BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — 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, who rose from working-class roots to become one of the highest-paid CEOs in the U.S. and fell to become federal prisoner No. 24463-001.

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 19 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 yard sale, with handwritten signs on poster board 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 Scrushy at one time the biggest person in it. One shopper said he had worked with one of Scrushy’s childhood friends, another said she was a friend of a former family baby sitter. “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 Scrushy and a few friends, going on to become the nation’s largest provider of inpatient rehabilitative services. It is still in business here in Birmingham, and though it has sold off many of 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, 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. But two years later, he was convicted on unrelated bribery charges for arranging $500,000 in donations to Alabama’s former governor, Don Siegelman, in exchange for a seat on a state board. 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 Scrushy had actively participated in the systematic reporting of false profits. He ordered 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 $3 dollar lampshade.”