by John Temple
Derik didn’t know much about the guy, but he liked their chances. Over the last two years, Chris and Derik had pulled off this particular sleight of hand a hundred times, helping straight citizens profit from the painkiller trade. The key was to make sure nobody thought too deeply about what they were doing. And that was the power of oxycodone, a power they understood by now. Oxycodone came in amber pill bottles, not little plastic bags, and it took the form of manufactured tablets, not powder or jagged shards. Pills looked legitimate. Their precise, factory-shaped contours made it easy for people to believe they weren’t making money from opioid addiction, just as they made real patients believe they wouldn’t become junkies.
Or maybe it came down to an even simpler truth. No matter how many pillheads died in train crashes, no matter how many times cops or TV reporters set up cameras across the street from American Pain, no matter how many politicians complained about pill mills destroying Florida, one thing remained the same: Wave enough cash in an upstanding citizen’s face, and he suddenly stopped worrying about whether the money had come from an addict’s pocket.
When Jennifer Turner heard Chris George talking on the wiretap about moving, she drove to Lake Worth to take a look at the new building.
It was enormous, a three-story, gleaming-white colossus that stood by itself on Dixie Highway, isolated by a buffer of 153 parking spaces. Windowless and invincible-looking, a solid block-like structure, taller than anything else in the area.
Turner imagined a sea of addicts inside the massive facility, hundreds of them lined up at customer windows, receiving their bottles of narcotics, then streaming out into the Florida sunlight to wreak havoc.
The vision haunted her. She had to stop this. But how?
PART I
1
It was late 2007 when Chris George told Derik Nolan that he was going into the pain management business with his twin brother Jeff. Derik wasn’t particularly surprised. The brothers already owned a place called South Beach Rejuvenation Clinic, basically a front to sell anabolic steroids. They called it a “telemedicine” clinic, and this meant the doctors consulted with patients over e-mail or phone, writing prescriptions for pretty much whatever muscle-builder the patients wanted. They advertised the clinic in bodybuilding magazines, and Derik was a faithful customer. So it didn’t sound to him like a huge leap to open another place that involved doctors and meds. The significance of it all escaped him.
Derik had met the George brothers when they were all competing to build houses in Loxahatchee in the early 2000s. Those were the boom years, when you could sell houses in Florida as fast as you could put them up, and housing prices seemed like they’d never stop rising. Derik had spent five years doing plumbing for someone else before investing in his own home construction company. Jeff’s hurricane shutter business did some subcontracting for Derik, and they started hanging out.
Derik had been pretty focused on building his business in those years, but Jeff brought out his crazy streak. They were in their twenties, guys with money in their pockets, but they still enjoyed kid stuff, mixing ammonium nitrate and flash powder, making their own quarter-sticks of dynamite and tossing them out the window of Jeff’s pearl-yellow Lamborghini in downtown Fort Lauderdale. Then speeding away, doubled over in laughter, hearing the boom, people scared shitless. Once, stopped at a streetlight, a guy pulled up next to Jeff and Derik’s car. Derik was driving, Jeff eating a piece of pizza, and Jeff just reached out the open window and put the greasy, half-eaten slice of pizza on the hood of the guy’s car. Why? No reason at all, except he thought it would be funny. The guy was pissed, but when he looked over at them—Jeff’s neck flaring out with muscle thicker than his head, Derik sporting a multi-broken nose—he knew there was nothing he was gonna do about it. A couple of times, Jeff and Derik did worse things to people who actually had it coming to them, and Derik started developing a reputation: a guy you didn’t mess with.
In 2006, the housing market started to teeter. Derik was overex-tended and went out of business. He took a job as a field superintendent with Majestic Homes, which was owned by Jeff George’s father, moving around the state and finishing mid-stream construction jobs, closing things down. He wound up on Florida’s west coast, in North Port, where Jeff’s twin brother Chris was running a division of Majestic Homes with half a dozen employees.
