Illicit cookie could have crumbled parole bid

An illicit cookie could have cost O.J. Simpson a chance at parole, according to a retired correctional officer who worked at the Nevada prison where Simpson has been for almost nine years.

With Simpson scheduled to appear before the Nevada Board of Parole on Thursday, Jeffrey Felix, a former correctional officer at Lovelock Correctional Center, recalled the cookie incident.

Not long after Simpson arrived at the prison, Felix said, an inmate who helped with food preparation stole cookies, brought them back to the unit where Simpson was housed and handed them to the other inmates, most of whom returned to their cells before eating the cookies.

But Felix said Simpson ate his cookie in plain view and drew the attention of a correctional guard who threatened to write up Simpson for a violation — one that could have imperiled Simpson’s chances at parole for his conviction of the 2007 robbery of sports memorabilia dealers in Las Vegas, according to Felix.

“Being the loud O.J. he is, the guard in the bubble saw him eating a cookie,” Felix told USA TODAY Sports. “And of course she said, ‘Where’d you get the cookie from?’ Well, O.J. doesn’t lie. He got it from a guy, a culinary worker.

“Well, she wrote him up for having contraband. Over a cookie. That’s pretty crazy. So when I came back the next day for work, O.J. came to me and told me what happened. He said, ‘I can’t have a write-up because I won’t get my parole.’ ”

Felix, who wrote about his relationship with Simpson in a book entitled Guarding

the Juice and retired in 2015, said he intervened with the female correctional guard.

“I talked to the lady who wrote him up and she said, ‘ I’m not changing my mind. He brought contraband on my tier,’ ” Felix said, adding that he told the woman she would forever be known as the “Cookie Monster” and that the write-up would undermine her reputation in the prison.

Now, Simpson is expected to be paroled and could be released as soon as Oct. 1 — thanks in part, Felix said, to the story of the illicit cookie and how the female correctional officer handled the potential write-up.

“So she tore it up,” Felix said.