Ex-Nixon Aide, Defense Lawyer Alan May Dies : Obituary: Decorated Green Beret offered free counsel to Vietnamese in the county. He succumbed to complications of diabetes at age 50.

Alan M. May, a former Nixon White House aide and prominent Orange County defense attorney who was known for his flamboyance and love of the county’s Vietnamese community, died Wednesday from complications of diabetes. He was 50.

May, a decorated Green Beret who served in the Vietnam War, often practiced law free of charge in Orange County’s Little Saigon area of Westminster.

In his most celebrated case, he represented Minh Van Lam, a Cal State Fullerton student who was accused of killing a physics professor in October, 1985.

William Cassidy, a defense investigator who was a business partner and close friend of May, recalled Friday that Lam paid May a $200 retainer, “and Alan spent $375,000 of his own money and put himself in personal bankruptcy to defend him.”

The case attracted national attention. A Superior Court judge accused May of turning the trial into “a media circus.” But the judge was swayed by May’s arguments and dropped the murder charge, instead convicting Lam of involuntary manslaughter.

Cassidy said that during the war, May “developed a very strong love for the Vietnamese people, which he carried with him for the rest of his life.” May opened a storefront practice in Little Saigon in 1984 to provide criminal defense services, mostly without pay. “He did over $1.5 million in pro bono work in four years,” Cassidy said.

In a sense, Cassidy said, May was a “Robin Hood,” who took hefty fees to defend professional criminals so he could support his charitable work.

Hundreds of bouquets sent by members of Southern California’s Vietnamese community were delivered to Home of Peace Cemetery on the outskirts of San Francisco, where a funeral service for May was held Friday.

Carl Holmes, Orange County’s chief deputy public defender, said that around the courthouse May was known as “an innovative and somewhat eccentric criminal trial lawyer who was often very imaginative and very committed to his client’s causes.”

May served in the Nixon White House as an aide on the Cabinet committee for education, then as special counsel to the President. For a time he was also director of ACTION, an agency that oversaw Vista and the Peace Corps, and was special assistant to the secretary of Health, Education and Welfare.

Cassidy said that in 1989, as a diversion from his worsening illness, May became fascinated with a 100-year-old report of a young woman who had committed suicide at the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego.

He insisted that he saw the woman’s ghost while staying in the room she died in and after extensive research he determined that she had actually been murdered. He wrote a book about the case, which in May was featured in an episode of CBS’ “Haunted Lives . . . True Ghost Stories.”

May is survived by his father, Dr. Angelo M. May, sisters Marilyn Langer and Carol Ann Falberg, and brothers David and Daniel May.