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of Medicine published the findings of a study that suggested HGH supplements slowed or even reversed some symptoms of aging in adults, the most dramatic of which was the increase of muscle mass and corresponding reductions of body fat. Other studies quickly followed. Preliminary results suggested that in addition to increasing lean muscle mass and burning fat, HGH might promote the growth of damaged organs, increase lung capacity and strengthen the heart. Though the studies offered only the most preliminary of findings, they were seized upon by a market primed for any kind of new miracle drug. That market, driven by legitimate doctors and unlicensed quacks alike, had been born in the fitness and health boom of the 1970s and was always on the lookout for the latest performance, health and diet enhancers, from herbal remedies to GHB—used as much by bodybuilders as ravers—to steroids. Starting in the early nineties, HGH became the ultimate wonder drug, touted as an elixir that builds mass like steroids but cuts fat like ephedra. Despite a paucity of evidence, many users believe that HGH removes wrinkles, cures baldness and, among men, has a Viagra-like effect on penile function.

The dangers of excessive HGH consumption are well known to researchers and are not a matter of dispute. As with steroids, too much HGH can cause a condition known as acromegaly, in which victims suffer acute joint pain, organ swelling, excessive hair growth all over their bodies and unnatural bone growth that results in enlarged brows for a Cro-Magnon-like appearance. Worse yet, chronic abuse of HGH can shut down the body’s natural production of it in the pituitary gland, hooking abusers for life. If that isn’t bad enough, HGH is also suspected of accelerating the growth of cancer cells and inducing diabetes.

Despite all the risks, by the late 1990s HGH had become a multibillion-dollar business. Leading pharmaceutical companies, among them Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk, Pfizer and Serono, all manufactured synthetic hormone and pumped it into the market via an ethically shady but FDA-approved complex of secondary wholesalers.

One of the biggest of these was a Phoenix-based company called Peak Physique. At the time of his murder, Konstantin Simberg was a government witness in a million-dollar HGH-theft case being pursued against the founder of Peak Physique, Troy Langdon.

Langdon launched Peak Physique in 1994, when he was a twenty-three-year-old drugstore clerk. Langdon, who did not even possess a pharmacist’s license, managed to build his drug-distribution company by exploiting FDA loopholes. Within a couple of years Langdon’s Peak Physique became one of Serono’s biggest customers for HGH it sold under the brand name Saizen. Through Langdon’s pioneering use of the Internet, his firm became a leading national seller, providing the drug to physicians and clinics as well as individual professional athletes, fitness freaks and a handful of aging A-list celebrities.

Records show Peak Physique achieved a cash flow of $25 million a month, but the phenomenal growth of the business, like that of HGH, proved to be highly problematic. Despite the cash churned by the company and the high-rolling lifestyle Langdon achieved, by 2001 his firm was on the ropes. Langdon and his partner were implicated in a robbery of Langdon’s own business and an insurance fraud scheme, but before police could bring them to trial, Konstantin Simberg, the chief witness against them, was burned alive in the Yavapai woods.

3. THE WONDER BOYS

LANGD ON DESCRIBES HIS OWN BACKGROUND as “being from dirt.” His father was a twenty-year enlisted Navy man who later worked as a roofer. Langdon brags he “never spent a day in college.” His greatest career move was to marry his high school sweetheart, Jennifer Shaffer, whose parents owned Cactus Pharmacy in North Phoenix. Shortly after his marriage, at age twenty-one, Langdon became a clerk at his in-laws’ pharmacy.

Never a particularly good athlete himself, Langdon had always been a sports fan. He’d hung out with jocks in high school, and later,