by John Temple
The inside staff was growing too. Chris and Derik needed people to handle the increased paperwork. Derik hired several friends, either guys he’d grown up with or had met building houses. Derik’s roommate, who’d come aboard earlier in the summer. Pedro, who’d worked for Derik on and off ever since his plumbing days. The brothers of Derik’s high school girlfriend, as well as her father, a biker who’d been an addict himself but had been clean for a couple of years. When Derik told friends about the money they could make, they quit good jobs—union plumbers, electricians—to be security guards or work the patient window at South Florida Pain. Even one guy who was a mortgage broker talked to Derik about coming to work at the clinic. It felt good to create jobs for friends who needed work, something that made Derik look both bighearted and powerful. And having his own crew strengthened Derik’s grasp on the operation, made him even more essential to Chris.
Most of the guys they hired were good-looking, clean-cut men, jacked up on steroids, wearing tight T-shirts and jeans. So Chris and Derik figured they should hire some good-looking girls too. They put an ad on Craigslist: Receptionist needed for busy pain clinic. No resume or experience needed. Just send picture. And they got lots of pictures, some professional headshots and some full-body pictures in swimsuits or lingerie, plus a couple of nasty messages, asking if they were running a doctor’s office or a modeling service. They had a good time deciding which women had what it took to land an interview. One former bikini model and high-end escort immediately caught Chris’s eye. Dianna didn’t like all the women hanging around Chris. They fought more and more, and she stopped coming to the clinic.
Staff-wise, the clinic was less doctor’s office than South Beach club—all tanned biceps and fake boobs. Derik loved it. He wanted the clinic to be a place where people enjoyed themselves—a junkie paradise. He bought black-market copies of movies that were still in the theaters and played them on the waiting room’s massive flat-screen TVs. They installed vending machines, and the staffers flirted with the patients, sweetie-this and honey-that.
Chris didn’t interact with the patients or staff much, so Derik was the center of the frenzy, directing traffic, deciding who got in and who didn’t, like a nightclub doorman. Sometimes he felt like a celebrity. The patients drove him crazy, but he loved the power, how they’d do whatever he wanted because he controlled the thing they wanted most. He could tell a patient to put on a blindfold and run across Cypress Creek Boulevard, and the guy would do it, no questions asked.
Under Derik’s watch, sponsors who were funding groups of patients got VIP treatment. They entered through the employee entrance, got to see the doctors right away. After coming for a couple months, patients often began to think they should be part of the clinic’s inner circle. Some patients became downright obsessed with the clinic and its staff. Suddenly, guys from Kentucky started dressing like Derik and the rest of the crew, asking them where they’d bought their shirts. Some brought in moonshine as gifts for Derik or the doctors, showing him pictures of their kids, or posted about the clinic on underground junkie websites and on druggie threads on general interest forums like Topix.com. Derik’s a good guy, but it’s hard to get face-time with him . . . Don’t go outside for any reason today or else you’ll get banned . . . Traffic’s backed up on Cypress Creek going west toward SF Pain today, take this route instead. . . .
Patients told Derik the street price of oxy 30s back home had dropped to $10, mainly because South Florida Pain was flooding the market. They said people who would have never visited Florida in the past were coming just to experience South Florida Pain. And people who used to come down just to get a prescription for themselves were sponsoring their own carloads. They got an e-mail from a sheriff in Kentucky. The guy sounded angry: I arrested another one of your patients last night. I can’t pull over a single car without finding an appointment card for your clinic. Thanks for destroying my community.
South Florida Pain wasn’t alone. Pain clinics were opening up all over Broward County, and patients told Derik the others were trying to copy his style, but no one had really succeeded. Derik told them nobody could match his showmanship, his panache. And it seemed to be true, judging by the lines in the waiting room. Everyone said South Florida Pain was the biggest pain clinic around.
