Today, he will be the one facing judgment.

Ethridge must answer the N.C. State Bar on charges that he swindled the home and life savings of Rosalind Sweet, an elderly, senile Smithfield woman in 2001.

The stakes are high for Ethridge, who, friends say, had dreamed of being a judge since boyhood. The bar could strip Ethridge -- a district court judge serving Johnston, Harnett and Lee counties -- of his law license, forcing him off the bench.

In North Carolina, it is unusual for an acting judge to be facing this kind of trouble. Officials at the State Bar can recall only one other judge whose law license was revoked for some misdeed committed as a lawyer.

According to the State Bar's allegations, Ethridge had Sweet, a retired school teacher, deed her home to him in 2001 and withdraw her retirement savings of $14,249, depositing it into a personal checking account in his name.

At the time, Sweet was mentally slipping, according to social workers and family members. Sweet, now 74 and battling Alzheimer's at a nursing home in Harnett County, thought Ethridge was her boyfriend, said neighbor Nezzie Sanders.

The State Bar hearing today might not be the end of Ethridge's problems. The bar, in its complaint filed in May, said Ethridge might not have forsaken just his ethical obligations as an attorney in his dealings with Sweet but might have also broken the law.

District Attorney Tom Lock said he might initiate a criminal investigation after the State Bar hearing concludes this week.

Ethridge, a lean 60-year-old with a deep, gruff voice, wouldn't talk about his life or the upcoming hearing when contacted late last month, saying that so much of his life had already been exposed in media reports.

But Ethridge is a mystery to most despite having practiced law within a tight community of attorneys for nearly three decades. Few Johnston County lawyers know where he lives or how he spends his free time. Even fewer know he has a teenage daughter.

What Ethridge's colleagues do know about him suggests that he is a man of contradictions.

Ethridge is an African-American who finished his schooling without having attended class with a white person. Now, he has said, his closest friends are former members of the Ku Klux Klan.

Growing up in Wendell, he harvested tobacco, washed dishes and cleaned houses. As a lawyer, he represented seven men facing death row. Ethridge grew up poor yet is wary of government entitlement programs, he said when campaigning for judge in 2004.

"He grew up in an era in which there was no middle ground," said Timothy Hodges, a former supporter who distanced himself from Ethridge in 2004 when he ran as a Republican. "It's been tough for him to navigate all these years."

Ethridge earned his law degree from N.C. Central University in Durham in 1971, the first in his immediate family to finish college, let alone a graduate program.

Soon after, he married Phyllis Forte, a classmate's sister and a Smithfield native. Ethridge settled on a practice in Smithfield, hoping to leverage his young bride's family ties to build a customer base, his former wife Phyllis Ethridge said.

Keeping his distance

Ethridge began working in Smithfield in the mid-1970s, one of two lawyers who were the first blacks to set up a practice in Johnston County. In those days, a billboard greeted people driving into town on U.S. 70 with the words "The KKKK welcomes you to Smithfield" (the extra K stood for "Knights").

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