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The Blairs Snitch Project: How Steroids get from China into Dietary Supplements
Steven Donald Wood, was in serious trouble when Serious Nutrition Solutions, was raided in 2011. He had been using it, along with several other companies located in Blairs, Virginia, to sell designer steroids labeled as dietary supplements. Over the next five years, he would work as an FDA informant, culminating in the arrest and imprisonment of his Chinese supplier, while shining a light on the pipeline that puts drugs into American nutritional supplements.
In April of 2009, Steven Wood sent a $25,000 dollar wire transfer from his American Chase bank account to a China Merchants account registered to Menwise Tech. Thousands of wire transfers are sent daily, from American to Chinese businesses, for a near limitless variety of goods and services, but this one was unusual in the fact that while money went to Menwise Tech, product was shipped with a return address indicating another company: Sino-Bio Tech.
This is common practice for companies wanting to avoid undue scrutiny or looking to reduce their paper trail, pre-Bitcoin. Here, it was important because Wood owned and operated a company that openly sold designer steroids on the dietary supplement market, both on his own website and on Bodybuilding.com, the world’s largest online supplement retailer at the time.
On the Bodybuilding.com message forums, Wood’s sales reps were heralding the arrival of a new product called X-Tren, to be sold under his Competitive Edge Labs brand…an orally active variant of the popular injectable steroid, Trenbolone.
At this point, it should be noted that the phrase “designer steroids sold as dietary supplements” is an order of magnitude less serious than it would appear. The legitimate chemical name of the steroids in question appears on each bottle, and buyers were (and are) most-certainly aware of what they purchase. This isn’t a case of spiking, when an undeclared ingredient is used in a product — this is a situation where the buyers are getting exactly what they want.
Assuming Wood’s $25,000 transaction was for the raw chemical needed to manufacture X-Tren (19-Norandrosta-4,9 diene-3,17 dione), it would have purchased 11.5kgs, which translates to 4,300 bottles of finished product. Each bottle could have retailed for around $50. Subtracting a standard manufacturing cost along with bottles and labels, this is very near $200,000 in retail profit, or maybe half of that if he sold wholesale.
To get his product into capsules, it would have to be shipped to a facility in North Carolina. In 2009, relatively few contract manufacturers wanted to work with designer steroids — if the production lines and capping machines weren’t properly cleaned, then cross contamination could result. If that happened, and an athlete tested positive (especially a high-profile one), then they’d trace the bottle back to the facility.
This necessitated that steroid powder was shipped from China to Virginia to North Carolina, processed into capsule form, then shipped back to Virginia for delivery across the country. Still, these obstacles were typical of the industry, and as long as the market wanted these products, and major distributors were willing to carry them, it was only a minor inconvenience.
In November, 2009, Bodybuilding.com was raided by the FDA for the unlawful distribution of designer steroids. Among the 66 products recalled. were three from Competitive Edge Labs (including X-Tren, M-Drol, and P-Plex). Bodybuilding.com immediately stopped selling prohormones and designer steroids, and they, along with dozens of other companies, faced criminal charges.
Later that month, two Texas men sued Competitive Edge Labs over liver failure, allegedly caused by M-Drol (chemically known as 2a,17a dimethyl etiocholan 3-one, 17b-ol).
The trade-off in buying designer steroids off the supplement market, is that while they are liver-toxic, nobody has ever been prosecuted for buying these products.
Normally, a major raid and FDA recall followed by a personal injury lawsuit, would result in a product like M-Drol becoming extinct.
But because wood owed (and still owns) SportsNutritionOnline.com, he was able to continue selling his products online, despite recalls and lawsuits, while also distributing them to other vendors. His sales reps kept promoting the product and it was still widely available online, along with the others that had been named by the FDA as containing illegal drugs.
For the remainder of 2009 through June of 2010, Wood sent an additional $1,714,286 in funds to his Chinese supplier, all of which paid for designer steroids that ended up on the supplement market. But in August of 2010, he began sending wire transfers through another company he owned, still to Menwise Tech, but this time through a JP Morgan Chase account. Through March of 2011, Wood sent $573,048 to China, all for designer steroids and prohormones.
