,” the former Boston boxer/policeman title character in the (’85-’88) TV series Spencer: For Hire. In Vega$ (’78-’81) Robert Urich is private eye Dan Tanna.

Follow the actor Avery Brooks who plays Hawk in Spenser: For Hire to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (’93-’99) as Capt. Benjamin Sisco. Deep Space Nine is a space station commanded by Captain Sisco who keeps a baseball on a stand in his office and in his private quarters at the station. Urich stars in The Ice Pirates with Michael Roberts who plays a pimp called Rooster in Baretta with Robert Blake.

Deep Space Nine has five broadcast dates connected to Fuhrman, McClinton or both. Two of them were aired back to back in season 1 (1993); March 21 and April 18.  Robert C. Hurd was killed on March 21. April 18 is Brad Roberts’ birthday. A second episode aired on June 12, 1994, the night. Ron Goldman and Nicole Simpson were killed. Murder in Brentwood tells you how important birthdays are to Fuhrman. O.J.’s Las Vegas arrest report says that Michal McClinton’s birthday is January 29, 1954. Fuhrman’s birthday is February 5, 1952. DS9 puts McClinton’s birthday and Fuhrman’s back to back in 1996 with episodes that aired on January 29 and February 5.  –Jasper