If you were going to buy steroids online, Trusted Anabolic Solutions seems like a pretty good bet. According to online reviews, TAS offered a good product, discreet packaging, and fantastic customer service from someone going by "Big H."
Then, a few weeks ago, something went awry. On Muscle Gurus, jilted customers complained that they were being scammed. On Eroids, a moderator posted a cryptic warning to steer clear of TAS.
TAS' angry customers will no doubt be relieved to know that there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for why the website hasn't sent them their drugs. It's because the man behind the website was just busted by the feds.
According to court documents filed this week, Hallie Clayton (we're going to go out on a limb and assume that this is "Big H") pleaded guilty in Dallas to conspiring to deal steroids through TAS and other websites.
The plea deal is light on details, saying only that Clayton would buy anabolic steroids in powder form from China and elsewhere and would use the laboratory he established to turn it into capsules or an injectable liquid. Which might give pause to anyone who read the assurances on the TAS website:
Unfortunately, as a result of archaic, unfair, and severely ignorant laws prohibiting access to anabolic steroids, almost all athletes and fitness industry professionals have no choice but to acquire them from "underground laboratories".That basically means 4 million American steroid users are injecting products into their bodies which are made in regular household kitchens with substandard hygienic conditions at best. To make things worse, they are almost always produced by people that [are] severely under-qualified and lacking the very basic skills and knowledge to perform laboratory manufacturing procedures that are important for products that are administered by intra-muscular injection. The active ingredients they use are hormones that have completely unknown quality. They are acquired from smugglers coming from countries' that have very little or no biochemical production laws or supervision, no sterile handling and storage and obviously very dangerous products.
At least some of the shipments Clayton picked up from a P.O. Box at a UPS store on Lemmon Avenue, and business appears to have been brisk, judging by his Mercedes and the pleasure boat the feds initially wanted to seize. The Dirty has a bit more on Clayton.
Clayton faces up to 10 years in prison and a $500,000 fine.