In March of 2011, Competitive Edge Labs issued a voluntary recall of M-Drol, a year and a half after the FDA had identified it as containing an illicit drug.
It was recalled…out of an abundance of caution…
By May of 2011, Xinli “Eric” Li, the owner of Menwise Tech and Sino-Bio Chem, began to think that his companies, along with Wood’s, were, were on the radar. Payments from Wood’s Chase bank to Menwise Tech would stop, and instead, Wood began using an American Express along with a Wells Wachovia account registered to a third business he owned, and sending wire transfers to Vita Health. Between May 2nd and August 2nd, $170,175 was sent from Wood to Li. Federal investigators would put the total amount of funds wired from Wood to Li’s new account in 2011 at $352,375.
From May of 2011 until the end of the year, the FDA was busy sending press releases with the results of their 2009 raid on Bodybuilding.com. Predictably, some six-figure fines would be levied, and some hefty legal bills were paid, but for most companies, it was a net victory — they walked away with more money than they’d have had if they never broke the law. Most importantly, nobody would spend even a day in jail.
On June 9th of 2011, a fourth business was registered, not in Wood’s name, but under the name of an (eventual) informant who would send $76,875 through September 12th.
Li had problems with packages getting intercepted by U.S. Customs before, and sent an email asking if there was an address in the eastern part of the country he could ship to. The eastern coast of the United States processes more packages than the rest of the country, and it’s thought by smugglers that the larger volume is more effective in allowing packages to go undetected. The same is thought about late December, when Christmas gifts and cards can stretch the post office to its limit. It’s a magical time of the year, when a $5 check from your grandmother might contribute to the likelihood of $5,000 in designer steroids hitting the market.
But before Li could ask about an east coast address, one of his packages was intercepted by the authorities.
On September 14th, agents from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and investigators from the local sheriff’s office executed out a search warrant on Wood’s businesses. Whether by poor timing or incredibly bad luck (or simply because he’d been set up by the first informant) when he showed up to work, Wood had been carrying $300,000 dollars in cash.
The following day, the authorities charged him with two counts of distributing anabolic steroids and five counts of money laundering. He was quickly released on a $1 million dollar bond, which the Commonwealth’s Attorney appealed (likely to apply pressure on him to cooperate).
<figure name="569d" id="569d" class="graf--figure graf--layoutOutsetLeft graf-after--p"></figure>
<figure name="569d" id="569d" class="graf--figure graf--layoutOutsetLeft graf-after--p">
</figure>The appeal was withdrawn , allowing Wood to remain out of prison, and begin working with law enforcement to bring down Li, and others, in what became known to the public as Operation Grasshopper.
At the same time in 2011, smaller companies’ plea deals from the 2009 Bodybuilding.com incident were being made public on a regular basis…without prison time, and with fines being less than profits, few took the FDA seriously.
Until 2004, there was a loophole of sorts that allowed anabolic steroids to be sold as dietary supplements. The landscape changed with the Anabolic Steroid Control Act of 2004, which placed anabolic steroids and specific prohormones on a more comprehensive list of controlled substances.
Still, there were loopholes to be exploited, and designer steroids were being sold openly as dietary supplements. An attempt was made to close this loophole with The Designer Anabolic Steroid Control Act of 2014, which expanded the list of anabolic steroids regulated by the Drug Enforcement Administration. Most importantly, the act made the mislabeling of anabolic steroids as dietary supplements a more specific crime punishible with lengthy prison sentences and substantial fines.
Steven Wood faced serious penalties, despite being arrested in 2011 and well before the 2014 Act was passed, because of the money laundering charges. As ridiculous as it may sound, selling hundreds of thousands of units of designer steroids as dietary supplements, was unlikely to result in prison time, while the money laundering offenses could have resulted in a decades long sentence.