On the other hand, being honest with himself, Derik had to admit the patients weren’t coming for the ambiance. The clinic was popular because it usually had pills in stock. After six months, Derik understood these people, knew they’d drive to a shithole in Anchorage if that was the closest place to get pills. No matter what they looked like or how they spoke, they were junkies, which meant they had no humility or pride. They were all about getting the fix.
Take the women Derik and his roommate were dating, for example.
The first time the girls had come into the clinic, just before the move from Oakland Park Boulevard, Derik and his roommate were all over them. One was a Marine, but cute and sweet, big blue eyes, blonde hair. She had military disability paperwork for an injury, some kind of lower spine thing. Her friend was Brazilian, great body, olive skin. She told the doctors she’d been mugged, beaten up.
Early on, Derik had hooked up with female patients from time to time. Nothing serious, just a quick good time in a back room. He knew those patients were just hoping to score some extra pills, but he enjoyed himself anyway. Derik thought these women were different. They seemed out of place among the clinic patients, uncomfortable, which made Derik like them. No way these young, fresh-faced girls were junkies.
The girls flirted with Derik and his roommate at the clinic and ended up going back to the guys’ apartment after work. Derik ended up with the Brazilian woman, his roommate with the Marine. Derik’s girl was amazing in bed, no inhibitions. Derik, always quick to jump into things, started hanging out with her every night, even met her mother. He liked her jet-black hair, her Brazilian lilt.
Not a week had gone by, however, before Derik realized that something was wrong with his new girl. He’d find her staring in the mirror for hours, glazed over, mesmerized by her face, picking at it. He’d take her to a restaurant with friends, and she’d cause a scene, start crying. He’d be alone with her and she’d start going into withdrawal, begging him for pills, acting like a straight-up addict.
Derik began to wonder if she was with him just because he was the man with access to the pills, if the whole relationship was just another junkie stunt. On the other hand, he couldn’t believe she was as bad as the pillheads he spent all day around, people who would do anything for a fix.
Almost a month into the relationship, she slept over one night, and Derik awoke to hear her phone buzzing. It was 2:00 a.m., and she was asleep, so Derik took a look at the phone. It was her friend, texting from his roommate’s bedroom in the same apartment. The girls had been texting back and forth for hours. His roommate’s girlfriend needed a pill to get her through the night, and she was trying to cut a deal with Derik’s girl, offering to give her dirt on other women Derik was seeing. It was the same kind of wretched bargaining Derik was used to seeing from the low-down zombies at South Florida Pain. It made him sick. He turned off the phone and tried to go to sleep.
The next morning, he told her to hit the bricks. He wasn’t surprised when the girls denied what was going on, but he couldn’t believe it when his roommate took their side, defended them. His roommate was head-over-heels into his new girlfriend, had bought her a car and paid her bills, couldn’t see that she was using him.
Derik, on the other hand, was no longer naive. The relationship had taught him one thing: No matter what they looked or acted like, all the patients were junkies—and junkies cared about one thing only.
As the staff grew, so did the variety of bribes and payoffs from customers. Everyone had a hustle going. Some employees took payoffs to let patients cut in line. Others charged extra at the counter. The staffers in charge of drug tests could make sure a test came back clean, for a price. Some employees became patients at the clinic, seei
ng the doctors and getting their own scrips and then selling their pills to patients.
Chris didn’t want people selling their own pills on the side, and Derik agreed, at least in principle.* They basically had a license to deal legal drugs. It was foolhardy to sell them illegally. But try telling that to the rest of the staff, who, after all, weren’t making nearly as much money as Chris and Derik.
On the other hand, Chris and Derik disagreed about the graft system. Chris thought it looked unprofessional for patients to be tipping the staff, like people trying to jump the line at a club. He worried that patients might run out of money or not come as often, or they might decide that South Florida Pain was too expensive for them.
Derik not only supported the payoffs, he was in charge of the system. When new staffers came on board, Derik told them that he’d be taking a 50-percent cut of any extra money they’d made, in exchange for shielding them from Chris.
