AMERICAN PAIN (37 page)

The office in Jacksonville, the patient said. The one you called me about.

Derik chalked it up to junkie confusion, until another patient asked him about the Jacksonville office. And another. Everyone saying Derik had called them and said they were opening a new American Pain in Jacksonville.

Derik and Chris started looking into it. They put out word with the staff that they wanted to talk to any patient who mentioned anything about Jacksonville or getting a call from Derik. After quizzing a number of those patients, it turned out that someone posing as Derik had been calling them, telling them about a new branch of American Pain that would be opening in Jacksonville in the middle of December.

Unlike Palm Beach Pain, this was a serious threat. By car, Jacksonville was four hours closer to Kentucky than Boca Raton. If patients believed they could get American Pain service and quantities that much closer to home, they’d go there in droves. Chris and Derik wondered how the new clinic had gotten their patients’ names and phone numbers.

They looked up the clinic’s state corporate records, and that’s when things clicked. They found a connection between the Jacksonville clinic and the MRI service Derik had made a deal with way back at the Oakland Park Boulevard location, the company that had promised (and delivered) twenty-four-hour turnaround on MRI reports. American Pain had made the MRI company a lot of money, and now they believed the company was stabbing them in the back by partnering with a new competing clinic.

Derik got the impostor clinic’s phone number from a patient and called it. Someone picked up.

Derik: Can I speak to Derik?

The guy: Hold on.

Pause.

Another guy: Yeah, this is Derik.

Derik: Derik Nolan?

“Derik”: Uh huh.

Derik, enjoying himself: That’s funny, because I’m Derik Nolan too, asshole.

He caught the guy by surprise for a second, but the guy recovered, barked back at Derik, saying they were going to take the top spot away from American Pain. Guy had a lot of balls.

Derik told Chris: Let me take care of Jacksonville.

The place was set to open December 14. Derik told Chris to give him $5,000, and he’d make sure it didn’t stay open long. He’d burn the place down. Literally.

Chris overruled Derik. Go up to Jacksonville, he told Derik, but don’t destroy the place. Just check it out, see if someone from the MRI company is there, see how many patients they have. If the new clinic really stole American Pain’s patient list, Chris would have grounds to sue.

Derik’s first mistake was taking his little brother with him to Jacksonville. His brother was nineteen, a good kid, not someone who should have been involved in this kind of thing. They’d driven up to case the clinic early one morning in mid-December, 2009. The place was called Jacksonville Pain and Urgent Care. It was in a decent location, a thoroughfare one mile off Interstate 10, though Derik knew from experience that the parking lot was too small and the neighbors in the oak-lined residential streets behind the red-brick building would probably cause trouble once the zombies descended.

Derik saw a guy from the MRI company standing outside the clinic, bold as he could be. Derik called Chris and told him about it. Chris said he was coming up to Jacksonville. He wanted to talk to the owner, give him one last chance to cut a deal before he filed a lawsuit. Derik knew Chris’s temper, knew a face-to-face was a mistake.

Derik wanted to get a peek inside the place but knew they might recognize him. So at 11:00 a.m., Derik’s brother filled out some new-patient paperwork and paid $250. But when his brother returned a couple hours later for his doctor’s appointment, the owner, a guy named Zachary Rose, told him he was too young to be a patient. Derik’s brother went back outside, got $400 from Derik, came back in and offered it to Rose. But Rose was firm. His doctor wouldn’t see a nineteen-year-old.

Derik met Chris and his buddy, and they headed into the clinic. Derik was last inside the door, and they were ready for them. A guy stepped inside right after Derik, and he had a gun. Derik told the guy that if he pointed it at him, he’d better be ready to empty the clip. Rose came out, and Chris was yelling and cursing, saying he wanted 50 percent of the clinic’s take or he’d burn the place down. Rose refused, and
another
one of his guys pulled a gun on Chris.

Then the cops showed up. They separated everyone for questioning and searched the American Pain crew’s cars.

The cops seemed to know a lot about American Pain, kept dropping hints that made Derik wonder why they knew so much about a pain clinic located three hundred miles away, like when they called Chris the $40 million man, which was a pretty accurate accounting of American Pain’s revenue. They also knew Derik’s name and what kind of car he drove, even before Derik told them. They asked him whether he’d gone to college, and when he said he’d taken only a few college courses, they made a big deal about that, saying that he couldn’t possibly be running a legitimate doctor’s office with so little college. They said he was nothing but a thug, driving three hundred miles to extort local businesses.

They arrested the four guys from American Pain on charges of extortion by verbal threat and everybody spent the night in jail. The next morning, a squad of defense lawyers appeared in the courtroom. Derik was surprised to hear that Jeff George, who hadn’t been speaking to Chris for a year and a half, had called his attorney, who’d sent the legal reinforcements. High-powered attorneys showing up for an initial court appearance was unusual, something usually reserved for mobsters or the sons of tycoons, and it reinforced Derik’s feeling that he’d be able to buy himself out of this mess too.

Dianna drove up, bringing a change of clothing for everybody. She bailed them out and got everybody rooms at the Hyatt Regency on the riverfront. They all went out that night for a nice steak dinner.

