Chris & Nancy

by Irvin Muchnick

  In 1990, following an undercover investigation conducted through Bill Dunn, a power-lifter and University of Virginia strength and conditioning coach, DEA agents raided Zahorian’s office and arrested him. (Dunn himself faced a long list of charges before turning state’s evidence, and died shortly thereafter.) The following summer, a jury found Zahorian guilty of eleven felony counts of illegally distributing controlled substances. It was the first conviction of a physician under the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988, the first statute to define steroids as a controlled substance and to ban their prescription for non-therapeutic purposes. Zahorian did federal prison time in addition to paying a fine and seeing the government seize his condo office complex.

  The wrestlers testifying at Zahorian’s trial included Superstar Billy Graham (by now crippled by bone and joint degeneration from his decades of steroid abuse), Rowdy Roddy Piper, Rick Martel, Brian Blair, and Danny Spivey. In one of his earliest and most important interventions, lawyer Jerry McDevitt got the judge to quash Hulk Hogan’s subpoena to testify. But Zahorian’s shipments of steroids to Hogan still came out in court, and news accounts carried a photo of the two posing together. The scandal unraveled when Hogan went on Arsenio Hall’s TV talk show, where he was expected to own up to a mistake but instead lied through his teeth, insisting he had never used steroids except on two occasions, under Zahorian’s supervision, to treat injuries. Former wrestling colleagues went on the record and persuasively contradicted Hogan. And the drug scandal fueled a sex scandal when ex-WWFers came forward with anecdotes of both hetero- and homosexual harassment by company executives.

  In 1994, Vince McMahon himself was in the dock in a federal courtroom on Long Island for alleged conspiracy to distribute steroids. But this time the government’s case overreached: a conspiracy, by definition, requires the participation of more than one person, and the mere suggestion that WWF’s booking priorities rewarded the unnaturally musclebound was insufficient to establish one. McMahon also may have lucked out. In 1990, through social connections, he had gotten a tip that Zahorian was hot, which motivated WWF to stop hiring him as a ringside doctor. During much of the period in question, Zahorian was employed by the Pennsylvania State Athletic Commission; after the passage of deregulatory legislation, there was still a requirement for a ringside physician, who henceforth would be appointed by the promotion. At McMahon’s trial, the former WWF employee in charge of that task, Anita Scales, testified that she had tried to cut off Zahorian, but McMahon assistant Pat Patterson overruled her, saying, “The boys need their candy.”

  At McMahon’s trial, McDevitt co-counseled with celebrated defense attorney Laura Brevetti (who reportedly had been on President Clinton’s short list when he was seeking a woman for attorney general). Months after the not-guilty verdict at McMahon’s trial, New York’s Village Voice exposed the extracurricular razzle-dazzle of Brevetti’s husband, Martin Bergman, a vaguely employed television producer and purported “fixer.” Bergman had introduced himself to one of the government’s star witnesses, Emily Feinberg, a former Playboy model. Feinberg had been McMahon’s secretary and had one of his many liaisons with the hired help. In the process, the Voice reported, Bergman secured advance knowledge of the details of Feinberg’s testimony, and the defense team was equipped for more effective cross-examination[1].

  The period of the trial was the ebb of WWF fortunes. In 1998, after a several-year-long slump, the company rebounded. Indeed, driven by a new star, Steve Austin, and then by The Rock (now movie star Dwayne Johnson), WWF live attendance, TV ratings, pay-per-view subscriptions, and merchandise sales reached levels unseen even in the Hogan days. Once and for all, McMahon shook off the threat of Time Warner’s Turner Broadcasting (whose mismanaged WCW would go into a shockingly rapid descent and, in 2001, close its doors). Going with the flow like any smart booker, but taking the principle to extremes, McMahon had turned himself into his own troupe’s leading TV heel.

  In the fall of 1999, WWF went public on the NASDAQ stock exchange, making McMahon an instant near-billionaire on paper. During the swirl of hype before the initial stock offering, he found it advantageous to put out the story not only that the federal government had persecuted him five years earlier, but also that he had been convicted on one of the counts of conspiracy to distribute steroids. This gave his persona a little more swagger, or something; that it happened to be untrue was . . . just wrestling. Why McMahon felt it fit the profile of an imminent Wall Street tycoon was yet another exhibit of his inside-outlaw path to fame and fortune[2].

