American Pain

by John Temple

  Derik and Chris liked to climb up to the rooftop to shoot Derik’s slingshot at unlucky cars and survey their empire, the flat Florida landscape to the west, the oceanfront condominium towers of Palm Beach to the east. From there, the American Pain employee parking lot glittered in the sun, looking like an exotic car dealership—Maseratis and Porsches and Range Rovers.

  On the roof one day, Derik looked across the street and saw a gray sedan parked in the alley next to the junk shop. Two people were in the front seat, a broad-shouldered man and a tall woman with blonde hair. They wore regular street clothes, but Derik could tell they were cops.

  Derik said to Chris: Look at those two idiots.

  Derik and Chris laughed at the pair, thought about pegging them with the slingshot. They wondered why the cops were even bothering to do surveillance. What were they going to gain? Everyone knew what was going on at American Pain. It was like staking out a Walgreens. They’d been operating out in the open for two years and one month. The cops could stare across the street through binoculars all they wanted, but until Florida changed its laws, American Pain was legal.

  One day in February, Chris called Derik and said he could cut off the ankle monitor, he was off the hook on the Jacksonville charges.

  Derik said: Huh?

  Chris started laughing. The people from the Jacksonville clinic were backing off, not pressing charges. They hadn’t shown up for depositions.

  Derik was suspicious. Chris would think it was a clever practical joke to trick Derik into cutting off the ankle bracelet, get him in trouble. Derik got off the phone and called his lawyer but didn’t reach him. Word got around the clinic, and pretty soon, everyone was urging Derik to cut it off, laughing at his reluctance.

  Eventually, Derik got in contact with his lawyer, who told him it was true. He could lose the monitor.

  At the end of the day, after the patients were gone, everyone gathered around like Derik was blowing the candles out at an office birthday party. Derik stood in the middle of the work area of the clinic and cut the itchy strap off his leg. He threw it in a box to be mailed back to the bail/bond office. He was free.

  At seven in the morning on Wednesday, March 3, 2010, Derik was in the shower in the fancy new house he’d leased two weeks earlier in Black Diamond Estates. His cell phone was already blowing up, ringing again and again. Derik had gotten used to this. There was always some kind of crisis at the clinic. But this was too much. He let it ring until his girlfriend said it was going to wake her little girl.

  Derik told her to put the phone on vibrate. He dressed in a suit, the phone still jittering. He finally looked at it. Something like ten missed calls from Chris. Derik called him back.

  Chris: What the fuck! The FBI is everywhere!

  Later, Derik would talk himself down, assure himself that everything would be OK, but he knew right then that the ride was over.

  PART III

  9

  FBI Special Agent Jennifer Turner wanted the takedown of American Pain to be an awesome display of federal power.

  According to her plan, more than four hundred officers and agents would hit American Pain and six other locations and fan out across South Florida to track down and interrogate approximately fifty associates of Chris George. The goal of the onslaught would be the immediate shutdown of the nation’s largest pain clinic, plus two others, and the seizure of any documents, drugs, and money inside. They also planned to seize Chris George’s assets, including multiple cars, houses, and a boat, plus nine bank accounts associated with George or his businesses. Turner hoped this show of force would convince some targets to cooperate immediately. Chris George might hold out, but at least he’d know how serious the feds were about taking him down. She wanted to frighten other pill mills as well. So it wouldn’t hurt to attract as much news media attention as possible.

  Planning for the raids was already well underway by the time the DEA submitted a search warrant application in late February 2010. Personnel and resources were brought in from FBI divisions around the country. Computer analysis experts stood by. Dogs trained to sniff out drugs and cash were readied. Two days before the raid, participants were briefed at a Boca Raton police facility, where federal agents broke down, step-by-step, how they expected the day to unfold. The task force wasn’t planning to make arrests. The search warrants were simply the next step in the investigation. Most participants were assigned to three types of teams: SWAT, search, or interview. The DEA would continue running the wiretap, reporting any relevant calls Chris George made. Supervisors would coordinate from a command post in Miami.

