Editor’s Note: CNN Films’ “American Pain” premieres Sunday, February 5, at 9 p.m. ET/PT on CNN.
CNN
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Throngs of individuals cling exterior the American Pain clinic in Boca Raton, Florida, ready their flip. Inside, a health care provider greets them one by one and prescribes them ache treatment, a handgun peeking out from beneath his white coat.
American Pain is a one-stop store, supplying each prescriptions and painkillers. At the door, a hulking bouncer warns individuals not to snort their drugs in the car parking zone. That would entice the type of consideration that the clinic’s homeowners, twin brothers Chris and Jeff George, are attempting to keep away from.
But it’s too late. Local and federal investigators are close by, watching each transfer.
These are scenes from a brand new CNN Films’ documentary, “American Pain,” which particulars the George brothers’ rise and fall as opioid kingpins. The movie by Emmy Award-winning director Darren Foster makes use of FBI wiretap recordings and undercover movies – together with the brothers’ unique jailhouse interviews – to paint an image of a ruthless pain-pill empire that turned the Georges into millionaires and enabled addicts from throughout the nation.
“The George brothers did not start the opioid crisis. But they sure as hell poured gasoline on the fire,” mentioned retired FBI agent Kurt McKenzie, who was half of the investigation – nicknamed Operation Oxy Alley – that started after oxycodone from the twin brothers’ clinics confirmed up at scenes involving drug overdoses. Investigators bugged the clinic’s telephones, recorded surreptitious video and despatched undercover brokers masquerading as a sufferers to purchase medicine.
“They became the largest street-level distribution group operating in the entire United States,” McKenzie added. “Nobody put more pills on the streets than they did. Nobody … and they were operating in broad daylight.”
Director: I was chased by drug kingpins
Between them, Chris and Jeff George ran 4 ache clinics and different associated companies in South Florida.
Their operation coincided with surge in the opioid epidemic between 2008 and 2010, when the prescription painkiller enterprise was booming, federal officers mentioned. People throughout the nation additionally have been starting to understand the poisonous toll the authorized medicine have been taking over communities.
“Before this case, the public only knew that people were dying from drug overdoses, they had no idea how the ‘system’ worked,” McKenzie mentioned. “The George brothers created the blueprint.”
They marketed the clinic in native newspapers and recruited medical doctors to prescribe the medicines, providing them incentives for giant and frequent prescriptions. To keep away from setting off crimson flags, the brothers’ clinics solely accepted money and bank cards – not insurance coverage, in accordance to courtroom paperwork. They employed girls via Craigslist to dole out the drugs prescribed by the medical doctors.
The George brothers made it simple to get medicine at their clinics, the place no appointments have been vital. Patients flocked to Florida from Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, West Virginia and different Appalachian states ravaged by opioid abuse.
“I believe we’ve created a new form of tourism,” Jeff George says in the documentary, in a telephone interview from jail. “We were basically like the Disneyland of pain clinics.”
Some drug sellers drove to the clinics from Kentucky in rented buses marked “Tree of Life Baptist Church” to masks their prison intentions, the movie reveals.
“It’s like a candy store down there,” one man advised FBI agent Jennifer Turner, who led the federal investigation, when requested why he frequented the George brothers’ tablet mills.
Meanwhile, the brothers have been making hundreds of thousands and attempting to outdo one another’s flamboyant existence. They purchased dear watches, flashy automobiles, boats and a number of houses. Jeff George drove a Lamborghini whereas his brother Chris had an unlimited personalized monster truck.
The clinics operated like frat homes, mentioned Derik Nolan, a longtime good friend of the twins who describes himself in the documentary as their right-hand man. As clients waited for his or her subsequent repair, clinic workers performed with remote-controlled automobiles and shot one another with slingshots. The clinics’ fridges held beer and Patrón photographs, Nolan mentioned.
The clinics’ money registers have been too small to include the incoming flood of payments, so workers stuffed the cash in large trash baggage.
One clinic referred individuals with out MRIs to a trailer behind a strip membership, the place they might get lap dances whereas ready for brand spanking new scans from sham radiologists, in accordance to an FBI agent quoted in the movie. The George brothers believed the imaging helped make their prescription course of look extra real.
The clinics’ medical doctors have been paid per particular person, which supplied an incentive to see as many sufferers as attainable, federal officers mentioned.
The medical doctors “did not obtain prior medical records or prescribe any alternative treatment. They did not make referrals to specialists. Virtually everyone examined by the co-conspirator physicians received a prescription for controlled substances,” courtroom paperwork mentioned. “There was no individualization of treatment as required under applicable federal and Florida law.”
Chris George brags in the movie that the American Pain clinic alone generated $40 million in income. American Pain prescribed 18 million items of oxycodone, rating amongst the high 9 purchasers of oxycodone in the nation, in accordance to courtroom paperwork.
“Of the 20 highest-prescribing physicians in the entire country, five of them worked at just one of Chris’ facilities,” mentioned McKenzie, the former FBI agent. “These are real doctors. They have real licenses … and what looked to be a real clinic.”
