by John Temple
HAGGERTY: Oh well. (laughs) I don’t think it’s going to affect my life very much.
Turner disagreed.
Footnotes
* In 2009, Florida doctors, pharmacists, and medical centers would distribute 523 million oxyco-done pills. The next highest state was Pennsylvania with 267 million.
* Dr. Joseph eventually lost his state medical license also. The state said he could potentially recover his license if he paid $15,000 in fines and costs, performed one hundred hours of community service, took some classes, and presented a one-hour seminar on “Falling Prey to Being Employed by Pill Mills.” Dr. Joseph did none of the above and let his license lapse permanently.
8
The big block-like building was an awesome sight, gleaming white against the Florida sky. At three stories, it was taller and wider than anything else on its stretch of Dixie Highway, and its windowless walls gave it an impregnable, fortress-like look. Chris George and Derik Nolan wanted it bad. They wanted out of shopping plazas and industrial parks, away from restaurants and angry neighbors. They wanted a stronghold.
Chris and Derik checked out the new building the day after the Palm Beach Post ran its November 20, 2009, story about the train wreck that killed two patients. It was time to get out of Broward County, which was overrun with clinics. The huge Boca Raton office, where they’d been for almost a year, was feeling cramped. They topped five hundred patients on many days. As had happened everywhere else, the police were stepping up their harassment of patients, and the complaints from neighbors were getting more strident. Chris wanted to find a place with enough of a buffer that the patients wouldn’t be constantly disrupting other businesses and residents. He also thought about changing the name again, moving away from calling it a pain clinic. He talked to the property manager for the Boca location about whether he should rename the clinic, using words like “family-oriented” or “general practice.” Something innocuous, bland, like “Parkridge Medical Center.” Chris had tabled the name change, but he kept looking for a new location.
The bank building was in Lake Worth, just up the road from Boca Raton. The area was populated by antiques shops and high-end home furnishings outlets frequented by the society types just north on Palm Beach. The neighborhood was perfect, all “Mexicans and little houses,” as Chris told a friend on the phone. In other words, people who didn’t have much pull with the police and wouldn’t complain about the clinic.
They talked an employee into letting them inside to look around. The first floor had space for everything they needed to service five-hundred-plus patients a day. There was a second floor for administrative offices and a gangway where security could keep an eye on the waiting room, and an open third floor. Chris and Derik talked it over and decided they would turn the third-floor space into the mother of all man caves. A sweeping wet bar, a giant projection system, and, Derik’s big idea, a mixed-martial-arts octagon cage where they could stage private fights. They called the third floor the Fantasy Factory.
But before they could implement any of their plans, the owner had to be convinced to lease the building to Chris, a twenty-nine-year-old felon, for the purposes of opening a pain clinic, at a time when pain clinics were all over the news. Chris researched the owner, who lived in a waterfront estate on Palm Beach.
Chris called the real estate agent, who seemed perplexed by his youthful voice.
“How many square feet are you looking for?” she asked.
“It’ll be for the whole thing,” Chris said.
She sounded skeptical. Surely he was looking to lease only the small outbuilding where drive-through customers were handled, she suggested. What did he need all that space for?
“Uh . . . medical,” Chris said.
“What kind of medical?”
“A doctor’s office.”
“OK,” she said. “Do you have a clinic?”
Chris didn’t want to scare her off with the word “clinic.”
“Well, I mean . . . just a doctor’s office,” he said.
He haggled with the agent, doing some quick math out loud regarding square footage and lease prices. He showed her he’d done his homework by saying he knew that the owner owed $2 million on the building. She brought the conversation back to Chris’s plans for the property. Chris said he had five doctors, twenty-five employees total, and served four hundred patients a day.
“What kind of practice?” she asked again.
“Oh, we do rehabilitation. We do, um, detox. We do pain management.” Chris didn’t want to end on those last two words, so he began making up stuff. “We do internal medicine. Um, I have all kinds of doctors. We do laser hair removal.”
