Jeffrey Felix - Guarding The Juice

GUARDING THE JUICE

How O.J. Simpson Became My Prison BFF

By JEFFREY FELIX
With Corey Levitan

INTRODUCTION

I was offered a sizable bribe not to publish this book. By O.J. Simpson. So say my former co-workers at Lovelock Correctional Center, where I was a prison guard for 20 years.

I just wish Felix would shut up already, he told one of them. I d pay him a million dollars to shut up.
But O.J. Simpson doesn t have that kind of money anymore. He earns $150 a week from an NFL pension and that s it.

This is not an O.J. book. I m telling you now, while you can still return it as new. I m sure it contains insight into the way his mind works, and fills in some gaps in the woefully inaccurate historical record amassed by the tabloids. But to me, it s the story of a personal experience that I m still sometimes not even sure was real.

I was O.J. s most trusted confidante during the first seven years of his only prison stay. He called me his best friend after A.C., referring to Al Cowlings, his chauffeur during the infamous Bronco chase.

That's not an honor that struck me as particularly honorable. You see, I know that O.J. Simpson killed his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and waiter Ronald Goldman on the night of June 12, 1994. Not because he admitted it to me (I don't think he's admitted it to anyone including himself.) I know because, despite how badly the LAPD effed up, the evidence was overwhelming. Even O.J. s attorney and former best friend Robert Kardashian admitted the following during a 1996 Barbara Walters interview: "The blood evidence is the biggest thorn in my side. That causes me the greatest problems. So I struggle with the blood evidence."

But I also know for a personal reason. When you get to know someone extremely well, you know when that person is lying, or being deceptive. The eyes either refuse to look into yours or focus a little too intensely, as though being forced. Or maybe it s not even that. You just know.

There is nothing special about my life, and that s always been perfectly OK with me. At every turn, I made decisions ensuring this fact. I opted for a secure but boring career, in a remote place, requiring the least amount of education and doing the least amount of work possible.

The universe had other plans for me. Imagine falling asleep while watching A Nightmare on Elm Street . Then you wake up and everything in the universe is exactly the same except that Freddy Krueger is now real. Oh, and by the way, you hang out with him every day and he s one of the coolest, most well-behaved, respectful people you ve ever met. That s how it felt.

There's a Safeway supermarket seven miles from the Lovelock prison. Twice a week for most of my 20 years on the job, I picked up a tuna salad sandwich there for lunch creature of habit that I am and glanced at the checkout-stand headlines.

I remember one National Enquirer cover in the winter of 2012. It read: O.J. Bombshell: I m Khloe s Real Dad. And I remember it because, about an hour later, I was standing near the payphone bank in Phase 1, overhearing O.J. and Khloe passionately debate how to handle the fallout.

I couldn t hear her words, but I knew she was begging him to take a DNA test. O.J. refused, but wouldn t explain why. Then he hung up and turned to me.

What do you think I should do, Felix?

Me? WTF?

Once my supervisors at the prison saw the trust O.J. placed in me, they made being his best friend part of my job. They looked the other way when I was late for gun-post duty due to a heart-to-heart in Simpson s cell about his dead sister, or when I couldn t be on the yard because O.J. asked me to do him a personal favor. (I ll get to some of those later.)
This all made perfect sense. If anything ever happened to O.J. due to something he got up to or a plot hatched by other inmates that he caught wind of our house would immediately be cleaned from top to bottom. Every officer would be fired. No one s career can survive the intensity of what went wrong? media scrutiny like that.

And so I became a super-secret O.J. double agent. Whether I liked it or not, I was his permanent sidekick the Robin to his Batman, the Jerry to his Tom, the Sundance to his Butch Cassidy. (And I looked it, too, standing only 5-foot-8 to O.J. s 6-foot-1.) We were inseparable.

Every weekday for seven years, I spent at least 20 minutes a day hanging out with the most famous American ever to be accused of murder. More than 150 million people tuned in to watch O.J. Simpson have that verdict read to him in 1995. Twenty years later, for an hour or more a day, the only one watching him was me. During our conversations, O.J. told me everything about his life.

Everything.
The list of media outlets requesting O.J. interviews was a mile long and got tossed in the garbage every week. The tabloids paid tens of thousands of dollars for information from inmates who weren t close enough to O.J. to spew anything other than facts they made up themselves.

While working at Lovelock, "I cannot confirm or deny that" is all I was permitted to say in response to even the most trivial of O.J. questions. The nondisclosure agreement we all signed to work at Lovelock was so strict, we could not even confirm whether Lovelock was where O.J. was even though the Nevada Department of Corrections listed him as an inmate on its website.

When I retired last September, that nondisclosure no longer applied. My prison shackles were unlocked. And so, now, is my strange-but-true story.

Before you start, though, you have my blessing to jump first to the chapter dedicated to O.J. s penis (Chapter 11, page 74). We both know that s what you were going to do anyway.

This book is for my wife, Rhonda, who seriously worried that I would end up either murdered by O.J. Simpson, or taken as his hostage during a botched escape attempt. Her love for me is rivaled only by her hatred of famous incarcerated former football players.

It's for my sons, Jacob and Zachary, who I couldn't be any prouder of even if they suddenly decided to become prison guards.

And it's for my father, Harvey, for teaching me that living your life for the approval of others is the worst prison of all.