by John Temple
The visitors made an impression on Derik. People were crazy for this painkiller stuff, talking themselves into believing they could find a doctor at eight o’clock at night in a place that was torn apart.
One day, Chris and Derik took a break from the renovation to try to track down a guy who owed Chris money. Driving around, they saw a pain clinic sign and decided to check the place out. Once inside, they said they were in pain, and asked if they could see a doctor. A staffer gave them forms to fill out, and then they walked out the door with the forms. Chris decided to use the same forms. Chris had Dianna cut the clinic name off the top of the forms and make copies with SOUTH FLORIDA PAIN CLINIC on top. Chris figured he’d need some paperwork, to keep up appearances, look legit and everything.
A friend of Derik was helping with the renovation. He had a hard time grasping the whole concept.
He kept saying: But you guys aren’t doctors.
Another friend, also from back home and visiting Derik at the time, couldn’t believe it either. It made no sense to him that a guy who wasn’t a doctor could open up a pain clinic. No way this could be aboveboard.
He said: Yo, Derik, you’re gonna get thrown in jail again.
But Chris George kept telling the guys that it was all legal. As long as you had a doctor ordering the drugs and writing prescriptions, you were fine. That’s how the other pain clinics in Florida did it. No one cared who owned the place.
Chris told Derik that once Jeff got his West Palm Beach clinic open, Jeff might give Derik a job at the patient window. Nothing great, maybe $12 an hour or so. But they had to see how it went first, whether Jeff would take enough time away from his other ventures to get the place open, and whether the clinic would attract enough customers to survive. Derik was only mildly interested. He figured Chris and Jeff might be able to turn the pain clinics into moderately successful small businesses, something along the lines of South Beach Rejuvenation, but working the patient window wasn’t going to make Derik rich.
So Derik finished the renovation and went back to his construction business, thinking that was that.
Derik didn’t know much about painkillers. Drugs, to him, meant weed or cocaine. He’d never messed with heroin or meth or OxyContin, didn’t hang out with anybody who did what he considered hard stuff. A girlfriend a few years back had always been on the hunt for Lortabs, though, and he’d noticed in recent years that some of the guys on his construction crew were too. Further back, the aunt who’d raised him in Binghamton, New York, had been taking prescription painkillers for years, doling them out when the kids had injuries, but that seemed different to Derik.
Derik’s family was hard to explain. Growing up, he lived with his aunt and uncle during the school year, then with his real father during the summers. So he had a mess of half-siblings and cousins he called his brothers and sisters. Derik didn’t mind explaining why his family was so splintered, but few people ever asked for the full story of what had happened, especially if they knew something about it.
Derik was an accidental pregnancy in 1977, his parents just out of high school in Sullivan County in upstate New York. Robert Nolan and Margaret got married, and Robert built a home insulation and window installation business. They separated when Derik was still a toddler, and Margaret moved with Derik to the village of Loch Sheldrake, where she worked as a barmaid at a place called Bum & Kel’s. She started seeing the tavern owner.
Derik was only four the day his mother died, but the memories appear to him in vivid visual flashes, bound together by facts he’d read or heard over the years. Derik and his father spent the day fishing. He fell asleep watching TV at his father’s house. In the middle of the night, his father woke him up, said they were going to look for his mother. They drove to the bar, and it was closed. Down the road, they saw Margaret’s car in the driveway of the bar owner. His father parked up the road, and carried Derik to the house. Through a front window, they saw Margaret and the bar owner in the living room, having sex.
Derik remembers his father banging through a screen door and setting him down inside.
He remembers his mother grabbing a knife from the kitchen, and his father pulling out the buck knife he’d used during the fishing trip.
He remembers his father chasing the bar owner outside.
He remembers his mother screaming: Don’t kill him, kill me! and Derik’s father replying: Don’t worry, bitch. You’re next.
He remembers his father, back inside and on top of his mother, stabbing her with the buck knife, over and over.
He remembers shaking his mother awake. She opened her eyes and looked at him, and her eyes were strange. Derik gave her another push, and blood sprayed, so he stopped shaking her.
