LAS VEGAS — Right to the end, Michael Amador did it his way.

The lawyer, whose nine-week defense of so-called Black Widow Margaret Rudin has been equal parts stumble and zeal, delivered a long, rambling closing argument Wednesday so different from the 30-minute, tightly-focused oratory he had promised the court, that the trial judge became enraged and called Amador a liar with no personal integrity.

"This court feels like you sandbagged the court. You lied to me," Judge Joseph Bonaventure bellowed at Amador at the end of the closing. When the lawyer protested, the judge bolted from the bench, shouting, "I don't even want to deal with you."

The fireworks occurred outside the presence of the jurors during a marathon day of closing arguments that stretched until nearly 10 p.m. and had jurors, lawyers and spectators rubbing their eyes and yawning.

Amador

The panel is to begin weighing evidence against Rudin for the 1994 fatal shooting of her millionaire fifth husband Thursday. Prosecutors contend she killed the real estate developer to get at his $11 million fortune, but her defense says she had nothing to do with his death and casts blame on the trustees of her husband's estate and his other associates in shady land deals. The 57-year-old grandmother and former socialite faces life in prison if convicted.

Rudin, who appears to enjoy an extremely close relationship with Amador, looked concerned as Bonaventure dressed him down Wednesday afternoon.

"You, Mr. Amador, have lost this court's respect and believability," the judge spat. "You have lost all honor before this court."

Bonaventure was livid because earlier in the week he took the unusual step of allowing both Amador and his co-counsel Tom Pitaro to make separate closing arguments. The judge, however, agreed with the proviso that Pitaro deliver the main case and Amador offer only a short assessment of Ron Rudin's complicated financial records.

The judge's decision seemed to be a nod to the three-member defense team's unique dynamic. Amador, who has focused almost obsessively on the victim's shady business dealings as a motive for others, led the defense during the early stages of the case.

However, after giving a poor opening and lurching through several cross-examinations, he and his client moved for a mistrial because of his substandard performance. Bonaventure denied that motion, but subsequently Pitaro and co-counsel John Momot took more prominent roles.

Amador seemed determined not to repeat the mistakes of his disastrous, unorganized opening as he delivered his closing Wednesday. He read his argument from a script which was also displayed on a large screen for jurors to read along.

At first his argument centered on the trustees of Rudin's estate and how they stood to gain from his death and a cover-up of his allegedly fraudulent business dealings. As his argument drew on, however, Amador began discussing Rudin's mistress, the forensic evidence in the case, the conduct of police and the dark hearts of the prosecution's witnesses.

"If you looked in their eyes as they testified, these people had no souls," he said. All but one juror had stopped taking notes as Amador began straying from his script and said in an emotional finale, pointed to his client and said in a quivering voice, "I am humbled by Margaret Rudin. Look at her. She's never given up. She fought the biggest, most powerful people in town by herself. I am humbled by her strength."

With his last word, Bonaventure sent the jury from the court and lit into Amador. The lawyer endured his wrath without uttering a word, and later outside court, Amador said neither he, nor Rudin regretted the closing he gave.

"I honor what I did. I did it for my client. [Bonaventure] can yell at me or call me anything he wants," he said. He called Bonaventure's comments a "hit and run" attack and said in spite of it, Rudin was "extremely pleased" with his performance and felt "protective" of him when the judge castigated him. "Not one person could've explained what I explained," he said.

Prosecutor Gary Guymon began the day with a meticulous, three-hour argument of the state's theory that Rudin shot her philandering husband four times in the head and then burnt his body in the desert in order to inherit his money.

"Boom, boom, boom, boom," Guymon thundered four separate times during his closing.

He pointed to a document Rudin added to his will indicating he feared his wife might kill him to get at his money.

"Ron Rudin believed Margaret Rudin may kill him some day. Ron Rudin was right," he said. He reminded jurors of testimony that Rudin never showed emotion when her husband was found dead or sought out police help in solving his disappearance pointed to her guilt.

"For seven years, you go home and your husband is there at night and for the first time you go home and he's not there and you think nothing of it?" said Guymon.

The prosecutor was clearly concerned that the jury, which has heard Rudin described as a paranoid alcoholic who dressed all in black and worried about demonic possession, find the victim sympathetic.

"People loved him and people cared about him," said Guymon, who three times pointedly mentioned that Rudin was "a human being."

After Amador's closing, Pitaro continued the defense's cause, arguing that Rudin was targeted "a good and decent woman" persecuted by shoddy detective work and the selfish motives of the victim's beneficiaries who had much to gain by her conviction. He attacked the prosecution's witnesses as motivated by reward money and derided the notion that Rudin's actions in the wake of her husband's disappearance were incriminating.

Pitaro compared the ash-blond Rudin to a Goldilocks character who was always, in police estimation, too stoic or too emotional but never just right.

"How would you like to be judged for murder by how some stranger thinks you should react," Pitaro asked.

Prosecutor Chris Owens had the last word in the state's rebuttal argument.

He described Rudin as "a woman that has ice water in her veins" and said the defense's suggestion that jurors link Ron Rudin's business deals to his death was laughable.

"Connect the dots?...Where are the dots? What's the connection between him doing [a land sale in the early 1980s] and what we're here about who killed Ron Rudin," Owens said.

He chided, "Anything to keep the jury from looking at the facts...How do you do that? You attack the witnesses, you attack the prosecutors or you attack the police...This is the smoke and mirrors defense."

Also Wednesday, Bonaventure questioned a female juror about "dissension" between her and other panelists over her smoking habit. The juror said she "absolutely" wanted to continue on the jury and would try to avoid problems in the future.