Dr. William Cast first sensed problems at HealthSouth Corp. when he noticed the attention being paid by its management to the positioning of then-CEO Richard Scrushy's photo at his surgical group's office.

While seemingly nitpicky details were attended to with the utmost care, Cast's group couldn't get answers about declining profits at the Fort Wayne-based ambulatory surgical center. The surgical center briefly partnered with HealthSouth, an Alabama-based rehabilitation company that was fast expanding into imaging and ambulatory surgery in the late 1990s.

"None of the revenue-producing factors had changed at our facility," Cast chronicles in his book, "Going South," which will be released in bookstores Dec. 1. "The case loads, margins, costs, and collection rates should have produced the same cash flows as in the past. Only the people running the ledgers had changed."

Cast's first book, published by Dearborn Trade, a division of Kaplan Professional Co., centers on HealthSouth's criminal pitfalls under Scrushy. It is the first book on the subject since the FBI raided HealthSouth's corporate headquarters in Birmingham, Ala., in March 2003. The hardback retails for $25.95.

Although numerous other executives plead guilty, Scrushy was eventually acquitted of all 36 charges of fraud in June. All the same, his legal woes continue. Late last month, Scrushy was charged with bribing former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman to get appointed to a key hospital regulatory board.

Cast's "Going South" describes stymied communications and confounding accounting at HealthSouth in its brief partnership with Cast's center starting in 1997. Cast takes issue with micromanagement practices as well, aimed at corporate compliance. HealthSouth's "pristine audits" sought - among other minutia on a 50-item checklist - to ensure that parking lots were clean, vending machines were stocked with Coca-Cola products (HealthSouth was partnered with Coca-Cola Co. at the time) and Scrushy's photo was straight and prominently positioned in offices.

But Cast's book isn't one man's inside account of HealthSouth's dealings. Cast admits he has never met Scrushy. Rather, the book is his summary of an ongoing Internet account that tells the company story.

While Cast's group brokered a deal to get his surgery center out of its HealthSouth partnership in 1998, his interest in the company's business record grew, and he began digging. He wondered how a company that once seemed to hold so much promise deliver so little. A stockholder to date, Cast's personal curiosity eventually led him to the Yahoo HealthSouth message board. There he found stock traders, disgruntled employees and other health care workers with various insights and opinions on the company.

"It's a conversation between aliases," said Cast, who goes by "charron_xxx" on the message board. In Greek mythology, Charon is the ferryman of the dead, a reference to HealthSouth's dire straits.

In it, the collective message board becomes a sort of organic central character. The sum of its parts - some experts, some "bashers" (traders who would spout off to drive stock prices down) - the board is repeatedly ahead of corporate media in relaying inside news about HealthSouth.

Admittedly, information requires some distillation, said Cast, who still checks the board daily, although that's down from the four-times daily routine he was in before the dust settled. In a way, the author is a gardener picking out some gossipy weeds in an attempt to harvest the most reliable fruit.

His discerning eye is assisted by his personal experience with the company, and he keeps up to date on more-traditional news reports. But he also learned much about day trading - a world he had little prior knowledge about. And he adds that all information, whether message boards or newspapers, should be critically evaluated.

Taking this into account, Cast stands by his rendering of events involving HealthSouth's rise and fall, and rebound since. Neither is Cast afraid of being silenced by Scrushy, citing legal protection on the basis that his accounts are accurate to the best of his knowledge.

In 1998, Scrushy scared some message board posters away - at least temporarily - after HealthSouth attorneys subpoenaed Yahoo for the release of names and demographic data for about 300 posters. Yahoo released information on less than 10 percent of the aliases on Scrushy's list, which its legal department agreed might be guilty of libel or slander.

True to his "Boogie Nights" alias, poster Peter D. Krum's comments often had an inappropriate sexual tinge. As part of his court settlement, Krum, a former HealthSouth employee, posted an apology for defamatory comments he made about Scrushy, Leslie and HealthSouth.

But others, like "The Emerging Analyst," who remained anonymous, would emerge as heroes in "Going South," guiding posters through difficult times with accurate, level-headed counsel. Cast goes so far as to credit the message board with helping many HealthSouth stockholders who might have otherwise lost everything through difficult times.

Stock prices initially dropped dramatically shortly after the 2003 FBI raid and amid subsequent news the company had lied about earnings and the stock was taken off the New York Stock Exchange. But they have continued to recover as an over-the-counter stock since bottoming out at less than a nickel per share. On Tuesday, trading under the symbol HLSH, the company's stock closed at $4.04.

Cast doesn't take it upon himself to question the jury's findings in Scrushy's fraud trial. But he's no less upset with the former executive's handling of HealthSouth.

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