  The search warrant targeted the homes of Chris George, Denice Haggerty, and Ethan Baumhoff, as well as South Beach Rejuvenation, East Coast Pain, Executive Pain, and, of course, American Pain.

  Turner didn’t sleep much the night before the raids. She was too keyed up and had too much to do. She wished she could be at every search location as well as the command post and the wire room. She didn’t want to miss anything. But she had decided to join the team searching Ethan Baumhoff’s house. After listening to the wiretaps, she believed the former police officer would be the most likely to cooperate, and she wanted to lead that interview. Ethan was the odd man out at American Pain, the only one who wasn’t an old friend of Chris or Derik. She’d considered approaching him even before the search warrants, to see if he’d cooperate, but had held off. She knew Chris George kept American Pain money and drugs inside the old bank vaults in the Dixie Highway building, and she assumed Baumhoff would know the vault passcodes. Without the codes, opening those vaults would be difficult, to say the least.

  Breaching Chris George’s house, on the other hand, would be simple. The feds decided to use a local police SWAT team, equipped with an industrial-strength pry bar to snap the front door deadbolt.

  It was crucial to hit all of the locations and targets simultaneously, so nobody would be alerted to destroy evidence or dump assets or fight back. They’d go at first light, just before 7:00 a.m., when everybody would still be at home. When the SWAT team came pouring through his broken front door, Chris George would feel the full weight of the federal government.

  Chris wasn’t home.

  He and Dianna had left the house separately at 6:00 a.m., on one of Chris’s obsessive missions to destroy Palm Beach Pain. Chris was still monitoring the GPS tracker he’d put on his rival’s car. The clinic operator had been to a fleabag motel the night before, a cheap dump popular with the oxy-tourists. The Palm Beach Pain guys visited motels like this one, putting flyers on cars with out-of-state tags. Then, Chris would wake up at the crack of dawn, check the GPS monitor, and go wherever the guy had been the night before so he could remove all the flyers.

  Today, Dianna was staking out the motel. On Chris’s orders, she was going undercover, planning to catch the Palm Beach Pain guys on video. She would talk to them, posing as a sponsor staying at the motel. Chris wanted some video he could take to the DEA.

  At 6:51 a.m., he called Dianna to coach her through the operation. He was following the Palm Beach Pain operator’s car.

  “Remember, you gotta hold that camera in your hand and not cover it up too much. It’s gotta aim at them, you know?” Chris said.

  “Yeah,” Dianna said. “I’m gonna do my best on that.”

  “Then say, ‘Listen, I bring a lot of people down here. What’s the price per pill?’ He’ll tell you.”

  Chris hung up. A moment later, his phone rang. The caller said he was a sergeant with the sheriff’s office. He said he was in Chris’s house, along with the DEA and the FBI, and they had a search warrant. They needed to talk to him. Chris could hear a strangely familiar sound in the background. Like dogs barking. Chris was bewildered. Why were the cops at his house, and why’d they have dogs?

  Chris hung up and started calling everyone—Derik, Jeff, his lawyer. Nobody answered. It was 7:00 a.m. He called Dianna back.

  “Babe, I’m fucked,” he said. “They have a search warrant. The cops are in
side the house.”

  “What?” Dianna shrieked.

  “You need to go there and see what’s going on,” Chris said. “Listen, there’s two guns in the garage. You’re gonna have to say they are yours, I mean, that you just brought them there. And I wasn’t there when you brought them there. Do you have any drugs there?”

  “Probably like a little bit of pot, but nothing crazy,” Dianna said. “I’ll get rid of them.”

  “Baby, you might have to take the blame for some of this stuff,” Chris said.

  “That’s fine,” Dianna said.

  “You know, I . . . I think I’m in a lot of trouble,” Chris said.

  They disconnected, and Dianna gunned her car toward the Talavera house, cutting off other drivers, going up on the curb. Every few minutes, Chris called her back, more upset each time.

  “Babe, I’m fucked,” Chris said. “I’m not going to deal with it. I’m just gonna kill myself.”

