Crazymank
MuscleChemistry Registered Member
I got it off another board. Explains a lot of why things have really changed, just in the last 6 months. Be careful "bros" ... lol.
Anthony Roberts: Ok...without telling us too much about you, can you let us know what your experience with steroids is?
Anon: Well, “without telling us to me about you” needs to be addressed first. I have already been convicted of several things and been through a couple prison systems. I need to state, right from the start, that some of the things I am going to talk about I did indeed experience myself. In some cases, a friend of mine did some of the stuff I will talk about. I can’t remember. Basically, if you are from the government and reading this, I assume you know who I am. If I didn’t already cop to something that you are reading, you should assume that my friend did it. Back then I was pretty doped up most of the time, so things get a little blurry every now and again. I suspect that other, non-G-men will recognize who I am as well. I’ll say something to you later on, if I feel like it. Although it should be obvious that I have the freedom to say whatever I want and artistic license to say it however I want to, if you are reading this and from the government, know that it is a bunch of flat-out lies. I don’t ever know what a steroid is. Cool?
Anyhow, I have a little bit of experience with steroids. To put it bluntly, I had the unfortunate distinction of being a fairly important part of what I consider to be the premier anabolics distribution and manufacturing operations of all time: Laboratorios Ttokkyo. Obviously, a white kid from the ‘burbs doesn’t just fly to Mexico City and apply for the job I had. It was a long and very unique road that we paved and led us to fortune, albeit brief and fleeting.
Anthony Roberts: Can you give us some back story here?
Anon: A little back story might be helpful in understanding the whole of things. I always remark to myself that really, anyone could have done what I did as long as they paid attention to the landscape of the time and wanted what I wanted as badly as I did. It’s kind of like starting a UG lab now; anyone who really wants to can find a way to import powder, a way to get vials and equipment, and start producing some garbage that people will happily buy. Most people are content to just buy it and spend the money, but there are those of us who are first compelled to buy 3, sell 2, and get a freebie and then wind up getting rich because other people are lazy (or smart).
A long time ago, when I first saw actual banner ads for powder suppliers, I got flashbacks of the beginning of my end. You guys are a bunch of retards, with your boards and pseudo-security. People from other countries sponsor your board and it’s not illegal in their country to sell steroids. You think that makes you safe. You’re just advertising for someone who is doing something perfectly legal, right? You really think it is that simple? You are providing a vehicle to enable illegal transactions. It’s like having banner ads for fertilizer on a militia website. I won’t harp on this yet, but I probably will. You are retards, just waiting for the Fed to take interest. Now, I was a retard once, too – so I can say that. You are a bunch of retards and you are going to fall. I’ll get into why later, if there is time.
Anthony Roberts: How did you start out in this particular line of work?
Anon: I started off like anyone else really; I just wanted to be bigger than the next guy. That mindset wound up transferring to my business approach as well and both got me into a boatload of shit eventually. I started off reading the boards, researching, learning, and pretty quickly I was a regular on ‘Bolex and Varix and a few other discussion boards. Its important to remember when you hear me talking about those days that the ‘net was much smaller back then and there were maybe half a dozen steroid-related websites. They didn’t have central repositories for profiles, cycles, and everything else that each board has today. Shit was kind of scattered, and Brian Raupp was ahead of his time, centralizing information and bringing clientele to himself. I don’t know Brian personally. From what I understand, he just got out of Federal Prison himself, after fucking up on supervised release. To me, that means he had a chance to not go away at all but blew it by being a dipshit and continuing to sell while on probation. I was supposed to sell him a bunch of shit one time but somewhere along the way the product was taken by the feds and the deal wasn’t lucrative enough to make me want to do it again. I’ll sell you 1000 bottles if I’m making $5 a piece and it’s easy for me to get the bottles in my hand, but that’s one of the logistical problems behind being a large importer and distributor: shipping volumes of product. It makes much more sense for me to get 1000 bottles and sell to two or three dudes who don’t want anyone to know who I am for fear of losing their client base. That way, I can mark things up $35 a unit and still get rid of it inside of a day. It’s the same number of boxes, but I’m making $35k instead of $5k and I don’t have to deal with people in the federal spotlight. If I set it up right, I’d never even see the boxes and I’d never even know what my customers looked like. I didn’t quite do it that way, but I never wanted to be in the spotlight. I guess that’s lesson one that Ttokkyo should have learned; keep thy ass out of the spotlight.
Anyhow, the boards were like the Wild West back then. Anyone remember HumanSaurus Rex? A good dude. How about Simian? Another good dude. How about Damian Borleone and Leroy? Chances are, if you knew them, you got locked up like me.
Oh, but wait. Another lesson: the Feds get everyone to roll. Some do it much more quickly and easily than others. Right now there is a fellow named GAC (Red Star of China) or Brock or Bruce sitting in the can. The Feds visited him but didn’t arrest or charge him. Wow. Watch what happens in China now. Tell me if it is a coincidence.
