JACKSONVILLE, FLA. -- Today more than 300 business leaders and civic worthies will gather outside a striking glass-front building that rises optimistically from a disheveled inner-city neighborhood.

They will applaud enthusiastically as Rep. Tillie Fowler formally opens the Donald D. Zell Urban Resource Center -- a bold venture that aims to train workers without jobs for the jobs without workers in a city that has suffered from more than its share of economic troubles.

Somewhere in the crowd, a lean, tanned 46-year-old man will be savoring the moment. Without him the site would still be occupied by a vacant, decaying clinic.

He has spent the best part of the past three years working feverishly behind the scenes: earmarking possible sponsors, crafting financing plans, keeping a fragile peace between the jostling departmental interests of the center's parent college. Throughout, he drew heavily on his years of experience as one of Wall Street's top investment bankers. But Martin A. Siegel, whose advice once brought in millions, has not received a penny for this job. He did it as part of the 3,000 hours of community service he was ordered to perform by a New York judge. Now he is hoping he has earned a different kind of reward: redemption.

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This gleaming structure represents his first significant achievement since the day in 1986 when Siegel had to tell his wife that his name was about to be added to the roster of Wall Street's insider trading scandal, the outbreak of financial larceny that had already brought down investment banker Dennis Levine and his onetime mentor, arbitrageur Ivan Boesky. It would later destroy junk bond king Michael Milken.

For Siegel, at last, the uncertainty was over. He seesawed between a feeling of relief and thinking there was nothing left to live for.

He insists he didn't dwell on the material things -- the Upper East Side co-op, the house in Connecticut with its beach and tennis court. "No, the biggest loss was the loss of respect," he says. "You can never recover from that."

Now he had to tell his family he would lose his job and almost certainly go to jail.

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He warned his parents that the kind of newspaper articles they would see after his guilty plea would be different from the ones his mother had faithfully collected in a scrapbook charting his progress through Wall Street's stratosphere.

The names Boesky and Milken have become synonymous with the complex sequence of crimes that came to symbolize the now-reviled greed of the 1980s. But Siegel's fall from grace was every bit as dramatic.

Speaking openly now for the first time since his sentencing, he talks of surviving "a war experience." Though his two-month prison sentence was the shortest of the four, he lived in near-total isolation for more than three years while he cooperated with government investigators. He was pilloried by those he had implicated, and ostracized by others he had called friends. In Wall Street circles he became a nonperson.

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"People will forgive you for a lot of things," he says, "but they won't forgive you for cooperating."

For almost seven years, he says, he has been trying to "make it right." A few weeks ago he was bursting with boyish pride as he showed a visitor the products of his restitution.

He explained how employers will be able to customize their computerized job specifications and how job applicants will be assessed and then trained to match them. He explained the computer design courses, the electronics laboratory and the video-conferencing facilities that will beam the center's teachers into classrooms hundreds of miles away. He even pointed out the "raised access flooring."

He didn't need to draw a visitor's attention to the more significant achievement of his years in Jacksonville: the enthusiasm with which the center's staffers greeted him and pumped his arm and asked why he couldn't visit more often, the glowing assessments proffered by colleagues at every opportunity.

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But there was one more thing he wanted to show. Opening the pristine visitors' book, he pointed to the very first entry: Robert and Bernice Siegel, his parents.

For a moment the errant son contemplated the return of a kind of approval he had once taken for granted. "It was nice," he said quietly. "They were proud of me."

The Heights, the Depths

From the beginning, the story of Martin A. Siegel seemed almost too good to be true. This financial whiz was young, smart, poised, but most of all (as no profile writer failed to point out) outrageously handsome. "Looks as if he should play the heartthrob in an old Greta Garbo movie," cooed one of the earliest hagiographies.

The script wasn't bad either: humble middle-class upbringing (Boston suburb), gritty progress through engineering school (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute), Harvard Business School honors, beautiful wife.

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After taking a job at Kidder, Peabody & Co., an established WASP-y investment banking firm, Siegel quickly cut himself a niche in the poorly charted territory of corporate takeovers, successfully defending a string of companies against hostile takeover bids. Before long Business Week magazine was hailing him as a "canny virtuoso of defensive tactics," a "kind of all-star middle linebacker" in the game of corporate football. (By the time his professional obituaries were being written in 1987 the favored description was "Wall Street's Secretary of Defense.")