The only realistic way to avoid prison would be a 5K1.1 letter: a motion for a downward sentencing departure, filed by the prosecution. These letters only come as a result of substantial assistance in the investigation and prosecution of others. To get this letter, and stay out of jail, you have to be willing to put someone there in your place.
<figure name="5042" id="5042" class="graf--figure graf--layoutOutsetLeft graf-after--p"></figure><section name="6993" class=" section--body"><figure name="5042" id="5042" class="graf--figure graf--layoutOutsetLeft graf-after--p">
</figure>Wood was more than willing, and in November of 2011 continued wiring money to Eric Li for designer steroids. This time, however, the Feds would be monitoring their communications and accepting delivery of the product.
In 2012, it was publicly announced that the charges against Wood were dropped. Most of the dietary supplement industry assumed that some local police intercepted a shipment of prohormones and decided not to prosecute.
This seemed a reasonable assumption, as in August of that year, the final plea deal in the Bodybuilding.com indictment was made, and despite selling tens of millions of dollars in designer steroids, prodation and a fine imposed.
</section>
By late 2013, over half a million dollars would be sent from Wood to Li’s China Merchant account. That money would purchase a sizable quantity of designer steroids, but more importantly, it purchased the Feds an inside look at how they were smuggled into the country.
Kilogram after kilogram of designer steroids were shipped into the United States, sometimes mislabeled as inoccouous dietary ingredients like resveratrol or acetyl L-carnitine, other times concealed in at the bottom of a 25kg drum of creatine monohydrate.
Both tactics are widely used by steroid smugglers, because unlike traditional narcotics (or “recreational drugs,” in juicer-parlance), drug dogs can’t detect steroids like they can, say, cocaine. A package labeled as creatine monohydrate, but suspected to contain a steroid, would have to be tested in a lab to confirm. And while that was happening, a shipping delay would be obvious to the smugglers, giving them time to destroy documents, clean house, and even move locations entirely.
Shipments by sea, Li explained via email, were safer than traditional post, but required larger volumes. And by using the name of an import business created specifically to handle those shipments, and arranging freight trucking straight from the port, customs could be fooled. Hiding a few kilograms of designer steroids in a few hundred kilograms of legitimate dietary ingredients, was the preferred method, and besides, Wood still needed those other raw materials for Serious Nutrition Solutions, which he continued to operate.
In the summer of 2013, and while Wood was secretly working with the Feds, all of the (illegal) Competitive Edge Labs’ products named in the Bodybuilding.com indictment ( X-Tren, P-Plex, and M-Drol) remain available for purchase online. It’s unknown where it was all coming from, and Wood claims that they were counterfeit.
His other businesss, Serious Nutrition Solutions would continue selling questionable dietary supplements, including noopert and picamilan, both of which are sold as drugs outside of the United States. And although the FDA eventually five letters to companies who were selling the latter, SNS did not receive one.
Eric Li was arrested in the Autumn of 2015 in Nevada, at Supply Side West, a massive trade show for the dietary supplement industry. With a 54 count indictment looming, he waived his right to be indicted on December 4th, and pled guilty to one count charging him with conspiring to commit wire fraud, smuggle goods, illegally import controlled substances, illegally distribute controlled substances, and defraud the United States.
Li was fined $1.6 million, and five months in prison before returning to China, on the proviso that he would never ship steroids into the United States again.
<figure name="e8ef" id="e8ef" class="graf--figure graf-after--p"></figure><figure name="e8ef" id="e8ef" class="graf--figure graf-after--p">
</figure>Wood paid a $1.5 million dollar fine, but served no time as a result of his cooperation. The relevant sentencing memorandum and exhibits were filed under seal, and his lawyer declined to comment for this article.
<figure name="6f82" id="6f82" class="graf--figure graf-after--p"></figure><figure name="6f82" id="6f82" class="graf--figure graf-after--p">
</figure>At the time of this writing, no further arrests have been made public as a result of Operation Grasshopper. It’s unknown what other suppliers or brands were part of the information and cooperation that earned Wood his freedom.
