Original subtitles

In 2008, the oxycodone epidemic reached South Florida.

This drug was killing kids.

Blane's addiction just got progressively worse.

It looks sort of like a zombie movie.

[woman 1] People snorting their pills,

people selling their pills.

Our local police keep telling me this is legal

in the state of Florida.

The pain clinics, they're everywhere.

I'm not answering any of your questions.

[woman 2] Chris and Jeff George are twin brothers.

Nobody was dealing anywhere near as many pills as they were.

Cash deposits of 150,000, 200,000 a day.

There were tens of thousands of people

who got drugs from this place.

They just appeared to be completely unstoppable.

Everybody knew that patients were dying

and nobody cared.

It makes you sad, it makes you angry.

It takes a little bit of your heart.

They just didn't feel like I could exhale...

[man on mic] 30 seconds out.

[woman 2] ...until we found the evidence we needed

to bring it to an end.

I'm special agent, Jennifer Turner.

[narrator] This isFEDS.

My name is Renee Doyle and...

I live in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

I was a single mom. I had four sons.

It's a very family-oriented environment.

A wonderful place for kids.

Blane is my third.

He was a strong-willed kid.

But he had a great sense of humor.

He was a great soccer player.

But in 2002, when Blane was 20 years old,

he ended up in a car accident.

He was okay, but...

his leg and knee...

was injured.

We went to the orthopedic doctor

and of course, they prescribed...

pain pills.

Oxycodone.

Oxycodone is an opiate and...

it is a very addictive drug.

It's something that you should just maintain

for a few days

and then, go on to something lighter.

But when Blane finished the prescription,

he continued taking pain pills.

At first, I did not know he was continuing.

But then, I saw his personality change.

He was just hazy and very argumentative.

I started seeing things missing.

That's how I really realized

how bad he was, that he was...

actually stealing from us.

Blane's addiction just got progressively worse.

He was very lethargic, blurry, you know, uneasy.

And two weeks before his 28th birthday,

Blane was walking down this very busy road.

He was just completely filled with drugs.

Completely out of his mind.

And was struck by a car.

And he died.

As a parent, losing a child, it takes...

little bit of your heart.

Takes a little bit of your heart.

And you never get over it.

I can tell you, you never get over it.

It's been 12 years.

At first, I did not know where these pills were coming from.

But later on, I found out

there was a pain clinic right around the corner

from my house.

The pain clinics were very different

from your regular doctor.

They made it very easy to get pain pills.

It was becoming an epidemic in our area.

Many people had a loved one that suffered from addiction.

And pain clinics were everywhere.

The state of Florida had over 900.

Broward County had 150.

Our community was suffering.

In 2008, I was assigned to the Miami division

of the FBI,

where after years of working healthcare fraud,

I was transferred to the organized crime squad.

Coming on to a new squad,

I was really looking to fit in and contribute.

On my floor in the building, we had break room,

and as I'm getting water from the water cooler,

I hear local police talking about these pain clinics,

also known as pill mills.

But they were bringing all of these people

from other states down to South Florida

to obtain large amounts of oxycodone.

[Renee] And we're not talking about,

you know, five pills or 12 pills.

We're talking about hundreds at a time.

Three-hundred, 500.

Massive amounts.

It was evil.

They're causing somebody to become an addict

and... um, maybe die.

So, when I initially learned about the problem,

I felt I actually have something

that I can bring to the table

and really contribute to my new squad.

The FBI has federal jurisdiction.

There's a local jurisdiction

that our local police departments have that I don't.

And that's the whole purpose of a task force environment.

That we all bring our various resources

and authorities to bear,

to help combat a singular problem.

In this case, the pain clinics in South Florida.

But we had more pill mills in South Florida

that we did McDonald's restaurants.

As much as I wanted to try and shut all of them,

obviously, that wasn't possible.

We were going to have to pair that down.

So, we obtained a list

of the top 12 oxycodone dispensing positions.

The top five worked for the same group of clinics.

