On June 28, 1996, OJ Simpson hosted an anti-violence fund-raiser that drew 300 attendees sponsored by a black charity. Attendees included F. Lee Bailey and Al Cowlings. News copters fluttered overhead, and a crowd assembled outside his mansion gates. Supporters stood on one side of the drive, and the Jewish Defense League turned out waving “GUILTY” signs to express their disdain over the accused killer’s “hypocrisy.”
The JDL is a terrorist organization. Irv Rubin, one of Pellicano’s soldiers, would face arrest in 2002 for the bombing of King Fahd Mosque in Culver City, and the office of Arab-America Congressman Darrell Issa. While awaiting trial, Rubin’s throat was slashed with his own prison-issued razor. He leapt, or was pushed, from a balcony to the floor 18 beet below. Rubin was placed under a medically-induced coma by doctors at the Angeles County-USC Medical Center, survived for a little over a week but his internal injuries were so severe that his heart stopped beating before the trial commenced. The authorities ruled his death a suicide. The family suspected that he’d been murdered. Peter Morris, Rubin’s attorney, allowed that suicide was a possibility, but pressed for an investigation. The family threatened a lawsuit if the government refused to comply.
The JDL’s mission is war on anti-Semitism and enemies of Israel. But Simpson wasn’t a Jew hater. In fact, the night before the murders on Bundy, he attended a benefit for israel’s Sheva hospital. And he wasn’t a Muslim. The JDL protest wasn’t about about hypocrisy or racism. The signs were for the cameras, intended to reinforce the public perception of OJ’s guilt.
Simspn, sporting a tuxedo, stepped through the gate and spoke to a reporter. “Who can be against stopping violence?” he said. “There have been 1,700 murders since Nicole and Ron and who cares about those people?”
Rubin of bellowed at the clutch of black Simpson supporters in the street. Behind him, his fellow domestic terrorists waved signs: “Hey O.J., Charity Begins At Home.” “Rent-A-Killer, Freak Show Tonight.”
Dean Boyd, a Customs Department spokesman based in Washington, described the Gambino Ecstasy operation as a “free-for-all. We’re beginning to see murders among rival trafficking groups. Now, we’re seeing suburban kids getting in over their heads, with the result that 21-year-olds are being found shot in the head for suspected Ecstasy thefts.”
Orgrad was not a bombastic gangster. He spoke in a measured tone and did not engage in open displays of pique. In Israel, a background check was conducted by authorities, and his record was clean. Customs agents in the US suspected that the name Orgrad was an alias, but he had a brother back home with the surname. In the US, he occasionally boasted that he was a Mossad agent, and his secret ownership of Chameleon Strategic Operations, a private detective agency in Los Angeles, was grist for suspicion of intelligence ties.
But mostly he conducted himself like an ambitious, hardened criminal. in an Armani suit.
Hus customer base included Ilan Zarger, a fellow Israeli middleman who resold the pills to Sammy “The Bull” Gravano in Arizona,. The New York Times reported on December 15, 2000 that Zarger’s drug ring was” the largest ever to have been based in New York City and was responsible for distributing nearly four million Ecstasy pills across the country.” Zarger arrested in July, 2000 with 15 members of a another criminal syndicat “known as the Brooklyn Terror Squad. This group, both prosecutors and their victims say, was made up of young men and women from Brooklyn who wreaked havoc in the city’s nightclub scene by robbing and assaulting young people as they danced at raves or at local night spots.”
Drugs trafficking was Orgrad’s primary business interest, but under Pellicano’s was a multi-faceted criminal enterprise. A whistle-blower told authorities that one one ocasion, Cookie and Irv Rubin tool part in the theft of computers and data related to a federal probe of investment fraud from offices in Beverly Hills.
And then there was Heidi Fleiss. It wasn’t kismet that sent her to J&J Beepers, where she met Cookie. An associate of Orgrad’s made the referral when she was looking for a wide-screen TV. Orgrad knew her business, and he wormed his way into her life, fully aware that she suited his purposes in the burgeoning LA underworld.
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