AMERICAN PAIN (19 page)

After the kidnapping incident, Chris and Jeff went back to not speaking to each other, and the lawsuits between the brothers proceeded. Jeff finally had opened his own clinic in West Palm Beach, calling it East Coast Pain and modeling it after South Florida Pain. But he was juggling South Beach Rejuvenation and other enterprises, including trying to start a strip club and running a timeshare resale business. So Jeff hadn’t focused on building East Coast Pain, and his doctors saw only a fraction of the patients South Florida Pain was handling.

As he and Jeff had originally planned, Chris wanted a string of clinics in multiple locations. He wanted a presence in West Palm Beach to compete with Jeff’s clinic. He also wanted to get Dianna out of South Florida Pain and into her own place. As they’d hired more staff, Dianna sat around and did nothing, mostly. She had been bored for months. She didn’t like all the girls around the office, especially the former bikini model who liked to sit on Chris’s lap in his office.

So Chris talked about opening a new clinic in West Palm Beach. Dianna would run it. He told her to set up a corporation in her name on Sunbiz, the Florida Department of State’s website. She did it, but it went no further. Dianna was increasingly unhappy. She didn’t like the cash lying around the house. She didn’t like how Chris was so focused on the money all the time, and not her. Fixated on it, like the more he had the more he wanted. She didn’t like the way the cops had targeted the Oakland Park Boulevard clinic, and the customers at the new location scared her and grossed her out. They were even more zombie-like than before, really strung out and smelly and unkempt.

She complained to Chris. It wasn’t normal to make this much money, to have cops showing up all the time, to have acquaintances stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars out of your house. She’d worked in strip clubs for years and managed to avoid trouble, which wasn’t easy. Now she was afraid they’d both land in prison.

Chris told her to not worry so much. The pain clinic was operating in a gray area. It was frowned upon, but there was nothing the authorities could do, because it was legal.

That October, almost exactly one year after they’d hooked up in West Port, Dianna left Chris and went back to the life. She lived out of her car, crashing at friends’ houses, and got a job dancing at Rachel’s, the strip club steak house in West Palm Beach. Chris put plans for his new West Palm Beach clinic on hold.

One morning, about a week after the Carmel Cafiero report, one of the security guards told Derik that one of the girls was there for her interview. They needed a receptionist, so Derik had run another “just send picture” ad on Craigslist, got a bunch of modeling headshots and cheesecake photos, and set up interviews. It was early in the morning when the guard approached Derik—they hadn’t even opened yet—and Derik figured the girl must be eager.

Derik went to the back room and a tall black woman greeted him. Too old for this job, Derik thought. He was aggravated, thinking the woman must have sent in a picture that wasn’t hers, and he gave her some attitude.

Derik said: Sorry, you’re not the look we’re going for.

The woman looked annoyed.

She said: What is this, a doctor’s office or a modeling agency? And what’s up with your parking lot? It looks like a Mercedes dealership out there.

That was weird, Derik thought. What did she care what kind of cars they drove? But he shrugged it off, let her leave, forgot about it.

Until the next day, when the guard again approached him before opening hours.

The guard said: Yo, D. That woman’s here to see you again.

And Derik turned around to see the tall woman standing in the employees-only area of the pain clinic. With about seven other people. Holding a Drug Enforcement Administration badge.

She made some smart-ass comment, but Derik was in shock and the words didn’t even register.

The visitors were a mix of Florida Department of Health, Broward County Sheriff’s Office, and DEA. They said they were there to inspect the clinic.

A detective from the sheriff’s office said: Shut it down, and get all of your employees together.

He asked everyone to produce identification, and Derik said he didn’t have a driver’s license, which was true.

A DEA agent said: You don’t have a driver’s license? That’s odd, considering we just saw you drive up in a Mercedes that costs, what would you say, $100,000?

Derik said: I guess you got me.

He asked if they had a warrant, and they said they didn’t need one because it was just an inspection. Derik had no idea whether this was correct, but he got the employees together and gave the agents an ID card that he had obtained after losing his license. The officers and agents split into teams. The female DEA agent took Chris into an office, where they holed up for a long time. They wanted the clinic’s dispensing logs. They told him they were inspecting South Florida Pain because of the quantities of oxycodone that had been ordered in the doctors’ names.

Another pair wanted to audit the pharmacy, examine purchasing records and inventories to make sure the pills the clinic bought were going to actual patients. Derik definitely didn’t want them doing this; God knew what the pill counts would be. So he pretended to not have keys to the pharmacy, said they’d have to wait for the pharmacy tech. He hoped to head her off, but she showed up.

Another pair of officers interviewed staffers. Two others interviewed Dr. Joseph, the first doctor to arrive that day. That interview was short. They emerged with the little doctor, and one agent said that Dr. Joseph had volunteered to surrender his DEA registration, which allowed him to prescribe and dispense controlled substances, in exchange for not being prosecuted, and they were going to seize his medications.