Designer steroids and Prohormones are still widely available to anyone with Google and a credit card.
Steven Donald Wood, was in serious trouble when Serious Nutrition Solutions, was raided in 2011. He had been using it, along with several other companies located in Blairs, Virginia, to sell designer steroids labeled as dietary supplements. Over the next five years, he would work as an FDA informant, culminating in the arrest and imprisonment of his Chinese supplier, while shining a light on the pipeline that puts drugs into American nutritional supplements.
In April of 2009, Steven Wood sent a $25,000 dollar wire transfer from his American Chase bank account to a China Merchants account registered to Menwise Tech. Thousands of wire transfers are sent daily, from American to Chinese businesses, for a near limitless variety of goods and services, but this one was unusual in the fact that while money went to Menwise Tech, product was shipped with a return address indicating another company: Sino-Bio Tech.
This is common practice for companies wanting to avoid undue scrutiny or looking to reduce their paper trail, pre-Bitcoin. Here, it was important because Wood owned and operated a company that openly sold designer steroids on the dietary supplement market, both on his own website and on Bodybuilding.com, the world’s largest online supplement retailer at the time.
On the Bodybuilding.com message forums, Wood’s sales reps were heralding the arrival of a new product called X-Tren, to be sold under his Competitive Edge Labs brand…an orally active variant of the popular injectable steroid, Trenbolone.
At this point, it should be noted that the phrase “designer steroids sold as dietary supplements” is an order of magnitude less serious than it would appear. The legitimate chemical name of the steroids in question appears on each bottle, and buyers were (and are) most-certainly aware of what they purchase. This isn’t a case of spiking, when an undeclared ingredient is used in a product — this is a situation where the buyers are getting exactly what they want.
Assuming Wood’s $25,000 transaction was for the raw chemical needed to manufacture X-Tren (19-Norandrosta-4,9 diene-3,17 dione), it would have purchased 11.5kgs, which translates to 4,300 bottles of finished product. Each bottle could have retailed for around $50. Subtracting a standard manufacturing cost along with bottles and labels, this is very near $200,000 in retail profit, or maybe half of that if he sold wholesale.
To get his product into capsules, it would have to be shipped to a facility in North Carolina. In 2009, relatively few contract manufacturers wanted to work with designer steroids — if the production lines and capping machines weren’t properly cleaned, then cross contamination could result. If that happened, and an athlete tested positive (especially a high-profile one), then they’d trace the bottle back to the facility.
This necessitated that steroid powder was shipped from China to Virginia to North Carolina, processed into capsule form, then shipped back to Virginia for delivery across the country. Still, these obstacles were typical of the industry, and as long as the market wanted these products, and major distributors were willing to carry them, it was only a minor inconvenience.
In November, 2009, Bodybuilding.com was raided by the FDA for the unlawful distribution of designer steroids. Among the 66 products recalled. were three from Competitive Edge Labs (including X-Tren, M-Drol, and P-Plex). Bodybuilding.com immediately stopped selling prohormones and designer steroids, and they, along with dozens of other companies, faced criminal charges.
Later that month, two Texas men sued Competitive Edge Labs over liver failure, allegedly caused by M-Drol (chemically known as 2a,17a dimethyl etiocholan 3-one, 17b-ol).
The trade-off in buying designer steroids off the supplement market, is that while they are liver-toxic, nobody has ever been prosecuted for buying these products.
Normally, a major raid and FDA recall followed by a personal injury lawsuit, would result in a product like M-Drol becoming extinct.
But because wood owed (and still owns) SportsNutritionOnline.com, he was able to continue selling his products online, despite recalls and lawsuits, while also distributing them to other vendors. His sales reps kept promoting the product and it was still widely available online, along with the others that had been named by the FDA as containing illegal drugs.
For the remainder of 2009 through June of 2010, Wood sent an additional $1,714,286 in funds to his Chinese supplier, all of which paid for designer steroids that ended up on the supplement market. But in August of 2010, he began sending wire transfers through another company he owned, still to Menwise Tech, but this time through a JP Morgan Chase account. Through March of 2011, Wood sent $573,048 to China, all for designer steroids and prohormones.
