Twisted Titan
16th December 2010, 12:50 PM
http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2010/12/hundreds_of_nj_police_firefigh.html
N.J. doctor supplied steroids to hundreds of law enforcement officers, firefighters
On a rainy August morning in 2007, the news rippled through New Jersey’s law enforcement ranks, officer to officer, department to department.
Joseph Colao was dead.
The 45-year-old physician had collapsed in his Jersey City apartment, the victim of heart failure.
Within hours, officers were calling the Hudson County public safety complex.
"Is it true?" they asked, recalled Detective Sgt. Ken Kolich, who’d drawn the routine assignment to look into the death. "Did Dr. Colao die?"
Kolich didn’t suspect foul play, but he found it odd — and a little disturbing — that so many officers were interested in the fate of a man with no official ties to any police agency.
Today, it’s clear Colao was more than just a doctor, friend or confidant to many of the officers.
He was their supplier.
A seven-month Star-Ledger investigation drawing on prescription records, court documents and detailed interviews with the physician’s employees shows Colao ran a thriving illegal drug enterprise that supplied anabolic steroids and human growth hormone to hundreds of law enforcement officers and firefighters throughout New Jersey.
From a seemingly above-board practice in Jersey City, Colao frequently broke the law and his own oath by faking medical diagnoses to justify his prescriptions for the drugs, the investigation shows.
Many of the officers and firefighters willingly took part in the ruse, finding Colao provided an easy way to obtain tightly regulated substances that are illegal without a valid prescription, the investigation found.
Others were persuaded by the physician’s polished sales pitch, one that glossed over the risks and legal realities, the newspaper found. A small percentage may have legitimately needed the drugs to treat uncommon medical conditions.
In most cases, if not all, they used their government health plans to pay for the substances. Evidence gathered by The Star-Ledger suggests the total cost to taxpayers reaches into the millions of dollars.
In just over a year, records show, at least 248 officers and firefighters from 53 agencies used Colao’s fraudulent practice to obtain muscle-building drugs, some of which have been linked to increased aggression, confusion and reckless behavior.
Six of those patients — four police officers and two corrections officers — were named in lawsuits alleging excessive force or civil rights violations around the time they received drugs from him or shortly afterward.
Others have been arrested, fired or suspended for off-duty infractions that include allegations of assault, domestic abuse, harassment and drug possession. One patient was left nearly paralyzed after suffering a stroke his doctor attributed to growth hormone prescribed by Colao.
For many in the physician’s care, use of the drugs apparently didn’t end with Colao’s death.
They instead sought other doctors who specialize in prescribing growth hormone or testosterone, an anabolic steroid, according to patients, legal documents and the doctors themselves. The physicians have not been accused of wrongdoing.
Attorney General Paula Dow, New Jersey’s top law enforcement official, called the newspaper’s findings "disturbing" on a number of levels and said the issue should be collectively examined by state officials, prosecutors and police chiefs.
"If it’s shown that these law enforcement officers are getting steroids and human growth hormone through illegal manners, and specifically through false prescriptions, that’s a violation of the law," Dow said. "It’s a fraud on the system, and it’s something that should be stopped."
While questions have been raised about some of Colao’s patients, many have been recognized for acts of heroism. Some have taken killers, carjackers and armed robbers off the streets. They have confiscated millions of dollars worth of illegal drugs intended for New Jersey neighborhoods. One talked a man out of committing suicide. Another saved the life of a choking infant.
In Colao, they found a doctor whose methods were simple and lucrative. Employees in his inner circle say he created bogus diagnoses for low testosterone levels or adult growth hormone deficiency, a condition that affects just one in 100,000 people, according to the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists.
"If you had 100,000 police officers come in, you’d get one," said Oregon physician David Cook, a spokesman for the endocrinologists group. "Obviously, he was doing it unscrupulously."
Legitimate diagnoses of testosterone deficiency are likewise far less common than Colao’s practice would suggest. About 2 percent of men in their mid-30s have a bona fide deficiency, Cook said. The officers and firefighters identified by The Star-Ledger had a median age of 35 when they obtained the substances.
University of Texas professor John Hoberman, who has studied doping in and out of sports for a quarter-century, called The Star-Ledger’s findings "extraordinary and unprecedented evidence" of a national problem that has been "systematically ignored" for more than two decades.
