It was a night when the storm didn’t just batter the windows of the Harrington estate in upstate New York—it felt like an omen announcing the collapse of an empire.
Inside the vast master bedroom, Alexander Harrington, a titan of American industry who just a week earlier had been feared in boardrooms and admired on magazine covers, lay motionless on a bed dressed in silk sheets. A so-called accident involving his private jet had left him, according to doctors, “functionally inert”—paralyzed from the neck down, speech slurred, trapped inside his own body.
