As pitilessly exposed during his federal corruption trial, Sen. Vincent J. Fumo has emerged as an even more intriguing and outsize personality than previously known.

For five weeks, his staffers, an ex-girlfriend, a onetime private eye, and his former political consultant have been dishing like crazy about the 65-year-old Fumo.

Their testimony and a trove of e-mails have not only pointed to the powerful Democrat's legendary ruthlessness, but also to an unexpected tenderness and generosity.

The constants are his energy, the range of his enthusiasms, and the demands he laid on his staff day and night, almost all of which he wanted addressed IMMEDIATELY!!!! . . . ASAP, as he would stipulate in e-mail barrages.

"Sen. Fumo was aware of everything," Frank D. Wallace, his taxpayer-paid private investigator, told jurors. "He was the ultimate control freak."

Fumo is, in short, a piece of work.

And a shopaholic.

"He liked to buy a lot of things, a lot of things," former girlfriend Dorothy Egrie-Wilcox testified. "He didn't buy one of something. He bought four."

That way, Fumo could have the same clothes - the same khaki pants, blue shirts and shoes - in all of his homes. That way, he could equip each floor of each home with the same Oreck vacuum. That way, he could have the identically stocked toolbox at each house.

"I didn't think it was very normal, but once you were with him long enough you saw it was normal for him," the 51-year-old Egrie-Wilcox said. She recalled their "Flintstones-sized" shopping sprees up and down the wide aisles of Sam's Club - outings that were illegally paid for, prosecutors say, with credit cards from a South Philadelphia nonprofit he controlled.

According to the Christmas wish list that Fumo thoughtfully handed out to friends and political allies, his interests were varied: guns (Fumo owns 300), cooking (Fumo's wish list included a $379 Le Creuset six-piece cookware set), sporting (the list included $229 Van Staal titanium fishing pliers).

Egrie-Wilcox said it was not uncommon for him to drop as much as $500 in a bookstore, sometimes buying multiple copies of a book.

Then there was his fascination with tools.

"I've never seen a person own so many tools in my life," Christian Marrone, a former aide and Fumo's estranged son-in-law, told the jury. "There were just tools everywhere."

Even so, "he very rarely used the tools," Egrie-Wilcox said. "He just had to have them."

The prosecution contends that Fumo enjoyed his lavish lifestyle by defrauding the state Senate and a pair of nonprofit organizations.

Although Fumo was paid as much as $1 million as a "rainmaker" for the law firm Dilworth Paxson L.L.P. and received a lucrative salary from his family's bank, he nonetheless found himself financially strapped.

"He spends the money before he has it," his former girlfriend said.

In a 2001 e-mail, Fumo wrote that the financial pressure "sucks!"