Lerach will probably serve one to two years in prison when he is sentenced in January. Many call the $8 million in fines chump change, and they have a point: Lerach has made a staggering income for a long time. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal said that Lerach's cut of lawyers fees in the class action against Enron Corp. alone could be as much as $50 million.

The essays look like Lerach's attempt to resurrect his image as a champion of investors, as portrayed in The New Yorker piece, and somehow forget about the legion of other stories that use descriptive words like "loathed" and "mean." Chief among the latter is a 1999 story in Fortune entitled "The King of Pain Is Hurting."

As a reporter at The National Law Journal for many years, I wrote my fair share of Milberg Weiss stories. This included one about a 1999 trial in which Weiss and Lerach had to testify about their incomes; they lost the case and the jury rendered a $45 million verdict against their firm for maliciously suing an economist to ruin his reputation. My 1996 profile of Lerach for Wired magazine appeared under the headline, "Bloodsucking Scumbag"—words that my editor wrote, not me.

In his Washington Post essay, called "Loser C.E.O.'s, Raking It In," Lerach lamented the "massive payoffs that corporations are handing to failing executives." He cited the departures of E. Stanley O'Neal from Merrill Lynch and Charles O. Prince from Citigroup; together, they left their companies "with $360 million in their own pockets."

Mentioning his own guilty plea, Lerach went on to ponder, "But what about accountability for Wall Street C.E.O.'s who line their own pockets while making stupid decisions that rob shareholders and pensioners of millions of dollars?"

Toward the end of his essay, Lerach sounded downright revolutionary.

"Someone told me recently that Lenin was wrong about communism but right about capitalism," he wrote. "Maybe he was. I'm on my way to prison because, in my zeal to stand up against this kind of corporate greed over the years, I stepped over the line."

The November 11 Op-Ed did not sit well with at least one member of Congress. In a letter to the editor, Representative Richard Baker, a Republican from Louisiana, said that in the class-action lawsuits Lerach essentially "extorted fees from the shareholders he purported to represent."

Baker added, "Ripping off shareholders by renting plaintiffs may be a profitable business model, but evidently it has one small drawback."

That drawback would be prison.

The day after the Post published Lerach's essay, Howard Kurtz, the paper's media columnist, wondered in print, "How do you have a guy who's a newly confessed crook have the standing to start lecturing us about the problems with C.E.O.'s?"

Perhaps Lerach, wily as ever, took a look at the reincarnation of Martha Stewart after her time in prison and thought that role might fit him nicely. The trouble is that he practices law, which, unlike baking brioche, requires a license.

Something else: For all the ink that's been spilled over Lerach by writers (including me), I wonder what the average citizen thinks of him.

Stewart, after all, has a fan club. As far as I know, Lerach does not.