p.m. eastern, saturday and sunday. the new film "american pain" premieres next. have a good night. testing, testing, one, two, three. sir, you got the headphones part there? >> yes, this is the doctor. am i looking for a part-time job? >> hi, this is dianna. >> i'm looking for a medical field. >> you guys want to [bleep] around? you're going to [bleep] need pain management. i walked out of the door. >> you make a lot more money doing this than you do doing plastic surgery. >> my doctor's average is about 1.89 a year. >> oh my god. that's great, chris. >> hello? >> christopher? >> yes. >> hey, it's the service office. >> what's wrong? >> you need to come home right now. there's some people at your house who need to speak to you. >> hello? >> hey. >> they're in the house, baby. they have dogs and the fbi is here. it's not a [bleep] joke. baby, you know i love you, right? >> yeah, i do. >> what do you want me to do? >> i don't know, chris. >> baby, i'm [bleep] i'm [bleep] >> why are you [bleep] >> they're going to put me in jail for a long time, babe. a long [bleep] time. >> you just need to relax, chris, and you need to think of a [bleep] plan. >> i'm just going to kill myself. >> don't do this. don't be stupid. but you need to think of something, and killing yourself is not the answer. you cannot leave me here by my [bleep] self to deal with your dirt. >> this was the cause of our epidemic in this country. florida was the epicenter. and the biggest ones in the business were the george brothers at american pain. >> the george brothers did not start the opioid crisis. 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 investigation. strippers and white supremacists running medical facilities. mri from the back of a strip club. criminal operations coming in from appalachia. doctors carrying guns under their lab coats. only in america. >> okay, cool. we're good. >> can you hear me? >> yep. >> oh, are you recording already? >> yeah, yeah, i started the recorder. >> okay. >> this call is from a federal prison. >> you know, this documentary is called "american pain," right? >> i think so. that's the working title. >> i think i was a pioneer. do i say that? i don't know. i think i was, yeah. >> yeah, we'll get to all that later. but for starters, let's talk about growing up in florida. >> it was 1980. she gained a lot of weight. the doctor said, you're getting too big. they didn't realize that there were twins. you know, they showed you those ultrasounds. they didn't look like anything to me. we moved to wellington. i had a lot of success in the building industry. wellington is more upscale than a lot of communities. it's really known for horses and polo. prince charles played polo in wellington. i mean, there have been some famous people. it was a great place for them to grow up. there were lots of kids, lots of families. you had four-wheelers and go-karts and all those sort of things. their sibling bond was so close. one would say something, and before he finished, the other would laugh. then i'd say, why are you laughing? he didn't, you know -- and he'd say, well, i know what he's going to say. i had them doing push-ups when they were little. we stressed exercise. they were great tennis players, tremendous athletes, and they were on the math team. they won palm beach county mathematics contest, along with another kid that's in prison with them called theo. chris and jeff were about eight or nine years old when their mother and i got divorced. >> i met chris and jeff's mother in '89, and i early on noticed that they were a little difficult. they were out in a wooded area, and somehow they started a brush fire, which actually turned into a small forest fire. it was sufficient that the fire department had to be called. they were there for a day or two putting it out. yeah, i wasn't real keen on that, especially because i was a firefighter. ended up getting community service for it, nothing major. they couldn't be together more than five minutes without fighting, and they couldn't be apart more than five minutes without wondering where the other one was. it was like a love-hate at the same time. >> although they competed against each other, you did not want to separate them. if you picked on one, you picked on two. chris and jeff played hockey. >> what do you think drew them to hockey? >> denise said, i'm not going anymore because the parents sitting in the stands with us started complaining about the boys. >> hey, right there. how about that? get off you? goodbye. >> some parents got very mad with them. >> off! off! off! >> they didn't understand the twin thing, and i had to explain it to them. with them, it wasn't always a relaxing time. for sure. >> about the trouble we got in, i mean, there was a lot of trouble. you want me to list, like, every charge? >> their father usually would get an attorney or whatever for them. he'd get them off with sometimes nothing more than community service. so they really never had to pay the price for any of their antics. their father told them the police were stupid because if they were smart, they'd be making more money. i think they just thought they were smarter than everybody else, and they could get away with everything. >> we were getting in fights and working out, bodybuilding, and we just wanted an advantage, so then we started doing steroids. >> i sort of guessed it when i started seeing them bulk up. and when i confronted them, i was like, don't you know how bad this stuff is for you? and they said, oh, no, no, we get the good stuff. >> on some discussion board on the internet, i found somebody in yugoslavia that i could western union money to. they'd put the steroids in, like, vcr tapes. i would use some of them with my brother and then sell some of them to my friends. the names it was shipped to were always fake names. i had a shift at a local business in west palm beach, but this time i went in and picked up the package, and i was walking out. all the agents, you know, came and arrested me. >> it was his first felony offense. >> chris got the jail that lets you out to go to work and then come back. >> work release. >> and he would come to work for me at majestic. we were building 100 homes at a time, a $40 million business. we put a lot of pride into the business, and chris carried that pride with him. >> i took a job working for chris and jeff's father. me and him became pretty good buddies. we were both into the same type of things. >> going to ufc fights. we would do it together. >> mosh pits. just banging and elbowing and kneeing and having fun redneck style, i guess. emerald city, it's just, you know, your standard strip club. chris would show up with his $500 in singles pretty much every night to see her. >> i came to florida when i was about 19. new hampshire was no good for me. everybody's hooked on something there. that's why i ran away. he was big. he was handsome. had an expensive car and sounds like he's fun. >> she was probably the prettiest girl in the strip club, and she was great on the pole. >> we spent the night, and it was, you know, ever since then. >> from that moment on, they were never apart. >> here comes my posse right now. >> so our contractor this week is john george. >> we did a tv show, extreme home makeover. chris and jeff both worked on that house. that was the height of majestic homes. the market was red hot. and then, of course, you had 2007 to 2008, a catastrophe. to see it collapse was sad. >> when the housing market crashed, i started working with my brother. >> i had no idea he was even a twin until i saw his brother. like, how do you leave that out? isn't that weird? >> this call is from -- >> jeff. >> an inmate at a federal prison. >> whose idea was the pain clinic? >> well, i'm sure chris probably said he started it. it was my idea. more of the ideas person, and he's a great operator. i'm probably more creative. he's more of an in-the-office workaholic type person. but our first business partnership was a hormone replacement clinic that prescribed testosterone, hgh, called south beach rejuvenation. >> south beach rejuvenation was basically a front for a legal steroid clinic. it's telemedicine for steroids. i was a patient. you would get a blood test done, and you were automatically approved. i don't even think the doctor looked at it. you would get a list of pretty much any anabolic steroid under the sun. and two days later, you got a box of rigs and all the steroids you wanted. it just came right to your house. >> i was looking to buy competitors to expand south beach rejuvenation. and dr. overstreet had a good little setup in miami. >> dr. overstreet, he's the one who brought the pain clinics to chris and jeff's attention. he told jeff the big money was at the pain clinics. anything to do with money perks chris and jeff's interest. >> for a doctor, he was young at 38 years old. >> he was like a bohemian type guy. dr. overstreet absolutely just wanted to make a quick buck. he wasn't trying to cure cancer. he was pretty much just content doing what he did, combing and working his flip-flops and bahama shirt with a medical coat over top of it. >> we decided to become 50-50 