The Godfather of Steroids

The Godfather of Steroids
"Tony Fitton was doctor and pharmacist. He really new how to cheat!"

By L. Jon Wertheim and David Epstein

Once upon a time, elite athletes who took extreme doses of anabolic steroids were sure that the drugs helped them jump higher, run faster, grow stronger. But these notions had never been verified in a lab. So in 1975 a British physiology professor at the University of Leeds, G. Romaine Hervey, set up an experiment to determine whether high doses of steroids truly boosted athletic performance or just gave users a psychological edge. "We knew young men who lifted weights felt that anabolic steroids helped them lift more, but we really didn't know [if they did]," says Hervey, now 83. "And since steroids did seem to make them bigger, we wanted to see whether that was normal muscle or water or something else."

It was a worthy inquiry, but Hervey was undone by one monumental oversight: He allowed 25-year-old Tony Fitton to observe the study. An industrial chemist and a top British powerlifter, Fitton watched with delight as the 11 subjects, gathered in a hotel room near campus, received boxes of the anabolic steroid Dianabol -- a drug he had been regularly using for three years. The instant Hervey left the room, Fitton took over. "Lads, the dosages are a bit high," he said of Hervey's regimen of 20 five-milligram tablets a day for six weeks. "If you feel more inclined to taking just two tablets a day, I'll buy [the rest] off you." As Fitton recalls, almost everyone in the room accepted his offer. Naturally, the subjects did not show appreciable strength gains at the end of the study. Fitton, meanwhile, had procured a cache of Dbol that he could deal or dole out to his lifting buddies.

Unaware that his experiment had been sabotaged, Hervey wrote in the influential medical journal The Lancet, "The results did not support the belief that anabolic steroids increase strength and performance." Although some lower-dosage studies showed contradictory results, Hervey's high-dosage trial held sway in the British and American sports medicine communities. In 1976 a former president of the American College of Sports Medicine, Dr. Allan J. Ryan, called steroids "fool's gold." A year later, another former ACSM president, Dr. David Lamb, wrote that the "administration of anabolic-androgenic steroids . . . does not of itself bring about any significant improvements in strength, aerobic endurance, lean body mass, or body weight." The Food and Drug Administration and the American Medical Association echoed that skepticism for a decade. As recently as 2006 the entry for Anadrol-50 in the Physicians' Desk Reference, the bible for pharmaceuticals, had this warning: "Anabolic steroids have not been shown to enhance athletic ability."
But the runners and lifters ingesting the drugs knew better. Dianabol, the first oral anabolic steroid, hit the pharmacies in the 1950s and, along with other anabolics, quickly found favor among some high-level athletes. "They would pin those warnings to their wall and laugh at them," recalls Charles Yesalis, a professor emeritus at Penn State and one of the country's foremost experts on steroids. "They had been seeking counsel and hearing silliness. Denying that these drugs worked is still to some extent damaging [the medical community's] credibility today."

Hervey's botched study had another far-reaching repercussion: It launched Fitton's two-decade career as a steroid entrepreneur. "I was off to a life of crime," he says now, a smile stealing across his face. By the early 1980s he had moved to the U.S. and was serving thousands of athletes: Olympians, top NFL draft picks, professional wrestlers, cops he'd met through lifting competitions and garden-variety gym rats. As one federal prosecutor said of Fitton in '85, "He may have been the biggest [steroid] dealer in the world."

Now a genial, paunchy 58-year-old raconteur who lives off his savings in Rochdale, England, Fitton remains unapologetic. "Life isn't fair," he says flatly, "so why should sports be fair?"

The saga of the steroid godfather begins in Rochdale, a working-class town in the moors outside Manchester. A silo-shaped teenager with a thatch of red hair, Fitton grew devoted to weightlifting, his gym an abandoned mill with broken windows that granted entry to pigeons as well as a blanket of fog so thick it often shrouded the barbells. In the late 1960s and early '70s, British schoolchildren were given unlimited free milk. By staying in high school, Fitton realized, he could rack up 10 pints of milk a day (free!) and add all that protein mass. Only after turning 20 did he finally graduate.