Chasing Pill Mills: An FBI Insider’s Story | The Hidden Third with Mariana van Zeller

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Hidden Third with Mariana van Zeller

Episode: Kurt McKenzie
Date: October 15, 2025
Duration: ~82 minutes

---

Overview

In this episode of The Hidden Third, Emmy- and Peabody-winning journalist Mariana van Zeller sits down with Kurt McKenzie, a former FBI agent, to explore the hidden world of pill mills, pain clinic scams, health care fraud, and birth tourism. Their candid, wide-ranging conversation highlights the ways in which underground economies—often in plain sight—fuel the opioid epidemic, exploit vulnerabilities in the health care system, and impact national security. Both share personal stories from their investigations, discuss the challenges of law enforcement, and reflect on the broader societal implications of their work.

---

Main Discussion Themes

1. Introduction & Shared Background ([00:37]–[01:12])

• Mariana and Kurt realize their investigative paths have crossed before, particularly during the Florida pill mill crises.
• Mariana teases a personal connection to one of Kurt’s cases (“Miami Mama” birth tourism), foreshadowing later discussion.

---

2. Kurt’s Early Career and Path to the FBI ([01:12]–[03:08])

• Kurt’s initial ambition was to be a scientist—he worked in pharmaceuticals and met FBI agents by chance.
• He joined the FBI as a forensic DNA analyst, working on violent crimes: “It’s rape, robbery, and murder. It’s mayhem all, all day long.” (Kurt, [02:18])
• Transitioned from lab work to field agent, assigned to Miami, just before 9/11.

---

3. Miami: America's Fraud Capital ([03:08]–[05:12])

• Kurt describes Miami as “the epicenter” of all types of fraud—investment, health care, identity theft, and more.
• South Florida’s unique blend of crime made the Miami FBI office “like the varsity team.” Despite being smaller than New York, it often had more indictments.

---

4. Operation Oxy Alley: Tackling America’s Biggest Pill Mills ([05:16]–[24:50])

Genesis of the Case

• Both Mariana and Kurt separately investigated “American Pain” and the George brothers, Florida twins behind the largest oxycodone/pill mill operation in US history.
• “Operation Oxy Alley is the name we gave to what ended up becoming the single largest drug diversion investigation in US history.” (Kurt, [05:51])

What Were Pill Mills?

• Clinics outnumbered McDonald’s in Broward County; strip malls might have several side by side.
• Clinics sold prescriptions and sometimes the pills themselves, “which seems like a conflict of interest… but it was legal at the time.” (Mariana, [17:53])
• Patients—often out-of-state—lined up, paid for sham MRIs, and received huge quantities of oxycodone, benzodiazepines, and muscle relaxants.

How Did the Scheme Work?

• Pills sold for $2–$3 each at clinics, then resold for $1/milligram in Appalachia: a 30mg pill could net $30 on the street ([20:18]).
• The lack of a prescription drug monitoring program in Florida allowed for rampant “doctor shopping.”
• “What we found were smaller organized crime groups… would sponsor a vehicle, four or five of your buddies, give them a couple thousand dollars, drive all the way down to Florida… visit as many clinics as they could.” (Kurt, [20:28])

Shocking Details and Notable Moments

• Physicians were “drug dealers with white coats” ([16:42])—many were retired, marginal, or previously sanctioned doctors, now incentivized by profit-sharing.
• In 12 months, one George brothers doctor, Dr. Cynthia Cadet, had 51 of her patients die soon after clinic visits ([38:31]).
• Clinic staff knew the patients were dying. In files, “D / slashee” meant “deceased” or “discharged,” with files archived once someone died ([37:32]).
• Prescriptions were handed out with little to no exam: “The average time was 3 minutes and 45 seconds.” (Kurt, [33:07])
• Stamping and rapid batch-processing of prescriptions kept the clinics running efficiently: “He was the original criminal efficiency expert.” (Kurt, [34:12])

Law Enforcement Response

• Investigators relied on evidence of intent, cash flows, and ARCOs (DEA tracking of all legal narcotics).
• Five of the top 20 highest-prescribing doctors in America worked for the George brothers ([23:04]).
• The total: over 20 million doses of oxycodone dispensed in under two years ([24:37]).

Impact

• After shutting down the operation, Florida saw a 41% drop in oxycodone deaths ([54:34]).

Memorable Quote

"Most Americans are raised to see doctors as the healer. These people were drug dealers with white coats." — Kurt McKenzie ([16:42])

---

5. Journalists & Law Enforcement: Working Side by Side ([12:50]–[15:51])

• Kurt explains why law enforcement nearly never asks journalists for sources; it’s a line they don’t cross for First Amendment and safety reasons.
• “Never a journalist. Not once. It’s just not done.” (Kurt, [15:20])

---

6. The Anatomy of the US Opioid Crisis ([41:35]–[47:58])

Societal Impact

• Death toll: Over a million Americans have died in 20 years from opioid overdoses ([42:13]); 3,000 people die weekly from drugs/alcohol in the US.
• Many addicts were initially prescribed opioids for legitimate pain, only to spiral into addiction.
• Prosecutors struggled to convict doctors on overdose death charges—jury bias against “junkies” cited as a barrier ([39:03]).
• The cases set the blueprint for prosecuting pill mill doctors; now, convictions are more common ([50:07]).

Pharmaceutical Industry’s Role

• Purdue Pharma’s misleading marketing helped fuel the epidemic, claiming 1% addiction rates (“which is bullshit,” Kurt, [46:47]).
• No Sacklers or Purdue execs went to prison; civil fines were minimal compared to profits ([47:44]).
• Insys Pharmaceuticals used similar bribery and fraud tactics around fentanyl prescriptions.
• John Kapoor, Insys CEO, was the first (and possibly only) pharma exec to serve prison time—only two years ([49:46]).

---

7. Birth Tourism & National Security: The Miami Mama Case ([55:10]–[67:13])

• “Operation Miami Mama” targeted clinics catering to Russian women seeking US birthright citizenship for their children.
• Package deals could range from $20,000–$120,000; included OB/GYN, translators, luxury accommodations ([58:02]).
• The children, born US citizens, are raised in Russia—potential future intelligence concerns.
• Over 600 births traced to just two clinics; schemes extended to illegally sublet apartments ([65:14]).
• Prosecution focused on falsified government records (passport applications); main perpetrators received short sentences ([64:22]).
• Passport revocations were possible, but not citizenship ([67:01]).

Notable Moment

“These are now US Citizens who are going to be raised and indoctrinated in Russia… That is correct. They are playing the long game. We are sitting here watching them go right by.” — Kurt McKenzie ([59:03])

---

8. Health Care Fraud: Stealing from the System ([67:28]–[75:49])

• The sheer scale: Over 10–15% of Medicare’s half-trillion dollar budget was stolen annually in the mid-2000s ([68:54]).
• Example: One husband-and-wife ring tried to steal $400 million, netting $200 million through fake clinics.
• Fraud methods:
  • Buying lists of patient data (names, SSNs) to bill for phantom services or equipment.
  • Durable medical equipment fraud; “liquid gold” urine testing scams.
  • Body-brokering: paying the vulnerable (homeless, elderly) to show up for fake treatments.

Notable Quote

“If you look at your paycheck…take 10% of that, and it’s going in some dude’s pocket.” — Kurt McKenzie ([69:06])

---

9. The Hidden Toll of Law Enforcement ([76:13]–[80:31])

• The job is deeply stressful: Kurt shares statistics on divorce, suicide, and illness among law enforcement.
• Support comes from tight colleague bonds; compartmentalizing trauma is necessary but imperfect.
• Mariana and Kurt reflect on “family” among investigative teams—having camaraderie and rituals like group dinners to process tough stories together ([79:22]).
• The emotional consequences on law enforcement and journalists run deep.

Notable Quote

“You will, if you do this job properly for long enough, it will hurt you in some way, shape or form. But you do it for a few reasons: one, you do it because it’s the right thing to do.” — Kurt McKenzie ([77:10])

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “If you’re an FBI agent, Miami—it’s like the varsity team.” (Kurt, [04:55])
• “There were more pain clinics at one point in Broward County than there were McDonald’s.” (Mariana, [17:16])
• “Doctors were paid by the head—50% of what the patients paid.” (Kurt, [31:17])
• “One of the doctors…prescribed more than every single physician in the entire state of California.” (Kurt, [23:20])
• “They all still had medical licenses. That was a requirement.” (Kurt, [30:53])
• “After shutting them down, oxycodone deaths dropped 41% in Florida.” (Kurt, [54:34])
• “Ten to fifteen percent [of Medicare] was being stolen outright.” (Kurt, [68:54])
• “If you walk into a grimy house and flip the lights on, the roaches all scatter. When you shine the light on something unsavory, it just goes away.” (Kurt, [66:13])

---

Key Timestamps

• 00:37–03:08: Kurt’s origin story and laboratory work.
• 03:08–05:12: Fraud culture in Miami.
• 05:16–24:50: The rise and mechanics of pill mills, undercover journalism, and law enforcement’s approach.
• 24:50–38:07: The deadly prescribing practices and pill mill profits.
• 38:07–47:58: Legal, societal, and pharma industry complicity in the opioid crisis.
• 55:10–67:13: “Miami Mama”—birth tourism, national security, and the Russian connection.
• 67:28–75:49: Health care fraud, durable medical equipment scams, and insurance fraud nationwide.
• 76:13–81:31: The personal costs of policing underground economies; emotional toll, camaraderie, and resilience.

---

Tone & Style

• The tone is candid, occasionally darkly humorous, but always seriously committed to exposing underground economies and the real human stakes.
• Both speakers combine insider expertise with personal vulnerability, offering rare insight into both the mechanics of hidden markets and their hidden tolls.

---

Conclusion

This episode gives a visceral, multifaceted tour of how criminal entrepreneurs—sometimes with white coats and degrees—exploit the cracks in health, legal, and immigration systems to profit from addiction, desperation, and global demand. Through Kurt McKenzie’s unfiltered accounts and Mariana van Zeller’s relentless curiosity, listeners gain both a blueprint of fraud’s mechanisms and a sense of what it costs to fight them. They agree: shining a light helps, but broader, systemic change is needed—from treatment and regulation to accountability in both medicine and government.

