Doctor Billions | 5. Go For Broke
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00:33 Feed your true crime obsession. The binge. In the middle of 2011, Spinal Solutions product rep Robert Pereira started looking at everything going on around him. The greedy doctors, living their most depraved lives on egomaniac airlines, the envelopes and FedEx is stuffed
00:57 with tens of thousands in cash. The screws he saw being manufactured in a dingy machine shop in the California Dead. destined for the insides of unsuspecting people's bodies. And the absolutely insane amounts of money this company's spinal solutions was making. Just the screws, the cross-links, the rods, the caps, just for the hardware itself, ran somewhere between, I mean, it can go anywhere from $25,000 over $100,000.
01:28 It was very common for it to be in the $60-plus-dollar range per surgery. Honestly, he was done. Everyone knew what was going on. And once I realized what was going on, and I knew that everyone is in on it, and they're all making just a shitload of money, I'm like, well, I'm fucking busting this party. This is done.
01:48 But then he had to ask himself, what does busting this party even mean? I know there was no going to Roger saying, hey, these screws seem inferior, you know. That's Roger Williams, his boss, who, as a reminder, was never charged with a crime, time for anything, Robert and so many others have independently told us, things we've corroborated
02:08 via depositions, court testimony, and investigative reports. I would have been fired on the spot right there, and I did my due diligence. I took screws. I knew what I was doing. You can't just call the cops. I mean, like, what's the cop going to do? After I spoke with other reps, and it became apparent to me that it wasn't just a rumor that they had in the past and they were currently manufacturing their own screws and past. casting them off as authentic, I decided this is insane. I'm going to go to the FDA.
02:39 You just can't do this. Robert's voice became one of a growing group trying to stop this rogues gallery of crooked doctors and medical grifters. But they were going up against so much money. And no one was going down without a fight. I'm Benadere. From Sony Music Entertainment and Western Sound, you're listening to Dr. billions. This is episode five. Go for Broke. Insurance investigator Bill Reynolds knew about what was happening with spinal solutions, and he knew all about the scheme surrounding Drobot and Pacific
03:26 Hospital. He was awash in information. It became a 24-7 obsession. I would get calls at dinner time at night, eight or nine o'clock at night, 10 o'clock at night, from informants or from doctors, all hours. You get into it. It's the spirit of the chase. This guy is a very bad person. It was beginning to take a toll. That was very problematic for a marriage relationship because I became so focused there. Sometimes Bill would be meeting with a source and suddenly get the feeling. He was being watched. I always arrive early. I'll circle around the restaurant and I look for strange antennas, for monitoring devices, things of that nature. Any cars that have, two men sitting in them or a male-female, making sure that they enter and leave an appropriate
04:19 amount of time. At the time, Bill was living in Brentwood, California, between San Francisco and Stockton. He'd drive down to Southern California to do interviews and meet with Mark and others, then go home, far away from the action. You might think the distance would make him safer. You'd be wrong. Bill says the guys he was going after started coming after him. and his family.
04:44 First, he says, they hacked him. I opened up an email. I didn't know it, but it had a hidden virus in it. Well, that's how I would walk into my office. I would see the mouse going across my screen and files going out. And I'm like, how can this be? And I'd rip the cords out of the wall, reboot. Next, he says they came for his computers.
05:08 My clock at 1130 always told me it was time. for lunch. So my buddy would come pick me up, 1120, 1130. I'd be gone for an hour, hour and a half. And so three different occasions came in the front door. My computer equipment got dropped on the stairway. They went out the rear sliding glass door, jumped the fence, and we're in the park and gone. He says this was just the beginning. I had three different times that they had jumped the fence. And when I say three different times, they would come at nine or nine 30, and then 10, 30, or 11 o'clock. At night.
05:44 At night. And my neighbor across the street had a motion-sensitive light. So when they were walking up my path to my house, boom, they were illuminated. And I had a glass door, and so I could see immediately. So they took your computer three times, and then they came to your front door and your back door three different times. Multiple times. I couldn't tell you how many times. He says the surveillance became constant.
