The Muscle Men

Odd growth is just one of the side effects of HGH on FDA lists. Long-term dangers include nerve pain, elevated cholesterol and glucose levels, and an increased risk of cancer — growth hormone makes everything on the body grow, the logic goes, especially tumors. Side effects of steroid use can include testicular atrophy, back acne, and psychological instability.

Even if J had met with a physician, a better sex life is still not one of the FDA-approved reasons to prescribe HGH. In a 2004 import alert, the FDA detailed the dangers of HGH, specifically the unregulated raw HGH coming in illegally from China. This cheaper product is especially popular, the alert says, among compounding pharmacies. The FDA says the only acceptable conditions for which HGH should be prescribed are exceedingly rare: hormone deficiency in children that causes short stature, short stature associated with Turner's syndrome, adult deficiency due to rare pituitary tumors, and muscle wasting associated with HIV/AIDS. Not bad sex. Not bigger muscles. Not baseball injuries.

Albany prosecutors say the type of operation PBRC was running appeals to tech-savvy young athletes who might not even know the damage they're doing to their bodies.

J says he believed he was making an investment in his future. He says he was desperate to maintain his lifestyle. Even if it was a poor existence as a minor-leaguer, it was all he knew.

"I've never had a real job that wasn't playing ball," he said. "If I decide I'm done with this, I might as well start working on a boat somewhere or mowing lawns."

Before she was the first physician to plead guilty in the Albany investigation, Dr. Ana Maria Santi was a popular doctor. A native of Poland, Santi, who is 69, survived the Holocaust there. Her father resisted Hitler's soldiers, hiding guns in the girl's bed to escape detection during Nazi searches. From Poland, she moved to Argentina and attended medical school. From there, she moved to the United States, settling in Queens, New York, and working as an anesthesiologist.

In New York, her life began to spin out of control. In 1990, her medical license was suspended for one year and she was sent to rehab after she admitted practicing medicine under the influence of alcohol. In 1999, her license was permanently revoked for the same thing. Records show that witnesses saw her consume alcohol while working. After losing her license, she continued to work in a doctor's office, though not as a physician.

By 2005, records show that Santi, who has described herself in court as an alcoholic, had discovered a new source of income. Working out of her home and from local copy stores, Santi began signing prescriptions sent to her from Oasis Longevity & Rejuvenation Center in Delray Beach. Despite the fact that her license and DEA number had been revoked, prosecutors say Santi wrote more than $150,000 worth of prescriptions for Oasis between January 2005 and September 2006 without ever seeing a patient face to face. She was paid $25 per prescription.

Instead of signing her own name and using her defunct DEA number, Santi assumed the identity (and DEA number) of Dr. Abdul Almarashi, a former colleague. She signed prescriptions: "A. Almarashi." Santi was signing off on thousands of prescriptions being filled by both Signature and Applied Pharmacy, another compounding pharmacy under investigation in Alabama. She made $7,500 a week, authorities say. During that time Almarashi lived in a nursing home in San Diego.

Even after Applied was raided in 2006 and investigators confronted her with evidence of her crimes, Santi did not stop signing bogus prescriptions. When she was arraigned last year, the Times Union in Albany reported Santi was asleep in her jail jumpsuit, curled up on a bench in the courthouse.

Santi pleaded guilty to criminal diversion of prescription medications, a class D felony. When she was sentenced in January, she told Albany County Judge Stephen Herrick that she was sorry for everything she had done. He cited the audacity of her prescription approval even after being confronted by authorities. She was sentenced to three to six years in prison.

The investigation that snared Santi began four years earlier as a combination of happenstance and good detective work, says Albany County District Attorney spokeswoman Heather Orth. "New York State has one of the best prescription screening processes in the country. [New York's Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement investigators] started noticing a doctor, David Stephenson, signing off on way too many scripts, and most of them were for steroids." Stephenson ran a website selling narcotics and steroids out of his upstate New York home. "It became clear that the number of prescriptions he was signing was more than the number of patients he saw," Orth said, "and signing a prescription without a face-to-face meeting is illegal in New York."

In 2004, an investigator placed an order through Stephenson's website, www.docstat.com, requesting methadone, hydrocodone, Ritalin, and testosterone. The investigator said he was an overweight pilot addicted to alcohol and heroin and needed the prescriptions because "I want to get high to fly." The drugs arrived in the mail a few days later.

Stephenson pleaded guilty to criminal sale of a controlled substance, but prosecutors say they realized they had just pricked the surface of a network more complicated than the infield-fly rule. Stephenson was a small player in what investigators learned was an internet-based black market making steroids and human growth hormone available to everyone from wily geriatrics looking for better sex to teenaged athletes with credit cards who heard their favorite pros talking about the healing effects.

"It became clear that there was a network — doctors, so-called rejuvenation clinics, pharmacies — and they were making controlled substances available illegally; that's what it all boils down to," Orth said. "Doctors have made a conscious effort to part ways with their oaths."

Mark Haskins, a senior investigator with the New York Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement, wanted to know more about where the prescriptions were coming from. In 2006, he went undercover in cyberspace. When informed of the operation, the Florida Department of Health provided Haskins a medical license and drug-prescribing number. Haskins created a bogus résumé full of degrees and fished it out over the internet. He created a website and company name — NuLife HRT, which he said was based in Albany. He used the address of a county office building.

Soon, he had a bite with Oasis Longevity. In court documents, Haskins says he negotiated a price of $50 per prescription, twice what Santi was getting. Offers from other clinics were being faxed to the number Haskins provided, which led to the prosecutor's office. Then Oasis began mailing him prewritten prescriptions they expected him to sign, all of them for steroids.

The investigation also netted other doctors. One was a dentist in Florida whose license had been revoked for incompetence. Another was Dr. Claire Godfrey, an obstetrician and former beauty queen from Florida in her mid-30s. Godfrey pleaded guilty to the same felony charge as Santi and was sentenced to five years of probation. She was involved with Infinity Rejuvenation in Deerfield Beach, and her name appeared on about $1.3 million worth of prescriptions in the six months before her arrest, most of which were filled by Signature. Prosecutors say Godfrey was recorded during surveillance of Signature asking if she would be paid all the money owed to her. She was concerned some scripts may have been stamped with her name without her knowing — and she wanted to make sure she would be paid for all of them. In the two years before her arrest, Godfrey was paid more than $200,000 for her prescription signing.

Dr. Robert Carlson of Sarasota had a successful practice before prosecutors say he got involved with Signature. A heart surgeon, Carlson was featured on local news shows because of his cutting-edge surgical techniques. An Eagle Scout, Carlson is an incredibly young-looking 51. The mansion he shares with his third wife, Julie, is valued at nearly $3 million, and he has a stable of horses on his property.