Steroids raid still reverberating
Six months after Florida arrests, probe snares pro athletes, nets cash seizures
By BRENDAN J. LYONS, Senior writer
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First published: Monday, September 17, 2007
Correction: An earlier version of this story contained inaccurate information regarding several pro wrestling figures allegedly implicated in a nationwide steroids investigation. Kurt Angle, Randy Orton, Oscar Gutierrez, Santino Marella and David Bautista have not been suspended by their respective leagues.
ALBANY -- A frigid wind was blowing through Gillette Stadium in January 2004 when the NFL's New England Patriots took the field for a home playoff game against the Tennessee Titans.
Rodney Harrison, one of the Patriots' star defensive players, was on his game in the subzero temperatures that Saturday night as he picked off a pass from Titans' quarterback Steve McNair, setting up a crucial second quarter touchdown for his team. The Patriots went on to win the Super Bowl that season while Harrison, a scrappy safety with a reputation for aggressive play, emerged as one of their standouts in the championship run.
But a few days before the game, according to law enforcement sources, Harrison made what would be his first of several discreet calls over a three-year period to order drugs from a South Florida wellness clinic -- a clinic that later became a target of the Albany County district attorney.
The clinic's workers knew they had a star athlete on the phone -- he wasn't their first pro sports client -- yet they crafted a phony prescription, signed by a doctor, for the drugs that Harrison, now 34, believed would help prolong his career, sources said.
Later that month, about two weeks prior to the Patriots' Super Bowl victory over the Carolina Panthers, a package containing human growth hormone in preloaded syringes arrived at Harrison's New England residence.
HGH, as it is called, is approved by the Food and Drug Administration for treating dwarfism in children and chronic wasting disease, often a symptom of AIDS. But it was banned by the NFL in 1991 as athletes and others began abusing it, usually in conjunction with steroids, in the belief the HGH can slow aging, speed healing and increase strength, stamina and muscle mass.
The same year Harrison placed his first order for HGH, New York Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement investigators in Albany began scrutinizing the illegal prescriptions of a Utica-area doctor, Dr. David W. Stephenson, whom they said built a lucrative business doling out drugs such as steroids and HGH to a largely Internet clientele.
