Confessions of a Steroid Smuggler : When the Quest for Big Muscles Turns Into a Passion for Big Money
By JOHN EISENDRATH
APRIL 24, 1988 12 AM PT
JOHN EISENDRATH IS A LOS ANGELES WRITER
AT 4:56 P.M. ON MAY 1, 1987, William Dillon entered Junior’s Deli on Westwood Boulevard, sat in a booth and learned he was going to be assassinated. Leonard Swirda ordered French fries and gave him the bad news. “I’ll say, ‘Let’s not talk here . . . ,’ ” Swirda said, describing how the hit would take place at a future date. “We go out to the car, I put a gun to your head, and I shoot you and throw you in the trunk, drive you to the desert, dig a hole and throw you in it. I’ve done it so many times.”
Dillon had been one of the biggest dealers of black-market anabolic steroids in the country, and now Swirda was telling him that some of his former customers wanted him dead. For 36 minutes, Dillon led his would-be executioner in a morbid colloquy, which he was secretly taping for the federal government. What if Dillon ran away? (Swirda: “I’ll find . . . where your mother lives.”) Could Swirda be persuaded instead to kill those who wanted Dillon dead? The hit man calculated. (“I’m gonna have to cut their hands off and their heads off so nobody is found.”) He’d do it for $40,000.
Dillon watched Swirda eat his fries. The calculus of murder was new to him. Dillon considered the human body a shrine. His 6-foot, 250-pound frame attested to his disciplined worship of the bench-press, the squat and injectable testosterone cypionate. Dillon loved to oil his delts, flex his pecs and pump iron. He looked forward to the day he could command $3,000 for a three-minute “guest pose” of his thighs.
Now Dillon’s dream has been deferred; he lives in fear for his life and faces 16 years in prison. He was one of several athletes and body-builders who made national news last May when they were indicted in San Diego by the federal government for illegally buying and selling steroids. Most of the drugs, which are illegal without a doctor’s prescription in the United States, were smuggled from Mexico to meet the demand of body-builders, who use them to gain bulk and strength. Twenty-three of the 34 people named in the 110-count indictment have pleaded guilty to felony charges, including smuggling, conspiracy and tax fraud, and await sentencing. They include Dillon, British Olympic silver medalist David Jenkins and Pat Jacobs, the former strength coach for the University of Miami. Swirda and two other men are to be tried for extortion this summer. Until all the cases are resolved, none of those who have pleaded guilty will be sentenced.
The federal government estimates that in 1986 and 1987, the San Diego-based group illegally sold between $2 million and $4 million worth of steroids made in Mexico and Europe to more than two dozen distributors in every region of the country. According to Phillip Halpern, the assistant U.S. attorney prosecuting the case, Dillon’s was by far the largest steroid operation ever broken.
This is William Dillon’s story, an account of life inside a steroid-smuggling ring. It is based on extensive interviews with Dillon and some of his associates and on the government’s case against members of the ring, which includes numerous secretly taped conversations.
Welcome to L.A., the Land of
Serious Muscles
GOLD’S GYM IN VENICE is the Yankee Stadium of body-building. It’s the house that Arnold built. Every day 1,500 Schwarzenegger disciples work out in one of three cavernous weight rooms, hoping to become the next Terminator. They grunt and groan and stare at themselves in the mirrors that line the walls, proudly noting every new bulge and vein. Above the mirrors is the pumpers pantheon: life-size posters of current and former Mr. Worlds and Mr. Universes. The champions stare down, taunting and inspiring. Keep lifting--another repetition! more weight!--and someday a picture of you, flexing in a Speedo, might be hoisted into our ranks.
William Dillon made his pilgrimage to Gold’s from his small Illinois hometown in October, 1984. Though he had just won the Illinois collegiate body-building title, Dillon was no mere muscle-head. That June he had received his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Southern Illinois University. After sifting through a number of job offers, he chose Hughes Aircraft in El Segundo. The federal government gave Dillon clearance to see classified scientific material, and he went to work in the company’s space and communications division and moved to West Los Angeles.