Transcript

[Kurt Mackenzie]

When I was there, you had to have a knife. One of you's got to take turns carrying it up your rectum.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Wait, it's up your butt.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

That's the prison wallet. You'll never leave home alone.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

You have something protected around it, I'm assuming.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Yeah. Or else you'll be bleeding out your coolo.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

I'm Mariana Van Zeller, and after reporting on black markets for my Emmy winning National Geographic show, Trafficked, I'm launching a podcast. You're getting emotional on me. Intimate conversations with those operating in the shadows. The Hidden Third is out now with new episodes every Wednesday. [e-mail] marianavanzeller Follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hi, Kurt.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Good to see you again, Mariana.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

I am so happy you're here.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

I'm glad to be here.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

We have a lot in common.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Yes.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Right. We've both dug into the pill mills.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Yes.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

The same twin brothers.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Yes. At the same time.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

At the same time, it turns out. Which. We'll talk in a little bit. We both investigated health care fraud.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Yes.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

And I actually have a personal story to talk to you about regarding one of your investigations called the Miami Mama, which I can't wait to tell you about it.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Okay, I'm all ears. I'm all ears.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Okay, so let's start from the beginning. As much as I know about your current work or your past work in the past few years, I don't know a lot about you. So when did you realize you wanted to join law enforcement or what did you want to be when you. What?

[Kurt Mackenzie]

A little. I wanted to be a scientist. And that's what I became. So that was my original job. I worked in the pharmaceutical industry for a few years, and I had a part time job and happened to meet a couple FBI agents. And just one thing led to another. This was in the mid-1990s. So I originally joined the FBI. I was recruited to work as a forensic scientist. Forensic biologist in the DNA analysis unit of the FBI. I did that for a few years and left the lab to go to Quantico, get my free gun and go catch bad guys. So.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

And what made you want to join the FBI?

[Kurt Mackenzie]

It just seemed like a great idea. It just seemed fun. And my mom always taught me, you know, strive for excellence. And that was excellence and still is excellence, quite frankly.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Were your parents happy when you told them you were joining the FBI?

[Kurt Mackenzie]

I think my mother was a little nervous, but they were. They're very proud. They still are. My mom's passed Away, but she was very proud. And. Yeah, yeah.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

And initially you were working in a lab, right? Can you tell me about that? What was, were you doing?

[Kurt Mackenzie]

So the FBI laboratory, when you're a DNA analyst, it's rape, robbery, and murder. It's mayhem all, all day long because it's DNA from homicides, serial killings, serial rapes, other violent crimes. And it's an assembly line system. So we have the FBI evidence response teams in the field. They collect the evidence, they ship it all to the laboratory, the central location, we process it, we pull DNA out of it, other types of evidence, and then we also testify in court about what we found and fascinating job, incredibly difficult, hard, and all the respect in the world to my coworkers and friends who are still there.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

So it's a little bit like a real CSI investigation.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

We were the CSI before csi. Yeah.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

It's amazing.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Yeah.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

When did you transition out of the lab and why did you do it?

[Kurt Mackenzie]

I left the lab in January of 2001 to go to the FBI academy. And I graduated from the FBI academy the end of May, ended up in Miami. September 11th hit a couple months right after that.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Did you have any idea what a great place this was to work as an FBI agent?

[Kurt Mackenzie]

No, I had no clue. The way the academy works is they assign you to an office. While you're there, you have no idea where you're going. When you sign up midway through, you find out where you're going. A little bit of a roll of the dice. And I got here and it was just non, stop, non stop.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Like what. What was one of your first cases once you came to Miami?

[Kurt Mackenzie]

I was originally assigned to a fraud squad, bank fraud. And that's extremely prevalent here. And it's street level fraudsters. Some of them are gang members who just happen to engage in fraud. Sometimes they kill each other, sometimes. We had one woman who actually died trying to get away from us. She ran off the side of a building and hit the ground. I mean, it was. It was insane down here, especially back then. Yeah.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

I think most people don't know this, but can you tell me in terms of fraud, how Florida stands national?

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Number one in the country? Yeah, number one in the country while I was an FBI agent. And I'm pretty sure it's the same.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Today in terms of all kinds of fraud.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Investment fraud, health care fraud, identity theft, you name it. Every single fraud you can imagine. This was the epicenter. This state, and in particular this area in this city.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

You know how many times I've been to Florida because You should just live here.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

All your work is here.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Just filming traffic. I think every other episode there was some story. We would have to try and avoid coming to Florida because so many stories brought me back here. We did an identity fraud case here. We did a story about, obviously, cocaine trafficking. I mean, there were many. Yeah, yeah. And I imagine for an FBA agent, FBI agent, that must have been really.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

It was. If you're an FBI agent, Miami, it's like the, the varsity team. Right. Because I, I, I gave an example previously, but the FBI office in Miami had about a third of the agent population of the New York FBI office. Right. But there were years where we would have more indictments than they did.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Wow.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

That's how rampant crime was in, in Florida and especially South Florida.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

One of the big reasons I wanted to have you on the podcast, and I'm so excited you're here, is because of one of the first investigations I ever did as a journalist here in the United States. And one of the biggest investigations you ever did, which was the Pill mills.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Yes.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Which I called. Mine was called the OxyContin Express. Yours was called.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

We called ours Oxy Alley. Operation Oxy Alley.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

And only because Express was taken.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Well, you know, maybe.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

So tell me about that. I can, I'll, I'll share a little bit about why we started this investigation and what it was. I guess we can tell our listeners what it was. I'll let you do that.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

So Operation Oxy Alley is the name we gave to what ended up becoming the single largest drug diversion investigation in US History. So a pair of brothers, identical twins here in Florida, set up a scheme and a system to divert pharmaceuticals, specifically oxycodone and a few other prescription medications from legitimate pharmaceutical commerce to the streets.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Through their pain clinics, through their chain.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Of pain clinics and, and friends and family distributions.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

And a lot of these pain pills were being found and actually killing people with overdoses all over the United States, especially in Appalachia.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Correct. We found evidence, or we proved, that the drugs that were shipped here to Florida by these brothers ended up going as far west as Texas and as far north as Massachusetts that we know of.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

So our investigation started because at the time I was working for Current TV on a show called Vanguard, and. And we started reading these news stories coming out of the Miami Herald about these pain clinics that were distributing oxycodone like Tic Tac. And there were lines of people out the door and people shooting these pills into their arms and body outside the pain clinic. And so we thought oh, my. This is crazy. At the time I remember I'd never heard of OxyContin to start with, or Oxycodone. And then we took a plane, came here, and our first day, I mean, we saw it all. We saw the lines of people outside the door, we saw the security cameras surveilling, which is not something that usually see in pain clinics. No, we saw the guards outside, security guards outside, people very high coming in and out of those places, and with Kentucky license plates, West Virginia, Ohio, all of it. And we decided we wanted to actually start try to film inside some of these pain clinics. So I put on a hidden camera and I went inside. And within seconds they told us, what do you need? We can give you anything you want. We just need an MRI. They gave me the paperwork for an MRI. Cost, it was about $250, I remember, for the MRI, which was being done behind the clinic, I believe, or close by. And then we went, and then we went actually to Kentucky, and we spent time in Greenup County, Kentucky, with a sheriff who told us how he was seeing hundreds of people dying from overdoses or catching people with these pain pills. And he told us the biggest culprit was a clinic called American Pain. The most of the pill bottles he was seeing were coming from a clinic called American Pain. So when we went down to Florida again, we decided, okay, let's try to see what we can find from American Pain. And we knew that we couldn't just walk in. We knew that they were shady and more dangerous than some of the other operators.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Correct.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

So we decided to, my husband, Darren Foster, who you know very well and as well, decided to set up shop with our cameras essentially on the other side of the street. And this was sort of a pretty large street, so we were hoping they wouldn't be able to see us, but we'd film outside the clinic what was happening. Again, lines of people and all the traffic. And within, I mean, a couple of minutes, this big car with these big muscled, bodybuilding looking guys came up to us, started yelling at us and threatening us and forced us to leave. So then you know what happened, right?

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Oh, yeah.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

So then the chase ensued, which we're down I95 in our car and I had very little gas on, remember perfectly well. And they started, they're chasing us. And I stopped. I was driving, my husband was filming me, Darren, and was filming the car chasing us. And we decided to stop. We had to stop at a gas station to put gas. And we thought maybe, let's just see what happens? And as soon as we stopped, they parked right behind us and they started coming out the car. And I thought, okay, maybe not a great idea. I had also watched the Sopranos the night before.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

You shouldn't do that before you deal with those guys.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

You shouldn't have done that. So my vision of what was about to happen was that they were going to come out with a gun and shoot us right in the head, right there and then. So I decided, okay, I'm not going to stop and continue down I95 with them still chasing us. But eventually I realized we were running out of gas. So I called an officer from the sheriff's department that we had spoken to the night before. We had interviewed the day before. And I told her, we are being chased by these guys from American Pain. And she said, Call 911 immediately. These are not people you want to mess with. So called 911 immediately. Eventually ran out of gas. Our car stopped, but they were so confused that they just stopped behind us and did nothing. And eventually the police showed up and they came up with some sort of excuse. But that was sort of our introduction to this investigation.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

That's a hell of an introduction, isn't it?

[Mariana Van Zeller]

It's crazy. It is crazy. I'd love to hear what your introduction to this craziness was.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

So I was happy working organized crime for the FBI at the time at a covert off site building. And Jennifer Turner was a friend of mine who was also on the squad with me. We had worked healthcare fraud before, migrated over to organized crime. So I'd heard, I'd seen some of this stuff on tv. And she. Luckily, because we worked in a task force building, it consisted of the FBI, the irs, Homeland Security, the atf, and every police department in Broward County. And it was all detectives. So there was a lot of, for lack of a better term, water cooler conversation. We just talked to each other in the hallway. Hey, you know, you exchange ideas or crazy stuff that you saw. So Jennifer was talking to these guys and heard the scuttlebutt about these insane clinics because our local partners were at a loss. What do we do about this? They could pull over a car, but the addicts all had prescription bottles. You can't lock anybody up for having a legitimate, lawful prescription. But then they would see the accidents, they would see the overdoses and the incredible volume and the madness that you saw outside the clinics. So what do we do? So the conversation started. Janet first thought maybe it was a health care fraud scheme, because that's our background Right. Maybe they're billing Medicare, and, you know, this is an overbilling issue. And then there was also some talk about possibly some Russian doctors involved. And we were heavy into Russian organized crime at the time. Certainly I was. So she started taking a look at it. I was busy doing other stuff, and about six months into it, she very quickly realized that it was blowing up and she was going to need more help. So I was asked to join the investigation. And I did a few months into it and worked it with her. But we would talk about the local coverage. We would talk about some of the other incidents we'd heard about. We heard about you.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Okay, how did you hear about what we were doing?

