i had just transferred to the south florida high-intensity drug trafficking area. we were part of the ocdetf task force. it was us, the fbi, along with the dea, other agencies, palm beach county sheriff s office, broward county sheriff s departments, and local police departments teamed up. i was literally in the break room at the water cooler one day meeting some of our local law enforcement partners, and i told them that i worked health care fraud for a number of years. and one of the police officers said, health care fraud? maybe you guys would be interested in looking at these clinics. typically, we would be looking at cocaine, marijuana. pills were never on our radar. why are so many people traveling from outside the state to come here? this isn t like we had the mayo clinic set up here, where it s the finest facility in the
entire country. you re talking about street corner popped-up overnight pain clinics. we decided to focus on the most prolific group. that would be the george brothers. on its surface, everything looked legitimate. these are real doctors. they have real licenses. they have real dea control numbers. and what looked to be a real clinic, so the question was, where was the crime? where was the crime? the office grew. it brought more attention to the business. so the doctors wanted an mri. the mri would help us verify the patient who would have some type of injury. so if someone came in without an mri, we d give them a referral to an mri office. which opened up a whole new realm of the mri companies. within weeks, pete tendale, he showed up wanting to do our mri business.
well, we stopped for gas and stuff, but that s it. at least i ll have seen an alligator one day. it was coming up on there. we were looking through data from the dea. the george brothers and people like them got almost 90 percent of all the oxycodone manufactured in the entire country. of the 20 highest prescribing physicians in the entire country, five of them worked at just one of chris facilities. just in 2009 alone, they ordered just shy of 3 million pills. those numbers were through the roof compared to their competitors. these are what they call red flags in the investigative business. i wanted my doctors to be the top prescribing doctors in the country. to me, that was an accomplishment of being number one, and that was really my goal. i believe that the individuals who manufactured, distributed, supplied these
it was really bad. i couldn t walk away from those drug-addicted babies and just ignore it. we all showed up with our signs, up and down we went. with florida regulations so lax that convicted felons are allowed to own and operate pill mills, south florida is ground zero. i was amazed at just the volume of weeks and months and months of doing these stories. you would see what we d film on tv, and you would say to yourself, who s not watching this? what does it take to wake people up? i saw some of the articles. my concern was them getting in trouble with the law. we would talk about that. you know, terry, that works for me. terry? yes. our brother-in-law just got arrested by dea. someone in kentucky turned him in down here. the arrests are widening, so i don t know, be careful or something. well, i don t have to be
on its surface, everything looked legitimate. these are real doctors. they have real licenses. they have real dea control numbers. and what looked to be a real clinic, so the question was, where was the crime? where was the crime? the office grew. it brought more attention to the business. so the doctors wanted an mri. the mri would help us verify the patient who would have some type of injury. so if someone came in without an mri, we d give them a referral to an mri office. which opened up a whole new realm of the mri companies. within weeks, pete tendale, he showed up wanting to do our mri business. he was always working, hustler kind of guy. premium tobacco, $4. pete was involved in all kinds of different businesses. i mean, the guy was an entrepreneur.