  “Don’t do this,” Dianna said. “Don’t be stupid. Don’t talk shit. You don’t know what’s going on. Let them do their investigation, OK?”

  “Baby, you know I love you,” Chris said.

  “Yeah, I do,” Dianna said. “I know you do. You just need to relax, Chris. And you need to think of a fucking plan. You’re smarter than this, OK? Your brain works really hard.”

  “I don’t know why they’re there, though,” Chris said.

  “Think of a plan, Chris. Think of a fucking plan.”

  “I don’t know what to plan for,” Chris said.

  “You need to think of something,” Dianna said. “Killing yourself is not the answer. You cannot leave me here by my fucking self to deal with your dirt.”

  “Babe, where are you at now?” he said. “Where exactly are you at?”

  “I’ll be at the house in two minutes,” she said.

  He was crying.

  “Stay on the phone with me,” he said. “Stay on the phone, will ya? I’m fucked, babe. They’re gonna put me in jail for a long time, babe, a long fucking time.”

  “I’ll take the fall for it,” Dianna said. “I’ll take the fall for everything, OK?”

  “Baby, no matter what happens, if they arrest you for anything illegal at the house, don’t worry, I’ll get you out,” Chris said.

  “You promise?”

  “Baby, I got a lot of people,” Chris said. “I’ll get you out, don’t worry about that. Let me call you back. Derik’s calling me back.”

  After prying open Chris George’s front door, it took the search team less than a minute to clear the house, room by room. No sign of Chris George or Dianna Pavnick. They did find a sophisticated surveillance system and, in a second-floor bedroom, what looked like explosive materials. They called the bomb squad, not something they had anticipated needing. Agents monitoring the Chris George wiretap said he’d told Dianna Pavnick there were firearms in the house, and this was true. They found two shotguns—a Remington 870 and a Benelli I-12 Diamond—leaning against a refrigerator in the garage, next to a red, white, and black Nazi flag. They also found a loaded Smith & Wesson 9-millimeter pistol in a nightstand in an upper bedroom. And some ammunition that didn’t belong to any of the guns, which made the agents wonder if George, wherever he was, had a gun on him. The agents on the wire said George was driving around, crying, talking about killing himself. He was a desperate man, and they hoped he was unarmed.

  At 7:24, Dianna Pavnick pulled up to the house, which was still being ransacked by dozens of agents. She seemed terrified. She agreed to talk to three people—the DEA’s Mike Burt, a DEA intelligence research specialist, and a local police detective. They put her in an unmarked police vehicle and talked to her, taking notes.

  Pavnick said she was the owner of Executive Pain. She said she knew nothing about American Pain. She said patients traveled from so far away because MRIs cost more in those states and doctors there were scared to prescribe controlled substances. Patients traveled together to share costs. She didn’t know what a sponsor was. She’d never heard of patients selling their pills in the parking lot. She said Executive Pain provided detox services. When they pressed her on this, she said she could remember only two patients who’d gone through detox. She acknowledged there were two shotguns in the three-car garage and said they belonged to her. The guns were old, she wasn’t sure they worked, she’d used them in the past to shoot skeet.

  The agents asked if Chris George was making bombs. Pavnick said the materials in the upstairs bedroom were for homemade fireworks, something George and his friends enjoyed.

  Then they showed her the pictures of George and another woman in the back of his truck.

  Still damp from his morning shower, Derik had called Chris back. Chris was freaking out, saying his home was being raided.

  “Dude,” Chris said. “It’s over, dude. Hear me?”

  Derik peeked out of his own window. His street in Black Diamond Estates was quiet, not a cop in sight.

  Chris asked Derik to meet him at their usual breakfast spot, a bagel joint next to Walmart.

  Derik’s first thought: This couldn’t have happened at a worse time. He’d loaned some serious money to friends, money he doubted he’d ever see again, and the last two weekends had drained him. Two weeks earlier, he’d taken his girlfriend on a cruise to the Bahamas, bought her diamond earrings, did lots of coke, and dropped probably $20,000 in a Paradise Island casino. The next weekend he spent at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood, more coke and whiskey, and his losing streak continued. He’d blown maybe $100,000 over the two weekends, and now he felt sick about it. At the very least, he was going to need some serious lawyering, which cost money. He’d probably earned $2 million in the past two years, mostly under the table, and now he was short on cash.