partners, dr. overstreet. my brother and i were equal partners. and what we each had was the responsibility to open up one office at first. my clinic, south florida pain. and his office, east coast pain. and we split the profits. >> we walked down to the tax collector's office, gave him $36, and he basically gave us this license to deal drugs. no questions asked. >> i had no idea. i thought it was going to be like a regular doctor's office. elevator music playing and a couple people sitting out there, not a line all the way down the street. >> the very first day, i was like, [bleep] man, we're not even open yet, and there's people waiting, scratching their neck, drinking mountain dews and smoking cigarettes. it kind of reminded me a bit of a trap house, you know? after being open for about three weeks, we got a phone call from dr. overstreet's wife. she said he'd been in a car wreck and flipped his jeep over a cliff and died. i only knew him for a few weeks. he was a really nice guy. i started hiring additional doctors. but everything ended up working out fine, and actually better, because he was a 50% partner. so i made actually more money with the new doctors. the new doctors get paid per patient. also, i would pay the doctors $1,000 a week to use their dea registration to order medication for our in-house pharmacy. no one's doing the same business model. we made it real easy to get the pain medication. >> i was 23 at the time. i owned half of a grow house. i was selling kilos of cocaine. i was doing all kinds of crazy dumb [bleep] my buddy that was living at the grow house started getting strung out. i said, what the hell are you doing, man? he goes, these. he said, they're roxy's, oxycodone pills. the m-box is what everyone called them. he goes, man, they'll [bleep] you up. he lost a crop of pot because he was just so messed up. he couldn't maintain it. so his way to try to pay me back was introduce me to this doctor. when i went in there, he told me, try to touch your toes. oh, i can't. yeah, you're messed up, man. he gave me 180 oxycodone tablets the first visit. and the second visit, he upped me to 240. i mean, it was just so simple. i'd never sold pills. and they were gone within a matter of a day or two. i was like, holy [bleep] i just made $3,000 doing nothing. in most states, there's a central database. if you went to a doctor and tried to go to another doctor and get a schedule ii narcotic filled, it's going to alert them. it's going to alert the authorities. it's going to alert the doctors not to see you. it's going to alert the pharmacies not to fill it. everyone knew that florida didn't have a database at the time. you can go to as many doctors as you wanted to. >> i was working at the barbershop, so cash in my pocket every day. you know, with the barbershop, it slows down, speeds up. and then weed, you buy a pound, break it down. cocaine, you buy a sack, cut it up. so -- wait, can i say that? >> yeah. >> yeah? a buddy of mine said, hey, come to this pain clinic, fill the script, i'll buy it back from you. these guys were literally just writing scripts. they weren't checking your bag. you didn't have to cough twice. he wrote me a prescription for 180 blues, 60 percocets, and 30 xanax. i called all the guys. i paid $500. they give you a prescription. we go fill it. and i was doing that times 10 or 15 people a day, 120 times a month. and they did used to laugh at me that i was the most organized drug dealer ever because i had a laptop and all my patients on the calendar. >> you would literally walk in with a laptop? >> laptop, crack open the laptop on the counter. so i was going from hustling, [bleep] barbershop to $5,000, $6,000 a day cash. and by the end of the week, i would have a jar, a mason jar this full with xanax. another jar this full, maybe two jars of percocets. so that was my byproduct. still got a great value on the street. people are still addicted to that. and xanax is a classic. ♪ ♪ our love is 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were wrapped around the building every morning. they're fighting and there's needles all over the place. and at that time, nobody knew what was going on. it wasn't on the news. >> the first tip that got us over there was some crazy behavior that was going on at a mcdonald's. there seemed to be traffic going from one side of the street to the other, and there was a sign that said pain clinic. >> anthony and i parked across the street and watched for a while. it was shady times a million. it was bizarro world. anthony said, i'm going to go find out what's going on. >> i had brought a couple of packs of cigarettes because everybody wants to bum a cigarette and then they want to talk. >> he came back to the van and said, they're all getting drugs. >> we saw as soon as they hooked up with these pain pills, they would go to their cars and use. they were snorting it and shooting up right in daylight. it was like everywhere you started to look, now that you saw it once, you're like, there's another car, they're doing it. there's another car, they're using. none of it was normal. >> i've never seen the likes of this doctor's office before. you know, i'm a construction guy, i swing a hammer. i don't think there was anybody with any medical office experience, let alone any medical training. >> as we expanded, we needed a lot more people. the hiring process was completely different for male and female employees. male employees were usually friends. the female employees, we would start by placing an ad on craigslist. >> we like to joke around and say that they only really hired attractive women, but i didn't really -- i didn't know that at the time. i was initially the only person in the pharmacy department. i would take the prescriptions that the doctor wrote, and i would fill the medication. i didn't know what roxicodone was. i didn't even know it was like this big thing. i enjoyed going to work every day. we were all young, we were all immature. >> it was like a frat house. >> remote-controlled cars and helicopters, and they'd fly around the office and shoot each other with slingshots and tasers. throwing knives, chinese stars stuck in the ceiling. swords and shields for the occasional sword fight. refrigerator full of beer, shots of petron. just anything that you ever wished you could do when you were a teenager, we did it when we were supposed to be adults. >> in a doctor's office? >> in a doctor's office. >> what's up, [bleep] >> i got a bunch of alcoholics here already starting to [bleep] drink this morning. that's retarded, chris. do i need to be involved in this? >> i don't know, do you? do you have any patients there? >> yeah, we have patients here. >> we realized that we needed to put more standards in place, so we hired a consultant. >> i had a very interesting career, i think. i was the senior investigator in the miami office, a group supervisor and a program manager. i retired, my wife decided she wanted a divorce. she got half my pension, so i had to pick up some money somehow. and that's how i got involved with the pain clinics. i met one of them, one of the george brothers. now i don't remember which one it was. >> what was your impression of him? >> a businessman. he knew nothing about the drugs, but he had doctors for that purpose, and he hired me to keep him straight. so it became a little business for me. i would do like a mock dea-type inspection. i had a checklist. they have to have signs posted. they had to follow all the rules of pharmacy. labels on the vials. record-keeping. inventories. physicians can justify writing for any drug they want, as long as they have standards for proper documentation. >> we kind of looked to the doctors to see how far we could push it. the doctors didn't say anything or raise a red flag or even an eyebrow. neither did the distributors of the drug wholesalers. >> i found most of my wholesalers online. they would send me a form to fill out. the pills would be mailed through ups or fedex. they would arrive in brown boxes just like any shipment. the patients had no idea. i imagine if they know, the delivery guy would never make it to the front door. just one delivery could be worth over a million dollars on the street to a drug dealer. we bought medication from over 10 wholesalers, and every one had their own process. some were very simple, where all i had to do was fax them or email. others might send an inspector to the office, and they would send him. >> if the wholesaler wanted me to check on a clinic, i would do it. they would pay me a couple hundred dollars for each stop i made. i told them don't sell it. it said it on the report i gave them. if they choose to sell it to them, i did my job. >> when i speak to those guys, the biggest pain clinics, they say they never once had a problem getting pills. >> that's true because if they were ordering, and i said they're keeping good records, they can justify it in their documentation of what the drugs are being used for, and that's why they're buying more. >> but wouldn't it be suspicious? >> you know, suspicious is not really defined in the law. it's a judgment call. >> every week our patient numbers went up, and