LAS VEGAS – If O.J. Simpson is concerned about his most recent brush with the law, it was not apparent Saturday as the aging former NFL star lounged poolside at the Palms Hotel.

“I’m not walking around feeling sad or anything. I’ve done nothing wrong,” Simpson told the Los Angeles Times.

“I’m having a great time.” Besides, he quipped, “I thought what happens in Las Vegas stays in Las Vegas.”

Earlier, in an interview in the hotel lobby, Simpson offered the most detailed account to date of a confrontation Thursday night in which he and some associates are under investigation for allegedly robbing two men of sports memorabilia and other items at gunpoint.

Simpson said he and his friends went to the Palace Station Hotel to reclaim various football souvenirs and personal photos, some of them taken by his slain ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson. Simpson said the meeting was arranged by a California auctioneer who had been contacted by the prospective sellers and was suspicious about how the men had obtained the items.

Simpson said he brought some “golfing buddies and some of their friends” to the meeting to help him carry his belongings out of the hotel. He vehemently denied that he or any of the other men was armed, as was alleged.

“I’m O.J. Simpson. How am I going to think that I’m going to rob somebody and get away with it?” he said during a 20-minute interview.

“You’ve got to understand, this ain’t somebody going to steal somebody’s drugs or something like that. This is somebody going to get his private (belongings) back. That’s it. That’s not robbery.”

The auctioneer, Thomas Riccio, set up the meeting with the buyers, Alfred Beardsley and Bruce Fromong, Simpson said.

Police, however, are taking the allegation seriously, according to a story published Saturday in The Las Vegas Review-Journal, which quoted a source close to the investigation as saying: “We do believe a robbery occurred and O.J. was part of it. He went there with goons who were armed.”

Simpson declined to identify the men who were with him, but said they were dressed in suits and headed to a dinner party later in the evening.

“They’re not gangsters – not that I know of anyway,” he said. “I don’t hang out with gangsters. I hang out with golfers.”

Thursday’s incident is just the latest in which Simpson has found himself in a legal tangle. Since his acquittal in the 1994 deaths of his ex-wife and her friend Ronald Goldman, he has been accused of assaulting a photographer; charged in a road-rage incident and ticketed for speeding through a Florida manatee zone in a power boat – among other run-ins with police.

But on Saturday, dressed in a white polo shirt, blue bathing suit, white tennis shoes and a white visor, the 60-year-old former running back smiled and waved to passersby who recognized him in the lobby. One man pumped his fist in the air and said “Juice” in an apparent show of support. Others asked to take photos or shoot video of him, requests Simpson declined.

During the interview, Simpson acknowledged he became emotional when he entered the Palace Station hotel room and saw that Beardsley and Fromong – whom he knows from past dealings – were trying to sell what he insists were items stolen from him by a former sports agent.

“Why would you steal from me? I have never been bad to you guys,” Simpson said he shouted at one point.

Simpson said the former agent stole the items, along with the suit he was wearing on the day he was found not guilty of killing his former wife and Goldman, when the agent helped him move out of his former home in Los Angeles . He said the agent once worked with Fromong and owed him money, and turned over the stolen items to Fromong to settle the debt. Fromong was not immediately available for comment.