Shape Shifter

In the netherworld of bodybuilders and supplementmakers, one name is on everyone's lips when it comes to designer steroids. But no one will say it out loud. The search for the man behind the juice

Derek Dueck's years as a bit player on Canada's track scene were already well behind him when he drove up to the border crossing that separates Sweetgrass, Mont., from Coutts, Alberta. Six years had passed since he'd been banned for taking andro, four since he'd decided to retire. On that snowy December day back in 2003, he was just another tourist returning home to Calgary.

Except something about Dueck didn't feel right to the guard at the station. He ordered the former sprinter to pull off the road and pop his trunk. Inside the car were more than 100 vials of undeclared medical supplies, half of which held Spirostim, a human growth hormone. Dueck claimed he'd bought it to treat himself for HIV before admitting he didn't have the virus. Despite persistent questions by the customs agent, he refused to name his source for the contraband.

Dueck was fined $1,800 Canadian on the spot and released. (He would later be charged with smuggling and making a false statement.) His cache was sent to a customs lab outside of Ottawa, where the contents of two small containers that couldn't be identified by the border guards drew the most interest. The government scientists quickly determined that one was THG, the designer steroid that had made news two months earlier when federal agents raided BALCO headquarters in suburban San Francisco.

But the other-a thick, oily substance labeled simply New Stuff-matched nothing the scientists had ever seen. They put it on a shelf to await further testing, and there it might have stayed if not for an anonymous e-mail posted to the World Anti-Doping Agency in Montreal in June 2004.

The untraceable e-mail said the customs inspectors had missed the real prize of their Coutts seizure. Scientists working with WADA immediately sent for the sample and set about breaking down the mystery substance. In November they concluded that Dueck was ferrying a new designer steroid: desoxymethyltestosterone. "Whoever made this drug had access to serious organic chemists; it is at a level of sophistication we haven't seen before," says the lab's director, Christiane Ayotte. "In my humble opinion, the same chemist who produced THG also produced DMT. And he is very, very clever."

Yes, he is. This is a man smart enough to dominate the dubious world of designer steroids while remaining in the shadows, just outside the drug chasers' grasp. Ayotte won't say who she thinks this chemist is. Nor will federal authorities. But here's what they both suspect: that all signs point to a muscular chemist plying his trade and hiding in plain sight in the farmlands of Illinois. His name: Patrick Arnold.

AYOTTE KNOWS Arnold by reputation only. The people he's worked with, and competed against, have the up-close view. Kitchen chemists and supplement-makers. Bodybuilders and jocks without portfolio. Students of the merits of prohormones and growth hormones. Attendees of shows like the Schwarzenegger-backed Arnold Classic Fitness Expo in Columbus, Ohio. Prowlers of the bodybuilding message boards.

If you want to learn about Patrick Arnold, these are the people you need to seek out. They can't tell you if Arnold is actually the mastermind of each new generation of steroids. But they are quick to say he is the most brilliant steroid designer in the country today. None of them would be surprised if someday it turns out he was behind it all.

Michael Zumpano is as good a place as any to start. The soft-spoken Californian sold $12.7 million worth of protein pills and shakes last year through his company, Champion Nutrition. On his website, the 48-year-old businessman boasts that no athlete "using our products in the Olympics has ever tested positive for any banned substance." In 1979, back when he was just a long-haired bodybuilder making ends meet as a personal trainer, he co-authored an 18-page pamphlet that changed many people's lives.

"I taught a class in steroids at Gold's Gym in Venice," he says. "There were no controls. The boys were taking everything and anything. One day, a guy came up to me and said his name was Dan Duchaine. He studied all I had to teach. The next thing I knew, we were collaborating."

The Underground Steroid Handbook revolutionized Cali gym culture by promoting what Zumpano and Duchaine called "safe steroid use." But by 1983, Zumpano had grown tired of leading the flock. "I'd had it with the whole guru thing," he says. He sold his interest in their publishing venture to Duchaine for a buck and went off to find a way to make a real living.

Zumpano kept in touch with his former partner as Duchaine moved down to Tijuana and started working for a lab that produced a variety of steroids, and then as he ran afoul of the law. Duchaine spent 18 months in an American jail for trafficking steroids across the border in 1986 and did another 30 months for peddling them and GHB, the so-called date rape drug, in 1992. Soon after Duchaine left prison, Zumpano was sitting in his office at Champion Nutrition in Concord, Calif., when his old friend called to say he was dropping by with a new acolyte.

"He had wanted me to meet Arnold," Zumpano says. "But Dan and I couldn't stop talking, mostly about a twin-engine he was thinking about buying. You could see Pat was annoyed. Finally he jumps up and yells, I'm not here to talk about airplanes! Pat wasn't very socialized. He could talk about chemistry or the kind of beakers he was using, but not much else."