Derik’s salary had jumped to $3,000 a week at that point, and before long, he was taking in maybe another $5,000 to $10,000 a week in payoffs. At the current rate of income, he’d clear half a million this year, and there was no reason to think that number wouldn’t keep on growing—as long as they didn’t get shut down.
Chris himself was set to make multiple millions in 2008. Seven months in, the clinic was servicing more than one hundred patients a day, and the number was forever rising. One hundred patients paying hundreds of dollars apiece for the doctor visit and the meds meant the clinic was taking in tens of thousands of dollars a day. They bought more garbage cans for the cashier windows and ran the full loads of cash back to Chris’s office over and over throughout the day, where it got dumped in one enormous garbage bag.
Mounds of bills became a common sight around the clinic, as ordinary as a pile of raked leaves on a fall day. On occasion, Chris had more than a million dollars of cash in his office, just lying around in a bag or a box on the floor. Derik saw the money and felt no thrill. The drugs were locked up in a safe, but they didn’t take major security measures to protect the money. Most of the people working at the clinic were Derik’s friends, and he trusted them. Besides, everyone was making so much money from their various hustles, and in a way, Derik believed the graft system protected the larger cash flow. As long as everyone was making lots of money, no one was going to upset the apple cart by robbing the clinic itself.
Derik also didn’t spend much time worrying about an outside crew robbing the clinic. He had installed lots of cameras and had his odd-couple security guards roving the parking lot. He didn’t like guns, never carried one. He had a bad history with them, starting, of course, with his father murdering his second wife. And Derik knew himself. He didn’t exactly avoid trouble. As long as there was cocaine and booze around, he was going to get in fights. If he carried a gun, he’d eventually use it, like his father had, and he’d wind up dead or in prison. Besides, he was 210 pounds of muscle and steroids, which made him feel invincible, with or without a gun.
Still, the cash was a problem. Chris had seen a movie called Blow, based on a true story about one of the biggest cocaine dealers of the 1980s, and he couldn’t forget the part where the guy was arrested and his millions seized.
So, not long after the move to Cypress Creek, Chris had a sit-down with a private investigator who supposedly knew how to deal with large amounts of cash. The investigator was a skinny old guy, close to seventy years old. Talked a lot about his days as a DEA agent in the 70s and 80s, before he’d gone bad and spent thirty-eight months in the joint. Lots of stories straight out of Miami Vice—cocaine, cash, and Colombians.
Chris asked the guy about “cleaning” money, how to do it. Chris didn’t know if he was using the right terminology—laundering versus cleaning versus just basic investing with cash. The investigator said he was looking to start an adult video store but was short on cash and maybe they could help each other out. Chris agreed to meet, more interested in picking the guy’s brain than really working with him.
Chris met the investigator at the Moonlite Diner, a chrome 50s-style restaurant two miles east of the new clinic location. At the restaurant, the fast-talking investigator drank coffee and explained how it was done. He’d help Chris establish an account at an offshore bank, maybe in the Cayman Islands, and take the cash there. He’d done it before, he said. Once he’d walked into a bank on Grand Cayman with $7 million in Colombian drug cash, and no one blinked an eye. The going rate was six points, the PI said, but the price was negotiable. Chris was less worried about the rate than the idea of just handing over hundreds of thousands to someone.
“I wouldn’t ever trust anyone to launder that kind of money,” Chris said.
“Then, well, you guys go fucking put the money in,” the investigator said. “I’ll just set it up for you. You do the accounts. I won’t even have access. You have the numbers. You have the password. It’s your thing, you put it in, OK?”
The key was, he said, Chris also needed to set up an offshore business that he could borrow money from to invest in legitimate projects in the United States. And then he’d pay his offshore business back, and the money would be clean. Chris asked some questions, but held the guy off.
“I’m still going to wait a while,” Chris said.
“It’s up to you. I mean, you know your situation,” the investigator said. “The only reason I brought it up is ’cause you brought it up to me. I would’ve never even fucking mentioned it. You could start small. You could start with fifty or a hundred K.”
