There's a script circulating in Hollywood about the night of June 12, 1994. It begins in the affluent Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles. The narrator, an ex-con from Miami named Charlie, approaches a cottage-style mansion on Rockingham Avenue and sees O.J. Simpson chipping golf balls on the lawn behind the gate.

The man calls out "Juice!" and Simpson welcomes him through the gate.

Simpson's happy to see his friend, but Charlie's here on business. He says "Joey" sent him to collect cocaine debts, many of them related to the celebrity football player's ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and more so, her best friend, Faye Resnick.

Simpson reacts with fury to being squeezed for money, and the target of that anger is Brown. He's scheduled to leave for the airport in less than an hour for a flight to Chicago, but Simpson decides he's going to confront his ex-wife at her home on Bundy Drive.

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With Charlie in tow, he drives his white Ford Bronco to the alley behind Brown's home, where blood is soon spilled in great quantity.

The premise might sound preposterous. The history of that terrible night has long been seared into America's consciousness. There wasn't some Miami mob grunt with O.J. Simpson the night Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were brutally knifed to death. The Los Angeles Police Department and District Attorney's Office couldn't have missed that Simpson had an accomplice, could they?

Charlie is based on a real Miamian, Charles "Charlie" Ehrlich, an ex-drug trafficker and longtime manager at Dean's Gold, a glitzy strip club on 163rd Street and Biscayne Boulevard in North Miami Beach. If fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth, then the script, titled Juiced, after Simpson's nickname, may shed new light on the events of that gruesome night. Or it could be an elaborate ploy to profit off one of the most notorious crimes in history.

Fact or fiction, it's one of those outlandish tales where the deeper you dig, the less crazy it seems.

Charlie

Denizens of Dean's Gold might notice a roundish, 67-year-old bald guy walking around the place like he owns it. Charles Ehrlich doesn't own the club, but he's helped run it for years.

These days, Ehrlich is head of marketing and promotion, routinely posing for social-media photos. He cozies up to exotic dancers at the bar. He flashes his grin in the parking lot with Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson and Rob Corddry after the pair shot some scenes for an episode of the HBO show Ballerz. He shares a laugh with Dennis Rodman.

In older photos that have nothing to do with Dean's, Ehrlich smiles with his longtime friend O.J. Simpson. While his presence on the night of the murders is open for debate, he was definitely with Simpson during the sports-memorabilia robbery in Las Vegas in 2007 that landed the former football star in prison for nine years. Ehrlich was also convicted in the case but did no jail time. He still sounds defensive about it.

"O.J. did nine years for something he should have done six months for," he says.

As for his own involvement, he says he was present during the impromptu hotel-room heist only because Simpson was a friend and asked him to come along.

"I made a mistake," Ehrlich says. "I never should have been in that room. Hindsight is 20/20. It was dumb. It was stupid. I never should have been there."

He told a similar story during interviews with CNN, ABC, and other news outlets when Simpson was up for parole and eventually freed in 2017.

"If it's believed" — "it" being the 'Juiced' version of the murder — "it immediately puts [Charlie] in prison. There's no statute of limitations on murder. Hence our dilemma."

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But when it comes to the reason for this phone call — the night of June 12, 1994 — Ehrlich clams up tighter than a...