In March of 2011, Competitive Edge Labs issued a voluntary recall of M-Drol, a year and a half after the FDA had identified it as containing an illicit drug.
It was recalled…out of an abundance of caution…
By May of 2011, Xinli “Eric” Li, the owner of Menwise Tech and Sino-Bio Chem, began to think that his companies, along with Wood’s, were, were on the radar. Payments from Wood’s Chase bank to Menwise Tech would stop, and instead, Wood began using an American Express along with a Wells Wachovia account registered to a third business he owned, and sending wire transfers to Vita Health. Between May 2nd and August 2nd, $170,175 was sent from Wood to Li. Federal investigators would put the total amount of funds wired from Wood to Li’s new account in 2011 at $352,375.
From May of 2011 until the end of the year, the FDA was busy sending press releases with the results of their 2009 raid on Bodybuilding.com. Predictably, some six-figure fines would be levied, and some hefty legal bills were paid, but for most companies, it was a net victory — they walked away with more money than they’d have had if they never broke the law. Most importantly, nobody would spend even a day in jail.
On June 9th of 2011, a fourth business was registered, not in Wood’s name, but under the name of an (eventual) informant who would send $76,875 through September 12th.
Li had problems with packages getting intercepted by U.S. Customs before, and sent an email asking if there was an address in the eastern part of the country he could ship to. The eastern coast of the United States processes more packages than the rest of the country, and it’s thought by smugglers that the larger volume is more effective in allowing packages to go undetected. The same is thought about late December, when Christmas gifts and cards can stretch the post office to its limit. It’s a magical time of the year, when a $5 check from your grandmother might contribute to the likelihood of $5,000 in designer steroids hitting the market.
But before Li could ask about an east coast address, one of his packages was intercepted by the authorities.
On September 14th, agents from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and investigators from the local sheriff’s office executed out a search warrant on Wood’s businesses. Whether by poor timing or incredibly bad luck (or simply because he’d been set up by the first informant) when he showed up to work, Wood had been carrying $300,000 dollars in cash.
The following day, the authorities charged him with two counts of distributing anabolic steroids and five counts of money laundering. He was quickly released on a $1 million dollar bond, which the Commonwealth’s Attorney appealed (likely to apply pressure on him to cooperate).
<figure name="569d" id="569d" class="graf--figure graf--layoutOutsetLeft graf-after--p"></figure>
<figure name="569d" id="569d" class="graf--figure graf--layoutOutsetLeft graf-after--p">
</figure>The appeal was withdrawn , allowing Wood to remain out of prison, and begin working with law enforcement to bring down Li, and others, in what became known to the public as Operation Grasshopper.
At the same time in 2011, smaller companies’ plea deals from the 2009 Bodybuilding.com incident were being made public on a regular basis…without prison time, and with fines being less than profits, few took the FDA seriously.
Until 2004, there was a loophole of sorts that allowed anabolic steroids to be sold as dietary supplements. The landscape changed with the Anabolic Steroid Control Act of 2004, which placed anabolic steroids and specific prohormones on a more comprehensive list of controlled substances.
Still, there were loopholes to be exploited, and designer steroids were being sold openly as dietary supplements. An attempt was made to close this loophole with The Designer Anabolic Steroid Control Act of 2014, which expanded the list of anabolic steroids regulated by the Drug Enforcement Administration. Most importantly, the act made the mislabeling of anabolic steroids as dietary supplements a more specific crime punishible with lengthy prison sentences and substantial fines.
Steven Wood faced serious penalties, despite being arrested in 2011 and well before the 2014 Act was passed, because of the money laundering charges. As ridiculous as it may sound, selling hundreds of thousands of units of designer steroids as dietary supplements, was unlikely to result in prison time, while the money laundering offenses could have resulted in a decades long sentence.