  ***

  After Zahorian, the best-known mark doctor in the 1990s was Joel Hackett of Indianapolis, known among WWF wrestlers as “Dr. Feelgood.” Hackett supported the addictions of Brian Pillman, who jumped to WWF from WCW in the midst of extremely eccentric behavior, most of it contrived, which earned him the nickname “the Loose Cannon.” Pillman liked to joke, “I’ve got to get back to my hotel room and call my doctor ’cause I just can’t ‘hack-ett’ any more.” When he died, empty containers of painkillers with Hackett’s name on the prescription labels lay next to Pillman.

  Four months later, in February 1998, another WWF wrestler, twenty-seven-year-old Louis Mucciolo (“Louie Spicolli,” a stage name inspired by Sean Penn’s character in Fast Times at Ridgemont High), mixing alcohol with huge quantities of Soma, died in a pool of his own vomit. Alongside were an empty vial of testosterone and a Hackett-prescribed supply of Xanax.

  Other prominent Hackett “patients” included Jim Hellwig (“The Ultimate Warrior”), Tony Norris (“Ahmed Johnson” in WWF, “Big T” in WCW), and Del Wilkes (“The Patriot”). The latter, one of Hackett’s distributors among the boys, was arrested 20 times for forging prescriptions and in 2002 served a nine-month prison sentence.

  More so than Zahorian — a poster child for steroid-pushing even though he also had a broader prescription palette — Hackett symbolized the overall lifestyle issues associated with wrestling. The same doctors who prescribed anabolic enhancers, with or without a sincere interest in the well-being of their patients, also processed bottomless demands for painkillers, sleeping pills, antidepressants, the whole nine yards. On the road, wrestlers swapped pharmaceuticals as freely as they did the anecdotes of their compound effects, mixing and matching whatever felt good and did the trick of getting them through interminable one-night stands.

  Marc Mero was “Johnny B. Badd” in WCW and “Wildman Marc Mero” in WWE. “There is no off-season in wrestling — and I mean no off-season,” said Mero, who wrestled Benoit in WCW. Mero now owns a gym near Orlando and runs a program spreading anti-drug messages to high schoolers. “You would do WrestleMania, the biggest show of the year, on a Sunday night, then turn right around and do the Raw shoot on Monday to set up the next batch of issues and feuds. That’s the equivalent of playing the Super Bowl one day and the first game of the next football season the very next day.”

  Mero said Benoit was not unique in his easy access to drugs of all kinds: “You name it, you could get it. There was always a doctor hanging around, or another wrestler who knew a doctor who could cover you with a script.” In TV interviews during the Benoit media frenzy and in his anti-drug lectures, Mero held up ever-growing lists of the dozens of his direct wrestling colleagues who had died young. He said no other occupation, not even military service in Iraq, could make such a dubious boast. (Mero didn’t shrug off Benoit’s concussions, either. He said, “I personally had matches where I didn’t even remember how I got through them.”)[3]

  Mindful of the Zahorian nightmare, WWF took no chances with Hackett, who would try to get to the wrestlers at events in Indiana but was barred from the dressing rooms. After Muccioli’s death, the company actively fed the regional DEA office information on Hackett’s shady practices. In 1999, when the Indiana Medical Board suspended Hackett’s license, WWF issued a press release lauding the action and pointing out that the state attorney general’s complaint “did not name any performers
connected with the WWF.” (The complaint did cite Hackett for illegally prescribing drugs “to at least 11 professional wrestlers.”) In 2001 the feds busted Hackett on twenty-four counts of making false statements and prescriptions, and twenty-four additional counts of controlled substance fraud and deceit.

  ***

  Chris Benoit’s growth hormone from China’s Gene-Science Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd. put him at the cutting edge — or maybe just the mainstream — of another phenomenon: the gray market in steroids sold across national boundaries via the Internet.