i never want to lose any business, so i tried to make our office as much of an assembly line as it possibly could be. >> okay. >> handwriting just took too much time. our employees helped get the charts ready and fill part of it out for them. the doctor had rubber stamps. it was my idea to use the stamps, and people liked that they can get in and out fast. >> hello? >> hey. >> hey. >> the cops got a whole carload of our patients all spread out on the sidewalk. they got an undercover cop car. >> i always wanted to work undercover. i thought if you're going to be a cop, you should probably do the really cool stuff. going into a house, buying a kilo of cocaine, doing a weapons deal or something like that. >> okay, westbound now. westbound to blue line. >> soon all those deals became 50-pill, 100-pill, 500-pill, 1,000-pill deals. >> it's going to be 13 pills for 160. >> counting out the money to the guy now. >> we have the signal. >> all right. >> hey, your hands. let me see your hands. don't move. >> cars were being stopped left and right. >> what did i do? >> settle down. >> what did i do? >> prescription after prescription. >> we got the roxy's, we got the xanax. >> the explosion was almost instant. >> you could throw a rock and hit somebody with 100 blues. >> 414 grams. >> if the main ingredient in each pill is oxycodone, then you can weigh them all together. >> at that time, we're still a local police department. we really didn't have the capabilities to really understand what was going on. >> all right. well, i didn't know that the percocet's with the oxy's. >> yeah. >> if you look at the ingredients in the percocet -- >> i'm going to start feeling sick soon if i don't have my medication. >> but you think, yeah, something's brewing. >> the sun is so different down there. first morning, we were so burnt, we could barely walk into the doctor's office. >> florida was the never-ending pill bottle. it was wide open. >> in the western part of kentucky, we were the biggest ring trafficking narcotics from florida. >> i used to do, like, what you might call muscle work. i mean, some of the stuff's pretty horrible, for real. prison school, that's where all the hookups are. whitney's father, glenn, my uncle, he was in prison with this guy who had this hookup in florida. >> my dad and my cousin, red, started going to florida, getting roxy's and bringing them back. and i started selling them for him. roxy's back then wasn't really heard of in kentucky. we had to give them away pretty much just to get them hooked on it. prescription drugs, they sell good. yeah. i started going to the doctor getting pledgings when i was 12 years old. they're a speed. in the '90s, i was selling dilaudid. it was a big one then. my brother glenn come by, and he said, do you want to make some money, some real money? just ride up there with me to florida. south florida pain was the original pain clinic. the word on the street was they wrote the most pills, and they were crooked, and they were felons that owned the clinic. so you wanted to go there. we were buying them for $3 a pill, basically, from the george brothers clinics. and we would bring them back to kentucky, and we'd sell them for $20 a pill. we would sponsor people going down there, like we would pay for their doctor's visits and their expenses. and in return, we would get their prescription, and i would sell the hell out of them. >> you're making $18,000, $19,000 off just one person. i would take van loads of people down there. >> i mean, we rocked it while it was there. >> i told somebody, and they told somebody else, and, i mean, there was hundreds, maybe thousands of people. >> those drug dealers from kentucky were renting buses. >> tree of life baptist church, the bus said on it, and that's how he started coming down. they were all wearing matching shirts. >> if you get pulled over, no one suspects a thing. >> 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. at adp, we use data-driven insights to design hr solutions to help you engage and retain top performers today, so you can have more success tomorrow. ♪ one thing leads to another, yeah, yeah ♪ we got the house! you did! pods handles the driving. pack at your pace. store your things until you're ready. then we deliver to your new home - across town or across the country. pods, your personal moving and storage team. >> 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. >> he started a company called faye imaging. and it was a mobile mri unit. everyone knew that faye imaging was the place to go. >> first thing, you'd go meet pete. >> parking lot, pete. >> it's in the back of a strip club off 45th street in palm beach. while you're waiting to get your mri, you'd go in there and get a few lap dances. when they're ready, they'd come in there and get you. >> i never went into the strip club, i wasn't old enough. i couldn't get in. >> i just got in the tube. he gave me the cd right afterwards with the image. and then the doctors report 24 hours later. everyone that went in there had a herniation, a bulging disc. something was wrong with them. and i said, pete, how does everybody have something wrong with them? and he said, let's just say my doctors look closer than other doctors. everyone told the doctors on a 1 to 10, they were a 10. and there's no way that someone could read your mind and know if you are or you aren't. they wanted to have medical documentation for things to cover their self. it was a facade. >> every time that i went down there and spoke to the doctor, he played along with it. like, he looked at the mri and he'd say, well, you know, you're in extreme pain. like, well, you need this much medicine. i mean, it just seemed too good to be true to me. >> we started to work with informants, some of the patients. they told us about what's going on inside the clinic. >> i used to work fraud cases. committing fraud is just a matter of understanding the system and taking advantage of its weakness to commit a crime. and that's exactly what these guys did. we had to prove that the mri, the patient files and examinations were window dressing that allowed them to deal drugs legally. >> all florida pills right there. there's another one there, south florida pain. roxicodone, xanax. >> when i first seen the first doctor, i was 17. we would just go see the doctor and come back, just like going to the mall. yeah, a 40-hour trip to the mall. >> it quickly grew from almost 100 percent local patients to about 95 percent out-of-state patients. >> i was going in three to four times a week. come home, kiss my husband, get back in the truck. the route i took to florida was i-65 to i-24 to 75 to 95, all the way to florida. i could probably make that trip right now with my eyes closed. >> a lot of people would go to i-95. i'd always go south florida parkway. >> why'd you go that way? >> that's just the way i like going. through kentucky, two-and-a-half hours, tennessee, two-and-a-half hours, georgia, eight hours, and then florida, six hours. on the way down there, it was always time crunch, like we stopped bare minimum. 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 medications had to have known exactly what was going on in south florida. they're following the life cycle of this pill from the day it's manufactured to the end user . they were having to continuously up the supply to meet the demand, and the demand was very clear as to where it was coming from. >> when we would come back from florida, it would be like christmas. >> i had a duffel bag filled up. i rattled, everywhere always. >> when everyone's got money, everyone likes each other. you know what i mean? we were having parties. we're a family. we was all close again. easter in 2009, my aunt had the adult easter egg hunt. >> you know the little plastic eggs? i was like, okay, well, look, we can't hide drugs in the eggs. so if they find a penny, it's going to be a roxy 15. if they find a nickel, it's a roxy 30. if they find a dime, it's weed. i had a big old yard. we hid probably 200 eggs. >> and then when she said go, the stampede of us running out, charged like bulls out there to find it. i mean, it was all over the yard like little maggots trying to find them. my cousin ray, he was bulldozing over people who were grabbing his easter eggs. it was hilarious. and then we were racing to see who could snort the most. >> hello? >> yeah. >> it is busy as [bleep] today. >> chris would stay in his office all day doing whatever he did in there. >> hello? >> hey. somebody called the cops and told them that there was a fight in the parking lot. >> you know, i would be out dealing with all the zombies and i would snap at them, smack them around as need be. a couple hours into the day, i was not as nice as i probably seem right now, you know. >> once you come in, you stay in until it's time to leave. i like you guys, but all the people who have been around hate you guys. >> when he did come out and he would see me mistreating or being rude to a patient or something like that, he would jump on their side and, you know, because, you know, they're just dollar signs. >> i'll take care of him. he just got to be a little nicer to the