06:13 All I had to do was look out my window. Always two guys in the car. Engine would be running all the time. It's 110 degrees out. So they had their air conditioner going, and you look on the ground, you see the water in the front. It didn't take a rocket scientist to realize what was going on. As his investigation kept going,
06:31 he says the harassment and threats escalated. My wife's vehicle, the right-side tires, were slashed. down the side. If she had been on the freeway, the mechanic said that she would have crashed and burned, and it was lucky that we had spotted it. And then, he says things got really personal. My youngest son went over to this bagel store by the high school.
06:58 So he's inside getting a sandwich when these two characters that had been surveilling my house came in and basically grabbed him by the arm and said, hey, we want to talk to you and pulled them outside. And when things started getting heated, he goes, I'm not telling you about my dad. A postman was standing right there and grabbed my son, pulled him in, and that was it. Bill talked to the police, but didn't file any reports,
07:25 and it's never been proven in court. But for his family, his wife, it was all too much, much, too much. The stress of having people outside your house, And then when the tires were cut on our car, and then when they jump the fence and cut the second-story window screens and pride the sliding glass window open up to get into my office, that kind of was the final mark. His wife had reached a breaking point. She left him. Yeah, especially when the car dealer told her that if she had driven out on the highway, she would have crashed for sure. Yeah, scary.
08:06 I mean, at this point, all these people are intimidating you. Your wife is telling you that that's enough. Why wasn't it enough for you? It was the race to get the bad guy. I viewed Michael Joba as the top gun in a criminal organization. And he was just controlling people with impunity. You know, with your law enforcement back. It's like you just keep kicking those nuggets over until eventually it's going to fall.
08:44 Bill's family weren't the only ones telling him to stop. He says his employer was also feeling it was getting to be much too much. Not the threats to Bill, the threats to their own bottom line. I would have weekly meetings with the vice president of the company, my director, and I would lay out the scheme and the exposure. But then when the press started getting into it and there's a lot of calls going on, people were coming forward, they realized, hey, we could have a real exposure here.
09:23 Remember, Bill had been a cop, but he was no longer a cop. He was an insurance investigator, working for an insurance company. His job description was not pursue justice. It was to root out fraud. to save the insurance company money. So, yeah, Bill was finding a lot of fraud. But was it going to save a lot of money? They saw and recognized that all this was illegal.
09:50 And when they had the CFO do the analysis, it was $5 billion to redo the surgeries, the revisions and pay temporary disability benefits and the exposure could have been huge. Wait, I want to make sure that I'm understanding you, right? The insurance companies knew what was going on, but they did a calculation and said, all these people who we think got the counterfeit hardware, we're going to have to redo all of their surgeries because they have counterfeit hardware. And that's going to cost too much money. It's going to cost $5 billion.
10:27 Right. So we're just going to pretend the whole thing doesn't exist, essentially. That is correct. Bill says he was asked to stand down. Then he says he was ordered. But I feel that there was a moral and ethical obligation to tell all these patients. Eventually, his employment was terminated. This kept escalating, and then the first couple months of 2012, I got walking papers.
10:57 Which left Bill with no wife, no job. Nothing to do, but keep going. I became so committed to this case. There are so many people that were being affected that I continued. I mean, I went several years with no paychecks and lived off my savings. Fortunately, I had that. He met with Robert Pereira. He met with Paul Randall.
11:20 He met with the U.S. attorneys building the kickback case in Southern California. And soon, he'd be meeting with a new set of lawyers to pursue his own case now that he and Mark were completely on their own. Far from Southern California, a different set of FBI agents were putting on their sunglasses and holster in their pistols. It was raid in time again. But not where you might expect with this story. I'm Laurel Rosenhall. I'm a journalist in Sacramento, California, and I'm now with the New York Times. Back in 2012, 2013, Laurel was a young reporter just getting started covering California politics for the local Sacramento newspaper, the Sacramento B. Just to have the FBI in the state capital is extremely dramatic and newsworthy, and that was a huge deal.
