Doctor Billions | 2. Growing a Spine

How did Pacific Hospital of Long Beach become a world-class spinal care center? It would take a lot of thirsty surgeons turning a blind eye and taking illegal kickbacks. And thousands of unwitting patients. Want the full story? Binge every episode of Doctor Billions ad-free now by subscribing to The Binge+. You’ll unlock over 60 true crime series instantly, get early access to drops on the first of every month, and hear exclusive bonus episodes. Search for the channel on Apple Podcasts or head to GetTheBinge.com. For behind-the-scenes details, join our free newsletter at Patreon.com/TheBinge. Doctor Billions is a production of Sony Music Entertainment and Western Sound. Follow @sonypodcasts and discover more at sonymusic.com/podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices at podcastchoices.com/adchoices. The Binge — feed your true crime obsession. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Fall never arrives all at once. First the air, then the light. And slowly, the things you love begin to find each other. A jacket meets a dress. A hoodie slips beneath a blazer. An old cap finds a new scarf. Because you don't simply step into the season. You create it, layer by layer, until it finally feels like fall. Find fall your way at Ross.

• 0:31Speaker 01

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• 1:08Speaker 02

  There's a big bay window that you can see people pulling up.

• 1:12Speaker 01

  In the months after agreeing to feed information to investigators, Mark Sersansi started getting paranoid. How long could he live as a mole inside the same organization that was paying him a six-figure salary? During the day, he worked hard. But during off-hours, he'd give information to insurance investigator Bill Reynolds, the names of people he encountered that day, documents he was able to photo or scan. Sometimes Mark would introduce Bill to colleagues, approaching them carefully to get more information on what they were doing and what they knew. It was a sticky situation, especially given that Mark and his family, wife and two kids,

• 1:53Speaker 01

  were living in a million-plus-dollar mansion courtesy of his boss, Paul Randall.

• 2:00Speaker 02

  I remember sitting there and looking up, and I saw two cars pull up. I saw Paul get out, and three other guys come out. One big guy got out of the car, and they started walking towards the door. And I'm like, OK.

• 2:11Speaker 01

  One night, right around dinnertime, everything exploded.

• 2:16Speaker 02

  They knocked on the door, so I came to the door, and I opened the door up. They said, hey, can you talk for a minute? I'm like, sure. And they says, hey, we know that you're the rat. You're giving information. Can you step outside? And I'm like, why? And they're just like, well, we want to talk to you. Like, literally trying to intimidate me.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  The jig was up.

• 2:34Speaker 02

  That's when I said, give me a second. I remember shutting the door. I looked at my wife, I'm like, hey, call 911. Get the boys into the bedroom. Grab the shotgun, and just sit there. And when they tell you to come out, come out. But literally just sit there until the police come. I opened the door, and I don't remember everything, but I remember that we started to scuffle, started fighting. I remember taking on one guy and hitting him, and I dropped him. And then I grabbed Paul, pulled him in to the house, shut the door, locked it. I either shoved him or hit him, but he fell to the ground, and I basically tore his toupee off. I remember that, it was on the ground. And he stood there, just shaking and all scared and nervous. I opened the door to take on the other two, and I started fighting with the big guy.

• 3:18Speaker 02

  Put him on the ground, and the other guy ended up running off.

• 3:23Speaker 01

  But this was just the beginning of all hell breaking loose for Mark Sersansi.

• 3:30Speaker 01

  I'm Benadere. From Sony Music Entertainment and Western Sound, you're listening to Dr. Billions.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  This is episode two, Growing a Spine.

• 3:56Speaker 01

  You might think that your boss showing up at your house to kick your ass would be enough to get you to run for cover. But you haven't met Mark Sersansi. Mark knew his employment at Paul Randall's company was over, but he was still living in a house Paul gave him. And it was still the Great Recession. You can't just get a new place to live without a new job, so he and his family were kind of stuck.

• 4:20Speaker 02

  Imagine this as a father or a parent. You're trying to find an employment, and you're trying to protect your family. You're trying to do all these things at once. I don't even remember sleeping.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  And the harassment just got worse and worse. He says his tires were slashed, his family was followed. And then...