The arrests happened on a Monday. The following Saturday, December 19, 2009, everyone went to the clinic’s Christmas party at the Breakers resort. Derik wore a $4,000 outfit: a two-toned black custom-tailored suit from Neiman Marcus, black shirt, black shoes—all black, except for the bloodred pocket square and silver skull-shaped cuff links with glittering crimson rubies set in the skull eyes. Underneath his pants, he wore an itchy black ankle monitor, courtesy of the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office. Chris had a matching ankle bracelet.

The Breakers was a 140-acre oceanfront resort in Palm Beach. It looked kind of like a mega-version of the Italianate-Floridian dream homes Derik and Chris had been building for Majestic Homes two years earlier: soaring tawny-hued towers, floodlit palm trees, ornate fountains, vaulted ceilings.

Ethan Baumhoff had arranged the party, and it was a more highbrow affair than Derik’s strip-club holiday celebration the year before. If Chris had put
Derik
in charge of the party, he would have just chartered a yacht, hired a herd of hookers, and bought a pile of cocaine.

But Ethan was always trying to legitimize the clinic, with his dress code and policy manuals and “Casual Fridays.” So he put his wife in charge of the party planning, and she hired a photographer, and everyone had their pictures taken in front of a snowflake backdrop. Like it was the prom or something, Derik thought. There was a disc jockey, but no one danced, except Derik. The party had a Vegas theme, and Ethan’s wife had also hired a gaming company to set up blackjack and roulette tables, which could have been fun, but Derik lost interest when he found out you couldn’t win real money. They gave everybody a stack of fake dollar bills to play with. Instead of George Washington’s stern-mouthed mug, the bills bore a picture of a grinning Chris George.

They had decided to give employee awards at the Christmas party, including a Doctor of the Year award. The selection process didn’t involve secret ballots or patient surveys or anything. Ethan had just told Derik about it one day, and they’d both snickered a bit as they considered the options. Politically, they couldn’t go with the elder Dr. Dreszer or Dr. Aruta, since they hated each other, which more or less ruled out the younger Dreszer too. That left Dr. Boshers and Dr. Cadet, and the choice was obvious. Dr. Cadet was consistently nice to everyone, and no one felt threatened by her. She was the one they had new doctors shadow. Most importantly, she was the patient favorite, for her caring manner and enormous scrips.

So Ethan had ordered a small gold-bordered wooden plaque that read:

R
ECOGNIZING
2009
D
OCTOR OF THE
Y
EAR
D
R.
C
YNTHIA
C
ADET
A
MERICAN
P
AIN

Derik gave a cornball speech, thanking everybody for their hard work. Dr. Cadet seemed touched by the honor. Derik couldn’t believe she was dumb enough to take the award seriously. But it was always hard to tell with Dr. Cadet. Did she believe she was helping people in pain? Or did she get that it was just a money-for-drugs operation? Sometimes, she seemed to understand that things weren’t quite right at American Pain. Like when she asked Derik if she was going to get in trouble for her patient load, which was topping seventy a day. Or was she somewhere in the middle, justifying her actions, grasping at every nugget of favorable evidence, like the doctor-of-the-year plaque, to convince herself that she was still practicing medicine? Derik wasn’t sure, and he wasn’t going to question her about it. People were entitled to their delusions.

The ankle monitor Derik wore after his Jacksonville arrest was the size of a BlackBerry phone. It was strapped to his ankle, and he was always aware of its presence, which was maybe the point of the thing. It had to be charged like a cell phone, so he would plug it in at night before he went to bed. But he’d thrash around in his sleep, and it sometimes detached from the charger cord, and in the morning, the battery would be low. So then he’d take the charger cord to the clinic and charge it there, sitting at his desk, tethered to the wall outlet like a dog on a leash. Derik was told that his movements weren’t actually being monitored, that the device was designed to alert the authorities only if he got close to the pain clinic in Jacksonville. Which was fine. Derik had no desire to go back there.

After Jacksonville, Chris and Derik worried that the police had put listening devices in their cars while they were impounded. They remembered how the police there seemed to know a lot about them, and they wondered if Pedro Martinez had been telling the truth back in October and there really was a big DEA chart somewhere with all of their names and pictures on it. They worried their phones were tapped and their offices bugged. One day, Derik came into the office to find the private investigator who had tried to convince Chris to let him launder his money. Ethan was with him. They had a machine and they said they were using it to sweep the office for bugs. Ethan was enamored with the guy, maybe because he used to be a DEA agent and then had gone bad, just like ex-cop Ethan had done. When the guy left, Chris told Ethan to stop hanging around with him.

Derik’s lawyer on the Jacksonville case was making him nervous. The lawyer said if the feds came after them, they would go after the weakest people first, probably the people who were most connected to society and felt they had the most to lose. Derik figured this meant Ethan and the doctors. The feds would scare the weak ones with the threat of long sentences, hard time, hammer them until they agreed to testify. The lawyer said it would be a racketeering case, because that would be the only way to hold Chris and Derik responsible for what the doctors were or were not doing behind their office doors. RICO was probably their best option, unless they could get Chris and Derik on some other charges, like selling pills out the back door, or the Jacksonville extortion charges.