Is He Hoping that Mark Furman Is the Detective?

Posted on September 14, 2007 in Celebrity Scoundrels

Just what happened in Las Vegas?

It all started, Southern California auctioneer Thomas Riccio said, when he received a phone call about a month ago “from someone insinuating they had personal items that once belonged to O.J. Simpson” and was interested in selling them. He said he was suspicious about how the sellers had obtained the items, which he described as footballs from record-breaking games, awards and personal photos.

He said the sellers claimed to have the suit Simpson wore the day he was acquitted in the deaths of his ex-wife, Nicole Simpson Brown, and her friend Ronald Goldman.

Riccio said he set up a meeting for 7 p.m. Thursday in a ground-floor room in an economy-rate annex of the Palace Station, a nondescript facility about a quarter-mile west of the city’s famous Strip. “Simpson was supposed to show up, identify the items and tell the men to either give the stuff back or he would call the police,” Riccio said.

But the plan quickly fell apart when Simpson showed up with an entourage of about seven “intimidating looking guys” — at least one of whom had a gun, Riccio said. “O.J. got really emotional, and things got kind of nutty,” Riccio said.

“We tried to peacefully reacquire these personal items, not for their monetary value, but for their family value. O.J. wanted to be able to pass these things down to his kids,” Riccio said. The auctioneer said that Simpson told him the items had been stolen from his house on Rockingham Avenue in Brentwood (a Los Angeles city district) by a former agent who claimed the onetime football star owed him money.

“It got kind of nasty,” Riccio said. “They (Simpson and his companions) took the stuff, and they left. What can I say? Things went haywire. I’m not sure if O.J. knew what was going to happen or not.”

Was there a bloody cufflink that he wanted back?