American Pain. East Coast Pain.

And then, executive pain.

All were owned and operated by Chris and Jeff George.

Chris and Jeff George are twin brothers.

They were 28 years old.

Physically, they were imposing characters

by the looks of them.

They cared quite a bit about health and fitness.

Chris had been arrested in the past

for sort of nuisance charges.

Growing up, they were just kind of low-level

sort of thugs.

But they came from a wealthy family.

Their father owned a business that

built homes in South Florida.

So, he got them out of all kinds of trouble.

But nothing to this level

I really wanted as many resources

in on this case as possible.

Kurt McKenzie was also an FBI agent

on the organized crime squad.

I had a very high regard

for Ken's studiousness and his dedication

and his focus.

[Kurt] We went to the pain clinics

to at least put eyes on them

to help give me mental reference

for what I was dealing with.

The best way I can describe it,

it looks sort of like...

a zombie movie.

Droves of people who obviously hadn't had a shower in days,

with their eyes half closed.

Just flooding into the front door.

They were disheveled.

They were strung out.

They could barely stand upright,

let alone stay in a straight line.

We could see people using their pills

in the clinic parking lot as soon as they obtained them.

People snorting their pills, people selling their pills.

It was so obvious that it was becoming

a feature on local news.

[reporter] Bouncers at executive pain management

aren't talking.

I'm not answering any of your questions

but we need for y'all to leave.

[reporter 2] Well, can I ask the manager?

Can't talk to anybody.

[Jennifer] It's very difficult for your mind

to rectify.

The idea of a medical clinic

that should be there to help people

with a place that was

dispensing copious amounts of these addictive substances.

Any reasonable person would instantly know

that this was nothing but a drug trafficking facade.

And anybody who denies that

is lying, or stupid.

It wasn't right.

Addicts needed help.

Yet, there were supposedly

physicians inside, writing prescriptions

for these pills.

This drug was killing kids.

It was killing people.

And it was very frustrating to see that

nothing was being done.

[Jennifer] We needed to shut these clinics down.

Our local police departments

keep telling me this is legal in the state of Florida.

So, why is that?

Simply put, at the time,

Florida did not have

a prescription monetary program

that monitors the numbers of pills

that individual patients are receiving.

So, even though you have individuals

who are drug seekers,

the police weren't able to do anything about

the clinics themselves,

let alone the physicians

because they were all operating legally.

Very few of the patients were actually from South Florida.

The tags on the vehicles that you'd see in the parking lot

were from as far west as Texas.

But primarily, Appalachia.

So, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia.

Because that was where the heart of the burgeoning

opioid crisis in the United States was.

[Jennifer] These people were coming

all the way to South Florida to get highly addictive substances

that they wouldn't be able to receive in their home state.

I was pretty quickly deflated.

Because this appears to be so flagrantly illegal,

but I really wasn't sure

where the illegal activity was.

I had to go back to the drawing board.

I decided to conduct a logical investigation

and let's see what kind of

evidence with illegal activity

we find if any at all.

When you're working a case of this scale

and we turn it into an official operation in the FBI,

agents are allowed to come up with their own operation names.

[Kurt] So, I-95 is about a ten-lane highway

going North and South.

Runs all the way from the bottom of Miami

all the way through the top of the state of Florida

into Georgia.

And it's a very popular highway

with pain clinic customers

who are arriving here from Appalachia

and other states to get drugs.

You would see pain clinics popping up in strip malls

all along roads that led to I-95.

So, we'd nicknamed the highway

oxy-ally.

Because of the volume of oxycodone

was being trafficked

along the highway.

So, we ended up with Operation Oxy-alley.

What we really needed was to obtain evidence

of what crime might be committed inside of the clinic.

So, some of the local police officers volunteered

to pose as patients.

We wanted to see exactly how lacks the procedures were

for handing our narcotics to patients.

We would send in one undercover officer at a time.

Walk in, they would pay their fee,

and they would sit and wait...

before being seen by a physician.

