AMERICAN PAIN (36 page)

HAGGERTY: Oh well. (laughs) I don’t think it’s going to affect my life very much.

Turner disagreed.

Footnotes

* In 2009, Florida doctors, pharmacists, and medical centers would distribute 523 million oxyco-done pills. The next highest state was Pennsylvania with 267 million.

* Dr. Joseph eventually lost his state medical license also. The state said he could potentially recover his license if he paid $15,000 in fines and costs, performed one hundred hours of community service, took some classes, and presented a one-hour seminar on “Falling Prey to Being Employed by Pill Mills.” Dr. Joseph did none of the above and let his license lapse permanently.

8

The big block-like building was an awesome sight, gleaming white against the Florida sky. At three stories, it was taller and wider than anything else on its stretch of Dixie Highway, and its windowless walls gave it an impregnable, fortress-like look. Chris George and Derik Nolan wanted it bad. They wanted out of shopping plazas and industrial parks, away from restaurants and angry neighbors. They wanted a stronghold.

Chris and Derik checked out the new building the day after the
Palm Beach Post
ran its November 20, 2009, story about the train wreck that killed two patients. It was time to get out of Broward County, which was overrun with clinics. The huge Boca Raton office, where they’d been for almost a year, was feeling cramped. They topped five hundred patients on many days. As had happened everywhere else, the police were stepping up their harassment of patients, and the complaints from neighbors were getting more strident. Chris wanted to find a place with enough of a buffer that the patients wouldn’t be constantly disrupting other businesses and residents. He also thought about changing the name again, moving away from calling it a pain clinic. He talked to the property manager for the Boca location about whether he should rename the clinic, using words like “family-oriented” or “general practice.” Something innocuous, bland, like “Parkridge Medical Center.” Chris had tabled the name change, but he kept looking for a new location.

The bank building was in Lake Worth, just up the road from Boca Raton. The area was populated by antiques shops and high-end home furnishings outlets frequented by the society types just north on Palm Beach. The neighborhood was perfect, all “Mexicans and little houses,” as Chris told a friend on the phone. In other words, people who didn’t have much pull with the police and wouldn’t complain about the clinic.

They talked an employee into letting them inside to look around. The first floor had space for everything they needed to service five-hundred-plus patients a day. There was a second floor for administrative offices and a gangway where security could keep an eye on the waiting room, and an open third floor. Chris and Derik talked it over and decided they would turn the third-floor space into the mother of all man caves. A sweeping wet bar, a giant projection system, and, Derik’s big idea, a mixed-martial-arts octagon cage where they could stage private fights. They called the third floor the Fantasy Factory.

But before they could implement any of their plans, the owner had to be convinced to lease the building to Chris, a twenty-nine-year-old felon, for the purposes of opening a pain clinic, at a time when pain clinics were all over the news. Chris researched the owner, who lived in a waterfront estate on Palm Beach.

Chris called the real estate agent, who seemed perplexed by his youthful voice.

“How many square feet are you looking for?” she asked.

“It’ll be for the whole thing,” Chris said.

She sounded skeptical. Surely he was looking to lease only the small outbuilding where drive-through customers were handled, she suggested. What did he need all that space for?

“Uh . . . medical,” Chris said.

“What kind of medical?”

“A doctor’s office.”

“OK,” she said. “Do you have a clinic?”

Chris didn’t want to scare her off with the word “clinic.”

“Well, I mean . . . just a doctor’s office,” he said.

He haggled with the agent, doing some quick math out loud regarding square footage and lease prices. He showed her he’d done his homework by saying he knew that the owner owed $2 million on the building. She brought the conversation back to Chris’s plans for the property. Chris said he had five doctors, twenty-five employees total, and served four hundred patients a day.

“What kind of practice?” she asked again.

“Oh, we do rehabilitation. We do, um, detox. We do pain management.” Chris didn’t want to end on those last two words, so he began making up stuff. “We do internal medicine. Um, I have all kinds of doctors. We do laser hair removal.”

They talked details, but the agent wondered aloud what kind of doctor’s office saw four hundred patients a day.

“That’s a pretty big business,” she said.

Chris changed the subject, offering her $280,000 a year for the building. She said she’d take it to the owner, and asked for the business’s name.

“Uh. American Pain,” Chris said, hoping she wouldn’t recognize it.

The agent didn’t pause.

“OK, and you’ve been in business longer than two years, correct? How old are you? You sound young.”

