'Devil's advocate' lawyer Jacques Vergés dies

Jacques Verges, the flamboyant lawyer who earned the nickname the “Devil’s advocate” for his defense of former Nazis, terrorist bombers and notorious dictators and their aides, died Thursday. He was 88. Verges died of cardiac arrest in the Paris bedroom of Voltaire, the Enlightenment philosopher famed for his attacks on the establishment, according to Pierre-Guillaume de Roux, the editor of Verges’ memoir “My Confessions.” “It was an ideal place for the final act of this born performer,” said de Roux. “Like Voltaire, he cultivated the art of permanent revolt and about-face.” Celebrated and excoriated, Verges already had a reputation as an acerbic attorney ready for the lost cause when he stepped up to defend Klaus Barbie, the former Gestapo captain who directed a campaign of torture and death in the south of France and was ultimately convicted of crimes against humanity in 1987 in Lyon, France. He was later a lawyer for Paul Touvier, a Frenchman who was Barbie’s aide in execution and was also convicted of crimes against humanity. “I would have defended Hitler,” Verges once said. “Defending doesn’t mean excusing. A lawyer doesn’t judge, doesn’t condemn, doesn’t acquit. He tries to understand.” Verges likewise lost the case against Carlos the Jackal, the Venezuelan terrorist who kidnapped 11 OPEC oil ministers in 1975 and led a series of bombings and shootings in the 1970s and 1980s. During the 1994 trial of Carlos, Verges found himself in the headlines, accused of being a spy and Carlos’ comrade-in-arms. He was never charged and appeared unperturbed at the allegations. “I’ll let you in on a little secret. The assassination of King Alexander of Yugoslavia, that was me. … The Great Train Robbery, that was me, too,” he said at the time, keeping a traight face as he spoke to French television. But Verges never denied — and indeed reveled in — the mystery that outlived him. Born in 1925 in Thailand, Verges’ mother was Vietnamese and his father was a Frenchman from the overseas island Reunion. He grew up on Reunion and took up the anti-colonialist cause as a young man. The attorney married one of his first clients, Djamila Bouhired, a young Algerian nationalist who went on trial in 1957, accused of planting bombs in public places. He took on Algerian citizenship, converted to Islam and rose to prominence in the foreign affairs ministry. Then, in 1970, he disappeared.