Carolyn Kaster/AP

Then-FBI Director James Comey testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, before a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. President Donald Trump abruptly fired Comey on May 9, ousting the nation's top law enforcement official in the midst of an investigation into whether Trump's campaign had ties to Russia's election meddling.()

In his short presidency, Donald Trump has taken many abrupt actions – but perhaps none more controversial than the sudden firing of FBI director James Comey.

President Trump had the legal right to oust Mr. Comey. Still, Tuesday’s unusual move throws a question mark over the future of the agency’s investigation into whether Trump associates collaborated with the Russian government in the 2016 presidential election.

Comey’s departure, coming just days after he reportedly requested more funds, has raised concerns that the investigation could be slowed or otherwise thwarted. The FBI’s image as an independent law enforcement agency also hangs in the balance.

But if Trump thinks Comey's dismissal will squelch the Russia investigation, he’s wrong, says an informed source speaking on condition of anonymity.

“He just wants Russia to go away, but it’s not going to,” says the source. “Agents are going to keep working on this.”

Indeed, the FBI’s Russia investigation is likely to proceed as normal – at least for the time being – according to Justin Levitt, a former lawyer at the Department of Justice (DOJ).

The Russia investigation “depends on an awful lot of career FBI investigators who are professional and do their jobs, and they do that whoever the director of the FBI is, and they will continue to do that with whoever the director of the FBI is, unless they’re told to stop,” he says.

Moreover, a former FBI official confirms that if a new chief tried to derail the Russia probe, he or she would have a hard time doing so without triggering alarms within the agency.

“The FBI director can authorize or deny resources, so he can take his foot on or off the gas for an investigation, but it’s highly unlikely that he would have the ability to stop an investigation,” says Leo Taddeo, former special agent in charge of special operations in the FBI’s New York office, and current chief information security officer at the Florida-based Cyxtera Technologies. “That would be difficult for a director to do and maintain credibility with his own team.”

The White House maintains that it remains committed to seeing the investigation through. “We encourage them to complete this investigation so we can put it behind us,” Deputy White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders told reporters Wednesday. “Nobody wants this to be finished and completed more than us.”

Continuity in the agency

As the head of the agency, the FBI director is aware of all the investigations the agency is conducting, but the depth of their personal engagement varies widely depending on the nature of the investigation. For the most part, the director at most receives occasional briefings on how an investigation is proceeding, experts and former FBI employees say, but when it comes to large, high-profile investigations, the director is much more involved.

“He’s more likely to be involved directly because of demands on him for information from Congress and others,” says Jonathan Smith, who was chief of special litigation in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division during the Obama administration. “He would be briefed frequently and involved in key decisions about how to proceed.”

Joseph J. Pelcher, a private investigator in New York state who worked at the FBI for 26 years, points to Comey deputy Andrew McCabe’s new role as the FBI’s acting director as evidence that there would be continuity with the investigation, at least in the short term.

“I’m sure he’s fully versed on the investigation, so there doesn’t have to be interruption,” he adds. The investigators “are just going to be briefing somebody different.”

Mr. McCabe's future at the FBI is also uncertain, however, with the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General investigating whether he should have recused himself from the investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails. On Wednesday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions – who has recused himself from the Trump-Russia investigation – and his deputy, Rod Rosenstein, had already begun interviewing candidates to serve as interim FBI director."

Comparisons to Nixon era

Comey was named FBI chief by former President Barack Obama in 2013 for a term of 10 years. Comey was not universally loved within the agency, and over time partisans on both sides have had reason to be unhappy with him.

“Going into last year, Comey was generally considered to be a distinguished public servant with impeccable credentials, but his public discussion of ongoing investigations was unusual and troubling for many current and former federal prosecutors,” says James M. Koukios, former special counsel to former FBI Director Robert S. Mueller, III, and partner at Morrison & Foerster.  “While there may have arguably been good reasons for Comey’s firing, the circumstances and timing of the move create the perception that it was politically motivated.”

Comey’s firing was not sparked by personal misdeeds, as in the case of the only other director to have been dismissed – William Sessions, whom former President Bill Clinton fired in 1993 amid ethics charges. The publicly stated reason for Comey’s dismissal – his handling of the Clinton email controversy – was laid out in a memo Tuesday by the new deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein.

