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To make sure United Savings would be able to pay these exorbitant salary contracts and golden parachutes, court documents show the officers stashed $6.6 million in an escrow account just ten weeks before the thrift failed so shareholders couldn't get hold of it. At the time, United was so wobbly it could ill afford to have any money siphoned off. But even after receiving written notice from regulatory watchdogs that the golden parachutes and bonuses were illegal, the board granted them anyway, and gift wrapped them in blanket indemnifications to boot.

If Hurwitz and his friends are guilty of anything, it may be of having gone right up to the legal limit and then leaning way, way over the line. While such actions may not be technically illegal, they could easily be unethical. Can you go to jail for unethical behavior? Probably not. Can you be stripped of millions in assets for shaving the line a bit too close for the comfort of a particular judge and jury? Maybe.

"Hurwitz was always within the boundary of the law," says ethics and environmental studies professor Newton. "But he is a perfect example of how it is possible for a person to be ethical at one level and totally unethical at another. He's like a robber baron who coaches Little League and is a great father on his own time. He does not have the foggiest idea that what he's doing from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday has a terribly damaging effect on the public."

"But Hurwitz must have gotten a clue somewhere along the line that ethical considerations are a problem for him, because he does walk the line so carefully," Newton adds. (This opinion, incidentally, has earned the professor the attention of Maxxam's lawyers. After a case study she had presented on Hurwitz, Maxxam and Pacific Lumber at a business ethics seminar was published in a collection of academic essays, Newton received threatening letters designed to muzzle her from Maxxam general counsel Anthony Piero. Of all the corporations and executives profiled at seminars conducted by the Center for Business Ethics in the past 20 years, only Maxxam has threatened to sue over its portrayal.)

The question of whether or not someone can be held liable for operating in a moral gray zone may be one reason Hurwitz is trying so hard to consolidate the OTS case into the FDIC case. While there is the temptation to view the FDIC and OTS actions as duplicative, there are substantial differences between the two. First and foremost, the FDIC action is a true lawsuit against Hurwitz alone, which will be tried in Judge Lynn Hughes' federal district court in Houston. The OTS case is an administrative court action against Hurwitz, his companies and the officers and directors of United Savings, which will be heard in front of an administrative judge in Washington, D.C., where the government's case may presumably be a bit easier to prove. Hurwitz has filed papers with the federal district court in Houston seeking to combine the two actions in his own home court.

Maxxam's Irelan insists that request is a practical matter. First, the company would like to hold down legal costs and defend only one trial. But more important, Irelan says, if Hurwitz loses to the OTS in administrative court, he will appeal to the nearest federal district court, and the FDIC case already is in the federal courts system. "Why go through an administrative action when you already have the whole subject before a court?" Irelan says.

What Irelan doesn't say is that an OTS judge is undoubtedly going to be vastly more familiar with thrift case law than a Houston district court judge. And Judge Hughes tends to side more often with anti-government arguments than he does with pro-federal views, which makes his court a doubly promising venue, from Maxxam's point of view.

Rick Stearns, who is handling the OTS case against Hurwitz, says his agency is under no obligation to roll its case in with that of another federal agency. In fact, he suggests that if the OTS is forcibly rolled in with the FDIC, he may refile the entire action again, and drag Hurwitz and the other defendants right back up to Washington.

It should be underscored that none of the charges lodged against Hurwitz by the federal thrift regulators warrants jail time, primarily because the word "fraud" never appears in any of the court papers.

Stearns says the OTS decided not to file civil fraud charges against Hurwitz and the others because it was principally interested in recovering the bailout money, not in setting Hurwitz up for a criminal prosecution.

"All we have to prove is willful and reckless disregard of the regulatory requirements," Stearns explains. "That is a much lesser standard of proof than a fraud charge. And there's no sense in our trying to prove a more difficult case when we can recover damages under regulatory violations."

The mere mention of fraud or criminal charges arouses Maxxam spokesman Irelan.

"In nothing that has been handed down by anybody is there any suggestion of criminality," he says emphatically. "None. Zero."

Passions run much higher in the United Savings case than in any of the previous actions against dead Texas thrifts because of how Hurwitz allegedly used the thrift to indirectly leverage his raid on Pacific Lumber, the corporate guardian of the largest remaining private stands of ancient redwoods in the world. After gaining control of Pacific Lumber, Hurwitz doubled and in some cases tripled logging rates to make enough money to pay down his huge takeover debts. Not only did that earn him the unceasing enmity of environmentalists, it also apparently led to his name appearing on a list of potential mail bomb targets compiled by the man accused of being the Unabomber, according to published reports.

And it has resulted in California environmentalists vigorously pushing their own solution to squaring United's debt to taxpayers by having the government expropriate the Headwaters Forest.

"There is a unique twist to this S&L case in that an outside group that has nothing to do with the FDIC is trying to push their own agenda -- something called debt-for-nature," says FDIC spokesman David Barr. "I guess it could be done, if it could be determined that whoever owned those trees was directly, financially responsible for decisions at that S&L. But there are a lot of legal things that would have to be ironed out to prove that."