"The use of performance-enhancers among first-responders has been a tabooed topic since it first came to light during the 1980s," Hoberman said. "This should shock the public as well as the public officials who will now have to take a stand on the widespread doping of public service professionals who carry guns and save lives."
Transformation
Gladys Nieves remembers when Joseph Colao could barely pay the bills.
Colao’s pain-management practice was foundering, and it seemed the doctor was, too. He had undergone triple bypass surgery at age 38. He was overweight and relied on a daily cocktail of medications to treat heart problems and keep his blood pressure and cholesterol in check, said Nieves, Colao’s patient coordinator from the late 1990s until his death.
Those were the hard times, before the wait for an appointment stretched to months. Before Colao, suddenly flush with cash, shelled out for $2,000 dinners in Manhattan and shopping sprees at Neiman Marcus, Chanel and Coach. Before he became a crusader for hormones.
Victor Biancamano, Colao’s former office manager, said it was about six years ago when Colao flew to Las Vegas for a crash course in hormone replacement therapy, a staple treatment of the anti-aging movement.
The new tools of his trade: testosterone, the primary male sex hormone, delivered in creams or through a needle; stanozolol, the steroid that cost Olympic sprinter Ben Johnson his gold medal in 1988; and HCG, or human chorionic gonadotropin. Though not a steroid, HCG is often taken with steroids or at the end of a steroid cycle to kick-start the body’s production of testosterone.
Human growth hormone, commonly known as HGH, joined the list of Colao’s favored drugs despite the restrictions on its use.
The anabolic steroids Colao worked with have far different functions than the class of substances found in many commonly prescribed products. Corticosteroids, for instance, are anti-inflammatories used to treat a host of medical conditions, including asthma, arthritis, allergies and cancer.
For Colao, who studied at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, the move to hormones and steroids marked a change from the physical therapy track he took after his graduation in 1992. But the new focus seemed to agree with him.
To Nieves, now a 42-year-old single mother, the transformation was stunning. It wasn’t just the increased business. Colao himself had changed. Trim and tanned, with muscle filling out his frame, the doctor looked every bit the anti-aging miracle man.
Along with the new focus came an important new relationship.
Representatives of Lowen’s Pharmacy, a neighborhood drugstore in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn, were shopping for doctors who could help them expand by moving huge quantities of steroids and growth hormone illegally imported from China, said Mark Haskins, who investigated the pharmacy for the New York State Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement, a division of the health department.
"Without a doctor, you can’t peddle the stuff," said Haskins, who retired from the agency after helping secure an indictment against Lowen’s. "You only need one doctor, and you’re golden."
Colao became that doctor.
The physician steered clients to Lowen’s, and the pharmacy sent Colao boxes of HGH as a kickback, Haskins said. The more product Colao pushed, the more he received off the books. And the more he received, the more he could sell for cash, Haskins said.
"Dr. Colao sold drugs," Haskins said. "Lowen’s sold drugs. There was no doctor-patient relationship here."
Nieves and Erika Lehar, the office’s blood specialist, said the HGH sales took place after hours or during lunch, when few people were in the waiting room. Colao directed Nieves to handle the smaller HGH purchases, or those under $1,000, she said.
"Doc would just give me the medicine in the box, and he would say so-and-so is coming to pick this up," Nieves said.
Larger sales were handled by Biancamano, the former office manager, according to Nieves and Lehar.
"I would see boxes on the floor and him getting stuff out of the box," Lehar said. "It was like a transaction. They paid cash. I would see them counting money. Some would be patients, and some would be Victor’s friends."
Biancamano, 36, who left Colao’s practice shortly before the doctor’s death, denied involvement in HGH sales or in any aspect of the physician’s hormone business, saying Nieves oversaw all patients and transactions.
"He never even taught me the business when it came to hormones," Biancamano said. "Him and Gladys handled everything. People have nothing else better to do than make up stories."
A Growing Clientele
From the squad rooms and firehouses of Hudson County, word of Colao’s reputation radiated out, town by town, county by county.
It was around 2005 when the first law enforcement officers and firefighters came to Colao for steroids, employees and patients said. Each month brought new faces from new departments. By early 2007, the office had become "a hangout for cops and firefighters," Nieves said.
Eight officers came from the Edison Police Department, seven from Paterson. Six more traveled from Franklin Township in Somerset County, Colao’s prescription records from Lowen’s Pharmacy show.