White House sources suggest a different narrative – that Trump himself had been wanting to fire Comey for some time, but was waiting for the right moment. In his letter to Comey, the president said, “It is essential that we find new leadership for the FBI that restores public trust and confidence in its vital law enforcement mission.”

Some liken Comey’s firing to the “Saturday Night Massacre” of 1973, when President Richard Nixon fired Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor investigating Watergate. Nixon’s attorney general and deputy attorney general resigned in protest. But FBI chief isn’t the same as special prosecutor, whose job is to investigate a specific legal case.

There are several other notable differences, experts say, differences that perhaps illustrate how partisan American politics – and the Justice Department – has become.

For example, the fact that in Nixon’s day both Attorney General Elliot Richardson and William Ruckelhaus, his deputy, refused the president’s order to fire Mr. Cox and resigned instead is another sign of how the DOJ has changed, says Mr. Smith, who is now executive director of the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs.

“As horrible as [Watergate] was for us as a nation, it strengthened the Department of Justice and strengthened its integrity,” he adds. “I’m worried that that integrity is being eroded by this president and this attorney general.”

Others take a more optimistic view. Firing Cox “did not stop the investigation or the pursuit of justice," says Mr. Levitt, the former DOJ lawyer. "It slowed it down and caused a delay, but it didn’t actually stop the investigation from proceeding,” he says, “and that I think is likely to be similar.”

Comey's replacement

Much will depend now on Trump’s choice as Comey’s replacement, how that person fares during Senate confirmation, and whether he or she can command the confidence of FBI staff, members of Congress on both sides of the aisle, and the American people.

Names being floated to replace Comey include John Pistole, former head of the Transportation Security Administration; Kenneth Wainstein, a former general counsel at the FBI; and former Rep. Mike Rogers (R) of Michigan, an ex-FBI agent and former chair of the House Intelligence Committee.

While it is rare for a director to substantially impede, or shut down, an investigation, former agents say, it is well within a director’s power to do so.

“Employees of FBI are not independent of the FBI director. They work for him and follow his orders. It’s that simple,” says Liza Goitein, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice in New York.

“The [new] director could have total control over the investigation if he or she chose to exercise that control,” she adds. Furthermore, she says, with Comey’s dismissal, the incoming director “has now received a pretty strong message that his or her role is to either shut down the investigation or keep it from going too far.”

If they did, however, it may provoke a response from the Bureau’s rank-and-file.

“If someone comes in who may want to try to stop or impede the investigation from going forward, information will come out, there will be all types of leaks,” says Joseph R. Lewis, who spent 27 years at the FBI and is now a part-time private investigator in North Carolina.

“They won’t stand for anyone obstructing an ongoing investigation,” he adds, “particularly if it’s leading in a manner that supports what they thought it was going to be.”

Since Comey was fired, there have been reports that the FBI had issued subpoenas in its investigation of Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, and that Comey had requested more resources for the Russia investigation just days ago.

“I think the Comey operation was breathing down the neck of the Trump campaign and their operatives, and this was an effort to slow down the investigation,” said Sen. Richard Durbin (D) of Illinois on Wednesday.

Based on reports of the subpoenas and Comey's request for more resources, Mr. Lewis believes that the investigation is heading somewhere.

“The director asking for additional resources, subpoenas being issued – they’re getting to brass tacks. They wouldn’t issue subpoenas unless they needed to get information and there’s a likelihood that information could be obtained through those records,” he says.

The Russia investigation “won’t die hard, it won’t die easy,” says Lewis. “There are too many professionals in that organization to allow that to happen.”

Staff writer Jack Detsch contributed reporting from Washington.

Russian Foreign Ministry/AP

US President Donald Trump, right, meets Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov at the White House in Washington on Wednesday, May 10, 2017. President Donald Trump on Wednesday welcomed Vladimir Putin's top diplomat to the White House for Trump's highest level face-to-face contact with a Russian government official since he took office in January.

The “Putin Not My President” signs had disappeared from Washington protests. The ongoing probes of Russian interference in the US election had receded enough from the foreground to allow the Trump administration to test the prospects for diplomacy with Moscow.