Chris cropped his hair short and had a good-looking, clean-cut college-boy look that Derik kind of envied, a look at odds with his police record. Chris had been thirteen the first time he got arrested. He and Jeff were busted making acid bombs on the Fourth of July. They did community service and took classes in fire safety. Later years brought a string of charges: possession of alcohol, fighting, disorderly conduct, obstruction of justice, and grand theft for stealing a police motorcycle when he was nineteen, the height of his crazy period. He never spent time behind bars until 2003, after a cop caught him picking up a package of anabolic steroids ordered from Europe. The steroids were for himself, Jeff, and a couple of friends. He pleaded guilty to felony drug possession charges and was sentenced to eight months in Palm Beach County Jail. He served six, most of it on work release, working for his father as a draftsman and supervisor. When he got out, he kept working for Majestic Homes.
Most people, seeing Chris and Derik together, would have pegged Derik as the criminal. Derik stood out at the gym, in the mosh pits, on the party boats on the Gulf. Tribal tattoos curlicued down his biceps and thick forearms. Off and on, he sported a Mohawk. He had a big square frame, big square brawler’s fists, and a big square head sitting right on his shoulders. His nose kind of mashed to the right. He spoke with a New York rasp, talking with his hands and his excitable, cocked, quizzical eyebrows. His walk was a swagger, his resting position a restless sprawl, thick arms flung wide, head tilted to the side. Derik called attention to himself, invited engagement, often the negative kind; certain people wanted to punch him in the face. If there was booze or coke around, and sometimes even if there wasn’t, Derik was going to fight. He knew he was supposed to cycle up and down on the testosterone and stanozolol, but he loved the way they made him feel: bigger, louder, stronger than the next guy. So he took them even when he wasn’t working out much. After Chris and Jeff opened South Beach Rejuvenation, Derik never paid for steroids again. He’d order whatever he wanted, and Jeff had them mailed directly to Derik’s place.
Chris had settled down a bit after his jail time, or at least he didn’t call as much attention to his troublemaking as Jeff did. Pretty soon, Derik considered Chris to be his best friend. Derik was three years older than the George twins, but he looked up to Chris, as much as he looked up to anyone. Derik didn’t hold it against Chris that he’d grown up loaded, the son of a multi-millionaire home builder, or that Chris had an Iron Cross tattooed on his upper chest and a Nazi SS insignia on his abdomen. Likewise, Chris didn’t care about Derik’s dark family history, or the things he’d done. Also, Chris barely drank, which worked out well for Derik, because Derik liked to get plastered or do a line of coke and have others do the driving. Chris was a healthy guy, aside from the steroids, and would sit in the strip club or the bar or the boat and sip his diet cola as the party raged around him.
Derik was used to working long days and coming home exhausted and filthy. But working on Florida’s west coast as the market was dying was easy, especially when you were best friends with the boss’s son. They’d put in half a day, then take a long lunch, and work maybe a couple more hours in the afternoon. Then Chris wanted to go out to eat every night, hit the gym, then head to a strip club, find some girls. Night after night. It was an exciting life, where you might spend the morning installing windows on a mid-level McMansion in Port Charlotte, then drop everything and charter a cruiser to the Keys. Derik could keep up with Chris’s pace, and they had the same stupid sense of humor.
Chris was obsessed with this girl who danced at a place called Emerald City Gentleman’s Club in Port Charlotte. Her stage name was Katie, kind of a
plain name for a stripper, surrounded by Jades and Fantasias and Candis. Derik thought Katie was her real name for about six months, only to find out that she was actually named Dianna, which sounded more stripper-like than her stage name. Dianna Pavnick had long jet-black hair, mischievously arched eyebrows, muscular curves, and a severe mouth. Chris couldn’t stop talking about her, wanted to go to her club over and over.
Chris would say: Oh, man, Derik, we gotta go to Emerald tonight.
Derik would say: Dude, this is like four nights in a row.
The head bouncer at Emerald was Dianna’s boyfriend. Derik would distract the guy by bringing in a huge stack of ones and making a scene, something that came naturally to him, and Chris would spend time with Dianna, trying to get her to go out with him. One day, the guy smacked Dianna around, and she went home with Chris that night, and they stayed together. Derik liked to say it was just a story of love at first sight at the strip club.