patients, right? >> yeah, like never says hi or bye to anybody. you know, he doesn't come in and say or welcome in there. >> hi, welcome to the dope hole. can i get you a syringe? >> they don't stop, dude. they're like literally like a bunch of [bleep] toddlers. >> i'm trying to make it look as legitimate as possible and i got these freaking morons in a parking lot acting like they're at mardi gras. >> it's a whole scene. the entire adult population of certain towns in kentucky or west virginia or whatever would come down. people brought winnebago's and pulled out their lawn chairs and everybody hanging out at their car, smoking, drinking. >> when you pulled into the parking lot, it was a family reunion sometimes. there'd be maybe six or eight people in my family sitting there. oh, what are y'all doing down here? i didn't know you had time to come down here. who are you bringing? >> i believe we've created like a new form of tourism. we were basically the disneyland of pain clinics. >> it's not a good look. >> i was just waiting for somebody to come in and shut us down and throw handcuffs on us, you know? it never happened. it was unbelievable to me. >> and at the same time, the juice is kind of worth the squeeze, you know what i mean? at the end of the week, i had mri companies come and handing me $3,000, $4,000 in cash for all the people i sent in their direction. the sponsor would be like, i brought 10 people. how much is it going to cost to get them to cut the line? they'd be like, give me two grand. the people that worked the counters, every single person that came through gave them $50 to move them up. >> the patients would say, i'll pay you extra if you fill my prescription first. >> and you know what the cashiers would do? that's theirs. >> so i would start taxing them, every employee, $200 a day. at the end of every day, i'd have another stack, $2,000, $3,000 sitting on my desk. i was probably making $20,000 a week. >> they didn't have time to use a cash register. they literally had garbage bins where when they would take your money, they would drop it in there. these guys are all taking these bags like santa claus. dollar bills flying around everywhere. they didn't give a [bleep] about that. literally stack of money each. there wasn't a cpa on staff. and of course, derek. he was enjoying those cash plates. that's [bleep] free money, dude. >> hello? >> chris. >> yeah. >> you know that virgin mobile guy, the billionaire? >> who's that? >> he made his own -- >> speak faster. >> he made his own ship to go to the moon. the seats are $200,000 a person. but that ain't that bad to go to space. >> once word got out that there was money to be made, and big money, they popped up everywhere, like weeds. >> starting my own clinic was easy. i mean, it was actually too easy. it wasn't until i met vinny when i realized how easy it was. i went into vincent colangelo's clinic. i was doctor shopping. i'm just sitting there filling out patient forms. he grabs my form, and he just starts checking. ten on the pain level. this hurts, this hurts, this hurts. you got to tell him this. i was like, who the hell is this guy? and everyone's like, oh, that's the owner. that's vinny. pill mill vinny. we hit it off. the next day, we went and met for lunch. he goes, you want to be a business partner? at that time, i drove a big jacked-up truck, a yellow f-150. and he said, i want your truck. that's part of the deal. i said, i don't have nothing to drive. that's fine. i'll give you this mercedes. he had an addiction to cars. he'd be online buying cars. every other day there would be a semi showing up. that's that 1967 camero, i forgot about that. e ended up having to get a warehouse to house these things. vinnie has always been a crack head. he's always smoked crack and went to prison for heroin. came out of prison and was on probation, i think whenever he started the pain clinics. the pain clinics were unorthodox. he said we have to have pool tables. for what? it's a doctors office. i realized 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out of state to see you here? >> because they're from the bible belt state, and they can't get pain medication. >> the man who answered would not give us his name. >> we spent months working on this story because we knew something significant was going on. >> aren't there doctors in kentucky? >> i don't know. i don't think so anybody will help them up there. >> i was told by one of my sources that the guy that was running it was some guy named chris george. we waited and waited until we saw him, and we went for it. >> morning, mr. george. we have pictures of people snorting, shooting up in this parking lot after coming out of your clinic. i mean, what do you have to say about what's going on here? >> i don't believe you're right. >> that's all you have to say? >> after our story, then they moved. >> we followed them every place that they had, we found them. you run, but you can't hide. >> be careful, there's a van across the street. >> yeah, it's probably carmel. >> i don't want to go there. i don't want to be on camera. >> should i change my clothes and put a mask on and go flash and dash? >> uh-huh, unless you have a slingshot. shoot out some of the windows. >> you want me to do that? >> i took pride in the fact that they were worried about us. >> yeah, i heard you. >> ma'am, we just want to know why all of these people have to drive thousands of miles to see your doctor. >> hello? >> that dumb [bleep] is here. >> who? >> that lady, that video camera lady is here. get out of here. >> eventually, we were in the news a lot, and it became a problem with some of my wholesalers. >> the wholesalers called, they were like, man, you guys look like drug dealers. we can't sell to you guys anymore. but listen, change the name, change the address, wink, wink, nod, nod, and we're back in business. at this point, we're probably buying a couple hundred thousand pills, maybe a million pills a month. that's a gravy train right there. >> their salesperson told us we should change our name. you know, put in somebody's name that doesn't have a criminal record. that would just take the spotlight off of us, and then also them, because they sold to us. so i changed the office name to american pain, because it sounded like a good name to me. >> we were in fort lauderdale. i saw a car pull over really quick, and they rolled a kid out of the car. and he just looked like he was dead, and he was kind of blue, and i was kind of getting ready to cpr him, you know, and i did maybe one or two compressions, and he just woke up like a zombie. he just nodded out on that opiate aspect of these drugs, and his friends panicked and threw him out of the car. >> i was working at a children's hospital on a neonatal unit in broward county, florida. all of a sudden, we had all of these babies on our unit that were addicted to drugs going through withdrawals, and they were all testing positive to oxycodone. my hospital didn't want it known that we had drug-addicted babies on our unit, and i was like, are you kidding me? every hospital in broward county has drug-addicted babies on it. at that moment, there was 150 pill mills just in broward county. >> people were dying because of them. families being destroyed. they'd come to florida and get drugs and die on the way home or die at home. 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 careful about that at all. >> someone picked it up building a case, chris. >> i know they're trying, but if they had gotten me, they would have had me by now. >> and they convinced me, nope, no problem here. we have doctors. we can't tell them what to do. they had the doctors sign forms at the end of every day. you didn't overprescribe, and they did all this to protect themselves. >> i know it's a lot of money. i don't want to talk on the phone too much, but there's a country called belize. it's a great place. >> where is that? >> belize is in south america. i'll tell you more in person. this is strictly for asset protection. >> chris had asked me, is there some place offshore i could put money? he says, i was thinking belize. and i said, well, if you want to take the risk like they did in panama in the 80-something. plus, i didn't think he had any real reason to, you know, because i didn't think they were doing anything that illegal. so there were four safes in the attic full of money. >> you know, when you're making money like that, it tends to distract you. our relationship was very rocky. >> what? >> you know why i'm not happy? >> do you think i cheat on you? first of all, you shouldn't do that to me. >> constantly, every single day. every single day, chris, i worry about what you're doing at work. >> i guess he had a couple of assistants. and i think, you know, they worked under his desk. you know what i mean, if you understand what i'm saying? so dianna, pretty sure she didn't like that very much. >> chris didn't want her at the office anymore so he could try to bang the other chicks in the office. so chris opens up a pain clinic and basically gives it to her. that's where executive came from. >> he needed somebody that he could trust to operate the