[Kurt Mackenzie]

I don't recall how the discussion came about, but we heard about you. And then we saw it on television later when you did the OxyContin Express.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

But you found out that we were doing the investigation at the time.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

We didn't find out about you that day, but we found out that you were investigating because you weren't the only one. There are a couple of other, I'll tip my hat to you, intrepid journalists, right, who were actually onto these guys and harassing. I don't want to say harassing them. They deserved it. But looking into what was going on.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

So you heard about our investigation, I guess. Also, we were actively trying to get you, our other FBI agents at the time. We didn't know your name, you particularly, but we were trying to get the FBI to talk to us. But because there was an ongoing investigation, you guys wouldn't talk to us.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

We don't talk.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Right.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

We will talk to you afterwards. We're not going to talk to you for several reasons. One, you don't want to tip off the bad guys that the feds are onto them. Just not a good idea.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Right.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

And two, you could theoretically compromise what happens in the courtroom afterwards. So the way the FBI works is we look at investigations. We look past the end of the investigation to what happens in court. Our goal is a conviction, not just an arrest. Right. So because of that, you want to protect the integrity of the investigation throughout the course of the investigation. So that means you keep your mouth shut, right? Until it's time to talk.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

You know, it's interesting, Kurt, I get asked a lot. It's, I think, one of the number one questions I get from traffic from filming, you know, these black markets for so many years. And people ask me, since you have all these contacts and sources, does the FBI or does law enforcement ever reach out to you to find out more about your sources. And I always say you don't. I've never gotten a call from any law enforcement agency about, you know, my sources, asking me for my sources. So I want to ask you why that is. I know why that is, but. And why do you think that's important?

[Kurt Mackenzie]

There's several reasons for it. One, people don't realize that federal law enforcement in general, and especially FBI and most law enforcement in general draw a very hard line at the First Amendment. Right. The appearance of impropriety is as bad as impropriety. Right. We don't ever want to be seen influencing journalists. We also don't want to put your life at stake because you don't have a badge and a gun and the protection of the U.S. government. Right. So that is something we generally do not do. The only time I've ever spoken to journalists is at the conclusion of an investigation. Right. I may follow up and say, hey, I know you spoke to that guy. We'd like to talk to you about. But that's after the fact, never during.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Right. I never even thought about the security angle of it. It makes total sense because if I were to rat on my sources, I would be in danger. And obviously, it's about the freedom of press, the independence of press, and the media is very important.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Exactly. Now I will tell you this. I have developed and recruited plenty of informants in my time. Lots of them. Right. From all walks of life, all professions. Never a journalist. Not once. Just.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Have you tried?

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Done. No, it's just not done.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Is it something that is known within law enforcement that it's just not kosher to do so?

[Kurt Mackenzie]

I can't speak for every law enforcement agency, but generally speaking, that is my experience. I have never once met a journalist who's an informant. I've met informants who worked for other agencies. The dea, in particular, Homeland Security, the atf, the Secret Service, Our own informants, tons of them. Not once have I ever met one who was a journalist. It's just not something that's done.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Right. And it shouldn't be done.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

No.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Very often we just don't do that.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Yeah.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Which takes me back to the reason why you didn't contact us when we were investigating something that you were also investigating at the same time.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Yeah. The thing is, too, you would probably be obligated to talk about talking to us. Right. We could say, hey, please don't say anything.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

But, you know, you never know.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

No. So we're not going to jeopardize. Not that we didn't trust you. But we're not going to jeopardize the integrity of the large investigation when we have other methods of finding stuff out.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

So you start investigating these pain clinics. And what was, what was some of the most shocking things that you found right off the bat?

[Kurt Mackenzie]

We could not believe what we were seeing on. On several levels. Right. So the first thing was the doctors. Most Americans, and I've said this in other media outlets, most Americans are raised to see doctors as the healer. Right. These people were drug dealers with white coats.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Right.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

That's all they were. And in my mind, I'm thinking, why would you go through that much school and the difficulty of the exams and the certification and the licensing to work for a guy with Nazi tattoos and cut off shirts. Right. It didn't make any sense to us.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

And just to paint the picture. So these were essentially pain clinics that were all over south Florida. There were more pain clinics at one point in Broward county than there were McDonald's. I remember that fact. It was a fact that we, I think, either had or we came out with our story or we.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

That's true.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

I remember that was a clear fact.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Yes.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

And there was, you know, some strip malls that had two, three of these pain clinics.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Correct.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

And inside, instead of getting the pain treatment that you think you get when you go to a pain clinic, you would just get in, say you wanted oxycodone, whatever it is you want it. Mostly it was oxycodone. And there would be a doctor there that would see you for about 2 minutes, 3 minutes max. Max. Right. Give you a prescription. They would, in many cases, not only prescribe the pills there, but they would also sell you those pills at the same pain clinic.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Correct.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Which seems like a conflict of interest. Right?

[Kurt Mackenzie]

It is. But it was legal at the time.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Right. Which is crazy to me that all of this was legal.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

I mean, pure insanity.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Which made your job so much harder.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

It made it harder because we had to look deeper than what was occurring on the surface. Right. So what you do when you do that is. I'm not a doctor. I don't pretend to be one. I'm not that smart. So I go talk to doctors who are actually board certified, legitimate specialists. Right. Pain management is a specialty under anesthesia. Right.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

It is a real specialty and a necessary one too.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Correct.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

There's a lot of people living with.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Correct. The FBI was never in law enforcement or me. Were never in the position to say nobody deserved to get pain medication or be treated. That is foolish. And we would never say that. What we were saying was, if you did have to be treated for your pain, how about actually diagnosing an illness, right? That never happened at these clinics.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

No one was ever diagnosed with.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Nobody was ever diagnosed with a damn thing. That never happened. Never.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

I mean, I went in again just to illustrate how crazy this was. Secret camera went into the reception, told her I had back pain. I think I said back pain or neck pain or invented something. And they said, oh, no problem. We'll give you whatever you want. So you just need an mri. If you come back with an mri, there's an MRI placed right across the street or behind our clinic. You come back with it. And because I didn't actually want to get the mri, I just wanted to prove how easy it was. I went outside, and again, there was a line of people waiting in the waiting room, most of them coming from out of state. And outside, I bombed a cigarette out of somebody and we started smoking together. And this guy had come down, I think it was from Kentucky, right. And I asked him, so what's happening here? So many people in the waiting room. And he told me, oh, this is like one of the best clinics to get drugs. We can get whatever we want. And then we just go up there, you know, and many of us, like, sell the pills. Most of us take them, and this is just the best place.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Do you know why that was?

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Why?

[Kurt Mackenzie]

So. So there is economic incentive. A good number of the patients, probably half of them, were not just patients, they were drug dealers. So the George brothers in their clinics, and most of the clinics in South Florida at the time, unaffiliated with the.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

George brothers, they owned the biggest one, which they own.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

They owned a chain, actually, they own a few of them. So they were the largest operators in the area. Right. Their volume far exceeded everybody else's by several fold. The deal is that they would sell the pills directly to the patients for $2 to $3 a piece.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

That's right.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Those pills were worth up to a dollar milligram on the streets of Appalachia. So a 30 milligram oxycodone pill here, you pay two or $3, you get 20 or 30 bucks for it on the street up there, Right? So what we found were smaller organized crime groups, we call them, usually family type groups in Appalachia, which sponsor was the term a vehicle. So you get four or five of your buddies, you give them a couple thousand dollars, you stick them in a car, they drive all the way down to Florida, they get enough money for gas, a hotel for one Night and maybe a little food. Visit as many clinics as they could.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Right. Dr. Shopping.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Dr. Shopping. Because that was permitted at the time. Because Florida at the time was the only state in the country that had no prescription drug monitoring program.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

That's right. Which is why people could go to several clinics and get as many pills as they wanted.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Correct. And then these guys would get a few thousand pills per person. Go back to Appalachia, you'd kick half to the guy who sponsored you, you'd get to keep the other half. So you get high for weeks or.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Months for free, basically.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

For free. Or split the rest and sell it and make a little profit, do okay for yourself. So there is economic incentive all around to do this all around.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

I mean, it's drug trafficking, essentially. Massive.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

That's exactly what it was.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Right. Why did you guys start looking at the George brothers and particular?

[Kurt Mackenzie]

We decided to reach out to the DEA fairly early on in this investigation. And the DEA maintains a system called arcos. Right. So I forget what the acronym is, but what most Americans don't realize is every lawfully produced narcotic in this country is tracked from production to dispensate. Dispensing. So I worked in a pharmaceutical industry before. One of the companies I worked for produced controlled substances. Extremely thorough record keeping that had to be shared with the dea, every single pill that was produced. So the ARCO system, we could go to the DEA and say, tell us how many oxycodone pills were sold here in South Florida. And they had the numbers. And the numbers are terrifying because at one point we realized more than 90%, almost 95% of all the oxycodone produced in the entire damn country was being distributed here in Florida and sold here in Florida.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

I remember that number. Well, we use that number in our investigation, too. It was mind blowing.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Yeah.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

And we didn't actually know that until we came to South Florida and started investigating. And then we found that number out, and we were like, oh, wow, this is really. We're in the right track.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

It's very true. So once we found that out, we said, well, where, where, where's the bulk of this going? Right. Obviously a lot of smaller operators, because it was the thing to do here at the time. But we figured out that the bulk of the bulk was going to clinics owned or operated by the George brothers.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

What were those numbers? Because I. I think there was something like 5 out of the top 20. Was that correct? Or 5 of the top 20 doctors prescribing correct were working at in the Whole country were working out of the George Brothers clinics.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Correct. So of all the doctors that worked at the George Brothers clinics, and there were several over the years, there are a few that stayed longer than others. But one of the things we realized is five of the top 20 prescribing physicians in the entire country work for the George Brothers. A few of them, one doctor in particular, who. I can't remember which one it was off the top of my head, but I remember seeing the numbers that that doctor prescribed more than every single physician in the entire state of California.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

It's insane.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Yeah.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