In the gym, Dillon found that champion lifters from other parts of the country get sand kicked in their faces at the Gold’s near Muscle Beach. “I was a midget,” says Dillon, who weighed 220 pounds at the time. “Lots of guys with my build were carrying 270 pounds. Obviously they were taking something.” Dillon quickly found out what. One of the first body-builders he met at Gold’s was David Grigus, whose brother he had known in Illinois. They became friends and workout partners. According to Dillon, Grigus used and sold steroids; he is one of those who eventually pleaded guilty to conspiracy and interstate commerce violations.
From the outset, Dillon says, “Grigus said if I took steroids I had a chance to go places.” Dillon resisted, even though he was receiving repeated requests for the drugs from his friends back home. “I gave them all to Dave,” he says of the orders. When, after several months, Dillon concluded that steroid-free lifting was getting him nowhere, Grigus allegedly taught him how to bulk up on drugs. He showed Dillon what to buy (an injectable form of testosterone called Sustanon 250) and, Dillon says, took him to his supplier in Mexico. For eight weeks, Dillon recalls, Grigus even filled the syringe and administered Dillon’s injections.
Sustanon 250 is expensive, however, and to pay for his supply Dillon decided he should be the one making money selling to his pals in Illinois. During the first five months of 1985, Dillon says, he made small sales to pay for his own drugs. Then he got married and moved his wife from Illinois to California. As she looked for a teaching job, expenses mounted and Dillon began to increase sales. By October he had 20 clients and was pocketing $18,000 on $30,000 orders.
With business expanding, Dillon says he fell under the influence of steroid guru Dan Duchaine, who would later plead guilty to conspiracy and interstate commerce violations. Author of the definitive “Underground Steroid Handbook,” which describes how to use the drugs and where to get them, Duchaine taught Dillon the value of being circumspect. “I was buying and selling out of my house,” says Dillon. “I didn’t try and cover up at all.” Dillon says Duchaine taught him to use anonymous post office boxes for all deliveries and to use public phones to conduct business. The government says Duchaine also provided Dillon with a European connection. Because the body builds up immunities to the constant use of any single steroid, lifters have to rotate types to get maximum results. Dillon says Grigus’ alleged Mexican connection did not have a varied selection. But the European steroids Dillon says were available through Duchaine could make him a full-service distributor.
Dillon rationalized his moonlighting at the time. “My wife was a teacher making $20,000,” he says. “I was making $30,000 (a year at Hughes). Money was tough. This was the chance of a lifetime to get ahead.” What’s more, at 25 and fresh from his hometown of 4,600, Dillon believed the more seasoned Duchaine when he said no one ever gets in trouble for selling steroids. “He told me,” says Dillon, “that the worst I could get was a slap on the wrist.”
Though he didn’t know it, Dillon’s burgeoning network was about to be dramatically affected by decisions being made more than 3,000 miles away in Washington. The Food and Drug Administration had grown increasingly concerned about steroids in the 1980s. Athletes in sports ranging from track and field to cycling had tested positive for steroids, and football players such as Howie Long and Lyle Alzado of the Raiders had gone on the record saying they had observed widespread use of the drugs on the gridiron. In addition, the FDA had concluded that steroid use could cause health problems such as liver tumors, prostate cancer and heart disease.
As a result, the FDA required a number of companies to withdraw steroids with no medical application from the market. In December, 1985--just months after, Dillon says, he hooked up with Duchaine--the agency withdrew the most popular steroid among body-builders, known as Dianabol, from its list of authorized drugs (although its legal manufacture had ceased in 1982). After that, methandrostenolone--the generic name for Dianabol--was available only through counterfeit sources.