business. so i did. i'm going to be good at it. and i was. >> executive pain, it was a busy clinic. probably the second biggest clinic in the country. seeing about 200 patients a day. >> when i had to kick somebody 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. chris's pain clinics were much more prolific than jeff george's pain clinics were. so chris was definitely at the top of the chart. you would love to get an undercover and working in the clinic. but we couldn't do that in this case. because if you didn't know chris or jeff, you did not get hired. >> we started figuring out, well, what can we do to get an undercover in there? i was sitting at my desk. i was wearing an affliction shirt. affliction was like the big thing back then. and i heard, who are you? and i said, well, i'm the new guy. and she goes, i need an undercover. the second you meet jen, you know she means business. she told me what was going on. and then it's like, you just want me to go basically to a doctor's appointment? and she said, it was not like any other doctor's office you've ever seen before. it was not very clean. chairs like bus terminals, like very close together. >> when you see the video, it doesn't look anything like any medical facility i've ever been into. >> can you guys do me a favor, try to keep the noise down? >> it looks like a dmv. and derek nolan is shouting, shouting at the top of his voice at the patients, threatening them. >> don't do anything stupid like spill your pills in the parking lot and get chewed up. >> walked to the front desk, paid my initial fee. >> what's your name? >> tyler. >> what's your last name? >> beckett. >> the name i was using, tyler beckett. don't ask where it came from. i think josh beckett was a pitcher for the marlins at the time. gave him my mri report. so he looked at it and he said, no, this mri report says there's nothing wrong with you. so i said, can i get a new mri? and he said, sure, give me $50, i'll write you a prescription. so i gave him another $50, wrote me a prescription for the mri. now we're still talking about the guy that's answering phones. pulled a piece of paper out, had directions on it to faye imaging. i get back, i brief everybody and they're like, ok, go to faye imaging. so we follow the address and we pull into the parking lot. immediately you think the guy's messing with you. it's a strip club. you pull around back and sure enough, there's a trailer there. >> am i coming in? >> they're checking people in and they said, oh, this will be a while. >> you can have a seat right over there? >> i said, i'll give you an extra $200. and she said, ok, you're next. and they walked me to the mri machine. they said it would be faxed within an hour. we go back to american pain. i had to do my urine test. and then i got to go in to see the doctor. it was dr. bosher's. he looked worn down. >> we found out later, dr. bosher's, he would use a lot of pills himself. and he would carry a gun to the clinic. we asked him, why do you carry a gun? he goes, that place is dangerous. he took my blood pressure, a quick history. >> he asked me, had i ever taken roxicodone before. you're basically already prescribing me a drug. >> then i knew everybody knows what's going on. i got a little more comfortable because he knows what i'm there for. >> here i am thinking, well, i just left the waiting room with 35 to 40 people slumped over, head nodding. i need to blend in. >> and i felt this whole thing spiraling out of control. >> this very easy task went to failure. i'm trying to think how i'm going to explain this to jen. i just screwed up. i'm the only undercover that can go into a pain clinic and not get pain pills. and i look up. >> and there's chris george standing in front of me, wearing an affliction t-shirt. here's the guy that this whole operation revolves around. nobody's been able to get close to him. >> it was amazing to see doctor refer to chris george as the medical expert. >> i found myself in a hallway, one-on-one with chris. and i'm thinking, don't screw this up. one minute or two minutes of interaction with a main target, you don't know if you're going to get it again. >> so i told him, i didn't know, i can't say, you know, i drink. he's like, yeah, you can't say that, man. he gave me directions to executive, dianna's clinic. took out his wallet, gave me my money back, and he said, look, go to this clinic. >> he made a phone call to dianna. said, hey, i'm sending this guy up to you. i'm like, man, i'm real sorry. are they going to give me a hard time up there? he goes, no, they're not going to give you a hard time. it's all the same. it's all the same thing. >> we went back to the office, and there's a long hallway. i can see jen walking towards me, and i'm just thinking, oh, [bleep] like, she is going to chew me out. and she came up and gave me the biggest bear hug, just about lift me off the ground. and she says, you did it. oh, my god, you did it. >> this was a key bit of evidence that we needed that links chris george to executive pain. and we also have the evidence that chris george is using his cell phone to conduct illegal activity. >> the money out of his wallet, having a doctor get permission from chris when that should be on the doctor, you know, i started putting it together going, wow. >> we knew he had executive pain. we knew dianna ran it, but we didn't know the relationship between the two. that executive pain was open for, quote-unquote, rejects. he didn't want any of his patients to go to his competitors. he wanted to maintain all the money for himself. >> hello? >> you got a whole new office? >> what? >> one day, i come into work, and patients are constantly 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 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. and i thought, the mri is the key to all this. pete had at least 50,000 people that had been scanned, and he had their phone numbers, and he had their addresses. i said, hey, pete, i want to buy your patient list. he goes, give me 25 percent of one of your clinics. i said, done. i set up this call center. it was just a back room in a pain clinic. it was like a little 10 by 8 room, and i put a few phones in there, and we would just start pounding them things, me and a buddy of mine named mike. we would just outright lie. oh, yeah, this is american pain, man. we moved. oh, we didn't tell you? their closed, don't even go there. just come right here. and i'm thinking, whatever works, man. i don't care, you know? >> they had our patient contact information. this is a lot worse than what other clinics were doing to us . é fluid smooth spray. powered by hydrating coconut droplets. with plant-based protein that penetrates. in one spray, get instant shine and smoothness. new tresemmé fluid smooth haircare. business can happen anytime, anywhere. so help yours thrive and stay connected with the comcast business complete connectivity solution. it's the largest, fastest, reliable network. advanced gig speed wifi. and cyberthreat protection. starting at just $49.99 a month. plus, you can save up to 60% a year when you add comcast business mobile. or, ask how to get up to a $750 prepaid card. complete connectivity. one solution, for wherever business takes you. comcast business. powering possibilities. i was really mad when i let my office go up there. >> they come in, and they said, who's that? i said, i am. i'm chris george. okay. i own american pain. okay. you're seeing my patients. i said, you don't own any of these patients, man. they're going to go where they want to go. i can't help it if my clinic's closer. should have thought of that, buddy. and that [bleep] him off. he goes, if you don't give me 50 percent, i'm burning this place to the ground. i said, it ain't going down like that here. and i pulled a gun from my waistband and pointed at him, laid him and his whole entourage up on the ground. the cops get there, and i said, yeah, i pulled a gun on them. of course i did. they come in and shake my business down like they're the mob. they're not getting [bleep] from me. >> and these guys just lied. if i was going to ask for anything, it would be all their money. because all their money was coming from my patients. the police arrested myself, derek, and two of my other friends for extortion. >> that's [bleep] they're making a bad name for this business. >> what [bleep] balls do they have? [bleep] >> now the cops know there's a [bleep] war going on. >> it's like the [bleep] cocaine days. >> jacksonville pain showed us chris george was expanding. he didn't want to just be the leader of pain clinics in south florida. he wanted to be the leader of pain clinics in all of florida. >> a pain clinic down the street just sold five of our patients, so derek's going to handle it now. >> i'm like the [bleep] underboss here. i'm the one that gets called when [bleep] needs to get done. american pain is the [bleep] it's [bleep] the biggest, the best. >> federal investigations are thorough, but they're not quick. we dot our i's and we cross our t's. but you have to balance the amount of time you're spending with the urgency of what's happening in front of