New York Daily News - http://www.nydailynews.com
BY T.J. QUINN, CHRISTIAN RED and MICHAEL O'KEEFFE
DAILY NEWS SPORTS WRITERS
Monday, March 14th, 2005
In April of 1992, Bill Randall arrived at Curtis Wenzlaff's Oakland, Calif., condo to make a routine steroids buy. Randall — an undercover FBI agent who was known at the time as Eddie Schmidt — spotted a photograph of Wenzlaff flanked by a good-looking, casually dressed man and an attractive woman.
Randall played dumb.
"I looked at it and said, 'Hey, who is that? I know that guy,'" Randall says. "(Wenzlaff) says, 'That's Jose Canseco. He's a friend of mine. I was his personal trainer.'
"We got on the subject of juice and steroids and he said that Canseco was on (steroids) and had been on a cycle, but he had to go off because his wife wanted to get pregnant. (Canseco) was having some problems as a result of steroid use."
Randall has always maintained that "Operation Equine" — the early '90s steroid trafficking investigation that is still the largest of its kind in U.S. history — was about targeting and eventually convicting steroid dealers, not users. But the meeting with Wenzlaff that day was one of several instances during which prominent athletes' names surfaced in the three-year stretch of the investigation.
"This was a one-of-a-kind operation," says Randall, a 33-year FBI veteran who is now retired from the Bureau. The sting operation originated in Ann Arbor, Mich., but soon reached as far as California, Mexico, Florida and Canada. "We took about 10 million dosage units off the street. There was a need for it to be addressed."
As the Daily News reported yesterday, one of the traffickers convicted in Operation Equine, Curtis Wenzlaff, supplied steroids to admitted juicer Jose Canseco and his former Oakland A's "Bash Brother" Mark McGwire, as well as several other major league ballplayers. The names of hundreds of other athletes — bodybuilders, wrestlers, Olympians, NCAA football players and players from every major professional sport except the NBA — also came up during the course of the investigation, Randall said. So did the names of firemen, cops, even two Academy Award winners.
The goal of Operation Equine, initiated when legendary Michigan coach Bo Schembechler asked Ann Arbor-based Special Agent Greg Stejskal to investigate steroid use by college football players, was to shut down major steroid dealers. The FBI didn't pursue prosecutions against Canseco, McGwire and most of the other athletes whose names surfaced during the inquiry, Randall adds, because they were users, not traffickers.
While Randall is proud of his work in Operation Equine — he spent 2 1/2 years undercover during the case, working with Stejskal — in hindsight, he says, maybe the FBI should have gone after some big-name jocks.
"If we had gone after Canseco, maybe we would have forestalled some things. We did end up getting some pretty good, sizable dealers," Randall says. "The word got out on the street that we were doing this. For a long period of time, at least a year or so, I think it really did have a chilling effect on the market.
"We did major league baseball a short-term favor by not going after players, but it was to baseball's long-term detriment. We could have cleaned up major league baseball."
Here are some scenes from Operation Equine:
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Flint, Mich., was a crumbling industrial town with little to offer young guys in the 1980s. Curtis Wenzlaff's ticket out, he hoped, was a football scholarship. Wenzlaff and his friends were gym rats, and he worked out furiously to build his body to Division I proportions. It didn't take long for them to learn that pumping iron wasn't the only way to build muscle. "Drugs were everywhere," says one of Wenzlaff's associates, who eventually became an FBI informant in Operation Equine and has requested anonymity for fear of retribution.
By the end of the decade, Wenzlaff had moved to northern California and had become an expert in a wide variety of drugs that make users bigger, leaner and stronger. That knowledge eventually led him to Jose Canseco and a rock star lifestyle, hanging out in exclusive clubs and chasing beautiful women.
Wenzlaff's associate, however, wasn't faring so well. The Michigan State Police arrested him in early 1992 and threatened to charge him with steroid trafficking. The cops told him they were going to hit him hard — they wanted to make him an example in the war against steroids.
Wenzlaff's associate turned to a man he had met in a Michigan gym, Eddie Schmidt, looking for help. He didn't know that Schmidt's real name was Bill Randall, or that he was an undercover FBI agent working on his own investigation. The associate spent four days in jail before Randall came up with an alternative.
"Randall and Stejskal met with me and asked, 'Have you ever been bowling? Now you are the ball and you are going to take people down,'" the associate says. "They had three or four stacks of pictures of me selling drugs out of a car, at the gym. They had done a lot of surveillance. They wanted sacrificial lambs. So it was either go to jail for several years or roll on several people. I ended up working for the FBI."
One of the lambs he sacrificed was the longtime associate who had moved out West and was living the good life — Curtis Wenzlaff.
