AMERICAN PAIN (39 page)

They opened on Dixie Highway on February 1, 2010. Chris continued to pay the lease on the Boca location even though it was empty. He figured if he stopped renting the space, Palm Beach Pain would swoop in there and try to lure patients who were looking for American Pain.

Similar to the previous moves, business was slower for a day or so at the new location, but by the end of the week, Dixie Highway was jammed two blocks south, a line of patients trying to pull into the lot, right-turn blinkers on. Derik hired a team of traffic handlers to flag patients into specific parking spots, like concert venues did. Security guards roved the two-anda-half-acre lot on golf carts. Derik stationed guards on the roof to keep an eye on the perimeter of the building, looking for cops and media vehicles.

The parking lot exited onto a one-way alley, which then took the traffic through a residential neighborhood. Derik didn’t want patients nodding off and running over people. He pondered the problem, then simply took down the one-way signs and had the traffic handlers direct people the other way.

Inside, they taped arrows on the floor to direct the foot traffic. The building worked beautifully, except for the bathroom problem. The single toilet on the first floor was laughably inadequate, especially since they were trying to process dozens of urine tests at any moment. After a week or two, Derik developed a system in which the employees took five or ten patients at a time to the bathrooms on the second floor to produce their urine samples.

Bigger place; same deal. A patient tried to sneak in a bottle full of urine for his drug test, swearing it was Mountain Dew. Derik told him to prove it. The guy grimaced and gulped, and Derik, impressed, moved him to the front of the line. Another patient made the mistake of calling Dianna a bitch. Derik slammed the guy into a wall, grabbed his neck, and started to squeeze. The guy went limp and collapsed, and Derik’s 6'4" Finnish bouncer, who looked like the Russian boxer from
Rocky IV
, dragged him out. A couple of patients fished out on the floor, just collapsed and started convulsing, and the staff called 911. The woman who owned the junk store on the other side of Dixie Highway, initially friendly, took to screaming across the street at Derik’s security guys. Patients were parking in her small lot, using her restroom to shoot up. Sometimes patients would go into the store and just stand there, glazed over, staring blankly at the same knickknack for five minutes. Once, a middle-aged woman nodded off in her minivan and dropped a lit cigarette in her lap. It burned through her shorts but she didn’t wake up until the shopkeeper pounded on her window. Derik and his guys tried to be responsive, zipping across Dixie Highway on a golf cart to talk to her. The shopkeeper told Derik about the problems, showed him blood spurts on the wall of her bathroom. Derik said his guys would take care of things, but the zombies didn’t listen, and the shopkeeper started calling tow trucks, as well as the cops.

A doctor at another big pain clinic quit, which sent a flood of new patients to American Pain. That was their biggest day yet. They serviced more than seven hundred patients that day, around $400,000 going into the trash cans and back to the money room.

Derik and Chris liked to climb up to the rooftop to shoot Derik’s slingshot at unlucky cars and survey their empire, the flat Florida landscape to the west, the oceanfront condominium towers of Palm Beach to the east. From there, the American Pain employee parking lot glittered in the sun, looking like an exotic car dealership—Maseratis and Porsches and Range Rovers.

On the roof one day, Derik looked across the street and saw a gray sedan parked in the alley next to the junk shop. Two people were in the front seat, a broad-shouldered man and a tall woman with blonde hair. They wore regular street clothes, but Derik could tell they were cops.

Derik said to Chris: Look at those two idiots.

Derik and Chris laughed at the pair, thought about pegging them with the slingshot. They wondered why the cops were even bothering to do surveillance. What were they going to gain? Everyone knew what was going on at American Pain. It was like staking out a Walgreens. They’d been operating out in the open for two years and one month. The cops could stare across the street through binoculars all they wanted, but until Florida changed its laws, American Pain was legal.

One day in February, Chris called Derik and said he could cut off the ankle monitor, he was off the hook on the Jacksonville charges.

Derik said: Huh?

Chris started laughing. The people from the Jacksonville clinic were backing off, not pressing charges. They hadn’t shown up for depositions.

Derik was suspicious. Chris would think it was a clever practical joke to trick Derik into cutting off the ankle bracelet, get him in trouble. Derik got off the phone and called his lawyer but didn’t reach him. Word got around the clinic, and pretty soon, everyone was urging Derik to cut it off, laughing at his reluctance.

Eventually, Derik got in contact with his lawyer, who told him it was true. He could lose the monitor.

At the end of the day, after the patients were gone, everyone gathered around like Derik was blowing the candles out at an office birthday party. Derik stood in the middle of the work area of the clinic and cut the itchy strap off his leg. He threw it in a box to be mailed back to the bail/bond office. He was free.

