AMERICAN PAIN (17 page)

“I wouldn’t ever trust anyone to launder that kind of money,” Chris said.

“Then, well, you guys go fucking put the money in,” the investigator said. “I’ll just set it up for you. You do the accounts. I won’t even have access. You have the numbers. You have the password. It’s your thing, you put it in, OK?”

The key was, he said, Chris also needed to set up an offshore business that he could borrow money from to invest in legitimate projects in the United States. And then he’d pay his offshore business back, and the money would be clean. Chris asked some questions, but held the guy off.

“I’m still going to wait a while,” Chris said.

“It’s up to you. I mean, you know your situation,” the investigator said. “The only reason I brought it up is ’cause you brought it up to me. I would’ve never even fucking mentioned it. You could start small. You could start with fifty or a hundred K.”

Chris realized that what he wanted was not to launder his money. The pain clinic money was legitimate, and he was going to pay taxes on it. He just wanted a place to put the cash. But Derik was right, this guy couldn’t be trusted. Before he cut ties with him, though, Chris wanted the ex-DEA agent’s take on something.

“DEA doesn’t like me,” Chris said.

“No shit,” the investigator said. “They don’t like me much either. So what?”

Chris told him how he’d called the DEA offices and the woman had known the address of the Oakland Park Boulevard clinic as soon as he’d said his name.

“She knew it just like that?” the investigator said.

“Yeah,” Chris said.

“Jesus,” the investigator said.

But then the guy backtracked, tried to brush it off. There were lots of pain clinics and the DEA had to monitor all of them. It wasn’t a big deal that the woman knew who he was.

“That doesn’t mean you’re doing anything wrong,” the investigator said.

“It’s not good, though,” Chris said.

“No, it ain’t good,” the investigator said. “It’d be better if she never heard of you. But it’s OK.”

If South Florida Pain was a target, he said, Chris would have known about it already.

“It takes them a while,” Chris said.

“Well, how long you been open?” the investigator said.

“Eight months.”

“If there was a problem, you would have heard a long time ago,” he said. “Just my guess. It’s a legit business. There’s no law against making money, you know what I’m saying?”

Chris was always searching for a bank willing to take the cash. He’d be with one bank for a month, but no banker wanted to take in this amount of cash day after day, even though Chris met with the management and insisted his cash flow was legitimate and he was going to pay taxes on everything. There were just too many federal reports to fill out for large amounts of cash.
^*
Banks didn’t want to deal with the Currency Transaction Reports and Suspicious Activity Reports and scrutiny from the IRS or the OOC or the FFIEC or the other alphabet-soup agencies that keep an eye on financial crime, especially South Florida banks that had lived through the cocaine cowboy days of the 1980s. Every major bank ditched the clinic, one by one, and wouldn’t say why. It was a constant problem because Chris had to have money in the bank to cover the doctors’ payroll, though he paid employees cash whenever he could.

In late September 2008, it happened again. Chris tried to deposit more than $250,000 in one of his banks, and the bank not only refused to take the money but dropped him as a customer. They wrote him a cashier’s check for the balance in his account. So Chris went to the house he and Dianna were renting in the Talavera development in Palm Beach County and piled the quarter million in a kitchen cabinet. One day, in early October, Chris came home and found broken glass in the bathroom. Someone had punched through the window to get inside. He checked the kitchen cabinet. That stash was gone.

Chris and Derik reasoned that the burglar was probably someone they knew, someone who knew where to find the money. They narrowed their list of suspects down to four people, including Jeff, who believed that some portion of the pain clinic’s profits rightfully belonged to him.

The next few days included a series of bizarre incidents, as Chris and Derik hunted for the money.
^†
Chris persuaded a locksmith to help him break into the car that belonged to a friend of Jeff. He and Jeff had a screaming match at their mother’s home, and guns were drawn. Chris also hired a polygraph expert to give lie-detector tests to the guys he suspected of the theft. The tests purportedly ruled out Jeff. And then suspicions focused on a friend of Jeff who had worked at South Beach Rejuvenation. The twins had grown up with the man, who had a long list of arrests for carrying a concealed weapon, DUI, marijuana possession, and trespassing.

Jeff was furious that his friend might have stolen the money, so he agreed to help lure him to his house one day in early October. Chris and Derik waited at Jeff’s, which was located in the Versailles development where Vanilla Ice, the rapper, lived and was soon to begin filming a new reality show about a home he was remodeling in the development. Jeff destroyed the homes he lived in, parked broken-down Lamborghinis in the yard, urinated in the pool. Derik checked out the new house, shaking his head. It was in better condition than Jeff’s previous homes, but it reminded him of a kid’s clubhouse. Dirty dishes in the sink, no food in the fridge, and toys everywhere: fireworks, martial arts throwing stars, air rifles. In one bedroom, a huge pile of cash lay under a blanket.