We're talking about how much, how many pills.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

During the course of the investigation. Which was less than two years. Right? It was less than two years. From the time we started till the time we shut them down. They were pushing about 10 million doses a year. And that's just oxycodone. That's not including the benzodiazepines like Xanax or Valium or things like that, or the muscle relaxants. Because what they would do, they would. Chris would order his physicians to dispense and to prescribe only drugs in this combination. The street addicts knew if you combined an opioid with a benzodiazepine, you get extra high. Right. You can also accidentally die very easily, which is what led to the huge volume of deaths here. But because the street addicts wanted it, Chris ordered his doctors to sell it and to dispense it. So it wasn't an issue of the doctors were doing what they normally do, which is doing what's in the best interest of the patient. The doctors were doing what Chris told them because he wanted to meet the needs of the addicts. So oxycodone alone was well over 20 million doses that they received and dispensed.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

It's crazy. And not, I imagine, an actual pain patient, somebody who's actually dealing with pain. Would that be a cocktail that they'd usually be using? Do you think that the oxycodone mixed with benzos and with muscle relaxants.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Not the way these folks did it. And I'll tell you why. It was also bs. And again, I'm no genius. I only learned this by actually talking to legitimate doctors. If you are a chronic pain patient and you're being prescribed an opioid, typically your doctor will give you a longer acting opioid, not four hours worth of drugs where you have to keep taking it constantly. And then maybe they'd prescribe you a lighter dose of something shorter acting. If you had, quote Breakthrough pain, where for some reason your drugs stopped working. The George brothers would prescribe. Typically, I can still see the prescription pads in my head anywhere from 120 to 240 or more, 30 milligram oxycodone pills, then another 90, 15 milligram oxycodone pills for breakthrough pain. You understand that the logic that it's BS, you don't do that, right. And then another 60 to 90 of the muscle relaxants.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

I mean, you don't even get that amount of Tylenol at your home, let alone.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

And for perspective, Right. So for your listeners, if they've ever been to the doctor and had a oral surgery or something, typically you may get percocet, which is 5 mg of oxycodone and 350 mg of acetaminophen, if I remember correctly. So you're talking about five, six times more.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

I mean, what would happen to us if we were to take that cocktail right now?

[Kurt Mackenzie]

I'd be unconscious.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

I would too.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Yeah, probably. And that's on the low end of the cocktail. Part of the reason we saw so many people die is because they're just not keeping track. They're popping pills like candy and they're gone.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

So I remember one of the first people we interviewed when we got to Florida was a mother of, she had two sons, Maureen Barrett, her older son Drew had already overdosed with his wife. They both overdosed the same day. And Todd was still sort of trying to get clean, but sort of, but still sort of using. And we filmed him actually as he was abusing oxycodone. And Maureen showed us her son, I think had died less than a year before. And she was showing us the pain pills, the bottles, and this is exactly what she was telling us. They gave him 200 and something pills from one clinic, 180 from another clinic.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Yes.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Who needs these many pills? No one. You. I mean, no one.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

I will say this. If you are an end stage cancer patient, you've got some horrific renal cancer, God knows what, and you're in the last stages of your life where you're in horrible pain. Absolutely. Give that person everything they want. They're probably bedridden anyway. Right after we, we served search warrants on American Pain and the other facilities and shut them down, we seized almost 30, 000 patient files. And I'll explain why they had files anyway in a second. But when I was there, you had to have a knife. One of you's got to Take turns carrying it up your rectum.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Wait, it's up your butt.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

That's the prison wallet. You'll never leave home alone.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

You have something protected around it, I'm assuming.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Yeah, or else you'd be bleeding out your coolo.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

I'm Ariana Van Zeller, and after reporting on black markets for my Emmy winning National Geographic show, Trafficked, I'm launching a podcast. You're getting emotional on me. Intimate conversations with those operating in the shadows. The Hidden Third is out now with new episodes every Wednesday. [e-mail] marianavanzeller Follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

We actually sat down. A team of us, including our intrepid prosecutors, Larry Lavecchio and Paul Schwartz. I tip my hat to them every day to this day, but we all sat in a room, several agents and the prosecutors. We spent a few weeks actually reading through thousands of these patient files. And they're all the same. It was all bs. Not once did we ever see a referral to a physician, another physician, or a specialist. Not once did we ever see any documentation from another doctor. Not once did we ever see any blood test results. Not once did we see anything beyond the doctor rubber stamping and making some notes. And the mri? Single page report, not even the full images, just a single page.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

And the MRI was just so they could have some sort of paperwork, window dressing. Window dressing?

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Yeah. You talked about before. Why the mri? They wanted to have some legitimacy surrounding their process. Right. And we called it the dance. So the doctors would use the MRI to say, oh, I'm a legitimate doctor, I did the exam, I have the mri. And Chris would say over prescribing, they did it, I didn't do it. So they're both pointing at each other.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Doing this, but the doctor worked for Chris.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Correct. They're both thinking, they're not going to get in trouble, the other one will. And they both covered themselves, not realizing they hadn't covered themselves.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

And one thing I remember is that you can tell, I mean, you can say anything from an MRI results. You can say, oh, this looks like this disc is slightly strange or dislocated, but it can be anything, right? And you can come up with any excuse basically, to prescribe people pills.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Another thing we learned from talking to real experts is some insane percentage of human beings on the planet over the age of 30, whatever the number was. Let's say it's 75% will have some spinal abnormality if you run an MRI on it. Right? Something that you can see that's a little off. It doesn't mean it's end stage pain.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Yeah. Or it doesn't. Maybe it doesn't even mean anything at all.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

If you look at mine, I'd probably scary to look at. Right. But I'm in no pain. So you can't. They would use that as cover because, oh, the patient claims they're in pain. And here at the L5, right. You're like, oh, okay.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

So back to the George brothers. So you realized looking at these doctors that a lot of them were actually working for the, for the George brothers.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Correct.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

And then what happened when you start looking into their, their operation? How massive was their operation?

[Kurt Mackenzie]

The first thing we figured out was the volume of pills. That that alone told us all we needed to know about the size. Then we started looking at the individual physicians. Who are these clowns? Right. These aren't real doctors. This has to be fake. That's when I first learned that there is actually an underbelly to the US medical community. I had no idea this was a thing broken. People who ran into some issue in their professions who would do anything for money. Right.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Sometimes I remember it was like retired doctors or. Yeah, sometimes it was doctors that ran into problems but weren't disbarred. Right. They weren't out of.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

They all still had medical lens. Yeah, that was a requirement. And on top of that, Chris had a deal worked out with his physicians. He would pay them a thousand dollars a week to essentially rent their DEA control number. So he would order massive amounts of pills under their names and the clinic. Right. So it was self serving that they had medical licenses.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

But that's not the only way they were paid. They were also paid a percentage per.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

That is correct.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Right.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

They were paid by the head. So in other words, however many patients came in, they got a cut of that, right. 50% if I remember correctly.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

So they had an incentive to see.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

As many patients, as many as you could. And we had doctors seeing 50 plus.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Patients a day, which is insane and almost impossible. I mean, you're not actually seeing them.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Correct? It's not almost impossible. It is impossible.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Right, right, it's impossible. And so what were they doing? So the people would go into the clinics and what would happen?

[Kurt Mackenzie]

The people would. And the only way we know this is by talking to the physicians later when they finally confessed. Right. And some of the patients who we got to cooperate. And also surveillance video. There was no surveillance video inside the clinic itself. Excuse me, inside the exam rooms. But there was. Chris was Paranoid. He knew that he was servicing a large group of addicts who were unpredictable. And sometimes they steal stuff, sometimes they resort to violence. So he had an extensive network of surveillance cameras throughout the clinic so we could track people from the minute they walked in the door, to sitting in the waiting room, to getting their exam, to walking out.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

So you mean you could track it when you started actually looking, tapping into these?

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Well, we didn't tap in. We actually, when we served the search warrants, we seized the dvr. Right.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

So the job, you were doing wiretaps at the time?

[Kurt Mackenzie]

We were doing wiretaps. Okay. That was before the, the search warrants. We did the wiretaps. But the biggest kicker for us when it came to patient time or how this actually worked was to look at the video. So that was my job because my co workers laugh and joke about me being slightly obsessive compulsive, but sometimes that comes in handy. So I sat in a room for a week and watch real time these videos and took notes. And I averaged out from the time a patient's foot crossed the doctor's office threshold till the time they walked out. The Average time was 3 minutes and 45 seconds.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

There's no exam being done at all.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

And on top of that, when we, I talked about the patient's files before, when we looked through the patient files, the doctors would check off all these exams that they'd purportedly done on these patients. When we took those exam sheets to real doctors and said, hey, what's this exam mean? How long does it take to do that? And we had several legitimate board certified pain management specialist look through the exams and go. All this would take you about an hour and a half to do.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Oh, my God. And they were doing in another three minutes.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

They're either the most magical doctors you and I have ever heard of, or it was all B.S. i'll vote for B.S. i'm just saying.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

And one way for all of Chris's bad things, he actually had has an incredible business mind, Right. Because one of the things he did tell us about the stamping, how this.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

How he got the doctors to stamp the stamping. So Chris, he realized very quickly that he wanted to churn patients as fast as possible. That was, he realized that was a way to make a profit. Right. So how do you speed up the process? Well, let me get a bigger facility, okay? Let me hire more doctors. This still isn't going fast enough. How do I do this? And he would look at his process very carefully. He was, to his credit, he was the original criminal efficiency expert. Right. He would look and realize that the doctors were spending maybe two minutes to write a prescription or a series of prescriptions, One for oxycodone, one for this, one for that. So he went and ordered rubber stamps. It's the same three drugs anyway, in slightly different dosages, but why bother writing? So he just got all of them, an array of stamps. He's stamp them out, sign it, and off they go. So you reduce your exam time by another minute or two.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

How much money were the doctors making and how much money did the brothers make?

[Kurt Mackenzie]

I'll start with the doctors, and I'll compare and contrast for you. So two of the doctors we arrested were former emergency room physicians. They were making 3, $400,000 a year as emergency room physicians. But that wasn't enough for them. They went to go work for Chris, and in a year they made. One made 1.2 million, the other one made about 1.1 million.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

In a year, how many days a week were they working there?

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Four or five, Usually seven or eight. Never more than eight hours a day. Never.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Do you think this. They were. Obviously there were. But I wanted to hear your perspective on this. They were aware that people were dying because of what they were doing?

