Elmer Smith | Don't look for him to languish in jail

SAYS HERE that O.J. Simpson is facing up to 60 years in prison for storming a Las Vegas hotel room to take back his stuff.

Well, no. He isn't.

He's not facing 60 years or even 60 months. By the time this latest O.J. dustup settles, he probably will not have served 60 days in the pokey.

He may have sold another 60,000 copies of "If I Did It," the hottest title on Amazon. com. He may have earned another 60 minutes in the spotlight.

But a long jail term for armed robbery? Not likely.

This is just the latest renewal of the long-running morality play "The Martyrdom of O.J." It's one more yank on our chain from one of the world's biggest yankers.

What he really broke into last week was a slow news cycle. If his showdown with a few unwitting memorabilia collectors costs him a few weeks in jail, it's a small price to pay for a man whose worse fear is that we will forget him.

The Las Vegas Police Department, all too eager to hang his pelt from their rafters, is an unwitting accomplice in his quest for notoriety.

They managed to get full TV coverage Sunday of his arrest, which showed him being led away in handcuffs. How many common crooks do you see get busted on national TV?

Then they charged him with a laundry list of felonies, including two counts each of robbery with a deadly weapon, assault with a deadly weapon, conspiracy to commit a crime and burglary with a firearm.

Simpson, the press dutifully reported, could face up to 30 years in prison on each of the robbery counts. Nobody who read or wrote those words believes he will face anything like 60 years.

A judge, apparently making sure that he spent at least a few days in jail, held him without bail even though there is no evidence that he was ever armed.

But an alleged accomplice, Walter Alexander, 46, of Mesa, Ariz., who was arrested on the same felony counts Saturday night, was released without bail.

Can you say, "O, wretched injustice!"?

Someone will. If his lawyers can't spring him by the end of the week,

we'll be barking at each other about whether poor Juice is being persecuted by the press and the police.

That to be followed by the old acid test: Do you believe he got away with murder? Which will be answered, as usual, in black- and-white terms.

There are people whose whole careers were spawned by O.J. mania. Greta Von Susteren is one of a half-dozen attorneys whose practice is confined to idle speculation on cable TV.

In fact, the Court TV channel is still running off the momentum it built up during the Simpson trial a full 13 years ago. Everyone from the assistant district attorneys who screwed up the prosecution to Mark Furhman, the lying racist whose perjured testimony helped to free him, have sold O.J. books.

Realizing that an industry has built up around him, O.J. has done everything he could to get a piece of the action for himself. His first book, "I Want to Tell You," came out before the verdict and flopped.

"If I Did It," the printed "confessional" in which O.J. speculates about how he would have murdered his former wife Nicole and her friend Ron Goldman is now the property of the Goldman family, who will collect 90 percent of the proceeds as partial payment for the $38 million wrongful-death civil suit they won.

What kind of worm writes a book to capitalize on the horrible murder of a woman he claims to have loved, a book that their children may read?

Sixty years in jail is a slap on the wrist for a worm like O.J. But don't count on it.

The criminal-justice system that failed to get him for murder 13 years ago does not get to put him away for life on some penny-ante "burglary." Even the so-called victims are starting to whine for him.

If they really want to punish O.J., they should sentence him to spend the rest of his life in obscurity. That would be a fate worse than death. *

Send e-mail to smithel@phillynews.com or call 215-854-2512. For recent columns: http://go.philly.com/smith