(Note from Anthony Roberts: This interview was conducted well before the recent Chinese powder busts…scary, huh?)
Anthony Roberts: What do you think of the state of internet steroid discussion boards?
Anon: Today, everyone and their uncle’s sister is a mod or some sort of VIP Member of a useless board that regurgitates the same profiles and bullshit, making people think that using steroids is actually a complicated endeavor. Back then, the boards were either owned by dealers and used as vehicle to sell their product, or the boards had resident, US-based dealers that catered to the members of said board. People bought the big drugs: dbol, test, deca, winny, and anadrol. Nobody gave a shit about trenbolone laurenate acetate 17a precursors. You know, there really are a bunch of retards out there now. They ever have antiestrogen precursors. Makes me want to puke. People are actually buying HGH FRAGMENTS! Hello! These things cannot possibly work. Ask any scientist who isn’t selling them. The entire protein must be there in order to be recognized. A fragment is useless. It’s like sawing one tooth out of a key and selling it as a key fragment. Sure, its part of a key, but its not going to turn any fucking locks. Anyhow…
Regardless of the politics behind the boards, very few people actually knew anything about steroids back then. The boards were a way to get your email address out there and to post “list me” in a thread so you could find a supplier. It was a ton of flaming and bullshit. I remember bringing down a board over and over again by pasting a little JavaScript into my post. You got redirected to gay.com or whatever. It was fun, and it certainly wasn’t the structured force that it is today. I guess that holds true for the entire internet and spectrum of social networking applications.
The only real book out there was that piece of crap by Bill Phillips (before he “sold out” literally and figuratively with Body For Life and make millions upon millions in addition to the Entrepreneur of the Year award). A cohesive set of steroid profiles had yet to be written. You had to Google a little more intensely than you do now to find your answers, and nobody wanted to do that. It didn’t take long for me, through a little extra effort, to become a pretty well-respected and regarded. If you could talk about what is really a pretty simple subject and use big words, draw clear metaphors, have anything insightful to say without copying and pasting (or if you were really good at pasting from Medline/PubMed), you became well-known pretty quickly. Because of this, I made a lot of good contacts for my personal gear. I was punctilious with my posts and people assumed that I was somebody.
That translated into good contacts. Specifically, I met people located closer to the Mexican border. The guys in NY had Brighton Beach and the Russians and lots of Euro gear. There were a few of those guys. But more interesting to me were the dudes out in California – all fairly spoiled white boys besides two in particular that I knew of – and they were all competing for business, doing crazy things with their prices if you came upon them through the right channels. I had a bunch of middle-level dealers that couldn’t keep up with me anymore, and they wound up referring me to their dealers. Why they did this is beyond me, but they did and it worked out well for me. You’d like to think that they were just good guys, looking out for a ‘bro” – but that’s bullshit. The fact is, I think I know why they did it. They made more selling to 20 different people than they made selling to me, and you can only get so much product shipped every week. I’d take it all from all of them. It didn’t make sense for them to turn down my business and it didn’t make sense to do business with me. So, they passed me on in hopes that the “bro” factor would get them in better with their suppliers. It didn’t work out like that. I wound up being their suppliers’ exclusive customer in many cases. Money is money and money isn’t a friend.
Anthony Roberts: So I imagine that you were a big time local dealer at that point?
Anon: Locally, I cut everyone’s throat in a real guerrilla move that I didn’t intend as such. I really had no idea that people were spending $90 on a bottle of test, even by the 100 count, and so when I started offering T200’s at literally 1/3rd of what anyone else was offering them at, I sold 3 times as much (the demand was bigger than the supply, apparently) and had a very, very secure customer base that nobody could hope to steal. My customers protected me because they didn’t want anyone knowing who I was and getting to me. I started supplying the local suppliers, then the not-so-local guys, then a bit more than that. I got myself a nice new luxury car. I had a few affairs. I was making chump change, but I only call it chump change because of what would happen later on.
So I am becoming a fairly substantial dealer, and it is happening on two fronts; there is my local area that I am selling in: far removed from Tijuana and the world of storage units, border crossings, and kidnapping; and there is the southern CA world of exactly that, and more. I was bicoastal, with more friends and associates out there than over here, and I spent a lot of time going back and forth to hang out and network and see things first-hand. If you’ve never been in a Granero during the early part of this century, you missed something really unique. It was exciting to be a part of all this criminality and shadiness. It was like living in some sort of movie for a whitebread kid like myself.