He remembers finding his father, who was on his knees, his flannel shirt soaked in blood, the barrel of a shotgun in his mouth. Derik called to his dad, who looked at him, let out a sigh. His dad dropped the gun and picked up Derik.
He remembers hanging onto his father as he ran to the truck, Derik looking back, over his father’s shoulder, the house getting smaller and smaller.
Of the next year, Derik remembers almost nothing.
Hours after the double homicide, Robert Nolan turned himself in to police. He went to trial the following summer on charges of aggravated manslaughter. He argued that he’d been driven temporarily insane by seeing Margaret and the tavern owner having sex. The jury deadlocked, causing a mistrial. In a second trial, he was acquitted. He did some out-patient therapy and then resumed his life. He remarried, this time to a woman five years younger than himself who had been named Miss Sullivan County the year before Robert killed Margaret. They moved to Free-hold, New Jersey, where Robert built a concrete company and sponsored a Little League team. Robert’s company thrived. The Nolans put up showy Christmas decorations and threw a pool party every summer.
Derik’s aunt and uncle had taken him in during the trials, so he continued to live with them during the school years. They had a small farm, where they raised horses and chickens. Summers, he lived with his father and his new family, which included three young sons. Derik played quarterback in the fall and pole vaulted in the spring, and when he wasn’t doing those sports, he was likely skipping school, hunting deer and riding four-wheelers on the farm. The day after his high school graduation party in 1995, he moved to Florida. He said he was going to college, but he just wanted out of New York. He got a job at a nightclub, went to a few classes at Palm Beach State College before quitting. He became a plumber, making good money.
But the story with his father wasn’t finished. Almost three years after Derik graduated from high school, Robert Nolan’s second wife served him with divorce papers. They’d been married for ten years. She said he was extremely cruel, though not physically abusive. The day after he got the divorce papers, Robert followed her into a walk-in closet and shot her point-blank with a 20-gauge shotgun. He went out behind the pool cabana, smoked a cigarette, drank a Scotch, and shot himself in the head with a .25-caliber Beretta handgun.
The story of Robert Nolan’s dead wives became a cautionary tale about the persistence of domestic violence as well as the fatal flaw of the insanity defense (his first trial had taken place the same summer as would-be Reagan assassin John Hinckley Jr., was found not guilty by reason of insanity). The New York Times published an in-depth story about the case. So people knew about Derik’s father, and Derik didn’t keep it a secret. Chris George knew about it, though he and Derik never discussed it in any detail. Derik already had a reputation. People already thought he was crazy. Better, he thought, to leave a little mystery.
Derik never really explained to anybody what he thought about his father. He knew that a beast had lived inside Robert Nolan. But most of the rest of the time, he hadn’t been a bad father. Derik had a temper, could kind of understand how someone could do what his father had done, snap under the pressure of family and work, especially if you saw your wife with another man. He didn’t hate his dad. What good would that do
? Instead, Derik directed his hate toward the cops and prosecutors who tried to put his father away.
Derik grew up, but he didn’t plan for the future. He was easily influenced by friends. He liked swords and slingshots and fistfights and blowing things up. People sometimes told Derik he was basically a 6'1" child, even at thirty years old. Derik didn’t mind because he knew it was true, and because he felt like acting like a kid was something everybody should try—it was fun. Still, he was smart enough, and he worked hard. He made good money as a plumber and used it to start building houses. He believed he’d found his one gift: running a business day-to-day. And then Chris George came along, and gave him a shot at the pain management racket.
When his cell phone lit up with Chris George’s phone number, Derik was crossing the Royal Park Bridge on his way home from a window job on Palm Beach. It was March 2008, a couple weeks after Derik had completed the renovation of Chris’s pain clinic. Even as recession loomed, the Florida dream was everywhere around him, a cluster of sparkling white boats bobbing on the intracoastal marina to his left, coral-and-white office towers and condos of downtown West Palm standing tall straight ahead.
Derik answered the call.