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Yes. They saw the news stories.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

You know, for me, when we did our story, when the OxyContin Express came out, one of the biggest regrets I had was. I mean, not that we would have been able to, but was not having been able to actually secure an interview with one of these doctors. I would have loved to, and we never did.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

They are rightfully ashamed to this day, I think. I don't know if you'll ever get any of them to talk because they built up in their minds, and I'm not putting on a profiler hat or anything, but we could very easily tell that in their minds, they'd built up a defense mechanism to justify what they were doing. In other words, hey, I'm just handing out medication. I'm a doctor. I'm allowed to do this. This is fine, right? They ignore the news stories. They ignored what they saw in their own waiting rooms. Because again, I'm watching the video. There's at least one day where I saw one guy faceplant in the waiting room of the clinic just passed out from opioid withdrawal or whatever.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Oh, my God.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

It took a couple minutes for one doctor to came out, looked at him. They called an ambulance, took him out. Nobody treated him. Two of the doctors were actually carrying guns under their lab coats. Because they were afraid of these obviously out of control people.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Patients, Right? Right.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

So no doctor, whoever worked in that facility can ever tell me that they didn't know what was going on. Matter of fact, it wasn't just the doctors. We knew that pretty much all the clinic staff knew what was going on because. And I said this in another venue when you talked about the addicts being found by law enforcement deceased with the pill bottle next to their name. Law enforcement's first tactic for the death investigation is to call the clinic. Hey, I need some patient files. This guy has all these pills. He's dead. Talk to me. Those extensive patient files that they kept their window dressing to cover their own asses. Right. One of the disturbing things we found as we went through those files, we would see the notation D slashee handwritten in some of these patient files. And what the hell does that mean? And we started backtracking and realized those people are all dead. Whoa. So deceased, deceased, or in their own black humor. Right, Discharged. Because if you're deceased, you're discharged. Right. So they knew. They were getting the calls that people were dying who just left their clinic and deceased put the file away. Next.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

And to me, that's what's even more reprehensible about all this, is that, you know, the George brothers had a history of going outside the law, right? They had a history. They ran a steroid company or a steroid. Like they were dispensing steroids illegally, right?

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Yes.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

But what was reprehensible to me was the doctor part of it. Because these are people who, you know, they're the Hippocratic oak oath. They promise to, you know, treat their patients well, and then they're knowingly killing people.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Jen and I and the rest of our team, we had a fantastic team from the dea, several other FBI agents, and a few other agencies. But Jen and I shared the bulk of the responsibility special later on in the case. And one of the things we figured out for one particular doctor is that in a 12 month period, she was working at that clinic for a little over 12 months, maybe 13 or 14 months.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Do you remember her name?

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Cynthia Cadet.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Okay. It's good to have the name.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Yes. So in a 12 month period, 51 of Cynthia Cadet's patients died within a few weeks of visiting the clinic or a couple of days or in some cases, a few hours in.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

How. What's the time span again?

[Kurt Mackenzie]

A few hours to a few days?

[Mariana Van Zeller]

No.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Oh, in 12 months.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

So in one year, 50.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

51 of her patients died. Were dead in the one year that she was operating, roughly. So think about that. Right?

[Mariana Van Zeller]

What happened to her? Where is she now?

[Kurt Mackenzie]

She went to prison.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

For how long?

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Not very long. Five years, I think.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Okay. Another part that I don't understand about this is that I've interviewed so many people who have spent years in prison because they were found with marijuana, you know, a little weed on their pocket. And we have actual doctors knowingly killing people who end up doing, you know, less than five years, less than three years. I mean, some of them don't. I mean, you had people in that case that didn't do any time in prison. This makes me so angry. How does it. I'm sure it makes you even more angry.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Oh, you have no idea. I would grind my. I was angry for several months at the conclusion of this case. But I'll share the short story with you. It's normally, FBI agents don't talk about what happened during the course of a trial or the jury. You know, that's sacrosanct. You don't talk about that. But whatever. Times passed.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Right.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Once we concluded the narcotic part of the investigation, we started the death investigation. And that was sort of used to encourage some of the doctors to plead guilty. In other words, by the way, we're looking, and if we find that we can tie you to the deaths of these patients, you're going to be charged. And most of them were like, oh, crap, I'll just plead guilty to drug trafficking, money laundering, whatever, and call it a day. Two of them, Cynthia Cadet and Joseph Castronovo, decided that I didn't do anything wrong. I'm going to go to trial. They went to trial. We charged them both. I think in total it was 12 overdose deaths. And I think we may have dropped two counts for long story on that. But either way, 10 or 12 overdose deaths that the two of them were responsible for, she had more than he did. We found out when the verdict came through, they were found not guilty on any of the deaths by the jury and guilty of the drug trafficking and money laundering conspiracy. And we had a juror reach out to us a few months or weeks later and explained to us. We said, hey, it's really not appropriate for you to talk to us. I don't care. I want you to hear what I have to say. She was so upset. She was crying because she said, two of the jurors decided that, you know, junkies are junkies and it's their fault if they get high or they die. And these doctors, you can't blame them for this. And they refused to convict on the death counts, so they held up the jury. So what ended up happening was a compromise verdict because again, this was an eight week trial. These people were sitting there for weeks, a couple of months, they just wanted to go home. And these two chuckleheads are holding up the works. Okay, fine, fine. But it was very upsetting to most of the jury. So if you can find those two fools, have an interview with them and ask them what were you thinking?

[Mariana Van Zeller]

But I actually think that's one of the problems that we have in this country. Is it? Because a lot of people just see these. Them as junkies, like you said, and not. This is a public health crisis that's happening in America.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Correct.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Nobody is doing drugs and living on the streets and doing, you know, shooting fentanyl up their arms because they want to. It is a public health crisis.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Yes.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

And it's not no one. It blows my mind every time. I mean, if you look, I've reported extensively on the opioid crisis. And if you look at the last. Since we started investigating this, I think in the last 20 years, more than a million Americans have died from the opioid crisis.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Correct.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

And if you compare that to 9 11, and I've said this publicly, again, is that 3,000 people died on 9 11. We reorganize our government, we spend billions trying to protect this country, and yet 3,000 people die every week in this country with both the opioid crisis and also alcohol and other drug abuse. And it seems like very little is being done. They're amazing people like you who are trying to go after the bad guys.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

We tried.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

We are not actually looking at the origin, the center of the problem.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

A few things. I'll say one, you hit on the number 3,000 during September 11th. That's one of the things I brought up in other media outlets is when we concluded the death investigation, we took all 28, almost 30,000 of those patient files I mentioned, digitized them, scanned them, and we had an analyst compare all of the patient names and Social Security number and date of birth to the Social Security Administration's master death database. We just did a random sampling. So we pulled 100 names. Let's say 10% of the names that we ran all came back deceased. So if you multiply that by 28,000, 30,000 patient files, theoretically you're talking about 3,000 people dead from this one group alone.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Just one pain clinic or just one group alone. These are the pain clinics that were run by the George brothers.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Correct. And by the way, that's only the people that we could prove went to the clinic. Don't forget there's a secondary and tertiary market. Right. That the guys I mentioned before going back to Kentucky, selling on the streets. Whoever they killed, we have no idea. Right. Because those are street pills. The guy's got five pills in his pocket and the rest are in his stomach. Right. So the number is off the charts.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

And the sad thing is, yes, some people see these people as junkies. But if you spend time, which I know you did, as I did, with the family members, a lot of times the grieving mothers, I will never forget the interview we did with Maureen Barrett. Her son Drew had just died from an overdose. Her daughter in law, same thing. And a year after our investigation, her other son Todd also died, you know, directly because of his drug abuse and because of what happened with, with the pain clinics here in Florida.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

I want to say something else too, based on what you just said, I've had a lot of friends and family ask me, well, how is this different from the heroin epidemic in the 60s, 70s, early 80s, where a lot of people were addicted and died there? And I try to explain to people the heroin epidemic in the United States, if you, you were using heroin, it was very clearly understood that what you were doing was wrong and dangerous. Everybody understood that. The users, the law enforcement, everybody understood that. What was very different about this crisis, at least the way it started when we were doing this, half the addicts that I met, encountered, and dead or alive, all started off with a legitimate medical issue.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Right.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Were over prescribed, became addicted very quickly and either ended up dead or just, you know, on the streets. So in other words, they had no idea that what they were being prescribed by their doctor could cause them this problem.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Absolutely.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Where their brain chemistry would be altered after a week or two, where they could not then survive without this drug. You've met addicts going through withdrawal.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Absolutely.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

It's not.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

And I've heard the exact same stories. We did a follow up story after the OxyContin Express. It was called Gateway to Heroin, which was about how it was becoming more difficult to get their hands on oxycodone. So people were turning to heroin.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Yes.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

And we interviewed a kid, I mean a young kid called Frank in Massachusetts, who was an athlete. He was in high school, high school football team, star athlete, great kid, loving family, and had an injury while playing football, went to the hospital, was prescribed Oxycontin and soon, I mean, within like a month of leaving the hospital, he was shooting Heroin up his arm.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Yes.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

These are stories that I've heard again and again all throughout this country.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

We saw it. You know, we saw it firsthand. And at one point, the American Medical association encouraged doctors to treat pain as the fifth vital sign. But there was no training being given in medical schools or almost none on addiction treatment. So you have a whole class of doctors coming out who are being told to aggressively treat pain, but no complete understanding of what that means and the potential downsides. And then along comes Purdue Pharma.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Right. I was going to bring that up.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

That actively lies and markets this drug and pushes it to these smart people who are missing that little nugget of knowledge. Right, right.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

So they lied by saying that these drugs were not addictive.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Completely lied.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Right.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

I think their advertising actually said it was like a 1% addiction rate, which is bullshit.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Right.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

That's not true.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

And do you think they knew they were lying?

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Yeah, they knew. They knew. It's been proven. This isn't Kurt Mackenzie saying this. This is multiple courts, media outlets, civil court, criminal court. This is. But we knew this at the time. I just couldn't speak out at the time about it because I knew there were other investigations going on. But. Yeah.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

What happened to Purdue Pharma and the family that owned Purdue Pharma?