In that light, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s meetings in Washington on May 10 with President Trump and with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson were set to be almost normal encounters for a difficult but necessary relationship.

Syria, fighting terrorism, and maybe even planning for a first meeting between Mr. Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin were on the agenda.

But then Trump abruptly fired FBI Director James Comey the previous night, and suddenly Russia and its role in influencing the outcome of the US presidential race – a role Mr. Comey was investigating – were back on center stage.

That will make any cooperation with Moscow – whether it’s on Syria, or Ukraine, or over any of the many other international issues the two powers have a stake in – all the more difficult.

“As long as the controversy over collusion between the Russians and the Trump campaign continues, Russia-US relations are kind of blocked,” says Stephen Sestanovich, senior fellow for Russian and Eurasian studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington.

“To the extent [the Comey firing] keeps the controversy alive, it’s hard to see how the relationship can improve,” he adds. “In fact it can probably only get worse.”

That’s saying something. Mr. Tillerson had already deemed bilateral relations to be at a “low point” when he visited Moscow last month. After meeting with Mr. Putin, Tillerson concluded at a terse press conference with Mr. Lavrov that “there is a low level of trust between our two countries.”

Until Tuesday, that cloud of mistrust that lingered over the relationship, while hardly dissipating, was gradually shifting from the election interference issue to more geopolitical and diplomatically manageable questions, like Russia’s support for Syria’s Bashar al-Assad.

'Grand bargain' less likely

Indeed, Trump and Tillerson appeared to have decided that, while relations were going to remain difficult, “Syria was the one issue they could try to use to turn the relationship around,” says Dr. Sestanovich, who was US ambassador-at-large to the former Soviet Union from 1997-2001. That was never going to be easy, he adds, because Putin’s plan for moving forward in Syria and resolving the long civil war there offers little to entice the US.

“The Putin plan doesn’t give the US much: it legitimizes the Russian role in the conflict, it fortifies Iran’s involvement, and it strengthens Assad,” he says. “For the US, the question was, ‘Tell me what’s good about it?’”

Even so, some in Washington had worried since Trump’s inauguration that the new president might strike a “grand bargain” with Russia, trading actions Putin covets – lifting of US sanctions on Russia, for example, or recognition of Russia’s “right” to Crimea – for Russian promises to act against ISIS and other terrorists.

That kind of deal suddenly seems less likely, some analysts say, at least in the near term.

“In many ways, Trump’s hands are now tied,” says Julianne Smith, director of the Transatlantic Security Program at the Center for a New American Security in Washington. “There are so many questions about his relations with Russia, about the people around him, their relations with Russia,” she adds, “that it would be very hard for the president to proceed with a full-on ‘grand bargain’ at this point.”

Trump might still try to “move the needle here and there,” she says, “but the Comey firing makes a tough situation for him that much more difficult.”

Downside to US turmoil

Like Sestanovich, Ms. Smith says the Russians have little to offer the US when it comes to Syria. “What I’m hoping is that Tillerson is whispering in the president’s ear that the Russians aren’t in a place to be very helpful on countering terrorism in Syria, they aren’t very active and conducting air strikes in the areas where ISIS is strongest,” she says.

But she also cautions that no one should be tempted to consider the uproar in Washington over relations with Russia a positive, even if it does put off actions by Trump that many analysts would view negatively.

“There’s a real downside to so much turmoil in our own political system, and it plays right into both the image the Russians want to portray of our democratic system and the way they want us act towards them,” she says.

“The Russians want us to keep quiet about the shortcomings of their political system, they don’t want to hear from us about their lack of respect for human rights,” Smith says. “So it’s unfortunate to have something like the Comey firing occur while Lavrov’s here, because it allows them to say, ‘How can you talk to us about political shortcomings when you are in such disarray?’”

But at least there were discussions between the two capitals. With the cloud over bilateral relations suddenly darkening again, Putin might decide there’s little to be gained with the US, and that could be bad for diplomacy.

Sestanovich says the Russians are convinced that “cold-war thinking still rules in the US” and that “if US-Russia relations are bad, it’s because the US has hostile intentions towards Russia.”