  Four months after the murder-suicide, the DEA coordinated an international investigation, code-named “Operation Raw Deal,” a series of raids on the underground ’roid network that marked the largest crackdown to date. With the assistance of other American agencies and their counterparts in Canada, Mexico, China, Belgium, Australia, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and Thailand, 124 arrests and seizures were made at fifty-six labs across the U.S. The scorecard on seized items included seventy-one weapons, twenty-seven pill presses, twenty-five vehicles, and three boats. The total stockpile of 11.4 million doses of steroids (based on 0.5 milliliter per dose) amounted to 570,000 ten-milliliter vials, with a street value exceeding $50 million. That was not even including Human Growth Hormone, Insulin Growth Factor, cocaine, marijuana, ecstasy, painkillers, anti-anxiety medications, or, of course, Viagra. Federal agents told Josh Peter of Yahoo Sports that China, where more than thirty-five drug wholesalers flourished, had emerged as the leading supplier of illicit steroids and HGH since the DEA began targeting Mexican suppliers in 2005. Chinese companies stepped immediately into the breach and kept the traffic flowing[4].

  Domestically, the highest-profile prosecutions busted putative “pharmacies” in Florida. The geography was a clue to how the marketing of designer anabolics had simultaneously and shrewdly melded three constituencies: elite athletes, wannabes at every level — and everyone in the whole wide world after the same thing Ponce de Leon once sought. That steroids were not really fountains of youth did not matter to either the sellers or the buyers. As Billy Crystal’s Fernando used to say on Saturday Night Live, it is more important to look marvelous than to feel marvelous.

  In February 2007, fourteen people running seven Internet drug dealers out of Florida were indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of selling drugs to clients without their having visited a doctor. Prosecutors operating out of the district attorney’s office in Albany, New York, arrested fifteen others on similar charges, and with the additional intriguing detail that many of the virtual patients were well-known professional athletes. The ringleader was the Orlando-based Signature Pharmacy, accused of selling $40 million worth of drugs in 2006. The leading associated sources of customers for Signature were the Palm Beach Rejuvenation Center and the website for the supplement marketer MedXlife. Signature’s owners, Greg Trotta and Brian Schafler, generated phony prescriptions through a physician named Gary Brandwein[5].

  On June 27, 2007, Albany DA David Soares issued a statement confirming that Chris Benoit was a Signature customer:

  Obtaining illegal steroids has become effortless. What was once only available in gyms and through underground distribution channels is now available in the living rooms and bedrooms of anyone with access to the internet. All one must do is perform a quick search for their drug of choice and shop for the lowest cost distributor.

  Steroids are dangerous, can cause violent side effects and more needs to be done to ensure these drugs and other controlled substances are regulated, and do not end up in the hands of anyone, adults or children, without a valid prescription.

  After learning about the tragic deaths over the weekend, we were able to confirm that professional wrestler Christopher Benoit received packages from Signature Pharmacy and “wellness clinic” MedXlife.

  Our thoughts are with the friends and loved ones of the Benoit family. . . .

  The news of Benoit and Signature came at the same time WWE attorney McDevitt was insisting to the media, “There’s no question [that] none of these drugs came from Internet pharmacies.”

  The Benoit-Signature connection also lessened the shock when, in August, names of other WWE stars surfaced on Albany DA lists of the pharmacy’s customers. The most frequently cited list of WWE people was Sports Illustrated’s, which included Benoit; the others were Chavo Guerrero, John Hennigan (“Johnny Nitro”), Ken Anderson (“Mr. Kennedy”), Shoichi Funaki, Brian Adams (retired and soon dead), Charlie Haas, Eddie Fatu (“Umaga”), Adam Copeland (“Edge”), and Sylvain Grenier. Another list, in the New York Daily News, added six more: Randy Orton, Robert Huffman (“Booker T”), Shane Helms, Mike Bucci, Anthony Carelli (“Santino Marella”), and Darren Matthews (“William Regal”). (The Signature list also included, in much smaller numbers, baseball and football players, boxers, and entertainers.)

  In an August 30 statement, WWE said that based on “independent information” from Albany investigators, “WWE has today, under the penalty provisions of its wellness policy, issued suspension notices to ten of its performers for violations. It has been WWE ’s practice not to release the names of those who have been suspended, but notice has been sent to all WWE performers that names of anyone who is suspended under the wellness policy as of November 1 will be made public.”