They talked details, but the agent wondered aloud what kind of doctor’s office saw four hundred patients a day.
“That’s a pretty big business,” she said.
Chris changed the subject, offering her $280,000 a year for the building. She said she’d take it to the owner, and asked for the business’s name.
“Uh. American Pain,” Chris said, hoping she wouldn’t recognize it.
The agent didn’t pause.
“OK, and you’ve been in business longer than two years, correct? How old are you? You sound young.”
“I’m twenty-nine,” Chris said.
“OK, that’s good,” the agent said. “An aggressive twenty-nine-year-old. I’m impressed.”
“My tax return from last year, I made over a million dollars,” Chris said.
This statement was both true and misleading. This year, Chris would owe about twice that amount just in federal income taxes. In total, his 2009 take-home would be closer to $9 million, more than the CEOs of Time Warner Cable, Target, and Pfizer.
When Chris mentioned his income, the agent perked up.
“That’s wonderful,” she said. “And are you a doctor yourself or are you just running the business?”
“No, I’m not a doctor,” he said. “I hire doctors to work for me. I just started a few years ago and kept expanding.”
“Wow!” she exclaimed.
And just like that, she was on board. Maybe she knew about American Pain and oxycodone, maybe she didn’t. But she was no longer skeptical. She would take Chris’s offer straight to the building’s owner.
The owner met with Chris and Derik at the building. Derik and Chris dressed in expensive suits, covered up the tattoos, tried to speak like educated professionals. Derik could tell from the way the owner spoke and carried himself that he was somebody. He seemed to have reservations at first, said he’d read something about pain clinics. They explained the business to him, leaving out the fact that nearly all their patients were junkies.
The owner barely used the building. He stored paintings in it. They were scattered all over the interior, but the collection was soon going to museums in New York and London. Derik thought this was interesting, especially when the owner said he had one painting locked away in the bank vault that was worth more than $1 million. The owner gave Chris and Derik copies of a book he’d commissioned someone to write about this genre of painting. Derik dealt every day with scumbags who thought of him as a high-level drug dealer. This was a nice contrast. It was a coffee-table book, so Derik took it home and put it on his coffee table, though he never actually opened it.
The owner wanted to see the Boca Raton operation before signing off on the lease. He did a walk-through one day, toured the packed waiting room and the back offices. By that time, Derik and Chris had things running pretty smoothly. The owner seemed impressed and agreed to lease his building to American Pain.
It was a good feeling to have a connection to a businessman of this caliber. Derik believed it meant that he was able to do business with a more legitimate crowd, operate on both sides of the street. Proof that he’d become truly successful despite everything.
On the other hand, Derik knew that the building’s owner probably didn’t have too many people beating down his door to pay more than $23,000 a month on a multi-year lease.
And when Chris heard those terms, he hadn’t blinked an eye.
At the same time Chris and Derik were cultivating the new building’s owner, they were also fighting off other pain clinics.
Palm Beach Pain was a clinic run by some guys from North Miami who had several small operations. They had set up shop one mile north of American Pain, on the same side of Federal Highway. It was closer to I-95, which meant it was no doubt siphoning off some patients who were looking for American Pain. Even more provoking, Palm Beach Pain had hired a guy to stand in the middle of Federal Highway and wave a sign, diverting traffic to their clinic.
Derik had sent a staffer to scope out the clinic, but the Palm Beach Pain guys identified him as an American Pain employee and kicked him out. Next, Derik chased off a guy who was handing out Palm Beach Pain cards in the American Pain parking lot. Derik went to the clinic and threw a handful of the cards in the manager’s face.
Derik said: Keep it up, and you’re gonna need pain management.
Derik was proud of the line, thought it was witty, and repeated it to Chris on the phone later in the day. It must have made an impression on the Palm Beach Pain guy too, because he just sat there without saying anything, and then came running out to apologize as Derik was pulling out of his lot.