Americans might consider that a “mistaken inclination,” he says, but he adds that Russians are no doubt going to see the latest crescendo of attention to Russia as fulfillment of their “outlook” – and that is going to put off further any glimmer of progress for the bilateral relationship.

Moscow dismissive of impact

Yet as incomprehensible as it may be to Putin, the fact is that the issue of Russian interference in the US elections, already troubling to a wide range of US leaders, has galvanized an increasingly bipartisan set of stakeholders in the wake of the Comey firing.

A number of Republican senators joined their Democratic colleagues in calling the dismissal “troubling,” while many conservative news commentators and analysts underscored the questions the president’s action raised about his and his campaign’s relations with Russia.

“First president ever investigated by FBI for collusion with hostile foreign power,” tweeted conservative foreign-policy analyst Max Boot. “First president fired FBI director in charge of probe.”

Russian officials may find that kind of commentary perplexing – just as they appeared to dismiss the potential for Trump’s firing of the FBI director to affect US-Russian relations.

When reporters asked Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov how Comey’s firing might affect US-Russia relations, Mr. Peskov said, “We hope that it will not affect them at all. That’s the United States’ internal affair. That’s the US president’s independent decision, which has nothing to do and should have nothing to do with Russia.”

He should be right, of course. But under the circumstances, US-Russia relations are likely to remain under a cloud for the foreseeable future, and some issues that normally would be strictly domestic affairs will continue to roil the bilateral relationship.

Hong Hae-in/Yonhap/AP

South Korea's new President Moon Jae-in waves from a car after his inauguration ceremony in Seoul, South Korea, Wednesday, May 10, 2017. Moon said Wednesday he was open to visiting rival North Korea under the right conditions to talk about Pyongyang's aggressive pursuit of nuclear-tipped missiles.

South Korea's new president, Moon Jae-in, was sworn into office Wednesday amid a gathering storm of foreign policy challenges: taming the Kim regime's nuclear program while forging new cooperation with Pyongyang; maintaining relations with the United States without antagonizing China. Nothing short of peace in East Asia is on the line.

But while the world remains fixated on North Korea, Mr. Moon faces a more fundamental challenge on the domestic front: rebuilding the public’s trust in government.

Moon's election was the culmination of a massive political upheaval, the likes of which haven’t been seen in South Korea in 30 years. Weeks of peaceful protests over a far-reaching corruption scandal led to the impeachment and eventual arrest of his predecessor, Park Geun-hye – a crisis that strengthened many voters' impression that the nation’s elite lived by a different set of rules, with money and connections the real pathways to success.

Such realizations were especially hard to swallow for young people who felt as if they were doing everything they could to get ahead in South Korea’s tepid economy. Their discontent paved the way for Moon's landslide victory this week, beating his nearest rival by 17 percentage points. 

“His election is the start, not the end,” says Lee Mi-hee, a 24-year-old Moon supporter who works as a project manager at a mobile app company in Seoul. Watching the live election results over a plate of chicken wings with two of her friends on Tuesday night, Ms. Lee struck a determined tone as it became clear Moon would win. “There is still so much wrong with Korean politics that needs to be fixed. It’ll be hard, but we have to do it.”

Moon, a former human rights lawyer, is well positioned to tap into the wave of public disillusionment with South Korea’s political status quo. He’s the country’s first liberal president in nine years and a longtime rival of Ms. Park, having lost to her in the 2012 elections by a million votes. It’s no small irony that Moon, who was jailed in the 1970s for protesting her father’s dictatorial rule, has taken over the presidency while Park awaits trial inside a 114-square-foot cell.

A hunger for change

The scandal that led her to that cell – and a potential life sentence – exposed a level of corruption many South Koreans had long suspected but had difficulty proving. The $52 million in bribes Park is accused of collecting or demanding from businesses is only the most egregious example. With distrust in the political system still running high, much of Moon’s success as president will rest on his ability to enact meaningful reforms and show that government is capable of working for everyone.

