S.D. Indictment Charges 2 With Hormone Sales

A Sacramento-area bodybuilder and a Carmel man were charged in a federal indictment unsealed Wednesday with distributing genetically engineered human growth hormone, a drug increasingly sought by top athletes as a non-detectable substitute for anabolic steroids.

William E. Cambra Jr., 31, of Carmichael and James V. Sorrano, 29, of Carmel were named in the 12-count indictment filed in federal court in San Diego that includes charges of conspiring to sell the synthetic hormone, distributing steroids and distributing counterfeit steroids.

The indictment marks the first time federal prosecutors have brought charges involving the distribution of the hormone, an expensive drug prescribed only for children with growth deficiencies that is in increasing demand among world-class athletes seeking to avoid drug tests, Assistant U.S. Atty. Phillip L.B. Halpern of San Diego said.

The indictment was unsealed after Cambra’s arrest Wednesday morning in Carmichael, a suburb of eastern Sacramento. Known as a national-class bodybuilder and owner of a Carmichael gym, Cambra was being held pending a bail hearing Thursday in U. S. District Court in Sacramento, Halpern said. Sorrano was still being sought Wednesday, he said.

If convicted, each could be sentenced to 38 years in prison and fined $3 million.

The indictment alleges that Cambra ran a nationwide network that distributed large amounts of the synthetic hormone and bogus anabolic steroids.

“What’s important is not so much what these guys did,” Halpern said Wednesday. “It’s the fact that the hormone itself costs between $600 and $1,200 (per dose) on the black market. Because of that, it’s not used by every Tom, Dick and Harry who wants to use steroids.”

“Only top-level athletes, be they bodybuilders, track and field, et cetera, would want to use human growth hormone,” he said. “It’s not readily detectable in drug testing. Therefore, they’re willing to pay the extra money to get the additional benefit of testing drug-free.”

Wouldn’t Have Been Caught in Olympics

The hormone is so hard to detect by the drug tests now given top athletes, Halpern said, that, “if you took it in the last Olympics, it would not have been caught.”

The hormone is the compound that Olympic gold medalist Florence Griffith Joyner recently was accused of taking.

Sprinter Darrell Robinson told the West German magazine Stern that he sold Griffith Joyner 10 cubic centimeters of the hormone for $2,000 in 1988. Griffith Joyner, who retired from competition in February, denies the accusation.

Because the risk of being caught using the hormone is so low, an “expanding” segment of the $200- to $400-million black market in steroids is turning to the hormone, according to Halpern, who is acknowledged as the nation’s leading prosecutor of illegal steroid sales.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration allows only two American firms to make the compound: Genentech Inc. of South San Francisco and Eli Lilly Co. of Indianapolis. The Lilly brand name for the compound is Humatrope; the Genentech name is Protropin.

Sold at retail for $450 a dose, it is prescribed for children whose pituitary glands do not naturally secrete enough growth hormone, Halpern said.

Athletes use it because it produces effects similar to steroids, he said, which help the body build and repair tissue, even under tremendous workout stress. In using the synthetic hormone, two refrigerated substances, one crystalline and one liquid, must be mixed and then injected, Halpern said.

Cambra and Sorrano were charged in connection with the Sept. 23, 1988, sale to undercover agents of $100,000 worth of the Lilly hormone, Halpern said. The hormone, worth $250,000 to $500,000 on the black market, had been trucked down from Northern California to the purchase site, a motel in El Centro, Halpern said.

Most of the cargo that the indictment charges was delivered in a rental truck to the El Centro motel consisted of bogus steroids, which proved to be oil-based fluid with no muscle-building properties.

The indictment takes seven pages to detail a conspiracy that prosecutors allege utilized a complex nationwide network to distribute the synthetic hormone and steroids to athletes throughout the country. The conspiracy operated from “sometime before” January, 1987, through last May, the indictment says.

It also alleges the mail sale in May of 2,205 tablets of the anabolic steroid stanozolol to undercover agents in Rancho Bernardo.

Although Cambra and Sorrano are from Northern California, the case will be pursued in U.S. District Court in San Diego because transactions alleged in the indictment took place within that court’s boundaries, Halpern said.