“I’m twenty-nine,” Chris said.

“OK, that’s good,” the agent said. “An aggressive twenty-nine-year-old. I’m impressed.”

“My tax return from last year, I made over a million dollars,” Chris said.

This statement was both true and misleading.
This
year, Chris would owe about twice that amount just in federal income taxes. In total, his 2009 take-home would be closer to $9 million, more than the CEOs of Time Warner Cable, Target, and Pfizer.

When Chris mentioned his income, the agent perked up.

“That’s wonderful,” she said. “And are you a doctor yourself or are you just running the business?”

“No, I’m not a doctor,” he said. “I hire doctors to work for me. I just started a few years ago and kept expanding.”

“Wow!” she exclaimed.

And just like that, she was on board. Maybe she knew about American Pain and oxycodone, maybe she didn’t. But she was no longer skeptical. She would take Chris’s offer straight to the building’s owner.

The owner met with Chris and Derik at the building. Derik and Chris dressed in expensive suits, covered up the tattoos, tried to speak like educated professionals. Derik could tell from the way the owner spoke and carried himself that he was somebody. He seemed to have reservations at first, said he’d read something about pain clinics. They explained the business to him, leaving out the fact that nearly all their patients were junkies.

The owner barely used the building. He stored paintings in it. They were scattered all over the interior, but the collection was soon going to museums in New York and London. Derik thought this was interesting, especially when the owner said he had one painting locked away in the bank vault that was worth more than $1 million. The owner gave Chris and Derik copies of a book he’d commissioned someone to write about this genre of painting. Derik dealt every day with scumbags who thought of him as a high-level drug dealer. This was a nice contrast. It was a coffee-table book, so Derik took it home and put it on his coffee table, though he never actually opened it.

The owner wanted to see the Boca Raton operation before signing off on the lease. He did a walk-through one day, toured the packed waiting room and the back offices. By that time, Derik and Chris had things running pretty smoothly. The owner seemed impressed and agreed to lease his building to American Pain.

It was a good feeling to have a connection to a businessman of this caliber. Derik believed it meant that he was able to do business with a more legitimate crowd, operate on both sides of the street. Proof that he’d become truly successful despite everything.

On the other hand, Derik knew that the building’s owner probably didn’t have too many people beating down his door to pay more than $23,000 a month on a multi-year lease. And when Chris heard those terms, he hadn’t blinked an eye.

At the same time Chris and Derik were cultivating the new building’s owner, they were also fighting off other pain clinics.

Palm Beach Pain was a clinic run by some guys from North Miami who had several small operations. They had set up shop one mile north of American Pain, on the same side of Federal Highway. It was closer to I-95, which meant it was no doubt siphoning off some patients who were looking for American Pain. Even more provoking, Palm Beach Pain had hired a guy to stand in the middle of Federal Highway and wave a sign, diverting traffic to their clinic.

Derik had sent a staffer to scope out the clinic, but the Palm Beach Pain guys identified him as an American Pain employee and kicked him out. Next, Derik chased off a guy who was handing out Palm Beach Pain cards in the American Pain parking lot. Derik went to the clinic and threw a handful of the cards in the manager’s face.

Derik said: Keep it up, and
you’re
gonna need pain management.

Derik was proud of the line, thought it was witty, and repeated it to Chris on the phone later in the day. It must have made an impression on the Palm Beach Pain guy too, because he just sat there without saying anything, and then came running out to apologize as Derik was pulling out of his lot.

So Derik was
really
pissed when, a couple hours later, he caught another guy handing out Palm Beach Pain cards one block away from American Pain. Now it was on. Derik stationed an employee in the offending clinic’s parking lot, handing out free visits to any patient who switched to American Pain. He called MRI companies and pressured them not to take Palm Beach Pain patients. When he heard about an American Pain patient who had been lured to Palm Beach Pain, Derik promptly called the cops and earnestly explained that he’d found a doctor shopper.

It didn’t matter to Derik and Chris that Palm Beach Pain pulled in maybe a couple dozen patients a day, while American Pain was servicing hundreds. The guys from Palm Beach Pain were upstarts and needed to be crushed. If for no other reason than that’s what the top dog does.

In late 2009, a patient came in and asked Derik when the new Jacksonville office would be open. Chris and Derik were looking at new locations up north, but it wasn’t something that a patient would know about yet, so Derik said he didn’t know what the guy was talking about.