AMERICAN PAIN (30 page)

He said: I’m going to fix that bitch once and for all.

He stalked over to her office and told Cadet that she needed to get her numbers back up.

Derik smoothed things over with Cadet. Derik liked Cadet, and she liked him. She laughed at his antics, called him the Original Gangster. She was no longer the happiest person he knew, however. Her marriage was breaking up, and she seemed like a lost woman for a while. The divorce became final in October 2009. She needed help with practical matters. Derik helped her find a new car similar to his, a Mercedes CLS 550, arranging the test drive with the salesman at Mercedes-Benz of Delray and going with her. When she wanted to buy a beach house, Derik made some calls to some real estate people he knew from his construction years. He printed out some good deals, set up appointments for her to see them.

So Derik didn’t like it when Chris yelled at Cadet. But at this point, Chris and Derik were clashing too. They almost had a fistfight one day because Chris asked Derik to give a deposition in Chris’s lawsuit against Jeff. Derik wasn’t going to put his name on any legal documents. At times, Derik considered quitting American Pain and opening his own clinic. He talked about it with Cadet, who said she would come with him. In fall 2009, he even put down a deposit on an office in Lake Park. But every time he was poised to jump, something stopped him. He and Chris would make amends, and Chris would boost his pay. Besides, Derik had been a key player in the creation of American Pain. He’d helped build a huge operation, and he didn’t want to start over.

No matter what they called the clinic or where they moved, Carmel Cafiero from Channel 7 would eventually show up. Her cameraman had a knack for getting grainy, ominous B-roll footage of the clinic exterior. Customers counting hundred-dollar bills before heading inside. Or sitting in their cars wielding hypodermic needles. Security guards lumbering thuggishly through the parking lot in their black T-shirts, spitting slow-motion into the grass.

When cameras showed up, Chris and Derik snuck out the back door. They didn’t need a repeat of the Cafiero report the previous fall, which had been a disaster. Wholesalers had dropped them, forcing Chris to change the clinic name and hire Ethan as his front man. Chris and Derik couldn’t afford to be directly linked with American Pain.

Still, Derik believed it was his right to know who was in his parking lot, to ask questions about what they were doing, so he occasionally violated his policy of making himself scarce when a camera was around. Sometimes it was hard to tell who was a reporter and who was just nosy. There were the amateurs, unaffiliated with any news organization, who would park outside the clinic and shoot video on their cell phones, including one woman who wore a wig and a hat so she wouldn’t be recognized. Sometimes they’d even come inside and snap some pictures or shoot a short video of the crowded waiting room.

One day, Derik’s crew chased off a woman who was cruising through the American Pain parking lot, shooting video on her cell phone. Turned out, she was posting the videos on her YouTube account, narrating her adventures as she went: “And now we got two security guys that are gonna come and tell me to get off their lot, maybe, I don’t know.” She shot video of Tennessee and Kentucky license plates, tsk-tsking until someone tapped on her window. “Get away from my car. Get
away
from my car!”

Later, Cafiero interviewed the woman for a segment on pain clinics, identifying her as a “citizen journalist.” The citizen journalist looked delighted to be in the studio, a big smile on her face, and told a story about being waylaid by American Pain guards. “One has a knife and the other has a set of keys in between his knuckles. He goes . . .” scowling and deepening her voice, “‘You don’t want any of this! You better come with us.’ ”

One day at the clinic, some staffers who hadn’t seen Carmel Cafiero’s reports asked Derik about them. Derik found one of the Cafiero videos online and played it for the staff on his laptop. Aruta and Cadet were there too. Aruta was aghast when he saw a patient shooting up in the clinic parking lot.

Aruta discussed it with Cadet afterward. They both said they hoped the pharmaceutical companies would come up with a narcotic painkiller that couldn’t be abused. But Aruta believed that drug diversion was a problem for the police. The patients were the ones who were violating the instructions printed right there on the pill bottle. How could
he
be held responsible? He and Cadet agreed: They had no control over what patients did with medication after they left the clinic.

And, in a way, the news coverage and the proliferation of pain clinics made everyone feel more secure. The clinics were everywhere, ads blanketing page after page of the
New Times
, billboards up and down I-95. They were operating out in the open, safely aboveboard.

Another time, Derik was walking to the convenience store across Federal Highway and saw a blonde woman and two men videoing the clinic. Derik approached, and all three strangers jumped into a maroon sedan and peeled out of the parking lot. Derik was suspicious, and curious.

Chris was leaving the office right at that moment, so Derik flagged him down and they followed the blonde woman’s car in a black Range Rover. Chris called 911 and explained what was happening, and the dispatcher told him to stop following the people. Chris kept going. The car stopped at a gas station, and Derik got out, and the threesome took off again. Finally, headed south on I-95, the car pulled over to the side of the road. Cops showed up and told Chris and Derik that the people in the car were media and to leave them alone.