For a couple of months it was the three of them—Chris, Dianna, and Derik—but then Derik went to jail. Derik was a terrible driver, always getting pulled over, and the tickets had piled up until he’d had his license suspended for five years. He started paying a guy to drive him to the construction jobs he was overseeing in North Port. One day, the guy didn’t show, and Derik decided to drive himself, made it a mile before getting pulled over, which ended up being a felony beef: driving with license suspended. His probation officer found out, and Derik went to jail. He’d never been behind bars, other than holding tanks. St. Lucie was the worst county jail in Florida from what the other inmates told him. Derik had no serious trouble there, maybe due to the fact that he was a sizable guy, 6'1" and 210 pounds when he was juicing. But he felt panicky the entire time and spent hours a day on the phone with his sister and his lawyer.
When he got out in January 2008, Derik had to start from scratch at thirty years old. Chris George’s father fired him from Majestic Homes, and Chris just disappeared on him, wouldn’t pick up the phone. Derik heard Chris and Dianna had moved back to Florida’s east coast without telling him. They’d moved into Jeff’s mansion in Wellington’s Edge, and Chris was working with Jeff at the steroid clinic.
Derik felt a little betrayed by Chris, but he got on with his life. He started a new business, window installation, friends driving him everywhere since he had no driver’s license.
So Derik was surprised when Chris got in touch a couple weeks later. Chris said he needed help, and Derik’s irritation vanished. All was forgiven. Chris had that kind of hold on Derik.
Chris told Derik about his new venture. He and Jeff were going to open a chain of small pain clinics. Jeff had recently bought a second steroid clinic, and a doctor there, a guy named Mike Overstreet, had worked briefly at a pain clinic called One Stop Medical. Steroids were small potatoes, Dr. Overstreet had told Jeff. The real money was in painkillers like oxycodone.
Chris didn’t even know what oxycodone was, much less how a pain clinic operated. He and Jeff ran some numbers and did a break-even analysis. The projections didn’t impress Chris. He wasn’t sure the business would be viable. But he told Jeff he’d give it a shot. They decided Jeff would open a clinic in West Palm Beach, and Chris would open one a little farther south, on Oakland Park Boulevard near Fort Lauderdale. They’d see how the two little clinics did, and maybe end up growing the chain.
In December, when Derik was still in jail, Chris and Dianna had gone to meet with Dr. Overstreet at his house in Fort Lauderdale. Over-street was a nice guy, black floppy hair, thirty-eight years old, more laid-back and irreverent than Chris expected a doctor to be. Chris liked him. He showed Chris and Dianna his vintage truck and motorcycle, then took them to a shed behind the three-bedroom house and showed them empty oxycodone bottles, meds he’d ordered when he worked at One Stop Medical.
Oxycodone was a legal controlled substance, Overstreet said. Some people took it for pain relief. Others took it to get high. It was addictive, and most doctors made it difficult for patients to obtain. Those doctors drowned their patients in paperwork, drug tests, and diagnostic reports. Some did extensive physical exams, interviewed their patients at length, referred them to specialists, made them do exercises and therapies and non- pharmaceutical treatments before agreeing to medicate. Despite all the tests, no doctor could ever really be 100 percent sure whether a patient was in real pain. Only the patient knew for sure. The doctor had to make a judgment call before writing a prescription. People wanted a doctor who would take them at their word, wouldn’t ask too many questions, wouldn’t make it too hard to get the drugs. Dr. Overstreet wanted to open a clinic that catered to those people. Other doctors had done this, and their waiting rooms were packed. At his previous clinic, Overstreet had developed a reputation as a big writer who asked few questions. His patients called him “The Candyman.”
Chris and Overstreet had struck a deal. Chris would make the initial investment, renovate the building, buy blood pressure monitors and exam tables and office supplies, manage the office, buy the pharmaceuticals. Overstreet would write the scrips and they’d split the profits, 50/50. The doctor said he didn’t want the responsibilities involved with running an office, so he’d leave that stuff to Chris.