So Derik was really pissed when, a couple hours later, he caught another guy handing out Palm Beach Pain cards one block away from American Pain. Now it was on. Derik stationed an employee in the offending clinic’s parking lot, handing out free visits to any patient who switched to American Pain. He called MRI companies and pressured them not to take Palm Beach Pain patients. When he heard about an American Pain patient who had been lured to Palm Beach Pain, Derik promptly called the cops and earnestly explained that he’d found a doctor shopper.
It didn’t matter to Derik and Chris that Palm Beach Pain pulled in maybe a couple dozen patients a day, while American Pain was servicing hundreds. The guys from Palm Beach Pain were upstarts and needed to be crushed. If for no other reason than that’s what the top dog does.
In late 2009, a patient came in and asked Derik when the new Jacksonville office would be open. Chris and Derik were looking at new locations up north, but it wasn’t something that a patient would know about yet, so Derik said he didn’t know what the guy was talking about.
The office in Jacksonville, the patient said. The one you called me about.
Derik chalked it up to junkie confusion, until another patient asked him about the Jacksonville office. And another. Everyone saying Derik had called them and said they were opening a new American Pain in Jacksonville.
Derik and Chris started looking into it. They put out word with the staff that they wanted to talk to any patient who mentioned anything about Jacksonville or getting a call from Derik. After quizzing a number of those patients, it turned out that someone posing as Derik had been calling them, telling them about a new branch of American Pain that would be opening in Jacksonville in the middle of December.
Unlike Palm Beach Pain, this was a serious threat. By car, Jacksonville was four hours closer to Kentucky than Boca Raton. If patients believed they could get American Pain service and quantities that much closer to home, they’d go there in droves. Chris and Derik wondered how the new clinic had gotten their patients’ names and phone numbers.
They looked up the clinic’s state corporate records, and that’s when things clicked. They found a connection between the Jacksonville clinic and the MRI service Derik had made a deal with way back at the Oakland Park Boulevard location, the company that had promised (and delivered) twenty-four-hour turnaround on MRI reports. American Pain had made the MRI company a lot of money, and now they believed the company was stabbing them in the back by partnering with a new competing clinic.
Derik got the impostor clinic’s phone number from a patient and called it. Someone picked up.
Derik: Can I speak to Derik?
The guy: Hold on.
Pause.
Another guy: Yeah, this is Derik.
Derik: Derik Nolan?
“Derik”: Uh huh.
Derik, enjoying himself: That’s funny, because I’m Derik Nolan too, asshole.
He caught the guy by surprise for a second, but the guy recovered, barked back at Derik, saying they were going to take the top spot away from American Pain. Guy had a lot of balls.
Derik told Chris: Let me take care of Jacksonville.
The place was set to open December 14. Derik told Chris to give him $5,000, and he’d make sure it didn’t stay open long. He’d burn the place down. Literally.
Chris overruled Derik. Go up to Jacksonville, he told Derik, but don’t destroy the place. Just check it out, see if someone from the MRI company is there, see how many patients they have. If the new clinic really stole American Pain’s patient list, Chris would have grounds to sue.
Derik’s first mistake was taking his little brother with him to Jacksonville. His brother was nineteen, a good kid, not someone who should have been involved in this kind of thing. They’d driven up to case the clinic early one morning in mid-December, 2009. The place was called Jacksonville Pain and Urgent Care. It was in a decent location, a thoroughfare one mile off Interstate 10, though Derik knew from experience that the parking lot was too small and the neighbors in the oak-lined residential streets behind the red-brick building would probably cause trouble once the zombies descended.
Derik saw a guy from the MRI company standing outside the clinic, bold as he could be. Derik called Chris and told him about it. Chris said he was coming up to Jacksonville. He wanted to talk to the owner, give him one last chance to cut a deal before he filed a lawsuit. Derik knew Chris’s temper, knew a face-to-face was a mistake.