“People are still hungry for change,” says Kim Hyung-geun, secretary general of Political Power Plant, a political outreach organization based in Seoul. South Koreans’ excitement was evident at the polls on Tuesday: voter turnout was 77.2 percent, the highest in 20 years. “Many want to see the whole system transformed,” Mr. Kim says.

The challenges ahead for South Korea are steep. Sluggish economic growth and a youth unemployment rate that reached 8.2 percent last year, its highest level since 1999, have fueled deep-seated fears about the country’s future. For young people, those fears were compounded by the accusation that Choi Soon-sil, Park’s longtime confidante at the center of the scandal, had pressured a prestigious women’s university to admit her daughter. The episode gave the youngest generation of voters all the more reason to feel as if the system was rigged against them.

Woo Suk-hoon, an economist who has studied the youth job crisis, says it will be up to Moon to show them otherwise. “What happened with Choi’s daughter made young people want to explode,” says Dr. Woo. The upside is that the scandal led thousands of them to get involved in politics for the first time. They became a mainstay of the “Candlelight Revolution” leading up to Park's ouster – so called for the candles protesters waved in the streets – and provided a major boost to Moon’s campaign.

“President Park was just the tip of the iceberg,” says Chong So-young, a graphic design student at Seoul National University and member of Femidangdang, a student-led feminist group that rose to prominence during the demonstrations. “Her impeachment was a good first step, but it’s important to keep the momentum going.”

In recognition of young people’s concerns, Moon has promised to create 810,000 jobs in the public sector and raise taxes on the wealthy. He has also vowed to create 500,000 jobs in the private sector by reducing work hours. Woo says Moon is unlikely to pursue immediate, radical changes as he works to protect a fragile recovery in Asia's fourth-largest economy.

Reforms won't be easy

Yet radical change is what many South Koreans are calling for when it comes to reforming the family-controlled conglomerates, known as chaebol, that dominate the country’s economy and wield vast political power. Public distrust of them hit a new high earlier this year with the arrest and indictment of Lee Jae-yong, the de facto leader of Samsung, South Korea’s largest business empire, on suspicion that he bribed Park in exchange for business favors. Moon has vowed to break the corrupt ties between government officials and business leaders by increasing transparency and implementing corporate governance reforms.

Reforms of any kind won’t be easy. His Democratic Party is the largest force in the 299-seat legislature but holds only 120 seats, far from the 180 seats needed to pass legislation without buy-in from other parties. And if the economy slows, lawmakers may fear that constraining the chaebol would further endanger growth.

All of this has led Park Jin, a political activist who helped organize the anti-Park demonstrations, to be skeptical of whether Moon will be able to deliver the kind of sweeping reforms that she considers long overdue. “It’s time for civil society to fight on Moon’s side,” Ms. Park says. “We have to drive him to make changes because these problems are difficult and won’t be solved immediately.”

So how long are South Koreans willing to wait?

Nam Ji-soo, a 21-year-old graphic design student at Hongik University in Seoul, has little patience and sees few reasons for optimism. “I’m not expecting many changes under Moon,” she says from behind the counter of a cafe in the trendy neighborhood of Hongdae. Ms. Nam works at the cafe 15 hours a week, one of two part-time jobs she has to save money to study in the US or Europe. She says she is less worried about navigating South Korea’s hyper-competitive job market than many of her friends, but that she still wants to improve her skills by studying abroad. “My friends are worried about finding work after they graduate,” she says. “The election doesn’t change that.”

But then there are South Koreans like Ms. Lee, those whom Moon has given a new sense of hope about the future. “After the Park scandal, I lost a lot of faith in government,” she says. “I think Moon can bring it back.”

Courtesy of Sun Sentinel

Authorities raided Reflections Treatment Center in Margate, Fla., on Dec. 21, 2016 – the same day they announced charges against six people involved in a South Florida sober home and drug-treatment operation.

Five days after losing her daughter to a drug overdose in a South Florida sober home, Jennifer Flory found herself standing before a task force set up to investigate sober homes.

“My daughter passed away on Thursday night and I’m coming here to get her stuff – and her – and to find out why she died,” the grieving mother from Illinois told the assembled group in West Palm Beach.

Months later, she said her public appearance so soon after her daughter’s passing was aimed at helping other parents and other addicts avoid the pitfalls that took her daughter’s life.