When Jeff and his friend arrived, Derik did his thing, punching the friend and then flipping him. The man landed on his head on the hard floor. He was knocked out for a moment, his body rigid as a plank. When he came to, his eyes were screwy. Jeff pulled out a gun and a pair of hand-cuffs—he was always coming up with random items like that. Their captive started going berserk, thrashing around, so Derik snapped the cuffs onto his wrists. Jeff yelled questions and waved the gun around. He fired the gun at point-blank range, the bullet creasing the cuffed man’s scalp and burying itself in the floor.

Now their captive was terrified and brain-scrambled from hitting the floor with his skull. He didn’t seem to fully comprehend what they were saying, but he knew enough not to admit that he’d stolen the money. So it was a standoff.

Derik and the George brothers huddled. Chris and Jeff wanted to let their friend go, to pay him to not tell police about what they’d done to him. Derik believed things had gone too far to just let the man walk out of the house. It wasn’t a situation that money could solve, something Chris and Jeff never seemed to understand. Derik lost the debate. They decided to let him go, although Jeff couldn’t find the handcuff key for a while.

Later, Chris told Derik he’d given the man $10,000 and persuaded him to sign some sort of legal document, swearing that the incident had never happened. To Derik, it seemed like the dumbest thing he’d ever heard of. You couldn’t walk both sides of the line, couldn’t be a gangster
and
a straight citizen. You had to pick a side, and they’d already chosen theirs.

On the other hand, the outlaw life was stressful, and Derik understood the need for a little normalcy. That’s why he’d begun seeing the pharmacy tech at South Florida Pain.

Derik wasn’t as attracted to his new girlfriend as he had been to his Brazilian ex-girlfriend, but he liked her and he loved her young daughter. He rented an apartment in Tamarac for the three of them. The relationship wasn’t particularly physical, but he needed something normal to come home to after a day of running South Florida Pain. Without that, Derik knew every night would be as crazy as the days, just an endless cycle of blow and alcohol and hookers and women like the Brazilian addict. He also didn’t mind the veneer of respectability his new relationship gave him. Taking care of his girlfriend and her daughter made Derik feel like a good guy.

The days were chaos. Always interesting, but always exhausting too. Patients going into withdrawal, their bodies turning on them, skin as gray and wet as an oyster. Every so often, a patient would just slide off a chair in the waiting room and fish out, flopping around on the floor like a hooked tarpon on a boat deck. The first time Derik saw a seizure, the patient fell and split his head wide open, blood everywhere, Derik and one of the doctors frantically trying to wake the guy up. As the patient numbers rose, the seizures grew more frequent. It became almost routine: Derik would yell for a doctor, run and dial 911. No one ever died right there in the office, but it was a concern, another reason to try to shield themselves legally. Derik knew junkies could die from too much dope—everyone knew that—but the idea of patients dying of overdose was abstract. He knew it could happen, but it was easy to not think about.

Some of the junkie stunts amused Derik, and some pissed him off, like when patients tried to bring their kids into the waiting room with them. The clinic was no place for children. But he was always curious to see how far people would go to get their fix or how dumb the pills made them. One pet peeve: how some of the zombies could never get the hang of tightening the drug test cup lids. They’d fumble the handoff and drop the cups, which turned them into what Derik called “exploding urine bombs.” At least once a day, Derik would dodge one or get soaked, one of his least-favorite parts of the job.

Most of the time, nobody watched the patients actually urinate into the cups. Derik knew patients were using other people’s urine. He knew this because the toilets where they did the drug tests were constantly clogged with containers and condoms that patients had used to smuggle in the substitute urine. Sometimes a pee-filled condom tucked into someone’s shirt would burst, soaking the patient. And at the end of the day, the parking lot outside often had broken condoms on it, ruptured and melting onto the hot asphalt.

Derik played dumb with the patients, like he couldn’t see the bulges in their jacket pockets when he took them to the bathroom for the urine test. But he couldn’t afford to be
too
accommodating with them. He could never be sure whether someone was working with the police, hoping Derik would screw up and say something incriminating. So if a patient was too dumb to figure out how to cheat the test or stupid enough to get caught with a container of urine, Derik would kick that patient out. A couple of times, patients were caught using a Whizzinator, basically a fake penis attached to a plastic bladder of synthetic urine that was belted to the patient’s hips.

A few times a day, each doctor called Derik back to discharge a patient. Most often it was for track marks, which he’d become good at identifying. The patients always had an excuse. The marks, they said, were from a recent hospital IV. Or from cutting briar bushes. Or the cat had scratched them.

Many patients didn’t realize how easy it was to get a prescription, so they overdid the fakery, coming in wearing a neck brace or even a cast. Sometimes the staff would find crutches discarded in the waiting room by a patient who had received medication. One day, Derik told a patient in a wheelchair that he was being kicked out for going to another pain clinic. The guy just popped out of the wheelchair and came after Derik.