by John Temple
The task force also began cultivating confidential sources. One early break came when a man was arrested in December 2008 for carrying a concealed weapon. The defendant had a long arrest record and was facing serious time. He told the FBI he could give them information about American Pain. He told them that Chris and Jeff George and Derik Nolan had accused him of stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from Chris. They’d assaulted and handcuffed him at Jeff’s house, and Jeff had fired a handgun next to his head before they let him go. Later, Chris George had given him $10,000 to keep quiet. The story had little to do with American Pain, but Turner was interested. Kidnapping was a predicate crime in RICO cases.
Another break came when Turner talked to Dr. Eddie Sollie, who’d worked at South Florida Pain for a few months in Fall 2008. Sollie said the clinic was a pill mill, that maybe 80 percent of its patients were addicts. The doctor said two of the physicians saw fifty to sixty patients a day, more than twice as many as he believed a doctor could legitimately treat in that amount of time. The doctors rushed through diagnostic paperwork, and the staff didn’t care if people were faking their urinalysis tests. Sollie said he’d brought up his concerns to Chris George, who’d dismissed them. Sollie had quit, and now he and George were suing each other. The Sollie interview was Turner’s first glimpse inside the operation of American Pain.
Turner wanted more informants. Lucky for her, thousands of American Pain patients were selling pills, and some percentage of them inevitably got busted. Turner’s task force eventually interviewed a number of these offenders about what they’d seen inside the clinic. A Boston drug trafficker was arrested with three thousand oxycodone pills from American Pain hidden in his jockstrap. The man told investigators he’d seen Dr. Beau Boshers, who hadn’t physically examined him but had made him touch his toes. A Kentucky woman facing drug charges agreed to visit American Pain and report back to the DEA. She saw Dr. Michael Aruta, who instructed her to fill her prescription at a Florida pharmacy, not out of state. A Florida man sold 399 oxycodone pills to an undercover deputy sheriff in the parking lot of a Royal Palm Beach shopping center. Later, he told federal agents that Derik Nolan had sold him the pills. If true, this was excellent evidence for an eventual RICO case—outright drug dealing, mixed in with the more ambiguous illegitimate prescribing. Each of these tidbits was added to the growing pile of circumstantial evidence that would go into the wiretap application. Chris George was not a criminal mastermind, Turner decided, but he did seem to be savvy enough to insulate himself from most of the lawbreaking going on around him.
Brick by brick, the task force built the foundation of evidence needed to get a wiretap authorized. Despite the public furor over pill mills, the FBI investigation moved at its usual methodical pace. Unlike local police, who place a priority on making arrests, the bureau wants to build cases that will withstand the rigors of federal court and actually land targets in prison.
If the feds were going to convict the whole group on racketeering, Turner knew they needed to prove that Chris George was the kingpin, that he was in charge and knew what was going on. They needed to make connections between his various operations and actually see him running the day-to-day business. They needed to go inside the clinic.
Detective Sergio Lopez had been doing undercover work for the police department in Hollywood, Florida, for eight years when an FBI agent called in 2009 and asked him to infiltrate a Boca Raton pain clinic. Meaning, go in and ask for a doctor’s appointment. Not your typical street-corner buy-and-bust.
Lopez, a lean, smiley man with merry black eyes and a Hispanic accent, pulled into the crowded American Pain parking lot on a Wednesday in late July. He was wearing audio recording equipment. Inside the clinic, he was amazed to see more than one hundred patients in the waiting room. All the chairs were full, and overflow patients were standing along two walls.
As soon as he walked in, two men approached him. They wore black T-shirts that bore the word STAFF. Lopez said he hadn’t been there before, and they guided him to the new patient window. Lopez waited in line, studying the room. Signs on the walls instructed patients to turn off their cell phones, to pay attention to staff, to not use cameras.
