James Edward Moore, Jr., was indicted for importation of anabolic steroids and possession with intent to distribute anabolic steroids on February 27, 2008. Moore admitted to ordering steroids from IP China sending money via Western Union on at least six occasions to Zhijum He of China. The charges listed in Moore’s indictment were based on thousands of vials and ampules of steroids and thousands of steroid tablets found at Moore’s residence, storage lockers, and three intercepted packages linked to Moore.
The investigation of Moore began in late August 2007 when the Department of Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) opened an incoming package addressed to Jimmy Moore, Jr.; the steroid shipment was sent via International Express Mail by Sany Zeng of Chungsa, Hunan (China).
A second incoming package from China on October 22, 2007 was examined by federal authorities under an anticipatory search warrant. This International Express Mail shipment contained various anabolic steroids and growth hormone, including products labelled Test 400, British Dragon Trenabol Depot, Primobolan QV 100, Teston QV 200, and HGH marked Getropin 10IU Recombinant Human Growth Hormone.
The third incoming package was ordered from AlinShop and shipped by Gore Elena from the Moldova Republic. It contained eight 5mL sachets containing testosterone cypionate and eight sachets containing testosterone enanthate. All sachets were marked “Aromathekaypoil.”
Moore waived his Miranda Rights and told investigators he sold the anabolic steroids primarily to bodybuilders at the Santa Cruz Gold’s Gym and used them for personal medical problems e.g. “to fix his hormone levels.” He reported that he was disabled due to cardiomyopathy and kidney problems. Due to the sheer quantity of anabolic steroids discovered during the steroid bust, the Gold’s Gym in Santa Cruz has the most “jacked” bodybuilders in the country.
Moore resided at a house for recovering drug and alcohol addicts where he was manager and caretaker of the facility.
New York Yankees baseball player Andy Pettitte allegedly obtainedhuman growth hormone from his father who obtained it from Kelly Blair who may have obtained it from pro bodybuilder Craig Titus. It has yet to be determined where Craig Titus obtained the growth hormone. Former IFBB Pro bodybuilder Craig Titus has been in jail awaiting trial in the murder of his personal assistant
Kelly Blair is the owner of 1-on-1 Elite Personal Fitness in Pasadena, Texas. He attended Deer Park High School with Andy Pettite. Craig Titus is formerly from the Houston area.
According to the Craig Titus and Kelly Ryan Investigation website:
The Daily News reports some of the drugs came from steroid-user Craig Titus, a champion bodybuilder who is facing a murder trial in Nevada for the slaying of his former live-in assistant.
Kelly Blair is also allegedly linked to Roger Clemens son:
Also, Blair was reportedly seen working with Koby Clemens, the son of seven- time Cy Young Award winner Roger Clemens, who was involved in a heated congressional hearing this past week. However, the Daily News reports that Koby Clemens, who is now playing baseball in the minors, hasn’t been linked to any illicit activity at the gym.
Film producer Julius Nasso denies any mafia involvement in Lowen’s Pharmacy, its compounding business or its large scale distribution of anabolic steroids and growth hormone. Julius Nasso was a long-time friend and former business partner of the principal owner and pharmacist John Rossi, who apparently committed suicide last month. While Nasso still owns the building where Lowen’s Pharmacy is located, his attorney claims Nasso has not had any ownership stake since 1988.
Nasso is a reputed Gambino crime family associate and pleaded guilty to an extortion conspiracy involving using mob muscle to shake down actor Steven Segal.
Nasso maintains there was no organized crime involvement with Lowen’s Pharmacy; John Rossi and Rossi’s son-in-law acted independently to start selling compounded anabolic steroids and growth hormone in 2004.
The drug store’s involvement in compounding steroids and human growth hormone appears to date back only a few years.
Court papers, filed in connection with a civil lawsuit, indicated that the pharmacy - an old-fashioned, 55-year-old shop in Brooklyn’s Bay Ridge section - acquired the equipment, expertise and client lists of another compounding pharmacy in California in 2004. The owner of that business, now defunct, also provided training for some of Lowen’s staff.
Rossi and his son-in-law expanded the compounding business by attending conferences on “anti-aging medicine” in Florida, where they struck up partnerships to provide drugs to a small group of health clinics that sold steroids and hormones over the Internet.
So we all agree that steroids are bad, right? They’ve brought suspicion and shame.
Then it got a little better. Dr. Gupta starts talking about the therapeutic use of anabolic steroids in HIV patients. He talks about the therapeutic uses of steroids.
