Trial tapes suggest Simpson could count on few friends

O.J. Simpson reacted to testimony during his trial in Las Vegas on Friday. Several of his former associates are testifying for the prosecution. (Associated Press)

LOS ANGELES - When he's not on trial, O.J. Simpson wakes up at 5 a.m. and is driving to a golf course in Miami by 6:30. He takes an afternoon nap and goes to bed early. In between, the football great is beset by requests.

Strangers want to take his picture. Fans want to buy him a drink. And, according to recordings played in his robbery-kidnapping trial in Las Vegas, men who call themselves his friends try to cash in on his infamy.

The hours of recordings - made surreptitiously by a Simpson business partner on Sept. 13, 2007 - provide an unfiltered look at the Hall of Famer's life since his 1995 acquittal in the killings of his former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman.

Though Simpson once juggled dating models and posing on Hollywood red carpets, the tapes portray an aging but still charismatic man, who draws crowds of adoring strangers in bars but counts few trustworthy friends.

His $400,000 annual pension and $1 million house seem at odds with the low-rent tactics of those who surround him. In the recordings, he complains about one confidant who tried to persuade him to film a sex tape and to pose for the National Enquirer with a mound of cocaine. Another associate is heard hitting him up for autographs only to call him a killer as soon as he's out of earshot.

"I know my friends," Simpson says on one tape, just hours before he and five cohorts allegedly robbed a pair of memorabilia dealers. The prosecution's witness list belies his assessment.

All but one of the eight other men at the Palace Station Hotel & Casino confrontation are testifying against Simpson. Several said he was the scheme's ringleader and that at least one of his associates was armed.

Simpson, 61, faces a dozen counts, including kidnapping, which carries a potential life sentence. Grayer and more weary-looking than at his Los Angeles trials, he nonetheless arrives at Courtroom 15A each day smiling. He laughs as he signs autographs and greets well-wishers.

"It gets old," he conceded after signing a book on a recent afternoon. But, he added, "I'm a public person. I love people."

His private life is fraught with schemes and betrayals, according to the recordings, interviews, and court testimony.

Simpson and his former agent, Mike Gilbert, collaborated on a number of business ventures, including a planned auction of the suit Simpson wore the day of his acquittal. In 1997, after a civil jury found Simpson liable for the pair of murders, Gilbert helped Simpson hide his assets, associates say on the recordings.

But a decade ago, the men had a bitter falling out and no longer speak. Prosecutors say Simpson's anger toward his old friend - he maintains Gilbert stole valuable mementos from him - led the NFL standout to plan the robbery.

On the recordings, Simpson rants about the agent's purported deceit to anyone who will listen.

Gilbert, he tells one gathering, once paid a woman to seduce him in a hotel room in hopes of selling the tape to the Enquirer. The set-up, which Simpson said he was unaware of, went belly up after he accidentally moved the hidden cameras.

Simpson's girlfriend, Christie Prody, recalls Gilbert promising her $1 million to install video cameras in her bedroom. "This is your friend?" she recalls asking Simpson incredulously.

Gilbert was just one of the characters who relied on Simpson - or at least his signature - for income. Bruce Fromong, one of the alleged victims, acknowledges that he owned about 2,000 items autographed by Simpson. The other alleged victim, Alfred Beardsley, Simpson says on one tape, desperately wants to buy his leather overcoat.

In conversation, those who deal in Simpson memorabilia bounce between obsessive devotion and derision, boasting of their close relationship with him in one breath and ridiculing him the next.

The man who made the recordings, Thomas Riccio, is called a "hero" by Simpson for alerting him that Beardsley was trying to sell his merchandise. But after Simpson's arrest, Riccio made more than $200,000 by selling copies of the recordings and snagging a book deal.

On the tapes, Simpson talks about grasping at the remnants of his once-considerable fame.

He seems to have time for everyone who recognizes him - even Riccio's friend, a limo driver who boasts to an uninterested Simpson about getting into strip clubs for free. When another man can't remember Simpson's movie roles, he gamely lists the "Naked Gun" movies.