There were sheriff’s officers and corrections officers from Bergen, Essex, Passaic and Ocean counties. Other clients included a dozen NJ Transit police officers, at least three state troopers and 16 state corrections officers working in seven prisons.
Distance wasn’t an obstacle.
Police officers made the trek to Jersey City from Eatontown, Deal, Asbury Park and Bedminster. One corrections officer, assigned to Southern State Correctional Facility in Cumberland County, lived more than 100 miles away.
There were patrolmen and deputy chiefs, detectives and union representatives. Two patients counseled students against drug use through the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program, which lists anabolic steroids on its national website as "one of the most dangerous categories of performance-enhancing drugs."
Another works in internal affairs, policing other officers’ behavior. Six of those who received steroids through Lowen’s were women.
Nieves said the medical practice’s swift growth came without the benefit of advertising. Colao didn’t believe in it.
"I remember someone asking Colao, ‘How do you get so many patients?’ " Nieves said. "He would look at me, give me a smile and say, ‘All word of mouth. I don’t have to do a thing.’ "
Residents of Hudson County formed the backbone of the practice, prescription records show. At least 40 Jersey City police officers and 27 city firefighters received hormones from Colao.
Smaller numbers of officers came from Bayonne, Hoboken and Union City. Fourteen more officers represented the county sheriff’s and corrections departments.
At the time of their treatment, the officers and firefighters ranged in age from 23 to 59, with almost three-quarters under 40.
To medical experts interviewed by The Star-Ledger, the clearest indication of something amiss in Colao’s practice is the number of young officers and firefighters — men still in their physical prime — who obtained steroids from him.
More than three dozen of the 248 identified by the newspaper were in their mid- to late 20s at the time, and dozens more were in their early to mid-30s.
Jersey City officer Michael Stise was 26 when he filled the first of seven prescriptions for testosterone and HCG in March 2007, according to the pharmacy’s records and a brutality lawsuit later filed against him and another officer.
Stise did not respond to requests for comment, and a lawyer representing him in the lawsuit did not return phone calls.
For dozens of patients, records show, Colao served up steroid cocktails, combining testosterone, HCG and stanozolol, the generic name for Winstrol, a drug popular with athletes and bodybuilders.
In the parlance of performance-enhancing drugs, it’s known as stacking.
Between October 2006 and July 2007, the month before Colao’s death, Jersey City officer Brian McGovern filled 20 prescriptions for stanozolol, testosterone, human growth hormone, HCG and nandrolone, according to the pharmacy records and legal documents.
Nandrolone is one of three steroids former major league pitcher Roger Clemens is alleged to have used.
McGovern, 40, was charged with misdemeanor assault and suspended for seven days after getting into a fight in Point Pleasant Beach in May 2009. He did not return calls for comment.
At least one of Colao’s patients is a competitive bodybuilder. Passaic County sheriff’s Detective Rafael Galan, 39, won the Mr. New Jersey middleweight bodybuilding title in 2006.
Galan has had a tumultuous tenure in Passaic County. In 2004, he was one of several sheriff’s officers ordered to undergo testing for steroids, according to a news account at the time. He later sued the department, claiming the tests were ordered illegally. The results were not made public.
Last year, he was criminally charged with official misconduct for allegedly tipping off a drug dealer to an investigation.
The Passaic County Prosecutor’s Office dropped the case with little explanation in April.
Galan returned to the department in July. He did not respond to requests for comment. Records show Lowen’s sent him testosterone and HCG in January 2007.
That same year, he would appear shirtless in a beefcake calendar sold under the name Calendar Cops and produced for charity by the publisher of NJ COPS, a monthly law enforcement magazine.
The Pitchman
He spoke with the fervor of an evangelist, salting his pitch with first-person details.
In the exam rooms of his Jersey City office, Joseph Colao told patients hormones had changed his life, according to employees and several officers and firefighters who were patients.
Growth hormone, he said, was as close to the "fountain of youth" as a drug could get. And if it was sexual prowess you wanted, testosterone was just the thing.
Among some two dozen patients who spoke to The Star-Ledger about Colao, not one could recall him discussing the serious health problems that can result from the drugs. Those problems include liver damage, prostate enlargement and an increased risk of heart attack and stroke.
It didn’t matter if patients’ blood work showed their hormone levels in the normal range. Colao prescribed the drugs anyway, said Nieves, his patient coordinator, and Lehar, the office’s blood specialist.
