Former Allegheny County Coroner Dr. Cyril H. Wecht, has been through all this before.

The settings may be different, but the circumstances -- right down to the reams of government evidence, the defense strategy of attacking the system, the prosecutors and the judge, and the defense that the activities were done for educational purposes -- are remarkably similar to a case he faced in state court in 1981.

And unchanged is the unique personality of the defendant with the daunting vocabulary.

In that first case, the world-renowned forensic pathologist fought -- and beat -- criminal charges that he'd misused his public office for personal gain.

It remains to be seen whether he can beat the charges in the new case, which is set to go to trial Jan. 28 in federal court.

"Am I surprised by the type of defense he is waging? The answer to that question is no," said Jim Lees, the assistant district attorney who prosecuted Dr. Wecht in Allegheny County Common Pleas Court in the spring of 1981.

But he is surprised that Dr. Wecht is back in the same situation -- charged now with mail and wire fraud for allegedly using public resources for private gain.

"[You] would think once you've been indicted for that and gone through that, you would do everything in your conceivable power to avoid even the appearance of that type of activity," Mr. Lees said.

"[That's] because governments, whether they be county governments or federal governments, have a long institutional memory. There are always going to be people left over who are taking a long, hard look at you and want a second shot at it."

The first inquiry into private work being done in the county morgue began in 1979, after the county controller said Dr. Wecht could owe the county as much as $100,000.

When a reporter suggested then that Dr. Wecht simply write a check to pay off the surcharge, his attorney at the time, John M. Feeney, laughed and said, "You don't know Dr. Wecht."

Instead, Dr. Wecht decided to take on the system, battling other county officials and employees, the grand jury system and the city's two daily newspapers.

On Sept. 4, 1980, a county grand jury recommended that six criminal charges be filed against him.

They alleged that as coroner, Dr. Wecht made nearly $140,000 between 1974 and 1979 by using morgue employees to process slides and tissue examinations for his private business, then called Pittsburgh Pathology and Toxicology Laboratory Inc.

Most of the money, prosecutors alleged, came from the Podiatry Hospital of Pittsburgh, which submitted nearly 10,000 specimens to Dr. Wecht's private lab for processing.

The coroner, who had become a county commissioner in 1980, denied any wrongdoing and claimed then-District Attorney Bob Colville filed the charges as part of a "personal and political vendetta."

"You should realize that there are certain individuals who pursue political elevation at the cost of tremendous unwarranted anguish to others and their families," Dr. Wecht said at a news conference on Sept. 8, 1980.

He also claimed that the private specimens were studied at the public morgue as part of a teaching program to maintain the professional skills of the staff.

Dr. Wecht's defense then is strikingly similar to the one that he is currently waging against the federal government.

In January 2006, U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan announced that a federal grand jury had handed up an 84-count indictment against Dr. Wecht. It alleged that he billed private clients of his business, Cyril H. Wecht and Pathology Associates Inc., for expenses he illegally charged to Allegheny County.

Prosecutors also accused him of using county resources -- such as office equipment and vehicles -- for his private business and used county employees to run personal errands for him, including walking his dog and shopping for sporting goods.

In the two years since, Dr. Wecht and his team of lawyers, including former U.S. Attorney General and Pennsylvania Gov. Dick Thornburgh, have waged an aggressive defense.

They have alleged political motivation as the reason that Dr. Wecht was indicted in the first place, blaming an ongoing feud with county District Attorney Stephen A. Zappala Jr.

Defense attorney Jerry McDevitt wrote in an early filing in the case, "At age 75, Dr. Wecht now stands charged in the twilight of his career of rendering dishonest services to the citizens of Allegheny County, ironically because in fact he refused to render dishonest services to the county to keep political peace with'' Mr. Zappala.

Dr. Wecht also has claimed selective prosecution by Ms. Buchanan, a Republican, because he is a Democrat. Mr. Thornburgh even testified before two House judiciary subcommittees, saying that the charges against his client were not typical public-corruption counts usually handled by the federal government.

The defense has made repeated claims of bias against the judge in the case, Arthur J. Schwab, filing two separate motions with the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to have him removed. Both were rejected.

And concerning charges that he improperly provided unclaimed bodies from the coroner's office to students in Carlow University's forensic sciences program, Dr. Wecht said there was nothing untoward about that practice and that the bodies were donated specifically for educational purposes.

"It's almost verbatim from 20-plus years ago," Mr. Lees said.

Last week, the original 84 counts were reduced to 41 at the request of prosecutors. The government said it was trying to streamline the case and also had discovered that some packages identified in the mail-fraud counts actually had been hand-delivered without ever going through the postal system.

Jury selection is scheduled to begin Thursday, with opening arguments slated for Jan. 28. The trial will be heard by an anonymous jury, ordered by Judge Schwab because of what he called "unprecedented" media coverage.

The case, which could include as many as 130 government witnesses and thousands of pages of exhibits, is expected to last up to 10 weeks, more than a month longer that Dr. Wecht's 1981 trial.

That case stretched for six weeks, including five days of testimony by Dr. Wecht himself.

By the time the panel of seven women and five men got the case, it took them just 10 hours to acquit him on one count of theft of honest services -- the only charge that remained against him.

Mr. Lees said he believes there were a number of things working against him.

He contends that the Crawford County judge who was brought in for the trial was unduly influenced by Dr. Wecht's defense attorney, the nationally known Stanley Preiser.

Mr. Lees said he vividly remembers walking into court on the first day of trial to find Mr. Preiser and his assistants sitting at the table traditionally reserved for the prosecution, nearest the jury box.

When Mr. Lees objected, the judge asked him to cite any legal authority that gave the prosecution the right to have that table.

"It's funny now. It wasn't funny then," said Mr. Lees, who left the DA's office in January 1984 to work with Mr. Preiser in his Charleston, W.Va., office.

During its portion of the case, the prosecution, which had compiled 35 volumes of tissue-specimen reports to use in the trial, called 37 witnesses. Mr. Lees recalled that many of them proved to be more helpful to the defense under cross-examination than to the government.

"Many of the employees of the coroner's office at that time were very loyal to Dr. Wecht, and we viewed them as doing their best to put his activities in the best light possible," he said.

When it was time for the defense to present its case, Mr. Lees said, it had what he called a "rock-star" quality.

Among the defense witnesses called were Dr. David M. Paul, who at the time was known as "her majesty's coroner" in London, and California pathologist Dr. Thomas Noguchi, who did the autopsies on Marilyn Monroe and Bobby Kennedy.

"The jury would just sit there kind of star-struck," Mr. Lees said. "It was a big production, a big show."

Both men testified that Dr. Wecht's practice of having private tissue examined in the county lab was a great training program to keep his staff sharp.

In interviewing a number of forensic pathologists around the country, Mr. Lees found that "it was uniformly thought that defense was ridiculous." But, he continued, it was nearly impossible to find anyone willing to testify against Dr. Wecht and say so.

"In retrospect, we were young prosecutors, and he had a very experienced defense team," Mr. Lees said. "When you put all four of those things together, it made for a tough prosecution."