(FORTUNE Magazine) – Graef "Bud" Crystal has long been a preeminent critic of excessive executive pay. Then along comes the most controversial pay package in recent memory--Disney's handing Michael Ovitz $70 million (about half in cash, the rest in options) in severance for 16 months' service--and guess what? Crystal helped design Ovitz's pay package. Says Crystal: "I hope people don't say, 'Jeez, this guy's working both sides of the street.' " Jeez, it sure looks that way.

Like many critics, Crystal got his start serving the very institutions he now rails against. In 1959 he began a long career as a compensation specialist, landing illustrious clients such as the late CBS chairman William Paley. By the mid-Eighties, Crystal was earning around $800,000, enough for three homes with a grand piano in each, and a red Porsche.

Crystal gave up the racket in 1989, and where some might have settled for a late-life career switch, he renounced his former ways. "I was beginning to think seriously about the need to save my immortal soul," he recently wrote in the Webzine Slate. Crystal turned coat and wrote In Search of Excess, a book panning the same executives he would once have aided (including the executives of Time Warner, parent of FORTUNE's publisher); he also occasionally wrote for FORTUNE. Being a critic meant scaling back as well, to one home, one grand piano, no Porsche. He purchased a single share each of 550 different stocks so that he could receive proxies and other documents.

Then came a call from Disney CEO Michael Eisner, in August 1995, luring him back to the dark side. It wasn't the money--he got only $20,000. Apparently he found the gadfly's life a lonely one, what with all the unheeded warnings and 3-cent dividend checks. To have one of the executives he'd criticized request his aid in designing a compensation package, well, that seemed to confirm the worth of his work. "I was just so flattered," he says.

Crystal hopes to return to his former life--his second former life, that is. He believes the Ovitz affair may even help focus attention on a possible next cause for him: severance. "I'd love to find a way to stop all this severance," he says, sans irony. "There's no social justice."

Fine, but if Crystal plans to save his soul and fight for societal virtue, he'll need a new title, like "Architect of lucrative compensation plans and tireless critic of high pay." It may be unwieldy, but at least it's accurate.

--Justin Martin