Chris needed a favor. South Florida Pain had opened the previous week and was already pulling in decent traffic, fifteen to twenty patients a day. But Chris’s father needed him to go to the west coast for the day on Majestic Homes business. So Chris asked if Derik could keep an eye on the pain clinic while Chris was gone, make sure Dianna was safe. Because, Chris said, everyone in the place was a fucking junkie.
Chris didn’t want to leave Dianna alone with those people, all the cash and pills lying around. He said Dianna would be happy to drive Derik to the clinic, since he still had no license. Two hundred bucks for the day. Easy money.
Derik pondered Chris’s offer. He’d thought he was done with South Florida Pain when he’d finished the renovation. Derik was on probation, couldn’t afford to get in trouble. And this sounded sketchy. He wasn’t even supposed to leave Palm Beach County, and South Florida Pain was in Broward. Besides, Derik was a construction superintendent, not a security guard.
But no one had ever accused Derik of being prudent, a good decision maker. He had a hard time saying no to friends, especially Chris. When they were renovating the clinic building, Chris had explained to him how the place would work, and Derik was curious to see it in action.
So Derik told Chris he’d do it, even though he knew it was probably a bad idea.
In fact, what Derik said was this: Man, you’re gonna get me locked up again.
So Derik hung out at the clinic the next day, twiddling his thumbs, helping out when he could. There wasn’t much need for muscle. The patients got what they came for and went away happy. The place felt illegitimate to Derik. The exam rooms had examination tables and blood pressure cuffs and anatomical posters depicting the human spine, just enough medical stuff to be identifiable as a doctor’s office—but somehow it didn’t feel real. Derik doubted the patients ever actually lay down on the exam tables.
It was a simple operation. Dianna greeted patients through the customer window, explaining that seeing the doctor required cash or credit card up front. No health insurance. Dr. Overstreet, the clinic’s sole physician, had explained that insurance companies would cause problems for pain clinics if they felt they were paying for unnecessary prescriptions. Taking insured patients wasn’t worth the scrutiny. Dianna took the $200 they charged for new patient visits, and the patient filled out the paperwork Chris and Derik had lifted from the other clinic. When it was the patient’s turn to see Overstreet, Dianna hit a switch that unbolted the magnetic lock on the door between the waiting room and the exam rooms. The patient went back to the exam room, came out five or ten minutes later with a prescription in hand, usually 240 oxycodone 30 milligrams, 60 to 120 oxycodone 15 milligrams, and 60 alprazolam. Chris hadn’t known how to order prescription pads, so he had called a print shop in West Palm Beach and given them Overstreet’s name, address, phone, and license number, and they’d printed them up, using some kind of special prescription paper.
So the patient would give the scrip to Dianna, and she would go back to the “dispensary,” a big name for the nine-by-three-and-a-half-foot closet where they kept the drugs in a gun safe they’d picked up at Costco and bolted to the floor. A laptop connected to a label printer sat on a card table. They’d copied the label format from a legit pill bottle to make sure they had all the right information on there. She’d punch in the patient’s information, print a label, fix it to a pill bottle, pull the drugs from the safe, and fill the bottle. Back at the front desk, she’d take the money for the meds, usually between $400 and $700, hand over the bottle, staple the receipt to the patient’s paperwork, and file it. Done.
Chris had Googled a few policies; the rest he either made up as he went along or he asked Overstreet. The doctor didn’t seem worried that anybody would be checking up on them.
On the first day of business, Dr. Overstreet had brought a bunch of small bags filled with pills from his house—oxycodone, Xanax, and Valium. He’d ordered the pills when he was still working at the One Stop Medical clinic and took them when he left. The bags weren’t labeled, and Overstreet didn’t even seem entirely sure exactly what was inside them. Five patients showed up on Day One, and Dianna counted their pills out of the bags and put them in pill bottles.
Everyone got pills, or, if the dispensary was bare, they got a prescription. Overstreet never turned anyone away empty-handed. His only restriction seemed to be that he wouldn’t prescribe more than 240 oxyco-done 30-milligram pills per patient every twenty-eight days. More than 240 pills, he told Chris, and you’re likely to attract police or DEA attention. Better to stay under the radar. He didn’t say how he knew this.
