The merchants along Milwaukee between Armitage and Diversey remember Stanley Wissner well because he often came into their stores, beginning in the early 90s. He was a shambling figure with yellowed teeth and worn clothes who gave off a strong odor. In winter he favored a face mask, a long coat, one pair of pants pulled over another, and an old pair of galoshes. For a time he was accompanied by an Airedale, to which he appeared devoted.
“To tell you the truth, if business was slow and no customers were there it was interesting to talk to him,” says Gary Siedband, the owner of Electronic Engineers. “But I never knew how much of what he said was truth.” Gillman liked Wissner, but Gartzman found him annoying, especially when he bragged that he spoke several languages or read textbooks. “I’m not an ignoramus,” says Gartzman. “I’ve had some college, and I can read a book. He came in and opened his mouth, and I wished he would leave. He was a total embarrassment. When I saw him coming I would go to the back of the store.”
Neighbors watched the house on Stave continue to disintegrate. In the winter of 2000-’01 Wissner stopped showing up on Milwaukee, though with the warm weather he was back. By midsummer he’d disappeared again, and the store owners wondered what had become of the man they knew so little about.
Stanley was a premed and German student at the City College of New York, where the education was cheap and good, and he graduated at the top of his class in 1957. “Colin Powell was there then,” he says proudly, though he admits they weren’t acquainted. He went on to the State University of New York’s medical school in Brooklyn, and to pay for it he helped his father in the projection booth. He says they grew close, but Leonard remembers a darker relationship: “Our father got up one day and told Stanley, ‘I’m not always going to support you.’ That was hurtful.”
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Stanley says that while he was in medical school he married his girlfriend after she threatened to embarrass him by telling administrators she was pregnant. “There were Jewish girls who would get pregnant and say, ‘Give me money for an abortion,’” he says. “It wasn’t my child. I didn’t have any feeling toward him.” He says his wife put the boy up for adoption, and they soon divorced. Neither Stanley nor Leonard knows what became of the child.
Associates say that during this period Wissner also developed an obsession with heavy-metal poisoning. “Lead and the other elements are ubiquitous and very dangerous,” he still says. He, like some other scientists, contends that the metals impair cognitive development and lead to autism and antisocial behavior.
By 1980 Wissner had sunk to working as a physician at a cut-rate clinic and pharmacy on Lincoln and at a clinic in West Town operated by Drug Industry Consultants. In 1984 the U.S. attorney indicted 40 DIC employees–the founder, several associates, and 16 physicians, including Wissner–accusing them of engaging in a $20 million scheme to defraud the medicaid system. Wissner and the other doctors were charged with prescribing cough syrup, sedatives, and other prescription drugs to addicts and dealers as heroin substitutes, and with ordering unnecessary tests and prescriptions that were billed to medicaid. “Stanley fit the profile here,” says Elliot Samuels, Wissner’s defense attorney in the case. “The owners would find these mentally dysfunctional doctors, stick them in the back of their offices, put prescriptions in front of them, and say, ‘Sign here. Sign here.’” Daniel Purdom, the assistant U.S. attorney who led the prosecution in the case, says of Wissner, “He was a pretty smart guy, but he was nutso.”
