O.J Simpson Enters Court in Handcuffs for Bail Hearing

By Art Harris, www.artharris.com, all rights reserved

In a world wide web exclusive, The Bald Truth has learned celeb hustler Tom Riccio sold six minutes of an enraged O.J. Simpson cursing and threatening two men he suspected of stealing his memorabilia, backed up by gun-toting goons, to the popular website, TMZ.com, for a tidy $150,000.

“They wanted to break the tapes, and I agreed to give them an exclusive for two days,” he told me. “They wanted the hotel room tape, but I’ve got lots more.”

Indeed…I broke the “price is right” details on Nancy Grace’s CNN Headline News Show Wednesday night when she asked me, “Art, how much did Riccio make on the tapes.”

Later, TMZ managing editor Harvey Levin acknowledged on Larry King Live that his celebrity news site had indeed paid for the right to air the tapes, but didn’t reveal the price.

ROWLANDS: The tape itself, you paid for these tapes? How did you get these tapes?

LEVIN: Well, I mean, we don’t say how we get it. I will say we got it legally, and I also will say that it is common practice for lots of organizations to pay for tapes. There’s nothing wrong with it. I mean, people pay for stringer tape all the time. So, you know, it’s one thing if you pay for an interview. That’s wrong. But if you pay for a videotape or an audiotape and the tape is the tape is the tape, that’s the way everybody works in this town. I mean — and they may say they don’t, but they do.”

While traditional news outlets do not “pay” for news, it’s indeed common practice for many networks and celebrity shows to license the right to use hot video, photos and other material like the OJ tapes. When such material could be evidence in a criminal trial, what may be hot for ratings, legal experts say, could hurt its evidentiary value and, in OJ, The Sequel, wind up helping Simpson walk if his lawyers can attack the taper’s credibility and his money motives.

Did Riccio goad O.J. on? Who suggested the goons come packing heat? What did OJ know about guns and when did he know it? Did he know he’d be leading casino commandos? He was certainly trained for it.

Remember Frogman, the TV pilot OJ shot before he slashed his ex-wife and Ron Goldman to death? Well, an Australian special forces trainer I interviewed when I was covering the case for CNN gave hands-on instruction on close-in combat to actors like OJ, to make scenes look real. Silent assasination techniques like slitting throatsi.

Savvy defense lawyers are expected to not only probe the details behind the tapes, but raise questions about the bonafides of its smarmy hawker, Tom Riccio, an ex-con who has served time in federal prison for receiving stolen property, among other things.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 20th, 2007 at 1:10 am and is filed under ART HARRIS REPORTS, ARTHARRIS.COM EXCLUSIVE, CELEBRITIES, LARRY KING, NANCY GRACE, O.J. SIMPSON, RON GOLDMAN, TOM RICCIO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.