Written by:
Corey Kilgannon
September 26, 2007
The Strong Island Underground: It was an enterprise advertised on the Internet for customers with dreams of pumping up their bodies with steroids purchased discreetly online.
But if the visions of a quick, chemically paved path to an Adonis-like body were glamorous, the origin of these steroids was not, according to federal and local investigators. They say the muscle-growth mixtures were whipped up in shabby brick building here on Verdi Street, an industrial byway in this central Long Island town.
“The federal agents showed up at my door one day, and I found out some guys were running a steroid factory in the next apartment,” said Billy Prince, 48, who rents the apartment next to a long narrow rented room above an automotive shop where the authorities said that two men operated a covert steroid lab. “They needed a big box truck to cart away all the vials and boxes of steroids.”
Agents said they found more than $6.5 million worth of steroids there, including raw ingredients from China, and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of laboratory equipment to transform them into usable form, as well as cartons to mail orders to customers — who paid in advance — said Erin Mulvey, a spokeswoman for the Drug Enforcement Agency.
Carlos Cuevas, 36, and Thomas Butler, are accused of running the lab in this suburban village on the Nassau-Suffolk border,
about an hour’s drive from Manhattan. It was one of three places on Long Island where the authorities said that dealers cooked up steroids. Two were less than five miles apart, one on Verdi Street and the other in a new upscale development in Melville.
At the labs, raw ingredients were pressed into pills or cooked into injectable liquids and supplied to a sprawling underground distribution network for steroids, human growth hormone and other illicit bodybuilding drugs, according to the complaint.
On Monday, federal authorities announced the results of a two-year investigation that they called the biggest crackdown on illegal steroids in the nation’s history.
It resulted in the arrests of 124 people, including nine Long Islanders who were accused of running sophisticated rings of mail-order steroid sales involving large quantities of ingredients from China.
The operation revealed a much wider trade in performance-enhancing drugs than previously known, with a collection of bathroom and basement manufacturers and distributors. That contrasted with more centralized drug manufacturing operations in past years.
On Long Island alone, federal and state agents reported seizing nearly 2.5 million doses of steroids, with a street value of roughly $13 million. The dealers engaged in illegally manufacturing and selling anabolic steroids over the Internet, the authorities said, and tried to avoid detection through anonymous e-mail services and password-protected chat rooms.
Customers contacted encrypted e-mail addresses and often sent cash to post office boxes.
“There was a definite local customer base on Long Island. However, the clientele was also outside this jurisdiction — they didn’t just cater to Long Island,” said Teri Corrigan, chief of the street narcotics and gang bureau for the Nassau County district attorney’s office, which worked with federal agents on the investigation.
She said that many sellers advertised on bodybuilding chat rooms and online bulletin boards, and that investigators placed Internet orders for steroids and observed sellers mailing packages. Web site operators are suspected of using savvy techniques to screen customers by checking their e-mail addresses to see if they had a history of visiting bodybuilding Web sites.
“They did not want first-time visitors,” Ms. Corrigan said. “We had to establish some credibility before placing an order.”
The idea of rampant steroid sales on Long Island came as no surprise to bodybuilders at the local gyms favored by young men with bulky physiques.
The term Strong Island is used frequently, especially among bodybuilders and rappers, to convey swagger and toughness.
Richard Schultz, 16, a junior at Farmingdale High School, said many athletes he knew took creatine, a legal substance used to help build muscle mass.
“I have heard rumors that one kid is doing steroids,” he said Tuesday after school. “There are always rumors that someone is doing it.” He added, “I heard you can get steroids on the Internet, but I am not doing it.”
James Roth, 45, said that the gym he used in Queens was shut down recently by the authorities because of reputed steroid sales there.
“There are two types of gyms: bodybuilding gyms and those gyms you use to just stay in shape,” he said. “The bodybuilding gyms have the drugs, lots of free weights and grunting. That is the difference.”
A Melville man, Christopher Lance, 36, who was arrested on Sept. 12 on drug-possession charges after officials said he ran a steroid lab out of his home, committed suicide last week, shortly after being released on bail. Mr. Lance was arrested along with his wife, Debra Rosenbach, 33, and his mother, Karen Lance, 55, in connection with the case.
At her house in Massapequa, Mr. Lance’s grandmother, Mary Smith, said on Tuesday that Mr. Lance was married five months ago and moved to the Melville house. She said she believed he killed himself because of “the shame his arrest brought upon our family.”
“He couldn’t believe they’d put his mother in jail because of what he might have done, and he killed himself out of love for his family,” she said. “His car was in the shop, and he gave his mother a package to mail, and they go and arrest her.”
Ms. Corrigan said her office was eager to diminish the supply of steroids on Long Island, where young people are susceptible because of an emphasis on athletics, peer pressure and concerns about their bodies.
“We have a county filled with athletic children,” she said. “And the last thing that D. A. Kathleen Rice wants is for our children to think it is accepted behavior to take steroids to look better or perform better at athletics.”
