Florida pill mills great business for ex-cons

Ex-cons like Vinny Colangelo are barred from certain business pursuits.

Felons can’t get a license in Florida as a pest-control operator. Colangelo can’t be a private detective or paramedic or title insurance agent or bail bondsman or labor union business agent. He can forget about employment with the Florida Lottery. Or qualifying as a notary.

“In Florida, this guy couldn’t own a liquor store,” said Broward Sheriff Al Lamberti.

Yet according to the DEA, Vincent Colangelo, who couldn’t kill bugs, serve cocktails or tail a cheating husband, could operate seven pain clinics and a pharmacy in Broward and Miami-Dade counties. His pill mills peddled more than 660,000 doses of oxycodone in just two years. The feds calculated Vinny’s proceeds at $22,392,391.

Ex-felons may find a lot of enterprises off limits, but to the consternation of Sheriff Lamberti, Florida’s famously lax regulation of pill mills offered a seamless transition for someone like Colangelo. He emerged from prison in 2004 after serving a four-year term for trafficking in heroin and cocaine and used his druggie expertise, according to the DEA, to build a $150,000-a-day business selling prescription narcotics.

“Selling prescription drugs is a lot more lucrative than selling coke,” said Capt. Karl Durr, head of the Palm Beach County narcotics unit. “You don’t have to cross international borders. The drugs are legally produced. And, for us, investigations are a lot more complicated, longer. A lot more expensive.”

Colangelo, busted Feb. 23 when federal, state and local cops closed down a dozen pain clinics in South Florida, was not the only convicted drug dealer in South Florida who got richer, faster, easier by peddling oxycodone. Pill-mill magnate Kent A. Murry came into the business with 15 previous arrests on his resume, included getting nabbed twice bringing in planeloads of marijuana from Colombia. Not to mention a very suspicious crash of a helicopter that happened to have a quantity of cocaine on board.

His criminal background was a perfect fit for Florida’s burgeoning pill industry.

[Thanks Clay!]