Christopher Paul George

Christopher Paul George, called Chris George (born November 11, 1980, in the United States) is an American drug dealer. Together with his twin brother Jeffrey Frank George (Jeff George) and other parties involved, he ran several pill mills in Florida, which contributed to the opioid epidemic in the USA. George was sentenced to 17.5 years imprisonment in 2012 for these and other crimes. The media called him Pill Mill Kingpin, because he was the owner of the largest network of such clinics in Florida between February 2008 and March 2010.

Origin, family, adolescence The twin brothers Chris and Jeff grew up as children of John George and his wife Denice Haggerty in Wellington, Florida, an area where the inhabitants are considered to be wealthy. The father had become rich in the construction sector. Their parents divorced in 1988. According to their father, Chris and Jeff were not particularly good students, but they acquired entrepreneurial attitudes in the parental home.

Chris was first arrested at the age of 13. Further conflicts with the police followed due to illegal possession of alcohol, brawls, contraventions, obstruction of justice and theft. In 2003 he was arrested for ordering and accepting a package of anabolic steroids for his own use and for friends. Chris George was sentenced to eight months in prison, six of which he served in work furlough, mainly as an employee of his father's business. After being released from prison, he continued working in his father's construction company. Previously, Chris had studied business administration and construction management without earning a degree, spending two years at Palm Beach Community College and two years at Florida International University.

Pill mills

South Florida Pain Clinic After talks with a doctor, Chris George decided at the end of 2007 to enter the pain management business together with his twin brother. He pushed ahead with the corresponding planning and preparations so that the South Florida Pain Clinic could start in February 2008. Its first location was a bungalow on Oakland Park Boulevard, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Within two weeks, Chris George recognized the opportunities in the pill mill business and began the expansion. He placed job offers for doctors on craiglist.org. A few weeks after the business started, a large number of Kentucky and Tennessee-based customers visited the South Florida Pain Clinic. The revenues increased significantly, partly because of so-called sponsors, who paid a handful of people, often opioid addicts, to come to the South Florida Pain Clinic, receive prescriptions for high-dose painkillers, and purchase hundreds of them at the clinic. Some of these pills were given by the patients or buyers to the sponsors, who then sold them on the black market. The clinic responded to these circumstances and the rapidly growing number of clients by moving to a new location, Cypress Creek Executive Court, an office complex near Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport, in summer 2008. At this location the number of personnel was increased. At the same time, internal processes were optimized so that as many patients as possible could be supplied with painkillers in the shortest possible time. The clinic developed more and more into a "prescription assembly line".

Despite the change of name, it was not possible to escape media attention and official observation. For example, the team of Portuguese journalist Mariana van Zeller filmed the clinic. These shots, and those of a subsequent pursuit of the journalist by Chris George and American Pain's head of security, were used in Zeller's documentary The OxyContin Express,

The search for a new location for American Pain began in November 2009 and Chris George decided to move to a former bank building on the North Dixie Highway in Lake Worth. It had three floors and more than 6,000 square meters, twice the size of the previous building on the North Federal Highway and almost twenty times the size of the bungalow on Oakland Park Boulevard. In the same year he acquired a pharmacy (Quick Pharm) in Orlando, Florida, which was subsequently also run by a straw man.

In February 2010, the twin brothers opened a small pill mill in Kennesaw, Georgia, as a precautionary measure in the event of stricter Florida legislation on the prescription and sale of prescription painkillers.

In August 2011, an FBI representative described the group of companies as the largest criminal organization in the USA dealing with the illegal distribution of painkillers.

Observations, criminal proceedings, judgments

For approximately 14 months, the FBI, DEA, the Internal Revenue Service, Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office and other law enforcement agencies evaluated information about the corporate group in covert Operation Oxy Alley

Among the confiscated goods owned by George were three large real estates, several luxury cars and motorboats. In the attic of Chris George's mother's home, $4.3 million in cash was found, stored in several safes.

The 123-page indictment dated August 11, 2011, was directed against George, his twin brother Jeff, Dianna Pavnick George, Denice Haggerty, 13 physicians, and 15 other individuals involved. In order to prove the cooperation of the defendants and the role of the doctors, the indictment was based, among other things, on the RICO act, a federal law passed in 1970, in particular to combat the American mafia. The charges were organized crime, conspiracy, money laundering, illegal distribution of drugs subject to special surveillance, maintenance of premises associated with drugs, and conspiracy to commit fraud in the Internet and mail order business. On February 12, 2012, George was sentenced to seventeen and a half years.

On February 11, 2022, George was released from federal prison.

Adaptations In addition to the contemporary coverage in newspapers and television stations, the criminal activities of the George twins were also taken up in other formats. The TV series Evil Twins described the twin brothers' behavior in the episode The Candymen, which was broadcast in 2015. The CNBC series American Greed made the pill mills of the George twins the subject of the episode Pain Killer Profits in June 2016. History produced Legal Pill Mills Ushered America's Opium Crisis, which deals with the George twins' ventures. John Temple published his book American Pain in 2015, which traces the rise and fall of George's Pill Mills. Warner Bros. acquired the film rights to Temple's work in 2014, and in September 2019 it was announced that a new production company - Faster Horse Pictures - was planning to make the film.

Annex

Literature John Temple: American Pain. How a Young Felon and His Ring of Doctors Unleashed America's Deadliest Drug Epidemic. Lyons Press, Guilford (Connecticut) 2015.