AMERICAN PAIN (20 page)

Chris told Derik what the wholesaler had said about him looking like a drug dealer, and Derik was offended.

Derik said: What the fuck do you want me to do? Get a face-lift? Tattoos removed? Lose the New York accent?

But he was really outraged when Chris said he was hiring Ethan as manager. He’d never liked Ethan, even back in North Port. Ethan was completely different than Derik and Chris—a rules-oriented guy, a stick-ler with a Napoleon complex. Worst of all, he’d been a cop, which meant that he had cop instincts and cop leanings. He would ruin the freewheeling chemistry of the place that Derik had created by hiring a mixture of friends and hot girls.

Chris said: That’s the point. He’s a strong representative for the clinic. He’ll really have no say, but we’ll put him out there to make it look like he does.

Derik didn’t like it, but Chris’s mind was made up.

During his first few weeks, Ethan Baumhoff spent most of his time in Chris’s office, learning about the clinic’s circulatory system of drugs and money. Chris wanted him to reestablish ties with the wholesalers who had dropped them after the Cafiero story and get the drug shipments flowing again. Chris also wanted to find some more wholesalers who would sell to him. Conveniently, the DEA website had a list of wholesalers, and Chris had Ethan call every one of them.

Ethan would also handle the money, establishing accounts with the banks and hauling the money back and forth. He carried the cash in a blue duffel bag, and because it contained so much money, he also carried a gun.

Derik continued to run the rest of the office, herding the patients, keeping an eye on employees, making fun of Ethan. His dislike of the new guy deepened as Ethan spent hours holed up in Chris’s office.

One of the first things Chris had Ethan do was create a new limited liability company under Ethan’s name and address so no one would be able to connect it to South Florida Pain. He had a lawyer write up a letter that made it clear that Chris was the real owner, but the state records would show that Ethan was the registered agent.

As soon as one problem was solved, another would emerge. They’d been in the Cypress Creek Executive Court only a couple of months when the office park people said they wanted the pain clinic out in December. Despite Derik’s efforts to keep order in the parking lots, there were too many complaints from the other tenants, and now the once-sleepy office court was a target for journalists and law enforcement.

The new office complex was just a mile east on Cypress Creek Road, closer to I-95. The tenants of the new location were more industrial, less customer-based, and Chris hoped that meant they’d be less concerned about the activities at the pain clinic. This time, they spent more time and money on the renovation—stone counters, carpeting, artwork. Chris hired a contractor, but they needed the job done quickly, so after the clinic was closed for the night, Derik would go to the new location and work until midnight.

Chris came up with a new name for the clinic, nothing that he pondered over too deeply. Ethan registered it on the secretary of state website, and when they moved in December to another new location, they started using the new name. They didn’t want or need eye-catching signs at the new location. Their customers would find them. So their new name was listed only in small print in a column, along with all the other tenants, on the red directory sign at the office park entrance:

A
MERICAN
P
AIN.

In November 2008, the Florida Department of Health finally issued administrative complaints from its inspection of the Oakland Park Boulevard clinic the previous summer. Derik and Chris remembered the little health inspector with his bad grammar, pleased with himself as he stuffed the photocopied prescriptions into an envelope.

In writing, some of the violations seemed laughably minor:

The investigator reported the following deficiencies:

a. No generic drug sign was displayed.

b. Several prescriptions were dispensed to patients but contained no patient names or addresses.

c. Several prescriptions were dispensed to patients but were not initialed and dated.

d. Several prescriptions were signed by Respondent even though they were not for specific patients.

Other charges seemed more serious, including claims that doctors had not documented any evaluations of patients before prescribing large amounts of narcotics.

