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One standout feature that would serve him well later in his legal career: a prodigious memory. A schoolboy friend with whom he traveled Europe in 1966 says Picard can recall to this day the names of restaurants and what they ate. One of Picard's colleagues says he can spit out case numbers in lawsuits going back three decades.

After the University of Pennsylvania and Boston University law school, he landed a job as a lawyer at the Securities and Exchange Commission, where he rose to oversee a legal team handling bankruptcy cases. He gained a reputation as someone who wasn't hidebound by the agency's old practices, and for a human touch. Charles Tatelbaum, a lawyer trying to get money back from a Mafia-linked trucking firm overseen by Picard's lawyers after it fell into bankruptcy, recalls a half-dozen calls from Picard after news broke that the mob had put a contract out on his life and everyone else seemed to be shunning him.

"I couldn't get a date for six months. My veterinarian wouldn't even see my cat," Tatelbaum says. "But Irving would call _ 'Are you all right? Is there anything I can do?'"

In 1979, Picard was appointed one of 12 U.S. trustees in a new Justice Department program charged with overseeing corporate bankruptcies. "If he decided something was unfair, he went after it," says former trustee David Coar, recalling how Picard would attack lawyers representing creditors for withdrawing big money from bankrupt companies to pay themselves. "There were no sacred cows."

In 1982, Picard left for private practice to focus on the niche business of collecting money after investment firms and brokerages went bust. He proved unrelenting at times.

In one case, in 1988, he was assigned to clean up after a 23-year-old art history buff, David Bloom, somehow persuaded 140 people to give him millions to invest in the stock market, then went on a fine-art-buying spree of works from the likes of Edward Hopper and John Singer Sargent instead.

Picard sued Bloom's parents for money their son had given them and, in an echo of his tactics today, went after a couple who had "fictitious profits," or who had taken more out than they had invested. Picard eventually got back $6.7 million, about half the total lost.

Colleagues from those years fill in another aspect of his personality: He is whistle-clean and intensely private, perhaps to an extreme. Several say they can't recall him ever uttering an expletive. Baker lawyer David J. Sheehan, chief counsel to Picard in the Madoff probe, says he's almost never mentioned personal matters in their 30 years working together, and that he's an "old-fashioned man." An old joke among family members is he's so straight-laced he should live on "Buttoned Down Lane." Picard apparently finds this funny.