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Bazetta man gets one year in prison for Internet steroids business
By Ed Runyan
WARREN
Had his million-dollar-plus business been legal, 23-year-old Joseph Stiver might be viewed as an entrepreneurial success story — not a man spending the next year in prison.
Stiver, of Cadwallader Sonk Road in Bazetta Township, was sentenced to a year in prison Thursday after pleading guilty in Trumbull County Common Pleas Court to operating a business that sold steroids to customers all over the United States.
The venture was run out of the home where Stiver, a Youngstown State University student, lived with his parents in Bazetta, and a storage unit on Bazetta Road.
Jeff Orr, Trumbull Ashtabula Group Law Enforcement Task Force commander, estimated the enterprise probably had revenues of close to $2 million. He said Stiver’s year in prison may not be the end of his troubles because federal investigators also are investigating other possible crimes.
When local investigators searched the house, they found almost $200,000 in cash, a computer equipped with encryption technology to enable him to take orders over the Internet, boxes of steroids, shipping materials and a few luxury items.
When they searched the storage locker on Bazetta Road, they found dozens of pill bottles, syringes and shipping materials.
Chuck Morrow, an assistant county prosecutor, argued in court that Judge Rice should give Stiver the higher end of the prison range — from nine to 60 months. Stiver had agreed to the prison range in August in exchange for prosecutors’ dropping other charges.
Morrow said Stiver had been deceptive with TAG investigators when they searched his parents’ Bazetta home in January.
Because investigators didn’t believe him, they conducted another search two days later and found additional evidence, Morrow said.
When officials with the Trumbull County Probation Department interviewed Stiver after he pleaded guilty to 13 felony charges — three of drug trafficking, three of drug possession, two of tampering with evidence, and five of identity fraud — he dismissed the crimes as being the result of “getting in over his head,” Morrow said.
But selling steroids “on a national basis by importing the dope from overseas, selling it to nefarious people from throughout the United States and having them distribute it for him” was more than “getting in over his head,” Morrow said.
Stiver responded a few minutes later: “It would be disingenuous for me to say I didn’t know what I was doing because I did. My parents raised me to know better.”
But Stiver told Judge Rice he’s only about a year away from finishing his degree at YSU and pledged: “You will never see me again for any criminal proceeding.”
The head of the YSU Department of Health Professions wrote Judge Rice a letter indicating that Stiver recently was accepted into the department’s respiratory care program.
Judge Rice said it was “kind of refreshing” to see someone with no previous criminal history and strong family support, which he said suggests Stiver isn’t likely to re-offend.
But “selling steroids is no different from any other drug on the street” because steroids have harmful side effects when used improperly, the judge said.
The $198,820 in cash and other proceeds from the enterprise are being forfeited to law enforcement, with 75 percent going to TAG, 15 percent to the Trumbull County Prosecutor’s Office and 10 percent to the Bazetta Township Police Department.
A former employee at Global Fitness on Elm Road, Randy McCale, 46, of Niles, also is indicted in the case. One of his roles was to obtain information from former Global customers to create PayPal accounts used to buy the steroids, investigators said. McCale’s case is pending.
It is not believed the acts had any adverse financial effect on the individuals whose identities were used, investigators said.