12:18 On June 4, 2013, the investigations of the massive web of fraud went to a new place, deep inside the California state halls of power. There was a raid on the office of state legislator Ron Calderon. I remember getting the call from my editor that this had happened, and I had, you know, already come. home for the day. I remember kind of dropping everything and running back downtown and going to the Capitol and trying to kind of understand. Senator Calderon had been in office since December 2006. He was a well-established longtime politician who came from a family of longtime power brokers. We knew like the different offices that they had gone into that Ron Calderon's office was a target and a bunch of boxes of material and computers and stuff had been.
13:10 carried out. Twelve years earlier, Ron Calderon's brother, Tom Calderon, had written a particular piece of legislation that the bad guys in this story exploited to get hundreds of millions of dollars. So you could say, in a way, that Ron Calderon was the uncle of California's notorious spinal pass-through law. He certainly acted like an uncle. Very protective. The Calderons have been a powerhouse in California politics for more than 30 years.
13:48 There were three brothers who had different times served in the legislature. It began with Charles Calderon, then Tom and Ron. Charles's wife Lisa has also served, and their son, Ian. But fun fact about California politicians, even though they're in charge of an economy worth trillions, the folks tending the store don't actually do all that. well for themselves. A standard member of the California Assembly makes $134,694 a year. I mean, it's a good paycheck, but it's not like Porsche 9-11 good.
14:25 Politicians, though, have access to more money than just their salaries. They get lots and lots of campaign contributions. I mean, these guys are always running for something. Then the lawmaker or the candidate, the political candidate, can decide how to spend the money. And then there's the law. lobbying. In Sacramento, there's an army of lobbyists spending money on politicians to educate them on the issues. Think like dinners at super nice restaurants to talk shop, or maybe a trip to Hawaii to attend some kind of seminar about something. And lots and lots of gifts. Sports cards, memorabilia. Tickets, bottles of wine, out to dinner. Bottle service at the Beyonce concert.
15:10 Every year, politicians have to report. all the gifts they get from lobbyists. Those reports are public, and journalists like Laurel go through them. We would look at those annual reports where the legislators had to disclose their gifts, and we would tabulate who got the most in gifts and who got the most in travel and all of that. Ron Calderon was one they liked to watch. There's 120 lawmakers, and he was frequently at the top or close to the top. I don't remember the exact dollar figures of what it was, but He was just definitely known to be someone who was enjoying the perks of the job. So after the FBI raided his office, reporters like Laurel were asking,
15:52 what could have gotten this guy in trouble? A few months after the raid, Al Jazeera America published a leaked FBI affidavit. And that explained the whole entire scam that they were investigating. That broke loose like a big piece of the mystery. The affidavit was over 100 pages long. It was pretty complex. There were multiple different elements to this. So this story really, like, dripped out in little pieces over the next couple years and, frankly, became like this ongoing saga that I covered in little bits and pieces for quite a long time. Was it shocking?
16:32 Became more and more shocking when you understood the depth of the different schemes that were underway. Calderon was popped for taking two sets of brass. One piece of it had to do with this bribery scheme involving the film production business in L.A. And one of the FBI agents had actually gone undercover pretending to be a film producer who was bribing Senator Calderon for legislation that would benefit the film industry. The undercover agent got Calderon to agree to push a new law to allow more films to get tax credits. In return, he hired Calderon's daughter at a production company and paid her for work she never did. I had started looking into this film production guy who was trying to influence Ron Calderon before I knew that he was an undercover FBI agent. And so I had like started piecing together.
