Original subtitles

- This was the largest investigation

of its type in U.S. history.

The local police departments in South Florida

came to us and said, we're doing car stops

and finding people who are obviously under the influence

with massive quantities of pills,

with pill bottles with their names on it.

And we'd get reports that people were dying of overdose.

Then you see pain clinics on every corner.

Then you see the addicts traveling to Florida

for exactly that reason.

We started to suspect there might be

a trafficking operation here.

We could not attack every single one

of these clinics at one time.

You go to the biggest, baddest distributor on the block,

and that's who you focus on.

We start off with surveillance.

And then we eventually introduce undercover agents.

- The doctors only cared about making money

and expanding their operation.

People are dying.

It was a great deal of urgency to gather the evidence

and shut all of this down.

- In the FBI, we make a lot of headlines.

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Drug busts,

mob stings,

terrorist takedowns.

- Get down! Get down!

- We understand why people want to tell stories about us.

- Mark it.

- Freeze! - FBI.

- FBI! - Action!

- But they don't know the half of it.

What really goes down,

we save that for each other

when we're talking agent-to-agent.

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This is "FBI True."

- Kurt, how is it that you came upon this case?

- Kristy Kottis is a 24-year veteran of the FBI.

She worked gangs, crimes against children,

as well as human and drug trafficking.

- So back in 2008, my partner Jennifer Turner and I

were actually assigned to a task force office

focusing on the South Florida organized crime.

So it's local PD and FBI agents and other federal agencies.

And it was literally water cooler talk.

When my partner was first talking to our local partners,

they were mentioning that they were stopping cars

with people with huge volumes of pills,

and they were occasionally finding people overdosed

on the streets and in local motels.

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We had started to hear rumblings

about an increasing number of deaths

from different parts of the country.

Law enforcement officers would call in

about these dead people that they found

with prescription pill bottles on them.

- Kurt McKenzie is a 23-year veteran of the FBI.

He started his FBI career as a forensic biologist

before working transnational organized crime, narcotics,

and health care fraud.

- It was technically legal for them

to possess these vast quantities of narcotics

because everybody had a prescription.

So we weren't exactly sure what we were looking at,

but we knew something was wrong here,

and something had to be done.

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- So you find out that these are

doctors working in a clinic. - Yes.

- So what's the next step? Everything's legal.

Where do we begin on this?

- I actually came to the FBI

from the pharmaceutical industry,

so I understood a little bit about the things

that we were dealing with in this case.

So one of the first things we did was talk to the DEA.

The DEA maintains a system called ARCOS.

So ARCOS is a database that contains information

about every single opioid dose manufactured

in the United States, from manufacturer to the pharmacy.

One of the things we found out is that in 2008,

more than 90% of all the oxycodone manufactured

in the entire United States was shipped to Florida.

- Wow.

- At that time, Florida did not have

a prescription drug monitoring program.

So in other words, if you were to go to a doctor in Florida

and get a prescription for a narcotic,

you could then go right down the street to another doctor

and get another prescription for a narcotic

and continue that all day long.

- You do surveillance on these clinics.

What are you guys seeing?

- You see lines going all the way down the street...

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Of people who look like they're under the influence.

- When you say clinic, like a doctor's office, or--

- They had doctors. They had licenses.

They would advertise that they were pain clinics.

They would help you with chronic pain.

So in 2008, in Broward County, Florida,

the greater Fort Lauderdale area,

there were more pain clinics

than there were McDonald's restaurants,

literally--well over 100 pain clinics

in South Florida at this time.

- It's unbelievable.

- At that time in Florida,

oxycodone was the number one cause

of overdose death in the state,

above heroin, above cocaine, above alcohol, oxycodone.

So we started to realize we had

a very significant problem

that was bubbling up underneath this investigation.

- Kurt, tell me what happened when you brought these

to the prosecutor's office.

- We would explain the volume of pills

that we saw being moved.

