Sacramento legal giant John Virga, who defended would-be assassin Squeaky Fromme, dies

John Edward Virga, who over the course of a 57-year career became one of Sacramento’s most prominent and successful attorneys, died July 14. He was 84.

Virga, the only lawyer to take testimony from a sitting U.S. president in a criminal trial, had a vast array of clients ranging from a bathhouse madam to celebrity athletes to a woman wrongly accused of hiring a hit man to kill an old boyfriend.

He also was known in Sacramento’s legal community as a lion who took time to offer advice and help to younger lawyers on their way up.

“He was like the godfather of Sacramento law,” defense attorney Mark Reichel said. “He was one of those people who was known just by his last name. ‘Oh, did you hear Virga was in court?’

“And he mentored a lot of young people. He would take aside a lot of public defenders leaving the office. He wanted to pay it forward, for sure.”

Longtime Sacramento attorney Bill Portanova said he knew Virga since 1979 when he was still in law school, and recalled him as “the loving grandfather of the law around here for decades.”

“He had this old-school presence that made everyone stop and just listen,” Portanova said, “like something from a well-written play. And at the same time, it was always natural. There was no pretense.”

And defense attorney Linda Parisi called him “a giant in the legal arena.”

“He was a great advocate even for the most unpopular amongst us,” she said. “He was a true warrior for justice.”

Virga’s infamous client: ‘Squeaky’ Fromme

One of Virga’s most famous cases came to him just nine years after he passed the bar exam in 1966.

He was appointed to represent Lynette Alice “Squeaky” Fromme, the former Manson family follower who pointed a loaded .45-caliber handgun at then-President Gerald R. Ford as Ford walked across Capitol Park in downtown Sacramento on Sept. 5, 1975.

The gun didn’t go off, and Fromme was wrestled to the ground and later faced trial in federal court in Sacramento.

Virga decided he needed the president to come to Sacramento to testify.

“I subpoenaed him to Sacramento,” Virga recalled in 2013. “The government was strongly opposed. I argued, ‘He’s a percipient witness. If he’s above the law, he doesn’t need to be here. If he’s not above the law, he needs to be here.’”

A compromise was worked out in which Ford agreed to testify in the Old Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House.

Virga, lead prosecutor Dwayne Keyes and U.S. District Judge Thomas J. MacBride met the president in Room 345 for 20 minutes on Nov. 1, 1975, as video cameras recorded the testimony.

The video later was played for the jury in Sacramento, where Fromme was convicted after a raucous trial that included Fromme producing an apple from beneath her robe and throwing it at the judge.

She missed and instead beaned Keyes in the face as he was delivering his closing argument.

“Sandy Koufax couldn’t have thrown a better pitch,” Virga recalled in 2013.

Sports fan was at center of legal ring

Virga represented a number of other prominent clients over the years, handling a DUI case for then-Sacramento Kings Coach Eric Musselman and winning an acquittal in 2000 for Kings player Jason Williams in a speeding and reckless driving case.

He won another acquittal the same year for Onterrio Smith, a Grant Union High School star running back who had been accused of misdemeanor battery.

“When you have the whole picture, you see he wasn’t guilty,” Virga said of Smith, who went on to star at Oregon and later in the National Football League.

Virga, the son of a prizefighter, was a die-hard sports fan whose fascination with fighting led to him traveling with Sacramento boxing champion Tony Lopez for matches around the nation and in South Africa, Virga’s daughter, Megan, recalled.

“My dad was always part of the entourage that went with Tony,” she said. “He did all of his contracts. Tony basically came from the Meadowview area of Sacramento and my dad had a real passion for people who needed help or could be taken advantage of.”

Virga often went to work on behalf of clients who were not well-off and needed help, said Luis Cespedes, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s judicial appointments secretary and a 25-year friend.

Cespedes said one of Virga’s most significant cases involved a client from Mexico who had been convicted in Yolo County of a drug offense and agreed to a diversion plan that was supposed to have his conviction removed from his record.

When the man left the country on his honeymoon and later returned through Texas, however, the conviction led to him being arrested and ordered deported.

“We worked diligently to have this conviction vacated so he could be released,” Cespedes said. “The client was in the immigration jail for 9 months and 23 days.

“But for John’s efforts, he would have been permanently barred from the United States and never returned to his wife and child.”

‘True hero in the civil rights community’

Cespedes said he would not be in his position if not for Virga’s support, and said Virga “was committed to access for justice for the poor, for people marginalized in our society.”

“He was a true hero in the civil rights community as well as the legal community,” he added.

Virga, whose older brother Michael J. Virga and nephew Michael G. Virga were both Sacramento Superior Court judges, once represented a judge who pleaded guilty to fixing parking tickets for friends while he was on the bench.

In another case in 1998, he used his influence to arrange a special favor for attorney Michael K. Brady before Brady was sent to prison after falling into drug and alcohol problems.

After sentencing in Sacramento Superior Court, Brady was taken to Virga’s office and allowed to change out of his jail clothes as California Highway Patrol officers stood guard. Then, Brady had a pizza party with his ex-wife and 5-year-old son, who was told Brady was leaving town on a long business trip.

Virga was a Sacramento native who was born May 22, 1939, and met his wife, Wendy, when they were both students at C.K. McClatchy High School.

“She was a sophomore and he was a senior,” said Megan Virga, who is an attorney in her father’s law office. “They met in homeroom because homeroom then was alphabetical, and she was a W and he was a V.”

Virga went off to college at UC Berkeley and received his law degree from Santa Clara University, then began his career as a Sacramento County deputy district attorney.

After four years, he left to form his own firm.

“He was still working to the end,” Megan Virga said. “He was contributing to brainstorming, verbally on all kinds of stuff.

“He wasn’t coming into the office because he had significant mobility issues, but the law was his life, so I would call him on the phone and he would want to know, ‘What’s on the schedule?’”

He died at home with both his wife of 61 years and his daughter holding his hand, Megan Virga said.

“I always hoped that I could be there for his last breath since he was there for my first,” she said. “So bittersweet.”

In addition to his wife and daughter, Virga is survived by two sisters, Margaret Lyon and Kate Enright, both of Sacramento; and son, John, a pediatric physical therapist in Chandler, Arizona.

Services will be at 11 a.m. Sept. 1 at St. Anthony’s Catholic Church, 660 Florin Road.