• 4:38Speaker 02

  We had a dog named Leila. It's a beautiful boxer dog.

• 4:42Speaker 01

  One day, Mark's eight-year-old son came in from the backyard.

• 4:45Speaker 02

  And he said, Dad, Leila, something's wrong with Leila. I said, what do you mean, honey? And so I went outside, and I looked, and I'm like, oh, crap. Well, they hung Leila off the shed. So it was like a hook thing, and they hung. And it was dead, and her tongue was hanging out, and my son's lot.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  There was a note on the dog.

• 5:03Speaker 02

  There's a couple sentences, but it was basically, you're next. This is what happens, Tourette's.

• 5:11Speaker 01

  Working with Bill, Mark had uncovered a lot about what was really going on at Paul Randall's medical company. The biggest realization? Paul Randall was just a cog in a machine. Everything seemed to go back to that hospital in Long Beach, Pacific Hospital, where Bill had noticed an astonishing uptick in surgery billings. In the 90s, the hospital had been acquired by an elusive and ambitious hospital administrator named Michael Drobot.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  Michael Drobot was an accomplished healthcare executive, not a doctor, but someone whose name was coming up over and over.

• 5:51Speaker 03

  Michael Drobot. Michael Drobot. Michael Drobot.

• 5:53Speaker 01

  Drobot. Michael Drobot. Joe McNally remembers the very first time he heard the name Michael Drobot.

• 6:01Speaker 04

  I was a federal prosecutor for 17 years in Los Angeles and Orange County. And the first time I heard it was when it was brought to us by a number of FBI agents who had been looking at healthcare fraud in Southern California.

• 6:16Speaker 01

  Joe McNally had heard a lot of names in his time, and these names, Michael Drobot and Paul Randall, did not immediately resonate.

• 6:24Speaker 04

  You know, as a prosecutor, you frequently will be told, you know, we're looking at this hospital executive, or we're looking at this doctor. Some of those cases go somewhere, some of those cases don't. And that's very much the nature of doing investigations and prosecutions.

• 6:39Speaker 01

  But pretty quickly, you got clued in. Drobot was a name to remember.

• 6:45Speaker 04

  Really interesting, personable, smart guy who was an entrepreneur, grew up in Michigan, was in the Navy Reserves around the time of Vietnam, and I think got acquainted with the hospital industry through that military service. And then he went out, and he was a hospital administrator in different places in the country.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  We reached out to Michael Drobot numerous times for this podcast, but we never heard back. But we've been able to piece together parts of his career, beginning from 1970, when he joined the Navy and was assigned as an officer at the U.S. Naval Hospital in Oakland, California. After leaving the Navy, Drobot got a job running the Alameda County Hospital in the East Bay, Alameda, California, and then other hospitals across the country. By the 1990s, Drobot had started his own hospital management company, buying up small hospitals.

• 7:39Speaker 04

  Eventually comes to California and gets more involved in the hospital industry and starts at some point Pacific Hospital in Long Beach.

• 7:47Speaker 01

  1997. Michael Drobot bought Pacific Hospital of Long Beach, a 184-bed community osteopathic facility. Average, resource-strapped, nothing special. At the time, Drobot had amassed significant wealth. According to testimony in 1997, he was worth $15 million, which would be more like $31 million today. But Drobot had big plans, plans that were not bound by a physician's ethical pledge.

• 8:19Speaker 04

  Look, the hospital world can be a challenging business. You've got to be pretty good at it. It's high overhead, getting paid can be challenging. If they're not managed right, hospitals can go out of business. By the same token, if you manage to bring in the right types of cases and high-paying surgeries, it'd be very profitable.