The doctors in a legitimate medical clinic

provide care that's individualized for you

and your ailment.

That didn't happen in the Chris George clinics.

[Kurt] We saw a little to no examinations being conducted.

We saw pills being handed out after a very short

interview.

[Jennifer] The pill-seekers directed how much pills they received.

And as long as they consistently asked for...

more and more and more pills,

they obtained more and more pills.

And that was the same thing

for every patient day after day, after day

in all of the clinics.

The list of irregularities within these clinics

goes on and on.

But where is the illegal activity?

The doctors were working inside a licensed

lawful establishment.

They were actually seeing the patients face-to-face.

They were writing prescriptions.

So, we did not see evidence initially

that any physicians were breaking law.

[Renee] It was very frustrating.

These pain clinics knew that addicts were coming in and...

making their scores right there,

and that was so painfully wrong.

It was horrible.

I don't understand how they have a conscience,

that they could do this.

But as long as the doctor had his license up on the wall,

everything was fine to run.

When I initiated the investigation,

clearly, I did not understand the scope of the problem.

But as the investigation grew,

my education of the problem grew.

And a sense of urgency

grew as well.

It just didn't feel like I could exhale...

until...

until we found the evidence that we needed

to put a stop to it.

I wanted to know as much as I could

about how things were operating inside of those clinics.

So, I really wanted our IRS partners to join us.

[David] My name is David Keyes.

I'm a retired special agent with IRS Criminal Investigation.

The basis of what we do is to follow the money.

Right? It's literally our mantra.

Either to prove tax evasion or tax fraud,

or money laundering.

[Jennifer] My thought initially was,

we were dealing with clinics that were

potentially involved in healthcare fraud.

But these clinics did not take insurance,

they did not take credit cards.

They only took cash as a form of payment.

Literally currency.

There were no medical programs being built.

No Medicare, no Medicaid.

So, there was no healthcare fraud.

But where there's cash,

I'm starting to feel more and more confident

that we're gonna have money laundering.

[David] Money laundering.

So, anytime you get proceeds of illegal activity,

any financial transactions that occur

are illegal under the money laundering laws.

From surveillance on the George clinics,

we became aware that these clinics

had three, four, 500 patients a day

paying $500 in cash

for the office visit.

Then, anywhere from a 1,000 or more

to buy pills

from the inhouse pharmacy.

Cash drawers were emptied into huge trash bins

with trash bags

that would fill up multiple times a day.

We would see from subpoenaing bank records.

150,000, 200,000 a day depositing in bank accounts

to the point that multiple banks

were shutting them down

for anti-money laundering risk management.

They were running out of places to put all of this cash.

Cash would get lost.

Cash would get stolen.

There are photos of employees

playing in piles of cash on the floor,

like kids in a snowstorm.

It's a logistical problem storing it, keeping it secure.

But one of the easiest ways to get it secure

is to buy an asset.

Analyzing the bank records,

there were cars that were bought.

Property being bought. Houses, land.

Luxury, high-end truck vehicles.

Jet skis.

Jeff George purchased a strip club.

They would take trips all over the country,

flying in a private jet.

Basically, anything they could spend the money on.

As an IRS investigator,

my goal was to take back those assets.

But you have to prove that the money you're talking about

is the proceeds of illegal activity,

and then, the assets bought with that money are tainted.

And subject to seizure and forfeiture.

[Jennifer] So, while the IRS were investigating

potential money laundering,

we're still looking for evidence of illegal activity.

And one of the best tools in our arsenal

is a wire intercept.

We did believe that Chris George's cellphone

was probably the best one to go up on.

Because Chris kind of rose to the top

more so than his brother.

But utilizing a wire intercept is extremely intrusive.

I have to attain permission from a judge

for that.

We needed evidence of...

Chris George utilizing his cellphone to direct

illegal activity.

In July of 2009,

one of our undercover task force officers

went to American Pain.

This time, the doctor did ask him a few questions

and one of those questions was,

"Do you drink alcohol?"