17:32 He had kind of built this big online persona for himself. And so then when I found out that he was an undercover FBI agent, I was just kind of like mind-blown. The other scheme is just as bananas. It involved another employment opportunity for one of Calderon's kids, but not in Hollywood. This one was at a hospital. And the bribes weren't coming from an undercover agent,
17:56 but an elusive and ambitious hospital administrator named Michael Drobot. I remember when I did do this deep dive to understand what was the surgery that they were. doing. What was the legislation that they were trying to pass to kind of protect that whole scheme? I just remember thinking how dark the whole thing was that this whole culture of political influence and in this case, corruption, actually like winds up with people getting surgeries they don't need and hardware put in their back that they maybe don't need. Michael Drobot bribed Senator Ron Calderon to protect the wildly lucrative spinal pass-through law.
18:46 Remember, Drobot had his own spinal hardware company, international implants, and he paid doctors an extra $5,000 if they used his devices and surgeries. So how do you bribe a senator without handing him a bag full of cash? The same way Drobat did with the doctors, with a contract. He hired Calderon's son as a hospital file clerk for three summers at $10,000 per summer. I had been thinking of it in the lens of the political corruption side of it, which is, you know, unsavory, but also kind of fascinating and exciting. But when I started realizing the extensive level of these surgeries and the amount of, like, pain that people were in and what was happening there, that's when the fact of it being like, oh, it's not just about the political corruption. This is about like real people's real bodies getting hacked up.
19:40 And I remember just feeling like that felt so dark. Ron Calderon pleaded guilty to a federal corruption charge and admitted he accepted tens of thousands of dollars in bribes in exchange for performing official acts as a legislator. He was sentenced to 42 months in prison. But here's what sticks with me. Drobot's fraud was worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The bride that helped shield it?
20:08 $30,000, laundered through a kid's mostly no-show summer job. $30,000, protecting one part of his gigantic fraud machine. The Calderon case is just one of the dominoes that started falling all around Michael Drobot. Observe the North American Dad, 50s, great polo collection. He enters his vehicle information on Carvana and offer a piece. years in minutes. Remarkable. He squints, reads it again, smiles and says, dang, that's a good offer. The highest form of approval. No haggling, no hassle. No one called him boss. He's still on the couch. Astonishing. Sell your car today on Carvana.com. Pickup fees may apply.
21:02 Welcome to the haunted library. Join me, Colin Morgan, as I read Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. A story of science and ambition, loneliness and longing, and what it truly means to be human. Listen to The Haunted Library, wherever you get your podcasts, or find us on YouTube. This is Bill Reynolds. Today's date is September 3, 2015. I'm speaking with Pilot Bob. Do I have your permission to record this statement? Yes, you do.
21:42 Thank you. We tried to reach Pilot Bob several times, but were not successful. But back in 2015, insurance investigator Bill Reynolds interviewed him over the phone. Pilot Bob had been terminated from spinal solutions in 2011, so four years later, he was more than ready to spill the tea. We've met and discussed several times your association with spinal solutions. Is that correct? Correct.
22:08 Bill was not interested in the party side of EGomaniac Airlines. When we spoke earlier, you stated that on several occasions you went down to Temecula and went to William Crowder's business called the Crowder Machine and Tool to pick up pedical screws. That's correct. Bill wanted to know about the cargo deliveries, the instruments and hardware. You indicated that you picked up two types of screws from Mr. Crowder, The first being a gray medical metal screw with a machine head, and the second type of screw was described as blue and gold with a articulating head.
22:51 Yeah. And these were the screws that you picked up at Crowder that he manufactured? Yeah. Yeah, we picked up those kind of screws at Crowder. And that you stated that you brought these back to the Spinal Solutions facility in Marietta and that you sorted them according to lengths in diameter and placed them in bags? Yeah.
23:13 Pilot Bob told Bill that he, a pilot, would pick up spinal hardware from a machine shop, take it to the Spinal Solutions office, and then help sort it out into baggies. That was medical hardware that would soon be in people's bodies. Then, Pilot Bob would shuttle the hardware to various doctors around the country. You stated that you flew surgical trays to hospitals
23:35 around the country on many occasions? Do you recall flying in one particular incident to Las Vegas to deliver a surgical trip? You said that you arrived late at night and that you had a tough time getting into the hospital. Do you recall that? Yeah, I delivered it to the hospital late at night, two trays. But that you said that was for surgery? Yeah. Why was a private plane from Marietta, California going to Las Vegas to deliver medical hardware?