At seven in the morning on Wednesday, March 3, 2010, Derik was in the shower in the fancy new house he’d leased two weeks earlier in Black Diamond Estates. His cell phone was already blowing up, ringing again and again. Derik had gotten used to this. There was always some kind of crisis at the clinic. But this was too much. He let it ring until his girlfriend said it was going to wake her little girl.

Derik told her to put the phone on vibrate. He dressed in a suit, the phone still jittering. He finally looked at it. Something like ten missed calls from Chris. Derik called him back.

Chris: What the
fuck
! The FBI is everywhere!

Later, Derik would talk himself down, assure himself that everything would be OK, but he knew right then that the ride was over.

P
ART
III

9

FBI Special Agent Jennifer Turner wanted the takedown of American Pain to be an awesome display of federal power.

According to her plan, more than four hundred officers and agents would hit American Pain and six other locations and fan out across South Florida to track down and interrogate approximately fifty associates of Chris George. The goal of the onslaught would be the immediate shutdown of the nation’s largest pain clinic, plus two others, and the seizure of any documents, drugs, and money inside. They also planned to seize Chris George’s assets, including multiple cars, houses, and a boat, plus nine bank accounts associated with George or his businesses. Turner hoped this show of force would convince some targets to cooperate immediately. Chris George might hold out, but at least he’d know how serious the feds were about taking him down. She wanted to frighten other pill mills as well. So it wouldn’t hurt to attract as much news media attention as possible.

Planning for the raids was already well underway by the time the DEA submitted a search warrant application in late February 2010. Personnel and resources were brought in from FBI divisions around the country. Computer analysis experts stood by. Dogs trained to sniff out drugs and cash were readied. Two days before the raid, participants were briefed at a Boca Raton police facility, where federal agents broke down, step-by-step, how they expected the day to unfold. The task force wasn’t planning to make arrests. The search warrants were simply the next step in the investigation. Most participants were assigned to three types of teams: SWAT, search, or interview. The DEA would continue running the wiretap, reporting any relevant calls Chris George made. Supervisors would coordinate from a command post in Miami.

The search warrant targeted the homes of Chris George, Denice Haggerty, and Ethan Baumhoff, as well as South Beach Rejuvenation, East Coast Pain, Executive Pain, and, of course, American Pain.

Turner didn’t sleep much the night before the raids. She was too keyed up and had too much to do. She wished she could be at every search location as well as the command post and the wire room. She didn’t want to miss anything. But she had decided to join the team searching Ethan Baumhoff’s house. After listening to the wiretaps, she believed the former police officer would be the most likely to cooperate, and she wanted to lead that interview. Ethan was the odd man out at American Pain, the only one who wasn’t an old friend of Chris or Derik. She’d considered approaching him even before the search warrants, to see if he’d cooperate, but had held off. She knew Chris George kept American Pain money and drugs inside the old bank vaults in the Dixie Highway building, and she assumed Baumhoff would know the vault passcodes. Without the codes, opening those vaults would be difficult, to say the least.

Breaching Chris George’s house, on the other hand, would be simple. The feds decided to use a local police SWAT team, equipped with an industrial-strength pry bar to snap the front door deadbolt.

It was crucial to hit all of the locations and targets simultaneously, so nobody would be alerted to destroy evidence or dump assets or fight back. They’d go at first light, just before 7:00 a.m., when everybody would still be at home. When the SWAT team came pouring through his broken front door, Chris George would feel the full weight of the federal government.

Chris wasn’t home.

He and Dianna had left the house separately at 6:00 a.m., on one of Chris’s obsessive missions to destroy Palm Beach Pain. Chris was still monitoring the GPS tracker he’d put on his rival’s car. The clinic operator had been to a fleabag motel the night before, a cheap dump popular with the oxy-tourists. The Palm Beach Pain guys visited motels like this one, putting flyers on cars with out-of-state tags. Then, Chris would wake up at the crack of dawn, check the GPS monitor, and go wherever the guy had been the night before so he could
remove
all the flyers.

Today, Dianna was staking out the motel. On Chris’s orders, she was going undercover, planning to catch the Palm Beach Pain guys on video. She would talk to them, posing as a sponsor staying at the motel. Chris wanted some video he could take to the DEA.

At 6:51 a.m., he called Dianna to coach her through the operation. He was following the Palm Beach Pain operator’s car.

“Remember, you gotta hold that camera in your hand and not cover it up too much. It’s gotta aim at them, you know?” Chris said.

“Yeah,” Dianna said. “I’m gonna do my best on that.”

“Then say, ‘Listen, I bring a lot of people down here. What’s the price per pill?’ He’ll tell you.”

Chris hung up. A moment later, his phone rang. The caller said he was a sergeant with the sheriff’s office. He said he was in Chris’s house, along with the DEA and the FBI, and they had a search warrant. They needed to talk to him. Chris could hear a strangely familiar sound in the background. Like dogs barking. Chris was bewildered. Why were the cops at his house, and why’d they have dogs?