As I was saying, I became a relatively large customer for more than one guy in the San Diego area and eventually had to strike deals with both of them that they wouldn’t do business with anyone besides me. I could certaintly keep them busy, and having them fucking around with dinky ass $5k orders was stupid for everyone when I could do four of five times that and pay on time for sure in full. I had half a dozen cell phones, one for each of them, and I knew that what I was doing was not that illegal anyhow. 5 year maximum sentence, and that was only if you got caught with a stadium full of dbol. I felt like I had a pretty good sense of the risk to benefit ratio, and the ROI (return on investment) was retarded. I had a good thing. I thought. And it made me read more about my business, study older compounds, alternative drugs that were not available in the states (like trenbolone) and generally think of ways that more money could be made, with a higher degree of safety. I figured that if I ever DID get caught, Id have a few million hidden away somewhere and I’d do the measly 6 months in jail. Whatever. Who cares? Pay me a million a month and I’ll do a couple years in the can. Who wouldn’t?
Well, I wouldn’t. Not now. But it sounds good, right?
Anthony Roberts: Sounds like a decent deal, actually…but how did all of this translate into you making your contacts in Mexico?
Anon: For a long time I avoided talking to anyone in Mexico who would have been a good supplier for me. I never intended on cutting anyone’s throat. I truly didn’t. As far as I was concerned, my suppliers deserved to be paid for taking all the risk that they took. In any given transaction, you have essentially X tasks involved. You have to buy the stuff (transfer money to someone in Mexico). You have to have everything crossed. You have to secure the stuff once it is crossed. You have to pack and ship it. That all happened “over there.” I had to receive the stuff. I had to dump it off on someone and get paid. I had to send cash back to CA or Mexico for the next one. I thought that a good 70 percent of the risk was “over there” between the Granero and Chula Vista, CA. Once it was crossed I saw very little risk after it left the San Diego airport or the Rialto hub.
This might be a good time for me to mention a few things about shipping. For one, every time you use anything besides regular USPS Priority mail, they can open your box just because they feel like it. There is good and bad about ground, next day air, UPS, FedEx, DHL (tons of issues with them) and USPS. The only thing that consistently helped me as a dealer was overnighting packages. Sure, its riskier and the box stands out a little more if it originates from or heads to one of the “hot spots” (NY, S. California, Miami), but if there is a problem with your package you know about it before it gets to you and you can structure to avoid problems. UPS told me that the Feds had my package on more than one occasion, and the infamous “Status: Exception / Forwarded to destination” helped me avoid controlled deliveries more than once. I have seen more than my share of controlled deliveries and have never been busted myself, but if the Feds get involved and it goes down like they want it to, there is always big trouble. Hopefully I will have time to get a little more into how the whole Federal drug charge thing works. We’ll see. This is supposed to be a short interview and I think Anthony is probably already thinking that I have said more than he wanted. It isn’t so easy for me to go back and relive this shit, so when I do, I have to set aside time to feel like a schmuck and I did that today. Today, I am a schmuck telling you stuff that schmucks might want to know.
Anthony Roberts: SO you were moving some decent amounts of product by then. Why get greedy?
Anon: So yeah, I was moving a good amount of product and felt pretty good about my security and personal safety, but once I started to push the envelope and move more than could easily fit into a box (about 200 bottle can go in a small box and not make a scene) I started having issues with transporting everything. Once you start mailing thousands of units, you have to work out the logistics of “where is it all going to land?” and “how much will that box weigh?” and “how many times can I use this address?” and “what MBE are they going to mail it from this time and is the UPS guy that we know even working today?” and “what if some FedEx knucklehead drops the box and I get 500 cc of oil leaking out the side because Juanito forgot to wrap it in a plastic bag?” and “will my Winny’s freeze in the plane during December?” (Answer: they might) and a bunch of other stuff that wouldn’t occur to you until you actually tried to move a thousand 10ml bottles a week across the country in a timely and secure fashion while not establishing a pattern and remaining anonymous.
We wound up using vehicles to transport everything. Paid drivers who were very well taken care of. But you know, anytime you add another person to the equation, you are exponentially increasing your risk. More on that later as well…
Anthony Roberts: SO where were you, personally, at that point?
Anon: All this shit was going on. I was making more money every week. It was a veritable gold mine, and I had a million ideas about how to make business better, decrease risk, turn the Mexican scene around, and change the scene for the better. I started to tell my suppliers what I was thinking and people started to listen. Back then, you would get a Reforvit in a bottle that had markings on the outside to show you how much oil was in there and thick globs of glue that seeped through the crooked, tissue-thin crooked label. Mexican products really did lack that crap that Americans eat up. You see it even in the supermarket. People buy the shit with the nice packaging and flashy label. Its human nature, and a vet company just didn’t need to cater to that type of consumer until the opportunity to capitalize on it was discovered.
Mexico was getting a really bad rap, and since I specialized in Mexican gear even though we could order tubs of dbol from Thailand for $40 (Note From Antony Roberts: A “tub” of Dbol is 1,000 tabs) and have things sent from Europe without too much difficulty, the focus was on Granero products because they were there and Mexicans liked making money on Mexican products. They had more control over it. Mexico was always looked down upon, and it bothered me. It still gets a bad rap, to an extent, but back then you had serious gear snobs who would poo-poo Brovel while totally overlooking the fact that Steris’ Phoeniz, AZ plant was shut down for being unsterile and underdosing product.
