This is an opinion column.

Matt Hart is out at the Alabama attorney general’s office.

It’s hard to believe. Hard, in some ways, to believe it took this long.

Because Alabama’s most celebrated corruption fighter reached critical mass. Of powerful people who wanted him gone.

Politicians feared him, and dirty politicians hated him like Al Capone hated Eliot Ness. His own bosses often felt trapped by him, because for every case he made in their name, he made them feel just a little uncomfortable, or out of control, or perhaps inadequate.

Talking to you, Attorney General Steve Marshall.

Because pointing Hart toward corruption was like setting a fire. Oh, he’d get the job done, but there’s no telling who might get flamed. He’d burn his own house to the ground with his boss inside if that’s what it took.

Which was why he is reviled by the powerful. And why he is admired by those who simply want someone in authority to give two hoots about Alabama’s corruption problem.

Hard to believe the Matt Hart era is over.

As a state prosecutor and a federal prosecutor and a state prosecutor again he made a big name for himself making big cases. He led a team that prosecuted several Jefferson County Commissioners and assorted legislators and bureaucrats in the two-year college system. He helped prosecute Birmingham Mayor Larry Langford and many, many more.

Then-attorney general Luther Strange hired Hart in 2011 after campaigning on a promise of cleaning up Montgomery. I tried to warn Strange then:

You better really, really mean it.

Because Hart couldn’t turn it off. He went after Republicans and Democrats, the powerful and the lowly. Hart prosecuted former House Speaker Mike Hubbard by force of will, making enemies of Alabama’s most powerful lawyers and its richest people, several of whom were embarrassed in the indictment.

Give Strange credit, he let Hart do his job, even when it got uncomfortable. Which is apparently something Marshall was not willing to do.

But anyone who watched Alabama government in recent years saw this coming.

They saw it when Marshall took tens of thousands in contributions from the company owned by Alabama’s richest man Jimmy Rane – who invested in a Hubbard business. They saw it when Rane, who made no bones about his contempt for Hart, gave hundreds of thousands to Gov. Kay Ivey and was appointed to lead her inaugural committee. He even lent his Great Southern Wood airplane for her campaign use.

Gov. Kay Ivey boards a Great Southern Wood plane during the last days of the campaign.

They saw it when Marshall took campaign contributions from Hubbard investors, witnesses and supporters, and they saw it when Marshall looked down as Alabama politicians tried to chip away at the very ethics law that put people like Hubbard in court.

I don’t know exactly what happened this week to force Matt Hart out of his job as head of the special prosecutions unit. Hart declined to comment, and Marshall did not respond personally to the question.

His office issued a vanilla statement that said “The Attorney General accepted Mr. Hart’s resignation today and thanked him for his service to the State. It is the policy of this office to refrain from comment about personnel matters, so we will have no further statement.”

But it was no shock.

I predicted in April Marshall would show Hart the door as soon as he was re-elected. He was re-elected less than two weeks ago.

It doesn’t take an investigation to figure it out. The time was right. Marshall has four years to live it down before he comes back up for election.

He’s banking that Alabama will forget.

There’s the rub, though. Because the best way to make Alabama forget Matt Hart is to continue the work he specialized in: Holding powerful people to account.

Now, I guess, we’ll see what kind of AG Steve Marshall really is.

John Archibald, a Pulitzer Prize winner, is a columnist for Reckon by AL.com. His column appears in The Birmingham News, the Huntsville Times, the Mobile Register and AL.com. Write him at jarchibald@al.com.