Doctor Billions | 5. Go For Broke

The bad guys fight back — going after Bill Reynolds, making his life hell, threatening his safety, and even his marriage. And another FBI raid shows the reach of this scam – deep into California state politics. 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

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• 1:05Speaker 01

  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 Fedexes stuffed with tens of thousands in cash, the screws he saw being manufactured in a dingy machine shop in the California desert destined for the insides of unsuspecting people's bodies, and the absolutely insane amounts of money this company Spinal Solutions was making.

• 1:37Speaker 02

  Just the screws, the crosslinks, the rods, the caps, just for the hardware itself ran somewhere between, I mean, it could go anywhere from $25,000 over $100,000. It was very common for it to be in the $60-plus-thousand range per surgery.

• 1:56Speaker 01

  Honestly, he was done.

• 1:58Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:11Speaker 01

  But then he had to ask himself, what does busting this party even mean?

• 2:16Speaker 02

  I know there was no going to Roger and saying, hey, these screws seem inferior, you know?

• 2:21Speaker 01

  That's Roger Williams, his boss, who, as a reminder, was never charged with a crime for anything Robert and so many others have independently told us, things we've corroborated via depositions, court testimony, and investigative reports.

• 2:35Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  You can't just call the cops. I mean, like, what's a cop gonna do?

• 2:45Speaker 02

  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 passing them off as authentic, I decided, this is insane. I'm gonna go to the FDA. You just can't do this.

• 3:03Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:19Speaker 01

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

• 3:34Speaker 01

  This is episode five, Go for Broke.

• 3:40Speaker 01

  Insurance investigator Bill Reynolds knew about what was happening with Spinal Solutions, and he knew all about the scheme surrounding Drobot at Pacific Hospital. He was awash in information.

• 3:52Speaker 03

  It became a 24/7 obsession. I would get calls at dinnertime, at night, 8:00 or 9:00 o'clock at night, 10:00 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.

• 4:10Speaker 01

  It was beginning to take a toll.

• 4:13Speaker 03

  That was very problematic for a marriage relationship, because I became so focused there.

• 4:19Speaker 01

  Sometimes Bill would be meeting with a source and suddenly get the feeling he was being watched.

• 4:24Speaker 03

  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 male, female, making sure that they enter and leave at an appropriate amount of time.

• 4:42Speaker 01

  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. First, he says, they hacked him.

• 5:09Speaker 03

  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.

• 5:28Speaker 01

  Next, he says they came for his computers.

• 5:30Speaker 03

  My clock at 11:30 always told me it was time for lunch. So my buddy would come pick me up, 11:20, 11:30. 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 were in the park and gone.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  He says this was just the beginning.

• 5:56Speaker 03

  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 o'clock.

• 6:05Speaker 01

  At night?

• 6:06Speaker 03

  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.

• 6:20Speaker 01

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

• 6:29Speaker 03

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

• 6:32Speaker 01

  He says the surveillance became constant.

• 6:35Speaker 03

  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.

• 6:52Speaker 01

  As his investigation kept going, he says the harassment and threats escalated.

• 6:58Speaker 03

  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.

• 7:10Speaker 01

  And then, he says, things got really personal.

• 7:14Speaker 03

  My youngest son went over to this bagel store by the high school. 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 him 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.

• 7:44Speaker 01

  Bill talked to the police but didn't file any reports, and it's never been proven in court. But for his family, his wife, it was all too much. Much too much.

• 7:56Speaker 03

  The stress of having people outside your house, and then when the tires were cut on our car, and then when they jumped the fence and cut the second-story window screens and tried to slide the glass window open up to get into my office, that kind of was the final mark.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  His wife had reached a breaking point. She left him.

• 8:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, especially when the car dealer told her that if she had driven out on the highway, she would have crashed for sure.

• 8:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, scary. 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?

• 8:41Speaker 03

  It was the race to get the bad guy.

• 8:47Speaker 03

  I viewed Michael Drobot as the Top Gun in a criminal organization. And he was just controlling people with impunity. You know, with your law enforcement background, it's like you just keep kicking those nuggets over until eventually it's gonna fall.

• 9:10Speaker 01

  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.

• 9:22Speaker 03

  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.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  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?

• 10:08Speaker 03

  They saw and recognized that all this was illegal. 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.

• 10:26Speaker 01

  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.

• 10:50Speaker 03

  Right.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  So we're just going to pretend the whole thing doesn't exist, essentially.

• 10:55Speaker 03

  That is correct.

• 10:58Speaker 01

  Bill says he was asked to stand down. Then he says he was ordered.

• 11:03Speaker 03

  But I feel that there is a moral and ethical obligation to tell all these patients.

• 11:10Speaker 01

  Eventually, his employment was terminated.

• 11:13Speaker 03

  This kept escalating. And then, the first couple of months of 2012, I got walking papers.

• 11:20Speaker 01

  Which left Bill with no wife, no job, nothing to do but keep going.

• 11:26Speaker 03

  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 Dad.

• 11:39Speaker 01

  He met with Robert Pereira. He met with Paul Randall. He met with the US 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.

