Gone With the Wind: A Cautionary Tale


Harry W. Green Jr. won a $2.25 million medical malpractice settlement, only to blow it all in two years on fast women, glitzy casinos and smooth-talking con men.

When Green first got his money, everyone close to him urged him to make conservative investments. He ignored their advice because, ironically, he thought they were after his money.

Now, at 36, Green lives in his aging parents’ small home just outside Chicago. He gets by on $470 a month in Supplemental Social Security, $66 in public assistance and $42 in food stamps. Because of the medical blunder that made him a temporary millionaire, he has no sense of balance, is plagued by double vision, speaks with painful slowness and uses a wheelchair full time.

Green began his riches-to-rags odyssey at the age of 21 when doctors diagnosed him with acromegaly, a rare benign tumor of the pituitary that stimulates the overproduction of growth hormone. People who get it tend to be unusually large — Green is 6 feet 10 inches tall — and struggle with distorted facial features and other distressing symptoms.

“When they told me what was wrong and what they do to fix it,” Green recalls, “I said, ‘Do it.'” But the procedure is not a slam dunk. Instead of just cutting out the tumor, the surgeons also removed some brain tissue, and Green slipped into a 10-week coma. “When I woke up,” he says, “nothing was the same, I mean, I couldn’t sit up, I couldn’t talk and I had a trach tube.”

And when doctors screw up, they seem to do it in multiple ways. Somehow, as they were inserting the trach tube, they severed the nerve that controls his right vocal chord. Before the surgery, Green had been ambulatory and independent — after, he needed so much care that he lived in a series of nursing homes. He was mad as hell. To get even, he did what any of us would do. He sued the bastards.

In October 1987, almost seven years after the operation, the hospital offered to settle. Green eagerly agreed. The attorney took half the $2.25 million settlement. “Do I feel he cheated me? Well, let’s say he took advantage of a situation,” Green comments. “They knew I was very anxious to bring it all to an end.”

With his nursing home days behind him, Green — now wealthier and, thanks to therapy, much healthier — was ready to swing. “I rented a limousine every night,” he remembers. He spent $500 to $700 a night, but the girls he was meeting weren’t the kind you bring home to Mom. He says the acromegaly has changed his face so much that he can no longer have sex without paying for it.

One night his driver made what seemed like a reasonable suggestion. “He said that as much as I use a limousine, I should own one.” Green bit. The next day, an owner of the car service talked him into buying two used limos for $63,000. He would get 40 percent of rentals whenever he wasn’t using them. “This guy could see I was a sucker and he went straight for the jugular,” Green says now. Soon, he was conned into spending another $60,000. “I was investment crazy,” he admits.

The limo service owners then wanted Green to put up $300,000, which they promised to match. Green anted up an initial $50,000. Meanwhile, they were taking Green on “business trips” — at his expense, of course — to Las Vegas, Atlantic City and other hot spots. When he’d ask why he hadn’t yet made anything from his investment, they’d tell him business was slow.

Finally, Green met a woman who explained how his two “friends” were robbing him. He didn’t own the cars, he now discovered, just liens on them. The woman suggested that if he wanted to make some real money, he should invest in her husband’s California company. He moved to San Diego — stopping en route in Las Vegas, where he paid off some gambling debts for his new pals. He put more than $100,000 into their business, and it turned to dust.

Eventually — broke, bitter, lonely and angry — Green came home to his parents’ house. These days he spends much of his time playing computer games and watching television. His life is not totally bleak. He just passed the test for his general equivalency diploma and is starting to look for a job. He’s become a devoted Baptist. “I finally found the serenity I had been searching for with my religion,” says a much wiser Green.


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