Villains Beginning With 'M'

Mason Verger

Hannibal created by author
Thomas Harris (1999)
film (2001)

Mason Verger is the son of Molson Verger, a wealthy meat packer. He claims to have accepted Jesus into his life, but uses his faith to gain access to a Christian summer camp his father owns so that he can molest children. He has a younger sister named Margot, whom he regularly abuses when they are children and brutally rapes when they are teenagers. Verger tears her labia, and dislocates her shoulder. Margot goes into therapy with Dr. Hannibal Lecter, who advises her not to fall into self-loathing, and that it would be cathartic to kill her brother instead. Years later, she works as Verger's bodyguard and tries to get into his good graces so he would donate his sperm to her lesbian partner, in order to take advantage of a stipulation in their father's will that denies her any inheritance but left in a provision stating that his estate and business would go to any children that Verger might have.

Lecter is introduced to Verger in the 1970s when a court order recommends therapy after he is found guilty of child molestation. During his sessions with Lecter, Verger claims to have worked with several of the world's worst war criminals, including Idi Amin. At one point, he was a participant at Easter of a re-enactment of the crucifixion which resulted in the death of a manual laborer. Verger and Lecter seem to get on well until Verger invites Lecter to his pied a terre in Owings Mills, Maryland. After Verger shows him the noose he uses to perform auto-erotic asphyxiation, Lecter asks him to demonstrate the procedure. While Verger is dangling from the noose and masturbating, Lecter offers him amyl nitrite and several other mind altering drugs, and convinces Verger to tear his face off with a shard of mirror and feed it to his pet dogs. Verger does so, and also gouges out one of his eyes and eats his own nose. Lecter finishes him off by manipulating the noose to break his neck. Amazingly, Verger survives this, but is left a hideously scarred and disfigured quadriplegic dependent on a life support machine.

According to the police, Verger is one of two of Lecter's victims to survive (the other going unnamed), until 1975 when Will Graham also survives. Verger never issues a statement in Lecter's trial. Instead, he concocts a plan to have Lecter eaten alive by boars, specially bred over several generations for viciousness and a taste for human flesh.

Later, Verger uses Clarice Starling as bait by discrediting her. A crooked Justice Department employee, Paul Krendler, also helps in the frame up. A tip off from a detective called Rinaldo Pazzi locates Lecter in Florence, Italy, under the alias "Dr. Fell." Pazzi tries to kidnap Lecter, but ends up murdered along with a Sardinian and a pickpocket. Lecter then returns to the United States.

Lecter's murder of a deer hunter alerts the FBI to his return to the U.S. Lecter is eventually kidnapped by Verger's men and is about to be eaten by the boars when Starling rescues him. She is wounded and Lecter takes her to safety.

In the novel, Verger is murdered by his sister, who kills him by forcing his carnivorous pet moray eel down his throat. In the film, he is killed by his private physician, Cordell, who, sick and tired of having to bow down to his abusive employer, pushes him into the wild boar pen, where he is eaten.

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