When he got to the receptionist, Lopez handed over an MRI report and his undercover identification card. Both bore the name “Luis Lopez.” The FBI had given Lopez the MRI report; he didn’t know where it had come from, but it indicated that his cervical spine showed “no evidence of fracture or dislocation, no prevertebral soft tissue swelling, no degenerative features.” In other words, nothing was wrong with “Luis’s” spine. Of course, it was intentional. The investigators wanted to see if Lopez could get a prescription with almost no evidence of pain.
The receptionist didn’t take the bait. He said he couldn’t accept the MRI report. He didn’t say why. He didn’t look at the report, just handed it back and told Lopez that he would give him a prescription for an MRI. The MRI prescription itself would cost $50. Lopez handed over the cash, and the receptionist gave him a map to the MRI service and began filling out the prescription.
The receptionist said Lopez should pick either neck or back to be scanned because the MRI company charged separately for each. Lopez picked neck.
He left American Pain, rejoined the federal agents, and they headed for the operation, which was in the trailer behind Goldfingers Gentlemen’s Club. A man was waiting outside with a clipboard, and he took down Lopez’s name and told him to wait in his car to be called. The MRI facility didn’t want a line of pain management patients standing around the strip club parking lot. Twenty other people were already waiting, sitting in their cars.
When Lopez’s name was called, he went inside the trailer, where a woman took his $250 and said that she could “rush” the MRI results for an extra $200. Lopez paid the extra money. However, there were twenty people ahead of him, so it would be several hours before he could get scanned, she said. Lopez made an appointment to return to the trailer at 1:00 a.m.
When he returned for his middle-of-the-night appointment, the woman instructed him to take off his clothes and put them in a locker. He did so. He was reluctant to lie down on the MRI machine, because the pillow bore a head-shaped shadow of grime from all the people who’d lain on it.
He said: Are you going to change the pillowcase?
She said: Don’t worry about it. You’ll be done quickly.
Lopez lay down. The scan took forty-five minutes.
The next day, he went back to American Pain and handed the receptionist a computer disc with his MRI scan. The MRI report was already complete, and it reported a small disc protrusion at C5-C6, a mild bulging of the annulus, and mild scoliosis, all of which was news to Lopez, who had no neck pain. He collected a urine sample in a filthy bathroom with an overflowing toilet, filled out some forms, and was eventually called back to see Dr. Beau Boshers.
Boshers asked him to rank his pain level on a scale of one to ten, and Lopez said it was a three or four, intentionally shooting for a low-ish number to see what the doctor would do. Boshers asked him to turn his neck to the right and left, and Lopez flexed his neck vigorously, without hesitating or wincing.
Boshers said: Well, it looks like about an eight or so.
The doctor marked “8” on the document.
Boshers took his blood pressure but didn’t otherwise touch Lopez. The doctor jotted swift notes on the pages, wrote prescriptions for 120 oxycodone 30-milligram pills, plus some 15-milligram pills and Xanax. Lopez filled the oxy prescriptions at American Pain, but the pharmacy was out of Xanax.
Lopez returned to American Pain every twenty-eight days for the next five months. He wore a baseball cap and glasses and saw Boshers each time. He recorded each visit and noticed that his appointment times shrank and prescription amounts grew. The first time he was in Boshers’s office for thirteen minutes and received 120 30-milligram oxycodone pills. In August, he spent seven minutes in Boshers’s office and left with 150 pills. September, five minutes and 180 p
ills. October, four minutes and 180 pills. November, three minutes and 180 pills. Lopez never asked to be upped.
In September, he covertly videoed Derik Nolan shouting instructions at the patients in the waiting room, telling them to fill their prescriptions in state.
“Florida only!” Nolan bellowed, pacing back and forth in front of the crowd. “If I get a call from outside Florida for verification of a script, you will be discharged, and I’ll let you come back next time, and I’m gonna take your money. And then I’m gonna kick you out.”
Nolan had a certain presence and seemed to enjoy being the center of attention, the waiting room silent except for his authoritative voice.
“Just follow all the rules, and everything will be fine,” he said. “Nobody around here likes you. I like you. But nobody else does.”
