George brothers, 30 others arrested in pain clinic chain

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

George brothers, 30 others arrested in pain clinic chain
Doctor charged with murder
August 24, 2011|By Bob LaMendola

The brothers knew patients had died. In January 2010, the indictment said, Chris George complained on his cell phone to a manager about a new patient who had overdosed.

"Now I got this lawful [sic] death lawsuit for a patient that [Dr.] Jacob [Dreszer] killed... This f---ing idiot came in one time and f---ing died. First visit," Chris George said. "He couldn't handle pain management."

Law enforcement on Tuesday arrested twin brothers they called kingpins of South Florida's biggest pill mill network, along with 31 of their top lieutenants in a criminal operation that used kidnapping and gunfire to profit.

Jeffrey and Christopher George collected $40 million in two years peddling 20 million pain pills from their string of four clinics in Broward andPalm Beach counties, federal prosecutors and police said. They made millions more by selling illegal steroids over the Internet and phony time-shares from a boiler room, officials said.

The 33 people were arrested on multiple charges ranging from racketeering to fraud and illegal drug sales.

Also, one of the brothers' pain clinic physicians was charged Tuesday with first-degree murder for prescribing 210 pain pills to a man who overdosed on them a few hours later. Jeffrey George was charged with second-degree murder in the same case.

Palm Beach State Attorney Michael McAuliffe called the murder charges against Dr. Gerald J. Klein and George a new attack on the illegal trade in prescription narcotic drugs.


"We looked at it not as a tragic accident but as a murder," McAuliffe said at a news conference in West Palm Beach. "We have sent a clear, unmistakable message ... to pill mill operators."

The Palm Beach Gardens brothers, age 30, made so much money at their pain clinics – American Pain, Executive Pain, Hallandale Pain, East Coast Pain and earlier locations in Fort Lauderdale – that employees toted cash away in garbage bags, federal prosecutors said in the indictments.

The bust was the fourth major assault on South Florida pill mills, although all four of the George clinics were shut down in a March 2010 raid, and all or most of the 32 are out of the pain pill trade. Spearheading all of those efforts are a federal-state-local task force led by the FBI and another based at a U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency office in Weston.

The brothers opened the clinics in 2008 after making big money through their illegal steroid business, South Beach Rejuvenation. They staffed the offices with 13 doctors, who saw as many as 500 people a day. Officials said the vast majority of the patients were drug dealers, runners or addicts with no legitimate need for pain drugs.

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