He seems impressed that steroids can be good but then discusses how the therapeutic uses for steroids were “hijacked” by athletes and especially bodybuilders. Blame the bodybuilders. Parties responsible for the hijacking include the “Arnoldistas” or followers of Arnold Schwarzenegger who, according to Shaun Assael, created a steroid “religion.”
He blamed talked about the “Underground Steroid Handbook” but didn’t even mention the author, Dan Duchaine!
Then Dr. Gupta’s credibility takes a major hit when he talks about growth hormone.
Then there’s human growth hormone (HGH), derived from the pituitary gland.
HGH derived from pituitary glands has not been used in medicine in decades. It is all recombinant human growth hormone nowadays.
But that hope was dashed when I learned that when taking anabolic steroids, “there’s always the risk of, you know, heart weakening and liver tumors.” And then I [again] learned Lyle Alzado blamed his brain cancer on steroid abuse.
Gupta asks what can be done about a good drug gone bad? The first thing we should stop doing is stop associating Lyle Alzado’s brain cancer with his steroid abuse. Why do we persist in repeating this again and again with the standard disclaimer that there is no medical evidence to support it?
The co-owner of Lowen’s Pharmacy has apparently died from a self-inflicted gunshot to the head; New York Police Department (NYPD) investigators maintain it was a suicide even though the victim was also shot in the chest.
Six NYPD police officers, most of whom worked out at Dolphin Fitness near Lowen’s, have been under instensive internal affairs investigations for improperly obtaining anabolic steroids from Lowen’s Pharmacy. Lowen’s Pharmacy has been raided on two separate occasions by narcotics officers working with the office of New York’s Albany District Attorney David Soares. These raids resulted in the seizure of over $7 million worth of growth hormone from China as well as $200,000 worth of various anabolic steroids, including testosterone, nandrolone and stanozolol; records seized showed that about $30 million in steroids and growth hormone were funneled through “longevity clinics” in Florida.
Lowen’s Pharmacy has ties to the Gambino crime family. Julius Nasso, Jr. is a part owner of Lowen’s Pharmacy; his father owns the building where Lowen’s is located at the corner of Bayshore Drive and 3rd Avenue in Brooklyn. The father of Julius Nasso, Jr. was a former pharmacist turned movie producer who served prison time for conspiring with the Gambino family to extort money from actor Steven Segal; the uncle of Nasso, Jr. owns a drug company and was sentenced for labor racketeering.
Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone were competitive rivals as box office muscle action heroes during the 1980s. But now Arnold and Sly are apparently good friends. According to Stallone, their friendship has flourished recently:
After he became governor, we started to build this relationship. We’d go to this place called Cafe Rome and smoke cigars, then they banned smoking, so the governor and I were in an alley stealing a few puffs talking about how to balance the budget. Now we meet every Saturday.
Schwarzenegger is even a fan of Sly’s movies nowadays. Arnold took his two sons on a flight to Las Vegas Los Angeles last week for the box office premiere of Sylvester Stallone’s latest movie, Rambo.
I’m certain that Arnold’s friendship with Sly will be criticized since Stallone has become the most high profile celebrity advocate for the use of growth hormone and testosterone in age management medicine during his recent promotional tour for Rambo.
Arnold has long faced criticism of his association with pro bodybuilding via the Arnold Classic because of the rampant anabolic steroid use in the sport. It’s good to hear Arnold is not turning his back on friends and the sport of bodybuilding simply due to political pressure!
Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a new recombinant growth hormone manufactured by the Canadian drug company, Cangene, and designed for subcutaneous injection. The brand name for Cangene’s injectable growth hormone is Accretropin. Accretropin has an identical amino acid sequence to natural human growth hormone produced in the pituitary. It was approved for treatment of children with short stature and Turner’s Syndrome (a chromosomal disorder in girls resulting in short stature and infertility). Cangene submitted the new drug application (NDA) to the FDA in July 2006.
Tercica announced that they just started a Phase II clinical trial examining the efficacy of IGF-1 stacked with human growth hormone (GH). Unfortunately for bodybuilders and athletes, the outcome measure in this study is not performance enhancement, increases in lean muscle mass, or loss in body fat.
The objective is to measure “height velocity” and safety in the treatment of short stature in children. The trial will examing the efficacy of three different stacks of GH + IFG-1 and compare them with GH alone (GH monotherapy).
Potential of GH/IGF-1 Combination Product: The combination product will be studied in children with short stature not associated with growth hormone deficiency, who also have low IGF-1 levels. A potential cause of short stature in this group of patients could be a suboptimal IGF-1 secretion in response to growth hormone stimulation alone. Pre-clinical studies suggest that co-administration of GH and IGF-1 may increase specific growth responses greater than growth hormone alone. Therefore, Tercica believes that treatment with a combination of both GH and IGF-1 may be superior to monotherapy of growth hormone alone in a subpopulation of children with low IGF-1 and short stature not associated with growth hormone deficiency.