• 8:41Speaker 01

  Pacific Hospital is small to medium sized. It's in a less well-off part of Long Beach, California, just off a major freeway. A bunch of low-rise buildings and parking lots taking up most of the city block. There's an emergency department, an ICU, a lab, pretty standard stuff. But over the years, Drobot had learned a few things about how this business works. So when he took over Pacific, he made some very deliberate choices. First, this wasn't just going to be any hospital. Pacific was going specialty, workers' comp cases, and for the most part, spinal surgeries. Why workers' comp? If you've ever been injured on the job, you know the workers' comp system is a kind

• 9:24Speaker 01

  of parallel medical system, paid for by employers with their own insurance companies, to get injured workers the care they need as quickly as possible. Workers' comp paid differently than regular health insurance, and a lot of procedures, especially big, complicated procedures like spinal surgeries, paid way better. So injured workers could be very valuable to hospitals and doctors.

• 9:50Speaker 04

  Drobot, I think, saw that there were certain types of services that would be valuable, and he built a hospital that began to really focus on those types of services.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  Spinal surgeries. In the 1990s and early 2000s, spinal surgeries were having a moment. A CDC study says that fully 39% of Americans have suffered some kind of back pain in the last three months, from minor aches to major disabilities. Maybe you've thrown your back out and had to lie in bed for a few days. That's actually minor pain. Major pain is like what Derica Moses from episode one experienced, that pop, and then it just never gets better. In 1996, there was new help with the most debilitating injuries. New spinal surgery tech came online to help with a procedure called lumbar fusion.

• 10:46Speaker 01

  This is when your lower back is so fukaka, they're going to put in a rod and screw your vertebra to it, just to stabilize, really immobilize the whole damn thing. This new tech made these surgeries way more successful, so the number of procedures more than doubled over five years. Drobot seemed to put two and two together. We've got these new surgeries that are really expensive to do, plus a parallel medical system that kind of lets you build whatever... Dot, dot, dot. Sounds like maybe this could be an opportunity.

• 11:22Speaker 04

  I think he talked to some doctors and said, you know, how do I build a world-class or first-rate spinal care center? And that was a project that he began working on and continued to work on over a number of years. And he began hoarding and bringing in, you know, different types of surgeons, including a number of spine surgeons.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  But being a businessman with an idea is one thing. It was going to take one hell of a cheat code to make it reality.

• 11:51Speaker 00

  Fall never arrives all at once. First the air, then the light, and slowly the things you love begin to find each other. A jacket meets a dress, a hoodie slips beneath a blazer, an old cap finds a new scarf. Because you don't simply step into the season. You create it, layer by layer, until it finally feels like fall. Find fall your way at Ross.

• 12:18Speaker 05

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• 12:35Speaker 01

  Ah, to be a businessman with big dreams. Of course, it's one thing to have a plan to turn a small hospital in Long Beach into a workers' comp spinal surgery money-making machine. Doing it takes more. Because hospitals don't refer patients and do surgeries, doctors refer patients and do surgeries. So where was Drobot going to get the doctors to fill his hospital with patients? Well, that's a marketing problem, isn't it?

• 13:06Speaker 06

  He was one of the keyest players in it all. He actually talked Paul.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  When Mark Susansy was spying for Bill Reynolds, he set up a meeting with someone on the sales team. Skinny, British, white hair past his shoulders, like SpinalTop, according to Mark. His name was Mick McGrath. Mark said to him, hey, you're worried about Paul Randall? Maybe you should bank a little insurance. Talk to the guy I'm talking to. Mick agreed reluctantly. And one day in February 2012, Mark, Mick, and Bill Reynolds met up at a nondescript Orange County restaurant for lunch. Bill started recording, and Mick started talking.

• 13:46Speaker 06

  You know, you listen, these people deserve it. They're all feasting off the carcass. No one there cares about the patient. No one there gives a fuck about the patient.

• 13:54Speaker 01

  For nearly an hour, Mick described everything he knew about what Paul Randall was up to, with Drobot and a whole lot more.

• 14:04Speaker 06

  Paul learned template. Well, he saw the opportunity at Drobot's and was getting paid a great amount of money to do it, so he...