"His mentality was to get them to the max, the highest," Nieves said.
Colao’s younger brother, Leon Colao, disputes Nieves’ characterization, saying that in the several years he worked as his brother’s office manager, he never saw Colao push a drug that wasn’t medically necessary. Leon Colao left the practice in 2005, returning to work there shortly before his brother’s death.
"My brother worked a very long time to get his medical license," said Leon Colao, 32. "He wouldn’t jeopardize that for anything in the world."
As the practice grew, Nieves said, Colao upgraded security, installing video cameras and a locking system that required patients to be buzzed in.
Nieves wondered if Colao just wanted the place to feel more professional, but she’d also noticed an increase in the number of unruly patients. More of them seemed to be edgy or quick to lose their temper, she said.
One incident still frightens her.
It was a gray day, near dusk. As Nieves left Colao’s basement office, a Jersey City police officer greeted her.
He’d been waiting in his patrol car, as if on a stakeout. When he spotted Nieves, he climbed from the driver’s seat and confronted her.
"Where’s doc?" he barked.
The officer, who’d been taking HCG and a high dose of injectable testosterone, wanted his drugs immediately, Nieves said.
She told him Colao wasn’t in the office. Then she hurried away.
"He abused the medicine," Nieves said. "He was scary."
The Star-Ledger confirmed the officer’s identity and prescriptions but is withholding his name at the request of Nieves, who said she fears retaliation.
The changing practice was confusing, even alarming, to Nieves. She didn’t get many answers from Colao.
"He told me, ‘The less you know, the better.’ He kept stuff from me," she said. "He was over his head. But the money motivated him."
Lehar, the office’s blood specialist, 35, likewise suspected there was more to her employer’s practice than Colao wanted anyone to know.
"There was a lot of mystery in there," she said.
Some patients, for instance, bypassed the typical appointment process. Those were the "important people" — athletes, bodybuilders and high-profile officials — who didn’t want to be seen or leave a paper trail, Lehar said.
"They would hide them," she said. "They would come in late, through the back door, so no one could see these characters coming into the office."
Looking back, Lehar said, she should have realized Colao was breaking medical protocol, if not the law. Today, that idea haunts her. What if someone had died, she wonders. What if she had gotten in trouble?
N.J. doctor supplied steroids to hundreds of law enforcement officers, firefighters
On a rainy August morning in 2007, the news rippled through New Jersey’s law enforcement ranks, officer to officer, department to department.
Joseph Colao was dead.
The 45-year-old physician had collapsed in his Jersey City apartment, the victim of heart failure.
Within hours, officers were calling the Hudson County public safety complex.
"Is it true?" they asked, recalled Detective Sgt. Ken Kolich, who’d drawn the routine assignment to look into the death. "Did Dr. Colao die?"
Kolich didn’t suspect foul play, but he found it odd — and a little disturbing — that so many officers were interested in the fate of a man with no official ties to any police agency.
Today, it’s clear Colao was more than just a doctor, friend or confidant to many of the officers.
He was their supplier.
A seven-month Star-Ledger investigation drawing on prescription records, court documents and detailed interviews with the physician’s employees shows Colao ran a thriving illegal drug enterprise that supplied anabolic steroids and human growth hormone to hundreds of law enforcement officers and firefighters throughout New Jersey.
From a seemingly above-board practice in Jersey City, Colao frequently broke the law and his own oath by faking medical diagnoses to justify his prescriptions for the drugs, the investigation shows.
Many of the officers and firefighters willingly took part in the ruse, finding Colao provided an easy way to obtain tightly regulated substances that are illegal without a valid prescription, the investigation found.
Others were persuaded by the physician’s polished sales pitch, one that glossed over the risks and legal realities, the newspaper found. A small percentage may have legitimately needed the drugs to treat uncommon medical conditions.
In most cases, if not all, they used their government health plans to pay for the substances. Evidence gathered by The Star-Ledger suggests the total cost to taxpayers reaches into the millions of dollars.
In just over a year, records show, at least 248 officers and firefighters from 53 agencies used Colao’s fraudulent practice to obtain muscle-building drugs, some of which have been linked to increased aggression, confusion and reckless behavior.
Six of those patients — four police officers and two corrections officers — were named in lawsuits alleging excessive force or civil rights violations around the time they received drugs from him or shortly afterward.
