What's the Beef?

Mike didn't need a lot of convincing. He took out a $2,000 loan on his credit card. His Florida connection set him up with his supplier, and Mike took his first order. From there his Aurora home business exploded.

"I didn't worry a lot about getting caught," he says now. "Of course, you don't want to get caught. But these message boards aren't exactly private. Guys are way out there in the open selling and using. The feds have got to know about it. It just can't be a big priority for them, though."

Finding customers was a piece of cake. They were there in cyberspace, just waiting on the steroid message boards for someone to offer to send them the drugs. "Everyone's there to talk, of course," Mike says. "But they're all looking to buy, too." They weren't just muscle-heads, either. Models bought steroids. So did cops -- lots of them.

He didn't sell anything exotic, just testosterone, D-bol, Deca, the basic anabolics. He unloaded pills, vials. (Syringes are legal to buy in Colorado without a prescription.) He never hooked up with a customer face-to-face; it was too risky. Besides, he didn't have to. The Internet gave Mike complete anonymity. All payments were made by wire, through Western Union, which on orders less than $1,000 doesn't require identification.

The web also permitted Mike to charge less than an in-person dealer. D-bol can go for $1 a pill in a health-club locker-room transaction. Mike sold it for half that. He purchased his supply from all over: Thailand, Egypt, Pakistan, Mexico and Germany. Soon, he says, wholesalers were contacting him, trying to get him to carry their goods.

At the height of his business, Mike was answering hundreds of e-mails and sending out thirty packages of steroids daily. He says he was making between $60,000 and $70,000.

Every month.

On December 3, 2003, a dozen law-enforcement officers gathered outside the Colorado Springs home of a 42-year-old rental-car employee named Cary Tannery. They were there because of a small blue envelope that had arrived in San Francisco from Xiamen, China, three weeks earlier. Inside the envelope were 1,000 small white pills.

Steroids are still legal in some countries, so most busts begin at the border. U.S. Customs & Border Protection has seen a steady rise in the number of steroid seizures over the past decade. In 1996 the agency reported 2,988 seizures; by 2003, the number had more than tripled, to 9,664. (Last year it dropped to about 7,300.) "Most of the seizures are incidental," says Andy Rivas of the U.S. Postal Inspection Service. "They'll do random checks of packages and maybe find something."

Still, at that point, many prosecutions simply stop. In some cases, the recipient of the package is sent a notice that his mail has been intercepted and found to contain a suspected illegal substance. If he's stupid enough to continue ordering -- and another package is intercepted -- or if the quantity of drug is sufficiently large, the case is usually referred to local law-enforcement agencies for further investigation.

Even then, nabbing a suspected drug user who orders through the mail is more complicated than it seems. It's a labor-intensive and exacting arrest. Some cases can take as long as a year to develop. Typically, the local cops, working with U.S. postal inspectors, must arrange what is known as a controlled delivery. A cop posing as a mailman delivers the illegal package to its address, and if all goes well, the intended resident accepts it. Several minutes later, more cops, accompanied by a search warrant, enter the place and bust the guy with the goods. If anything goes wrong, the charges often don't stick, and all the police work swirls down the drain.

The lawmen gathered in front of Tannery's door weren't about to make any mistakes. The Chinese pills confiscated in San Francisco -- later identified as stanozolol, the same steroid used so successfully by Olympic sprinter Ben Johnson -- had been overnighted to Colorado Springs. The police also started putting together the information necessary to obtain a search warrant for Tannery's house.

On the afternoon of December 3, Tannery picked up his package while being staked out by a police narcotics team. About an hour later, a Colorado Springs police tactical enforcement unit entered the house with guns drawn. Tannery was placed in handcuffs and read his Miranda rights.

Tannery quickly admitted that he'd ordered the stanozolol from a website, www.crownvicboys.com. (The site is still up, and its home page is hardly secretive: "This Web Site contains anabolic steroid oriented material." The page also includes this caveat: "If the use of Level III controlled anabolic + androgenic compounds are illegal in your country, then we advise that you adhere to the laws of your jurisdiction." Product descriptions and order forms follow.) The cost for 1,000 pills was about $300, which Tannery paid anonymously, using a Western Union wire.

Tannery insisted it was the first time he'd ever done anything like this and said he'd ordered the steroids only because he had suffered weight and image problems after his divorce and wanted to get back into shape. After a few more questions and a thorough search of Tannery's apartment, the police advised him that they were letting him go and that he'd be sent an arrest warrant by mail.