Reveal

Before sunrise, a line of passenger vans heads to job sites across Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Cenikor didn't want to show us where they were sending rehab participants to work. So we followed the vans to find out.

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Cenikor rises from the ashes, thanks to the inventor of NFL football pads, the war on drugs and the endorsement of an American president.

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He’s a liar, a killer and a wannabe country music singer. Luke Austin finds Synanon in prison and borrows from its philosophy to create Cenikor. But graft and violence nearly destroy it.

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After amassing a small fortune, Synanon’s megalomaniac leader turns the revolutionary rehab into a violent cult, with mass sterilization, a paramilitary group and a rattlesnake in a mailbox.

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Cenikor’s bizarre form of rehab has its roots in Synanon: a revolutionary rehab that started in the 1950s on a California beach. Its charismatic leader, Charles Dederich, mesmerized the nation by claiming to have developed a cure for drug addiction. The program became a phenomenon and quickly spread across the country. But soon, Dederich wanted to profit off its success, and this “miracle” began to change.  

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Penny Rawlings is relieved to finally get her brother into rehab at a place called Cenikor. She doesn’t realize that getting him out of treatment is going to be the bigger problem. 

This is the first chapter in Reveal’s American Rehab series, exposing how a treatment for drug addiction has turned tens of thousands of people into an unpaid shadow workforce.

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Since the coronavirus started spreading in the United States, members of the Asian American/Pacific Islander community have been verbally assaulted, coughed at and spit on, and even physically attacked. This is the latest chapter in an ongoing saga of hate and racism spreading alongside a public health crisis. 

The Trump years have seen an increase in domestic terrorist attacks linked by hateful ideologies that thrive online. Reveal teams up with Type Investigations to track each case and determine what the government has done to fight them.

Despite revelations of clergy sex abuse and promises of transparency, a prominent Jesuit university does little to punish priests who cross the line. 

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The federal government’s early failures to manage the coronavirus shifted a heavy burden to local officials. We look at how decision-makers in two states, California and Florida, found their way to shutdown and beyond. 

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