  Derik’s cousin drove him to Starbucks and then the bagel place, and Chris kept calling Derik with more news, more places getting shut down. Derik said he was thinking about going to American Pain to confront the agents. Chris vetoed the idea. Vehemently.

  “They’re gonna question you like a motherfucker, dude,” Chris said. “About who deals with the money. Who owns the place. Fucking all kinds of shit, dude.”

  At the same time the SWAT team poured through Chris George’s front door, a large truck pulled into the American Pain parking lot. The back doors opened, and a team of police officers with shields and masks poured out.

  A staffer who’d gone to high school in upstate New York with Derik was the first American Pain employee to arrive at the clinic that day. The employee was thirty-one, a former Marine who had previously worked for a plumbing company before he started doing paperwork and counting out pills in the American Pain pharmacy. He’d started at $500 a week, but his salary was boosted to about $1,500, plus another $5,000 from patient bribes. At the Christmas party where Dr. Cadet won the “Doctor of the Year” award, this employee had won “Staffer of the Year.”

  The staffer pulled into the parking lot, then saw a deputy sheriff at the door. Then dozens of agents swarmed him, yelling at him—get out of the car, do you have a weapon? They put him in a police car as they ransacked the building. His cell phone rang, over and over, but he didn’t answer. A steady stream of early-bird patients pulled into the lot, saw the cluster of police vehicles, then got out of there, looking confused. The cops eventually put a barrier over the parking-lot entrance. Two DEA special agents took the employee inside to grill him in an empty office. He talked about the patients, about the staff, the quirks and reputations of the doctors. Cops and agents were packing patient files into cardboard boxes, studying the surveillance camera system, taking photos of everything.

  Outside, neighbors watched from across Dixie Highway as cops wheeled carts and dollies bearing stacks of boxes out of the big white building, loading them into a Broward County Sheriff’s Office truck.

  At the bagel joint, Chris was flushed and frantic. He told Derik the FBI and DEA and sheriff’s office were searching everybody’s houses, and they were going to find
guns at his house. Derik sent his cousin back to his house in Black Diamond Estates to get the cousin’s guns and Derik’s money and anything else he could find that would get Derik in trouble if the feds showed up.

  Chris and Derik sat in Chris’s truck in the parking lot and started calling everybody, doctors and staff, checking in. Derik talked to Dr. Aruta, who said he’d headed in to work as usual that morning, then had seen the police barrier at the clinic and kept on driving.

  Derik said: Take off. Go to Costa Rica, go somewhere, just take off.

  Everyone Chris talked to was panicked.

  Jeff: “The cops come after me, I’m fucked.”

  Ethan: “Dude, I told you this day was going to come. Remember when I asked you to put some fucking money away in a trust account with an attorney for a defense fund?”

  Chris got ahold of Dr. Cadet. They speculated about what the charges might be.

  “What did we do wrong that we’re racketeering about?” Chris asked.

  “I know, right—what?” Cadet said. “Like, we’re not . . . We’re doing a service and getting money for it.”

  “I’ll try to call you back unless I’m fucking in jail,” he said.

  “OK,” she said.

  “If you guys aren’t in jail,” Chris added.

  “Oh, God, I know,” Cadet said.

  Chris called Dr. Boshers. If any patients or staffers asked him to write a prescription, Chris said, Boshers should treat them like cops. Chris said he’d gone to a gas station and tried to use a debit card linked to his bank account, and it was declined. Then he’d gone to one of his banks; they said his accounts were frozen.

  “You gotta get the money out of your account,” Chris told Boshers.

  “OK,” Boshers said. “What are they gonna indict you guys for?”

  “Most likely it’ll be either conspiracy or racketeering, or something like that,” Chris said.