Jeff had found a little storefront on Oakland Park Boulevard that previously held a Mobile One store. A handful of other pain clinics were operating in Broward County, including two that had opened on the same street. The area was becoming known for its pain clinics, and Chris thought it made sense to open there. That’s when Chris got in touch with Derik to ask if he’d help renovate the space.
Chris wasn’t sure if the clinic would work out, but he was confident about his business skills. He believed no physician-run operation could compete with him. Doctors didn’t understand marketing, minimizing costs, maximizing efficiencies, managing people, accounting. The basics of business. Chris had studied business and construction management. He’d gone to college for four years, two years at Palm Beach Community College and another couple at Florida International University, but he never graduated, just took classes he wanted to take and avoided the ones he thought were stupid. His father would say Chris and Jeff absorbed business principles by growing up in an entrepreneurial family, sitting at the dinner table during the years John George was building Majestic Homes, driving a back-hoe as soon as their feet could reach the pedals. John George had moved to Florida as a young guy, taught shop class for a while, and he wasn’t shy about mentioning the time he’d been named the Palm Beach County Teacher of the Year. John had stood out as a teacher before quitting to follow in his own father’s footsteps—construction—where he really stood out, making millions building houses. He’d taken a huge gamble, quitting a steady job, and he made a success of it. John George divorced the boys’ mother when they were eight, but he and Denice stayed on good terms most of the time, and she even worked for him for seven years.
After his prison stint on the steroid conviction, Chris went to work for his father. He moved to North Port to expand Majestic Homes’s reach to the west coast of Florida. Chris built some fifty custom houses for Majestic Homes before the crash, juggling subcontractors, buyers, realtors, suppliers, and banks. By comparison, he figured, running a pain clinic would be a piece of cake.
Derik had a buddy drive him out to Oakland Park Boulevard to take a look at the future location of Chris’s pain clinic. It was kind of a dump, three miles from the beach and a few doors from a dive motel and a Publix supermarket. Most of the surrounding buildings—an auto insurance agency, a bridal headpiece shop, a podiatry office—were a similar size and shape as the Mobile One storefront: single-story stucco bungalows. Four parking spaces in the front, a few more around back. The storefront was an orangey-tan with white trim. Two dilapidated columns held up the front overhang, including one that had crumbled and detached from the roof, revealing the pole underneath the stucco shell. The brown fronds of an ungroomed palm tree spilled into the parking lot.
Chris and Derik renovated th
e building with a couple pals, not exactly a bang-up job. Chris just wanted to get the place open. He figured it didn’t much matter how it looked. So they tore all the walls down and reframed the interior, about eleven hundred square feet. There was a waiting room, a window where Dianna could greet customers, three examination rooms in the back, a little closet where the drugs would be kept. New carpet, doors, paint, the cheapest stuff they could find. A two-week job. But one of the first things Chris did was put a sign on the big white pole out front. Big red letters on a white background: PAIN CLINIC. And even bigger letters on the sign on the roof of the small building: SOUTH FLORIDA PAIN CLINIC. Chris bought stick-on lettering for the windows:
PAIN MANAGEMENT
TESTOSTERONE
WEIGHT LOSS
HGH
WALK INS WELCOME
Basically the offerings included everything that people desperately wanted from a doctor but usually couldn’t get. Drugs to make their life more enjoyable, without the usual hassle. Dr. Overstreet believed pain meds would be the big draw, but he had experience with the muscle and weight-loss stuff from Jeff’s steroid clinic, so they’d decided to throw those into the mix.
The signs worked. Pretty much every day somebody stopped by to ask about when they were opening. Oakland Park Boulevard regulars: fidgety, dirty, aggressive. Derik and Chris would be working, covered in sawdust, pencils behind their ears, and some guy would stick his head inside, inquire about their status. One night around 8:00 p.m., Derik was gluing down fresh carpeting and a guy walked in, nonchalant, or trying to act that way. He looked at Derik, who was covered with carpet glue, sweaty, dirty. The floor was half-carpeted, tools everywhere.
The guy: I need a doctor. Can I see a doctor?
Derik looked at him like he was crazy.
Derik: For real, bro, look around. Does it look like we’re open for business?