The FDA’s supply-side approach caused the steroid black market to boom. In fact, it had the ironic consequence of transforming Dillon from an average distributor to one who, he says, “could walk into any gym in the country and sign up every steroid user in the place.” Through Duchaine, Dillon says, he met David Jenkins, a member of Britain’s silver-medal-winning 1,600-meter relay team at the 1972 Munich Olympics. The government says Duchaine had met Jenkins after the Olympian had moved to San Diego and gone into business selling nutritional supplements. According to both Dillon and Jenkins, the three men discussed joining forces in the nutrition business over dinner in January, 1986. Out of the blue, Jenkins mentioned wistfully that anyone able to supply Dianabol could turn a dramatic profit. “A couple of weeks later,” Dillon recalls, “we met again, and Jenkins looked us both in the eyes and said: ‘I can supply the Dianabol. Can you distribute?’ We looked at each other and told him yes.”
The Ring and the Mexican Connection
THREE MONTHS LATER, Dillon, Duchaine and Jenkins had dinner in Carlsbad. They talked again about the nutrition business. They gossiped. Dillon says they talked about every thing except their fledgling business--the illegal importation and distribution of steroids. After the meal, Jenkins got up, took the package Dillon and Duchaine had brought for him and said goodby. According to government documents, the package contained about $30,000 in cash. In return, Jenkins left a small key and a set of directions. Dillon and Duchaine followed the directions to a room at the Allstar Inn. The steroids were in a suitcase on the bed. “We hung out in the room for a while,” Dillon says. “I watched TV, and Dan took a shower. Then we just left like we were checking out.”
According to the grand jury indictment handed down May 21, 1987, this was a typical transaction. Formalized in February, 1986, the steroid ring consisted at first of Dillon, Duchaine, Jenkins and his Mexican manufacturer, Juan Macklis. An odder quartet can scarcely be imagined: Dillon, his open face and quick smile so reflective of his willingness to trust people; Jenkins, an untrusting cynic; Duchaine, the xenophobe who once insisted in a taped telephone conversation, “I’m not prejudiced against Mexicans, but they’re Mexicans”; and Macklis, the Mexican manufacturer who reportedly kept two pit bulls in his office.
As head of Laboratorios Milano de Mexico, a large pharmaceutical company based in Tijuana, Macklis was able to supply his partners with counterfeit Dianabol and 13 other steroids. In brochures he had printed up, Macklis boasted that he could provide his customers with injectable and oral steroids made from synthetic derivatives of either human or animal testosterone. Although steroids are legally available in Mexico without a prescription, the indictment alleges that Macklis broke U.S. laws. (He and seven other Mexican citizens named in the indictment are now fugitives.) He allegedly provided phony labels bearing the trademarks of such legitimate drug manufacturers as Searle, Squibb and Ciba-Geigy SA. The government also alleges that smuggling the drugs in from Mexico was part of the service provided by Macklis. According to the indictment, the steroids were transported in specially constructed compartments built into car gas tanks, wrapped in garbage bags around the bodies of couriers or sewn along the bottoms of their pant legs.
In exchange for his efforts, Macklis had required Dillon and Duchaine to give him a $28,000 deposit. According to the indictment, which both Dillon and Jenkins say is accurate, Macklis’ company churned out $81,000 worth of drugs within weeks of receiving the deposit. Typical of the kinds of orders Macklis filled was a $26,000 shipment containing 2,500 bottles of methandrostenolone, 4,000 ampules of nandrolone decanoate, 500 bottles of oxandrolone and 500 vials of testosterone cypionate.
Dillon was the telemarketing specialist of the group. He called his friends in Illinois. He allegedly contacted Grigus, who had moved to Denver. One buyer says Dillon flew to Las Vegas to give him a pitch. Dillon even made cold calls. “I never met Dillon,” says Michael MacDonald, who lives in Minnesota and claims to hold 36 world records in the bench-press, including a personal best of 608 pounds. “He just called me up.” MacDonald, who has pleaded guilty to interstate commerce violations, says he eventually bought for resale more than $265,000 worth of steroids from Dillon--a staggering display of sight-unseen salesmanship.
