Elderly Brooks man, victim of financial exploitation, tells his story

BROOKS, Maine — All his life, Arthur Green worked with his hands.

The 74-year-old retired construction worker and carpenter used those hands for 50 years as a laborer in Massachusetts. He also used them to build himself a home and an adjoining camp on Sanborn Pond in the small town of Brooks, where he expected to peacefully enjoy his twilight years among the loons and the tall white pine trees.

But when he used them in March 2011 to take hold of a notice of eviction that was served on him by the granddaughter he had helped raise, that sense of peace disappeared.

He learned that he had inadvertently signed away all his rights to the property, and that 20-year-old Nevin Bennoch of Brockton, Mass., was trying to sell some of his real estate while he was living there.

“It’s a heck of a thing to go through,” Green said this week.

What happened to Green is a tangled knot of financial exploitation, unclear understanding of estate planning and family betrayal that took months to unravel with the help of Legal Services for the Elderly, according to the attorneys who helped him recover his property.

Jaye Martin, director of the Augusta-based nonprofit agency, described Green’s situation as a “very classic scenario of a family member stealing the house and land and then trying to evict the elder from his own home.”

What separates Green from others is his willingness to talk about what happened to him, Martin and attorney Denis Culley said.

On Tuesday, Green sat at the kitchen table of the former hunting camp he had transformed into a comfortable lakeside home, his black cat Marie playing at his feet. He suffers from severe health problems and settled himself slowly and painfully into a chair. He said that he wanted to share his story so that nobody else will have to go through what he did, and Culley sat next to him as he disclosed the details of what had happened.

“Don’t sit there and think everything’s rosy, ‘cause it ain’t,” he said. “The worst ones to trust is your family.”

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Elderly Brooks man, victim of financial exploitation, tells his story