OJ Simpson's Plot Unveiled During Court Hearing
by Chris Georg
November 9th 2007
As the first day of O.J. Simpson’s alleged armed robbery pre-trial hearing wrapped up in Las Vegas yesterday, a series of incriminating details pointing at the former NFL star emerged.
According to one of the victim’s testimony, O.J. Simpson himself plotted the military-style invasion into his room, in which the former football player and some of his “buddies” stole $80,000 worth of sports memorabilia from his hotel room.
Bruce Fromong, 53, a sports memorabilia collector, who was the first of eight witnesses scheduled to testify, said in court that all the stuff in his room was his.
During his three-our recount of the incident, he claimed he didn't know who he was supposed to meet with on September 13, the day Simpson burst into his room at the Palace Station Hotel-Casino near the Las Vegas Strip.
According to Fromong, he and a colleague, Alfred Beardsley, were invited to the room by Thomas Riccio, a Los Angeles memorabilia dealer, who only informed them that an “anonymous buyer” was interested in his stuff.
“When he came in, he kind of stopped, he looked at me and I looked at him,” Fromong was quoted by the New York Times as saying, adding that he knows Simpson for over ten years.
“There was a lot of hollering and yelling and O.J. was yelling, particularly at Alfred Beardsley, saying, 'I thought you were a good guy, I thought you were my friend. You stole from me,'” Fromong said.
Following Fromong’s statement, Riccio took the stand for two hours and confirmed that he arranged the hotel-room confrontation for Simpson after Beardsley contacted him to sell several Simpson items.
“I have my boys here; we’re going to take care of it,” Riccio quoted Simpson as saying.
Riccio explained that the 60-year-old former athlete considered the items seized at gunpoint from the two collectors to be his stolen family heirlooms and never discussed using weapons or violence.
“O.J. was going to come into the room and identify the stuff and hopefully they were going to turn it over to him and we were going to call the police. That was basically the plan,” Riccio told a packed Las Vegas courtroom.
“O.J. was mainly the one plotting this out,” Riccio said. ”We all were sort of (plotting it), but he was mainly the one making the decisions.”
However, when at leas one of Simpson’s entourage showed off a gun, he was as surprised by the act as were the two dealers, because it wasn’t part of the plan.
“There was no reason to have a gun,” he said. “They were getting the stuff back without a gun.”
After the incident, Simpson left a voicemail for Riccio denying that there were guns involved.
“Hey Tom. It's O.J. What are they talking about a gun? All I wanted was my stuff back again,” Simpson says on the 35-second recording, which was played yesterday.
“Nobody had a gun, you know?” he says. “Ain't nobody had any guns. They're feeling guilty so they're trying to make up something.”
The hearing expected to last two or three days, is for Joe M. Bonaventure to decide if there is enough evidence to pursue multiple felony charges against Simpson, who together with two others, Clarence Stewart Jr. and Charles Erlich, are facing 11 felony counts of armed robbery, burglary, kidnapping, assault, conspiracy and coercion stemming from the alleged robbery.
A kidnapping conviction could result in a life sentence, while the armed robbery charge also carries mandatory prison time of between two and fifteen years.
Former co-defendants Michael McClinton, Walter Alexander and Charles Cashmore are expected to testify that Simpson asked for guns to be brought along to show they were serious about retrieving items that he claimed were his.