Good riddance to bad rubbish, and good rubbish, too

Rico says Campbell Robertson has an article in The New York Times about a yard sale of Richard Scrushy's stuff, now that he's having to pay back his debtors:

What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world and lose his casserole dish? These are the wages of sin for Richard Scrushy, the Alabama businessman who rose from working-class roots to become one of the highest-paid chief executives in the United States, and fell just as quickly to become federal prisoner No. 24463-001.
His name was pried off libraries and campus buildings, and his 16,000-square-foot and helipad-equipped home was opened up to paying gawkers. In the two years since he was ordered by a judge to pay $2.87 billion to HealthSouth, the company he started in 1984, his nineteen cars and his wife’s jewelry collection have been auctioned and his houses sold. Then, over the weekend, came perhaps the final indignity: a yard sale. It took place in the estate’s spacious barn, and in some ways it was like any old yard sale, with handwritten signs on colorful poster board, sodas selling for a dollar, and shelves full of knickknacks of debatable taste or utility.
And as at any good yard sale, no one was a stranger, given that Birmingham is in many ways something of a small town and Mr. Scrushy at one time the biggest person in it. One shopper said he had worked with one of Mr. Scrushy’s childhood friends, another said she was a friend of a former family baby sitter, and still another said Mr. Scrushy had spoken at her daughter’s graduation.
“I respect Richard,” said Syble Marshall, who runs a day care center in town, setting up a particularly Southern kind of velvet barb: “He was an intelligent crook.”
HealthSouth was founded by Mr. Scrushy and a few friends, going on to become the nation’s largest provider of in-patient rehabilitative services. It is still in business here in Birmingham, and though it has sold off many of Mr. Scrushy’s acquisitions, the company is profitable, having survived a very bad decade and the arrest of many of its executives.
As his wealth and profile grew, Mr. Scrushy cut a complicated figure, a short-fused dynamo as extravagant in his personal tastes and pursuits, including recording albums with his own country music band, Dallas County Line, as he was in his philanthropy.
But local opinion of him turned steadily less mixed over the past decade as his company’s stock tanked and he was sued by his shareholders and then accused by the Securities and Exchange Commission and federal prosecutors of overseeing an accounting fraud that ran into the billions.
He was acquitted of criminal charges in a 2005 trial, during which the public’s attitude seemed to turn from fury to scorn. But, two years later, he was convicted on unrelated bribery charges for arranging $500,000 in donations to Alabama’s former governor, Don E. Siegelman, in exchange for a seat on a state board. Mr. Scrushy, 58, is currently serving a seven-year sentence in Beaumont, Texas.
Then, in 2009, a judge presiding over a suit brought by HealthSouth shareholders found that Mr. Scrushy had actively participated in the systematic reporting of false profits. He ordered Mr. Scrushy, who estimated his net worth in 2003 at $300 million, to pay $2.87 billion to HealthSouth in damages for the accounting fraud. Since then, it has become a matter of collecting it.
“We got a $2.9 billion judgment, and our job is to satisfy that judgment,” said John Somerville, who represents the lead shareholder in the suit. “Part of our job is to seize assets and sell those, and that can include the $5 million lake house and that can include the three dollar lampshade.”
In May, Freeman’s, a Philadelphia-based auction house, will hold an auction of some of Mr. Scrushy’s art collection, which includes works by Picasso and Renoir. The weekend yard sale brought in about $164,000, said John C. Jones, a representative for Freeman’s who helped arrange it. That is a tiny fraction of the $100 million in assets collected so far, but a tidy sum nonetheless.
Hundreds of bargain hunters, many of them estate sale regulars who spoke in accents that would be familiar to Mr. Scrushy from his upbringing in Selma, Alabama, lined up on a cool Saturday morning outside the stately back gate. Some came for vindication and others as voyeurs, but most were there for the values.
When the gates opened, a few middle-aged men out front broke into a run, rushing toward the $120 monogrammed golf bags, $25 Hermès ties, and various schadenfreude treasures, like a photograph of Mr. Scrushy shaking hands with Mr. Siegelman ($500) and a framed inspirational text called The Penalty of Leadership ($40).
Not everyone was enjoying themselves. “To me, this has come to the point where it’s borderline disgusting,” said Mike Plaia, who said he showed up before 6 a.m. Mr. Plaia is Mr. Scrushy’s son-in-law. Last year, as part of a settlement, he agreed to give up certain property that the shareholders’ lawyers said had been transferred to him by his father-in-law in an effort to hide assets. On Saturday, Mr. Plaia, his wife, and some friends were waiting outside the gate like everyone else, hoping to buy a childhood bicycle and other items of sentimental value. He arrived on Friday, he said, hoping to be let in early before the crowds picked the place clean. But he was turned away. This is not about raising money, Mr. Plaia said, “it’s about humiliating him and putting him on display.”
Mr. Somerville pointed out that, a year ago, Mr. Scrushy’s third wife was allowed to take certain things from the estate, including any children’s toys she wanted, and that family photos were handed over to the Scrushys as well.
About an hour after the sale opened, with shoppers trying on Armani jackets and making jokes about the décor, Mr. Plaia was standing guard over an enormous pile of clothes, including the tuxedo that Mr. Scrushy wore at one of his weddings.
There were plenty of others who were not bothered by the idea of humiliating Mr. Scrushy, people who, in fact, felt that no penalty would be too severe. Ken Robertson, 62, a retired accountant, wandered around with his hands in his pockets, contemplating, he said, “how easy it is to live on other people’s money". Mr. Robertson’s father— who died recently, but had spent his working years as an accountant, first for the Birmingham steel mills and then for the Army Corps of Engineers— lost $28,000 when HealthSouth’s stock collapsed, one of so many people who saw their savings shrivel or disappear. Mr. Robertson said he was not buying anything of Mr. Scrushy’s, considering that, in a way, his family had already paid for it once. Delivering laments about greed and justice in modern America, he meandered into the inner rooms of the barn, walking past a neat stack of CDs on a table. They were albums from Mr. Scrushy’s band, and they were being given away.