And the undercover said,

"Well, yeah, I might have a beer or two at night."

For whatever reason,

the doctor got a little uncomfortable with this.

Saying, you know, "When you mix alcohol with these drugs,

it can cause all kinds of problems.

Let me call in our resident expert,

and we'll see what he has to say."

And sure enough, who walks in but Chris George?

Chris George is not a medical doctor.

He's not...

authorized by law

to recommend or deny

or issue a prescription to anybody.

Or direct anybody to do so.

Chris says, "Don't worry,

I got another place that you can go.

Let me make a call."

And he utilizes his cell phone

and he ends up calling Executive Pain.

And Chris George says to the undercover,

"It's no problem, it's all the same.

They're expecting you, just go up there."

"Those doctors there at Executive Pain

will see you

and will get your prescription.

You'll get your medication."

Right there, we knew, we had evidence of a crime.

[Jennifer] We could finally show a court,

unquestionably, that Chris George was utilizing

his personal cellphone

to conduct illegal activity.

So, we could get a wire tap on his phone.

It was huge.

That was a good day in July of 2009.

When you've flipped the switch and go live on someone's phone,

we literally have a wire room

where we are listening to calls live.

If the call is flagged as Containing Illegal Activity,

they will type out the entire conversation

for future potential use.

It's evidence that you're not able to obtain

any other way.

It's invaluable.

And early on, it allowed us to understand

the physicians, their motivations.

[Christopher] I own the biggest office in the country.

Average doctor earning between

two and $6,000 per day.

[Augusto] Oh, okay.

I'm really interested in making a lot of money.

We learned the physicians at American Pain

were paid $75 per patient

that they wrote prescriptions for.

[Kurt] The more productive doctors could see as many as...

fifty patients a day.

So, you do the math.

And they were also paid a $1,000 per week

if they allowed Chris George to use their DEA

license number to order pills into the clinic.

[Kurt] You have these doctors making

thousands and thousands of dollars per week

for working anywhere from six to less than eight hours.

[David] The motivations varied for the doctors.

But it was usually because they needed

more money, quickly.

Could be their retirements weren't good anymore.

Investments weren't good,

Debts, gambling problems,

whatever it might be,

they were lured in, thanks to the money.

As a parent, I was just very angry.

Because there was just no conscience

with anybody that worked there.

They were being paid so much

that they didn't care.

They just wanted their money.

It was the power of the almighty dollar.

We hold doctors on a pedestal for good reason.

You know, the education they have to obtain,

the experience they have.

And they're involved, in some way, shape or form,

saving lives,

making people's lives better, improving...

quality of life.

These doctors weren't doing that.

These doctors were ruining lives.

There is a federal stature that involved physicians

prescribing outside the scope of professional practice.

And we started to hear evidence of that.

[Christopher] Are you familiar with pain management?

[Augusto] I don't have any experience in pain management,

at all.

[Christopher] Well, that's okay. It's okay if you don't.

[Jennifer] So, we knew that the physicians

were prescribing controlled substances

not related to the scope of the professional practice

that that physician is involved with.

Which is illegal.

But we want to work a case that encompasses

all of the illegal activities

that are being done by the entire criminal enterprise,

not just the doctors.

We did hear conversations on the wire

about the extent of illegal activity

in both Chris George's world and Jeff George's world.

They were talking about lying on paperwork.

[Christopher] Remember, we're lying about

how many are out of state.

If you give them our real dispensing log,

it's gonna show that everybody's from out of state.

You hear them talking about the patients.

[Michael] These hillbillies, don't give a[bleep] about their health.

That there was no patient care provided.

And in fact, the more patients his doctors were able to see in a day,

the more money he made.

[Christopher] I want them to make a lot of money.

The more they make, the more I make.

All of these things in their own words

and their own voice.

That's incredible evidence.

But we were doing something brand new here

and we didn't know how much evidence was enough.

Was it gonna work? Was it gonna stick?

