For decades, truckers have hauled cargo on the nation's highways with little regulation on how much pollution their rigs puff into the atmosphere. In December 2000, during Bill Clinton's final days in the White House, the Environmental Protection Agency decided that needed to change. The EPA created a new rule requiring diesel engines built after Jan. 1, 2010, to have cleaner exhaust. Nitrogen-oxide emissions were to be cut by as much as 95 percent.

The new rule sent engine makers scrambling for a fix. And one Seattle-area company seemed to have it.

Kirkland-based Integrated Fuel Technologies, started by a former real-estate developer named Robert Firebaugh, purportedly had developed an effective new catalytic converter system which broke down nitrogen oxides into separate (and harmless) nitrogen and oxygen molecules.

With the engine industry under the gun, and truckers hoping to avoid an extensive retrofit of their vehicles when they replaced the engines, Firebaugh's idea was "a bright spot," says Jay Thompson, president of a consulting firm in Denver called Transportation Business Associates. The journal Science News announced the invention as a big step forward in cleaning up diesel emissions. And Integrated received expressions of interest from Bellevue-based PACCAR, the third-biggest truck manufacturer in the world.

But the converter that could rescue the truckers is now being choked by litigation. Firebaugh's investors, many of them a close-knit group of Mormons, have accused him of ripping them off. They say he lured them in with half-truths, developed a design that was unworkable, and diverted some of their money to hair-loss treatments, a lakefront house in Medina for his mistress, and trips to Las Vegas.

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