1998 was one hell of a year for me. I went to Rehab for 28 days to “kick” some vexing recreational drug habits I had developed over the last few years. I spent quite a bit of time reflecting on my situation and the situation of my organization – writing and rewriting a philosophical treatise regarding business management and drug dealing in my head. But the worst thing, the most trying thing that happened, and when I say “happened” I am referring to tangible, palpable things, was that our sole Mexican connection just up and bailed out of the business one day after getting spooked. No warning, no replacement supplier given, he just hung us out to blow in the wind. We had to stop selling Mexican gear temporarily and this croaked over 50% of our business. If this was not rectified soon, I knew we would lose customers to dealers who could deliver as well as losing some of our dealers to other suppliers. This situation was a calamity of giant proportion and I tasked Rocco, my trusty deputy, to develop a strategy to not only find us a new Mexican source but to insure that something like this never happened ever again.
And this is what Rocco came up with – 1) we would have to have multiple sources in Mexico so that if one “went down” the others could step in to pick up the slack; 2) we should start counterfeiting Mexican gear locally to augment our supply and these counterfeits must be identical clones to the real thing; 3) we needed to somehow incorporate the internet into all this as to facilitate and speed up communications within out network. Rocco and one of his crew went to work on #1 while I mulled over #’s 2 & 3.
Rocco and Tommy Truck, so named because he was the size of a big diesel, took a 14 day “vacation” to the Texas/Mexico boarder, visiting perhaps 40 pharmacies in Mexico and setting up a supply route. To distance ourselves from this supply route as much as possible, Tommy came up with a great plan – we would use mules to move money and product back and forth over the border. There are a lot of very poor towns along the Texas/Mexico border with a lot of very poor single mothers living in abject poverty. Women looking for a way “out”. Any way out. Women you’d never suspect would be involved with a steroid operation. Women that US Customs would never suspect either. How perfect…symbiosis at it’s best. These women were our “mules” and for a single, weekly day trip across the border, they earned a nice tax-free $300-$500. Not a giant pile of dough for sure and not enough money to make me risk being a mule but everything is relative: If you live on public assistance and only get a $750 check once per month, the opportunity to make another $1200-$2000 per month is very tempting. This worked out quite well for all parties involved. The women got their weekly “pay”, the pharmacies along the border got their easy and highly profitable sales and we got our gear (and laid – more on that later). At one point in time we had at least one person per day making a mule trip for us.
As for counterfeiting gear, this proved to be more difficult. Initially. I decided that a better way if not the best way to do this would be to recruit a poor chemistry major at the local college who needed to make some serious cash. In all honesty, it didn’t take more than a week before I had 4-5 chem heads who wanted “in”. After a lengthy interview process whereby Rocco and I grilled each candidate, we selected two chemists . And we rented 1200 square feet of commercial space just outside of N’awlins in a professional building to set up operations. A week and $25,000 later, we were cranking out vials and amps en masse. This was almost too easy.
But I saved the most exciting thing for last – our manipulation of cyberspace to sell gear everywhere, to communicate with everyone and to truly make us into a global steroid village. Here is how our business basically worked. We would have a guy in an Eastern Bloc country who was not shipping gear to us, just a guy who needed some easy money, set up a web site hosted in his country. Next, we would spam all the steroid bulletin boards and chat rooms constantly so people would know we were “available”. Now you’re thinking, “there are plenty of vanishing web sites that do what you did, what makes you so special, tons of people in Spain and Greece who do the same thing, you wire them money and they send you gear, so what?” The difference in what we did over what almost everyone else does now is that we provided anonymous, domestic delivery even though you would send your money overseas. Here is how it worked – you sent your wire to our contact in the Czech Republic or wherever. He would e-mail us here in the states and tell us what to ship to you from Louisiana. Then he would wire your money to us minus the 12% fee we let him keep. This worked well because nosy government agencies could not do anything to him in an Eastern Bloc country and they could not track what he did or when he did it. Of course, we’d have these “collectors” change web sites every 60 days as well as “money drop addresses”. When we changed the URL to a web site, all we simply did was announce the change in the chat rooms or on the bulletin boards. This plan worked flawlessly, in over 400 transaction in a 14 month period with an average order being just over $1100. We were never detected or intercepted a single time in this period. So it would appear that this method, while perhaps a little on the slow side with regards to the consumer getting their product, did offer the a higher level of security than international deliveries or “face-to-face” deliveries. Boy, don’t you just love e-commerce? We actually toyed with the idea of putting in a SSL page on the websites so that customers could make purchases with a credit card and speed things up a little (as well as making it convenient as hell, imagine putting your gear on your Visa?) but due to the paper trail it would have created, we opted not to.
Things were going exceedingly well. Business was increasing substantially and I was squirreling away about 50% of my cut every week, first directing the money in under $10,000 chunks to Grand Cayman and some other island bank and then wiring the cash to various high yield mutual funds. I had purchased a brand new Big Dog, Pit Bull custom hardtail motorcycle. I had the cars, the houses, the vacation spots and I was still partying hard (without the recreational drugs of course). Our counterfeiting operation was going very well also. We had set up a dummy company that was supposed to market and sell gift baskets as a front for the counterfeiting business. What shocked the shit out of us was that the gift basket company was actually profitable, bringing in about a grand per week. We had a dead ringer of a clone for Reforvit-B as well as the entire Brovel and Tornel lines. Raw materials were quite easy to get and having a legit business as a front made things all that much easier in getting the raw materials as well as laundering money.
As an added bonus, some of the skeezers we had on the payroll as mules down in Trailer Park Trash, Texas really liked us “muscled and chiseled” guys and when we made trips to their shanty towns, we usually ended up getting a piece of tail from the various welfare queens. In honesty, I did not know if they fucked and sucked us because they were really into us or if they thought that part of their mule duties included “entertaining” us when we made visits. I guess it didn’t matter, white trash skanks like these pretty much will do whatever you ask of them. Not only did I have many a ménage au trois, I had three or four women at a time. The most perverse and vile sexual acts of exploitation were eagerly accepted by the mules. Rocco and Tommy actually made video tapes of their exploits and sold them through a certain on-line auction web site. This led me to another great idea – why not auction off large blocks of steroids on-line?
The ruse was simple – we would send an e-mail to the larger players and bodybuilders looking to purchase hard to find stuff in substantial quantity. In the e-mail, we would tell them that the “Giant Stuffed Frog, Item Number 21340-0911” was really ten, 5mg bottles of IGF-1a. So this way, people could bid on the items (we always had a fair reserve price) that were in short supply or hard to get. This also worked like a charm. We must have successfully auctioned off close to $100,000 worth of stuff in under eight months. Welcome to the computer age!!! Truly we are a cyber generation.
Next Installment: Episode V – Exodus
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