Anthony Roberts: So was steroid dealing your “job” at that point?
Anon: I was a full time drug dealer by now, thinking along the lines of a regular businessperson, I guess. I and always had a penchant for business. I wanted to grow an empire, because it was there, begging to be built. Like I said, I really think almost anyone could have done what I did. You almost couldn’t get in trouble for steroids back then. If I told you about the sizes of the boxes I had mailed to me, from within the United States, seized by authorities without significant follow-up, you’d be shocked. It really seemed like nobody cared all that much, but I knew that as soon as you started thumbing your nose at the government, they would have to step in and do something. I always said that if they could look the other way, they would. We didn’t wind up letting them, much like the powder and UG lab guys are not letting them now.
My friend suggested that Ttokkyo do something to set them apart from all the other vet pharm producers in Mexico. He suggested that they do something like build better packaging and spend some money on ink that didn’t run, good quality paper, nicely crimped vials, and throw some shrink wrap around the glossy boxes. He suggested that they go ahead and have a US-based lab run assays of their product and post them online, verifiable and for the world to see.
They listened. I think it was partially just a way to placate a big customer at first, but when this same person met with the bigwigs of the company and told them about putting padding in the bottles so the tabs wouldn’t rattle when they were mailed, about producing a trenbolone product even though it was so much more expensive than the classic vet drugs, and boost the dosages of everything so it was more easily used by human beings, the Good Company listened to it’s customer base. At least, they listened to my buddy.
Nobody made 10 mg dbol back then. Ttokkyo fucked up a little by making the 10mg tablet almost identical to the 5 mg tab (people will pay a buck a tab and only a buck a tab in lots of gyms). Still, the investment in collateral materials, packaging, lab work, and a fairly intense viral marketing campaign took off. There were some of us board members posting pictures of products before they were released, to generate buzz. All you had to do was send something to a board owner once in awhile and they would let you post whatever you wanted. Plus, every board wanted to be the board that had the first pictures of Trenbol 75 or Deca300 or whatever.
Some of us made sure to let the world know of the differene between Ttokkyo and Brovel or Tornel. It was obvious when you saw the products, but we had to get people to order the products in order for the word to spread and for the actuality of what they had accomplished to be recognized. The board members listened, bought products, and Ttokkyo was quickly recognized as something unique. They set a standard that Quality Vet almost immediately followed and became the norm.
Interestingly enough, I am almost certain that Ttokkyo can attribute a degree of its initial success to its name. People actually thought it was from Japan. They wanted “that Japanese stuff” and apparently didn’t see the huge “HECHO EN MEXICO” on the bottle or the SAGAR numbers. Whatever.
Anthony Roberts: Looking back, what do you think about that now?
Anon: Its also interesting to me now, looking back, that the same things people held against Mexican gear back in the day are completely overlooked and even justified today when it comes to UG products. They used to call Mexican products “bathtub” gear and talk intense shit about the lack of controls and not being able to trust something that wasn’t regulated, something that was Mexican.
Now you have UG stuff showing up in some of the Anabolic guidebooks and listed as “legit” –one of the biggest mistakes you can make and most irresponsible things you can do, if you ask me. I say this for a variety of reasons, and I say this as a human being who wants what is best for humankind. One reason this is wrong is that it is misleading and unsafe. These UG products are NOT legit. They are NOT actual pharmaceutical products, produced with any kind of control or academic oversight. These “UG” are made by unemployed losers looking to make a buck and specifically NOT looking to better the human race. The sit there, all sweaty, weighing powder with a $100 scale, doling it out with a plastic spoon, and working with tools from Vials-R-Us and Home Depot. This shit just isn’t a good idea. I know a couple guys who actually died from staph infections related to UG gear. And no, it wasn’t because they didn’t swab their ass with isopropyl first. These were professional juiceheads. They didn’t post on the boards, so you didn’t hear about them. They were just regular amateur bodybuilders trying to do what they do, and I am very sure that there are more than a few others out there who died because of bunk gear (the same shit that Llewellen says is real). (Note From Anthony Roberts: Ok…I typically wouldn’t let someone attack another steroid author like this, regardless of my personal feelings on him, but I agreed to let this article be uncensored, so that’s what it is)
The second reason it is a big mistake to represent “UG” gear as legit is the basic fact that you cannot guarantee these UG labs will be doing the same thing on Friday that they were on Thursday, or that the labels of identical products were even printed by people who know each other. You are essentially legitimizing the illegitimate, and that’s an awful thing to do. Nobody wins in that scenario, except the publisher of the book and the UG lab that is feeding him kickbacks. All the boards with sponsors are going to be indicted or are already in bed with the feds. I don’t care what country they are “located” in. I know too much to believe any of that “our owner is in Australia” bullshit. I will spew more about why I don’t believe this and how I know it to be bullshit later.
