The Kardashians Read online

  “O.J.’s view was that Robert would be his eyes and ears and keep him up to speed, and come over and spend time with him at his beck and call, and that was very, very difficult for Robert to do,” Kraines learned over dinner. “One of O.J.’s biggest fights with the ‘Dream Team’ was that they were pissing away his money.” “That whole deal was a lot of pressure and tension for Robert,” continued Kraines. “After the O.J. thing a lot of people didn’t want to have anything to do with him—more than anyone can believe. More than he believed. He was hoping that him sticking up for his friend and being there at the time of need would bring him fame and fortune, and it may have brought him fame, but for not very long, and did not bring him fortune. It brought him misfortune.”

  None of what Robert Kardashian went through in the wake of the O.J. case has ever been reported before, including in the critically acclaimed, Emmy-winning 2016 TV miniseries, The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story, which starred David Schwimmer as Robert Kardashian, Selma Blair as Kris Kardashian Jenner, and Cuba Gooding Jr. as Simpson and was based on journalist and attorney Jeffrey Toobin’s bestselling 1996 book, The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson.

  In that miniseries there is a scene in which Kardashian, using the alias Richard Kordovian in order to hide his suddenly famous identity and name, takes his children to a restaurant, where he is treated like a VIP because of his new celebrity status. At the table, he tells his children, “We are Kardashians, and in this family being a good person and a loyal friend is more important than being famous.”

  But in reality, Kardashian wanted both—the fame and being perceived as the loyal friend, according to his close inner circle.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Dire Warnings

  When the murders occurred, O.J. was on his way to Chicago, or already in the Windy City, he claimed. When he returned to L.A.—a few days before his arrest—he was met by a throng of reporters, lawyers, and his loyal friend Robert, who helped in handling his luggage, mainly a Louis Vuitton bag, which would become part of the mystery because there were suspicions that it might have contained the murder weapon, a knife, or the bloody clothes that Simpson had hidden there, and that Kardashian aided in disposing of it. There were also suspicions that the weapon was hidden in Simpson’s golf bag, which he and Kardashian picked up at LAX a day after O.J.’s return from Chicago.

  So suspicious were the police of Kardashian’s role that detectives showed up at relative Sam Kardashian’s Southern California Disposal and Recycling Company, in search of the Louis Vuitton bag and possibly other evidence. “We have our own little transfer station, which is like a little dump,” said Sam’s wife, Paulette in 2015, “and they thought we helped get rid of it. My husband’s sister was working here at the time and told the police, ‘No, we haven’t seen Robert. We don’t know anything about it.’”

  Larry Kraines, who was seeing Kardashian “no less than four or five nights out of seven” during the O.J. case, had gone to Kardashian’s newly rented house in Encino on the day Kardashian brought the bag there, and what he witnessed he believes underscored Kardashian’s innocence. “A friend of Robert’s and I went up to the bedroom and we saw the Louis Vuitton bag lying there and I said to Robert, ‘Is there anything in there?’ He said, ‘No, just a Playboy magazine and some clothes from when he was in Chicago,’ and that was it.”

  O.J. was still free and at his home on Rockingham—family members were standing guard there, fearing he’d kill himself—when Kardashian left Encino to spend time with him. Rather than drive there in his sporty Mercedes, he decided to take Denice’s Rolls-Royce, the big British luxury car that had once belonged to her late husband, Toby Halicki. The reason for Kardashian’s car change was because he suspected he’d be bringing O.J. back home with him so he could avoid the media and the escalating press coverage, and the larger Rolls could handle any luggage or personal effects he might bring with him.

  As he was pulling out of the gated, hilly driveway, Denice came running out to tell him to take the Louis Vuitton bag out of the trunk of the Mercedes and put it in the Rolls so the bag could be returned to O.J., which was done. Kardashian brought Simpson back to the house with him without being spotted by the press. As it turned out, the Rolls made for perfect cover to hide a suspected murderer and his mouthpiece, a scene even a creative filmmaker of mysteries would never have imagined.

  Before O.J. fled in the Bronco, Denice was the one who cooked the meals, who accompanied O.J. and Kardashian to Nicole’s funeral, who was an eyewitness to the various ways they disguised themselves to avoid the media.

