American Pain

by John Temple

  “Yeah, OK, it’s just, I don’t ever want to go through it, but it looks like I’m in the middle of this crap,” Boshers said.

  Chris called a representative from a drug wholesaler, just to vent.

  “They’re taking down every pain clinic, and they’re gonna go after the wholesalers afterwards,” he said.

  “Uh, so what you’re giving us is a heads up, you’re saying,” the rep said.

  The feds kept calling Chris, telling him they wanted him to come home, talk to them. Chris had no intention of doing that. For one thing, he knew they’d probably seize his Range Rover the moment he drove up.

  Dianna called too, crying. She was still at the Talavera house, talking to the feds, and they were showing her pictures of Chris and another woman in his truck. Everything going on, and she was frantic about Chris and other women.

  Under his breath, Chris said: Oh, God.

  Then, to Dianna: That’s not true.

  Eventually, Chris and Derik went to see Chris’s attorney, who’d represented him during his 2003 steroid conviction. They met Dianna and Jeff and Jeff’s girlfriend there. Chris signed over his new white Range Rover to the lawyer as a retainer fee, since his bank accounts were frozen.

  Turner waited outside as the SWAT team invaded Ethan Baumhoff’s house. After a few moments, the team reemerged with the clinic manager and led him to a van, where Turner grilled him.

  Baumhoff didn’t seem surprised about the raid. He was resigned and respectful and, as Turner had suspected, he was an open book. As a former cop who had testified in court many times, he knew that the first person to cooperate was likely to get the biggest break.

  Baumhoff gave them the previous day’s cash proceeds, the money-counting machine, and the all-important combinations to the clinic safes. He explained the “pain train,” how rejected American Pain patients were referred to Executive Pain. He outlined how the doctors wrote scrips for staffers. How Roni Dreszer had a cocaine problem. How Aruta and Boshers carried guns at work. How Baumhoff had tried to institute standards, to inventory pills, to buy a crash cart for patients going into seizures, and how nobody cooperated with his efforts to give the clinic a more legitimate appearance. He said he believed the doctors knew what they were doing, with the possible exception of Cadet. She was naive, the one most likely to have been duped.

  Baumhoff talked for hours, a mixture of fact and opinion and rumor. It was like he’d been waiting for months for the feds to arrive.

  Derik visited a couple of acquaintances who owed him money. He collected an emergency fund of about $20,000.

  People kept calling Derik, asking him what to do, and Derik told them to go to his house, since the cops weren’t there. His girlfriend ordered pizza and sandwiches to be brought in.

  Derik called Chris with what he knew.

  “They got all the doctors and suspended all their licenses,” Derik said. “They took Roni in and gave him a piece of paper saying his DEA license was suspended. He’s got a hearing in a month. They went to Cynthia’s house, gave her a piece of paper, said her license was suspended for a month. Uh, Jacob also.”

  Derik was thinking the feds might be listening to their calls, so he bought a bunch of burners, cheap cell phones with prepaid minutes, and went back to his house so his girlfriend could activate them. Still no cops in Black Diamond Estates. Derik assumed they didn’t know where he lived since he’d moved there only two weeks earlier. A bunch of staffers were waiting at Derik’s house, panicked, and Derik gave them all burners.

  People kept coming, and Derik’s house became an impromptu headquarters, since everywhere else was under siege. Derik was pretty well moved in by that time, a few boxes still unpacked in the garage. Every time the guard at the gate called him to say there was a visitor, Derik figured it was the cops, but they never showed up. The visitors all told their stories. Ethan, with a long tale about how the cops had him in cuffs all day at his house, interrogating him. Another staffer had been getting breakfast at Dunkin Donuts when federal agents walked up to him, wanting to talk. Another had been at home in the shower when the cops showed up. One was freaking out because agents had seized her Range Rover.

  Most of the employees said the cops and agents who’d interviewed them seemed unfamiliar with the details of the case, like they’d been brought in just for the raids. Some of the agents had seemed like they were used to dealing with gangs and cartels and didn’t understand why they were interrogating people who worked at a doctor’s office.

