AMERICAN PAIN (16 page)

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, seeing 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.