HUDSON COUNTY — A three-part series in the Star-Ledger this week detailed how 248 police and firefighters had obtained steroids illegally from a Jersey City doctors. Police in Hoboken, Jersey City, Weehawken, North Bergen, Union City, Bayonne, and even tiny Guttenberg have been mentioned.
The piece begins:
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.
Angel Alicea of Hoboken’s public safety division said he wants to investigate, and also introduce steroid testing in the police department.