For legendary whistleblower, the fight continues
16 years later, George Green now battles the IRS.
By Mark Lisheron
<http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/local/05/mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Sunday, May 07, 2006
HORSESHOE BAY -- Another lawyer has tried to quit George Green and, by
God, Green isn't in any mood to let him.
This is the way it has gone for Green, burning through 13 law firms, 20
lead and at least 100 associate lawyers and assistants, and $7 million
in legal fees.
Green spent seven years in the 1990s persuading juries, judges and
politicians to compensate him after the state fired him from his job as
an architect. He was awarded $13.7 million -- the largest amount Texas
has ever been forced to pay someone who blew the whistle on corruption.
For the past eight years, Green has been in a street fight with the
Internal Revenue Service. At the end of March, a tax judge ruled that
Green owed the federal government $3.3 million.
Through it all, Green has been disgraced and reviled in the corridors of
the Capitol. He gave up trying to find work in his field. Local
companies wouldn't hire him. He has lived for years on the handouts of
family and friends, his remaining millions knotted up in a complicated
tax-sheltered trust set up to stiff-arm the federal government.
At 58, Green lives with his parents, Garlan, 81, and Margo, 78, in
Horseshoe Bay. The woman he had hoped would stand with him through this
struggle and for the rest of their lives gave up on him years ago.
With the deadline for another appeal coming in July, Green doesn't have
time for reflection. As he has for the past 15 years, Green needs a
lawyer to keep up the fight.
"People have said that I'm complicated," Green says. "I don't think
there's anything complicated about me. I didn't want this fight. But
when they decided to crucify me, to eliminate me as a person and a
professional, I didn't have a choice. My dad said to me, 'John Wayne's
dead. We could use another John Wayne.' "
George Green is an Eagle Scout. His critics sometimes used the term with
disdain, like do-gooder or whistle-blower. But Eagle Scouts are taught
to live by a code. "The foremost responsibility of an Eagle Scout is to
live with honor," the Eagle Scout Challenge reads.
Pair that with a fierce independence. "From the time he was walking,
George thought he could do anything," his father says. "Even to this day
it's that way. For George, right is right and that's that."
Green lives in a perpetual guerrilla operation against the government.
He bought property in Canada and dropped out for a few years. He spends
time in Mexico.
While he lives with his parents, he will not use their telephone. He
uses prepaid phone cards so his cell number cannot be retrieved.
The George Green of today is, maybe, 40 pounds heavier than in his state
government days. He is polite but direct, with scant patience for any
small talk that interferes with the retelling of his story.
*Once upon a time*
Green grew up in El Paso, one of three children in a close-knit family.
He earned a degree from the highly regarded school of architecture at
the University of Texas. As a young designer Green helped the company he
worked for build Lakeway World of Tennis, a club that was, in 1973, one
of the finest in the country. The ideas he contributed to the design are
among his signal achievements, he says.
For four years Green had his own architecture company. But in 1983, when
consulting work for commercial real estate slowed in Austin, Green, at
age 35, took a job as staff architect for the state's social services
agency, then known as the Department of Human Services. Green's father
warned him that he was unsuited for government work.
In 1984, he married a legal secretary he had known a short time, one of
his few genuinely impulsive acts. After eight months, she left him
without explanation and never came back.
Green immersed himself in work, assessing the agency's 600 buildings
around the state and reviewing contracts for new construction. In each
of his first four years, Green received positive performance reviews,
which he's saved to this day. They point out his willingness to
personally inspect construction work and his attention to detail.
His supervisors, though, didn't always want his full attention. He
pointed out instances of the state overpaying for rental space and
construction shortcuts that might pose safety hazards. Green's bosses
asked that he overlook them, Green testified during his trial 15 years
ago. He wouldn't.
"It is a level of professionalism that I will not compromise," Green
says. "I am not a hard-nosed, inflexible person. It was the right way to
do it. I was not a radical."
When Green threatened to take his complaints public, Harold Jobes, the
director of business for Human Services, questioned his phone records,
asking Green to account for roughly 8,000 calls he had made on his state
phone during a 2 1/2-year period. Green accounted for all but one, he
later testified in court: a seconds-long call to his father.
After a second investigation into his use of disability leave, Jobes
fired Green in December 1989. Jobes took the case to Travis County
District Attorney Ronnie Earle. A grand jury indicted Green for theft of
time for abusing his sick leave, but Earle later dropped the charges.
Green sued his former employers in 1990 under the recently enacted Texas
Whistleblower Act. So convincing was the case, the jury awarded Green
$13,619,831.87 (the jury subtracted 13 cents for the unaccounted for
call to his father), $10 million of it in punitive damages. His first
attorney eventually earned $4.6 million of that, for his work through
the trial.
The indignant foreman, Richard Fogg, said at the time that the jury
intended to send a message that civil servants ought not be punished for
doing the right thing.
After the Texas Supreme Court ruled for Green, though, it was up to the
Legislature to authorize payment.
Instead, House Appropriations Committee Chairman Robert Junell said the
Legislature had an obligation to refuse expenditures that were not in
the best interest of Texas taxpayers. Members took to the House floor in
1995 to portray Green as greedy. They refused to pay him.
As the penalties for failing to pay Green drove the judgment past $19
million, the court of public opinion heard Green's case.
TV news features statewide showed Green in his tweed sportcoat with
armloads of documents descend on the Legislature. The June 12, 1995,
issue of People magazine treated him like a hero. Diane Sawyer called
him "One tough Texan" in prime time.
Late in the session, Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock brokered a deal with Green to
accept the original settlement without the late payment penalties.