He told the patients to drive carefully and make sure they knew their doctor’s name.
“When a cop says, ‘Hey, what’s your doctor’s name?’ and he’s holding your prescription bottle and you don’t know it, you’re going to jail.”
At one point, Nolan gave the patients a brazen tip.
“Do not be shooting up or snorting in the parking lot!”
Nolan left the waiting room, the babel rising in his wake.
Surreptitiously, Lopez pointed the camera at his own face for a moment, eyebrows raised in jovial astonishment.
“Wow!” he said.
The task force sent a second undercover cop into American Pain. That operation was cut short when the undercover told Dr. Boshers that he drank “a couple beers a day.” Boshers didn’t like that. American Pain patients usually knew better than to acknowledge that they drank alcohol. The doctor called Chris George to his office, introducing him as “one of our experts,” offering the investigators a rare interaction with their primary target.
But Chris George didn’t say much at first, as Beau Boshers explained his concerns.
BOSHERS: The thing that bothers me about it though is he drinks every day and you gotta be real real cautious with prescribing these medications to people that drink alcohol cause you can end up you know getting respiratory distress you can go into cardiac arrest,
UNDERCOVER: I mean I
BOSHERS: Right.
UNDERCOVER: It’s not like . . .
BOSHERS: But that one day that you take a roxicodone and you drink six beers and you die your parents are not gonna blame you they’re gonna blame me.
UNDERCOVER: No I know but I’m, I mean, I’m not like a low-life punk, I mean I’m responsible, and . . .
BOSHERS: You don’t have to be.
UNDERCOVER: No I know.
BOSHERS: Michael Jackson died from an overdose too, you don’t have to be, you can be anybody, anybody can die.
The undercover protested, saying he would stop drinking.
BOSHERS: The thing is that my patients that I treat here they don’t drink. You’re the only patient that I’ve talked to that said that. Most of them they don’t drink or they drink occasionally, they don’t drink.
UNDERCOVER: None of those people (laughs) come on.
BOSHERS: They say they don’t drink.
UNDERCOVER: Well I’m telling you I’m not gonna drink if you tell me it’s gonna hurt me I mean I’m not, listen Doc I’m not here to kill myself.
Boshers was apologetically firm: He wouldn’t write the scrip. Chris George weighed in, saying that he’d give the patient his money back and refer him to a different clinic.
UNDERCOVER: Well are they gonna do the same thing?
GEORGE: (Laughs) No.
Chris George and the undercover left Boshers’s office and George gave him directions to Executive Pain and told him to ask for Dianna. She’d get him in front of a doctor within twenty minutes, he said.
GEORGE: If he
The undercover left the clinic without drugs, but Turner knew the operation had been a major success. The recording contained evidence that Chris George was in charge of Executive Pain, as well as American Pain. It had also revealed how complex the relationships were at American Pain.
Boshers had seemed apologetic, but he still wouldn’t write the scrip, if only because the man had violated an unwritten rule by saying he drank alcohol. And Chris George said he couldn’t pressure the doctor into writing it. On the other hand, Boshers had agreed to the boss’s plan to send the patient to another clinic that was clearly under Chris George’s control. And the doctor was OK with giving the man his money back, even though he’d seen a doctor, which implied that the drugs, not the medical evaluation, were what was being purchased. The recording contained good evidence that Chris George was running an illegal operation.
Everyone on the undercover operation understood the significance of the brush with Chris George. When the undercover rejoined Turner and the other agents after the operation, a cheer erupted.
A year after Turner’s watercooler introduction to the pill mill problem, her task force prepared to submit its wiretap application to a federal judge. Pill mills were a front-page problem by now, and Turner’s task force meetings were crowded with supervisors from the FBI and DEA. Fifty local police officers had been deputized to work on the federal investigation.