A few years after being divorced by his wife, he married Jane Day Stuart, a Kidder, Peabody executive, and the two built a dramatic beachside house in Connecticut. As critics enjoyed recalling later, he drove an Alfa Romeo convertible when he was not commuting to and from his dream home by helicopter. Jane Day gave birth to three children, including a pair of twins. His salary leapfrogged into six digits and then well into seven as he moved to Milken's investment firm, Drexel Burnham Lambert.

And all the while he was busily planting the time bomb that would destroy him. By 1981 he had become friendly with Boesky, already established as a Wall Street giant through a string of audacious speculative triumphs. Boesky asked for tips on takeover deals that the younger man was working on. Siegel obliged. His reward: cash payments totaling $700,000.

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Siegel also confessed later to having "crossed the line" with another arbitrageur, Robert Freeman of Goldman Sachs. The two spoke daily, exchanging philosophies and, Siegel told government investigators, confidential information.

(Freeman pleaded guilty to using insider information in only one deal; in a recent Fortune article he suggested Siegel had substituted his name for Boesky's in the other deals. Although many people believe Siegel was a major source for "Den of Thieves," the account of the scandal written by Wall Street Journal reporter James B. Stewart, Siegel has never spoken on the record about the scandal or the protestations of his onetime associates. "Freeman was a soul mate," he says now. "I still like Bob Freeman. If he wants to deny everything, that's his business.")

Though Siegel says he had ended his arrangement with Boesky by August 1984, the fuse smoldered till Nov. 11, 1986, when his lawyer told him that his earlier links with the arbitrageur had been discovered. Levine had ratted on Boesky, Boesky had fingered Siegel. "By that weekend it was over."

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The Moment of Truth

"As far as I'm concerned, I died," he says now, leaning back behind the shabby veneer desk in the office from which he supervised the construction of the Urban Resource Center. "That Marty Siegel died in 1986." The office is barely larger than a closet, perhaps a sixth the size of the 20th-floor suite at Kidder, Peabody's Hanover Square headquarters he occupied for more than 15 years. He insists the contrast concerns him little: "I was never an office person. I was a guy who spent five days a week on the road."

If the old Marty Siegel is dead, the resemblance is uncanny. Sure, a few silver streaks have crept into the thick black hair. Sure, there is just the hint of a second chin.

But the impish grin hasn't changed. Nor have the clear, eager eyes, or the lean, angular body. (He never strayed from his thrice-weekly 1 1/2-hour workouts.) Even the outmoded pin-striped suit that hangs a little too loosely off the new Marty Siegel was owned by the old one; he hasn't bought a new suit since leaving New York almost seven years ago.

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Siegel came to Florida in December 1986 looking for a place to ride out the storm he knew was about to break. "I knew that once it became known that I was cooperating I would become a pariah. New York is a very big city but it was going to become a very small one."

Under his agreement with the Securities and Exchange Commission he would pay more than $9 million and forfeit $10 million more in bonuses and stock owed to him by Drexel -- a sum many times greater than the illegal gains from his relationship with Boesky. (The fact that others involved in the scandal paid back little more than they had earned illegally does not bother him, he insists: "The money didn't matter anymore, I just wanted to get this thing behind me.")

Siegel was allowed to keep the $5 million in proceeds from the sale of his Connecticut and Manhattan homes. After legal fees and taxes, that left him a little more than $3 million for a house on the ocean in Ponte Vedra Beach on the outskirts of Jacksonville.

He is sensitive about press reports that he chose Florida because the state's homestead law protects property from seizure by creditors, and that he has emerged from the scandal with a lifestyle that many would envy. He points out that his wife's grandmother lives nearby and that several states have similar property protection statutes.

The slightly worn BMW he drives? He bought it 12 years ago when his oldest daughter, Jessica, was born. (In truth, he says, he never much cared for the trappings of wealth. Those helicopter stories? The aircraft's owners needed to make the journey anyway; after sharing the cost with neighbors it worked out cheaper than the train.) Then there is the legal bill, still in seven figures with more than $1 million already paid: "I will be working for my lawyers for a long, long time."

His punishment began, he says, as soon as he turned state's witness and moved to Florida. Government investigators had banned him from talking to anyone about his case. But he knew, anyway, that many people he had thought of as friends would not have taken his call. "You went from talking to 40 people a day to talking to one or maybe two," he says. "I did a lot of car pool and a lot of shopping. I could arbitrage real good between the three local supermarkets."

At first Siegel's sentencing was scheduled for six weeks after his guilty plea in February 1987. But as the authorities assembled their case against Freeman and pursued other leads, it was repeatedly delayed; weeks turned into months, months turned into 3 1/2 years.

Forbidden to take a paying job, Siegel filled the time organizing a computer camp for underprivileged students and working for the local Boys and Girls Club.