  It was left to the obsessive students of TV story lines to match up the identities of the suspended wrestlers with those named in the press reports. The most curious case was Orton, a star of the very top tier who had a history of disciplinary issues and suspensions. His TV “push” continued unabated, so it was obvious he was not being suspended, and within weeks he headlined a pay-per-view show and recaptured a championship. If any of the earlier Orton suspensions had been for violations of the wellness policy, rather than general misbehavior, then the policy would have called for an escalating punishment for a second “strike” or termination for a third. Since WWE wasn’t commenting on individual cases, the guess was that the company ruled that the publication of his name on the Signature lists was for an earlier violation for which he had already been punished. Another guess was just that WWE applied the wellness policy with blatant, self-serving inconsistency.

  If Orton constituted a head-scratcher, the finger pointed at Mr. Kennedy — who was part of the August 30 group of suspensions — had to be marked hilarious. During the Benoit media frenzy, Kennedy/Anderson had been one of the most vociferous defenders of WWE on his blog and in televised interviews. In particular, he ridiculed the credentials of former WWF star Mero, saying Mero was unqualified to comment on conditions in wrestling in 2007. (Like Kennedy, Matthews/Regal and Guerrero also had lied during that period by maintaining they were clean, but neither was as obnoxious as Kennedy or as aggressive toward critics such as Mero.) Little more than a month later, Kennedy was shown to have been ordering anastrozole, among other drugs, through Signature. The certified use for anastrozole is for women fighting breast cancer. The “off-label” use for men is combating gynecomastia or enlarged mammaries — or, as they call it in the gyms, “bitch tits.”[6]

  ***

  On July 17, 2007, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation released the toxicology reports on the Benoit family. Before being killed, Daniel had been sedated with Xanax. Nancy’s test showed Xanax, painkillers, and a high blood-alcohol level. And Chris had testosterone in his system — enough to give him a testosterone-to-epitestosterone ratio (T/E) of 59-to-1. Normal is 1-to-1. In Olympic drug testing, the cutoff was 4-to-1. In WWE drug testing, the cutoff was 10-to-1. According to Dave Meltzer, who also covered mixed martial arts, for which many state athletic commissions conduct drug tests, Benoit’s T/E reading would have been the third-highest ever recorded in the California commission’s thousands of tests of mixed martial artists and boxers.

  But Dr. Kris Sperry, the state medical examiner, refused to go there. “We analyzed the urine of Chris Benoit for the presence of steroids, and the only steroid drug that we found was testosterone.
This was measured at a level of 207 micrograms per liter,” Sperry said blandly.

  WWE lawyer McDevitt praised Sperry for conducting his press conference “very professionally and surgically.” All the “speculation about the impact of steroids on this case was essentially removed by Dr. Sperry in about as clear a scientific language as one can articulate,” McDevitt asserted. The key finding was that there were “no illegal anabolic steroids” in Chris Benoit’s body.

  By the same logic, a heroin addict who obtained a hospital’s supply of opium likewise would not manifest the presence of “illegal drugs.” The Benoit and Toffoloni families hardly slept better knowing that what the toxicology tests most immediately identified as the cause of Chris’s 59-to-1 T/E ratio was just testosterone, and not some common street drug[7].

  David Black, WWE’s drug-testing administrator, said on CNN’s Nancy Grace that if someone is on testosterone replacement therapy (and Black later confirmed that Benoit was), “the T/E ratio in the urine is no longer of interest. The interest and focus now shifts to the blood testing. And the T/E ratio, as someone takes testosterone replacement therapy, their body stops producing epitestosterone. . . . Testosterone’s in the numerator. Epitestosterone’s in the denominator. You can get a T/E ratio of infinity, and it does not mean anything.”

  In an interview for this book, Dr. Richard Auchus — an endocrinologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, who helped develop the therapeutic use exemption standards for the United States Anti-Doping Agency, the agency authorized by Congress to support the U.S. Olympic movement — disagreed.

  “It is possible to be doping with a testosterone-to-epitestosterone ratio of 4-to-1,” Auchus said. “It is impossible not to be doping with a T/E of 59-to-1.”