  Chris and Jeff and their women arrived later in Chris’s other Range Rover, bringing a bag of steroids they didn’t want the feds to find. For some reason, the feds had let Dianna take the black Range Rover, which was a few years older; they were focused on the new white one Chris had signed over to his lawyer.

  Late that afternoon, sitting on Derik’s couch, Chris and Jeff and Derik watched the local news. The first six and a half minutes of the program were devoted to the raid. The video showed a Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office cruiser parked across the entrance of the American Pain parking-lot gate. The camera peered through slats in the gate to show cops and agents strolling around the parking lot in masks and black jumpsuits.

  Derik felt sick to his stomach. Chris and Jeff couldn’t believe what was happening either. The feds seemed to think the American Pain crew was equivalent to the Gambino crime family. They couldn’t believe the feds could do this, just come in and take everything before they’d been proven guilty. How was that legal? And if they had the power to do that, who knew what else they’d done? Were their phones tapped? Had all the legal advice they’d bought and paid for over the years been completely wrong?

  The news anchor cut to a live shot of a reporter standing in front of Chris’s house in Talavera. “Neighbors said there was never any cause for alarm,” the reporter said, “until the bomb squad showed up.” Video showed the street blocked off with a bomb squad truck, orange traffic cones, and fire trucks. A bomb tech in a full military-green armored suit and mask lurched into the house. Derik thought this was overkill. He and Chris and Jeff liked to build and blow up homemade fireworks. It had nothing to do with American Pain.

  Derik’s grandmother in Deerfield kept calling. She knew where he worked and was worried he was in trouble.

  She said: You’re on TV!

  Derik said: I’m fine, Grandma. I’m just sitting at my house.

  Eventually everyone split. Chris left behind the steroids and older Range Rover and asked Derik to take care of them. Derik wasn’t happy about this and wondered if Chris was going to cut him off again, like the time when Derik had gone to jail on the traffic charge and Chris stopped picking up his calls. But Derik did what Chris asked—he hid the vehicle under the covered back porch of a friend’s house in Loxahatchee and threw the bag of steroids in a garbage bin behind a McDonalds.

  10

  The day after the raids, Derik and Chris went back to the big building on Dixie Highway, and reality set in again: It was over.

  The clinic, which had bustled with staff and patients just two days earlier, was an echoing ghost town of office furniture. Signs gone from the walls, filing cabinets empty, barely a sheet of paper left. Not a single pill. Nothing in the desk drawers. No computers or mainframes, the security system taken right off the walls. Even the ATM was gone. The feds had taken everything. They’d also seized most everything Chris owned, confiscating more than $7 million in cash and bank accounts, plus his cars.* Chris knew they’d also be going after his three houses in the Talavera development.

  A few days later, Derik again visited a lawyer, this time by himself. In the past, lawyers usually made him feel better about his prospects. Not this time. The lawyer basically said Derik needed to prepare himself to go to prison. If the cops came after him, and the lawyer believed they would, Derik needed to think about accepting a plea bargain. If he refused to plead guilty, he would go to trial, which could lead to a life sentence. Derik couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Lawyers
they’d consulted had always said the clinic was legal, that Derik couldn’t be held responsible for what the doctors did behind closed doors. Derik couldn’t understand what had changed.

  He remembered his weeks in St. Lucie County Jail on the probation violation, how jumpy he’d felt the whole time. No way could he risk a life sentence.

  But he also remembered the prosecutors going after his father. He’d learned then that it was wrong to work with the cops, even if your mother had been stabbed to death. He couldn’t turn on his friends, couldn’t turn rat.

  He was trapped.

  But the days went by, and nobody was arrested. The cops never even contacted Derik, possibly because they didn’t know where he was. His name wasn’t in documents filed in federal court.

  In optimistic moments, Derik wondered if he was going to squeak by somehow. Maybe nobody knew about him. After all, his name hadn’t made the papers. Meanwhile, the George twins had become famous overnight. On Sunday, March 7, the Palm Beach Post ran a long front-page profile of Chris and Jeff. Even though American Pain had dwarfed Jeff’s clinics and the brothers hadn’t been speaking to each other for most of the time the clinics were open, the story made it sound like they were equal partners in a single criminal network.