• 14:12Speaker 01

  Randall, who could sell ice to Eskimos, was the intermediary, introducing Drobot to as many Southern California back surgeons as he could. And Drobot paid Randall a hefty finder's fee. Randall knew a lot of these doctors because he was already in the back surgery game, but from a slightly different angle. He worked with a company that sold the hardware, rods and screws. So between Randall, the doctors, and now Drobot at Pacific Hospital, there is a whole lot of you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours. And the amounts of money were astronomical.

• 14:49Speaker 06

  He would just put his own prices on, because it's not altering. If you're just putting your own price and putting in your own money, basically, is what he's doing. I'll think I'll get 32,000 for this one. How about 57 for this one? I mean, there's no rhyme, reason, or there's no algorithm or formula behind it. It's all greed.

• 15:05Speaker 01

  The amounts of money made Randall a little scary, to be honest, says Mick McGrath.

• 15:10Speaker 06

  I'm intimidated by the guy. I started getting not, I can't be around him. I just, you know what I mean? He's just that kind of an evil character. I see people like ID channel and the disappeared channel. It's the kind of people...

• 15:21Speaker 01

  Bill told Mick a story about muscle guys bursting into operating rooms to chat with doctors who owed money. They talked about certain hospital administrators who may be pushing past legal gray areas. And they wondered out loud about whether or not the feds were on to something unsavory.

• 15:42Speaker 01

  Mick was not spilling his guts altruistically. Maybe he sensed something in the air.

• 15:48Speaker 06

  Well, listen, I'm being candid. I played everything out here on the line because I'm a good guy, but I don't want it to come back and bite me in the ass because you're going to get, you could have got this information without me coming and throwing myself to the slaughter, you know? I mean, I've got 20 years of my life. I lost my wife and kids at this point. The last thing I want to do is lose my reputation, being a snake after I've been accused of it, you know?

• 16:09Speaker 01

  Maybe he was starting to suspect he was on the losing end of things.

• 16:14Speaker 06

  I mean, I really have put my life into this career. I've been doing this, and I got fucking nothing.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  Mick then cuts himself short. He had to get back to work. Bill reached down and turned off the recorder.

• 16:34Speaker 07

  Hi, my name is Daniel Capen. I'm an, I was an orthopedic surgeon up until five years ago.

• 16:41Speaker 01

  Daniel Capen is a spinal surgeon who got in with Drobot on the ground floor. In the late 90s, Capen had a small practice with a couple other doctors in Downey, California. Downey is a small southeast LA county suburb, practically Orange County.

• 16:56Speaker 07

  I played college baseball. I was the captain of my baseball team, but I realized I wasn't hitting the curveball, and I had better keep in the chemistry lab and bio lab.

• 17:07Speaker 01

  When he got to medical school, he gravitated towards muscles and bones, orthopedics.

• 17:12Speaker 07

  And eventually, one of the things that caught my fancy was the adult human spine. And that's what drove me to open up a practice that focused 90% on spine.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  I don't think a lot of people really understand the complexity of the human spine. They think it's, they just think it's sort of magical. So how would you describe, like, the complexity of a spine and why that was interesting to you?

• 17:38Speaker 07

  It was interesting to me because it, first of all, was a very challenging surgery. Second of all, even though I'm Christian and I believe God does a good job with most designs, the human spine is mechanically not the greatest design, which is why, as people age, you know, a very high percentage of people wind up with spinal pain, spinal degeneration, difficulties with their nerves.

• 18:06Speaker 01

  So back in 1996, Michael Drobot met Dr. Capen for the first time, and he wanted to entice him to come use his newly acquired Pacific Hospital for all his back surgery needs. They set up a meeting.

• 18:20Speaker 07

  He seemed like a nice guy, seemed very affable, direct. He and the hospital staff were interested in having new doctors.

• 18:30Speaker 01

  So just so I understand, the pitch was essentially Drobot had taken over this hospital, and he was going to pivot the hospital from what it had been doing into a very, like, spine-centric hospital and surgery center. So he was asking you all to sort of bring your business there because this was going to be a specialty hospital, essentially.

• 18:52Speaker 07

  Yes, essentially, that's correct.