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Anthony Roberts: Ok...without telling us too much about you, can you let us know what your experience with steroids is?
Anon: Well, “without telling us to me about you” needs to be addressed first. I have already been convicted of several things and been through a couple prison systems. I need to state, right from the start, that some of the things I am going to talk about I did indeed experience myself. In some cases, a friend of mine did some of the stuff I will talk about. I can’t remember. Basically, if you are from the government and reading this, I assume you know who I am. If I didn’t already cop to something that you are reading, you should assume that my friend did it. Back then I was pretty doped up most of the time, so things get a little blurry every now and again. I suspect that other, non-G-men will recognize who I am as well. I’ll say something to you later on, if I feel like it. Although it should be obvious that I have the freedom to say whatever I want and artistic license to say it however I want to, if you are reading this and from the government, know that it is a bunch of flat-out lies. I don’t ever know what a steroid is. Cool?
Anyhow, I have a little bit of experience with steroids. To put it bluntly, I had the unfortunate distinction of being a fairly important part of what I consider to be the premier anabolics distribution and manufacturing operations of all time: Laboratorios Ttokkyo. Obviously, a white kid from the ‘burbs doesn’t just fly to Mexico City and apply for the job I had. It was a long and very unique road that we paved and led us to fortune, albeit brief and fleeting.
Anthony Roberts: Can you give us some back story here?
Anon: A little back story might be helpful in understanding the whole of things. I always remark to myself that really, anyone could have done what I did as long as they paid attention to the landscape of the time and wanted what I wanted as badly as I did. It’s kind of like starting a UG lab now; anyone who really wants to can find a way to import powder, a way to get vials and equipment, and start producing some garbage that people will happily buy. Most people are content to just buy it and spend the money, but there are those of us who are first compelled to buy 3, sell 2, and get a freebie and then wind up getting rich because other people are lazy (or smart).
A long time ago, when I first saw actual banner ads for powder suppliers, I got flashbacks of the beginning of my end. You guys are a bunch of retards, with your boards and pseudo-security. People from other countries sponsor your board and it’s not illegal in their country to sell steroids. You think that makes you safe. You’re just advertising for someone who is doing something perfectly legal, right? You really think it is that simple? You are providing a vehicle to enable illegal transactions. It’s like having banner ads for fertilizer on a militia website. I won’t harp on this yet, but I probably will. You are retards, just waiting for the Fed to take interest. Now, I was a retard once, too – so I can say that. You are a bunch of retards and you are going to fall. I’ll get into why later, if there is time.
Anthony Roberts: How did you start out in this particular line of work?
Anon: I started off like anyone else really; I just wanted to be bigger than the next guy. That mindset wound up transferring to my business approach as well and both got me into a boatload of shit eventually. I started off reading the boards, researching, learning, and pretty quickly I was a regular on ‘Bolex and Varix and a few other discussion boards. Its important to remember when you hear me talking about those days that the ‘net was much smaller back then and there were maybe half a dozen steroid-related websites. They didn’t have central repositories for profiles, cycles, and everything else that each board has today. Shit was kind of scattered, and Brian Raupp was ahead of his time, centralizing information and bringing clientele to himself. I don’t know Brian personally. From what I understand, he just got out of Federal Prison himself, after fucking up on supervised release. To me, that means he had a chance to not go away at all but blew it by being a dipshit and continuing to sell while on probation. I was supposed to sell him a bunch of shit one time but somewhere along the way the product was taken by the feds and the deal wasn’t lucrative enough to make me want to do it again. I’ll sell you 1000 bottles if I’m making $5 a piece and it’s easy for me to get the bottles in my hand, but that’s one of the logistical problems behind being a large importer and distributor: shipping volumes of product. It makes much more sense for me to get 1000 bottles and sell to two or three dudes who don’t want anyone to know who I am for fear of losing their client base. That way, I can mark things up $35 a unit and still get rid of it inside of a day. It’s the same number of boxes, but I’m making $35k instead of $5k and I don’t have to deal with people in the federal spotlight. If I set it up right, I’d never even see the boxes and I’d never even know what my customers looked like. I didn’t quite do it that way, but I never wanted to be in the spotlight. I guess that’s lesson one that Ttokkyo should have learned; keep thy ass out of the spotlight.
Anyhow, the boards were like the Wild West back then. Anyone remember HumanSaurus Rex? A good dude. How about Simian? Another good dude. How about Damian Borleone and Leroy? Chances are, if you knew them, you got locked up like me.
Oh, but wait. Another lesson: the Feds get everyone to roll. Some do it much more quickly and easily than others. Right now there is a fellow named GAC (Red Star of China) or Brock or Bruce sitting in the can. The Feds visited him but didn’t arrest or charge him. Wow. Watch what happens in China now. Tell me if it is a coincidence.