Mike Burt, the DEA special agent, wrote an affidavit that would form the foundation of the wiretap application. It included evidence obtained from the undercover operations, from the various patients who’d been arrested selling pills, from the kidnapping of the friend who the Georges suspected had stolen Chris’s money, from surveillance video, and from the doctor who’d formerly worked there. It also included information about Stacy Mason’s death in Kentucky.
As expected, on November 6, 2009, the judge granted permission to listen in on Chris George’s cell phone calls. They flipped the switch immediately.
The wire room was located in DEA offices, in a big room with a number of computer terminals recording multiple wires simultaneously. In the early days of the Chris George wiretap, the room was crowded. It was exciting to finally hear their target’s voice. No one wanted to leave, least of all Jennifer Turner.
Turner felt a certain reverence for the wire. It had taken a year of work to obtain, and it was the greatest privacy intrusion she was allowed by law, except for a search warrant. She’d been thinking about Chris George for months, and now she would hear him conducting his life and work. It was a chance not only to gather evidence but also to learn how his mind worked.
The listeners wore headphones, and the computer screen signaled when there were incoming or outgoing calls or texts. You could hear the phone ringing. They had surveillance vehicles following George much of the time. When George talked with his lawyer, the agents flagged the phone number and marked the call as privileged.
Some of the recordings made the targets seem like frat-boy prank-sters, as when Chris George and Derik Nolan discussed what to do about a suspicious vehicle in their parking lot on November 9.
NOLAN: Should I put a mask on and go cover it up or something? (Laughs)
GEORGE: No.
NOLAN: Should I change my clothes and put a mask on and go slash the tires?
GEORGE: The best thing to do is have a slingshot far away and shoot out some of the windows.
NOLAN: You want me to do that? I can go get one. I got a slingshot at my house.
The wiretap didn’t yield a smoking-gun statement right away. If George was selling drugs out the back door, or dealing directly with sponsors, or ordering the doctors to prescribe narcotics without a legitimate medical purpose, he was careful enough not to do it on the phone. Turner realized the recordings would have to be mined carefully for more circumstantial evidence that Chris George was in charge and knew what was going on. As when he told the manager of one of
his pharmacies that he should “always lie” to inspectors about the percentage of controlled substances the pharmacy distributed. Or when he and Derik Nolan discussed an unpleasant staffer.
NOLAN: I will take care of it. He’s just gotta be a little nicer to the patients, right?
GEORGE: Yeah, he never says “hi” or “bye” to anybody. He doesn’t welcome them . . .
NOLAN: “Hi . . . Welcome to the dope hole. Can I get you a drink?”
As the days passed in the wire room, the timbre of Chris George’s voice began to grate on Turner. He was a mumbler. She speculated that his lack of enunciation was somehow due to heavy steroid usage, but whatever the cause, it was annoying. And many of the conversations were mind-numbingly irrelevant, George musing about the latest thing he was thinking about purchasing: model airplanes, a custom-made swamp buggy, tickets to a fight or game. And breast implants for his girlfriend. Not Dianna, who’d already received hers. His other girlfriend. On November 13, after the breast augmentation procedure, Chris talked to that girlfriend’s mother.
WOMAN: She’s like a zombie . . .
GEORGE: Hey, you know what? She’s like one of the patients now.
WOMAN: And why does she take all those pills? She wants to be a drug addict? What happens if she likes that garbage?
GEORGE: I won’t let her, don’t worry.
Two days later, another conversation between George and his own mother, Denice Haggerty, particularly infuriated Turner. They discussed an article in the Palm Beach Post about a patient at one of Jeff’s clinics who’d died of an overdose. The article mentioned Jeff’s clinics and also American Pain. George and his mother chuckled about what Jeff had said to the reporter, which was characteristically reckless, including: “Unfortunately, the clinic and the doctor can’t control a patient if they go home and do something stupid.” And: “I bought my Lamborghini four years ago. If I wreck it, am I going to hold the Lamborghini dealership responsible?” The story also noted that Haggerty was the operator of Executive Pain, but Haggerty didn’t sound worried.