  And on the day the arrest warrant was issued, charging O.J. with a double homicide, it was Denice who advised her fiancé to quickly summon Al Cowlings to act as O.J.’s protector in case he tried to injure or kill himself, a decision she’d come to regret.

  Kardashian, the man of peace, the born-again Christian, also had a love for guns, and there were at least five in the house—a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson, several rifles, and a pellet gun. Kardashian called a friend who lived nearby to pick up the weaponry to keep them out of suicidal O.J.’s hands. But he had no idea that O.J. had actually smuggled his own gun into Kardashian’s home. Kardashian spotted it and, frightened, asked O.J. to pray with him. This was all happening in the room where Kardashian’s daughter, Kim, then thirteen, slept when she visited, a bedroom with a feminine canopied bed.

  Not long after the prayers, and with the house bustling with lawyers, O.J. disappeared.

  Knowing he was about to be arrested, he had penned his mea culpa and fled in the Bronco with a loaded gun and with pal Al Cowlings at the wheel of the getaway SUV, leaving the police, the prosecutors, and his best friend, Kardashian, in a virtual state of shock. An all-points bulletin was issued by the LAPD, setting in motion the famously bizarre televised freeway chase that mesmerized millions of viewers across the country and ended with O.J. in handcuffs at his Brentwood home.

  It was one of American television’s first authentic, unscripted nonfiction reality shows, and it had the Kardashian patriarch as one of the leading players.

  Denice’s suggestion to Robert to call in Cowlings to help had gone terribly awry.

  * * *

  FROM THE BEGINNING, JUST AFTER the white Ford Bronco chase, just after Kardashian read the rambling, incoherent O.J. letter to the media, Kardashian was warned to stay out of the case by those who most cared for him, such as his brother, Tom, and his pal Larry Kraines.

  “I told Robert not to get involved, and Tommy told Robert not to get involved,” recalled Kraines. “I didn’t feel that to be in the limelight the way he would be, would be good for him, particularly if it would be proven that O.J. did do it. I was trying to be more objective, but Robert was being the loyal friend, and I think he wanted to be in the limelight a little bit. He did love the attention, and at that time he needed a little attention. I don’t think he had a clue that O.J. could do such a thing—it wasn’t even imaginable.”

  Kardashian refused to believe that his friend of many years and one-time business partner had turned into a killer. And unlike the schmaltzy O.J. miniseries dialogue, Robert Kardashian actually adored being the center of attention, being a celebrity of sorts. It took a horrific murder to give him the fame he had long craved since the days when he was on the edge of the entertainment business in his involvement with Radio & Records and Movie Tunes and those other businesses he had hoped would make him rich and famous.

  On Friday, June 17, 1994, five days after the butchering of Nicole and Ron, the day of the nationally televised Bronco chase, and shortly after Kardashian read to the assembled press the letter O.J. had left behind—the moment the Kardashian name became known worldwide for the first time—his brother, Tom, paid him a visit at his new home to try to convince him not to get further involved.

  Robert was then living with Denice in a gorgeous, gated contemporary rental over the Santa Monica Mountains from Beverly Hills in the affluent community of Encino, in the
smoggy San Fernando Valley. He had leased the recently remodeled five-bedroom, five-bath, 7,104-square-foot home on the secluded 16000 block of Mandalay Drive in May 1994, about a month before the murders, at a favorable rate because the builders reportedly had had a tough time selling it. Kardashian had recently sold his beloved Tower Lane estate, where he had raised his children and where his marriage had fallen apart because of his wife Kris’s affair.

  With his twenty-eight-year-old white girlfriend, one-time model and low-budget movie actress Paula Barbieri, O.J. had been hiding out with Kardashian and Denice—sleeping in the bedroom Kardashian had reserved for his daughter Kim in his new place, where he thought he would be able to start a new, happier chapter in his life at fifty.

  It would not come to pass.