(Note from Anthony Roberts: This interview was conducted well before the recent Chinese powder busts…scary, huh?)
Anthony Roberts: What do you think of the state of internet steroid discussion boards?
Anon: Today, everyone and their uncle’s sister is a mod or some sort of VIP Member of a useless board that regurgitates the same profiles and bullshit, making people think that using steroids is actually a complicated endeavor. Back then, the boards were either owned by dealers and used as vehicle to sell their product, or the boards had resident, US-based dealers that catered to the members of said board. People bought the big drugs: dbol, test, deca, winny, and anadrol. Nobody gave a shit about trenbolone laurenate acetate 17a precursors. You know, there really are a bunch of retards out there now. They ever have antiestrogen precursors. Makes me want to puke. People are actually buying HGH FRAGMENTS! Hello! These things cannot possibly work. Ask any scientist who isn’t selling them. The entire protein must be there in order to be recognized. A fragment is useless. It’s like sawing one tooth out of a key and selling it as a key fragment. Sure, its part of a key, but its not going to turn any fucking locks. Anyhow…
Regardless of the politics behind the boards, very few people actually knew anything about steroids back then. The boards were a way to get your email address out there and to post “list me” in a thread so you could find a supplier. It was a ton of flaming and bullshit. I remember bringing down a board over and over again by pasting a little JavaScript into my post. You got redirected to gay.com or whatever. It was fun, and it certainly wasn’t the structured force that it is today. I guess that holds true for the entire internet and spectrum of social networking applications.
The only real book out there was that piece of crap by Bill Phillips (before he “sold out” literally and figuratively with Body For Life and make millions upon millions in addition to the Entrepreneur of the Year award). A cohesive set of steroid profiles had yet to be written. You had to Google a little more intensely than you do now to find your answers, and nobody wanted to do that. It didn’t take long for me, through a little extra effort, to become a pretty well-respected and regarded. If you could talk about what is really a pretty simple subject and use big words, draw clear metaphors, have anything insightful to say without copying and pasting (or if you were really good at pasting from Medline/PubMed), you became well-known pretty quickly. Because of this, I made a lot of good contacts for my personal gear. I was punctilious with my posts and people assumed that I was somebody.
That translated into good contacts. Specifically, I met people located closer to the Mexican border. The guys in NY had Brighton Beach and the Russians and lots of Euro gear. There were a few of those guys. But more interesting to me were the dudes out in California – all fairly spoiled white boys besides two in particular that I knew of – and they were all competing for business, doing crazy things with their prices if you came upon them through the right channels. I had a bunch of middle-level dealers that couldn’t keep up with me anymore, and they wound up referring me to their dealers. Why they did this is beyond me, but they did and it worked out well for me. You’d like to think that they were just good guys, looking out for a ‘bro” – but that’s bullshit. The fact is, I think I know why they did it. They made more selling to 20 different people than they made selling to me, and you can only get so much product shipped every week. I’d take it all from all of them. It didn’t make sense for them to turn down my business and it didn’t make sense to do business with me. So, they passed me on in hopes that the “bro” factor would get them in better with their suppliers. It didn’t work out like that. I wound up being their suppliers’ exclusive customer in many cases. Money is money and money isn’t a friend.
Anthony Roberts: So I imagine that you were a big time local dealer at that point?
Anon: Locally, I cut everyone’s throat in a real guerrilla move that I didn’t intend as such. I really had no idea that people were spending $90 on a bottle of test, even by the 100 count, and so when I started offering T200’s at literally 1/3rd of what anyone else was offering them at, I sold 3 times as much (the demand was bigger than the supply, apparently) and had a very, very secure customer base that nobody could hope to steal. My customers protected me because they didn’t want anyone knowing who I was and getting to me. I started supplying the local suppliers, then the not-so-local guys, then a bit more than that. I got myself a nice new luxury car. I had a few affairs. I was making chump change, but I only call it chump change because of what would happen later on.
So I am becoming a fairly substantial dealer, and it is happening on two fronts; there is my local area that I am selling in: far removed from Tijuana and the world of storage units, border crossings, and kidnapping; and there is the southern CA world of exactly that, and more. I was bicoastal, with more friends and associates out there than over here, and I spent a lot of time going back and forth to hang out and network and see things first-hand. If you’ve never been in a Granero during the early part of this century, you missed something really unique. It was exciting to be a part of all this criminality and shadiness. It was like living in some sort of movie for a whitebread kid like myself.
