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Jacques Portsman
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"Jacques" redirects here. You may be looking for "Jacques Hammer", the French localization name for Jack Hammer; or "Pierre-Paul Jacques"; Max Galactica's birth name in the French localization. "Yūki" also redirects here; please see Yūki (disambiguation) for other uses.

Jacques Portsman
How about a handshake to seal the deal?

Jacques Portsman was a prosecutor prodigy who was in charge of the investigation into a murder that occurred in Miles Edgeworth's office.

A corrupt prosecutor[]

Main article: The Kidnapped Turnabout
Jaques

Arresting Ernest Amano.

Although Jacques Portsman appeared as nothing more than a sports-obsessed prosecutor to his peers, he was actually an agent for an international smuggling ring. His job was to control investigations surrounding puppet corporations of the ring and conceal evidence to cover the ring's tracks and prevent its leader's identity from being revealed. He achieved this through forged evidence and intentionally backing out of certain cases. He rose among the ranks of the prosecutors of Los Angeles to become a high prosecutor in the late winter of 2019. Portsman was also supposed to retrieve court files related to the KG-8 Incident from Room 1202 of the Prosecutor's Building, which was the former office of late prosecutor Byrne Faraday. However, despite insisting that he wanted Room 1202 as his office, he instead received the adjacent Room 1203 since Room 1202 was already occupied. After taking Room 1203 as his own, Portsman arranged for a basketball hoop previously located outside the Prosecutor's Building to be relocated to the 12th floor hallway and positioned near the entrance of his new office.

Interpol became aware that a corrupt prosecutor existed within the ranks of the Los Angeles prosecutor's office, but the identity of the prosecutor remained hidden. Thus, as Interpol agent Shi-Long Lang was about to arrest Ernest Amano, Portsman and his partner Buddy Faith were able to take Amano, a fellow ring member, from Lang without drawing suspicion.

Mission failure[]

Main article: Turnabout Visitor
Miles Edgeworth
I believe the proper phrase here is, "you fail."
Maggey Pretends To Lock The Door

Tricking Maggey Byrde into opening Room 1202.

On the night of March 13, following Amano's arrest, Portsman received a directives card from the smuggling ring's leader ordering him to retrieve a video from the KG-8 Incident that had been confiscated from Amano after his arrest. Portsman had Faith fetch the video and two pieces of evidence intended for Amano's trial: the revolver used during the crime and the victim's pendant.

Portsman the gunman

After shooting Detective Faith.

Meanwhile, Portsman saw his chance to steal the KG-8 files from Room 1202. The basketball hoop outside of Room 1203 had by then become a staple of Portsman's office, so he moved the hoop to the door of Room 1202 and switched the number plates between Rooms 1202 and 1203. Then, at around 12 AM, he tricked the lone late-night security guard, Maggey Byrde, into opening Room 1202 for him with the master key, and then he searched for the KG-8 files. Failing to find what he needed in the office's safe, Portsman ransacked the office bookshelf and then repositioned the binders in what he believed was the correct order after failing to find the files yet again. However, Faith, who had come to the Prosecutor's Building to deliver the requested evidence, caught Portsman in the act and realized that there had been more to his errand than his partner had let on. The two struggled, and Portsman grabbed Faith's revolver, and shot him in his abdomen, accidentally getting some of Buddy's blood on the videotape he was tasked with retrieving in the process. Portsman then wrote detective Dick Gumshoe's name in Faith's blood on some of the books, planning to pin the crime on him since Gumshoe was the only one who was currently in possession of the office key, and took for the corpse the three pieces of evidence, including the video, despite having noticed that it was stained from the gunshot, as the evidence was simply too incriminating against the smuggling ring to just leave behind. With the hour being then around 1:30 AM, he asked Byrde to close the door again, discretely put the basketball hoop back into place after she did so, and then left the building; unbeknownst to him however, the master key had at that point been stolen by someone else, so Byrde had only pretended to lock again the door of what she believed was Room 1203. Portsman then spent some time in the Criminal Affairs Department to establish his alibi.

Half an hour later, at around 2 AM, Miles Edgeworth, the resident prosecutor of Room 1202, found the room unlocked and discovered the body, having also had a chance meeting with an intruder who held him at gunpoint, and the ensuing investigation went underway. To ensure Gumshoe's arrest, Portsman barged into the office again at around 2:56 AM, to take over the investigation; he knelt over Faith's body as if he were mourning his death, and then he pointed out the bloody writing implicating Gumshoe. However, by then, someone else had taken one of the files on which Gumshoe's name was written (coincidentally, the one containing the same papers Portsman himself was searching for), nullifying the accusation against him due to the logical flaws presented by the fact. Portsman thus revealed his backup scapegoat: Maggey Byrde, who had had the only master key in the building at the time. While he initially tried to paint Byrde as the thieving intruder of the office, who then murdered the detective who had discovered the act, after being faced with the fact that Byrde couldn't possibly know about the secret safe, Portsman quickly switched around his reconstruction, instead claiming that he had told Faith about the safes that were in each prosecutor's office, and such Faith had to be the one who tried to rob the safe, at which point Byrde had caught him in the act and killed him in self-defense. Portsman also claimed that he had been in his office the entire time before the fact; despite the flaws and gaps present in his overall reconstruction of events, he nonetheless then used his authority to have Edgeworth, Byrde and Gumshoe removed from the crime scene, pointing to them all as potential suspects.