And that was that, until a few months later, when the whole scene played out on a forty-seven-minute documentary called
The OxyContin Express
, which Derik and Chris watched on
hulu.com
. The blonde woman was a documentary filmmaker named Mariana van Zeller. For the first fifteen minutes of her story, she shadowed a pill addict whose brother had died of an overdose. The guy, who looked familiar to Derik, let the camera follow him as he was rejected from a pain clinic and finally bought pills from a street dealer. He even let her shoot him crushing and smoking a pill off a scrap of tinfoil. Then the focus shifted to American Pain. The blonde woman shot video of the old South Florida Pain location on Oakland Park Boulevard. It had been closed down for almost a year, but the big red-lettered signs were still up and old customers still came by. Derik kept a guy parked out front to direct patients to the Boca location. “So we came here to check out this pain clinic because a lot of the law enforcement and doctors told us that a lot of the prescriptions are actually coming from this one pain clinic,” van Zeller said to the camera. She got a map from Derik’s guy, who sat in a tan Ford Ranger, a towel draped over his window to block the blazing South Florida sun. She followed the map to the clinic in Boca Raton, and that’s when Derik spotted her. As Derik and Chris followed her, van Zeller drove and narrated at the same time, glancing nervously at the rear-view mirror: “So we were filming a pain clinic from across the street and essentially had the camera out for five minutes and this huge black SUV comes up with a guy all tattooed, a huge guy, and starts asking us, ‘What the fuck are you doing? What are you filming?’ ”

Derik didn’t remember being quite that aggressive. He thought he actually smiled, raised his hands in peace. And he considered himself neither “huge” nor covered in tattoos. But saying a 210-pound man with some ink had approached her wouldn’t have made for good TV. Or won a Peabody Award, like
The OxyContin Express
did that year.

Still, it could have been worse. At least the blonde woman hadn’t named him or Chris and had blurred out their faces on the video.

The Boca Raton police kept an eye on the clinic and regularly pulled over patients leaving the parking lot, but they were friendly enough to Chris and Derik and didn’t give them a hard time. They came to the clinic asking for information on patients they suspected of doctor shopping. Derik helped the cops when he could, trying to stay on their good side.

Still, sometimes, Derik would look around at the hundreds of drug seekers in the waiting room and feel a stab of panic. There was no way they’d get away with this.

Derik would say: Chris, we gotta calm it down.

Chris would say: Nah, we’re good, we’ll be OK. Until they change the laws, we’re legit.

Other times, it would be Derik telling Chris there was nothing to worry about. Sometimes they would agree they needed to be more cautious, but then over the course of the conversation, they’d talk themselves out of their own fears. Caution wasn’t natural to either of them.

In October, Derik flew to Italy for a friend’s wedding. While he was there, he got a phone call from his cousin. A former American Pain employee had been arrested on cocaine and gun charges, a guy named Pedro Martinez who had worked for Derik on and off for years, ever since Derik’s plumbing days. Derik had fired him from American Pain after finding out he was selling pills.

When Derik got back home, he went to Pedro’s house. Pedro was acting odd. He turned the TV volume up high and whispered as he told Derik what happened after his arrest. Pedro said he’d been held at a police station in Royal Palm Beach until another cop showed up, a deputy sheriff from Palm Beach County. Derik knew the deputy’s name. He knew him well, actually. The cop had come to American Pain a number of times while investigating patients for doctor shopping. Derik had always been cooperative and handed over patients’ medical records. The deputy was a friendly guy, always asking questions about the clinic.

Pedro said the deputy sheriff was some kind of DEA task force member, and he’d shown Pedro a big board with Chris and Derik’s photos on it, along with half the American Pain staff. Like something out of a gangster movie, Pedro said, all these mugshots and arrows pointing from one guy to the next. Magnets with titles on them. Derik’s title was “Enforcer.”

Derik was surprised, and a little hurt, that the cop had been just posing as his buddy, even asking him to go out for a beer.

Pedro said: Well, these guys got you all marked up like you’re going down like some big organized crime ring.

Derik said: Man, these guys are taking this shit a little too seriously.

Pedro’s story didn’t seem quite real, but it lingered in the back of Derik’s mind, the Mafia-movie poster with his mugshot on it, and the title: Enforcer. Was the DEA really investigating American Pain? The lawyers had told them they were in the clear, that the doctors were ultimately responsible for what they prescribed. Pedro’s story was bullshit. Had to be.

Footnotes

* This is based on Dianna’s court testimony. She declined to be interviewed, and Chris did not discuss his relationship with her in detail.

* This is according to interviews with Derik and court testimony. The only prescriptions actually found in Derik’s patient file were from Dr. Jacobo Dreszer.