As I was saying, I became a relatively large customer for more than one guy in the San Diego area and eventually had to strike deals with both of them that they wouldn’t do business with anyone besides me. I could certaintly keep them busy, and having them fucking around with dinky ass $5k orders was stupid for everyone when I could do four of five times that and pay on time for sure in full. I had half a dozen cell phones, one for each of them, and I knew that what I was doing was not that illegal anyhow. 5 year maximum sentence, and that was only if you got caught with a stadium full of dbol. I felt like I had a pretty good sense of the risk to benefit ratio, and the ROI (return on investment) was retarded. I had a good thing. I thought. And it made me read more about my business, study older compounds, alternative drugs that were not available in the states (like trenbolone) and generally think of ways that more money could be made, with a higher degree of safety. I figured that if I ever DID get caught, Id have a few million hidden away somewhere and I’d do the measly 6 months in jail. Whatever. Who cares? Pay me a million a month and I’ll do a couple years in the can. Who wouldn’t?
Well, I wouldn’t. Not now. But it sounds good, right?
Anthony Roberts: Sounds like a decent deal, actually…but how did all of this translate into you making your contacts in Mexico?
Anon: For a long time I avoided talking to anyone in Mexico who would have been a good supplier for me. I never intended on cutting anyone’s throat. I truly didn’t. As far as I was concerned, my suppliers deserved to be paid for taking all the risk that they took. In any given transaction, you have essentially X tasks involved. You have to buy the stuff (transfer money to someone in Mexico). You have to have everything crossed. You have to secure the stuff once it is crossed. You have to pack and ship it. That all happened “over there.” I had to receive the stuff. I had to dump it off on someone and get paid. I had to send cash back to CA or Mexico for the next one. I thought that a good 70 percent of the risk was “over there” between the Granero and Chula Vista, CA. Once it was crossed I saw very little risk after it left the San Diego airport or the Rialto hub.
This might be a good time for me to mention a few things about shipping. For one, every time you use anything besides regular USPS Priority mail, they can open your box just because they feel like it. There is good and bad about ground, next day air, UPS, FedEx, DHL (tons of issues with them) and USPS. The only thing that consistently helped me as a dealer was overnighting packages. Sure, its riskier and the box stands out a little more if it originates from or heads to one of the “hot spots” (NY, S. California, Miami), but if there is a problem with your package you know about it before it gets to you and you can structure to avoid problems. UPS told me that the Feds had my package on more than one occasion, and the infamous “Status: Exception / Forwarded to destination” helped me avoid controlled deliveries more than once. I have seen more than my share of controlled deliveries and have never been busted myself, but if the Feds get involved and it goes down like they want it to, there is always big trouble. Hopefully I will have time to get a little more into how the whole Federal drug charge thing works. We’ll see. This is supposed to be a short interview and I think Anthony is probably already thinking that I have said more than he wanted. It isn’t so easy for me to go back and relive this shit, so when I do, I have to set aside time to feel like a schmuck and I did that today. Today, I am a schmuck telling you stuff that schmucks might want to know.
Anthony Roberts: SO you were moving some decent amounts of product by then. Why get greedy?
Anon: So yeah, I was moving a good amount of product and felt pretty good about my security and personal safety, but once I started to push the envelope and move more than could easily fit into a box (about 200 bottle can go in a small box and not make a scene) I started having issues with transporting everything. Once you start mailing thousands of units, you have to work out the logistics of “where is it all going to land?” and “how much will that box weigh?” and “how many times can I use this address?” and “what MBE are they going to mail it from this time and is the UPS guy that we know even working today?” and “what if some FedEx knucklehead drops the box and I get 500 cc of oil leaking out the side because Juanito forgot to wrap it in a plastic bag?” and “will my Winny’s freeze in the plane during December?” (Answer: they might) and a bunch of other stuff that wouldn’t occur to you until you actually tried to move a thousand 10ml bottles a week across the country in a timely and secure fashion while not establishing a pattern and remaining anonymous.
We wound up using vehicles to transport everything. Paid drivers who were very well taken care of. But you know, anytime you add another person to the equation, you are exponentially increasing your risk. More on that later as well…
Anthony Roberts: SO where were you, personally, at that point?
Anon: All this shit was going on. I was making more money every week. It was a veritable gold mine, and I had a million ideas about how to make business better, decrease risk, turn the Mexican scene around, and change the scene for the better. I started to tell my suppliers what I was thinking and people started to listen. Back then, you would get a Reforvit in a bottle that had markings on the outside to show you how much oil was in there and thick globs of glue that seeped through the crooked, tissue-thin crooked label. Mexican products really did lack that crap that Americans eat up. You see it even in the supermarket. People buy the shit with the nice packaging and flashy label. Its human nature, and a vet company just didn’t need to cater to that type of consumer until the opportunity to capitalize on it was discovered.
Mexico was getting a really bad rap, and since I specialized in Mexican gear even though we could order tubs of dbol from Thailand for $40 (Note From Antony Roberts: A “tub” of Dbol is 1,000 tabs) and have things sent from Europe without too much difficulty, the focus was on Granero products because they were there and Mexicans liked making money on Mexican products. They had more control over it. Mexico was always looked down upon, and it bothered me. It still gets a bad rap, to an extent, but back then you had serious gear snobs who would poo-poo Brovel while totally overlooking the fact that Steris’ Phoeniz, AZ plant was shut down for being unsterile and underdosing product.