The only realistic way to avoid prison would be a 5K1.1 letter: a motion for a downward sentencing departure, filed by the prosecution. These letters only come as a result of substantial assistance in the investigation and prosecution of others. To get this letter, and stay out of jail, you have to be willing to put someone there in your place.
<figure name="5042" id="5042" class="graf--figure graf--layoutOutsetLeft graf-after--p"></figure><section name="6993" class=" section--body"><figure name="5042" id="5042" class="graf--figure graf--layoutOutsetLeft graf-after--p">
</figure>Wood was more than willing, and in November of 2011 continued wiring money to Eric Li for designer steroids. This time, however, the Feds would be monitoring their communications and accepting delivery of the product.
In 2012, it was publicly announced that the charges against Wood were dropped. Most of the dietary supplement industry assumed that some local police intercepted a shipment of prohormones and decided not to prosecute.
This seemed a reasonable assumption, as in August of that year, the final plea deal in the Bodybuilding.com indictment was made, and despite selling tens of millions of dollars in designer steroids, prodation and a fine imposed.
</section>
By late 2013, over half a million dollars would be sent from Wood to Li’s China Merchant account. That money would purchase a sizable quantity of designer steroids, but more importantly, it purchased the Feds an inside look at how they were smuggled into the country.
Kilogram after kilogram of designer steroids were shipped into the United States, sometimes mislabeled as inoccouous dietary ingredients like resveratrol or acetyl L-carnitine, other times concealed in at the bottom of a 25kg drum of creatine monohydrate.
Both tactics are widely used by steroid smugglers, because unlike traditional narcotics (or “recreational drugs,” in juicer-parlance), drug dogs can’t detect steroids like they can, say, cocaine. A package labeled as creatine monohydrate, but suspected to contain a steroid, would have to be tested in a lab to confirm. And while that was happening, a shipping delay would be obvious to the smugglers, giving them time to destroy documents, clean house, and even move locations entirely.
Shipments by sea, Li explained via email, were safer than traditional post, but required larger volumes. And by using the name of an import business created specifically to handle those shipments, and arranging freight trucking straight from the port, customs could be fooled. Hiding a few kilograms of designer steroids in a few hundred kilograms of legitimate dietary ingredients, was the preferred method, and besides, Wood still needed those other raw materials for Serious Nutrition Solutions, which he continued to operate.
In the summer of 2013, and while Wood was secretly working with the Feds, all of the (illegal) Competitive Edge Labs’ products named in the Bodybuilding.com indictment ( X-Tren, P-Plex, and M-Drol) remain available for purchase online. It’s unknown where it was all coming from, and Wood claims that they were counterfeit.
His other businesss, Serious Nutrition Solutions would continue selling questionable dietary supplements, including noopert and picamilan, both of which are sold as drugs outside of the United States. And although the FDA eventually five letters to companies who were selling the latter, SNS did not receive one.
Eric Li was arrested in the Autumn of 2015 in Nevada, at Supply Side West, a massive trade show for the dietary supplement industry. With a 54 count indictment looming, he waived his right to be indicted on December 4th, and pled guilty to one count charging him with conspiring to commit wire fraud, smuggle goods, illegally import controlled substances, illegally distribute controlled substances, and defraud the United States.
Li was fined $1.6 million, and five months in prison before returning to China, on the proviso that he would never ship steroids into the United States again.
<figure name="e8ef" id="e8ef" class="graf--figure graf-after--p"></figure><figure name="e8ef" id="e8ef" class="graf--figure graf-after--p">
</figure>Wood paid a $1.5 million dollar fine, but served no time as a result of his cooperation. The relevant sentencing memorandum and exhibits were filed under seal, and his lawyer declined to comment for this article.
<figure name="6f82" id="6f82" class="graf--figure graf-after--p"></figure><figure name="6f82" id="6f82" class="graf--figure graf-after--p">
</figure>At the time of this writing, no further arrests have been made public as a result of Operation Grasshopper. It’s unknown what other suppliers or brands were part of the information and cooperation that earned Wood his freedom.
Designer steroids and Prohormones are still widely available to anyone with Google and a credit card.
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