• 18:54Speaker 01

  The way the system is supposed to work is doctors and independent practice find what they think is the best hospital for their patients. Then they apply to that hospital for privileges, basically the right to do surgeries there. Surgeons will often have privileges at several hospitals so they can have more flexibility to give their patients the best care. What Drobot needed to do was convince doctors like Capen that Pacific Hospital was the new best place. But Pacific Hospital was still being built out, so he innovated. He wasn't just going to set up a new hospital. Drobot had a whole fleet of companies, all designed to make doctors' lives easier and more lucrative.

• 19:37Speaker 01

  He offered consulting contracts for doctors helping advise the build-out, paid positions on Pacific Hospital's board, management deals where he'd take over all the annoying parts of a doctor's private practice.

• 19:49Speaker 07

  We no longer had to worry about hiring, firing, or modifying the way the practice ran. To a degree, selfishly, it helped the fact that I didn't have to have a retirement plan for everybody. It just became...

• 20:05Speaker 04

  Me.

• 20:05Speaker 01

  You don't have to be a small business owner anymore. You can just be Dr. Capen, orthopedic spinal surgeon, and not really worry about all the rest.

• 20:15Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 20:15Speaker 01

  For Dr. Capen, this was great. Not just a great new hospital, but no more managing people. There was literally an outside office manager who took care of everything. And maybe the best part? He didn't have to pay for any of it. Drobot's companies simply took a percentage off Capen's business. And the more surgeries he sent over to Pacific Hospital, the more money he made.

• 20:40Speaker 04

  It was more financial freedom.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  Seems pretty sweet, right? But there was a catch, a big one. An exit clause in case Capen stopped sending surgeries to Pacific Hospital.

• 20:53Speaker 04

  That they could terminate the agreement.

• 20:56Speaker 01

  No more surgeries, no more management, no more money. But hey, no problem. As long as Capen kept referring his surgeries to Pacific, the money would keep coming and coming and coming.

• 21:14Speaker 01

  Pretty soon, word spread.

• 21:16Speaker 04

  In this industry, like any industry, people know what other people are doing.

• 21:21Speaker 01

  This is Joe McNally again, formerly with the Justice Department.

• 21:24Speaker 04

  Word starts getting out about spinal doctors, Southern California, you know, Pacific Hospital. Oh, where do you take your cases? Where do you do work? I do them at Pacific Hospital. Well, then, you know, doctors talk. And next thing you know, certain doctors who had never been to Pacific would say, oh, well, I'd like to come work with you, but I want a deal.

• 21:46Speaker 01

  Drobot would soon have dozens of similar agreements with doctors, many of whom, like Capen, were spine surgeons. And helping him make those deals was Mark Sersansy's old boss, Paul Randall.

• 21:58Speaker 04

  His job was to go out there and he called himself a marketer and market the hospital. But Randall was really out there brokering deals. And, you know, a hell of a salesman to just bring people in.

• 22:09Speaker 01

  Hospitals are places for the sick and injured to receive care, but they're also businesses. And the key to Drobot's dream was keeping those operating rooms full. Get those patients in there, do those surgeries, bill those surgeries, rinse, repeat.

• 22:25Speaker 04

  And so, you know, that was something that, you know, I think from a business standpoint, you know, Mike and the hospital were good at making sure that their operating room was always occupied.

• 22:36Speaker 01

  And it worked. From 2001 to 2010, the small hospital did over 5,100 spinal fusions on workers' comp patients. That's three times as many as any other hospital in California. The bill? $533 million.

• 22:56Speaker 01

  And at this point, you might be wondering why we're talking to a federal prosecutor about all this. That's because those contracts and deals that Drobot was signing in order to entice doctors to bring their surgeries to Pacific Hospital, most all of them were illegal.

• 23:12Speaker 04

  This was one of the largest healthcare fraud cases ever. And certainly, from my perspective, the largest kickback case in California history, just based on the volume of patients impacted and the dollar amount involved.