you. >> hello? >> hey. >> yeah. >> you hear about our patients? >> there was one particular moment, chris is talking to derek nolan about some people who'd been in an accident. they left his facility. they were high on drugs, and they got hit by a train while trying to cross a train track in their car. >> they tried to [bleep] weave through a railroad crossing and got hit by a [bleep] train yesterday. >> what did they say? >> two of them are dead. one of them is in critical condition. >> did it say there were pain clinic people? >> no, it didn't say it, but it will tomorrow. >> oh, really? >> it will tomorrow that there was roxy scattered throughout the car. >> yeah. >> it might have been exploded. i mean, they honk the horn, and they [bleep] have gates and lights that go off. >> they got hit by a train. you got to be an idiot to get hit by a train. you got to be stupid to get hit by a train. >> you got to be an idiot to get hit by a train, and that was the end of the conversation. >> all right, goodbye. >> it's chilling. it's chilling to hear somebody with no regard for human life and their only regard is profit. >> i guess i had a whole new appreciation that day for how just heartless and ruthless he was. i went to the hospital where the individual who survived the crash was. they were still in a semi-coma. we were, of course, wanting to talk to them about the pills that they got while they were going through american pain. but we never had that opportunity. there was another instance where we were interviewing an individual who came to south florida with three people and were in a terrible, terrible accident. part of his face was severed in the car accident, and i asked him, why come all the way to south florida? and he could barely move his mouth because he was all bandaged up. and he said, because it's like a candy store down there. it's worth it. and he said, as soon as i get out of here, i'm going to go back. and i remember thinking, how are we ever going to stop this? >> you slide it from the bottom, and it skids down, and you chase the smoke. >> roxies, you can smoke them, snort them, you can bang them, you can take them, and you're going to feel them. i've always taken pain pills because i have a bad back and stuff. but the roxies, they're something else. once you take one, oh, my god, the next day, if you don't take one, your stomach's hurting. i mean, they're that addictive. >> everybody got addicted to these pills. everyone i knew. people were losing their homes, selling their kids' food stands, stealing their christmas presents. they'd shoplift, some of them even prostituted themselves out just to get those pills. even my dad, which never did dope, never did drugs, ever, he got addicted to roxies, and he overdosed and died. >> when i sold coke, it was a party. everybody was at the bars. but with the pills, it was do or die. you were going to be so sick if you didn't get it. you'd do anything. i did pain pills before, but the roxies got me. i ended up getting on pretty bad. i got to where i couldn't sleep for three hours without having to get up and snort some pills. >> i started doing all my profit. like, i was probably doing, like, 20 to 30 a day. it was bad. it got to where i lost everything. i lost everything before i even got indicted. my daughter overdosed on pain pills when she was 16 months old on roxies. she got a hold of my prescription, yeah, and she almost died. >> you know, when things are going good, you don't want to stop doing them. there was no reason to stop at that time. >> chris and jeff, they wanted the best of stuff. jeff had a lamborghini. chris gets an unbelievable truck, fancy watches, jet skis. jeff had a 50-foot boat. they did it all. >> i bought three houses and was in the process of buying eight more. and they were mostly just for my friends to live in. going to the super bowl, vacations, concerts, and just going out. >> one wanted to be better than the other. chris wanted to be the biggest, the best, and he achieved it. >> american pain brought in $40 million. >> just for american, or is that all of them included? >> just american. executive did probably about $10 million. >> i was making roughly $500,000 a week. profit, i'm just talking profit. i've always had a fantasy of flying helicopters. after my first clinic, i just ended up getting one. and man, i'd fly that thing all over the place. i landed one time at a kfc. and we walked into that place to grab some chicken, and these girls were like, who in the hell is this dude, man? i was making so much that i turned and lined up towards everything that was happening. i knew people were dying. i knew people were dying that were going to my clinics. i would justify it all. they were going to die no matter what, whether they came here or not. they were going to end up going somewhere else. i just justified all my actions because i was making that kind of money. it was just a drug-dealing game times 10, times 1,000. get 150,000 pills fronted to you. you didn't have to cod. by the time you overran the check, you sold all them pills. and with lou fisher as my compliance officer, and he was also compliance officer for all these distributors, i mean, what lou fisher said was golden. >> i wasn't getting paid by the clinic, so the wholesale always paid me. >> and the pain clinics were using you to say to the wholesalers, lou says we're good, sell us the pills. you were kind of in the middle. >> right, but i had no hesitation to recommend not to sell. >> but did you ever feel yourself stuck between? >> no, they never argued with me. i gave them the information. they said thank you. gave them the report. they mailed me a check. i was done with it. >> right now we're where the pain clinic used to be. zach rose ran it. my computer shop was over there right next door to the attorney's office. >> i had a realtor. i said, hey, do you know anybody that does computer networks and security cameras? he said there's this guy just right down the street. so i went and talked to john. seemed like a real nice guy. he sets up my stuff. everything's cool. >> when they opened, there was hundreds of people crossing cat's head avenue every day getting drugs. it was ruining our neighborhood. >> my office received a telephone call from an individual who had information pertaining to a pain clinic. i had heard about the pill mills primarily down in south florida. i did not know this was happening in jacksonville. >> the source was hired by the owner of the pill mill, zachary rose. so the source had a day-to-day involvement with the pain clinic. >> i'm john presby. i do computer. >> the very first time that i put on the wire, i thought you can't hide it. they're going to see it. but bruce said if there's a problem, you just hit the floor and we're coming in. >> this particular source was able to ask the question and sit back, and these people buried themselves. >> they never questioned me, never tried to stop me. no one said a word to me, ever. >> what are these people going to talk about? i determined it would be money. >> i didn't see any of them with remorse or any of it bothered them. they didn't care. >> hello? >> how's it going? >> i didn't see any of them with remorse or any of it bothered them. they didn't care. you could do it in a year for, like, $11k. hmm. barista: order eleven! yeah, see you at 11. 1111 masters boulevard, please. gonna be eleven even, buddy. really? the clues are all around us! some things are too obvious to be a coincidence. detect this: living with hiv, i learned i can stay undetectable with fewer medicines. that's why i switched to dovato. dovato is for some adults who are starting hiv-1 treatment or replacing their current hiv-1 regimen. detect this: no other complete hiv pill uses fewer medicines to help keep you undetectable than dovato. detect this: most hiv pills contain 3 or 4 medicines. dovato is as effective with just 2. research shows people who take hiv treatment as prescribed and get to and stay undetectable can no longer transmit hiv through sex. don't take dovato if you're allergic to its ingredients, or if you take dofetilide. taking dovato with dofetilide can cause serious or life-threatening side effects. hepatitis b can become harder to treat while on dovato. don't stop dovato without talking to your doctor, as your hepatitis b may worsen or become life-threatening. serious or life-threatening side effects can occur, including allergic reactions, lactic acid buildup, and liver problems. if you have a rash or other allergic reaction symptoms, stop dovato and get medical help right away. tell your doctor if you have kidney or liver problems, or if you are, may be, or plan to be pregnant. dovato may harm your unborn baby. use effective birth control while on dovato. do not breastfeed while taking dovato. most common side effects are headache, nausea, diarrhea, trouble sleeping, tiredness, and anxiety. detect this: i stay undetectable with fewer medicines. ask your doctor about switching to dovato. (vo) at wells fargo, direct deposits come up to two days early with early pay day. what if everything came two days early? (hero) have a good weekend! alright now... have a good