We really, honestly didn't know.

We wanted all of the evidence that we could possibly obtain

in order to bring the case to an indictment.

So, we continue to listen.

By this time, we have been working the case

for not quite a full year.

And as 2009 started to unfold,

we were receiving more calls

from police departments throughout the country.

Because more and more people were dying

of overdose deaths.

And they would find the deceased with

pill bottles from doctors

working for one of the George Brother clinics.

The deaths were trickle at first,

and then, they absolutely became a constant stream.

There was a huge toll of deaths.

Car accidents all over the place.

Not only here in South Florida,

but up I-95.

One day, a car load of patients

from Tennessee had just left Chris' clinic.

They'd all started popping the pills in the cars.

And at a train crossing, they stopped on the tracks.

[Kurt] They were so under the influence,

they didn't realize the train was coming.

The train hits them.

The next day on the wire intercept,

we hear Chris George discussing

this train crash.

[Derik] They tried to [bleep] weave through

a railroad crossing

and got hit by a[bleep] train.

Two of them were dead.

[Christopher] You have to be an idiot to get hit by a train.

[Jennifer] It really gives you an insight

into how cruel and crass

these individuals were.

No sympathy, no remorse.

Nothing of that nature, just...

what a bunch of f-ing idiots.

And what a bunch of morons...

to try and do that.

And so, that...

It... it...

It makes you sad, it makes you angry.

And when you see the overdosed deaths,

and you see the coroner's reports,

and the autopsy reports,

and the pictures

of the deceased individuals,

it takes a huge toll,

emotionally, personally.

[Jennifer] Working a case of this scale,

it was very important that

we give each other the...

the space and even the grace to have bad days.

To be temperamental, to vent,

to do whatever we needed to do to get it out.

I was the only female federal agent

who worked on the case.

So, I was able to check in on the guys

in ways that you know, only...

kind of a motherly or sisterly sort of way that...

that only a woman can do.

But if anything the overdose does

only added fuel to our fire.

It also started to increase with a sense of urgency

of bringing everything to an end.

Towards the end of 2009,

we heard Chris George starting to

have conversations with real estate agents.

He wanted to expand the business yet again.

He wanted a facility was big enough

to sustain his operations for quite some time.

[Jennifer] There was a real estate agent

who suggested that there was a bank that...

was closed.

It had been closed for a number of years.

And he ended up signing a lease form at the end of the year.

Because of the holidays, I knew no one

would be around.

So, on New Year's day,

I drove up to the new facility.

And as I drove around the parking lot,

I just thought, "Oh, dear God!"

It was enormous.

It was a 20,000-square foot facility.

It just causes you to lose your breath for a few heart beats.

What's going through my mind?

Because they're gonna hire more doctors

because they're gonna see more patients.

Chris George just appeared to be completely unstoppable

and... and...

that was all the more reason why we needed...

to bring it to an end.

[Kurt] The facility was up and running

in February 2010.

There were massive crowds of people.

Many of them looked to be under the influence.

Some people even passing out on the floor of their clinic.

They were utilizing what used to be a bank vault

to store their own money and their own pills.

They could handle two to three times the volume

that they previously did.

[Kurt] We could have waited

another six months to a year

to gather even more evidence.

But we couldn't let that happen.

The longer that facility was open,

the more pills were going out the door,

and the more problems were going to be

resulting from that.

So, that sort of put a little urgency

to shut this whole operation down

on a shorter timeline than we'd originally planned.

The paramount concern were the numbers of overdosed deaths.

[Kurt] You had seven people a day on average.

In Florida alone,

dying of an oxy-related overdose.

So, we decided to serve search and seizure warrants

and bring the entire enterprise in one day.

March 3rd ended up being the day.

March 3rd, 2010.

[Kurt] We had hundreds of agents and officers.

Numerous locations were raided at the same time.

[Jennifer] All the George brothers clinics.

American Pain, East Coast Pain,

Executive Pain.