  In the papers, Chris’s lawyer played down the case against the Georges.

  “These guys may have talked a big game, but they really didn’t do anything illegal,” he told a reporter.

  Privately, the lawyer told Chris that if he married Dianna, it would give them something called spousal privilege, which meant they couldn’t be forced to testify against each other. Five days after the raid, Chris and Dianna applied for a marriage license, and four days after that, a deputy clerk of court married them in the Palm Beach County Courthouse. Derik didn’t go to the ceremony.

  Derik didn’t know whom to trust, and he grew suspicious of friends he’d known since he was a kid, hyperaware of the subtleties of every comment or question. He studied phone texts for signs that the sender was being handled by the cops, was trying to catch Derik doing something illegal or saying something that could be used in court. Derik spent a lot of time talking to his former coworkers at American Pain, cajoling everyone to stick together, not to give the feds anything. The fewer people talked, the better.

  “I ain’t fucking signing nothing, I ain’t cooperating, I ain’t talking,” Derik told Chris. “The only time they’re gonna see me is when they put me in handcuffs.”

  The George brothers’ inner circle discussed the situation during dinners at the Bonefish Grill and at their mother’s house. During the meetings, they left their cell phones in their cars, because they figured the feds might have the technology to somehow turn on the phones and listen in on their conversations. The guys assured each other they wouldn’t break and speculated about who was most likely to cooperate with the feds. Jeff wanted to obtain depositions from everybody so they would all be locked into statements. Everyone agreed they should try to shift all the blame to the doctors.

  Another pain clinic owner asked Derik if Chris was willing to sell American Pain’s phone number to her. Thousands of American Pain patients were finding out that their oxy supply had suddenly disappeared. They were no doubt panicking, calling the number. Derik asked Chris about it, and Chris said yes. He needed cash. The woman paid $50,000 for it.

  Derik also needed money. He was kicking himself for blowing everything. When the clinic owner who bought American Pain’s phone number offered him a job doing the same thing he’d done at American Pain, he took it.

  He lasted one day. The clinic was depressing. The doctors were low writers, wouldn’t prescribe more than 180 oxy 30s a month. They didn’t know how to play the game, and everybody was spooked after the American Pain raids.

  The feds had not raided Pain Express, the clinic Chris and Jeff had launched a month earlier in Georgia. Nevertheless, it shut down shortly after the raids. The doctor just quit, no doubt alarmed by what had happened in South Florida.

  A few weeks after the raid, Derik pulled together a little money and financed another pain clinic in Vero Beach with Dr. Cadet’s boyfriend, a doctor who’d worked for a few weeks at American Pain. But Derik couldn’t spend much time there because he didn’t want to tip off the feds that he’d started another operation. Within two weeks, the doctor quit, saying there weren’t enough patients to make it worth the risk. The place just folded, and Derik lost his stake. Derik believed if he could have been present, he could have kept it going. But with a federal investigation hanging over his head, no one respected or feared him any longer. And after the Vero Beach clinic closed, no one wanted to work with him.

  Derik waited to get arrested, growing depressed and anxious. He popped more and more Xanax. He barely ventured outside the big house in Black Diamond Estates.

  The search warrants changed everything for the American Pain task force too. Information, once so scarce, now threatened to inundate. The raids gave Jennifer Turner and her colleagues a massive document trove to explore, including more than twenty-seven thousand patient files from American Pain alone. They had video from the clinic’s surveillance system and photos the agents had taken of all the clinics and homes they’d raided. And then there was everything stored on the hard drives of the computers they’d confiscated. Chris George’s money was stashed in nine different bank accounts, but the largest haul had been in several safes in the attic of his mother’s house on Primrose Lane, where the search team had found $4,553,400 in cash.

  Working ten hours a day for two months, a team of agents and lawyers began combing through the patient files, trying to quantify the scope of the George operation. They reviewed ten thousand files by hand, and found they were all essentially the same. Between July 2008* and the raid, the doctors of South Florida Pain and American Pain wrote 66,871 prescriptions for various medications. Ninety-six percent of the prescriptions were for oxycodone or alprazolam. More than 80 percent of the patients were from out of state.* The five American Pain doctors under investigation wrote prescriptions for fourteen million oxycodone pills. Executive Pain’s six doctors wrote for almost four million oxycodone pills. Boshers was the biggest writer, personally responsible for prescribing 3,601,860 oxycodone 30-milligram pills. Altogether, doctors targeted at both clinics had prescribed enough oxycodone to have given every man, woman, and child in Florida a pill.

