Reached by Alzheimer’s disease, the star lawyer for politico-financial files died on Sunday at the age of 72. He had started to defend the former President of the Republic Nicolas Sarkozy in 2014.
by Pascale Robert-Diard
Azheimer’s disease had removed the memory of the one he was. Lawyer Pierre Haïk died Sunday, February 19, at the age of 72. But these long years of erasure, until its definitive professional withdrawal, in 2019, have in no way started the RAM that he left to all those who knew him. A model of criminal defense for its colleagues, young or not young, including the Keeper of the Seals, Eric Dupond-Moretti, who wanted to announce his death himself , welcoming “one of the greatest of our time”. An accomplice of courtroom, vacation and giggles, who was invited in all the conversations of his two closer friends, Thierry Herzog and Hervé Temime. “Our brother,” they say of him. But above all, he was “stone”, a love, a pride, a presence of every moment for the one with which he shared everything, Jacqueline Laffont.
At a time when he should only write about him, his Algerian childhood and his arrival in France, in 1962, at 12 years old, his studies of letters, then of law, which he financed by working as a teacher for Children in difficulty, his militant commitment within the information group on prisons founded by Michel Foucault, his interest in the seminars of Jacques Lacan, his learning of penalty scratching the visons of prisons, his current Arab, his compulsive reading of newspapers , his friendship for Enrico Macias, his passion for Oum Kalsoum, his habit of pinching the cheek of his loved ones by punctuating his sentences with a “Miskin” or a sound “Wallou”, now the image of his couple S ‘interposes and imposes itself. Like two identities melted in one, “Pierréjacqueline”.
“Pierréjacqueline” was born in February 1984. Pierre Haïk, who had sworn out four years earlier, was looking for a collaborator, her friend Thierry Herzog presented Jacqueline Laffont. She was 23 years old, was going to get engaged, Pierre Haïk was ten more, he was married and father of two daughters. Everything should have opposed the repatriated eruptive sefarade Jew from Algeria and the discreet daughter of a Catholic and Gaullist naval officer. Nothing separated them anymore. Private couple, professional couple, same requirement passionate for a profession which they said: “We have permanently as tenants anxiety, doubt, questioning. Optimism is not from our city.”
He pleads as he boxes
But for many years, only his name to him appeared in the newspapers, and the clientele of drug traffickers whom he shared with Thierry Herzog had earned them the nickname of “3h” (Haïk, Herzog, heroine). On press photos or images of televisions at the exit of the audience only appeared his face with a matte complexion, the hair in battle, the white flap of his black dress, as still shaken by the passion of the passion of debates. A mouth which, even when she smiled, could not reassure completely. Looking at better, you could see a small and elegant silhouette sneak in the shadows, her files under her arm, while her husband and associate took light.
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