  * * *

  WHEN TOM KARDASHIAN TURNED on the TV and saw the Bronco chase, he couldn’t believe his eyes. The fugitive had been one of his close friends, as close to him as he was to Robert. Watching the cops chase the Bronco was Tom’s second shocker in a week; the first was the actual news of the murders. “That,” he stated, looking back years later, “was a terrible shock. That wasn’t anything my wife or I would have expected. The only reason I would have thought that O.J. was capable was because he played a violent sport.”

  Tom’s wife, Joanie, had become close to Nicole Simpson, but not as close as Kris, who was younger and had more in common with her. And Tom said Nicole had never given Joanie a hint about the physical abuse she was suffering at the hands of O.J.

  Tom never discussed O.J.’s guilt or innocence with his brother. “We never went into that because my brother believed in O.J., so he supported O.J. He went to the trial every day. He visited him in jail while O.J. was incarcerated, so my brother just stood behind him, so that was it. We didn’t discuss at dinnertime with my parents, ‘Hey, did O.J. really do this?’ I have no idea if he did it, and I supported O.J. because I had known him to only do good things for people that were friends that I knew, so the murder was a real shock because if he was this kind of [psychopathic] person, I didn’t know it.”

  While there was no talk between the Kardashian brothers about who killed Nicole and Goldman, Tom did step in to advise his brother to distance himself from the case, just as Larry Kraines and a few others had.

  “When I heard what was going on in the Bronco, my wife and I went over to my brother’s house, and he was already on the phone with different people, with the news media, and they wanted to interview him, and all I can remember is telling my brother, ‘You know, you’ve done your bit, now get out of the deal,’” Tom said in 2015.

  “This was just after he read O.J.’s letter to the press, and I told him, ‘That was great, you were wonderful. Now I think it’s time you lay low, because this will never stop.’ I was a different kind of person than Robert, so my advice to him was, ‘Now it’s time for you to back away and let the professionals take care of it.’ It’s just what I’ve seen in this town all these years—usually nothing good comes out of what my brother was doing, which was wanting that kind of notoriety. It usually doesn’t work to your favor. I gave him the kind of advice my father would have given him. It wasn’t a fair thing for me to tell him what to do, but I just told him how I felt.”

  Robert basically brushed him off.

  “His reaction was like nothing—‘Okay, thanks, I hear you.’ He wouldn’t have taken my advice, because that was him. He was who he was—he liked the notoriety. He liked the fame, and that’s probably why the girls [Robert’s daughters, Tom’s nieces] got it the way they got it”—a reference to their fame and notoriety as reality TV stars and more.

  Continued Kardashian: “While he was going through the trial he really liked the pictures being taken of him; the press knew who he was. When we went to a restaurant, they would always get him the best table. That’s how Beverly Hills was, and he loved that. Before the O.J. case he was an unknown, but if he could have been a movie star, I guess he probably would have done that. He liked the fame and the glory.”

  And he got both in spades during the lengthy trial, before it all turned against him.

  Kardashian was given the full-monty celebrity treatment.

  In restaurants, actors like Roger Moore of James Bond fame sought him out to chat. Rod Steiger sent wine to his table. He and his arm candy/fiancée—leggy, buxom Denice, who fit right into the Hollywood scene with her cosmetically implemented looks, got invitations to A-list parties and screenings such as one at the sprawling estate of producer Robert Evans, where the other guests included the Beattys—Warren and Annette Bening—and Victoria Principal, among others.

  The powerful Hollywood talent agent Sue Mengers cooed over him, recounting how she and David Geffen got together every morning to watch the case on TV, and she whispered that he could expect a huge advance for any book he wrote when it was time. And Kardashian was secretly hoping that Pacino or De Niro would play him when the movie was made.

  Denice’s father, Richard Shakarian, who had taken over for his father, Demos, as head of the Full Gospel Businessmen’s Fellowship, convinced Robert to speak to the Pentecostal gathering at the big Anaheim Convention Center. The born-again Christian was in heaven, literally and figuratively, telling the praise-the-Lord gathering that he had given O.J. a Bible and prayed with him. “God has a plan for everyone,” he told the audience. “I hope you will keep O.J. Simpson in your prayers.”