[Kurt Mackenzie]

They got sued out of existence, basically. And there was a lot of call for the Justice Department to actually prosecute the family. I wasn't a part of that.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Did any of them. I know the answer, too. But did any of them do any time in prison, even though they knowingly lied? And in many people saw them as being responsible for the beginning, for the creation of this opioid crisis that we see of the biggest drug epidemic in America's history.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Nobody from that family or nobody who controlled that company ever went to prison, as far as I know.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

And they made billions of dollars.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Correct? Billions of dollars. And they still got. Even though they were hit with civil fines in the billions, from my understanding, the family still retains a couple billion dollars.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Right. I mean, what they paid was a drop in the bucket compared to the money that they actually made from these pills.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Yeah.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

After we did that heroin, the story on the gateway to heroin, we did another report called Death by Fentanyl. And this is because we had so many sources, people on the streets, law enforcement. I got a call one day from a guy, an amazing narcotics agent in California called Bob Pennell. Do you know him?

[Kurt Mackenzie]

No.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Amazing guy. And he called me and he said, hey, Mariana, he watched the OxyContin Express and Gateway to heroin. He said there's a new drug called fentanyl. You might want to start taking a look at that. I had again never heard of fentanyl and started investigating it. And we eventually came up with the name of this one company called Insys.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Pharmaceuticals that were the infamous Insys.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Have you heard of this as well? I'm sure you have. So they were same thing, they were bribing doctors to prescribe their pills. It was Subsys was a fast acting fentanyl pill that you put under your tongue. Sublingual. And they were lying to health insurance. Telling people basically that. Telling health insurance that their patients were terminally ill cancer patients and when that was not the case and basically prescribing people that had or asking doctors or bribing doctors to prescribe people that had like headaches to prescribe them fentanyl.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Same behavior pattern, same thing we saw just different company.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

So it was exactly, exactly the same thing that had happened with Purdue.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Yes.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

A couple of a decade before, 15, 20 years before, this new company was doing the exact same thing, same pattern. But in this case we actually through our investigation and through the incredible work of law enforcement in that case, they actually were able to put the head of. John Kapoor was the CEO infamous Dr. Kapoor. He was the first head of a pharmaceutical company and I believe to this day perhaps the only one that ever did time in prison, although he only did two years in prison as well.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Yeah, I'm not aware of any others that went to jail. Talking about going to jail. One of the things that, you know, I talked earlier about the trial and how frustrated we all were and you know, angry and what have you. The upside is that we got so much publicity from this case that we sort of created a blueprint for how to conduct these investigations. Because I'm not aware of anything on this scale or of this type being done before. Before.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Right.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

So we would get calls, both the agents and the prosecutors from agents all over the country from other agencies. Hey, let's. Could I talk to you about how you did X, Y or Z and.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

They called you about this case particularly.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Yes. So what you started to see over time was more and more people going to prison. Right. Which was unusual before. It was rare for doctors to go to jail before. Now it's much more common. Right. Because they've. The investigators learned this is the critical evidence you need to establish this and you know, look out for that and it's made a difference. So now if you look at news stories, it's not uncommon to see doctors going to prison for over prescribing.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Yeah, it's getting better for sure, but it's still very hard. Why? Do you think what needs to change? Do you think what needs to happen so that less street dealers go to prison and more. I mean, not that I don't want them in prison, but why is the balance, the scale so unjust right now? And we're not seeing more of these people that are actually making millions of dollars, the doctors, the pain clinic owners, the pharmaceutical company owners.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

You know, I've said this before in a few public outlets, but the answer to the American drug addiction problem is not law enforcement. No, it's not. We are a small part of the solution if everything else goes wrong. But it's in treatment, it's in education, it's in legislation, it's in multiple areas, it's in the medical community. Right, which is where it started, like I told you, treatment and education for doctors.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

It's not with law enforcement and it's in Congress. And it's politicians that need to change.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

It's everywhere. It's. It's. What you saw with our case was a reflection of systemic failure. Right. I'll give you an example. And I'm not. I'm going to be very careful about what I say because I'm not in any way trying to malign the dea. But if you want to produce opioids as a manufacturer, you have to get permission from the dea. As these manufacturers increased their production quotas every time they wanted to increase, every year they had to go to the DEA to get permission to increase. Right.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

So meaning Purdue Pharma, if they wanted to make more OxyContin pills, they would have to get the DEA to agree to that.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Every company was producing any opioid. If you wanted to increase your production to produce it all, you had to get permission from the DEA to increase your production. Permission from the dea. Right. DEA regulatory and DEA enforcement are two different groups, basically. And one of the things I was surprised to find out at the time, they weren't. Their communication wasn't as efficient as you would think it was. There is one gentleman in particular from the DEA who tried to sound the alarm about this back then. Joe Ranasisi. I've never spoken to him, but I'm very familiar with his work. But he was also trying to wave the flag that it's systemic failure. Right. We should not have raised those quotas. We should have asked harder questions. The pharmaceutical. It's everybody.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

You know. My husband did Directed the film American Pain, which is all about the George brothers and their operation.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

And you guys did a great job, by the way.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Thank you so much. I'll tell him. Darren, if you're listening, Darren, American Pain, it was a CNN films and it's now available on hbo. And you were obviously featured. You were one of the main people that was interviewed for that story.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

My partner, Jennifer Turner and I were together on that. We were happy to talk to you guys. We wanted to tell the story.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

How was that experience for you after so many years to be able to tell that story?

[Kurt Mackenzie]

It was. It was great for us. It was a little cathartic because again, we had some emotional baggage from that investigation. For me, it was five years almost because I started in 2009. We had the trial in 2013 and then everybody didn't get finally go to jail and the whole thing didn't get wrapped up till 2014, 2015. So it was quite a while and it was frustrating. It took a lot of incre. I cannot. It's hard to explain to normal people how many hours and how much time and stress was involved in that investigation. Obviously, we weren't completely thrilled with the outcome.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

But what was it. What was it that you wanted to have happened that didn't happen?

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Me personally?

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Yes.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

I wanted every single one of all those people we charged to go to jail for life. That is what I wanted. That is not what I got. Right. My secondary goal was to shut down this operation and stop the distribution.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

You did that.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

We did that. So I'm happy we did that.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Tell me about the number of deaths at the time in Florida and how that decreased after your investigation, because that's pretty incredible.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

We stopped tracking the deaths once we stopped, you know, once a trial, we didn't really pay much attention to it, but the Sun Sentinel, the local Fort Lauderdale newspaper, actually did an article and they said that the death rate from oxycodone in the state of Florida alone had dropped 41%.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

And that's just Florida.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

That was just Florida. Right. So we went after the biggest player in the game. And that actually did have an effect on the overall situation. So at least temporarily anyway.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Right. Another investigation that you did that was really fascinating. That's the one that I have a personal story for you which is about the. You guys called it the Miami Mama. I'm not going to butcher this.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Yeah. We call that one Operation Miami Mama.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Yeah. What was that about?

[Kurt Mackenzie]

So that was a birth tourism case. Right. So for your listeners who aren't aware, there Was. It's not as big as it was now, but there was, at a time in this country, pregnant women coming to the United States for the express purpose of giving birth to their kids here so their kids could get U.S. citizenship. And the first time I'd ever heard of it was an investigation by Homeland Security on the west coast involving Chinese women. And Homeland Security busted up that crew and locked up a few people. We started seeing it here on the streets of South Florida, but it was Russians. And as we dug into it, we realized, again, the FBI model is to go after the biggest offenders in the game. And two of the biggest clinics here handling these women were a clinic called Miami Mama and another one called Status Medical.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

These were also clinics.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

These were also clinics. Yeah, these are also clinics run by criminals. So.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

And what did you find out? And wait, okay, maybe. Maybe I'll tell you my story, right?

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Yeah, I want to hear your story.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Which is, I used to rent my house in LA through Airbnb, and once I rented. And it was a Russian man, a Russian doctor. I know. I think I might be an accessory to the crimes that you're.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Please, no more Airbnb, Mariana. No more Airbnb. It's just.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

So the Russian doctor. So I had our cleaners come in and clean the house while these people were renting our house. And I thought I was renting the house to a Russian doctor. And my cleaners, when we came back from, I don't know, we were traveling, told us, oh, there was a baby who was born inside your house. And so this was a Russian family. I didn't want to investigate this much more. I should have just given you a call, and I now somehow part of your own investigation. But it turns out I believe what happened. I'm not sure, but I believe what happened was that, yes, he was a Russian doctor who had Russian families coming into the country to pay him to deliver their babies in these Airbnb homes so they could become American citizens.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Yes. So what we found out was that this was occurring here in Miami. And much like you, who you at least knew, you rented your house out. What we found here, these two clinics. And I'll talk more about Status Medical, because they're a little bit more aggressive with their. Their. And a little bit better organized, too. They would advertise in Russian and in English on websites in the United States and in Russia. It would say, in Russia, born in the usa. It was a big banner on the. On their website, and they would charge anywhere from 20,000 to $120,000.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Oh, my God.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

To the women to come to the United States. And it was a la carte concierge service. At the low end, you got your ops, you got your obgyn, right. And your hospital visit and all that stuff. On the high end, you got a translator, you got an apartment, you got a driver.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Nice Airbnb.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

You got nice Airbnb. And the women would come here to have their kids and then immediately turn around and go back to Russia with the American passport in hand. Now you're thinking to yourself, why is that that big a deal? They're not staying here. They're not, you know, getting welfare. The usual things would make Americans angry. But I try to encourage people to think past that. These are now US Citizens who are going to be raised and indoctrinated in Russia, their parents, because your average Russian person in Moscow makes maybe 800amonth. They don't have the money for this. These are the elites and the government connected in Russia. Right. That's who's having their kids here. So they're going back. They can very easily come back in 30 years plus and run for president if they want to.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

It's a national security.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

That is correct. Right. They are playing the long game. We are sitting here watching them go right by.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

So do you think that that was actually the case, that there were some of them that were high connected?

[Kurt Mackenzie]

I'm convinced. I know it. Right. We had several informants who told us. One told us in particular that he had friends in the Russian government who were aware that this was going on, and they were all for it. Right. They wanted to support it because they knew exactly who all these kids were. So now the Russian intelligence services, you can start when you're 18 years old. So now they have people to go mine. They have a ready population of people to be their next generation of spies.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

So it's not just an economic incentive. I thought that for sure. I'm sure the majority of them is just because they want their kids to have an American citizenship so they can, if they want to come to the United States one day, that's part of it. Right?