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• 13:05Speaker 01

  Far from Southern California, a different set of FBI agents were putting on their sunglasses and holstering their pistols. It was raiding time again. But not what you might expect with this story.

• 13:17Speaker 05

  I'm Laurel Rosenhall. I'm a journalist in Sacramento, California, and I'm now with The New York Times.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  Back in 2012, 2013, Laurel was a young reporter just getting started covering California politics for the local Sacramento newspaper, The Sacramento Bee.

• 13:33Speaker 05

  Just to have the FBI in the state capitol is extremely dramatic and newsworthy, and that was a huge deal.

• 13:41Speaker 01

  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.

• 13:57Speaker 05

  I remember getting the call from my editor that this had happened, and I had 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.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  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.

• 14:22Speaker 05

  We knew 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 carried out.

• 14:36Speaker 01

  12 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.

• 15:11Speaker 05

  There were three brothers who, at different times, served in the legislature.

• 15:16Speaker 01

  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 911 good. 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.

• 15:57Speaker 05

  Then the lawmaker, or the candidate, the political candidate, can decide how to spend the money.

• 16:03Speaker 01

  And then, there's the 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.

• 16:26Speaker 05

  Tickets, bottles of wine, out to dinner.

• 16:30Speaker 01

  Bottle service at the Beyonce concert. Every year, politicians have to report all the gifts they get from lobbyists. Those reports are public, and journalists like Laurel go through them.

• 16:41Speaker 05

  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.

• 16:53Speaker 01

  Ron Calderon was one they liked to watch.

• 16:56Speaker 05

  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.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  So after the FBI raided his office, reporters like Laurel were asking, what could have gotten this guy in trouble? A few months after the raid, Al Jazeera America published a leaked FBI affidavit.

• 17:23Speaker 05

  And that explained the whole entire scam that they were investigating. That broke loose like a big piece of the mystery.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  The affidavit was over 100 pages long.

• 17:35Speaker 05

  It was pretty complex. There were multiple different elements to this. So this story really dripped out in little pieces over the next couple of years and, frankly, became this ongoing saga that I covered in little bits and pieces for quite a long time.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  Was it shocking?

• 17:55Speaker 05

  Became more and more shocking when you understood the depths of the different schemes that were underway.

• 18:02Speaker 01

  Calderon was popped for taking two sets of bribes.

• 18:05Speaker 05

  One piece of it had to do with this bribery scheme involving the film production business in LA. 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.

• 18:27Speaker 01

  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.

• 18:40Speaker 05

  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 started piecing together, 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.

• 19:07Speaker 01

  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, but an elusive and ambitious hospital administrator named Michael Drobot.

• 19:27Speaker 05

  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 winds up with people getting surgeries they don't need and hardware put in their back that they maybe don't need.

• 20:03Speaker 01

  Michael Drobot bribed Senator Ron Calderon to protect the wildly lucrative spinal pass-through law. Remember, Drobot had his own spinal hardware company, International Implants, and he paid doctors an extra $5,000 if they used his devices in surgeries. So how do you bribe a senator without handing him a bag full of cash? The same way Drobot 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.

• 20:32Speaker 05

  I had been thinking of it in the lens of the political corruption side of it, which is unsavory, but also fascinating and exciting. But when I started realizing the extensive level of these surgeries and the amount of 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. And I remember just feeling like that felt so dark.

• 21:09Speaker 01

  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 bribe that helped shield it? $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.

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• 22:52Speaker 07

  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. Thank you.

• 23:06Speaker 01

  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.

• 23:24Speaker 07

  We've met and discussed several times your association with Spinal Solutions. Is that correct? Correct.

• 23:31Speaker 01

  Bill was not interested in the party side of egomaniac airlines.

• 23:36Speaker 07

  When we spoke earlier, you stated that on several occasions, you went down to Temecula and went to William Crowder's business called Crowder Machine and Tool to pick up pedicle screws? That's correct.

• 23:55Speaker 01

  Bill wanted to know about the cargo deliveries, the instruments and hardware.

• 23:59Speaker 07

  You indicated that you picked up two types of screws from Mr. Crowder, the first being a gray metal screw with a machine head, and the second type of screw was described as blue and gold with a articulating head? 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. Yeah. And that you stated that you brought these back to the Spinal Solutions facility in Marietta, and that you sorted them according to length and diameter and placed them in bags? Yeah.

• 24:36Speaker 01

  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.

• 24:55Speaker 07

  You stated that you flew surgical trays to hospitals around the country on many occasions. You recall flying in one particular incident to Las Vegas to deliver a surgical tray. 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 you said that that was for a surgery? Yeah.

• 25:22Speaker 01

  Why was a private plane from Marietta, California, going to Las Vegas to deliver medical hardware?

• 25:28Speaker 07

  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.

• 25:41Speaker 01

  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.

• 25:52Speaker 07

  How about Dr. Cully White? Yes, we flew Dr. Cully White. Picked him up in Waukesha, Wisconsin, and flew him to St. Martin's in the Caribbean.

• 26:06Speaker 01

  Dr. Cully White was the doctor from Wisconsin who operated on Bob Gore. We heard about him last episode. 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.