"It was never about George Green or his personality," Junell, now a
federal judge in Midland, says. "My opinion was the judgment was
unjustified based on the facts. As a steward of the state's funds, I
felt it was wrong to pay him in full. But, no, I have no hard feelings."
*It all falls apart*
For Green's supporters, the moment was sweet, but short-lived.
Donna Darling, a whistle-blower who had successfully taken on the
state's Employee Retirement System, testified at his trial and helped
draft documents for him. Now remarried, Donna Hood said she was drawn to
Green because he had the courage to publicly identify the pervasive
corner-cutting and corruption they had both seen. Green's settlement
should have sounded the call for good government -- and George Green
should have led that charge, she says.
"What he started out to do was fabulous, what he uncovered was
incredible, but I still don't think George ever got it. I think it was
about the money for George," Hood says. "Now I am pretty sure George was
in it for George all along."
Hood was right, at least, about what didn't happen. No Human Services
administrators replaced, no overhaul of contract or construction
policies, no repairs made on substandard work. In several newspaper
stories, Jobes, who is now dead, essentially called Green a liar and a
malingerer.
The Legislature commemorated Green's settlement in the same session by
passing a law capping all future whistle-blower awards at $250,000 and
back pay. And in legal cases of all sorts, the Legislature continues to
refuse any payment; the state now owes more than $13.2 million to 900
claimants.
Before his troubles started, Green had fallen in love with a woman who
worked in his agency.The woman recently agreed to discuss her
relationship with Green only if granted anonymity. With more than 25
years in state government, she believes disclosure of her relationship
with Green could cost her her job and her pension.
She had come to Austin from a nearby rural town at 18 to escape a cycle
of early marriage, child bearing and drudgery, says the woman, who is
wearing a crisp linen pantsuit, her nails freshly done, sipping a
margarita at Curra's on East Oltorf Street. She had worked her way from
clerk to department director -- and not by questioning authority. She
insisted that she and Green keep their relationship a secret from
co-workers.
The couple had broken up several times under the strain of Green's fight
and had always gotten back together when Green would promise that things
would change when the money came. Finally, she tired of trying to live
up to Green's black and white ideal.
"You are either with him or against him, so he saw himself as the hero
and me as the traitor," the woman says. "With George, everything is a
battle.In the end, he loved the battle more than me. He's wasted the
best years of his life on this mission to prove . . . I don't even know
what it is he is trying to prove."
To love Green is to love the battle. She didn't understand that, he
says.Recalling her, he knits his thick hands together, and the track of
a single tear lengthens on his cheek. "She cried a lot. I did, too. She
decided my quest was too dangerous. She said that to me. I find that to
be fatally flawed."
*In it for the long haul*
Green moves seamlessly from the state fight to the federal fight. They
are all of one piece. The "gubment" -- he deliberately slurs the word --
at war with George Green.
Green had to give the IRS $3.5 million -- an estimate of what the
government says he owed after paying some taxes on his money -- before a
judge would even listen to Green's claims last year. The judge ruled
that Green owed $3.3 million. IRS attorneys and officials will not
comment on the case.
The math would suggest the government should return $200,000. But Green
can walk you through each line of the 38-page United States Tax Court
ruling to demonstrate why he aims to get the whole $3.5 million back.
The arguments the government used to arrive at the $3.3 million figure
are specious, Green says. But, he insists, the dollar amount is immaterial.
"To ignore the immoral, unethical and outrageous behavior of government
is to endorse it," he says.
Green has had a tough time enlisting and keeping lawyers who understand
his urgency. Gregg Kosterlitzky, the San Antonio tax attorney who
represented him in federal tax court, had asked Green for his release
from the case in writing. As of Friday, Green had managed to persuade
him to stay on.
If he could find another lawyer, maybe Green would cut him loose. But
there is that July deadline.
In George Green's world there is always another deadline, always another
appeal. The gatekeepers, as he calls the lawyers, are part of the
system, and because of that, the gatekeepers always seem to let him down.
Disappointed, Green must soldier on because he cannot come to terms with
something that most people take for granted, that the world is a flawed
place, says C. Fred Alford, a University of Maryland professor who has
written a book about whistle-blowers.
Whistle-blowers like Green, Alford says, cannot stop fighting. "Fighting
is a way of keeping at bay the knowledge that the world is deeply
corrupt. If you stop fighting, you have to live with what you have
learned, and that is a disaster."
Green spends his days rummaging through his meticulously filed boxes to
marshal an argument that will persuade the gatekeeper, Kosterlitzky.
He and his father never miss the TV series "24" with its bullet-train
take on government intrigue.
When the burden gets to be too much, he comes out to the 20 acres his
father bought in 1997. Out here he can work with family, the few who
have stood by him all this time without question.
"I know I'm getting melodramatic," his mother says, "but this is really
like a tragedy in my family. It's pretty hard to see this happen to your
son. And I don't see an end to it."
At the gate to the family property are the flags of the United States
and of Texas. Green laid the foundations for the poles and does not
consider the act ironic. Behind the barn is the trailer Green lived in
during his fight with the state. His father had it moved here. On an
oily cardboard box next to a tool stand is the wooden sign for Green's
architecture company, outlines showing where glued-on letters once were.
With his money tied up, by government and by design, two foundations for
what was supposed to have been a house have gone unimproved for years.
"Those are dreams," he says, firing up a small backhoe. "Maybe we can
realize them one of these days.
"This mess didn't allow me to gain the predictable life I imagined for
myself. There has been heartache and loneliness, but I have my
self-respect, and no one can take that away from me."
Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/local/05/7green.html
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