Undeterred, Edgeworth continued his search in the 12th Floor Hallway and thanks to Byrde's recounting of the events, he figured out what Portsman had done, as there were signs that the basketball hoop had been moved, and not only the door of Room 1203 was locked and without any fingerprints from Byrde on the knob, but there was a note left by Faith slipped underneath it. Edgeworth reentered his office and confronted Portsman with the note, indicating that Faith had retrieved the evidence that Portsman had wanted, but had not found the prosecutor in his office as Portsman was claiming to had been, as well as proof of his trickery with the rooms' doors. However, Portsman was able to dodge the accusations, by claiming that the lack of Byrde's prints on his office's doorknob was due to him simply wiping the knob before touching it out of obsessive-compulsiveness; as for the note, it could had been left earlier during the day, with Portsman simply failing to notice it on the floor while working. Then, taking advantage of Edgeworth's erroneous notion that the killer and the intruder he had met in his office were the same person, Portsman declared his backup alibi: he had been at the Criminal Affairs Department around 2 AM, and as such he couldn't possibly be the killer.

Nonetheless, he was unable to keep the lie going for very long, as Edgeworth was able to deduce that two people had actually entered his office that night; furthermore, while Portsman was still able to briefly dodge the accusations, on account that they hinged on him being the first of the intruders in the office, he then however, made the critical mistake of claiming that he was already storing two pieces of evidence that Faith had given him, in an attempt to conceal the existence of the tape, unaware that the note from his partner had specifically mentioned three. Having seen through his attempted deception, Edgeworth immediately had Gumshoe search Portsman for the missing third piece of evidence: the video, which was furthermore stained with fresh blood, and with only Portsman and Faith's fingerprints on it. With no way for him to run away anymore, Edgeworth conclusively revealed Portsman as the murderer, after which the latter began rapidly biting down on the medal he wore around his neck until he finally swallowed it and fainted. Portsman was promptly arrested for Faith's murder, accidentally leaving his directives card behind, which Edgeworth mistakenly came to believe was a card sent by the Great Thief Yatagarasu due to their near identical appearances.

Personality[]

Gkyuuki

Mugshot.

Portsman was a great fan of sports and regularly played tennis, dodgeball, soccer, and basketball. He would spend hours training in his office. In fact, he seemed to spend far more time working out physically than studying his law books, which themselves were vastly outnumbered by shelves upon shelves of sports memorabilia, trophies, and awards in his office. His love of sport permeated almost everything he did, from having officers "pass" him evidence, to dragging a basketball hoop outside his door for practice, to exercising in his office. When working with others, he offered them a handshake to "seal the deal". When he got serious, he put on the jacket he normally had nonchalantly slung over his shoulder. When worried, he tended to chew on the medal he wore, eventually swallowing it and fainting when finally defeated.

While he came across as a cheerful and impulsive man who cared about his friends, in actuality he was a cold individual who viewed his partner as expendable. He also seemed to have been a bit of a perfectionist.

Name[]

  • Japanese - Makoto Yūki (優木誠人):
    • "Yūki" (優木) has the same Japanese pronunciation as "courage".
    • "Makoto" (誠人) means "honest person".
  • English - Jacques Portsman:
    • His English name is probably a corruption of "jock sportsman".

Unofficial[]

  • Brazilian Portuguese - Tales Portivo: [1]
    • Adaptation of the US pun.
    • "Tales" comes from the Greek Tháles, which means "the flowering one".
    • "Portivo" is an invented surname, to make an pun.
    • His full name is a pun on "esportivo" (sporty) ("Tales Portivo"), for being obsessed with sports.
  • French - Olivier Chelem:
    • "Oliver" is intended to be a reference to the protagonist's name in the French dub of Captain Tsubasa.
    • "Chelem" comes from the French for the sporting term Grand Slam (Grand Chelem). Both his given and family names therefore reference the character's love of sports.

Development[]

  • In the Japanese version, he is voiced by Yūki Furukawa, one of the game's planners. The character's appearance is also apparently based on Furukawa, as he too plays basketball and wears polo shirts.

References[]

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