weekend. (co-worker) but it's wednesday... (co-worker 2) see you monday! (co-worker 3) am i missing something? (hero) it's the weekend baby... see you later. (vo) like getting things two days early? when it comes to payday, you can with wells fargo. (co-worker 4) what are you doing this weekend? hello? >> how's it going? >> slammed, dude. this place is way too small. we've got way too many people here. >> american pain was growing and kept growing throughout the investigation. >> hi, my name is chris george calling about an office you have for lease? >> uh-huh. give me the name of the business. >> american pain. >> american pain. >> the last office was in lake worth. it was a huge old bank building on two acres. >> what's your use? >> medical. >> well, this has 160 parking spaces and it's basically 20,000 square feet. >> yeah, that's why i like it. >> the bank. so ridiculous. >> when we opened up that monster office in lake worth, we just had it down to a science. everybody knew their role. the doctors were down to 45 seconds to three minutes with each patient. it was just boom, boom, boom. you're in and out. always got what you needed. >> had a national expansion plan. first office in georgia was already set up. it was running. and then we had future ones planned in texas and in missouri, detroit, philadelphia, and in boston. the plans were in the works to really take over the whole country. in a few years, we ran the clinics. we prescribed about half a billion pills. we were on track to get to a billion and probably double every year after that. >> so then i was looking to buy a pharmaceutical wholesaler and also how i could start my own drug manufacturing company to make my own oxycodone. >> part of the franchise plan was also to buy a bank because the banks were a huge problem taking in so much cash. >> the clinics were growing out of control and they needed to be shut down. >> the fbi, dea, irs, and the broward and palm beach county sheriff's offices raided american pain clinic early wednesday. agents were also raiding at least two other clinics owned by jeff george or his family members. >> we had well over 200 federal agents and at least that in local police. >> we showed up to chris' house to serve the search warrants. he was not there. >> we ended up calling chris george on the phone. >> hello? >> christopher? >> yes. >> it's the sheriff's office. >> what's wrong? >> you need to come home right now. there's some people at your house that need to speak to you. >> we breached the entrance, initiated the search. we seized a small amount of cash, some documents. >> hello. >> hey. >> babe, i'm [bleep] they have a search warrant. they're inside my house. >> what? for what? >> i don't know. >> we did find three firearms. chris is a convicted felon. he's not supposed to have any firearms in his house. >> call your lawyer right now, chris. >> you need to go there and see what's going on. listen, there are two guns in the garage. you need to say they're yours. >> i'll get rid of them. >> baby, you might have to take the blame for some of this stuff. >> that's fine, babe. call your lawyer. >> babe. 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. i said, go check the attic. and the investigator found three safes with over $4 million in them. >> hey chris, i'm sorry, honey. >> they knew exactly where these safes were. someone very close to you knew that and is the informant. >> is it okay to talk on this phone? >> babe, this isn't good at all. this isn't good at all. >> okay. >> [bleep] dude. where are you at? >> i'm almost there. >> babe. >> yes? >> [bleep] dude, i don't know. maybe i should kill myself. >> you need to relax and you need to think of a plan. >> i'm just going to kill myself. babe, you know i love you, right? >> killing yourself is not the answer. you cannot leave me here by my [bleep] self to deal with your dirt. >> what do you want me to do? >> i don't know, chris. i don't know what you got us into. >> oh, babe, i'm [bleep] i'm [bleep] babe. >> because the george brothers had been living such an outlandish lifestyle for so long and they had gotten away with so much, we wanted chris to feel like there was no place to hide. >> what's going on? >> listen, they showed me pictures of you [bleep] some other girl in your car. >> [bleep] >> and you [bleep] come clean to me right now or i'm going to [bleep] kill you. >> that's a [bleep] lie. that's a [bleep] lie. >> yeah? >> they're trying to get you to turn on me. don't [bleep] listen to them, man. there ain't [bleep] like that. >> hold on. >> babe. you hear me? hello? you hear me? >> so, at some point, didn't they show you a photograph, a compromising photograph of chris? >> that was a story i made up. i made that up. he was at his lowest point. i wanted to mess with him a little more. see if i can get the truth out of him before i went to jail for him. shocker. yeah, if i was going to face a sentence for him, be a man. say what's real. don't be a jack wagon. >> major new developments today in the case against one of our area's biggest prescription drug kingpins. >> the twin brothers, jeff and christopher george. >> now facing allegations of violent crimes. >> running one of the largest illegal prescription drug networks. >> chuck jarsinski couldn't believe prosecutors found $4. 5 million in his neighbor's home. >> they did? holy smokes. >> two brothers, their mother and one of the men's wives have all pleaded guilty to taking part in a massive illegal drug network. >> jeff george pleaded guilty today to a racketeering conspiracy charge in federal court. >> guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud. >> guilty to second degree murder in connection with overdose deaths. >> pill mill mastermind jeff george will spend the next 15 years behind bars. >> i got an alert on my phone that said my bank account was $99 million in the negative. and i thought, what the hell is going on? i didn't think nothing of it. i go into mcdonald's and order a hot cakes and sausage. insufficient funds. second bank card declined. third bank card declined. i'm like, what in the hell? i call my personal banker and she said, it's the u. s. marshals. they have a hold on your account. i said, what? and i just went outside and just threw up in the parking lot of mcdonald's. i was sick. >> john frisky made it to where the hard drives kept breaking on purpose so he would come take my hard drives out of the computer, put new ones in. he'd turn them hard drives into the dea and they were just stealing evidence, stealing evidence. >> i went to prison for seven years. now i'm on probation. vinny, i think got 20 or 25 years. they raided all his clinics, took all his cars. the dea was hauling all the cars out of his warehouse. that truck was right there. he still kept that thing to the very end. >> you know pete tendale? >> ah, parking lot pete. we didn't feel that we had enough evidence to charge him as part of the conspiracy at the time. but pete being pete, he didn't learn his lesson. >> he'd opened up a pain clinic in tennessee and unfortunately he'll probably be in prison for the rest of his life for that. went to trial and lost. >> once the real heavy raids were going on, everybody dropped me. then the state of florida stopped them from dispensing. they didn't need me anymore. then i got into the speaking side of it with janssen pharmaceutical. janssen made something called fentanyl. it's a patch. it's dangerous, yes. the drug can kill you, but it can help you too. >> to me it was just another house full of men. these guys, they're all scumbags. they're all scum of the earth. i was a scumbag. i was a criminal. i assisted in the demise of the american culture. you know, looking back at my growth, you know, i was a [bleep] [bleep] and [bleep] back then, along with all these other guys. >> man, i don't like the fact that i lost the majority of my adult life. the juice definitely wasn't worth the squeeze now. served 10 years. i mean, i've been home for two days. it's been about 48 hours i've been free with my jewelry. >> my aunt, pat, she was getting a $500 a month disability check, and she decides to put $60,000 down on a $200,000 home. and that's what got the feds looking at us, all of us. >> they called me a drug lord. the judge considered me the kingpin. >> i don't believe in snitching, but i did what i felt was best for me and my family. me and whitney both went down there and testified. >> i was in the dorm with dianna george and her mother-in-law. they was kind of stuck up, but they was cool. you know, we played cards together every day. and i was like, hey, you was at the doctor's office. she was like, i own the doctor's office. and i was like, ok, that's why you're here. the mother-in-law, they called her gangster granny. she was real naive. she really doesn't believe she did anything wrong. but, i mean, i think that it was an eye-opener for her, for sure. >> chris wouldn't take a plea. he just kept saying, i didn't do anything. i'm going to plead not guilty. so they charged denise and dianna with wire fraud, which was a potential five-year maximum sentence. and the wire fraud was nothing more than a questionnaire. >> it