Part 5 -
MM: When did the bubble burst?
DD: We had an idea that the FBI and customs were interested in all this steroid stuff. On the west side of LA, there were a lot of steroid dealers, and stupidly, they were all packing and shipping from the same storage facility. There were four or five guys using the same storage facility in Culver City at the same time. Sticking ’em in boxes, slapping labels on, and dropping them off at the same UPS shipping center. It was kind of hilarious because we’d walk down the walkways, and one of us would yell, “Can I borrow a hundred bottles of this? I’ll pay you back tomorrow.” It was crazy.
After a while, I realized the FBI was beginning to follow me. At that point, I said this is enough. Up to that point, it was some kind of childish game— making believe I was a criminal. None of us really thought we were criminals because they weren’t really drugs, and we weren’t selling to other criminals. But when the government started observing me, intercepting my packages and everything, I said enough is enough. And at the same time, Laboratory Milano was getting a little pushy: they were trying to push more product for me to buy than I was really able to handle, so I was getting kind of paranoid. I was afraid that other criminals in the gym were going to rip my money off, and with the government following me around, I just told them at the end of 1988, “Look, we all know the government is on to us, so before something bad happens, I’m out of it, and I suggest you close down the operation.”
They said,“OK, we’ll cut it right now.” Then, I moved out of the city. I moved up to Benicia, California, to Champion Nutrition because Michael Zumpano was a friend of mine—he was one of the coauthors of the Underground Steroid Handbook. I began working for him. And I was lost. I knew I didn’t want to be a steroid dealer anymore, but I was so out of doing the nine-to-five thing that I really couldn’t commit to doing the job he wanted me to do, so I just kind of laid around the house, read a lot, etc. I just didn’t know what to do. Luckily I had saved a lot of money, a hundred thousand dollars, so I didn’t have to work for awhile.
But, I missed Southern California and decided to move back and work with one of my partners in what was then Olympia Nutrition. I had no idea that my partners [from Laboratory Milano] were still going gangbusters and selling to everybody in the world, including Larry Pacifico, who was cooperating with Federal authorities. And then, one day, May 17, 1987, I was driving to the gym for a workout, from Benicia to Concord, and I was pulled over by a police car, and there were at least 15 shotguns aimed at me, and I was told to lie face down in the middle of the road.
Justifiably so—I had a lot of guns in my house—weird ones, too. I had a gun fetish as many of the nouveau riche people do, where you buy the things and never shoot ’em because it’s just something to buy. Back then, it was the Miami Vice days, and I had the Rolex, the flashy cars, and guns. I was such an asshole.
MM: I was going to ask if you were one of these stereotypical steroid gangsters.
DD: Oh yes. No socks, silk coat, that kind of thing. Just an asshole. I’m ashamed to think of it. At least I got it out of my system.
MM: How much money were you making at the height of the business?
DD: About $4,000 a week, which is chump change compared to other steroid dealers, but for me, coming from a poor family, it was a staggering amount of money. And of course, I didn’t know how to handle it. I should have been more frugal, but I had a real car fetish. I had a 427 Cobra replica, a Porsche 550 Spyder replica, an Interceptor, a big black van, an Impala, and a Jetta all at the same time. The van was kind of interesting because I still dabbled in steroids after I left Southern California. I still had my friend in Holland who was crying to me that he needed to make money. Even though I was out of the steroid business, I would receive packages from him. The van had a complete hand canner like those big cans that you put protein powder in. Well, there’s a hand closer that will close it tight, and I put all of
my steroids in cans like that and packed them with Styrofoam pellets, so they wouldn’t rattle, and I had fake labels for protein powder, and I’d ship ’em out like that.
MM: Tell me about the first time you went to prison.
DD: That was March 14, 1989 [slowly, pausing for a moment, as if accessing the data]. And I had been sentenced to three years for “conspiracy to defraud the government” since I had mislabeled the steroids from Laboratory Milano. And it was kind of an odd sentence because it was understood between the defense lawyers and the prosecutors that some pretty harsh sentences were going to be handed out to send a message to the athletes, but it was our understanding that as soon as the sentences were handed down, we were supposed to file a reduction of sentence motion, and it would be granted.
That was generally true, except for me [sad chuckle]. For example, one of my partners had a sentence of seven years. He got out in ten months. Another guy had a one year sentence. He was out in three months. I had a three-year sentence, so I figured I’d be out in five or six months. Buuutt, I rewrote that steroid book. And published it. And the judge didn’t think I was repentant.
He gave me a reduction but not as much as I thought. I finally got an 18-month sentence, and back then, the Federal guidelines were easier, and I only had to do about two-thirds of the time. I was in prison for about ten months, and then I was in a halfway house for about two more.
MM: Which prison camp was it?
DD: Boron Prison Camp—about a hundred miles from Los Angeles, right next to Edwards Air Force Base. We always saw the shuttle coming down.
MM: What are your memories of that time?
DD: A big adventure—all my friends were there. John Romano was there. John Romano and I were roommates and workout buddies. We really had a bond in that prison. And it was before the crack sentences started filling the prisons, so it was mostly a white guys’ prison for fraud—a lot of pot and methamphetamine—not too much cocaine back then. But it began to fill up. So we all knew we had short sentences and that it wasn’t the end of the world. Yeah, there was a little panic.
I was wondering if I’d ever get that sentence reduction, but for ten months, it was an adventure, and I recommend being in prison for a short time to many people because you’ll see how the government works and what kind of people are in Federal prison. They’re not the kind of criminals you’d expect. We had young 19-year-old kids there who did things like take rattlesnakes off Indian reservations and milk the venom, and technically that’s stealing from an Indian reservation, so they gave them a year. One guy photocopied a dollar bill and put it in some Laundromat change machine to get quarters out, and they gave him a year for that. Another guy was rustling cacti off Federal land, and he got a year for that. Chickenshit stuff.
MM: So after you got out, what events led to the subsequent clenbuterol bust?
DD: Oh God [taking off his sunglasses and rubbing his forehead]. I was idiot. You know, one of my big problems up until lately was that I found it hard to say no to people if they asked me for a favor. When I got out of prison the first time, I was aware of GHB, but I knew the government was not going to be happy about it being sold, so I didn’t touch it. But after about a year, everybody was selling it, and the government wasn’t doing anything about it. The guy who ended up being the codefendant on my case, Larry Wood—I guess the government was going to go after him for something else—said, “I have this mail-order customer list of longevity people, not athletes, and they want their GHB, and I have a limited amount, and I’d like you to sell it for me because I don’t want to be around it.” I said, “I don’t have a problem with that because no one’s been arrested for it, and it’s only a couple of months of work, it’s a little bit of money for me, and there’s no advertising—everybody knows everything about it,” so I did it.
Unfortunately, one of those customers was an undercover DEA agent. We never approached him directly because he was listed as a fax line, and at the time, I didn’t have a fax machine at my house. So one day, I was just looking over the customer list, and I said, “Oh well, I’ll get Larry to fax this guy” because Larry had a fax machine, and that was the impetus of the undercover buys and the GHB and the subsequent arrest.