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Yeah.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

But you're saying that it's not only economical, it's also political.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

It's political, but very quietly political. Right. And it's economic, but it's not. The wealthy Russians understand that they stay wealthy at the whim of Vladimir Putin and his cronies. You don't get to be rich or do business unless you're playing ball with the right people. It is very easy to piss those people off. You're a journalist. I'm sure you've seen plenty of stories of wealthy Russian oligarchs who fall out of favor with the Kremlin.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Absolutely.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

And they end up magically poisoned and dead. Right? These people all know that. So they need somewhere to be able to run, right? In case if things go sideways. That's why they're buying apartments and condos. And London here, Australia, several other countries, right? So, yes, they're looking for a back door, but also they still have their friends that they're dealing with, and their friends know where their kids are born. It's a whole. It's very subtle, right? It's very subtle, but it is occurring. It has occurred. Status Med alone, if I remember correctly, actually, between Status Med and Miami Mama, I want to say we identified 600.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Kids who had been born here.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Who had been born here.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Were these clinics owned by the same person?

[Kurt Mackenzie]

No, two different people.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Two different people.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Status Medical. We were able to get inside. We had a cooperator. We had much more evidence to go with, and that was run by a gentleman named Vlad Navitime, and his associate was Vera Musico.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Did you guys have undercover agents going in?

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Not. Not. Well, I'll use the. The FBI terminology. You have a certified undercover agent. We did not do that because you.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Did for the pain clinics, which I forgot to mention we did.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

We did that extensively.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Right.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

That was a little different for this one. This is a funny story. So for. The way the FBI operates is, if you want to do, for lack of a better term, extensive undercover work, you must be a certified undercover agent. You have to graduate from the undercover school, which is very difficult. Very difficult to do. 50% dropout rate. At least in the FBI, if you're a certified undercover, it's a big deal, right? You get a lot of respect from rank and file agents.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

So, wait, why 50% dropout rate?

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Why is it a very difficult school? I never went. I could hook you up.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

I'd love to introduce you to.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

I'll let you talk to some of those certified guys. I know a bunch of them. A lot of respect for them. A lot of friends in that world. But we elected not to use a certified undercover for this. However, I had an ace in the hole. My partner at the time was my trainee. So when new agents come out of the academy, they're paired up with an old crusty dude like me who helps teach them the ropes. And I happened to get this brilliant young female agent who was born in Ukraine, right? So at the time I was learning to speak Russian, because that's most of my subjects. I want to be able to communicate a little better, build rapport. Speak Russian a little bit. Yeah. So her and I would sit in the car and talk, and. And.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

And she spoke Russian.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Fluent native speaker. Right. So we worked this case together. I guided her through the case, but her one undercover appearance was to walk into the clinic saying, hey, you know, I'm going back to Russia, but I'm going to be given. I'm. I'm pregnant. I'm going to be giving birth soon. How does this work? Right. So she went into the clinic, kind of asked around innocently, and then walked.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Out, which is what I did in the pain clinics in Florida a few years before she did.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Yeah, yeah. But that was the extent of it. We never. We never went any further than that, quite frankly. We didn't need to, because the records are what got them. That's how. So we paired up with the State Department. Right. The State Department's investigative wing is a group called dss. Diplomatic Security Service. Phenomenal agents. And they were able to get for us all of the entry records and passport applications and visa records for all of these people. The husband, the baby daddy, whatever he is, the mother and the kids themselves. So one of the things we figured out by looking through the records. Again, when you're obsessive compulsive, records are your friend. Right. So to get a passport for a child born in the U.S. both parents have to sign the application. Right. We saw father signatures on some of these applications, but no entry record. So the father was not here. He did not sign that application in the Status Medical office. Right. Or the Miami Mama office. So you falsified government records at that point.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Right. Because they need to be present to sign. They can't be present.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

You cannot submit.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Can't be a docusign.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Correct. Right. You can't have somebody sign it and say it's you. That. That's all illegal. So that's how we got them, is on the falsification of the records.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Was that the only thing you were able to get? Seems like. Was that enough, though?

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Yeah, it was enough to lock up four people and shut down the operation.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

And you locked them for how long?

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Ooh, let's see. Vlad got the longest. He was a ring leader. He actually pled guilty and cooperated against his folks. He only did maybe 18 months.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

How much money was he making?

[Kurt Mackenzie]

I don't remember. But he was doing pretty well because, again, you got a lot of patience 20 to 120 grand a piece. And by the way, you know, you talked about Airbnb and subletting. One of the things we found out here, I have a lot of friends in the local PDs and the Aventura PD, North Miami Beach PD. Both those neighborhoods are. And the Sunny Isles Beach Police Department. All three of those cities have large Russian speaking populations. They also have a lot of snowbirds. So people from up north who come to Florida, they may live here for a couple of months during the winter. They go back, they leave their condo unoccupied. They come back, and somebody's been living in a damn condo for a couple of months. Dirty dishes. So he was arranging backdoor deals to illegally sublet these apartments while these people are out of town.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Wow.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Right. So pure profit because you're only paying the crooked building manager or whatever else.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Oh, my God. That is insane.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Yeah, yeah, that's what was going on. And then I had informants in a couple of places and then from the local PD too. But you'd see by the dumpster in these condos and apartment buildings, and there's a bunch of baby strollers back there because they're going back to Russia. I don't need the baby stroll.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

I'm not.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Yeah.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

So how many people do you think, in the case of these two clinics alone? You said how many?

[Kurt Mackenzie]

600?

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Six. 600.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

And that's just these two clinics. They were the biggest offenders. There were other clinics, right?

[Mariana Van Zeller]

How many clinics would you estimate there were?

[Kurt Mackenzie]

There are at least a half a dozen at the time here.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Just in Florida?

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Yeah, just in Florida.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

And there was certainly some operations happening in California as well, and likely New.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

York, because you got to remember, my specialty for years was organized crime, in particular Eastern European and Middle Eastern criminal groups. So the largest Russian speaking population in the United States is New York. Second is Miami. So. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they were all coming here for this purpose. Right.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

So do you know if these are still happening, if these. I'm sure they are.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Oh, I'm sure they are.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Clinics still exist around the U.S. i'm sure it's.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

It's much more difficult to do now, though. Much more difficult anytime. The analogy I've made in the past is if you. Not to be gross, but if you walk into. I've been into some pretty grimy houses in my time as an agent, servant, search warrants and stuff. You walk into a house, it's pretty grimy, you flip the lights on, what happens. The roaches all scattered. So when you Shine the light on something unsavory, it just goes away. Right. So the people who are doing it know that they don't want to be caught. They don't want anybody catching them on camera or putting them in prison. So the activity dies down a fair amount.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

But I'm sure, I mean, there is demand, so there's going to be a supply.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Always going to be supply if there's a demand. Yeah.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

And what happened the 600 births that you for sure know were part of this operation? Were you. Was there. Were you guys ever able to revoke their citizenship?

[Kurt Mackenzie]

We revoked the passports for the ones we could prove where the father wasn't here. Right. Which was only a fraction of the 600. So we could revoke their passports, but we could not revoke their citizenship.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Why not?

[Kurt Mackenzie]

It just wasn't done, at least not under the previous administration. So now the current administration may have a different view and that may change, which, as far as I'm concerned, would be a good thing. But we will see. I don't know, but I was told at the time we could not do that.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Let's talk about health care fraud.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Sure, sure.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Because I know it's another part of your world that you've investigated extensively and so have I.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Yes.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Tell me about how you became interested in it and what was sort of the biggest case you investigated or one of the most colorful cases you've investigated.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

We're going to be here for a long time if you do that. I actually was involuntarily assigned to a healthcare fraud squad. I didn't want to have anything to do with it. It sounded boring to me.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Why?

[Kurt Mackenzie]

It just sounded boring. Right. I was an immature agent at the time. I was brand new, but I didn't know much.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

And I guess the idea that who cares if health insurance companies or Medicare is being scammed. Right. We can't. We. There's no actual bad guy behind. There's not a face.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Then you get into it and you realize, oh, no, there are plenty of very, very bad people here. Why? Because there's money here. Not only is there money here, the worst part about it is the health care fraud that we were investigating involved theft from Medicare. So that's your paycheck, Right. That's your money that's going to the federal government that's being stolen. One of the things the FBI established very early on when I was working these cases in 2004, 5, 6. At that time, the federal government's budget for health and human services, slash Medicare, was $550 billion, give or take. Now it's over 800 billion. At that time, 10 to 15% of it was being stolen outright. Yeah, stolen outright.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

10 to 15%, yes, yeah.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Stolen outright through fraud.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

And that's all our money.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Basically, that's your money out of your paycheck. So if you look at your paycheck, look what's going out for Medicare, and take 10% of that, and it's going in some dude's pocket.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

And this is just Medicare, which ticked.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Me off, by the way. That's why I was motivated newly. Once I found that out, like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, my money.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

And I think, you know, when it's Medicare fraud, you kind of understand why people would get angry. I think sometimes what happens when it's health insurance scams is that or fraud is that people think, who cares? These are big companies. Nobody really likes health insurance companies anyway. You're going to pay, but we are going to pay as well.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

They got to raise your premiums. You're going to pay, right? And I will say the health insurance companies do a better job controlling fraud than Medicare does. Um, I remember getting to arguments with people from Medicare about thefts and losses. I was seeing in cases, and their attitude essentially was, listen, this is how the system's set up. We really can't do a whole lot about it, which is incredibly frustrating, especially when you consider the largest healthcare fraud case I had was a husband and wife and maybe 30 of their associates tried to steal $400 million from U.S. taxpayers. They got 200 million.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

How?

[Kurt Mackenzie]

They set up a scheme with, if I remember correctly, fake durable medical equipment companies. So picture this. You're a Medicare recipient. You go to a provider, a doctor's office or a clinic, or a durable medical equipment company that sells artificial arms and legs. You know, God forbid you have diabetes, you lost a foot, I need a prosthetic limb. You go to these providers. Getting a provider license was easy. It was a joke, right? Once you got that license, you have a license to bill Medicare. So they would do two things. One, they would either buy out a small business that was already existing and already had a license and just latch themselves onto that. That company may bill the government for $10,000 a year. 20,000. Now it's a million, right?

[Mariana Van Zeller]

For these prosthetics or for.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

There were no prosthetics. There was nothing. They're just submitting the paper. It's all paper.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

But under whose name? Like, who were they pretending needed those prosthetics?

