By
Nick Dorsten, Esq.
While I have written often in the past about the scourge of
prescription drug abuse in this part of Florida (see
here,
here or
here,the tampabay website has an
article that talks about how one man got his life back by GOING to prison...
— When a police officer knocked on the door of Dr. Kevin Denny's home around 9 one morning in 2009, Denny opened it barefoot and bleary eyed, wearing a terry cloth robe. Cars were being broken into in his
Pinellas County beach neighborhood, said the officer. Could Denny come out and check his?
Within seconds, a dozen federal and local cops swarmed around the doctor who had once treated the powerful and prominent, guns aimed.
He was under arrest, they told him, for illegally prescribing
pain pills.
The 55-year-old doctor's fall was long, hard and spectacular: An internist with sterling credentials and a successful practice in
St. Petersburg, Florida for more than a decade, Denny lost it all to his own
cocaine and alcohol addictions. To fuel his $125-a-day crack habit, he embarked on a new career:
pill mill doctor, writing
illegal prescriptions for
OxyContin to addicts he met over a beer at a chicken wing restaurant.
Denny, who once led his fellow residents at the prestigious Cleveland Clinic, ended his medical career in the fellowship of doctors who enable addicts to get legal narcotics. Unlike street drugs, the prescription trade requires doctors to keep it going. It is considered deadlier than trafficking in
heroin and
cocaine, killing an average of seven people a day in Florida.
Yet even in the Sunshine State, widely considered ground zero for the illicit
prescription narcotic trade, relatively few doctors are even arrested, let alone convicted. Because these drugs do have a valuable medical purpose — controlling severe pain — and are legal if properly dispensed, it is tough to stop a
pill mill doctor.
What kind of doctor gets into the business of harming and possibly killing people?
Many
pill mill doctors didn't make much of a mark in medicine and have retired. "These doctors often have few opportunities in their later years,'' said a state special prosecutor for prescription
drug trafficking.
When law enforcement moves in, the common reaction is for doctors to say they were railroaded, said an assistant state attorney in Hillsborough County.
Then there's Kevin Denny — skilled practitioner and deeply repentant.
"Except for Denny, I don't know of any cases of doctors immediately admitting guilt and apologizing,'' said a narcotics detective for the Pinellas Sheriff's Office.
After his May 2009 arrest, Denny pleaded guilty, went to rehab, and started his 70-month prison sentence in October 2010.
"The last thing I wanted to do was hurt people. But I did,'' he said in a three-hour interview at the federal prison on Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Ala.
He says he is grateful he was stopped after a few months of scribbling prescriptions for addicts. He knows what could have happened.
"Thank God nobody died," he said of his "patients.''
But Denny believes he came close to killing himself.
• • •
In his earliest memory, Kevin Denny wanted to be a doctor.
He was 4, standing by his dying grandfather's bed. The old man moaned in pain. Denny's mother wept. The child made a promise to help the suffering.
No one in his family had ever made it beyond high school. His dad was a punch card operator, his mom a housewife.
They were strict Southern Baptists, and for Denny and his two sisters, their modest Kansas City home was a "serious place," he said. He remembers his parents worrying about his tie-dyed T-shirt and his hair growing over his ears.
He was smart, athletic, good looking and determined. In the National Honor Society, and an all-conference athlete in four sports, he was on track to achieve his dream: getting into a program at the University of Missouri where he could earn both his bachelor's and medical degrees in just six years.
His parents helped with tuition and he loaded boxes at Sears to earn money.
There were cracks in the success story. He got his girlfriend pregnant during senior year of high school, and the couple married. His parents divorced when he was 18. He tried LSD — once.
"But the feeling of escaping to an alternate reality was something I'd later crave," he said.
In medical school, he made an impression.
"Kevin Denny stood out," said an emeritus professor, "because he was so genuinely caring."
The professor recommended him for a residency at the prestigious Cleveland Clinic, where he was assigned the nerve-racking job of leading the Code Blue resuscitation team. Fellow doctors so respected his calm focus under stress they elected him chief resident.
After four years, he got another sought-after position, studying heart transplant techniques at McGuire VA Hospital in Virginia.
He was recruited by
St. Petersburg Medical Clinic in the late 1980s as an internist and specialist in vascular medicine. He loved the work and his patients. He also loved weekends of diving, fishing and Jack Daniels.
"I worked hard; I played hard — I lived to extremes," he said.
• • •
By the early '90s, he was living with his second wife and their three children in a big waterfront house in St. Petersburg.
For six years, Denny cared for a multitude of patients, treating the sick and dying.
