Best in the West

Ebony, April, 1994 by Laura B. Randolph

NOT long after Denzel WAshington began researching his role in the country's most talked-about film, Philadelphia, he visited the Los Angeles law offices of Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. It seems the Oscar-winning star wanted a real-life role model on whom he could base his portrayal of a lawyer in the multimillion-dollar hit.

To study for the role, Washington didn't want just any lawyer. He wanted to observe the black belt of trial lawyers -- a masater of litigation who was winning the big-time, big-bucks cases.

Moe importantly, he wanted a lawyer who'd gone from underdog to top dog, a lawyer who knew how to play a courtroom as well as Wynton Marsalis knows ow to play a trumpet, a litigator who'd taken the cases people said he might win when hell freezes over, then laughed all the way to the bank when the multimillion-dollar verdicts came rolling in.

He wanted Johnnie Cochran.

"He said he'd asked around and he heard I ws the lawyer," says Cochran who, unfortunatley for WAshington, had to refer the star to one of his young associates because Cochran wasn't arguing a case in court at the time.

Nonetheless, Washington had heard right. As, apparently, had a number of other stars--including Elizabeth Taylor, who, last December, advised Michael Jackson he needed Cochran to take over his defense on charges that Jackson molested a teenage boy, and Snoop Doggy Dog, the controversial rapper with the country's No. 1 album who has hired Cochran to defend himon murder charges.

Cochran, however, is not just a hired gunf or the beautiful, the famous and the affluent. On the contrary, perhaps more than any other lawyer in L.A., Cochran is a legal hero because he takes the kind of cases ordinary citizens can identify with, cases where his clients not only are not rich and famous but nameless and faceless people of average to meager resources.

Like the family of Ron Settles, the California State University-Long Beach footballstar, who, Signal Hill police contended, hanged himself in the city jail after he was arrested for speeding. After geting a court order for the exhumation of Settles' body, Cochran proved that he young Black man hadn't hanged himself after all. He had been strangled.

Then there are the families of the 18 little Balck girls who allegedly were being sexually molested by their third-grade teacher, a teacher, Cochran established, school officials knew was a pedophile before they assigned him to the school.

"Nobody did anything about it because these people were poor and minority," says Cochran, who, in 1990, negotiated the largest settlement in the history of the L.A. School District on behalf of the little girls. "Not only does the settlement ensure none of the girls will ever have to work, I made sure a major fund was established should any of them ever suffer psychological problems."

That kind of thinking, say insiders, coupled with what Cochran calls his "burning passion to eradicate injustice" make the 56-year-old Louisiana native uniquely suited to represent Reginald Denny--the White truck driver who was beaten in 1992 when the unrest triggered by the Rodney King verdicts broke out--in his civil rights suit against the city.

Long before he became internationally famous for his "A" list client roster or the out-of-court settlement he helped negotiate with the 14-year-old boy who accused Michael Jackson of sexual molestation, there were stories about Cochran.

In fact, in the City of Angels, what you hear about Cochran is legal lore, sometimes legend: how he got Todd Bridges acquitted of all charges when the Diff'rent STrokes star was accused of shooting a man in an alleged drug deal gone wrong.

HOw, not long after former football star Jim Brown hired Cochran to represent him when a schoolteacher accused him of rape, the charges were dismissed.

How, in Southern California the quickest and surest way for a victim of police brutality to get the government's attention is to hire Cochran. (It has been estimated that, over the past decade, juries have awarded his clients an estimated $35 million in county and city funds, coming primarily from police abuse cases.)

And most important, you also hear how Cochran--the Los Angeles Trial Lawyers Association's 1990 "Attorney of the Year"--sees the law first and foremost as a tool to empower the powerless.

That's exactly why Cochran says he is representing Reginald Denny. The way the U.C.L.A. and Loyola Law School graduate sees it, Denny's case comes down to one thing--racism. "This case is about more than Reginald Denny," says Cochran, whose $40 million civil rights lawsuit on Denny's behalf charges the L.A. police purposely abandoned that the predominantly Black neighborhood of South Central L.A. during the unrest. "This case is about empowerment of people who are perceived to be powerless. There were over 25,000 9-1-1 calls requesting help for Rdginald Denny and all of them went unresponded to. What does that tell you? They would never have done this in an affluent White area."