The big surprise that emerged from this summer's arrest of Arlington police officer Thomas Kantzos wasn't that he'd been using steroids, nor that he'd once had them delivered to his squad car, nor that he repeatedly tipped off his dealer as a local drug task force was preparing to move in. It was that the Arlington PD described in the criminal complaint bore as much resemblance to a Major League clubhouse circa 1998 than it did to an agency charged with policing illegal drugs, performance-enhancing or otherwise.
As with baseball, it looks like most of Arlington PD's juicers, who aren't identified by the feds, are going to skate. But not Kantzos, who pleaded guilty on Tuesday to a charge of "exceeding access to a protected computer," which carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison.
His crime is only tangentially related to his steroid use. In late December 2011, his dealer was worried about a car that was parked near his house. Kantzos, under the guise of checking if the car was stolen, ran its license-plate number through the Texas Department of Public Safety's protected database.
As it turned out, the car was being used by a local drug task force, which had planted a tracking device on the dealer's car. That bit of intelligence was enough to convince the dealer to lay low for a while, which allowed him to successfully elude capture.
It seems that Arlington PD's steroid problem will be handled internally. Police Chief Will Johnson has implemented mandatory random steroid testing, and Kantzos has been fired, which hopefully marked the end of the steroid era in Arlington.