At home, Denny was another man entirely, said son Stephen Denny, 36, the child from Denny's first marriage. What started as a fun evening would usually end with his drunken father becoming verbally abusive over some perceived slight, the son said.
"My dad at work was a different person from my dad at home," said Stephen Denny.
• • •
Wife No. 3, said Denny would come home from work and head straight to the fridge to guzzle four tallboy beers while he stood there with the door open. Then, he'd start in on the Jack Daniels.
"I begged Kevin to get help, but he was afraid if he did he'd lose his medical license," she said.
"I was afraid I'd lose my practice,'' Denny agreed.
"But I was also afraid I'd have to stop drinking and face what a bad problem I had."
Meanwhile, he was rated one of the top cardiovascular specialists in the Southeast by Best Doctors in America, which asks doctors to rate their peers.
"He eventually ran into a lot of trouble,'' said a former patient, a retired Pinellas Judge. "But, for years, he was an excellent diagnostician — one of the best doctors I've ever had."
After his divorce from his wife in 1997, Denny said he got heavily into snorting
cocaine, smoking
marijuana and hanging out at strip clubs. Up all night partying, he would be too tired to go to work. He had formed a professional partnership with three colleagues. But as his life unraveled, his partners and administrators at St. Anthony's Hospital in
St. Petersburg were concerned for him and angry that he was letting his patients down.
At their urging, he called a referral service for doctors with substance abuse problems. When the counselor said his medical license might be suspended, Denny hung up, he said, and never called back.
• • •
Kevin Denny's daughter used to spend every other weekend with her father after her parents divorced at his 4,000-square-foot, Tudor-style home in Tierra Verde, across the street from the gulf.
But after her father married a fourth time in 2006 and retreated into
crack cocaine, the house became "home to the living dead" and she quit visiting, said the girl, now a senior in college.
By 2007, his work habits were so erratic, he was fired from his practice and lost his contract with St. Anthony's.
Still, said a former patient, a retired Pinellas County court magistrate, Denny saved her life because he diagnosed her auto-immune diseases and quickly got her to specialists.
"I vacillate between being furious at Kevin for not getting help sooner and having my heart broken,'' she said.
"Because he was such a great doctor who was throwing everything away."
He was years behind in alimony and child support and owed more than $100,000 in back taxes. His wife was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. His children wouldn't speak to him. His house was in foreclosure.
"Game on. Slow suicide," he said of this time.
By late 2008, Denny didn't expect to live much longer. He was having trouble breathing and his legs were swollen, both results of the booze and the crack, he said.
For Christmas, he gave his children his prized possessions: a collection of first edition books, an expensive tennis racket. And the doubled-edged razor his grandfather carried through the trenches of France in World War I — the same grandfather by whose bed a young Denny had stood, pledging to ease suffering.
"Despite all of the terrible things I've done, I hope someone will remember the years I kept that promise," he said.
• • •
In early 2009, he was approached by the manager of a pain clinic on Dale Mabry Highway in Tampa and offered a job — $300 on the days he worked — which was enough to feed his
crack and booze addictions.
"It was a
pill mill. The people who came in were addicted. I was addicted. It was a nightmare," he said.
"But I was too far gone to care."
A few months after he wrote the
prescriptions at the wing restaurant, police came to his house.
"They saved my life," he said.
His lawyer, a
criminal defense attorney, who has defended other doctors and pain clinic owners, said Denny is unique.
"He actually welcomed prison," said the attorney. "The only thing Kevin wants people to realize is that addiction is a disease — a disease that's treatable, which means you can recover and perhaps shouldn't lose your medical license for the rest of your life."
But Denny did.
In prison, he gets up at 5:30 a.m. and sweeps and mops the floors. Afternoons, he mows the long grass on the side of the road. He is tanned and muscular now, his blue eyes clear. He has been clean and sober for two years.
• • •
Before he started his sentence, Denny was at home. A white SUV pulled into the driveway and a man wearing a dark tie and white shirt knocked on the door and handed him a paper to sign.
It began, "Kevin Mark Denny, MD hereby voluntarily relinquishes his license to practice medicine..."
Have you been
arrested on
prescription pill or
trafficking in oxycodone charges? Then the
Pinellas, Florida based
Blake & Dorsten, P.A. Pinellas criminal defense lawyers are at your service.
For more information, or to speak directly with experienced
Pinellas County criminal defense attorneys, please contact the law firm of
BLAKE AND DORSTEN, P.A. at 727.286.6141 or email the defense lawyers at: info@blakedorstenlaw.com
