Tuesday July 06, 2004
Last week, on Tuesday June 29th, wearing his BodyBuilding.com T-Shirt, Jason Cholewa, a 22 year old student at the University of Rhode Island was arraigned on four counts of felony drug charges in District Court, South Kingstown Rhode Island. The police officers in Narragansett Rhode Island, armed with a search warrant, seized 4,000 pills, dozens of vials, and $29,000. Cholewa is being held without bail and has been charged with three counts of possession with the intent to distribute and one count of possession of a controlled substance. Anabolic steroids and Vicodin have already been identified and other substances have been sent to labs for identification testing.
Of particular interest to our members is the fact that Jason was a popular moderator for the Bodybuilding.com Discussion Boards. Jason posted as Big Red and Big Red HH and was a frequent contributor to the TeenBodyBuilding.com and Bodybuilding.com web sites. Bodybuilding.com has banned him from their boards and apparently, they have deleted all of the posts about his arrest.
Detective Lt. Gerald Driscoll said Jason was a "mid-level dealer." Driscoll added, "We suspect that the source of these drugs is somewhere out of state." Additionally, it was learned that Jason was arrested five years ago for disorderly conduct in Connecticut.
The estimated value of the drugs was only $4,000. Which given the kamikaze cycles that some bodybuilders are taking these days could be considered an amount for personal use. They also found Vicodin. Dealers take note, if you're going to deal roids, don't deal other stuff. It seems that it's the recreational drugs that causes law enforcement to get a lot more serious a lot faster. And of course if someone you deal steroids to starts hounding you to sell meth, ecstasy, or coke, you can be pretty sure they're setting you up.
To convict Jason of dealing, the prosecutor will have to prove that he had intent to distribute. And here's where Bodybuilding.com comes in. At this point, it's safe to assume that Big Red HH's entire Personal Message history has been subpoenaed along with all of his threads on Bodybuilding.com's Discussion Forums. And if not subpoenaed already, it probably will be soon. Hopefully, Bodybuilding.com will hire a lawyer and turn over only Big Red's PM's and Posts -- not the entire forums database and everyone's PM's along with it.
For Jason to get off, he'll probably try to prove that the steroids that were found were for personal use. And as attorney Rick Collins points out in his book Legal Muscle, law enforcement much of the time has no idea how different steroids are from recreational drugs in terms of what would constitute an amount appropriate for personal use. In other words, 100 D-Bol is a lot different than 100 ecstasy. The other way Jason could make his situation better would be to rat out someone or several someones. He could try to plea bargain his sentence down in exchange for names. If he were to go this route, the implications for the members of BodyBuilding.com's Forums could be quite serious. In fact, Detective Lt. Gerald Driscoll said that "This is an ongoing investigation."
I'm not suggesting that the Administration of BodyBuilding.com knew that one of their Mods was a dealer, but this is exactly why EliteFitness.com never allows sources - known or suspected - to moderate our forums.
Credit: Emailed to me from EF
Jason Cholewa's (a.k.a. Big Red HH) Progression
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