Margaret Rudin's lawyer let a stripper rummage through her legal files, hid boxes of evidence, jetted off on a European vacation when he should have been interviewing witnesses and was more concerned with TV appearances than preparing her murder defense.

Those are just some of the many allegations Rudin's current legal team made against her former lawyer, Michael Amador, in a motion for a new trial filed last week. Rudin, found guilty in May of killing her millionaire fifth husband, claims Amador's incompetence — as well as misconduct by the judge and prosecutors — entitles her to another trial.

Judge Joseph Bonaventure, who presided over the case, will hear arguments for a new trial August 24. If he denies the defense motion, Rudin will be sentenced August 31. She faces life in prison.

In his motion, public defender Craig Creel argues that Bonaventure pressured Rudin in a private meeting not to drop Amador as a lawyer and the prosecutors misstated the evidence to the jury. He reserves his biggest criticism for Amador who did nothing during the alleged misconduct.

"Was there anybody sitting next to Ms. Rudin when this was happening?" Creel wrote.

Amador was widely criticized as bumbling and ill-prepared during the 10-week trial. Early on in the trial, he asked for and was refused a mistrial for lack of preparation. Bonaventure repeatedly castigated him, once calling him a man with "no honor," and Rudin fired him days after the verdict.

Amador still maintains he did nothing wrong and bristled at the portrait of incompetence painted in the public defender's motion.

"I was never unprepared for this trial. Nobody prepares a case better than I do," he said Monday.

But in affidavits accompanying the motion, members of the defense team who came to the case after Amador claimed he did almost no pretrial preparation for the complicated case.

"Although files and discovery had been copied and placed in binders and individual files, it appears no work had been done on them," co-counsel Tom Pitaro, who joined the case three weeks before trial, recalled. "The defense was quite simply not ready for trial."

"Mr. Amador had failed to interview any of the proposed State's witnesses," defense investigator Tom Dillard wrote. "In my opinion, the defense investigation was done literally on the fly hour by hour and day by day..."

Perhaps the most stinging and serious criticism came from his own secretary, Annie Jackson, who resigned after the trial. In her affidavit, Jackson alleged that Amador lied when he told Bonaventure he had no book or movie deals based on the case. In fact, she said, he was negotiating such deals and after talking to the judge, hid the paperwork in a private safe.

She also charged that, after Rudin fired him, Amador held back "six or seven boxes" of paperwork or evidence which Rudin wanted sent to her new attorneys. Jackson said the lawyer needed them for his book and movie deals and said he planned to secret them in a storage unit rented under an assumed name.

The secretary also painted Amador's office as almost comically disordered.

"Even before he got into her case, he was in way over his head," she said.

In November, when he should have been poring over evidence, he took a month-long trip to Paris and Italy, she said.

Jackson claimed that when he returned "he still did not begin work on the Margaret Rudin case. However, he did plan a big Christmas party."

Things got worse when his girlfriend left him and she and her mother stopped working in his office, Jackson said. The case load mounted, but Amador never seemed to do any work on any case, she said.

The secretary said the only thing that grabbed her boss's attention was "media attention" and that on the rare occasions Amador did meet with his client, he made sure cameras from the CBS show 48 Hours were rolling.

One time, she had a motion on her computer "but then the camera crew from 48 Hours knocked out the power and I lost the motion. It was a big nightmare."

Amador seemed unconcerned, she said. He told her "that he spent more of his evenings at strip bars, and in the company of strippers. In fact, on many occasions, Mr. Amador was bragging about the many strippers he was dating."

"Worse, the strippers were calling and even coming over to the office during business hours when I was there. I personally recall one occasion when Mr. Amador even allowed one such stripper to go through and separate Margaret Rudin's documents," Jackson said.

Amador denied all the charges in Rudin's motion. Jackson, he said, "is looking for her five minutes of fame" and wasn't privy to the extensive preparation he did.

"Annie's best work she did for me was mowing my lawn," he snapped.

He said Rudin's new team had tried to get him to go along with "the lies, the misstatements, the wrongs."

"But I refused to lie to the court," he said.

He said that the trial strategy he was criticized for — concentrating on the shady real estate deals of Rudin's husband — was actually his client's idea. Now, he said, she was "willing to say anything," including accusing him of drug use, "to save her own neck." Amador even released a report from a urine test he said he took after the verdict which showed him clean from drugs.

"This one's pretty ugly all around," admitted prosecutor Gary Guymon. "I think the court's going to look very hard at Mike Amador's conduct during the trial."

The prosecutor said that while Amador's conduct gave a "black eye" to the case, Rudin had other competent attorneys in co-counsel John Momot and Pitaro as well as two private investigators — paid for at taxpayers' expense.

"She got a fair trial," he said.

Despite the criticism heaped on him during and after the trial, Amador, who represented Rudin pro bono, said he would gladly go through the trial again.

"I got a lifetime of happiness," he said. During the trial, he met Maggie Mabie, a Court TV viewer from Los Angeles who became so interested in the case that she and her mother drove to Las Vegas to watch it in person. Mabie and Amador had their first date on the night of the verdict and plan to be married in November.