This is the first in a series of articles on the trial of Mike Hubbard. Read the other installments here: part two; part three; part four; part five.

The story of Mike Hubbard sounds like an only-in-Alabama joke: A politician runs a statewide campaign against corruption, wins big, quickly passes some of the toughest ethics laws in the nation, then gets skewered by those very laws. But the case against Hubbard, the Speaker of the Alabama House, is no laughing matter. Even in a place where political corruption is as much a part of the landscape as kudzu, the extensiveness and brazenness of his alleged crimes have stunned even longtime followers of politics in the state.

“Mike Hubbard has been the overlord of an orgy of greed and corruption like we have never seen,” Bill Britt, host of Alabama’s weekly political talk show, The V, declared in a recent episode. “He is the Caligula of Alabama. Just a tyrant, and a mean and perverse guy.”

Hubbard wowed the national Republican Party in 2010 when he masterminded a GOP takeover of all branches of government in the Yellowhammer State. Before Hubbard came along, the legislature had been controlled by Democrats for 136 years, since Reconstruction. Two years later, a grand jury delivered 23 felony indictments against him. The trial, which begins its jury selection today, will offer a rare view into the greasy gears of Republican machine politics, showing in exquisite detail how the state of Alabama has been turned into a single-party vehicle for graft.

With his slick hair, pudgy belly, and car salesman’s smile, Hubbard looks every bit the Southern politician, a role for which he has been well-groomed. Born and raised in the Mayberry-esque town of Hartwell, Georgia, he was senior class president, the Georgia representative in a national high school civics competition in Washington D.C., and state champion of a “Voice of Democracy” speech contest (in which he beat future Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed). But he cut his teeth as a campaigner in Southeastern Conference football, first as a journalism scholarship student at the University of Georgia, where he helped lead the public relations push for Hershel Walker’s 1982 Heisman Trophy. Then, as a flak for the Auburn University athletic department, he did the same for Bo Jackson in 1985.