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Steroids, it has been widely reported, have serious health consequences. Just last week, at a congressional hearing, three-time Olympian Jim Ryun — now a representative from Kansas — told his colleagues that steroids have been linked to liver tumors, cancer, jaundice, fluid retention, high-blood pressure, severe acne and kidney tumors — among other problems.
But like cocaine, heroin and other drugs, they might sap your long-term health, but they can make you feel like Superman in the short term.
"It's the best," Wenzlaff's friend says. "I was just reminiscing the other day with some guys about when we used to use steroids. You felt like a million dollars. You could drink like a fish. You didn't get hangovers."
But mostly, he says, steroid users live dull, regimented lives. Most of their time revolves around working out, eating constantly to maintain their bulk and sleeping to recover from their workouts.
Then there were the mood swings, the 'roid rage. "I was also the biggest a------," Wenzlaff's associate says.
He says he's glad he finally ended his Faustian bargain with steroids. "I was a dumb kid taking a lot of drugs," he says. "Bill Randall turned out to be a role model to me. The only other role models I had were goons in the gyms."
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Wenzlaff and his associate sold steroids to each other for years, but otherwise they had taken very different paths in life. The associate shared an apartment with three other guys, drove a car that belonged in a junkyard and scraped for money. Wenzlaff, meanwhile, hung out with elite athletes, partied with beautiful women and enjoyed the finer things in life.
Wenzlaff's flashy lifestyle soon made him a target for the FBI.
"Wenzlaff had a big mouth," the associate says. "He would try to entice me by always dropping names. 'This is going to so-and-so.' When you're making $3,000 to $4,000 a week, you think you are invincible."
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The life of an undercover agent, Bill Randall says, is full of stress, frustration and regret. "You lose your life," he says. "You totally immerse yourself in this. It played a mind game on me.
"How do you explain it? Does it have an effect on your family? You bet," Randall says. "A lot of sacrifices were made. But in order to do a case as long as we did, we had to arrange an undercover. I was undercover for two and a half years, sometimes juggling three or four different cases. That's why I had to be so careful with the sources, not give too much away.
"I missed the births of both of my kids. I was constantly away from my family."
It's also emotionally taxing, he says, to become close to a guy you will eventually arrest, maybe throw in prison, maybe take his car, his home, his career, his dignity.
"I deceived this guy," he says, nodding at Wenzlaff during an interview at an Ann Arbor tavern last week with The News in which the two saw each other for the first time since Randall helped bust Wenzlaff. "Is he a bad guy? No. Does it play a mind game on you? Yeah. They (the Bureau) wanted to relocate me and my family. But because of my respect for (Stejskal) as a fellow FBI agent, we went as far as we did. The fact is, I trust Greg Stejskal 100%."
Randall also corroborated a report in The News last month that Stejskal had met with MLB security chief Kevin Hallinan shortly after Operation Equine concluded, with the warning that baseball was tainted with steroid users, most notably, Canseco.
"'Did anybody say anything?'" Randall recalls, mimicking how Hallinan and MLB officials reacted when they heard Canseco and other players' names were linked to steroids. "'Phewww!'"
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The life of an informant may be even more stressful than that of an undercover cop. Wenzlaff's associate says he was kicked out of the college where he was enrolled in an athletic training program. That was hard to explain to family and friends, since the FBI forbade him from telling anybody about his bust or his arrangement with them.
Dealers he set up for the FBI, meanwhile, were sending him death threats. He recalled one harrowing instance during a trip across the Mexican border to purchase steroids.
"That's when it got f------ scary. Twice at least, I was on my own, wired, no gun, no nothing. I remember I was trying to get this border patrol agent who dealt steroids, to go out on a boat. A lot of times, I had to pressure these guys when I would do deals. "We had some special agents (women) in bikinis, wired and we were all trying to get (the border agent) on a fishing boat to cross the border. He didn't know my background when I first met him, but by that time word got around that I had been busted (back in Michigan), so things got really touchy. That's when I wanted to get the ---- out of there."
The associate says he prefers to remain anonymous about that part of his life — he was only in his early 20s — because of the possible repercussions.
"I have nothing to gain but negative notoriety. I don't want people to have to question my integrity," he says. "I'm pretty much a hermit. Others may enjoy attention. I don't."
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In late summer of 1992, about a month after Wenzlaff was busted, the associate and Wenzlaff ran into each other at a Michigan gym. Wenzlaff was told by Randall to stay away from the associate, but his anger took over. "Curtis says, 'I ought to kill you,'" the associate says. "He had every right to come after me."
They ran into each other at the gym several times after that. Finally, Wenzlaff figured it was time to bury the hatchet. "I said to the guy who set me up, 'Buy me a can of protein powder and what's done is done,'" Wenzlaff says. "I left hundreds of thousands of dollars on the table after I was arrested from people who owed me money. And I lost out on millions of dollars in potential future earnings. But at that point, I just wanted to walk away."
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