We would talk about the activity

that we saw at the clinics.

But we were not met with a great deal of enthusiasm,

because on its face, this activity is all legal.

Every doctor has a DEA license.

The clinics are appropriately licensed by the state.

- All these drugs that you were talking about,

they're all legal. - Correct.

All manufactured in the United States

by established pharmaceutical companies

and transported to South Florida,

which obviously is concerning to a prosecutor.

Because you wanna come to them with obvious law

that's being broken, and we did not have that here.

- And how frustrating was that?

- It was frustrating, but it was more of a challenge.

We weren't gonna let that stop us.

We have to show that what's happening in these clinics

is outrageous, and that the volume

is indicative of something illegal happening

here at these facilities.

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We understand that they're operating

a surface operation here, but your gut

tells you something's wrong.

So once you send in the undercovers

is when you really start to see what's happening in the clinic.

And it doesn't look like any medical facility

you or I have ever been to. It looks like the DMV.

There are just wall to wall people.

You have people wearing shirts that say security

like you're in a nightclub.

Bouncers in a clinic.

- We send an undercover in who met with a doctor

for his "examination."

- The undercover told the doctor

that he would drink the occasional beer

after he took these pills.

- The doctor says, I'm a little concerned.

I don't know if I wanna give you these drugs.

- The doctor tells the undercover,

well, I have to call in my expert.

- The doctor seems like he's doing the right thing,

and then in walks Chris George, the owner of the clinic.

Why is he being summoned?

- And that's when, for us, things got really interesting.

- The owner of the clinic,

who has no medical training whatsoever,

that's who the doctor was calling his "expert."

- He sent him to his overflow facility,

basically, for the people who are in really bad shape.

Those doctors would ask even fewer questions.

- And then our undercover got a prescription

from the other clinic as if nothing had happened.

Of all the pain clinics in South Florida,

the most prolific were five locations

owned by Chris George and his twin brother, Jeff George.

They had their own pharmacy.

- When we started doing a deeper dive,

we realized that five of the doctors who worked

for the George brothers prescribed

more oxycodone than every single doctor

in the entire state of California that year.

So we started to suspect there might be

a trafficking operation here.

We decided to make the biggest splash where we could.

You cut off the head of the snake.

You go to the biggest, baddest distributor on the block,

and that's who you focus on, and that's what we did.

- And that's the George brothers.

- And that was the George brothers.

- What are you learning about them?

- They are shrewd businessman.

They're working to make these facilities operate

as efficiently as possible

so they can push as much narcotics

as they possibly can.

Avid bodybuilders.

They like to drive fancy cars.

You'd see the cars pull up to the clinic.

Chris had this ginormous monster truck.

They were buying yachts, fancy houses.

They were living the high life.

- Were they always in the medical service industry,

or did they do other things?

- Neither brother had a college degree,

a medical degree, or anything like that.

Chris was a convicted felon.

So he knew that by law he could not have his name

on a medical facility, so he had the names of friends

on the clinic's paperwork.

Chris never hired a single medical professional

outside of the doctors.

So everybody who worked there were friends and family.

And the criteria for working there

if you're a female was, you had to be pretty.

So there are a handful of strippers working

in these facilities as well.

As a matter of fact, Chris's girlfriend at the time

was also an exotic dancer.

He put her in charge of one of the clinics,

his overflow facility.

- What did you find was the preferred method

to get their dosage of pain meds?

- Cash.

Most clinics, most health care facilities you go to,

they ask you for insurance, maybe a credit card.

Not this place--every single transaction was straight cash,

another red flag.

- And what kind of narcotics are you seeing?

- It's what we call the cocktail,

so it was a combination of oxycodone, 30 milligram pills,

oxycodone, 15 milligram pills, and usually a muscle relaxer

or what's called a benzodiazepine, like Valium.

- Oh, my goodness. All in one?

- All in one.