  Being in the media spotlight, however, wasn’t all that Kardashian had hoped for. The dark side of fame was becoming the focus of tabloid print and TV reportage. The O.J. case and the cast of characters had all the elements. And next to Kato Kaelin, O.J.’s roommate at the time of the murders, Kardashian was considered central casting’s version of the slimy hanger-on, the mouthpiece with the edgy music-industry background. His Armenian dark looks, his expensive suits, that streak in his hair, the Rolls-Royce or Mercedes-Benz that were his daily drivers fit the tabloid narrative perfectly. He was the epitome of O.J.’s advisor and pal.

  * * *

  CURIOUSLY, OTHERS PERCEIVED KARDASHIAN DIFFERENTLY, viewing him as one who cared little for the spotlight, as one who was shy.

  A few days before the Bronco chase, Kardashian had lunch with his close friend and divorce attorney, Neal Hersh, at Harper’s, a trendy restaurant located in what was then the ABC Entertainment Center, in Century City, and later the headquarters for CAA, the powerful Creative Artists Agency.

  Kardashian told Hersh that he had been invited to be the keynote speaker at the graduation at his alma mater, San Diego School of Law, which was quickly coming up, and he was asked to talk on the topic of lawyers who succeeded as businessmen. “And Robert was saying to me, ‘Neal, I’m too shy. I don’t want to stand in front of all those people and speak.’ And I said, ‘Robert, your story is fantastic. I’ll help you write this thing. Don’t be silly. Say yes.’

  “And something like twenty-four hours later he was on national television, being seen by a billion people worldwide, and at that moment he was probably one of the most recognizable faces in America, if not the world. So if someone says he wasn’t shy or unassuming, they are wrong. He was shy and unassuming. He just was thrust into the O.J. case.”

  Joni Migdal agreed with Hersh’s assessment.

  The woman who had known him since junior high, who had become his confidant, and his lover for a time, who was at his side when he met his future first wife, Kris, and who took him in when they separated over her affair, said the “beauty of Robert was that while he was very, very popular, he did not want to be famous at all.”

  She said his parents, Arthur and Helen, were furious when he came to O.J.’s defense and put the Kardashian name out into the public domain for the first time.

  “When he offered to help O.J., they were mortified because the important values they had instilled in Robert were to stay under the radar, and live his life quietly, and with dignity and with respect. They liked O.J., but they hated the notoriety. They hated the publicity.”<
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  Robert’s family, the Kardashians, were a secretive lot, making money in tough, highly competitive, sometimes dirty businesses—from waste management to historically corrupt meat packing and much in between—so keeping it on the down-low was of the utmost importance. By going public in the most publicized murder trial in contemporary American history, Robert had broken the Kardashian family’s vow of silence, its omertà.

  Thus, members of the sprawling Kardashian family—Robert’s generation of relatives whose forebears had fled Armenia and a genocide of its people that was prophesied—weren’t at all happy with the attention he had brought to the Kardashian name. And were even more upset later by the even brighter spotlight shone on it by Robert’s ex-wife Kris Jenner and the three daughters she had with him, in particular Kim Kardashian, of sex tape fame.

  The good Kardashian name, they felt strongly, was being dragged through the mud.

  As one outspoken family member, Paulette Kardashian, wife of Kardashian relation Sam Kardashian, proprietor of Southern California Disposal and Recycling Company—famous for the massive thirty-by-fifty-foot American flag flown above his business near the busy 10 freeway in Santa Monica—declared in 2016:

  “Nobody would have known who the Kardashians are. We were really put on the map because of a murder and a sex tape, and that’s sad. My husband—he’s really quite upset that the Kardashian name has been taken down. When you have a clean name, and then your name is known all over the world for different things, it’s very difficult. The Kardashian name got recognized because of the murder and when Kim did that sex tape.

  “My granddaughter, who goes to university and kind of looks like Kim, told me when her classes start she will text her professors and tell them, ‘Please don’t use my last name in class.’ She doesn’t want to be hassled.

  “When all this started,” continued Paulette Kardashian, “my husband kept thinking it’s going to go away, but I said, ‘It’s not going to go away. It’s only going to get bigger.’ But what is it those Kardashians are selling? They really aren’t noted for anything. But people give Kris credit because she’s very smart, she’s very shrewd … a murder and a sex tape.”