24:05 You stated that when you were delivering these trays, that there was no documentation or invoices on the trays when you delivered them to the hospital? No, I just take them in and drop them off, and no one gave me any paperwork. Sorry, medical hardware with no documentation? Bill then asked Pilot Bob about a list of specific doctors and whether or not Pilot Bob knew they were involved.
24:30 How about Dr. Cully White? Yes, we flew Dr. Cully White. Pick him up in Waukesha, Wisconsin, and flew him. to St. Martin's in the Caribbean. Dr. Cully White was the doctor from Wisconsin who operated on Bob Gore. We heard about him last episode.
24:50 He lived a life of pain after an on-the-job injury and then a back surgery performed by Dr. Cully White. We found Cully White's name in Pilot Bob's flight logs several times. God, if people knew how hospitals worked, They would just quit it altogether. I mean, the stuff I saw, it just destroyed my faith in the medical community, pretty much. Robert, that's all I have.
25:24 You're aware that I was recording this and everything you stated is true and correct? Yeah, to my knowledge and certainly my emotional feeling about it. Okay, I'm going to turn the recording off now. All right. December 8th, 2022, in small town, Wisconsin. Tammy Gore woke up wanting to make her husband Bob Gore his favorite meal, ribs, red potatoes, and brownies for dessert. Last episode, we talked about how Bob had suffered a debilitating back injury at work, made it hard for him to lie down, travel, even getting through a day could be rough. He'd found a local back surgeon, Dr. Cully White,
26:09 who we were just talking about. But the surgery just seemed to make everything worse. Cully was very good at making it seem like it was all Bob's fault. And then he would go in and say, I'm not getting relief. It's not any better. We tried to reach Cully White for comments, but never heard back. For the record, he has denied any wrongdoing having to do with kickbacks or his back surgeries being improper. He was put on methadone. And eventually they said he would have had to go to the methadone clinic every day, drive an hour away to. to go to get the methadone because it was so addictive,
26:47 almost like heroin. Bob lost all of his teeth, and he weaned himself off by himself for 30 days. They don't even know how he survived. On that morning of December 8th, Tammy walked from her bedroom to the living room where Bob had been sleeping. He slept sitting up in a chair because of pain. That morning, I woke up at 6.30,
27:08 came up to the living room, and he looked at me, and he said, Tammy, why didn't you talk to me all night? and I said, honey, I was in the bedroom all night. And he's like, no, you weren't, you were sitting in the chair. Tammy was confused. She'd slept all night in bed. And I do to this day, believe it was an angel that was waiting for him. They slowly started their day.
27:28 He made breakfast, went into the bathroom and everything, and he asked me to lay down with him, and we said that we loved each other, and I got up to make his favorite meal. And I thought, I'm going to let him sleep. And I woke him up, And I couldn't, well, I couldn't wake him. I tried to wake him up.
27:47 And he was gone. And I will tell you that for the first time in our marriage, I saw a piece on my husband's face where God says, you're absent from the body present with the Lord. It was the first time I saw a piece where there was no pain in those eyes. He died three days before their seventh wedding anniversary. Bob wanted to be cremated. So the next morning, Tammy went with other family members to the funeral home.
28:28 And when she was there, like Derricka Moses in episode one, she made a funny request. I think I just said, can I have his hardware? Because I didn't even know that it wouldn't melt, I guess. I don't know what even made me do that. The hardware from Bob's back didn't melt. So I guess I was kind of shocked when I saw him because I threw the bag. I just was like, how can they be so bent? Tammy wasn't sure what she would do with them.
28:54 She thought maybe she'd get him tested one day. I didn't know if I would ever get an answer. And I just felt like it was kind of like justice for Bob. And I thought he just deserved that. He really did. Because he really should be here with me. I'm sorry. After we interviewed her, Tammy sent us Bob's hardware.