• 23:29Speaker 01

  Michael Drobot's biggest achievement was not building a world-class spine center. It was getting so many doctors to take so much money in exchange for patient referrals, get them to put greed, not care, at the core of their practice, and turn Pacific Hospital into a billion-dollar fraud machine.

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• 24:28Speaker 00

  Fall never arrives all at once. First the air, then the light. And slowly, the things you love begin to find each other. A jacket meets a dress. A hoodie slips beneath a blazer. An old cap finds a new scarf. Because you don't simply step into the season. You create it layer by layer, until it finally feels like fall. Find fall your way at Ross.

• 24:59Speaker 01

  Remember Derica Moses from the first episode? She was working for Pepsi, lifting some pallets of soda bottles. Heard a pop in her back. And before she knew it, she was in a doctor's office, and he was recommending surgery.

• 25:11Speaker 07

  Yes, he told me that I would get between 90 and 95% better. And that's what gave me the hope to have the surgery done.

• 25:19Speaker 01

  She trusted her doctor. But when money enters the care equation, use this hospital and get paid, for example, financial incentives warp every single decision.

• 25:33Speaker 01

  If you've ever had a surgery, you know those bills come with dozens of lines. Everything from surgical instruments to anesthesia in medicine, to the tools used during the surgery. Room charges, nurse charges, the bed and the recovery room charges, the individual pieces of spinal hardware that get placed in your back. It goes on and on and on. The doctor's cut of a surgery bill is only one of those lines. Sometimes not even the biggest one. All in, these surgeries get billed in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. So each patient referral to Pacific Hospital was worth a lot of money. And Drobot really wanted to get a steady stream of them in the doors and into his operating rooms.

• 26:19Speaker 01

  While in some professions, you can give a simple referral fee, in medicine, you cannot. It's illegal. You can dress it up as a management agreement, or a consulting contract, or something else.

• 26:32Speaker 04

  Well, you can take money for a lot of different reasons. But as soon as it's a quid pro quo, as soon as it's this for that, and patients are involved, it becomes a kickback.

• 26:42Speaker 01

  And kickbacks are illegal.

• 26:45Speaker 04

  It's not walking in with a bag of cash and handing it to you, saying, give me your patients. You know, the doctor's looking at this, he's like, well, I'm going to make more money if I bring my surgeries there. Less overhead. That's the deal, I'm going to do it. And so you had doctors that did it.

• 27:01Speaker 01

  Doctors involved in Drobot's scheme had a menu of options to choose from. Do your lumbar fusion surgery at Pacific Hospital. $15,000 each. Do your cervical fusion surgery at Pacific Hospital. $10,000 each. Use Drobot's imaging company for your patient's MRI? $200. Use spinal hardware from Drobot's company? Extra $5,000. Were doctors making the best decisions for their patients? Hard to know. Was all the care necessary? Hmm.

• 27:38Speaker 04

  So I think that Pacific Hospital, during the time period we looked at, ended up doing roughly $1 billion worth of surgeries.

• 27:45Speaker 01

  A billion dollars worth of surgeries. Thousands of patients, dozens and dozens of doctors. All that money Drobot was handing out was in addition to what doctors would bill the insurance companies for their services. There were no bags of cash. Instead, there were contracts, papered with real lawyers, to make the payoffs look legit. Four kinds, basically. Management contracts, like the one Dr. Capen signed. Consulting contracts, paid seats on Pacific Hospital's board.

• 28:16Speaker 04

  There weren't really any duties that came with that.

• 28:19Speaker 01

  The fourth category was maybe a bit flimsier than the others. Drobot signed option agreements on doctors' practices. Big money to reserve the right to purchase a doctor's business at a later date. Only, he never did buy them. Just handed out fat checks.

• 28:35Speaker 04

  What they would say is, you know, $50,000 or $100,000 a month. But there was no requirement at the end of that that the doctor partway with his practice. And so, you know, it was, you know, an option agreement. It's really an option for nothing.

• 28:49Speaker 01

  The giveaway was that no matter the agreement, the contracted payments changed every month. More surgeries, more money. Fewer surgeries, less money.