Chris realized that what he wanted was not to launder his money. The pain clinic money was legitimate, and he was going to pay taxes on it. He just wanted a place to put the cash. But Derik was right, this guy couldn’t be trusted. Before he cut ties with him, though, Chris wanted the ex-DEA agent’s take on something.
“DEA doesn’t like me,” Chris said.
“No shit,” the investigator said. “They don’t like me much either. So what?”
Chris told him how he’d called the DEA offices and the woman had known the address of the Oakland Park Boulevard clinic as soon as he’d said his name.
“She knew it just like that?” the investigator said.
“Yeah,” Chris said.
“Jesus,” the investigator said.
But then the guy backtracked, tried to brush it off. There were lots of pain clinics and the DEA had to monitor all of them. It wasn’t a big deal that the woman knew who he was.
“That doesn’t mean you’re doing anything wrong,” the investigator said.
“It’s not good, though,” Chris said.
“No, it ain’t good,” the investigator said. “It’d be better if she never heard of you. But it’s OK.”
If South Florida Pain was a target, he said, Chris would have known about it already.
“It takes them a while,” Chris said.
“Well, how long you been open?” the investigator said.
“Eight months.”
“If there was a problem, you would have heard a long time ago,” he said. “Just my guess. It’s a legit business. There’s no law against making money, you know what I’m saying?”
Chris was always searching for a bank willing to take the cash. He’d be with one bank for a month, but no banker wanted to take in this amount of cash day after day, even though Chris met with the management and insisted his cash flow was legitimate and he was going to pay taxes on everything. There were just too many federal reports to fill out for large amounts of cash.* Banks didn’t want to deal with the Currency Transaction Reports and Suspicious Activity Reports and scrutiny from the IRS or the OOC or the FFIEC or the other alphabet-soup agencies that keep an eye on financial crime, especially South Florida banks that had lived through the cocaine cowboy days of the 1980s. Every major bank ditched the clinic, one by one, and wouldn’t say why. It was a constant problem because Chris had to have money in the bank to cover the doctors’ payroll, though he paid employees cash whenever he could.
In late Se
ptember 2008, it happened again. Chris tried to deposit more than $250,000 in one of his banks, and the bank not only refused to take the money but dropped him as a customer. They wrote him a cashier’s check for the balance in his account. So Chris went to the house he and Dianna were renting in the Talavera development in Palm Beach County and piled the quarter million in a kitchen cabinet. One day, in early October, Chris came home and found broken glass in the bathroom. Someone had punched through the window to get inside. He checked the kitchen cabinet. That stash was gone.
Chris and Derik reasoned that the burglar was probably someone they knew, someone who knew where to find the money. They narrowed their list of suspects down to four people, including Jeff, who believed that some portion of the pain clinic’s profits rightfully belonged to him.
The next few days included a series of bizarre incidents, as Chris and Derik hunted for the money.† Chris persuaded a locksmith to help him break into the car that belonged to a friend of Jeff. He and Jeff had a screaming match at their mother’s home, and guns were drawn. Chris also hired a polygraph expert to give lie-detector tests to the guys he suspected of the theft. The tests purportedly ruled out Jeff. And then suspicions focused on a friend of Jeff who had worked at South Beach Rejuvenation. The twins had grown up with the man, who had a long list of arrests for carrying a concealed weapon, DUI, marijuana possession, and trespassing.
Jeff was furious that his friend might have stolen the money, so he agreed to help lure him to his house one day in early October. Chris and Derik waited at Jeff’s, which was located in the Versailles development where Vanilla Ice, the rapper, lived and was soon to begin filming a new reality show about a home he was remodeling in the development. Jeff destroyed the homes he lived in, parked broken-down Lamborghinis in the yard, urinated in the pool. Derik checked out the new house, shaking his head. It was in better condition than Jeff’s previous homes, but it reminded him of a kid’s clubhouse. Dirty dishes in the sink, no food in the fridge, and toys everywhere: fireworks, martial arts throwing stars, air rifles. In one bedroom, a huge pile of cash lay under a blanket.