The former chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Court had a thing for celebrities — once asking activist actress Angelina Jolie to play the role of a “honey trap’’ in a real-life attempt to arrest a notorious African warlord, a published report said Saturday.
The Sunday Times of London said loopy lawman Luis Moreno Ocampo also tried to recruit film stars George Clooney and Sean Penn in his international crusades.
The startling information was leaked by the court to the French Web Site Mediapart and made available to the British newspaper.
Moreno Ocampo approached Jolie about five years ago — and even tried to cast her husband, Brad Pitt, as a co-star — in a stranger-than-fiction plot to take Ugandan Joseph Kony into custody in the Central African Republic, where he was based.
“Forget other celebrities, she is the one,” Moreno Ocampo wrote in an e-mail. “She loves to arrest Kony. She is ready. Probably Brad will go also.”
Moreno Ocampo wanted to embed Jolie, and hopefully Pitt, with US Special Forces close to Kony’s stronghold, according to the report.
Jolie wrote Moreno Ocampo at one point. “Brad is being supportive. Let’s discuss logistics. Much love Xxx.”
Moreno Ocampo claimed Jolie had suggested she could lure Kony to dinner as a ruse to arrest him, the report said.
American troops, he told her, “are eager to get Kony . . . [and] after meeting you, they will do it.”
Moreno Ocampo had his own fixation on Jolie. The prosecutor, who won only one case in his nine-years on the court, was ultimately even less successful with Jolie.
At one point he sent her an e-mail: “Dear Angie, I hope you are well. I miss you.” It went unanswered.
When he heard she was ill, he sent an e-mail to her assistant confessing: “I realize how much I love her.” The assistant replied Jolie had changed her e-mail address.
Moreno Ocampo made still less headway with Clooney and Penn.
He asked Clooney for help flying spy satellites over Libya “to put pressure on Khadafy’s generals.’’
Moreno Ocampo also invited Penn to a New York hotel, and tried to involve the star in a potential investigation into the Palestinian conflict. The ever-flip Penn responded, “While you make the decision on Palestine, I’m embroiled in a decision weather [sic] or not to get a steam in the hotel spa.’’