was about how many out-of-state patients we had versus how many in-state patients we had. it was a lie. it was a lie. >> i met chris on the van, and i didn't like him. i don't like the fact that he let his mom go to prison for any amount of time. i don't care if she only did it a couple years. still, it's your mama. >> when i went to jail, i was relieved that i was going to detox. i went through the worst hell you could imagine. i laid in a medical cell for three days, straight naked, [bleep] throwing up constantly. and i was just praying, like, if there's a god, just let me die right here. i was ready. i was ready to be done off the pills. i mean, those things were killing me slowly. and they were killing a lot of people. i mean, i've seen a lot of people die from them. people that were friends of mine that died from the drugs i sold them. >> we actually reviewed the ♪ ♪ our love is strong when no one does the other wrong ♪ ♪ our love is lasting ♪ ♪ when there are no questions just understanding ♪ ♪ there's no need ♪ ♪ woah ♪ ♪ it's sweet love, it's sweet love ♪ ♪ it's sweet love baby ♪ pandora gift sets for every love. starting at $99 as a musician living with diabetes, fingersticks can be a real challenge. that's why i use the freestyle libre 2 system. with a one-second scan, i know my glucose numbers without fingersticks. try it for free at freestylelibre.us at adp, we use data-driven insights to design solutions to help you manage payroll, benefits, and hr today, so you can have more success tomorrow. ♪ one thing leads to another, yeah, yeah ♪ ♪when i was but a child... eating heinz on spaghetti.♪ ♪i hoped and wished that i could be a grown-up already.♪ ♪adulting sucks!♪ [background singers echo] ♪adulting sucks♪ ♪you have to eat healthy... all the time?♪ ♪but fortunately...♪ ♪your ketchup can be, no sugar added heinz.♪ for instant volume and hair that shines and flows like water. new tresemmé fluid volume spray. infused with a blend of biotin and plant-based protein that penetrates. in one spray, get naturally lifted, exceptionally fluid hair. new tresemmé fluid volume haircare. (vo) at wells fargo, direct deposits come up to two days early with early pay day. what if everything came two days early? (hero) have a good weekend! alright now... have a good weekend. (co-worker) but it's wednesday... (co-worker 2) see you monday! (co-worker 3) am i missing something? (hero) it's the weekend baby... see you later. (vo) like getting things two days early? when it comes to payday, you can with wells fargo. (co-worker 4) what are you doing this weekend? >> we actually reviewed the patient files that we seized from the george brothers' clinics. and then we started making phone calls to sheriff's departments and to police departments around the country. we pulled approximately 300 names from the patient files that we seized. a random sampling of people. and we realized that 10% of that random 300, once we checked, were deceased. so if you extrapolate that out to 28,000 patient files, you're talking about almost 3,000 dead from this one organization alone. and that's just of the people that went to the clinic. that doesn't include the secondary or even the tertiary drug market. most of the customers from these facilities who died, died of overdose. and the rest died of accidents. >> thanks to the george brothers and their industry, we've lost thousands, tens of thousands of americans. and you can't help but think about the great number of citizens that gave their lives to this epidemic. >> when the george brothers got busted in florida, it hurt us. it hurt us bad. the whole louisville got sick. and the crime rate went really high. >> there's no pills. and you're riding around looking, no pills. >> that's when heroin come in. i see friends of mine, they're homeless, holding signs, shooting heroin now. and every one of them started out on roxie's. being an addict, it takes a toll on you. i've been locked up in louisville metro 37 different times. i had two kids that was adopted when i was in federal prison. i got to see them one time, and then they went through with adoption. >> lord, i ask that you be with my friend as she walks out this door. help her to be the person that you would have her to be, lord. >> i don't want to keep living this life. i don't want to keep going to jail. >> amen. >> my daughter, i hope that she comes to look for me soon. when she comes and finds me, i don't want her to see a needle junkie that's in jail. i want to have my shit together. >> i had heard that you had someone close to you who was either addicted or -- is that true? and can you explain that? >> yeah, i'd rather not talk about that. >> sorry, johnny. >> oh no, i was just unprepared for it. it's all right. well, i lost a son to it. it doesn't ever go away. he had a car accident in tennessee, lost his spleen, and was in a lot of pain. he got medicine from the pill mills, and i didn't know they were pill mills. i didn't even know he was getting medicine. he o.d.-ed on it. you're having a lot of that. zach moved next door to me, and i was happy to shut him down. you've got to end it. you've got to end these people. you've got to put them out of business. and it's everybody's job to do it. everybody's, i believe. >> the industry, the doctors, the drug stores, and me, we were all drug dealers. because everybody knew what the other one was doing. if you didn't, you were stupid. i mean, look at people that own the clinics. come on. the manufacturer was making billions of pills. you think they didn't know? >> the doctors turned a blind eye. the owners turned a blind eye. the pharmacists turned a blind eye. the distributors turned a blind eye. and everyone just lying in their pockets full of money. >> i mean, don't get me wrong, they definitely should have came after us, but they didn't want to go after big pharmacy. they didn't want to go after the drug distributors. they just wanted us. we're nobody. the money we made is peanuts compared to what big pharma's made over the years. it's basically ruining people's lives. >> so after all this, florida finally puts regulations and controls in place. why do you think it took them so long? pass? >> pass on that one. i think it's politics, dude. i don't want to get involved with that. >> i don't know why they pushed the boundaries the way they did. you know, the five-cent psychologist, they'll tell you, oh, they had no consequences. or you're going to hear they were spoiled rich kids. why i think? i don't know. i don't know. i don't know . >> chris is finally getting out of prison after over ten years. it's very exciting for all of us. i just want him to come home to something that he'll be surprised by. he deserves it. he really does. >> a lot of emotions going wild this morning, but i'm excited. i've been waiting for this for a long time. [ phone ringing ] >> oh, my god, that's him. oh, my god. oh, my god. oh, my god . ♪ >> in the end i pled out to one count of racketeering conspiracy and was sentenced to 17 1/2 years in a federal prison. i ended up serving 11 years. my brother jeff pled out to racketeering conspiracy, same as me, and got 15 1/2 years in the federal system, but he was also charged with murder for a patient who overdosed and got 20 years for that charge, which is why he's still in prison now. i definitely wish people didn't die from the medication. i don't know why certain people did die, but in the end, it's their responsibility. they're responsible for themselves. i'm not. they said they were in pain to my doctors. they got an mri showing they were in pain. so the doctors gave medication. now, what they did with that is out of my hands. addiction in this country has always been here. so i don't think we actually 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, and now they die at three times the rate. i can't say that i'm responsible for it. they're responsible for causing a problem in the country. they're the ones that came there and drove however many miles they drove, 600 miles or 1,000 miles. they're the ones that did this. the patients are the ones that caused whatever problems we have here. they act like i'm the bad guy here because i own the business, but i didn't prescribe one pill. you know, in this country anybody can open a business. that's the good thing about it. there's a lot of things i want to look into now that i'm out. you know, things have changed out here, and i want to find out, you know, what the best business would be to open. you know, just deciding, you know, what to do. we already have a few things going on in the real estate industry. derek and i started a business together, building homes, and we have everything set up for that right now. >> if there's another housing crisis or something like that, we may have to venture back into the medical field. >> what's new in your life? what's happened since last sunday? >> well, i got married. my wife delivered twin boys. your own stepfather told me not to name them chris and jeff. >> that would be pretty funny, i guess. >> yeah. >> i'm just keeping my options open. i'm going to figure something out here real soon. ♪ ♪ >> announcer: this is cnn br