(FORTUNE Magazine) – When last we left Richard Scrushy, former HealthSouth CEO and current defendant in an 85-count fraud indictment, he'd joined the Guiding Light, a predominantly black church in Birmingham, Ala. That may get him past the gates of heaven (see "Reborn Free" on fortune.com) but not, apparently, the gates of HealthSouth.

The Guiding Light's Christmas pageant has for the past several years been staged in a building formerly known as the Richard M. Scrushy Conference Center. Guiding Light was still welcome this year. But HealthSouth had one condition: a certain parishioner was not.

Scrushy showed up anyway. HealthSouth security ordered him out of the building; he refused; Guiding Light's pastor objected; police were summoned; bedlam ensued. HealthSouth accused Scrushy of sneaking onto the grounds in the back of a dark-windowed van. Nonsense, says his lawyer, Raymond Johnson Jr., who was also his driver: "If the guard at the gate had looked in, he would have seen Mr. and Mrs. Scrushy right behind me, in the back seat." Johnson also insisted Scrushy never got the word he wasn't welcome and disputed HealthSouth's assertion that he was a "security risk." The real agenda, he fumes, was "intimidation and humiliation." The two sides did finally reach an uneasy truce: Scrushy watched the pageant, while HealthSouth security watched Scrushy. --John Helyar