• 26:24Speaker 07

  God, if people knew how hospitals work, they would just quit it altogether. I mean, the stuff I saw, it destroyed my faith in the medical community, pretty much.

• 26:45Speaker 07

  Robert, that's all I have. 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.

• 27:08Speaker 01

  On December 8, 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. It made it hard for him to lie down, travel. Even getting through a day could be rough. He found a local back surgeon, Dr. Cully White, who we were just talking about. But the surgery just seemed to make everything worse.

• 27:37Speaker 06

  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, and...

• 27:47Speaker 01

  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.

• 27:57Speaker 06

  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 go to get the methadone because it was so addictive, 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.

• 28:20Speaker 01

  On that morning of December 8, Tammy walked from her bedroom to the living room where Bob had been sleeping. He slept sitting up in a chair because of pain.

• 28:29Speaker 06

  That morning, I woke up at 6:30, 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.

• 28:41Speaker 01

  Tammy was confused. She'd slept all night in bed.

• 28:44Speaker 06

  And I do, to this day, believe it was an angel that was waiting for him.

• 28:49Speaker 01

  They slowly started their day.

• 28:51Speaker 06

  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, and he was gone.

• 29:14Speaker 06

  And I will tell you that for the first time in our marriage.

• 29:23Speaker 05

  I saw a peace on my husband's face where God says, "Since you're absent from the body, present with the Lord," it was the first time I saw a peace where there was no pain in those eyes.

• 29:39Speaker 01

  He died three days before their seventh wedding anniversary.

• 29:45Speaker 01

  Bob wanted to be cremated, so the next morning, Tammy went with other family members to the funeral home. And when she was there, like Derica Moses in episode one, she made a funny request.

• 29:56Speaker 05

  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.

• 30:04Speaker 01

  The hardware from Bob's back didn't melt.

• 30:07Speaker 05

  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?

• 30:15Speaker 01

  Tammy wasn't sure what she would do with them. She thought maybe she'd get him tested one day.

• 30:19Speaker 05

  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.

• 30:32Speaker 05

  He really did. Because he really should be here with me. I'm sorry.

• 30:38Speaker 01

  After we interviewed her, Tammy sent us Bob's hardware. We had Bill Reynolds analyze it. After a few weeks, he had an answer. Together, we called Tammy.

• 30:50Speaker 05

  Hello, Tammy.

• 30:52Speaker 03

  Hello, Tammy. This is Bill Reynolds.

• 30:54Speaker 05

  Hi, Bill.

• 30:55Speaker 01

  Tammy sent Bill rods and screws that Dr. Colly 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.

• 31:06Speaker 03

  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 magnifying glass, nothing even resembling that showed up.

• 31:23Speaker 01

  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. Tammy also sent us the medical report about Bob's surgery. That report mentioned two pedicle screw systems from a company called Spintech, ending in T-E-K. It says the screws were implanted in Bob's L3 and L4, his lower back.

• 31:59Speaker 03

  In examining the operative report, Dr. Colly White identified the hardware as Spintech's. I immediately went onto the FDA website.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  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. Spintech, the company in Colly White's report, should be in one of those FDA databases. But...

• 32:25Speaker 03

  And was unable to authenticate the manufacturer, any identification on it.

• 32:31Speaker 01

  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.

• 32:42Speaker 03

  It led me to believe that this clearly was part of the counterfeit surgical hardware that infiltrated the medical system.

• 32:51Speaker 01

  And Tammy, how does that make you feel to hear that?

• 32:54Speaker 05

  It's very hard for me. It's like, it's gonna be really rough. But at least it's justice for Bob. God picks our fate, so I guess I have to look at life that way. It just sucks how somebody can destroy somebody's life because he was the nicest man in the world.

• 33:17Speaker 01

  I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  Bill's conclusion is his opinion. We cannot be sure of the counterfeit claims. The hardware is old, it's been through an incinerator, stuff could have happened. Like I said, Colly 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.

• 33:50Speaker 05

  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.

• 33:59Speaker 01

  So Tammy did get one thing she wanted. Colly White will never perform back surgery again.

• 34:09Speaker 01

  Coming up, on the season finale of Dr. Billions, operations backlash and spinal cap reached their dizzying conclusions.

• 34:18Speaker 03

  At one point, we probably had 50, 60 people indicted.

• 34:22Speaker 01

  While Bill Reynolds and Mark Sershan see try to find their own path to justice.

• 34:27Speaker 03

  They stopped at nothing to expose the truth. My name is Bill Reynolds, and I'm a whistleblower.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  And Robert Pereira reaches a boiling point.

• 34:37Speaker 02

  And I'd be like, hey, are you guys gonna do anything? We're doing five, six cases tomorrow, and then five, six cases the next day. Are you guys gonna do anything?

• 34:47Speaker 01

  That's next up on episode six, Whack-a-Mole, the season finale of Dr. Billions.

• 35:07Speaker 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 directly.

• 35:56Speaker 01

  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. Lewis. 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, P L L C.

• 36:33Speaker 01

  Next up, episode six, Whack-a-Mole.

• 36:47Speaker 04

  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.