Derik figured it couldn’t be kosher for Dianna—whose previous work experience consisted primarily of dancing at Emerald City Gentleman’s Club—to be operating the drug dispensary. He asked Chris about it. Didn’t you have to be a pharmacist to hand out pills? Especially these pills? Chris said he’d asked Overstreet the same thing, and the doctor said it was OK because Dianna was under his supervision. Chris had looked up the rules, and as far as he could tell Overstreet was right. Lucky for them, Florida law allowed doctors not only to write prescriptions but also to actually sell the controlled substances themselves. No pharmacist needed.
In fact, a major key to the pain clinic business, Overstreet had told Chris, was dispensing the drugs in-house. That way, patients didn’t have to find a pharmacy to fill their prescriptions, which wasn’t always easy. Legitimate pharmacies sometimes blacklisted a pain clinic, refused to fill its scrips. They didn’t like to see too many suspicious-looking patients with large narcotics prescriptions from the same place. They’d grill the patient, call the clinic. Patients hated this. If South Florida Pain Clinic wrote and filled the prescriptions, patients would flock there. And the clinic would get paid twice—once for the doctor’s visit and once for the pills.
Overstreet’s stash of pills had lasted less than a week, but by then Chris had bought more. The doctor had told Chris which drug wholesalers he’d used in the past and how to fill out the order forms, called 222 forms, that let the DEA track the flow of controlled substances. The order forms listed the supplier, the purchaser, the drugs and amounts. Before the clinic opened, Chris had called Overstreet’s wholesalers and asked them about the ordering process. He was used to dealing with vendors from his days at Majestic Homes, and he was good at working the phone, asking the right questions. He sent in the forms, along with Overstreet’s state medical license and DEA registration number, which allowed the doctor to prescribe controlled substances, and the drugs were shipped. The wholesalers didn’t ask many questions about the office or Chris, though some said they would be sending someone to inspect the clinic. Basically, the wholesalers verified that Overstreet had an active DEA registration, and if the credit card number went through, they sent the dru
gs. It was unbelievably easy, like ordering a shipment of drywall.
And that was the part that blew Derik’s mind the most: how this quack Overstreet could order narcotics and no one blinked an eye. He’d assumed there was someone paying attention to this stuff, that you couldn’t just team up with a doctor to buy and sell pills to drug addicts. It was way too easy. But that’s what they were doing, and Derik was starting to wonder if Chris was on to something.
The clinic was pulling in a few more patients every day, Chris told Derik. Five on Day One. Then seven. Twelve. Eighteen. Twenty. Word was spreading. Even better, every patient booked a follow-up appointment twenty-eight days later. After a couple of days, Chris had begun to wonder if his early volume projections were a little low. Less than two full weeks in, he knew the pain clinic was a go.
Chris wanted to make the whole process as easy as possible for the patients. The word about convenience would definitely get around. That was good business. Patients were used to doctors giving them a hard time. At South Florida Pain, they would be treated differently. Customer service was key. Overstreet said they didn’t need any sort of diagnostic test—no CAT scan or MRI—on the first visit, though he thought they should start requiring them on the second visit a month later.
Chris had come to the conclusion that almost every single patient was a drug seeker. Overstreet had never really spelled this out, and it wasn’t always obvious, because the patients would lie their asses off to get a fix, saying they were in agony from an old construction injury or whatever. And sometimes Chris wondered if maybe some of them were in pain. It was hard to tell who was injured and who was in withdrawal—both conditions gave people a panicky look. Chris didn’t know what Overstreet was doing in the examination room, but the appointments took just a few minutes and nobody was asking for the other meds they offered—HGH or testosterone or weight-loss pills. These people didn’t care about looking good. All they wanted was oxycodone. For all Chris knew, some of the patients might be in real pain and maybe need the drugs. But it hadn’t taken him long to realize that pain sufferers weren’t the target demographic. The clinic’s bread-and-butter was people who took the pills to get high.