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Player agents in Major League Baseball referred clients to a physician in Golden State who illegally wrote prescriptions for performance-enhancing drugs, according to an bill of indictment unsealed Wednesday by federal authorities. Related (April 10, 2008) (April 10, 2008)

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Dr. Ramon Scruggs and two of his associates confront 11 complaints stemming from the suspected statistical distribution of steroids and human growing internal secretion to patients who did not have got legitimate medical grounds for using the substances, the bill of indictment said.

The participants were referred to Scruggs by agents “for the intents of obtaining anabolic steroids and other drugs which those people knew to be banned by Major League Baseball and therefore unavailable to the participants through lawful medical channels absent the illegal rules provided by Scruggs,” the bill of indictment said.

The bill of indictment did not name any participants or agents, and did not stipulate how many participants might have got got been involved, although lawyers familiar with the lawsuit have said it is expected to be less than a dozen. The bill of indictment said that Scruggs also distributed performance-enhancing drugs to law enforcement military officers and others.

The legal action against Scruggs come ups less than four calendar months after released his study on the usage of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball.

The bill of indictment was not the first clip Scruggs had been tied to distributing performance-enhancing drugs to baseball game players. In the , Troy Glaus of the and George C. Scott Schoeneweis of the were cited for receiving steroids after Scruggs had written them prescriptions.

“It’s already been discussed and hashed out,” Schoeneweis said at Shea Stadium. “It’s all old news.”

That information stemmed from an probe into an Internet ring of pharmaceutics and antiaging clinics by government at the Capital Of New House Of York County territory attorney’s business office in New York and federal government in Alabama. Lawyers familiar with the lawsuit had said Scruggs wrote prescriptions for participants besides Glaus and Schoeneweis.

Rob Manfred, baseball’s executive director frailty president for labour relations, said the commissioner’s business office was cooperating with the federal probe and declined additional comment.

The New House Of York Times reported in March that agents in Golden State for the had been investigating Scruggs for respective years. That probe regained impulse in the last twelvemonth after it had go dormant, lawyers familiar with the lawsuit said.

The bill of indictment of Scruggs, along with the two associates — Allan Danto, a consultant, and Heidi Macpherson, an business business office director — is another case in which the United States attorney’s office in the Northern District of Golden State have taken on a substance involving professional jocks and performance-enhancing drugs.

The bill of indictment was signed by Flatness Parrella and Jeff Nedrow, the two helper United States lawyers who have got done much of the work in the Bay Area Lab Co-operative investigation, dating to 2002 . The I.R.S. particular agent Jeff Novitzky, who have go the human face of most of the federal government’s probes into the statistical distribution of performance-enhancing drugs to professional athletes, is not believed to be playing a cardinal function in the Scruggs case.

Scruggs operated his medical pattern out of the New Hope Health Center inch Tustin, Calif. State government have got detailed numerous modern times he have improperly written prescriptions for patients across the state whom he never examined.

Documents filed by the state medical board in June 2004 and updated in June 2006 said Scruggs had “prescribed approximately 6,073 prescriptions of unsafe drugs or controlled matters over the Internet without a good religion scrutiny of the patients” in and out of Golden State since 2000. Scruggs settled the substance and accepted a $4,800 mulct and 35 calendar months of probation.

Scruggs was described as “an antiaging and public presentation specialist” inch an interview in 2000 on the Web land site . He said at the clip that he was concerned about how other docs viewed him.

“If you desire to cognize the truth, I don’t like taking 22- or 23-year-olds and putting them on steroids; it do me nervous,” helium said. “Yet I’d rather have got got them come up to me, and pull off their steroid use, than have them make it on their own.”

Scruggs have admitted to taking human growing internal secretion and also complained that there were few “steroid-friendly pharmacies.”