Will Brink was a young writer for muscle magazines back then and, like Arnold, he was enthralled by Duchaine. Today, he operates an Internet site on which he bills himself as a marketing consultant to the health and bodybuilding industry. He says he's developed a new endurance-enhancing supplement that he's hawking to U.S. Special Forces in the Middle East. "Everyone read Dan then," he says.

"We knew he really cared, and his advice was straight. He loved nurturing guys in the field."

Guys like Arnold. Duchaine first met the kid not long after Arnold, the son of two high school principals, graduated from the University of New Haven in 1990 with a degree in chemistry. Brink says Duchaine, who was himself a Boston University theater grad and self-taught chemist, was impressed by the new guy's knowledge and his ability to think outside the box.

The new guy had an equally high opinion of himself. "Pat thought he was smarter than the rest of us," says Brink. "And when it came to steroid biochemistry, he was."

Stan Antosh was looking for someone smart like that. At the time, Antosh, a former high school wrestler and extreme fighter, was running a small supplements lab. The Palm Springs-based OSMO is still around, but Antosh sold his stake last December.

"I don't like to talk about this stuff very much," he says before spilling his piece of the Arnold saga. In 1996, Antosh's researcher had quit, and Duchaine suggested Arnold, who was living with his mom in Connecticut. Antosh hired him sight unseen and sent him money for the move. "Pat showed up in a little Honda held together with wire," he says. "I put him up in a motel and told him to hit the library."

The supplements business was exploding, in part due to a law passed by Congress in 1994. The Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act relieved manufacturers of having to prove supplements safe and instead required an understaffed FDA to prove them unsafe. In the time it took the federal agency to come to any finding, millions of dollars could be made-and were. In two years, annual sales of supplements had jumped from $8.1 billion to $11.3 billion. Everyone was looking for the next big thing.

Soon after Antosh hired Arnold, OSMO found it. Antosh had sent his employee to learn about a German company that made a nasal spray containing androstene, a hormone used by the East German Olympic program in the 1960s and 1970s. Labs in China were pumping it out by the barrel. In November, OSMO put the hormone into pill form and brought it to market as Andro. "I went from making $10,000 a month to $200,000 a month," says Antosh. "Things were going so good, I gave Pat a business card with the title of president and a third of the company."

But Antosh barely had time to revel in his good fortune. He'd been charged with selling GHB three years before, and in late 1997 he was convicted and sent to federal prison for two years. With his boss behind bars, Arnold got the credit for Andro. "What was I going to do?" Antosh says. "I had other problems."

Already a booming success in the gyms, Andro got a huge PR boost when a reporter stumbled onto a bottle of it in Mark McGwire's locker in August 1998. "After that, everyone wanted to try it," Karlis Ullis says. Ullis is a Santa Monica sports medicine and anti-aging doctor. Practitioners of these recent disciplines help baby boomers who are trying to fend off the inevitable, often with hormonereplacement therapy. But their work with hormones and supplements also helps bodybuilders and athletes find out which work and which won't. "Pat became huge," Ullis says. "When he spoke on the message boards, it was treated as a sign from God. I think he enjoyed that. He wanted to be like Dan. He wanted to be a legend."

As McGwire's image was taking a hit, Arnold was polishing his own. He traveled to the trade shows, wrote for fitness magazines and capitalized on the free interaction of the Internet. Googling Patrick Arnold got you links to his latest findings and some photos of his six-pack abs. Posts on message boards like misc.fitness.weights began to pop up with subject headers like "Help Me Patrick Arnold." He was informative and entertaining, striking a boldly arrogant tone while shredding rival supplement-makers and innocent questioners he deemed unworthy.

There's an old post on one of these boards from Andrew Thoresen, about meeting the guru. Thoresen lives in Phoenix, where he is a forensic engineer. Now 25, he says he was looking for advice on nutrition five years ago when he sent a photo and other relevant information about himself to a website sponsored by Arnold's Champaign, Ill.-based supplements company, Proviant. He got back an invitation to test a new pro-hormone called 1-AD. "Pat said I had perfect genetics to test the products," Thoresen says. Thoresen added 40 pounds to his bench press and a new name to his e-mail list. On a visit to family in Chicago in February 2003, he took a detour to see Arnold. The man he met was at odds with the Internet image. "It was a little weird," Thoresen says. "He's quiet and introverted. Not the kind of guy who strikes up a conversation." They shared a few drinks before the then-36-year-old chem whiz suggested they head to a local strip club. "We sat in the back row, in the dark, the whole time," Thoresen says.

