THIS week, in an airless bunker of a courtroom in southern Germany, a former second hand car dealer and insurance salesman went on trial for tax fraud after more than a year of incarceration and humiliation.
It is no ordinary trial. The accused is Peter Graf, the domineering and obsessive father of the most successful female tennis player ever, Steffi Graf.
For a decade he strutted the flash spots of Marbella and Florida, barking orders to underlings, wheeling and dealing with the corporate elite, obtaining vicarious fulfilment from the achievements of a daughter he groomed ruthlessly.
Now he appears a broken figure, undergoing treatment for alcohol and drug addiction and various ailments while in custody in his native town of Mannheim.
The sad and seamy life of the 60 year old, his lifelong manipulation of his "poor little rich girl" daughter and his business machinations with the huge sums of prize and sponsorship money Steffi generates - all form a dark contrast to the squeaky clean image of the tennis star as the blond, lithe German heroine.
Peter Graf's chronic personal problems are likely to feature prominently in the trial.
Michael Schmidt Degenhard, a Heidelberg psychiatrist who has treated Graf in prison, reported that the accused has been on tranquillisers for 25 years and drinking inordinate amounts of spirits for almost 20 years to try to conquer an "eternal fear of failure".
From 1982, when the 13 year old Steffi made her professional debut, until last year, the tennis star's earnings were estimated at 152 million deutschmarks (£64 million) on which, by last year, only 10 million deutschmarks tax had been paid in a country where the top rate is 53 per cent.
Graf and his financial adviser, Joachim Eckardt, are accused of tax avoidance to the tune of 19,871,045 deutschmarks (more than £7.7 million) between 1989 and 1993 alone. But the 237 page charge sheet goes further. The father is said to have behaved dictatorially in managing his daughter, not shying away from physical violence in bending her to his will.
A new biography of the Graf clan cites witnesses testifying to the physical abuse meted out by the father when he thought Steffi was under performing. "For the first time there are witnesses for a topic that was taboo for years - Peter Graf beats his daughter," they write. "He even landed her one when Steffi was kneeling on the floor to pick up a fork." The father later disputed this vehemently.
The intense, tennis focused, relationship of the father and daughter began early, before the girl was four. Peter doctored a full size racquet for the infant by sawing off the handle and encouraged her to use it in the living room, using the couch as the net.
He himself had a miserable upbringing. He was born in Germany in 1936. His mother, a depressive, killed herself when he was a child. His father, a local sports official, decamped with a girlfriend and Peter was reared by an aunt.
He developed an early zeal for sport, alternately pursuing boxing, weightlifting, football and the pentathlon. Relatively late, at the age of 25, he discovered tennis. At the Mannheim club he joined, the biographers wrote, "The trainers praised his talent for gauging others' weaknesses and making the most of them".
At this time he was selling insurance and travelling north to Hamburg to buy second hand cars which he would then sell on to American GIs in his native south west.
But in 1981 when Steffi, as a 12 year old prodigy, served notice of her arrival by winning the Florida Orange Bowl championship, Peter gave up his day jobs and devoted himself to his daughter's career and the amassing of money. He obtained special permission for her to leave school at 14. A year later, when Steffi asked to go hack to school, daddy knew best and said no.
Trainers, managers, coaches and consultants came and went, ditched when they appeared to threaten the singularly close relationship on and oft the tennis court. By the mid 1980s, with the corporate sponsors queueing up to be associated with the Grafs and the money flowing in (Steffi was a millionairess in 1986 at the age of 17), Peter's overriding concern - according to the prosecution - was how to maximise the profits and retain as much as possible of it.
In a bizarre press conference appearance, he staged a dialogue with Steffi in which she pledged never to have a boyfriend, never to marry, never to have children.
At the US Open in 1984, Peter Graf sought advice on how to evade the taxman and was told to move out of Germany, to Monaco or some other tax haven. But he had built a family fortress in Bruehl, near Mannheim, wanted to remain in Germany and so devised schemes whereby corporate sponsors such as Adidas, Opel and Dunlop were told to deposit the fees via subsidiaries outside of Germany and into foreign accounts, on the principle that one third of the earnings be paid in Germany and two thirds abroad.
In 1987 he set up a shell company in the Netherlands through which, it is alleged, most of the Graf millions were transferred to the Dutch Antilles. There are also said to have been accounts in Liechtenstein, the Bahamas and Switzerland.
Alternatively, Peter Graf is also accused of insisting on cash payments from tournament organisers in Germany, driving off with plastic bags filled with hundreds of thousands of deutschmarks in the back of his car.
By 1989 Graf was said to be imbibing a bottle of brandy a day and indulging his wildest nouveau riche megalomaniac fantasies. In Marbella he embarked on a two year affair with model Nicole Meissner, who was already linked with a gangland hard man, Eberhard Thust.
Meissner became pregnant, claimed Graf was the father, gave birth to a daughter in January 1990 and registered Graf as the father. He always dismissed the fatherhood allegation and was later vindicated in a paternity test.
Meissner hawked her story round the tabloids and found a taker in Bild Zeitung, the bestselling German daily newspaper. But in February that year, Graf obtained an injunction preventing Bild from publishing the story after Meissner signed a notarised statement declaring she had never had "intimate relations" with Peter Graf and that he was not the child's father.
According to the biographers, Graf engaged a Croatian middleman to deal with Meissner and her minder, Thust. In a Mannheim hotel, the Croat handed over 600,000 deutschmarks; another 200,000 followed later. In return, he collected compromising tapes, photos and the statement signed by Meissner. A few months later, the story hit the tabloids anyway, besmirching the Graf family's name.