They were given massive quantities,

usually between 300 and 500 pills.

And here's the scary part.

The cocktail was thought up not by the doctors at the clinic,

but by the addicts, because the addicts understood

if you combine an opioid with a benzodiazepine,

you actually get higher than you would with just the opioid.

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- What are some of the tools we used against this group?

- We were on an Organized Crime squad,

and we treated this group as a RICO investigation, right?

This was racketeering. This was all friends and family

joined together for the purpose

of committing crime for profit.

And we treated them no different than

Italian American Mafia or Russian Mafia cases.

They sold drugs, intimidation, threatening competitors,

money laundering.

They did all of it.

We started to realize that because these patients

were coming from other parts of the country,

maybe we should go to those parts of the country

and see what's law enforcement doing about the problem there,

and work together with them.

The core of the drug addiction problem,

as far as oxycodone was concerned, was in Appalachia.

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I went to Harlan County, Kentucky.

And that is also where we learned about sponsoring.

- What's sponsoring?

- In Appalachia, a drug dealer would sponsor a vehicle.

So he would get five people, stick them all in a car,

pay their gas, their hotel expenses,

and the money that they're gonna need for pills,

so give them a wad of cash, you know,

between $8,000 and $10,000.

This caravan would come to South Florida,

stay in a hotel for a day or two,

and go to multiple clinics and load up on pills,

and then drive all the way back to Appalachia.

- And once back, what do they do with their collection?

- They would give half to the sponsor,

and they were allowed to keep the other half

to sell for themselves or use,

'cause everybody was an addict,

so all the dealers were also addicts.

And you have to look at the economics of it.

A 30 milligram oxycodone pill in South Florida

you could buy for $2 or $3.

That same pill in Appalachia is now $30.

We ended up eventually on a tap of Chris George's cell phone.

- And what do you hear on that phone when you get up on it?

- He's complaining about his competitors.

He is directing clinic employees,

and more telling, he's hiring doctors.

- Tell me about that.

I have to hear his hiring process.

- Chris George put out Craigslist ads...

And interviewed the doctors over the phone or in person.

He asked them if they had a DEA control number.

He told them, this is what we do here.

This is what we prescribe. Are you good with that?

And then he explained to them that they would get paid

half of the fees that were gathered

from the patient visits.

- How much could a doctor make in a day?

- There were two emergency room physicians who worked

for Chris George who were making almost $400,000 a year

working in a hospital as emergency room physicians.

Working for Chris George, they were making

up to $1.2 million a year.

- What? - Yes.

- Tell me more about those phone calls.

- There was one particularly shocking call

between Chris and his mom.

She was also an employee at one of the clinics, by the way.

- Not only did we get reports that people were dying

of overdose, but we were also getting reports

from Highway Patrols in other states

that people were crashing their cars.

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These people all drove

to South Florida to get the pills.

Many of them could not wait to get back home

to start getting high.

So they're in their cars, driving back

under the influence of opioids,

and they're crashing and dying as well.

- Wow.

- One of the more disturbing things

that we heard on the wire

was Chris and his associate, Derik Nolan,

who is his head of security, talking about

a car load of patients who came from Appalachia,

went to their facilities to get drugs,

and died in a train crash.

They were driving under the influence,

tried to cross a train track.

They got hit by the train.

Derik calls Chris. Have you seen the news?

Chris says, is it our pain patients?

Yes.

- "You have to be an idiot to get hit by a train."

- Wow.

- So at that point, we also knew

the mindset of who we were dealing with.

Not just the drug dealer, but probably a psychopath too.

- When did you start to think we could do something

a little more aggressive than just Title III undercover buys?

- Towards the end of the wire,

we realized that we were going to have to get

a search warrant to shut all this down.

We could have waited a few more months to gather more evidence,

but Chris was planning to expand his empire.