By this time, interest in Arnold had been piqued in other quarters as well. In the spring of 2002, norbolethone, a substance banned by the IOC, turned up in the urine of U.S. cyclist Tammy Thomas. (The steroid would later be made illegal by the Anabolic Steroid Control Act in 2004.) Speculation about the identity of the drug's designer was all over the message boards, and when a reporter from The Washington Post tracked down Arnold six months later, she asked if he was the drug's source. "I don't want to answer that question," Arnold said. "I may have made a lot of things at one time." Then he asked the reporter why she was linking him to Thomas.

In fact, she wasn't the only one connecting the dots. When Thomas was called before the grand jury investigating BALCO in late 2003, prosecutors asked her about Arnold. She said she didn't know him.

At least one person intimately involved with BALCO does admit to knowing him, though. For years, Victor Conte, BALCO's founder, and Arnold have squared off in the muscle chat rooms like brothers in bunk beds, challenging each other's chemistry knowledge. After the BALCO scandal broke, Conte told reporters that the feds had asked him to wear a wire to tape Arnold. When Conte told his story in the pages of The Magazine last December, he was asked whether Arnold supplied BALCO with THG. "I won't tell you who gave it to me," he wrote then. "All I'll say is he called it The Stuff."

In an early-April conversation, Conte is pleasant though distracted. His lawyers are trying to reach a settlement on tax and money-laundering charges he faces in connection with the raid on his headquarters. Plus, there's a defamation suit filed by Marion Jones. When asked about Arnold, he again defers. "My lawyers instructed me not to discuss anything connected to my case," he says.

But if the work of Patrick Arnold is such an open secret in the supplements subculture, why are the rest of us, from congressmen in Washington to grand jurors in San Francisco, still in the dark? Arnold himself supplies some insight in this online post: "I always specifically avoided terms like muscle growth, anabolic, etc. I knew what I was doing. I could not control what other companies did. That is the problem with our industry, no control over the lunatics."

Although Arnold is quick to offer advice online, he is much less willing to answer e-mails or calls from those looking for a different kind of dialogue. His lawyer, Rick Collins, says he has advised Arnold not to talk to reporters. "What would he have to gain?" he says.

And it's not as if Arnold has remained unscathed. The federal legislation that outlawed norbolethone did the same for most pro-hormones as well. On Jan. 20, 2005, Arnold's best-selling product, 1-AD, was also banned. Now, none of his products cracks the top 10 in the cyberstore of bodybuilding.com.

As it turns out, Christiane Ayotte wasn't the only one studying a flask containing the New Stuff in the summer of 2004. Don Catlin, director of the Olympic Analytical Lab at UCLA, had his own stash. Catlin is the one who first sniffed out norbolethone in the spring of 2002. The next year, he unmasked THG after a syringe filled with it was sent by a disgruntled track coach to the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency.

Catlin will not say where he got his sample of New Stuff, but he says he's sure it originated from the same place as its predecessors. And once he did figure out what it was, Catlin says the feds asked him to keep it to himself. Catlin went to the Summer Games in Athens with a test for DMT, hoping to snare someone who could lead him to its source. He caught no one. In the fast-moving steroid underground, DMT was already obsolete. "I suppose that was good news," he says.

Derek Dueck pleaded guilty to one count of smuggling and one of making a false statement in late January. He was hit with fines for another $3,000 Canadian, but he never did give up his supplier. A drug agency source says, "I wouldn't read much into the fact that charges haven't been brought against some pretty obvious suspects. This ain't over yet." According to Catlin, everyone is already searching for evidence of the next Stuff.

If they find it, one name is sure to surface again.

TEN MILES from the Champaign airport, two county roads intersect hard by a cornfield. The horizon is crisscrossed with power lines and trailer parks. This is the home of Proviant's long, two-story headquarters. The glass doors are locked. A staff directory that hangs in the entryway doesn't list Arnold. It's an unpromising start to a final effort at lifting his veil.

Inside, the lobby is eerily quiet. There is no receptionist. A man in his late 40s, dressed in a white lab coat, emerges from behind another set of locked doors. A hairnet covers his short, dark hair. He has a dark complexion and a chamber-ofcommerce smile. He introduces himself as Ramlakhan Boodram, who is listed as Proviant's president in the same corporate papers that call Arnold a Proviant director.

When he is asked if Arnold is receiving visitors, Boodram disappears for a minute, then returns. "Patrick can't come out," he says. Will he deliver a note? Boodram agrees and disappears again with a hastily scribbled request for an audience. When Boodram returns, he is still alone. "Sorry," he says. He points to the door, extending his hand in a polite goodbye gesture.

"By the way," he says. "I've read what you've done. I've enjoyed it." What does Arnold think? The door is already closed before the question can be asked.

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