Institutional portal - Municipality of Milan

Milan, March 5 2020 – The operation conducted by the Special Interventions Team of the mobile radio unit of the local police in Milan was called “Muscle bound” which led to the denunciation, at liberty and in complicity, of twenty-one people for aggravated fraud against the State – for an estimated total of around 50 thousand euros - and another person also for illegal practice of the medical profession, receiving stolen goods and false documents.

The investigation was started in May 2019, when a doctor from the San Raffaele Hospital was contacted by a pharmacy in Milan, in the Ticino area, for information regarding a prescription with which he would have prescribed anabolic drugs. Specifically, these were growth hormones which, producing side effects, are prescribed only in strictly necessary cases and to people who are constantly monitored by a doctor. The type of drug, very expensive (around 600 euros per pack), is entirely paid for by the National Health Service.

Having denied the prescription, the doctor who apparently wrote it went to the hospital police station and was thus put in contact with the Special Interventions Team of the local police: the complaint for theft of the prescription book from which it had been removed was formalised. the statute of limitations, investigations were therefore started.

Investigating starting from the first false prescription, local police officers traced, in 20 pharmacies scattered throughout Lombardy, other prescriptions deriving from stolen prescription books and filled with stamps of furtive origin, on which false signatures of doctors were then affixed.

Having acquired the images of the video surveillance systems of the pharmacies and identified the people who collected the anabolic drugs, it was possible to trace in particular two subjects who work in the world of fitness: A.A., a 36-year-old Italian, well-known nutritionist in the gym circuit , and G.S., a 30-year-old Italian, personal trainer, both working in a fitness center in Desenzano del Garda. The first would have prescribed the drugs in place of the unsuspecting doctors from whom prescriptions and stamps had been stolen; the second, an athletic trainer also known in the entertainment world, procured the clients.

From in-depth investigations, through observation activities, telephone interceptions, searches and seizures, it also emerged that, while some took the drugs unaware of how they were procured, others were aware of the fraudulent methods: 22 people ended up in the register of suspects.