Others have been arrested, fired or suspended for off-duty infractions that include allegations of assault, domestic abuse, harassment and drug possession. One patient was left nearly paralyzed after suffering a stroke his doctor attributed to growth hormone prescribed by Colao.
For many in the physician’s care, use of the drugs apparently didn’t end with Colao’s death.
They instead sought other doctors who specialize in prescribing growth hormone or testosterone, an anabolic steroid, according to patients, legal documents and the doctors themselves. The physicians have not been accused of wrongdoing.
Attorney General Paula Dow, New Jersey’s top law enforcement official, called the newspaper’s findings "disturbing" on a number of levels and said the issue should be collectively examined by state officials, prosecutors and police chiefs.
"If it’s shown that these law enforcement officers are getting steroids and human growth hormone through illegal manners, and specifically through false prescriptions, that’s a violation of the law," Dow said. "It’s a fraud on the system, and it’s something that should be stopped."
While questions have been raised about some of Colao’s patients, many have been recognized for acts of heroism. Some have taken killers, carjackers and armed robbers off the streets. They have confiscated millions of dollars worth of illegal drugs intended for New Jersey neighborhoods. One talked a man out of committing suicide. Another saved the life of a choking infant.
In Colao, they found a doctor whose methods were simple and lucrative. Employees in his inner circle say he created bogus diagnoses for low testosterone levels or adult growth hormone deficiency, a condition that affects just one in 100,000 people, according to the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists.
"If you had 100,000 police officers come in, you’d get one," said Oregon physician David Cook, a spokesman for the endocrinologists group. "Obviously, he was doing it unscrupulously."
Legitimate diagnoses of testosterone deficiency are likewise far less common than Colao’s practice would suggest. About 2 percent of men in their mid-30s have a bona fide deficiency, Cook said. The officers and firefighters identified by The Star-Ledger had a median age of 35 when they obtained the substances.
University of Texas professor John Hoberman, who has studied doping in and out of sports for a quarter-century, called The Star-Ledger’s findings "extraordinary and unprecedented evidence" of a national problem that has been "systematically ignored" for more than two decades.
"The use of performance-enhancers among first-responders has been a tabooed topic since it first came to light during the 1980s," Hoberman said. "This should shock the public as well as the public officials who will now have to take a stand on the widespread doping of public service professionals who carry guns and save lives."
Transformation
Gladys Nieves remembers when Joseph Colao could barely pay the bills.
Colao’s pain-management practice was foundering, and it seemed the doctor was, too. He had undergone triple bypass surgery at age 38. He was overweight and relied on a daily cocktail of medications to treat heart problems and keep his blood pressure and cholesterol in check, said Nieves, Colao’s patient coordinator from the late 1990s until his death.
Those were the hard times, before the wait for an appointment stretched to months. Before Colao, suddenly flush with cash, shelled out for $2,000 dinners in Manhattan and shopping sprees at Neiman Marcus, Chanel and Coach. Before he became a crusader for hormones.
Victor Biancamano, Colao’s former office manager, said it was about six years ago when Colao flew to Las Vegas for a crash course in hormone replacement therapy, a staple treatment of the anti-aging movement.
The new tools of his trade: testosterone, the primary male sex hormone, delivered in creams or through a needle; stanozolol, the steroid that cost Olympic sprinter Ben Johnson his gold medal in 1988; and HCG, or human chorionic gonadotropin. Though not a steroid, HCG is often taken with steroids or at the end of a steroid cycle to kick-start the body’s production of testosterone.
Human growth hormone, commonly known as HGH, joined the list of Colao’s favored drugs despite the restrictions on its use.
The anabolic steroids Colao worked with have far different functions than the class of substances found in many commonly prescribed products. Corticosteroids, for instance, are anti-inflammatories used to treat a host of medical conditions, including asthma, arthritis, allergies and cancer.
For Colao, who studied at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, the move to hormones and steroids marked a change from the physical therapy track he took after his graduation in 1992. But the new focus seemed to agree with him.
To Nieves, now a 42-year-old single mother, the transformation was stunning. It wasn’t just the increased business. Colao himself had changed. Trim and tanned, with muscle filling out his frame, the doctor looked every bit the anti-aging miracle man.
Along with the new focus came an important new relationship.
Representatives of Lowen’s Pharmacy, a neighborhood drugstore in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn, were shopping for doctors who could help them expand by moving huge quantities of steroids and growth hormone illegally imported from China, said Mark Haskins, who investigated the pharmacy for the New York State Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement, a division of the health department.