“Alison knows that I love her and care about her and miss her terribly. But that can wait,” she said in an interview with the Monitor. “Right now there is an urgent need for people to be helped and saved.”

With more than 140 people dying every day in the US from drug overdoses, addiction treatment has become a growth industry across the country. South Florida, in particular, is a national destination for those seeking treatment. 

It isn’t just Florida’s warm and sunny weather. Those suffering under addiction are targeted by aggressive marketing tactics featuring national advertising and patient recruiters.

In the process, Florida has also become a prime location for unscrupulous drug treatment centers that seek to recruit young addicts covered by their parents’ insurance policies. Many of the “patients” are allowed to continue to use drugs while the treatment center overcharges their parents’ insurance policy for unnecessary drug tests and other unneeded services.

Federal, state, and local authorities are cracking down, but the insurance scams continue.

Flory says chief among her mistakes was assuming that everyone in the drug treatment industry was honest and actually cared about the well-being of her daughter.

“I think people need to know, there are scam artists out there,” she says. “Don’t just send your kid to Florida and expect a miracle.”

Two years ago, that’s what Flory did with Alison.

“I didn’t know the industry wasn’t [closely] regulated. I didn’t know that addiction treatment wasn’t under the supervision of a doctor at all times,” Flory says. “I was picturing white lab coats and stuff like that. I didn’t know. I didn’t know any of it.”

Instead of being helped along a road to recovery to a new life, Flory’s daughter was recruited away from an effective drug treatment program and lured into a sham program.

As reported in the first part of this two-part series, the program, Reflections Treatment Center in Margate, Fla., was set up largely as a mechanism to overcharge health insurance policies for unnecessary tests and treatments at inflated prices. As the operators of the treatment center grew richer, Flory’s daughter experienced relapse after relapse while living in a fake “sober home” where illicit drug use was permitted.

It was in one such sober home where, on Oct. 14, Alison and one of her housemates, Nicole De La Pena, smoked crack cocaine laced with the synthetic opiate carfentanil. Alison passed out and never woke up. Nicole spent a week in the hospital and is suffering from memory loss.

Although Reflections was later raided by the FBI and shut down, many other treatment centers and sober homes in South Florida are continuing to operate under a similar business model based on insurance fraud.

Criminal investigations are ongoing. And a special task force is exploring how to reform the sober home industry to weed out bad actors.

In the meantime, parents are continuing to struggle to identify legitimate and effective treatment centers and recovery residences. Flory and other mothers of addicts are part of an informal support network that offers help and advice to those seeking to identify quality treatment centers and avoid the fraudsters. 

Key questions parents should ask

Flory and Johanna De La Pena, Nicole’s mother, both offer the same essential piece of advice to parents or loved ones of an addict seeking treatment: Talk to other moms of addicts.

Both of them say that parents and others researching rehab programs are at a significant disadvantage when trying to differentiate legitimate treatment centers and recovery residences from the bad actors in the industry. 

The issue of selecting a treatment center and recovery residence arises at a time of crisis not only in the life of the addict, but also in the lives of those affected family members who are attempting to help the addict. In other words, the addict isn’t the only one whose life is in turmoil.

These vulnerable family members are confronted by a well-organized, well-funded, and in some cases highly deceptive marketing effort designed to attract and recruit new patients. Sometimes they offer free airfare to Florida, a tactic that experts say should raise red flags to family members.

“I would have never sent her [to Florida] if I knew then what I know now,” Ms. De La Pena said in an interview. “I would have picked a different state. I would have researched the facilities more. I would have gotten references.”

She says when her daughter agreed to enter treatment in Florida, she was so desperate to do something to help her daughter that she did not fully investigate the drug treatment industry.

“At the time my daughter was sent off to Florida I was still kind of in denial about her addiction,” De La Pena says. “In my hometown, we don’t really talk about this.”

Experts stress that not all drug treatment centers in Florida are engaged in health-care fraud. There are many long-established, reputable, and effective treatment facilities in the state. One key piece of advice offered by many experts and many parents of addicts: Find a reputable treatment center and stay there. Resist patient recruiters, they say.