Chris George says he took satisfaction in his clinics’ quantity.
“I wanted my doctors to be the top prescribing doctors in the country,” he tells the filmmakers in an interview from jail. “To me, that was an accomplishment.”
John Friskey owns a pc service enterprise in Jacksonville, Florida. At the time a tablet mill moved in to the identical strip mall, Friskey was a grieving father who’d misplaced his son, Andy, to opioid dependancy. Andy cherished music and performed the guitar.
“He was in a car accident in Tennessee. He had a ruptured spleen and was in pain,” Friskey advised CNN. “He got medicine from the pill mills. I didn’t know they were pill mills. I didn’t even know he was getting medicine. He overdosed on it.”
The neighboring ache clinic was owned by a person named Zachary Rose, who was rivaling the George brothers for supremacy amongst Florida tablet mills. Rose’s clinic introduced crowds of drug customers from out of state to the space, and Friskey needed him out of the strip mall.
When the clinic requested Friskey to assist them preserve their laptop networks and safety cameras, Friskey noticed a possibility. He approached the DEA and supplied to assist shut it down.
FBI informant will get emotional speaking about his motivation
DEA brokers wired him and recorded his conversations when he labored on Rose’s computer systems, as medical doctors there bragged about how a lot cash they earned per day.
Friskey mentioned he would take out their onerous drives, exchange them with new ones and switch the previous ones over to federal brokers.
“They never questioned me, never tried to stop me,” Friskey mentioned. “I was happy to shut him down.”
Rose pleaded responsible to a drug conspiracy charge in 2012 and was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
Everything got here crashing down in August 2011, when federal investigators raided the brothers’ houses and found unlawful weapons, medicine and different gadgets.
They additionally raided the house of the twins’ mom, Denice Haggerty, who labored at one of the ache clinics. There, they found safes in the attic stashed with $four million.
The brothers have been amongst 31 individuals indicted – together with their mom – beneath the federal RICO Act, which targets organized crime. Thirteen medical doctors additionally have been charged, and all however two pleaded responsible to lesser fees of cash laundering or wire fraud.
Haggerty, the twins’ mom, pleaded responsible that yr to one depend of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and was sentenced to 30 months in prison.
Chris George pleaded responsible to one depend of racketeering conspiracy and was sentenced to 17 years in jail. He served 11 years and was launched in September 2021.
Jeff George additionally pleaded responsible to a racketeering conspiracy cost and was sentenced to 15 and a half years. He additionally was convicted of second-degree felony homicide in the deadly overdose of a affected person, in accordance to courtroom filings. He acquired a further 20-year sentence for the homicide cost and stays in jail.
An estimated 3,000 individuals died from overdoses linked to the brothers’ clinics, McKenzie mentioned. He mentioned the FBI got here up with that quantity after reviewing a random sampling of 300 affected person information from the brothers’ clinics and noting what number of of the sufferers had later overdosed.
As many of the clinics’ clients offered their drugs to others, that estimate doesn’t embrace the secondary and even tertiary drug market, McKenzie added.
The brothers, now 42, go away a authorized legacy in Florida.
In 2011, the state handed a “pill mill law” that banned pain clinics from dispensing opioids and established necessities for medical examinations.
But Nolan, the Georges’ affiliate who additionally pleaded responsible to a racketeering cost and served 10 years in particular person, looks like regulation enforcement focused the incorrect individuals.
“They didn’t want to go after big pharmacy. They didn’t want to go after big distributors. They just wanted us – we’re nobody. The money we made is peanuts compared to what big pharma made over the years,” he mentioned in the movie.
In latest years giant pharmaceutical firms corresponding to Purdue Pharma, whose OxyContin painkiller has been extensively blamed for kickstarting the opioid disaster, have agreed to pay billions of dollars in authorized settlements. Drugstore chains corresponding to CVS and Walgreens also have agreed to settle lawsuits introduced by states and native governments alleging the retailers mishandled prescriptions of painkillers.
Meanwhile, greater than a decade after the FBI shut down their operation, Chris George believes he and his brother play no position in the deadly overdoses.
“In the end, it’s their responsibility. They’re responsible for themselves, I’m not,” he says in the movie after his launch from jail. “I don’t think we created more addicts. They were already here. They just had an easier way .. to get their drugs. And a safer way. Now they don’t even know what they’re getting.”
Chris George, who’s out on parole, continues to deflect blame for his medicine’ lethal toll onto his former sufferers.
“They mentioned they have been in ache to my medical doctors. They acquired an MRI exhibiting they have been in ache. My medical doctors gave them treatment. What they did with that’s out of my arms.
“They act like I’m the bad guy here ‘cause I owned a business,” he added. “You know, in this country, anybody can open a business.”
Chris George mentioned he plans to begin an actual property enterprise along with his good friend Nolan.
And if the housing market crashes, like it did throughout their opioid empire’s heyday, Nolan advised the makers of “American Pain” that he has one other concept.
“We may have to venture back into the medical field,” he mentioned.