But the system of itemized billing, resulting in individual lawyers charging as much as 39 hours in a day and 164 hours in a week, continued unchecked for most of the past decade.

"It is simply disgraceful, " said John Marquess, the chairman of Legalgard Inc., a Philadelphia-based investigative firm that scrutinizes legal bills. Marquess reviewed more than 50 bills -- and five billing patterns -- for The Herald.

"There is no justification for this kind of billing, " he said. "It is clear these lawyers are not fulfilling an obligation to the public, but are simply trying to make as much money as they can. They gouged the public."

Huttoe, Trinchet and Carter did not respond to The Herald's multiple requests to discuss their bills.

Huttoe's situation is unique. He openly assigned his cases to other lawyers during the period reviewed by The Herald. The practice is now prohibited, but at the time there were no rules against it.

His use of other lawyers makes it far more difficult to pin down his hours.

Mastos and Maultasch sat down for extensive interviews. Both men said their 24-plus-hour days resulted from slipshod record-keeping.

Mastos, for example, billed 30 1/2 hours on only his third day on the job and now cannot document that he actually worked those hours. Still, he insists that he did all the work and merely put the hours on the wrong day.

"This was a new experience, " Mastos said. "My record- keeping was not good, not as good as it should have been. But God, when you look at the dollar figures here, there's no one ripping anybody off."

Overall, the lawyers differed greatly in their billing practices. Lawyers representing co-defendants who faced identical charges sometimes produced bills more than double their co-counsels.

Some lawyers, like Trinchet, billed for hundreds of hours of legal research; others, like Mastos, did not.

One lawyer, Antonio Marin, even billed county taxpayers for the time he spent preparing 43 bills. The county paid him $1,550.

Several lawyers who agreed to talk to The Herald also blamed billing problems on Dade County's failure to provide clear guidelines for them to follow.

Mastos snapped, "For some bureaucrat in the county three years later in the wake of Court Broom and everything else to suddenly start trying to nail lawyers to the wall because nobody has the vision or foresight three years ago and five years ago and 10 years ago to say, 'Look, this is county money.' That's outrageous."

Mastos said he never asked county officials to spell out the billing rules for him. He did ask for advice from a few of his lawyer friends.

"That's one of the first questions I asked, parenthetically, when I left the bench: 'How do you bill? How do you set these fees?'

"And some of the answers I got were very, very wide- ranging. One guy said, 'Well, if a guy is driving a car or if he's wearing a watch, you haven't charged enough.' "

But Mastos said he didn't take his friend's advice. "You can see from my fees that I have not gouged anybody, " he said. "I don't gouge people."

The Herald study uncovered some clear billing patterns. A half-dozen lawyers used some of the following methods to transform a legal system for the poor into a lucrative, publicly-financed business:

'BOILERPLATING'
Charges repeated for same documents

Many lawyers used billing for "boilerplate" documents as an easy way to make money. They charged over and over again for "preparing" and filing the same routine legal documents.