The difficulty is being able to ignore fancy advertisements and slick website presentations to identify a truly reputable treatment center. Equally important is the ability to identify legitimate recovery residences and bypass fake sober homes, flop houses, and drug dens.

Addiction recovery specialists suggest parents and other loved ones ask a few key questions:

• Is the recovery residence certified by the Florida Association of Recovery Residences? If not, look elsewhere.
• Does the sober home offer residents free rent and money for food? Experts say residents should pay their own way. Offers of free rent or other benefits can be evidence of illegal patient brokering.
• Is the recovery residence coed? Experts say sober homes should be segregated by gender and not facilitate dating-type relationships between patients, which in the early stages of drug treatment can take the focus off recovery and make relapse more likely.
• Is the staff of the sober home trained in CPR? Do they have a supply of naloxone in the house for use as an emergency antidote in the event of an overdose?
• Are random drug tests performed? How much do they cost? Such tests should cost $5 to $10.
• Are referral fees paid to the sober home from a drug treatment center if residents enroll at that center? If so, it suggests the presence of an illegal kickback scheme, specialists say.

Parents need fortitude, strategy

For some parents, dealing with a child who is an addict requires not only fortitude but strategy and cunning.

After spending a week at her daughter’s bedside at a South Florida hospital following Nicole’s overdose in October, De La Pena decided it would be best to take her daughter home to Texas.

She arranged for security officers to accompany them from the hospital to the airport until they safely boarded their flight. As they entered the line for TSA screening, Nicole saw an opening.

“She just started running and I couldn’t get to her,” De La Pena says. Nicole apparently wanted to be with her boyfriend, who was also in a drug treatment program.

It took two months of pleading on the telephone before Nicole agreed to return to her mother’s house in Texas. Soon, Nicole began plotting her return to Florida.

De La Pena refused to pay for a flight to Florida. But that didn’t stop Nicole’s boyfriend from pulling strings to arrange a “free” Texas-Florida flight.

“These kids already know that they can get free flights back to Florida, so when she was here she was already planning it,” De La Pena says.

The mother says she was able to intercept and stop attempts by two different treatment centers to send a free ticket to Nicole. It is a common recruitment tactic to offer to pay for airfare to Florida if the would-be patient has health insurance and is willing to enroll in their treatment program.

Maureen Kielian is the Florida director of the anti-drug group Steered Straight and a member of the Sober Homes Task Force. She says there is a relatively easy way to determine if a treatment center is engaging in an illegal activity such as patient brokering – offering something to a prospective patient in exchange for their agreement to enroll in a particular treatment program.

“If they are being offered anything free, they are being brokered,” she says. “The way to think about it is if my son had leukemia, would this be happening?” she says. “Would they be flying you in for treatment? Would they be offering you free anything? No.”

After dealing with her daughter’s overdose, De La Pena knew about patient brokering and was twice able to intercept and block free plane tickets meant for Nicole.

“Then one of them did purchase her a ticket,” she says. “It was late at night when I saw it and I personally contacted the person and told them they better cancel. They were really ugly and rude. So I told them I am canceling my insurance because I know that is the only reason they wanted her out there. They said, no, we’ve already verified the coverage.” De La Pena upped the pressure. She told them what they were doing was illegal. They disagreed.

After the telephone call ended, De La Pena sent them a text message with the business card of an official with an anti-fraud task force in South Florida. She repeated her statement that what they were doing was illegal. “Within minutes he texted me back, saying that he had canceled the flight,” she says.

“The next morning, my daughter did not know that I had canceled the flight,” she says. “I was asleep at six in the morning when she got a ride to the airport.”

De La Pena sent a text message to her daughter who, by then, was stranded at the airport. The message: Give your mom a call when you are ready for a ride home. Nicole called her grandmother for a ride.

The time away from Florida has been good for her daughter, De La Pena says. Nicole has a job and has been drug-free for three months. The mother says it is easier to fight off patient recruiters when they think there is no insurance policy to fleece.

A fast way to stop the fraud

Flory says she believes any chance her daughter Alison had for recovery was lost amid the ongoing fraud in South Florida. “I think she was doomed by the people who were supposed to help her,” she says.