  Then there was the wiretap. The task force had intercepted approximately four thousand of Chris George’s cell phone calls between November 2009 and March 2010, plus twice as many text messages. The wiretap recordings had to be mined for exchanges that could be used as evidence that Chris George was in charge of American Pain and understood the clinic’s impact. That meant listening to dozens and dozens of phone calls during which Chris George mumbled interminably with a buddy about something stupid. But here and there among the idle chatter, a nugget of conversation illuminated the operation and mind-sets at work, something they could use to show a connection between parties or to establish culpability.

  In January 2010, for instance, two months before the raids, Chris George and Ethan Baumhoff had a series of discussions about a questionnaire sent to them by the Harvard Drug Group. The Michigan drug wholesaler—no connection to the university—was one of American Pain’s oxycodone suppliers. Baumhoff had lied on the forms about how many patients they saw and what percentage were from out of state. Then he’d asked the doctors to sign the forms.

  GEORGE: Was it hard for the doctors to sign those, or did they just sign them right away?

  BAUMHOFF: Oh they signed them right away.

  GEORGE: Signed them right away. Well, what did you tell them they were?

  BAUMHOFF: I told them it was a questionnaire for a wholesaler.

  GEORGE: Wholesaler. Did they even read over it?

  BAUMHOFF: No. Aruta looked at it and he goes ‘this, is this number really accurate?’ and I said mmm, probably not.

  On January 3, Chris George and a friend discussed
a time-share operation that Jeff was running.

  FRIEND: But that scam’s gonna end. I mean, people are onto that one, that makes the news almost as much as pain clinics.

  GEORGE: (unintelligible) it’s not killing anybody, though. That’s the difference.

  The agents also took note of this text-message exchange between Chris George and Dianna Pavnick two months before the raids.

  PAVNICK: I’m scared to go away for a long time, but I keep going for you.

  GEORGE: Going where?

  PAVNICK: Prison.

  For a time after the search warrants were executed, the wiretap on Chris George’s phone was still operational, though George was suddenly more guarded on the phone. Three weeks afterward, Dr. Cadet sent George a text.

  CADET: Hang in there Chris. Let’s hope this will all be resolved in time.

  GEORGE: Well, it will take time for sure probably while I’m in jail and hopefully no one else with me.

  An assistant US attorney named Paul Schwartz was assigned to lead the case. Schwartz was in his mid-fifties and had spent much of his career prosecuting South Florida branches of the Colombo, Lucchese, and Gambino families, leaning hard on alleged caporegimes with nicknames like “Fat Tommy” and “Carmine The Snake” and “Ronnie One Arm.” He’d used RICO laws to go after a Bloods-affiliated street gang in Mira-mar. During a Gambino prosecution in 2004, it was alleged that mobsters were planning to murder Schwartz, and that wasn’t his first death threat.

  Schwartz was hard and foul-mouthed in meetings with defendants but quick to call defense attorneys and apologize afterward. In court, he fired his cross-examination questions in semiautomatic staccato bursts. His Bronx patter was so profuse that even veteran court reporters had to ask him to slow down. A fanatical exerciser, his twice-a-day workouts were legendary in courthouse circles. During trials, he woke at 4:30 a.m. and strapped on a forty-pound weight vest to run one hundred flights of stairs at the courthouse. He said it relieved the stress of his job. He was fit but lacked athletic grace—his movements, like his speech, were herky-jerky, stiff. His diet was as rigid as his workouts: oatmeal and fish and no french fries. He was of average size, but you could see the chest and shoulders under his dress shirts, and his face was lean and creased and hard. He approached his job with a fierce joy, whether he was interrogating wiseguys or studying textbooks. He was always learning something new, and that kept him interested. He was very glad the US Attorney’s Office had no mandatory retirement age.