"Without a doctor, you can’t peddle the stuff," said Haskins, who retired from the agency after helping secure an indictment against Lowen’s. "You only need one doctor, and you’re golden."
Colao became that doctor.
The physician steered clients to Lowen’s, and the pharmacy sent Colao boxes of HGH as a kickback, Haskins said. The more product Colao pushed, the more he received off the books. And the more he received, the more he could sell for cash, Haskins said.
"Dr. Colao sold drugs," Haskins said. "Lowen’s sold drugs. There was no doctor-patient relationship here."
Nieves and Erika Lehar, the office’s blood specialist, said the HGH sales took place after hours or during lunch, when few people were in the waiting room. Colao directed Nieves to handle the smaller HGH purchases, or those under $1,000, she said.
"Doc would just give me the medicine in the box, and he would say so-and-so is coming to pick this up," Nieves said.
Larger sales were handled by Biancamano, the former office manager, according to Nieves and Lehar.
"I would see boxes on the floor and him getting stuff out of the box," Lehar said. "It was like a transaction. They paid cash. I would see them counting money. Some would be patients, and some would be Victor’s friends."
Biancamano, 36, who left Colao’s practice shortly before the doctor’s death, denied involvement in HGH sales or in any aspect of the physician’s hormone business, saying Nieves oversaw all patients and transactions.
"He never even taught me the business when it came to hormones," Biancamano said. "Him and Gladys handled everything. People have nothing else better to do than make up stories."
A Growing Clientele
From the squad rooms and firehouses of Hudson County, word of Colao’s reputation radiated out, town by town, county by county.
It was around 2005 when the first law enforcement officers and firefighters came to Colao for steroids, employees and patients said. Each month brought new faces from new departments. By early 2007, the office had become "a hangout for cops and firefighters," Nieves said.
Eight officers came from the Edison Police Department, seven from Paterson. Six more traveled from Franklin Township in Somerset County, Colao’s prescription records from Lowen’s Pharmacy show.
There were sheriff’s officers and corrections officers from Bergen, Essex, Passaic and Ocean counties. Other clients included a dozen NJ Transit police officers, at least three state troopers and 16 state corrections officers working in seven prisons.
Distance wasn’t an obstacle.
Police officers made the trek to Jersey City from Eatontown, Deal, Asbury Park and Bedminster. One corrections officer, assigned to Southern State Correctional Facility in Cumberland County, lived more than 100 miles away.
There were patrolmen and deputy chiefs, detectives and union representatives. Two patients counseled students against drug use through the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program, which lists anabolic steroids on its national website as "one of the most dangerous categories of performance-enhancing drugs."
Another works in internal affairs, policing other officers’ behavior. Six of those who received steroids through Lowen’s were women.
Nieves said the medical practice’s swift growth came without the benefit of advertising. Colao didn’t believe in it.
"I remember someone asking Colao, ‘How do you get so many patients?’ " Nieves said. "He would look at me, give me a smile and say, ‘All word of mouth. I don’t have to do a thing.’ "
Residents of Hudson County formed the backbone of the practice, prescription records show. At least 40 Jersey City police officers and 27 city firefighters received hormones from Colao.
Smaller numbers of officers came from Bayonne, Hoboken and Union City. Fourteen more officers represented the county sheriff’s and corrections departments.
At the time of their treatment, the officers and firefighters ranged in age from 23 to 59, with almost three-quarters under 40.
To medical experts interviewed by The Star-Ledger, the clearest indication of something amiss in Colao’s practice is the number of young officers and firefighters — men still in their physical prime — who obtained steroids from him.
More than three dozen of the 248 identified by the newspaper were in their mid- to late 20s at the time, and dozens more were in their early to mid-30s.
Jersey City officer Michael Stise was 26 when he filled the first of seven prescriptions for testosterone and HCG in March 2007, according to the pharmacy’s records and a brutality lawsuit later filed against him and another officer.
Stise did not respond to requests for comment, and a lawyer representing him in the lawsuit did not return phone calls.
For dozens of patients, records show, Colao served up steroid cocktails, combining testosterone, HCG and stanozolol, the generic name for Winstrol, a drug popular with athletes and bodybuilders.
In the parlance of performance-enhancing drugs, it’s known as stacking.