He was actually looking at getting a new primary location,

and we found out it was a 20,000 square foot building

in Palm Beach County, Florida, that used to be a bank.

- Oh, my.

- He could easily triple the amount of prescriptions

that he was handing out. - Mm-hmm.

- It was a great deal of urgency

to get the search warrants and gather the evidence

and shut all of this down.

They had started moving into the facility

at the beginning of 2010.

So March 3, 2010, we hit them with everything we had.

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We had over 250 law enforcement officers--

federal, state and local--

going to both brothers' houses and all their facilities,

and their mother's house.

- We found four safes in Mom's attic

with about 4.5 million in cash that she'd hidden for her sons.

We also had people going to the houses

of the clinic employees to interview them.

My job was to lead the team to go to Chris's house.

We get into the house.

Chris isn't there.

We come to find out he'd actually gotten up

very early in the morning to go harass another competitor.

Kristy, you've done a bunch of search warrants in your time.

- Absolutely.

- You know that a lot of times you'll do a search warrant,

you'll execute a warrant, you will see things

you weren't expecting.

He actually had a white supremacist flag in his garage.

I'd never seen anything like that before.

We found three firearms...

One of which was a stolen 9-millimeter.

- Oh, wow. - Chris is a convicted felon.

He's not allowed to have firearms, right?

- Oops.

- So right there, grounds to arrest him right there.

I was also talking to the wire team,

because one of the things that concerned me,

I found some ammunition in the house

that did not match the guns that we found.

So potentially, there's another gun out there,

probably on Chris.

So they were listening and reporting back

to me what they were hearing.

And he had called his girlfriend, Dianna Pavnick,

the former stripper who ran one of his other facilities.

He's telling her, you have to take the blame for the guns.

You're gonna have to take the blame for some of this.

- So Chris George, at that time,

realized the weight of the federal government

coming down on him. - Yeah.

- The business is shut down at that point,

because we seized a few hundred thousand doses

of oxycodone and Xanax from the clinics.

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And we seized almost 28,000

patient files from the clinics.

- What do you find from the patient files that you grabbed?

- We actually sat down and went through, by hand,

almost 10,000 of those patient files.

The first thing you start to see

is that everybody is getting the same medication.

Chris actually had rubber stamps made up

for the dosage and the drug,

and the doctors would rubber stamp all the prescriptions.

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The most disturbing thing, we started to see a notation

in the files that said "DC."

What does that mean?

Discharged or deceased?

That was their sense of humor.

If you're deceased, you're also discharged.

- Oh.

- So we realized, not only did everybody in the clinic

know that the patients were dying,

the doctors knew the patients were dying,

and the George brothers definitely knew

the patients were dying, and nobody cared.

They only cared about making money

and expanding their operation.

We gave 300 random names from the patient files

and sent those names

to the Social Security Administration.

And we realized that 28 of the 300 names that we sent

were dead, so almost 10%.

- Wow, that's a tremendous amount when you start looking

at 28,000, 10% of that. - Yeah.

You're looking at almost 2,800 people dead

in about a year and a half.

And that's just the patients who came to the facility.

Remember, these drugs are all being sold

directly to the streets.

We had no idea how many people died on the streets.

- Right.

- About a year and a half after the search warrants,

we arrested 32 employees of this clinic,

including Chris and Jeff George.

32 people who, in less than two years,

made more than $40 million...

Pushing way over 20 million doses

of just the narcotics alone, the opioids.

It contributed to an estimated 2,800 deaths

caused by the drugs dispensed by their clinics.

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They are also nowhere near as many pain clinics now.

You have to look hard to find them,

instead of being on every corner.

- How does this case rank with all the other cases

you've been involved in?

- This is probably the most impactful

investigation in my career.

The number of overdose deaths in the state of Florida alone

had dropped 41% in the year following this investigation.

- Wow. - And that's impactful.

It wasn't the end of the crisis, obviously,

but we did our part, and we're very proud of that.

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