Flory has hired a lawyer to investigate a possible lawsuit against one or more of the drug treatment centers Alison attended.

The lawyer, Susan Ramsey of West Palm Beach, says the increased law enforcement scrutiny of the treatment industry in recent months is causing some people to close their doors and move on.

“There are those who are going to pull up their shingle and go find some other scam. I think that is happening,” she says. “But the struggle is going to continue for some years.”

One development that Ms. Ramsey says might trigger a rapid cleansing of the treatment industry would be if insurance companies launched their own investigation into past practices and demanded their money back from shady treatment centers and laboratories that overbilled.

“That is what they need to do,” she says. “That would stop this pretty darned fast.”

At one point De La Pena got the same idea. She called her insurance company and asked them to block a South Florida treatment center from billing more charges to her health insurance plan. “They declined to do that,” she says.

She called a fraud investigator with the insurance company. He never called back.

'I know the warning signs'

Flory says she will always feel an emptiness from the loss of Alison, her oldest child. But in a cruel twist, her struggle dealing with an addicted child is not over yet.

Four months after Alison’s fatal overdose, her 20-year-old son came to her with a heart-breaking admission.

“I’m doing heroin and I need help or else I’m going to die,” she says he told her. That’s not all. “He wanted to go to Florida. That wasn’t my idea, but he said that’s where he wanted to be.”

He enrolled in a South Florida drug treatment facility.

“So at first it looks like I’m doing the same thing all over again, expecting a different result,” Flory says. “But now that I know how it works… I have people watching out for him. If I knew then what I know now, I would have seen what Alison was falling into.”

This time will be different, she says. “I know what to expect. If he is going to get into trouble, I know what the warning signs are and I am going to have him watched like a hawk by all the people I have met. I have a big network of people now who live (in South Florida) because I’ve made it my business to know them.”

If there is any one rule she will enforce with her son that she did not enforce with Alison it is that he will enroll in a legitimate, high-quality program and remain in it.

 “You don’t move,” Flory says. “You don’t make any decisions about that. He knows that he is not allowed to make those decisions.”

This is Part 2 of 2. You can read Part 1, "Alison's story: How $750,000 in drug treatment destroyed her life," by clicking here.

AP Photo

Solicitor General nominee Noel Francisco, left, Assistant Attorney General, Antitrust Division nominee Makan Delrahim, center, and Assistant Attorney General, Office of Legal Counsel, nominee Steven Engel, are sworn-in before testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee's hearing on their nominations, on Capitol Hill in Washington, May 10.

 With President Trump’s controversial firing of FBI Director James Comey, the next crucial step in Washington is to restore the faith of Americans in rule of law. Mr. Trump must quickly nominate a new FBI chief who can pass Senate scrutiny and has enough independence to keep alive the agency’s probes of alleged wrongdoing – from Russian meddling to security leaks – that led to this crisis.

Americans have shown a keen interest in the process of choosing high-level officials of justice with the recent selections of a new Supreme Court justice, a new attorney general, and others. While the Senate may debate a person’s character, policies, or past decisions, this collective desire helps bind the process: Pick someone who can fairly apply the universal principles embedded in law to both individuals and society.

Not all nations adhere to this belief in an impersonal good that, if not yet fully grasped by everyone, is at least applied by a chosen few who, in being selected in a democratic way, are seen as virtuous, practical, and wise people.

Over the centuries, most nations have moved beyond the idea that rule of law comes from a monarch who claims a divine mandate. But many countries still tolerate autocrats who impose their will rather than honor the people’s hope to anchor human justice in the all-embracing higher concepts of justice, such as equality before the law and the intrinsic worth of the individual.

That hope for eternal ideas and virtues that guide human life has a long history. For Americans, it is found in this famed sentence in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, and that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Much of the public passion over the Comey firing is driven by this persistent desire to maintain a society guided by principles aptly applied by those with the widest support. The Senate, in tandem with the president, remains the vehicle for such an important selection.

If Americans do not want their institutions of justice – from the FBI to the Supreme Court – to become even more political than they are now, they and their representatives must reinforce the time-tested hope for a common good in decisions of law. That motive above all should guide the process of approving a new FBI chief.