When the moment of truth finally came, his sentence was lighter than he had dared hope. He pleaded guilty to one count of securities fraud and one count of tax evasion. On top of the two-month prison term, Judge Robert Ward ordered him to do 3,000 hours of community service. At the request of Charles Spence, president of the city's community college, who met Siegel when the college took over his computer camp, the bulk of his time (2,400 hours) would be devoted to the training center project.

At the time the judge's leniency drew fierce criticism. Siegel is unapologetic: "I served 3 1/2 years before the two months."

He reported to Jesup Federal Correctional Camp in Georgia on July 1, 1990. He and Jane Day had taken a psychiatrist's advice on how to explain his absence to the children. "I sat down with the kids and explained that I had done something wrong and I was going to go away to make it right, like when Scott {his son} gets sent to his room when he does something bad."

Secretly he feared victimization in the prison after an unhelpfully timed article branded him a "rat." But his 54 days of incarceration passed relatively uneventfully. He painted lines on the parking lot, computerized the library and coached the winning team in the prison volleyball competition.

On his release he threw himself into the planning and design of the $13 million training center. There were big and small triumphs along the way: picking up the building site for a song, establishing links with more than 150 local businesses, securing a bargain price for a consignment of computers from IBM. Most significantly, though, there was a sense of acceptance: "I was just so grateful to be part of a team again."

The center opened quietly in January. Siegel is proud of how its courses have been tailored to the needs of local employers through the consultation process he oversaw, proud of how the 25 students who began the first secretarial course should all be placed in jobs by the end of the month.

In the city where he once sought to be "invisible," he is no longer an exile. "I did some bad things, but I did some good things before and I've done some good things since, and now I want to get on with my life."

Why Did He Do It?

As the scandal unfolded, and in its immediate aftermath, one question engaged armchair pontificators across the country. Why did these men, whose legitimate earnings exceeded anything most people dream about, do it? What drove Siegel, the man who seemed to have everything, to risk it all for a few hundred thousand dollars more? Commentators churned out knowing treatises on the perennially underestimated power of greed; they speculated about the likely impact of the business failure of Siegel's father early in the investment banker's career.

"It was insane," says Siegel, burying his face in his hands. "I can't rationalize it. I have no excuse for it." But on innumerable long walks on the beach near his house, he admits, he has combed the years before his fall for a clue to what he did.

He recalls the nagging self-doubt and craving for security he experienced while his every step was praised to the skies. "I knew I was never as good as they said I was. I moved too far, too fast. I was 34 years old and I was on top of the world. I was a master of the universe, but the higher I went the greater the drop was.

"I was always fearful that every deal was going to be my last, that it was all going to come crumbling down. I felt I had to get an insurance policy."

He is determined, he says, that his children have "the building blocks of self-confidence" he lacked. When they grow older he plans to show them copies of some of the favorable articles written before his crime, and some of the stinging ones that appeared later.

"I'll give them both sets and say: 'Look, neither of them are true, the truth is somewhere in between.' "

Out of the Shadows?

Could today's ceremony mark the beginning of Siegel's emergence from the shadow of transgressions committed almost a decade ago? "I'm not sure," he says.

His caution is understandable. He will remain on probation for two more years, and it is still hard to escape regular reminders of his folly. None of his former Wall Street friends will be at today's opening; Siegel says he still feels embarrassed when he meets acquaintances during his periodic, uneasy visits to New York.

Guardedly, he reveals that he has avoided the sizable oeuvre of books and articles on the scandal. He even kept away from the film "Wall Street." "It's a defense mechanism, I suppose. You just get to the stage where enough is enough."

There are other encouraging signs. According to Stan Block, executive director of the training center, many involved in the project were skeptical when they first heard of Siegel's involvement but were quickly won over. "We couldn't have got this thing off the ground without Marty," Block says.

Earlier this year Spence wrote to Judge Ward commending Siegel's "extraordinary contribution" and reporting that he had devoted to the project almost double the number of hours prescribed by the judge's order. He says he plans to enlist Siegel's help on future college projects, and Siegel confirms that he will pitch in.

There are times, too, when he finds himself acknowledging the advantages of his new life. Like the night before this interview, when his daughter Jessica ran into trouble with her math homework. "She was doing primes. I was there to help. If I had been living in New York City I would have been on a plane somewhere."

And there are times when he ponders what he threw away. "I'm at the point of my life where I am now seeing members of my peer group moving on and doing important things. I could have made a contribution, I could have played that game. I'll never play in the major leagues again."

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