• 29:04Speaker 01

  At any point here, did you think maybe this wasn't kosher according to the feds? Or according to any law enforcement?

• 29:12Speaker 06

  You know, in retrospect, maybe I should have had a lawyer look every two years.

• 29:17Speaker 01

  This is Dr. Daniel Capen again.

• 29:19Speaker 06

  I thought, since we had an agreement that was vetted twice by healthcare attorneys that said it was okay, that it was okay.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  Dr. Capen says he didn't know anything was wrong with the agreement because, he says, his lawyers okayed it. That's what he says. But that was, of course, the strategy, right? Make it look legit, so when the feds come sniffing around, you have plausible deniability. Capen admitted to taking over $5 million from Drobot in return for sending hundreds of surgeries to Pacific Hospital. As the DOJ's case against Drobot got thicker, Mark and Bill were chin-deep in their own parallel investigation. With Mark outed as a rat, he knew he was a target for Randall and Drobot.

• 30:13Speaker 02

  I didn't trust anyone at the time, not one person. The only person I trusted was Bill. That was it.

• 30:19Speaker 01

  Bill, on the other hand, couldn't say the same.

• 30:22Speaker 03

  Even though I worked hand-in-hand with Mark and I trusted the guy, when I developed information, it was really a one-way street. Things we did together, I give him copies of it, but the other items that background the criminals and civil cases that were brewing out there, I kept those guarded.

• 30:41Speaker 01

  Right. Why?

• 30:42Speaker 03

  In law enforcement, you don't want to disclose your investigation to a source. You're always fearful of him taking that 180-degree turn and going back and following that money. What brought him from Oregon to Southern California was money, the promise of a huge salary and potential for making even more and taking care of his family.

• 31:11Speaker 01

  Paul Randall and his partners knew about Mark. It was only a matter of time before they discovered Bill, too. Next time on Dr. Billions. Was the hacking the first time that you noticed, like, oh, they're coming after me?

• 31:27Speaker 03

  Yeah. And then shortly thereafter, I had some Middle Eastern people surveilling my house consistently. I had three different times that they had jumped the fence. And when I say three different times, they would come at 9:00 or 9:30, and then 10:30 or 11:00.

• 31:45Speaker 01

  At night?

• 31:46Speaker 03

  At night.

• 31:47Speaker 01

  So they took your computer three times, and then they came to your front door and your back door three different times?

• 31:56Speaker 03

  Multiple times. I couldn't tell you how many times.

• 31:59Speaker 01

  And who was responsible for that?

• 32:01Speaker 03

  I think it was financed by Drobot. I wasn't intimidated. I should have been.

• 32:19Speaker 01

  Unlock all episodes of Dr. Billions ad-free right now by subscribing to The Binge Podcast channel. And it doesn't stop at Dr. Billions. Subscribers get a binge drop of a brand-new series on the first of every month. That's all episodes, all at once, all ad-free. And between drops, you've got ad-free access to Crime Scene, The Binge's weekly series, plus instant access to over 70 true crime podcasts, shows like Doctor's Orders, Night Shift, and Firebug. So you'll never be short on stories. Search for The Binge on Apple Podcasts and hit subscribe. If you're not on Apple, head to GetTheBinge.com to subscribe

• 33:02Speaker 01

  directly. Dr. Billions is produced by Western Sound for Sony Music Entertainment's The Binge. I'm your host, Ben Adair. 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 Balut. It was written by Dana Balut and Ben Adair. Najib Amini is our fact checker. Michael Rayfield is the mix engineer. Music courtesy of North Figueroa Studios. Legal by Sam Borenzweig at Clarus Law, PLLC. Next

• 33:45Speaker 01

  up, episode three, Rat's Nest.

• 33:58Speaker 00

  Fall never arrives all at once. Burst the air, then the light. And slowly, the things you love begin to find each other. A jacket meets a dress, a hoodie slips beneath a blazer, an old cap finds a new scarf. Because you don't simply step into the season, you create it, layer by layer, until it finally feels like fall. Find fall your way at Ross.