But the thing was, the complaints were directed at Dr. Rachael Gittens and Dr. Enock Joseph, neither of whom even worked at the pain clinic anymore. Dr. Gittens had left to open her own clinic. And they hadn’t seen Dr. Joseph since the DEA inspection, when the Haitian gynecologist had given up his DEA registration, rendering him useless to the clinic. So it was no great concern to Chris or Derik when they read that the physicians might be facing “restriction of practice, imposition of an administrative fine, issuance of a reprimand, placement of the Respondent on probation, corrective action, refund of fees billed or collected, remedial education and/or any other relief that the Board deems appropriate.”

And that was it. Neither the DEA nor the health department made a move to shut down the clinic, and this fact bolstered Chris’s confidence. The DEA and the state health department were targeting the
doctors
, not the people who owned or ran the clinic. Chris and Derik were off the hook. They could always get more doctors.

And over the next few weeks, Chris did hire two more full-time doctors—Dr. Jacobo Dreszer and Dr. Cynthia Cadet—to replace the doctors lost after the DEA inspection. Dr. Dreszer was a hot-tempered Jewish guy originally from Colombia. He’d been an anesthesiologist for thirty years, which made Chris happy because it looked good to have a guy who actually had some expertise in pain management. Dr. Dreszer had a son who was also a doctor, and the younger Dreszer was also set to start work at the clinic in a couple of months. Roni Dreszer had received his MD from Drexel University four years earlier, but he’d been booted from his surgical residency at a hospital in Philadelphia. His problems had a lot to do with his love of gambling and Percocets. He owed $300,000 in student loans and approximately $30,000 to credit card companies. His first job as a full-fledged doctor would be working for Chris George’s pain clinic. Derik found this humorous, along with the fact that Roni Dreszer’s mother had driven him to and from his job interview.

Derik liked all the new docs, but Dr. Cynthia Cadet was the one he connected with the most. She was a small and slender black woman with fine features. She’d attended Cornell University on an ROTC scholarship and had been a major in the Air Force. She was kind and compassionate with the patients, listening to their fears and concerns, as opposed to some of the doctors who barely spoke to them. She never seemed to be in a hurry. Even if it was late at night and everyone else wanted to go home, she’d get absorbed in conversations with patients. Derik had to knock on her door a couple of times to ask her to hurry up. But everyone—patients and Chris alike—loved the fact that she generally wrote big scrips. Even on the first visit.

Derik didn’t get to know Cadet very well until one evening when he was in the little break room in the rear of the clinic. He’d found some tortillas left over from lunch, and he was conducting a little experiment, covering them with sour cream and tossing them to the ceiling to see how long they would stick up there. Cadet came through the room on her way home, then stopped and stared at Derik like he was crazy.

She said: What are you doing?

Derik said: I’m sticking tortillas to the ceiling.

She said: Oh!

He said: You want to try?

She gave it a shot, and after that, Derik and Cadet were friends. He bought Christmas gifts for her two kids. He walked her to her car at night. She seemed like one of the happiest people Derik had ever met, out of her element among the junkies and schemers of American Pain. But she seemed unaware that she didn’t fit in with the other doctors, who appeared to be more clued in to what they were doing, bickering with each other about patient loads. Floating into the office each morning, tottering slightly on her high heels like a girl, singing out, “Hi, Derik!” as she passed his office, a big smile on her face.

They didn’t bring their homeless security guard along to the new location. The guard was nearly useless at preventing problems in the parking lot. He still couldn’t even operate the walkie-talkie. But Derik didn’t want to fire him outright, so he instead posted the vagrant employee at the old location and told him to hand out flyers directing patients to the new place up the road. The homeless man liked being in on the real action of the clinic, and he looked crushed when Derik gave him his new duties.

Before long, patients began approaching Derik, irritated, asking why his guy was charging for directions from the old location to the new location. Five bucks a pop.

Derik went down to the old location and spied on his employee from an adjacent parking lot. The vagrant man stood near the entrance of the old clinic, waving down patients as they pulled in looking for American Pain. He did his crazed little dance steps, gesticulating with his skinny arms, exchanging flyers for bills through the car window, like a corner boy with a bag of drugs.