[Kurt Mackenzie]

They would steal because Another thing I found out is there's a whole underworld where you can buy entire lists of patient names, so security numbers, dates of birth. They're bought and sold on the streets of Miami and other cities. Right?

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Right.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

So you're an enterprising crook. You buy a small existing business that makes nothing that has a license, you go find another guy on the street and you get a sheet of names. You get somebody who knows the billing process. You submit those bills to Medicare, you're gonna get at least 50% reimbursement, which is what my people did. 400 million. They got 200, and it's in their pockets.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

And there was no. They weren't actually spending any money or treating anyone or seeing anyone. What their operation was just filling paperwork and sending it to Medicare.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

They purportedly had 50 clinics. Right. There were 50 locations that they purportedly were doing business with. They were acting as the biller. And these 50 clinics owned by their 30 friends were legit businesses, quote, unquote. I personally wrote all the search warrants for all 50 of those locations. There wasn't a damn thing in any of them.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Nothing.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

There was no little shop, little sign. A couple of them had maybe some paperwork, an artificial limb or two. There was no business being conducted. Nobody working in there, nothing. It was all.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

They weren't even trying to hide the fact that they were doing this. You know, I just saw a very similar case in a. We were investigating these rehab scams all over the country, and we landed actually in Arizona, where, because of the Native American population there, it's very easy if you're Native American in Arizona to actually get insurance because of COVID They were trying to make it easier. So all you needed to do was give your Native American ID number, make a phone call, and you'd get insurance. And pretty premium good insurance.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Yeah.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

So there were all these bad actors that set up these sober homes and rehab facilities that weren't actually real, and they weren't actually providing treatment for the most vulnerable of people. You know, people who actually had drug addiction and alcohol addiction and really needed that help. And they would bring them into these rehab facilities and charge insurance or Medicare for sometimes, like we heard, you know, $10,000 a day and provide nothing.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Yep.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

We heard of some zoom calls that they were having. Their therapy sessions were Zoom calls where 400, 500 people would be on these zoom calls with one doctor or one therapist.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

That's pretty bold.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

It is so bold. I mean, but not much more bold than what the story that you just told.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Yeah, yeah.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

And again, it's like exploiting unintended consequences too. Right. Because they're trying to do good and make it easy for people to get the insurance and the help that they need.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Yeah.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

But at the end of the day, there are people just lurking around the corner trying to make a buck.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

One of the things I neglected to mention before, I don't, I can't speak for the Native American population, but here in Miami, one of the things we also saw is that the patients, the Medicare beneficiaries themselves, were in on the scheme a lot of times. So the fake providers would not only buy lists of information off the street, but it was not uncommon for them to go down to certain neighborhoods with a van, round up some homeless people or homeless looking people, or just old folks, know old folks home, hey, we're going for a ride, casino, whatever. And then it will give you 200 bucks. Just go visit this clinic.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

It's body brokering. We saw the exact same thing in the rehab industry. The exact same thing where people, former addicts or current addicts were being paid. Here's a hundred dollars, go look for people on the streets. A lot of times it was homeless people in California or in Arizona. And they would bring them to these fake rehab clinics.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

And they don't care because it's not that they're paying a premium out of their pockets. Right. They're seeing a 200 when they don't have any money and they benefit from, from it. And sometimes they'd round these people up once a week and hit these facilities. And I talked about durable medical equipment. That was a big scam back then. They've moved on to other scams. Another scam, I had one guy put in prison. He was running a fake laboratory. So he was associated with sober homes who said, okay, we're a sober home. We're going to do drug testing for all our patients. We're going to send them to this lab.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Is it the urine, the urine testing? Was it the urine test called liquid gold? Actually in the rehab world, as you probably know, I've heard about. We had one of our whistleblowers who told us about. She had been in one of these sober homes run by one of the worst actors in California who runs many of these sober and detox facilities. And she was telling us, yeah, that they would basically give her weed and drugs on the way to get her urine test because they wanted it to test dirty. First of all, they wanted everyone that in their care to do it like once a week because they could charge insurance $1,500 $2,000 per urine test, hence liquid gold. But also they would give them drugs so they would test dirty, so they would go through the cycle of detox because you can really charge insurance through. If you put a patient through detox. And people were dying and overdosing and.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

One more time, nobody cared.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

And nobody cared. Yeah, it's crazy to me now that we've had all this very depressing conversation, but important. I mean, I am forever grateful for the work that you do because as journalists we can investigate and we can get whistleblowers to talk to us and we could sort of shine a light. But you guys are really up there on the front lines getting people that need to be behind bars behind bars, which is pretty amazing.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Yeah, we true.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

And in many ways it's a very thankless job. Tell me about that part, like what that means to you. And if you think that it's become.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

More thankless recently, it's become much more difficult. And I'm not going to talk politics, but between people's perception of law enforcement in general, it becomes much more difficult to do the job which was already difficult to do in the first place. What your average American doesn't realize is that suicide is prevalent in law enforcement. Quite frankly, more of us kill ourselves than are killed by bad guys. Every year we have a 70 plus percent divorce rate, myself included. So you will, if you do this job properly for long enough, it will hurt you in some way, shape or form. But you do it for a few reasons. One, you do it because it's the right thing to do. You care about your family and friends. You don't want these people on the streets getting to them. You care about the country you live in and keeping it in one piece. And you'll do whatever it takes to do that. And to be honest with you, part of it too is it's kind of fun in some respects.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Right.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

It's crazy. You have to be wired a little wrong to have fun at that. But that's why we do it. But. But it does have a price. And I think I feel bad for my friends who are still in. I'm retired, obviously, and you know, I like retired life. But yeah, it's tough. It's very tough.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

I think you've done an incredible job. You mentioned some of the sort of ramifications that has had on you. You mentioned being divorced. What else do you have to deal with? If you don't mind me asking personal questions.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

But this way I'll take without Going in my health history. I'm a cancer survivor, too, which I'm sure the stress of the job contributed to that. That's also fairly prevalent. Your friends will die also. I have a handful of friends who died from nine, 11 related cancers. I have one friend who was murdered by a child molester, and I have another friend who committed suicide. So most agents know somebody like that. Right. That's just common. So you will see that kind of thing around you. It's. It's. It's tough.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

And let alone, like, the stories that you're like the, you know, talking to the victims, the family of the victims, that part alone, like that, you know, I get asked that question a lot. How do I deal with it?

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Yeah.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

And I think in my case, I. I either have a heart of stone. No. I think that I'm very able to compartmentalize and really hear the saddest, most horrible stories. And then being able to go home and just put that there in a box.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Yes.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

And not bring.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

It's very difficult to do. It's very difficult to do. I'm. I was decent at it, but obviously not perfect. Right. Most of my friends are pretty good at it, but we're not perfect. You survive by the camaraderie, which is part of the reason why law enforcement is like this. It's an extremely cohesive. I've worked in the private sector now, and before I joined law enforcement, I've never worked anywhere with this cohesive. A set of people. And you're tight because you have to be. You have nobody else to talk to.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Right. It's a family. It's the same thing with the people that I travel with for my. For traffic. It's. We're a family. And one thing that I made sort of mandatory for all of us is that at the end of the day, after hearing all the horrible stories, we have to get together and go out for dinner or at least have a glass of wine or a beer. So we could just. Solid therapy.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

We did a lot of that.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

So wine helps me tremendously.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Wine can be a friend or not, but. Yeah, I get you. I'm right there with you. Yeah, it's tough. It's sharing that with friends, talking to each other. It helps if you have. I have a very large extended family, and that's extremely helpful because I get to be around normal people where I talk about normal stuff.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Yeah.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

So, yeah.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

And it's interesting because as fascinating as your job is, and my job is as well is that I have friends, you know, who you know, I go from filming a woman carrying fentanyl across the border and, you know, the packing of fentanyl in Mexico and all of that, to filming that. And then the next day or that same afternoon, it's happened. I'm at a soccer game with a bunch of mothers, and I don't. When they ask me, okay, so what were you. Look, what was your story? And I don't. Yeah, exactly. I don't really want to get into the details because it's crazy.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

You can't. And the few stories I could tell after they were adjudicated. Right. My family would always ask me. But there's two problems. One, if it's active and ongoing, you have to filter what you're saying. So you're sitting there thinking, what can I say? So you look like you're lying.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Yeah.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Which if you're in a relationship, you can only imagine that that's difficult. And for the rest of your family, when you can tell them the story, they're like, I don't want to go outside.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Right. They get scared of the.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Scared. Like, stop telling me stories, stop talking.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Yeah. In many ways. Yeah. The only people that really understand is the people that went through with it, through it with you, which is why it becomes very much a family.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Big time. Big time. So my best. Luckily, I had friends before I joined the Bureau, but really good friends. But some of my best friends to.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

This day are all agents because we spent. I spent so much time in my job talking to the bad guys, even though I don't want. I don't like calling them the bad guys, because the majority of cases, these are people just like you and me, who, because of lack of opportunities, end up involved in life of crime. Not everybody. Not the George brothers, not everybody, but a lot. A lot of people. But. So I think that I don't spend enough time talking about the amazing work that people like you do. And I'm a true admirer of you, and thank you for all that you've done for this country.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Thank you. And let me be the first to say thank you for the amazing job you do of telling these stories. We're actually. Most law enforcement officers I know are fans of yours.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Thank you.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Because our first reaction is she goes to places and talks to people that we wouldn't go to or talk to without several guns. And, you know, that takes courage. So we're fans also. And thank you for the opportunity. Very appreciative.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It was an amazing experience. I really liked sharing.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Thank you, Marin. It's great to see you again.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

You too.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Tell Darren I said hey, and this was great. Thank you very much.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Thank you.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

When I was there, you had to have a knife. One of you's got to take turns carrying it up your rectum.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

Wait, it's up your butt.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

That's the prison wallet. You'll never leave home alone.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

You have something protected around it, I'm assuming.

[Kurt Mackenzie]

Yeah, or I was be bleeding at your coolo.

[Mariana Van Zeller]

I'm Mariana Van Zeller, and after reporting on black markets for my Emmy winning National geographic show, trafficked, I'm launching a podcast. You're getting emotional on me. Intimate conversations with those operating in the shadows. The hidden third is out now with new episodes every Wednesday. [e-mail] marianavanzeller Follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.