Tercica is the biotechnology company that is the first to bring FDA-approved recombinant insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1) to the marketplace. The brand name for IGF-1 is Increlex and the generic name is mecasermin.
It is interesting that discussion of the use of growth hormone and IGF-1 in athletes for performance enhancing purposes revolves around the extremely dangerous side effects of these drugs; efforts to prevent GH use in sports is often based on the dangers of the drugs and potential public health crisis they may cause.
Yet a news story about the therapeutic use of growth hormone and IGF-1 in children gets buried in the news.
Could you imagine a pharmaceutical company (whose top-selling drugs are anabolic steroids) becoming the title sponsor of a professional bodybuilding contest? What is Unimed, whose top selling drug products are Anadrol-50 (oxymetholone) and AndroGel (testosterone), sponsored the Mr. Olympia Bodybuilding contest resulting in the “Unimed Pharmaceuticals IFBB Mr. Olympia Bodybuilding Championships”?!! Or how about Savient, whose top-selling drug product is Oxandrin (oxandrolone), sponsoring the Arnold Classic resulting in the Savient Pharmaceuticals IFBB Arnold Schwarzenegger Classic Bodybuilding Championships?!! Observers would comment on the irony given that professional bodybuilding is practically synonymous with the use of anabolic steroids.
Interestingly, in the sport of professional cycling, such an unlikely sponsorship has been taking place since 2006 when the biotechnology company Amgen became the title sponsor of professional cycling’s Amgen Tour of California. One prominent cycling commentator called it the “death of irony.” You see, Amgen’s most successful product to date is Epogen (recombinant erythropoietin); it’s second best-selling drug is a long-acting version of Epogen called Aranesp (darbepoietin). Epogen is the most notorious performance-enhancing drug in cycling; Epogen is to professional cycling what anabolic steroids are to professional bodybuilding!
If the controversial title sponsorship was not enough, Tour of California organizers accidentally forgot to drug test riders for Epogen during the inaugural 2006 Amgen Tour of California. They tested for all other banned drugs but simply forgot to test for Epogen!
And why is Amgen spending $35 million sponsorship over a 5-year commitment on professional cycling? Is it because professional cyclist represent proof of the miraculous performance-enhancing effects of their products? Not exactly. Amgen’s scientific director Dr. Steven Elliott explains:
Our opportunity is to educate cyclists that there is an appropriate way to use a drug, and doping in sport is not it… Our medicines were made because we want to treat grievous illnesses. They’re not for enhancing performance in sport.
I think the sport of professional bodybuilding could use a $35 million infusion by a giant pharmaceutical company who manufacturers anabolic steroids and/or human growth hormone who could use the sponsorship as an opportunity to promote the therapeutic benefits of anabolic steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs.
But then again, along with the Amgen sponsorship of the Tour of California came pressure to expand anti-doping testing and improve anti-doping procedures.
The upcoming 2008 Amgen Tour of California cycling road race will adopt the most comprehensive anti-doping protocol in cycling history it was announced by Andrew Messick, president, AEG Sports, presenter of the race, at a press conference today.
This is something that professional bodybuilding probably does not want.
It appears that the federal government is mounting a case against Applied Pharmacy Services (APS) based in Mobile, Alabama. APS has been target of a federal probe for several years although no one has yet been charged with a crime.
However, in court documents provided to MESO-Rx indicate federal investigators believe APS was part of a conspiracy to distribute anabolic steroids:
[A]n illegal conspiracy to dispense and distribute anabolic steroids, which are Schedule III controlled substances, human growth hormone (HGH) and other drugs, outside the usual course of professional medical practice.
The alleged conspiracy includes Applied Pharmacy Services, Inc. with Samuel Kelley and Jason Kelley identified as major shareholders involved in the day-to-day operations of the pharmacy.
Also named in the conspiracy is Brett Branch, an APS sales rep and owner of Infinite Health in Eaton, Colorado. Brett Branch is accused of recruiting local physicians to write steroid prescriptions for customers of his clinic as well as recruiting customers from gyms around Eaton, Colorado; Branch also allegedly received commissions on each steroid prescription dispensed to customers of Infinite Health. Colorado physicians identified include Kenneth Olds, M.D., Kelly Tucker, M.D. and Scott Corliss, M.D. Dr. Tucker subsequently invested in Infinite Health to become a co-owner with Branch.
A raid on APS in December 2006 originated with Albany District Attorney David Soares. However, the federal investigation and alleged conspiracy charges are separate from the New York state investigation.
