Backbreaker

Drug-dealing seems a strange career choice for a young chiropractor who could make a good living playing it straight. No records in Boulis' case offer a motive, but it seems likely that he hadn't quite left behind the hard partying of his college years.

His case would prove among the strangest in Atlanta history. According to an investigation by the state's attorney general, Boulis pleaded guilty to possession with intent to sell but withdrew that plea when he learned that he was to get jail time rather than probation. He was found guilty anyway, though by the time the jury delivered its verdict, Boulis had dashed from an Atlanta courthouse, a fugitive from justice. He turned himself in two weeks later and was sentenced to five years in prison, according to the attorney general's report. But Boulis struck an unorthodox deal with prosecutors whereby he wrote a $200,000 check, earmarked for the narcotics unit, in exchange for a reduced sentence of probation. The controversy that ensued prompted then-Gov. Zell Miller to order an investigation that ultimately brought about more severe penalties for Georgia's first-time drug offenders.

Goroway was well-aware of his old friend Boulis' criminal past. "He was in a lot of trouble," Goroway said in his deposition. "He was losing his license. He wasn't a very good guy, and I tried to help him out, and I gave him a job with me."

As described in Goroway's deposition, Practice Mechanix was a traveling seminar in which Goroway and his staff offered other practitioners a crash course in profit-boosting. Cutting costs was one obvious measure. But they also urged their colleagues to locate unbilled-for services and connected them with Goldstein's lucrative line of electrodiagnostic tests. Goroway was a natural; he finally had a stage upon which he could perform. It wasn't quite the acting exposure he'd dreamed of during his New Jersey boyhood, but the crowds were rapt.

At the outset of his seminars, Goroway stressed that Practice Mechanix's goal was to provide patients better treatment. But what drew chiropractors from around the country was the pledge that his methods could double or triple a clinic's revenue. After Goroway's presentation, salesmen approached chiropractors to "close" them — that is, convince them to sign a lease with Premier, Goldstein's company, which arranged for technicians to bring the diagnostic equipment to chiropractor offices and perform the tests, according to deposition testimony.

"He did well in front of people," Goldstein recalled in a recent interview by phone. "He was very charismatic, very smart — the kind of person who when you looked at him, he got through to you and made you believe what he said."

Practice Mechanix produced $800,000 in revenue in 1998, its first year. That doubled in 1999, and by 2000, revenues had passed $2 million. By the next year, Goroway reported a gross income of $2 million on his personal tax return.

The company was Goroway's creation, but it owed a debt to Dr. David Singer, a chiropractor who had long run his own seminar series. Goroway became a client of Singer's around 1991. He paid careful attention not just to the business concepts Singer preached but to Singer's delivery, his magnetic presence.

Those seminars, it turned out, had also become a kind of recruiting tool for Singer, a devotee of the Church of Scientology, the controversial self-help system maligned as a cult by critics. Boulis was enamored of Singer too and followed him into Scientology. Goroway would later note that Boulis "chipped away" at him until finally, around 1999, as he was getting Practice Mechanix off the ground, he joined the church.

By 2001, Practice Mechanix was using telemarketers and junk faxes to reach chiropractors. At its peak, Goroway claimed the company had 125 employees, a 34-seat telemarketing house in Pittsburgh, and $650,000 in operating expenses per month. Much of its success came from concepts of business organization that Goroway learned through Scientology, he would later say.

His profile was so high within the chiropractic community, Goroway noted, that Singer, who did not return calls for comment, called to invite him to join his company as a consultant, an offer he turned down. But he also attracted some unwelcome attention: A huge insurance company had noticed Practice Mechanix too, and its high-priced attorneys had Goroway in their crosshairs.

Goroway didn't know it yet, but his business was growing too fast. As more money came in, Goroway hired more salesmen and had less control over what was happening between them and company clients.

In 2001, he started receiving complaints from chiropractors who alleged that Boulis was encouraging them to pad their bills illegally. According to the deposition, he remembers telling Boulis "that I wanted to be totally good about everything we do and totally clean." Boulis, reached through his attorney, declined an interview request.

At the same time, the two friends were feuding over money — each said that the other owed him a hefty sum. Because Scientologists are barred from suing each other, they went through a mediation brokered by a church member. The mediator ruled that Goroway owed Boulis. Goroway quit the church and cut Boulis out of Practice Mechanix.