Derik protested. The pills were worth a lot of money. They were just going to take them? Derik said he wanted to transfer the meds to another doctor’s name, and the agents said it didn’t work like that. They were confiscating Dr. Joseph’s drugs.

Dr. Joseph, the doctor who’d been at the clinic the longest, just walked out the door, probably bewildered because his English wasn’t great. The agents spent an hour questioning another physician, Dr. Beau Boshers. They asked the new doctor how many patients a day he saw, what kind of exams he gave, whether patients came from out of state. Dr. Boshers had worked at the clinic only for a couple of weeks, and he already suspected the place was an unusually well-insulated pill mill, though he certainly wasn’t going to admit it to federal agents. He barely examined his patients, but he believed he was protected by the MRI reports and the diagnostic paperwork he filled out for each patient. He’d earned his medical degree in his mid-thirties and worked for several years as a hospital-based internal medicine doctor. The money had been good, but the hours were long and the work grueling. By comparison, the pain clinic was easy money.

Derik sneaked away from the agents for a moment and started calling the other doctors, telling them to not come to work. He headed off a couple doctors that way, though one later surrendered his registration just like Dr. Joseph had. The cops kept asking Derik when the other doctors would be arriving, and Derik played dumb, said they were supposed to be here, they must not be coming in.

He enjoyed the cat-and-mouse game, but he was worried that the clinic’s run was over. While he waited to see what would happen, Derik sat with Dr. Boshers in the waiting room and watched TV.
Rambo
was playing on one of the big flat-screens. Groups of patients loitered outside in the parking lot, hoping the clinic would reopen. Every once in a while, the bold or desperate ones came up to the door and pressed their faces to the glass.

Around midday, one of the cops told Derik they’d run his identification and he was in big trouble. Not for the clinic or the drugs, but for driving with a suspended license. Not to mention the fact that he was on probation and wasn’t supposed to leave Palm Beach County. He could be looking at years in prison. Multiple years.

Derik felt the same way he’d felt when the health department investigator had made copies of the incomplete MRI prescriptions in June. All the shit he was pulling, and these guys were going to violate him on a
traffic
charge? But he knew the prospect of prison time was real. The memory of his stretch in St. Lucie County Jail, ten months ago, was still fresh.

But they didn’t arrest him. Around 2:00 p.m., the inspectors and cops just packed up and left. They took Dr. Joseph’s stock of pills with them, and they were mouthy on the way out the door.

One said: Just remember, Derik, we let you go. But I have a feeling we’re gonna have further business.

When they were gone, Derik walked outside and addressed the patients.

He said: Thanks for waiting, everybody. Come on in!

The patients flowed inside, and Dr. Boshers got to work writing scrips. One doctor down, but back in business.

Even before the inspection, Chris had decided it was time to make some moves—for the good of everyone. One of the pharmaceutical wholesalers had called Chris after the Carmel Cafiero report aired and said the company couldn’t sell drugs to South Florida Pain Clinic any longer. The wholesaler specifically mentioned Derik’s presence in Cafiero’s story.

The wholesaler said: That guy just
looks
like a drug dealer. We can’t be doing business with you guys anymore.

The wholesaler also suggested that Chris change the clinic’s name, make a fresh start.

Chris thought about it and decided the wholesaler was right. First off, the clinic’s reputation was both a blessing and a curse. Their word of mouth had been great. People knew the doctors at South Florida Pain wrote big and the guys made it as easy as possible. Prospective patients still came every day to the old location on Oakland Park Boulevard, months after it had shut down. Derik had hired a guy for $500 a week to just sit there in his car and hand out flyers with directions to the new clinic.

But after the
Sun-Sentinel
story and picture and now the Cafiero report, the big red-lettered South Florida Pain Clinic sign on Oakland Park Boulevard had become a symbol of pill mills. They’d changed locations, but the name itself was still a target. They needed a new one.

And they needed a new face. Despite the improvements they’d made to the business, Chris and Derik themselves had become liabilities. Chris would continue to own the clinic, but he needed a straw owner. It couldn’t be Derik, especially after the Cafiero report. His relationship with Dianna was on the rocks, so she wouldn’t work either. It needed to be someone without a police record. Someone respectable, who could be the face of the clinic. Someone who could start fresh with the wholesalers and the banks.

Back in North Port, Chris had worked with a guy named Ethan Baumhoff, an ex-cop. Originally from Missouri, Ethan had spent five years in the Army and then a decade as a police officer in various small departments before moving to Florida and going into construction. Ethan was a grown-up, thirty-seven years old and married with kids. He had a clean record, as far as Chris knew, and his background in law enforcement would look good to anyone investigating the clinic. Chris talked to Ethan, who agreed to be the manager of the pain clinic.