29:19 We had Bill Reynolds analyze it. After a few weeks, he had an answer. Together, we called Tammy. Hello, Tammy. Hello, Tammy. This is Bill Reynolds. Hi, Bill. Tammy sent Bill rods and screws that Dr. Collie White put in Bob's back. Bill did not find the markings and engravings that he would expect on a piece of legitimate surgical hardware.
29:43 There was no engraving, no identification whatsoever on it. And because there was no engraving on the tulip or the rod, I used a little magnification. fine glass, nothing even resembling that, showed up. Implantable devices in the United States must have a lot, batch, or serial number, according to the FDA. Federal laws require manufacturers to include identifying numbers on the hardware, as well as the name of the patient who received it, and the date it was implanted. Without that identification, there's no way to know who made Bob's hardware.
30:21 Tammy also sent us the medical report about Bob's surgery. That report mentioned two pedical screw systems from a company called Spine Tech, ending in T-E-K. It says the screws were implanted in Bob's L3 and L-4, his lower back. In examining the operative report, Dr. Cully-White identified the hardware as spine techs. I immediately went onto the FDA website. The FDA actually runs public databases where you can search for a company or a device and see what's registered, what's been cleared or approved, and who's allowed to make it. Spine Tech, the company in Cullywhite's report,
30:58 should be in one of those FDA databases. But... And was unable to authenticate the manufacturer, any identification on it. A counterfeit screw without a lot or serial number would not be listed in that database. A company that doesn't exist would not be listed in that database.
31:20 It led me to believe that this clearly was part of the counterfeit surgical hardware that infiltrated the medical system. And Tammy, how does that make you feel to hear that? It's very hard for me. It's like, it's going to be really rough. But at least it's justice for Bob. God picks our date, so I guess I have to look at life that way.
31:45 It just sucks how somebody can destroy somebody's life because he was the nicest man in the world. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. Bill's conclusion is his opinion. We cannot be sure of the counterfeit claims. The hardware is old. It's been through an incinerator.
32:06 Stuff could have happened. Like I said, Cully White has denied ever taking kickbacks or using counterfeit hardware, and those allegations were never proven in court. However, he did plead guilty in 2013 to billing for services he didn't provide, and for that, he was sentenced to six months in prison, and he surrendered his medical license.
32:27 And that was really a big thing for me because I didn't care about the money or anything. I just didn't want him to hurt another person. So Tammy did get one thing she wanted. Cully White will never perform back surgery again. Coming up on the season finale of Dr. Billions, operations backlash and spinal cap reached their dizzying conclusions. At one point, we probably had 50, 60 people
32:58 indicted. While Bill Reynolds and Marks Ersanssey try to find their own path to justice. They stopped at nothing to expose the truth. My name is Bill Reynolds and I'm a whistleblower. And Robert Pereira reaches a boiling point. And I'd be like, hey, are you guys going to do anything? We're doing five, six cases tomorrow and then five, six cases the next day. Are you guys going to do anything? That's next up on episode six, whack-a-mole. The season finale of Dr. Billions. Dr. Billions is produced by Western Sound for Sony Music Entertainment's The Binge. I'm your host, Benadare.
33:55 I'm also the executive producer for Western Sound. From Sony Music Entertainment, the executive producers are Jonathan Hirsch and Catherine St. Louis. Dr. Billions was reported and produced by Dana Ballute. It was written by Dana Ballute and Benadere. Najeeb Amini is our fact-checker. Michael Rayfield is the mix engineer, music courtesy of North Figueroa Studios, legal by Sam Borenswag at Claris Law, PLC. Next up, episode six, whack-a-mole.
34:28 I'm Josh Maykowitz, and I hope you'll join us for season five of Dateline Missing in America. In each episode of Dateline's award-winning series, we will focus on one missing person's case, and hear from the families, the friends, and the investment. Investigators all desperate to find them. Maybe you could help solve a mystery. Search Dateline missing in America to listen completely free or subscribe to Dateline premium to unlock new episodes early.
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