Between October 2006 and July 2007, the month before Colao’s death, Jersey City officer Brian McGovern filled 20 prescriptions for stanozolol, testosterone, human growth hormone, HCG and nandrolone, according to the pharmacy records and legal documents.
Nandrolone is one of three steroids former major league pitcher Roger Clemens is alleged to have used.
McGovern, 40, was charged with misdemeanor assault and suspended for seven days after getting into a fight in Point Pleasant Beach in May 2009. He did not return calls for comment.
At least one of Colao’s patients is a competitive bodybuilder. Passaic County sheriff’s Detective Rafael Galan, 39, won the Mr. New Jersey middleweight bodybuilding title in 2006.
Galan has had a tumultuous tenure in Passaic County. In 2004, he was one of several sheriff’s officers ordered to undergo testing for steroids, according to a news account at the time. He later sued the department, claiming the tests were ordered illegally. The results were not made public.
Last year, he was criminally charged with official misconduct for allegedly tipping off a drug dealer to an investigation.
The Passaic County Prosecutor’s Office dropped the case with little explanation in April.
Galan returned to the department in July. He did not respond to requests for comment. Records show Lowen’s sent him testosterone and HCG in January 2007.
That same year, he would appear shirtless in a beefcake calendar sold under the name Calendar Cops and produced for charity by the publisher of NJ COPS, a monthly law enforcement magazine.
The Pitchman
He spoke with the fervor of an evangelist, salting his pitch with first-person details.
In the exam rooms of his Jersey City office, Joseph Colao told patients hormones had changed his life, according to employees and several officers and firefighters who were patients.
Growth hormone, he said, was as close to the "fountain of youth" as a drug could get. And if it was sexual prowess you wanted, testosterone was just the thing.
Among some two dozen patients who spoke to The Star-Ledger about Colao, not one could recall him discussing the serious health problems that can result from the drugs. Those problems include liver damage, prostate enlargement and an increased risk of heart attack and stroke.
It didn’t matter if patients’ blood work showed their hormone levels in the normal range. Colao prescribed the drugs anyway, said Nieves, his patient coordinator, and Lehar, the office’s blood specialist.
"His mentality was to get them to the max, the highest," Nieves said.
Colao’s younger brother, Leon Colao, disputes Nieves’ characterization, saying that in the several years he worked as his brother’s office manager, he never saw Colao push a drug that wasn’t medically necessary. Leon Colao left the practice in 2005, returning to work there shortly before his brother’s death.
"My brother worked a very long time to get his medical license," said Leon Colao, 32. "He wouldn’t jeopardize that for anything in the world."
As the practice grew, Nieves said, Colao upgraded security, installing video cameras and a locking system that required patients to be buzzed in.
Nieves wondered if Colao just wanted the place to feel more professional, but she’d also noticed an increase in the number of unruly patients. More of them seemed to be edgy or quick to lose their temper, she said.
One incident still frightens her.
It was a gray day, near dusk. As Nieves left Colao’s basement office, a Jersey City police officer greeted her.
He’d been waiting in his patrol car, as if on a stakeout. When he spotted Nieves, he climbed from the driver’s seat and confronted her.
"Where’s doc?" he barked.
The officer, who’d been taking HCG and a high dose of injectable testosterone, wanted his drugs immediately, Nieves said.
She told him Colao wasn’t in the office. Then she hurried away.
"He abused the medicine," Nieves said. "He was scary."
The Star-Ledger confirmed the officer’s identity and prescriptions but is withholding his name at the request of Nieves, who said she fears retaliation.
The changing practice was confusing, even alarming, to Nieves. She didn’t get many answers from Colao.
"He told me, ‘The less you know, the better.’ He kept stuff from me," she said. "He was over his head. But the money motivated him."
Lehar, the office’s blood specialist, 35, likewise suspected there was more to her employer’s practice than Colao wanted anyone to know.
"There was a lot of mystery in there," she said.
Some patients, for instance, bypassed the typical appointment process. Those were the "important people" — athletes, bodybuilders and high-profile officials — who didn’t want to be seen or leave a paper trail, Lehar said.
"They would hide them," she said. "They would come in late, through the back door, so no one could see these characters coming into the office."
Looking back, Lehar said, she should have realized Colao was breaking medical protocol, if not the law. Today, that idea haunts her. What if someone had died, she wonders. What if she had gotten in trouble?