We weren't going to be arresting people,

but it was the only opportunity

to get the remainder of the evidence that we did not have.

There's a heavy responsibility.

Case had never been worked like this before.

We didn't know if we would find

the evidence that we needed to put people in jail.

But it went so much...

better than I could have ever hoped for.

We seized 28,000 individual paper patient files.

We could see file after file after file.

And everything looked almost the same

in every single file.

It was evidence.

They were prescribing the same thing to everyone.

So, there was no individualized care.

So, they were writing these prescriptions

for no legitimate medical purpose.

And that was very, very clear in the patient files.

[Kurt] My job on that day

was to supervise the search of Chris George's residence.

He was not there.

He had already left for the day.

But we found a lot.

We found several bottles of different kinds of

prescription medications,

steroids, and things of that nature.

We found three firearms.

Two shotguns and a stolen nine-millimeter pistol.

Chris George was a convicted felon

and he as such was not allowed to have firearms.

We found explosive material.

I actually had to call the bomb squad

to remove the explosive material from the house.

And I found a white supremacist flag

in his garage.

With any search warrant service,

you hope to gather evidence of a crime.

And that's what we got that day.

I was part of the money laundering investigation.

Huge amounts of bank records were analyzed

before the raid.

So, we seized all kinds of assets

that we could prove

to a court that came through illegal funds.

We seize Chris George's home, Jeff George's home.

Jewelry, Rolexes,

a Range Rover.

Numerous bank accounts.

Over $3 million of currency.

In total, we seized probably a little bit in excess of ten million.

[Jennifer] The evidence of evidence that we obtained,

the amount of cash and assets that were seized,

the amount of pills that were seized that day.

Holy cow! I really got myself into something there.

[giggling]

Once we shut them down, the focus was on...

reviewing the evidence.

[Jennifer] First, we wanted

to take the list of patient names

and find out how many

of these individuals have died.

We ran their...

names, date of birth, social security numbers

to find out who was dead.

There were...

more than any of us hoped to see.

You're talking somewhere in the neighborhood of 3,000

deaths of folks who...

saw one of these doctors during that

little over a year time frame

and are now dead.

[Kurt] And that only represents

the people who actually walked in the door to the clinic.

That doesn't represent the street market

that was fed by this organization.

So, there were tens of thousands

of people

who got drugs from this place.

And the number of deaths is off the scale.

In many of the patient files, we would find...

a simple notation.

D slash C. D/C.

And when we went back and spoke to clinic employees,

we found out D/C meant either discharged

or deceased.

We understood at that point

that everybody that worked in this facility

knew that patients were dying

of overdose or...

accidents related to their drug use,

and nobody cared.

They just went on with business as usual.

Because they were making a lot of money.

I had a level of disgust at what I was seeing.

But it also served to motivate me even more

than I was already motivated.

Because at that point, I was determined

these people were going to jail.

This was not gonna happen again.

They had to go to jail.

Because they knew people were dying and they didn't care.

It wasn't until 2011

that we either arrested individuals or they turned themselves in.

The physicians were reluctant to come in initially

and even when they did come in,

they were very quiet.

They were in complete denial that they were at fault.

[Jennifer] But we knew what the backgrounds

of each of the physicians were.

So, we knew they were prescribing

outside the scope of their professional practice

and we knew they were prescribing

the same thing to everyone.

These were some seriously flawed people...

who put their greed

above their concern

for whether or not their patients lived or died.

[Jennifer] But we needed their cooperation.

[Kurt] We wanted them to point the fingers

at the George brothers and say...

"I was a criminal,

and this person's a criminal as well

because they did exactly what I did.

And we did it together."

[Jennifer] It went on four months on end.

And literally, I felt as though

I wasn't doing my job

if I wasn't living and breathing,

trying to put these individuals in jail.

In order to solicit the doctor's cooperation,

we were just very upfront.

This is the government's case.

This is what we're going to be charging you with.

This was your role in the conspiracy.

And this is why we think it's in your best interest

to plead guilty.

