MAGNETO

In Uncanny X-Men Vol. 1 #350 (1997), a robed figure calling himself Erik the Red hauled a captured Gambit before a kangaroo court in Antarctica and charged him with crimes against mutantkind. The name itself was borrowed goods: Scott Summers had invented the Erik the Red disguise decades earlier in X-Men Vol. 1 #51–52 (1968), and the Shi'ar agent Davan Shakari had worn the costume after him.

The trial's real payload was a confession nobody on the X-Men had ever heard. Under Erik's questioning, Gambit admitted that years before joining the team he had done a job for Mister Sinister — assembling the team of killers called the Marauders, the same Marauders who then carried out the massacre of the Morlocks in the tunnels under New York.

Only on the issue's final page did the hood come off: Erik the Red was Magneto in disguise, staging the whole proceeding to force the secret into the open on his own terms. The revelation shattered Gambit's standing with the team he had hidden it from — Rogue abandoned him in Antarctica in the fallout that followed — and it remains the one courtroom where the Master of Magnetism played prosecutor, judge and surprise witness at once.