Cochran and Fuhrman, it is true, were made for each other. Tape recordings of Fuhrman's naked racism were what made Cochran's claim of a police frame- up stick for the OJ jury. But Simpson's acquittal was actually just the latest of many bruising encounters between Cochran and the LAPD.
Johnnie Cochran this week was accused of single-handedly stoking the fires of racism to save his client. His fellow defence counsel Robert Shapiro said Cochran had "dealt the race card from the bottom of the pack". The father of victim Ronald Goldman said he should be "put away" for shoving a wedge between the races.
Indeed, in the closing days of the trial, Cochran appeared with bow-tied bodyguards from the Nation of Islam, the radical black group headed by Louis Farrakhan. The clean-cut Nation members are a symbol of black pride, but Farrakhan and his aides have a long history of anti-Semitism, blaming Jews for conspiring against blacks.
Combined with Cochran's comparing Mark Fuhrman to Adolf Hitler in a case where one victim is Jewish, it so offended Shapiro that he said he would never work with Cochran again.
But to accuse Cochran of wantonly crying racism in a crowded theatre is unfair. In 1966, the young attorney represented the wife of Leonard Deadwyler, who was shot and killed by the LAPD after a 90mph chase. Deadwyler was speeding to hospital because he thought his pregnant wife was in labour.
The inquest was televised, and though Cochran lost his case, Los Angeles had its first good look at him. Over the next 30 years, his reputation - and his law firm - grew, largely by taking on the LAPD.
In 1981, Cochran won $700,000 in an out-of-court settlement for the family of Ron Settles, a black university football star who police said hanged himself in jail, but it was alleged had died in a choke hold. In 1991, he collected nearly $10m from a jury for the family of a 13-year-old girl molested by an LAPD officer. Today Cochran is considered one of America's top trial lawyers, with wide-ranging connections throughout the Los Angeles legal and political establishments.
James Harold Cochran, 58, was born in Shreveport, Louisiana and moved to California at the age of six. His father was an insurance company executive, and Cochran's upbringing was firmly middle-class. He graduated from law school in 1964. Among his classmates was the future LA Mayor Tom Bradley. Cochran, like many defence lawyers, served briefly in the District Attorney's office as a prosecutor. There, Judge Lance Ito, who for 10 years prosecuted gang violence cases in LA, worked under him before being appointed to the bench. It may have explained Ito's deferential treatment of Cochran early in the trial.
According to LA law professor Peter Aranella, who knows Cochran well and talked to him weekly through the Simpson trial, he is neither a stellar legal analyst nor particularly bright. But then,"very few great trial lawyers have brilliant minds". There is, says Aranella, "a warmth and a charisma to him that captivateseveryone in the courtroom. He speaks with the cadence and rhythm of a preacher."
Cochran is a true huckster, insisting that he "never, never" doubted Simpson's innocence. At the trial, he left colleague Barry Schenk to hammer on about thedetails of DNA evidence, while he launched into what the St Luke's Gospel had to say about the big lies from the LAPD, calling Fuhrman the rotten apple and "genocidal racist".
Cochran divorced his first wife, Barbara, in the Seventies after a series of bust-ups. She sought restraining orders, alleging he had slapped her around, thrown her against a wall, and "threatened on numerous occasions to beat me up". Cochran, who has remarried, says he "never, never" touched her.
Life After Johnnie Cochran: Why I left the Sweetest-talking, Most Successful Black Lawyer in LA came out this summer. "John and OJ are two middle-aged stars," wealthy and ambitious, Barbara wrote. "But behind their smooth, charismatic exteriors I can't help but see two men who have very little respect for women, who need to abuse and control the women in their lives, who use their money as a means of control."
OJ Simpson was an unlikely black martyr; though he came from the ghetto, he had remarried into the pretty white lives of West LA. But when in mid- 1994 he pleaded with Cochran to join the case, hemust have expected that the undercurrent of race would become a major theme for the defence. After all, when Liz Taylor had previously introduced Cochran to Michael Jackson at her mansion, the attorney set about turning his client from accused child molester to ethnic underdog, taking him round black community leaders in LA, to churches and National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People meetings, where Cochran is a prominent member.
Johnnie Cochran was everywhere this week, lording it in a succession of TV interviews, demanding that America face up to its race divides. At a time when the civil rights movement in America is short of ideas and direction, he is emerging, in the words of former Mayor Bradley, as "a national hero to African Americans". He has proved himself smart enough to take on an $8m prosecution team and win, on live TV, while he speaks to the heart of what many blacks feel about the live legacy of racism in America.
At the annual conference of the black caucus in the US Congress last month, Cochran flew in from Los Angeles as star guest. He was besieged by autograph-hunters while former General Colin Powell looked on from the wings.
"I'm not sure that Johnnie has political ambitions," Professor Aranella says. "But I think he wants to be a player on the national stage of the civil rights movement and this has pushed him forward."
In his speech, Cochran compared the People v OJ Simpson to the landmark ruling from the Supreme Court desegregating schools, Brown v Board of Education. "In America," he said, "how could we, as blacks, possibly initiate the race card?" And the 5,000-member audience, like innocent jurors, ate out of his hand.
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