They reluctantly...

understood what we were saying.

Reluctantly.

[Jennifer] The overwhelming majority of the defendants

eventually wanted to cooperate.

Chris and Jeff George

were the last ones to come through the door.

Because they bore the majority of the responsibility.

[Kurt] When we told Chris George

that we were estimating that almost 3,000 people died,

he actually laughed.

And I believe the comment made to us was,

"Well, you know Al Qaeda killed more people

on September 11th."

He thought of the patients as weak.

His attitude was, "Well, if you do drugs, you know, that's your fault.

And if I don't sell them to you,

somebody else will.

So, I'm just here to get paid.

Whatever happens to you is your fault and your problem."

[Jennifer] All they did was continue to...

rationalize and justify what they were doing.

"Well, the state says this is legal.

The state's allowing us to do this.

They're telling us how to operate a business.

And all of a sudden, you guys are coming in,

telling us this is illegal?

That's not true."

[Kurt] The approach we took with the George brothers

was to explain to them

how damning this evidence was against...

them.

And that it would be in their best interest

to plead guilty, because if this went to trial,

they were looking at the potential

of life in prison without the possibility of parole.

[Jennifer] It took hours upon hours

to finally

bring them around to...

"Yes, we knew that we were...

running a drug trafficking organization.

Yes, we know what we were doing was being drug dealers."

[reporter] New developments today in the case

against Fort Lauderdale's biggest prescription drug ring.

Twin brothers, Chris and Jeff George

plead guilty.

But get reduced sentences

in return for cooperating with the government.

[Jennifer] 32 individuals were indicted,

including the George brothers, physicians,

and clinic employees.

The main offenses were drug trafficking

and the money laundering offenses.

[Jennifer] 28 of them

decided to enter a guilty plea with the government.

And they were all sentenced to some...

amount of jail time.

Jeff George got 15 years.

[David] And Chris George got 17 years.

You could argue they should have got more.

But the system was what the system is.

[Jennifer] You do feel a great sense of satisfaction

in seeing them held accountable,

especially because they were all so arrogant.

They had the sense of entitlement

that they were untouchable.

And the feeling of satisfaction was...

you're not untouchable.

We got a lot of publicity for shutting down American Pain.

Not only did the other purveyors of these drugs realize

"My day is coming next,"

but we were also creating a template for how you work

these investigations successfully.

[David] Florida changed its laws.

We got a prescription database monitoring program

to prevent the same patient getting multiple prescriptions

of the same medication.

It was huge thing.

My friends and I, as moms,

we decided to do the grassroots effort

and decided to rally these pain clinics

and make that public awareness.

With the FBI involved,

that opened up the doors for the police,

to be more aggressive.

We started seeing, you know, doctors being arrested

and the owners of the pain clinics

being arrested.

We helped close over a 150 pain clinics

right here in Broward County.

We were seeing a decrease not only in...

pills getting out onto the street,

but also the number of overdose deaths.

From 2010 to 2011,

the death rates from oxycodone overdose dropped

forty percent in the state of Florida.

Forty percent.

The FBI had the resources and the people...

and the connections to be able to successfully

work an investigation of this size.

But special agent Turner was the one who started this.

And I don't think this would have worked as well

if it wasn't for her.

[Jennifer] For a period of a year and a half

to two years or more...

I had no life.

This was my life.

I stopped working out,

because all I did was this case.

The first time I went for a run again,

was the day we arrested Chris George.

Because I finally felt like I could breathe again.

The weight of...

the epidemic, the overdose deaths,

the human toil involved in this case

was unlike anything any of us had ever worked before.

But if the agent I was at the end of the investigation

could speak

to the agent I was at the beginning of the investigation,

I would tell myself that...

"You're going to find a certain amount of personal fortitude

within yourself

that you never

knew existed.

But you have within you all along."

MS13 is the most violent street gang I've ever investigated.

MS13 they are like animals

because they make young kids into psychos.

My job is to protect those kids!