asking me when i was opening the new clinic in jacksonville. they were like, you called me the other day. and i said, i called you? they were saying american pain moved to jacksonville. here s our new address, you know, come in under your same appointment day. so i decided to call the number, and i said, hey, i m looking for derek from the pain clinic. yeah, that s me. what do you look like, man? he said, yeah, i m a big guy with the tattoos and stuff. i said, man, i don t know what the [bleep] is going on, buddy, but that s me. why are you pretending to be me? what the [bleep] is going on here? chris looked up the address, looked up the corporation, and one of the owners was pete tendale. and the other owner was zach rose. i m watching all these patients drive from out of state. they re coming all the way to palm beach, fort lauderdale, miami. and i thought, why don t i just open one right in jacksonville? that s the first city you come to when you come across a state line that
here s our new address, you know, come in under your same appointment day. so i decided to call the number, and i said, hey, i m looking for derek from the pain clinic. yeah, that s me. what do you look like, man? he said, yeah, i m a big guy with the tattoos and stuff. i said, man, i don t know what the [bleep] is going on, buddy, but that s me. why are you pretending to be me? what the [bleep] is going on here? chris looked up the address, looked up the corporation, and one of the owners was pete tendale. and the other owner was zach rose. i m watching all these patients drive from out of state. they re coming all the way to palm beach, fort lauderdale, miami. and i thought, why don t i just open one right in jacksonville? that s the first city you come to when you come across a state line that can save six or seven hours of drive time. everyone was using billboards, or they d pay referral fees, or they d give out gas cards to get people to come to their clinics.
but they sure as hell poured gasoline on the fire. they became the largest street-level distribution group operating in the entire united states. nobody put more pills on the streets than they did. nobody. they created a blueprint for how this is to be done. and they were operating in broad daylight. the scale of this enterprise, i mean, it was enormous. you had addicts streaming in from all over the country, thousands of miles just to come to florida to get drugs. when you see what s going on inside that clinic, your jaw just falls to the floor. i got your pills in the parking lot. chill out, man. i ve been on the job as a special agent for over 20 years. and i ve seen a lot of crazy. but this was just [bleep] crazy. you couldn t make up the stuff that happened in this
i think i m in a lot of trouble. search warrants are always enlightening. you find things you never expected to find. and oddly in his garage he had what looked to be a white supremacist or a nazi flag. i d never seen one of those in somebody s house before. obviously, people like that are not going to invite me to their homes, but i d never seen one like that before. even though chris was an avowed white supremacist, some of the doctors that worked for him were black, some were jewish. this is america, right? green is more important than any other color. denise woke up first and said, somebody was walking around the side of the house. and i looked and i saw some woman with a gun and i m going, oh crap. chris? yeah, what s going on? it s the dea. they re at everybody s house. jeff, we need to go to our mom s house. you know why? there s stuff in the attic. when i heard that phone call, i called one of the investigators out there.
out of american pain, i would just send them to executive pain. give them a fresh start. so all my paperwork looked good. oh, that guy came in with track marks? i kicked him out. i don t know what happened there. chris also convinced denise, his mother, to go to work for him. denise was in the office. i mean, she saw what was going on. hello. hey, chris. hey, mom. i m filling out this questionnaire for harvard. they want to know what s the percentage of out-of-state patients. you ll have to take out the name and address on it. why? they ll be alarmed by how many out-of-state. denise was the assistant manager, kind of. she oversaw everything when i wasn t there. anything i needed, she would help me out with it. she was the one that was meeting with the wholesalers and getting the doctors to sign all their stuff. was she ever suspicious of the operation? she never said anything to me. you start building your link chart right off the bat.