Anthony Roberts: So was steroid dealing your “job” at that point?
Anon: I was a full time drug dealer by now, thinking along the lines of a regular businessperson, I guess. I and always had a penchant for business. I wanted to grow an empire, because it was there, begging to be built. Like I said, I really think almost anyone could have done what I did. You almost couldn’t get in trouble for steroids back then. If I told you about the sizes of the boxes I had mailed to me, from within the United States, seized by authorities without significant follow-up, you’d be shocked. It really seemed like nobody cared all that much, but I knew that as soon as you started thumbing your nose at the government, they would have to step in and do something. I always said that if they could look the other way, they would. We didn’t wind up letting them, much like the powder and UG lab guys are not letting them now.
My friend suggested that Ttokkyo do something to set them apart from all the other vet pharm producers in Mexico. He suggested that they do something like build better packaging and spend some money on ink that didn’t run, good quality paper, nicely crimped vials, and throw some shrink wrap around the glossy boxes. He suggested that they go ahead and have a US-based lab run assays of their product and post them online, verifiable and for the world to see.
They listened. I think it was partially just a way to placate a big customer at first, but when this same person met with the bigwigs of the company and told them about putting padding in the bottles so the tabs wouldn’t rattle when they were mailed, about producing a trenbolone product even though it was so much more expensive than the classic vet drugs, and boost the dosages of everything so it was more easily used by human beings, the Good Company listened to it’s customer base. At least, they listened to my buddy.
Nobody made 10 mg dbol back then. Ttokkyo fucked up a little by making the 10mg tablet almost identical to the 5 mg tab (people will pay a buck a tab and only a buck a tab in lots of gyms). Still, the investment in collateral materials, packaging, lab work, and a fairly intense viral marketing campaign took off. There were some of us board members posting pictures of products before they were released, to generate buzz. All you had to do was send something to a board owner once in awhile and they would let you post whatever you wanted. Plus, every board wanted to be the board that had the first pictures of Trenbol 75 or Deca300 or whatever.
Some of us made sure to let the world know of the differene between Ttokkyo and Brovel or Tornel. It was obvious when you saw the products, but we had to get people to order the products in order for the word to spread and for the actuality of what they had accomplished to be recognized. The board members listened, bought products, and Ttokkyo was quickly recognized as something unique. They set a standard that Quality Vet almost immediately followed and became the norm.
Interestingly enough, I am almost certain that Ttokkyo can attribute a degree of its initial success to its name. People actually thought it was from Japan. They wanted “that Japanese stuff” and apparently didn’t see the huge “HECHO EN MEXICO” on the bottle or the SAGAR numbers. Whatever.
Anthony Roberts: Looking back, what do you think about that now?
Anon: Its also interesting to me now, looking back, that the same things people held against Mexican gear back in the day are completely overlooked and even justified today when it comes to UG products. They used to call Mexican products “bathtub” gear and talk intense shit about the lack of controls and not being able to trust something that wasn’t regulated, something that was Mexican.
Now you have UG stuff showing up in some of the Anabolic guidebooks and listed as “legit” –one of the biggest mistakes you can make and most irresponsible things you can do, if you ask me. I say this for a variety of reasons, and I say this as a human being who wants what is best for humankind. One reason this is wrong is that it is misleading and unsafe. These UG products are NOT legit. They are NOT actual pharmaceutical products, produced with any kind of control or academic oversight. These “UG” are made by unemployed losers looking to make a buck and specifically NOT looking to better the human race. The sit there, all sweaty, weighing powder with a $100 scale, doling it out with a plastic spoon, and working with tools from Vials-R-Us and Home Depot. This shit just isn’t a good idea. I know a couple guys who actually died from staph infections related to UG gear. And no, it wasn’t because they didn’t swab their ass with isopropyl first. These were professional juiceheads. They didn’t post on the boards, so you didn’t hear about them. They were just regular amateur bodybuilders trying to do what they do, and I am very sure that there are more than a few others out there who died because of bunk gear (the same shit that Llewellen says is real). (Note From Anthony Roberts: Ok…I typically wouldn’t let someone attack another steroid author like this, regardless of my personal feelings on him, but I agreed to let this article be uncensored, so that’s what it is)
The second reason it is a big mistake to represent “UG” gear as legit is the basic fact that you cannot guarantee these UG labs will be doing the same thing on Friday that they were on Thursday, or that the labels of identical products were even printed by people who know each other. You are essentially legitimizing the illegitimate, and that’s an awful thing to do. Nobody wins in that scenario, except the publisher of the book and the UG lab that is feeding him kickbacks. All the boards with sponsors are going to be indicted or are already in bed with the feds. I don’t care what country they are “located” in. I know too much to believe any of that “our owner is in Australia” bullshit. I will spew more about why I don’t believe this and how I know it to be bullshit later.
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