Derik wanted to get a peek inside the place but knew they might recognize him. So at 11:00 a.m., Derik’s brother filled out some new-patient paperwork and paid $250. But when his brother returned a couple hours later for his doctor’s appointment, the owner, a guy named Zachary Rose, told him he was too young to be a patient. Derik’s brother went back outside, got $400 from Derik, came back in and offered it to Rose. But Rose was firm. His doctor wouldn’t see a nineteen-year-old.
Derik met Chris and his buddy, and they headed into the clinic. Derik was last inside the door, and they were ready for them. A guy stepped inside right after Derik, and he had a gun. Derik told the guy that if he pointed it at him, he’d better be ready to empty the clip. Rose came out, and Chris was yelling and cursing, saying he wanted 50 percent of the clinic’s take or he’d burn the place down. Rose refused, and another one of his guys pulled a gun on Chris.
Then the cops showed up. They separated everyone for questioning and searched the American Pain crew’s cars.
The cops seemed to know a lot about American Pain, kept dropping hints that made Derik wonder why they knew so much about a pain clinic located three hundred miles away, like when they called Chris the $40 million man, which was a pretty accurate accounting of American Pain’s revenue. They also knew Derik’s name and what kind of car he drove, even before Derik told them. They asked him whether he’d gone to college, and when he said he’d taken only a few college courses, they made a big deal about that, saying that he couldn’t possibly be running a legitimate doctor’s office with so little college. They said he was nothing but a thug, driving three hundred miles to extort local businesses.
They arrested the four guys from American Pain on charges of extortion by verbal threat and everybody spent the night in jail. The next morning, a squad of defense lawyers appeared in the courtroom. Derik was surprised to hear that Jeff George, who hadn’t been speaking to Chris for a year and a half, had called his attorney, who’d sent the legal reinforcements. High-powered attorneys showing up for an initial court appearance was unusual, something usually reserved for mobsters or the sons of tycoons, and it reinforced Derik’s feeling that he’d be able to buy himself out of this mess too.
Dianna drove up, bringing a change of clothing for everybody. She
bailed them out and got everybody rooms at the Hyatt Regency on the riverfront. They all went out that night for a nice steak dinner.
The arrests happened on a Monday. The following Saturday, December 19, 2009, everyone went to the clinic’s Christmas party at the Breakers resort. Derik wore a $4,000 outfit: a two-toned black custom-tailored suit from Neiman Marcus, black shirt, black shoes—all black, except for the bloodred pocket square and silver skull-shaped cuff links with glittering crimson rubies set in the skull eyes. Underneath his pants, he wore an itchy black ankle monitor, courtesy of the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office. Chris had a matching ankle bracelet.
The Breakers was a 140-acre oceanfront resort in Palm Beach. It looked kind of like a mega-version of the Italianate-Floridian dream homes Derik and Chris had been building for Majestic Homes two years earlier: soaring tawny-hued towers, floodlit palm trees, ornate fountains, vaulted ceilings.
Ethan Baumhoff had arranged the party, and it was a more highbrow affair than Derik’s strip-club holiday celebration the year before. If Chris had put Derik in charge of the party, he would have just chartered a yacht, hired a herd of hookers, and bought a pile of cocaine.
But Ethan was always trying to legitimize the clinic, with his dress code and policy manuals and “Casual Fridays.” So he put his wife in charge of the party planning, and she hired a photographer, and everyone had their pictures taken in front of a snowflake backdrop. Like it was the prom or something, Derik thought. There was a disc jockey, but no one danced, except Derik. The party had a Vegas theme, and Ethan’s wife had also hired a gaming company to set up blackjack and roulette tables, which could have been fun, but Derik lost interest when he found out you couldn’t win real money. They gave everybody a stack of fake dollar bills to play with. Instead of George Washington’s stern-mouthed mug, the bills bore a picture of a grinning Chris George.