In August 2017, two men broke into the well-secured Hohenort Avenue home of Brian Wainstein in Cape Town’s affluent Constantia suburb. They entered his bedroom and shot him several times. His wife and child, lying alongside, were untouched. His death brought to prominence the occasionally treacherous reality of the steroid world, described by rapper Kenny P as “f**king dangerous”.
Wainstein was known as the Steroid King, a moniker earned through his international reputation as a broker and supplier of steroids. He was known to have a propensity for violence and intimidation. “At one time he had the biggest steroid operation in the world,” said Mark Stent, a former bodybuilder.
Israeli-born Wainstein lived variously in Ireland, Cyprus and SA. He first came to prominence in Ireland in 2007, when he was charged with selling steroids online. The Irish Times said Wainstein, who used the name Barry Benjamin in e-mails, had pleaded guilty in a Dublin court to nine charges relating to the possession, sale and distribution of the substances at premises in Dún Laoghaire. Illicit substances valued at €15,000 (about R260,000 now) had been recovered.
Judge Martin Nolan said that he had been “leaning towards” jailing Wainstein for 12 months due to the seriousness of the charge but didn’t do so because Wainstein had pleaded guilty and avoided what might have been a long trial. “I have decided to impose a two-year sentence, but to suspend all but four months of it, which he must serve so that he will have a taste of prison,” said Nolan.
Wainstein, a dual citizen of Israel and SA, wound up in Cape Town some years later. Evidently, his trail of crime followed him. He popped up as a red notice on Interpol’s screens on behalf of Cyprus, which was seeking his extradition for counterfeiting and drug-related crimes. He was named in Canadian court papers as a member of a sophisticated steroid-trafficking enterprise, and US authorities were also after him, accusing him of flooding the country with steroids.
According to information from a New Jersey criminal case against his accomplices, Wainstein led a steroid-manufacturing operation called Axio Labs. In 2013, a notice of extradition was issued for the illegal importation of drugs, including anabolic steroids. He was still fighting extradition when he was killed in 2017.
Any thoughts of keeping a low profile in Cape Town were blown earlier that year when he was arrested for possession of uncut diamonds. Missing number plates on his BMW had drawn the attention of local police, who pulled him over and discovered the diamonds.
He allegedly threatened to ‘blow up their store’ if they didn't carry his supplements. The owners left town quickly
Wainstein also allegedly terrorised a Green Point sports-supplement business, Nutrition Rage, in November 2016, ordering the owners to stock his brand of steroids, manufactured by Axio Labs. According to the Sunday Times, Wainstein allegedly threatened to “blow up their store” The owners left town quickly — for good.
In June 2020, Fabian Cupido, one of the assailants in Wainstein’s killing, was sentenced to an effective 25 years in prison by the high court in Cape Town. The former train driver, a member of the notorious 27s gang, was one of more than a dozen suspects arrested in connection with organising the hit. Another, William “Red” Stevens, was shot and killed outside his home in February 2021.
It was alleged that Wainstein’s underworld involvement led to the war between Cape Town’s violent nightclub-security factions. Predictably, it ended badly.
In 2018, another prominent figure in the bodybuilding world was murdered. Depending on who you talk to, Tyrel Ekermans was either a devoted father and husband who found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, or a member of the steroid underworld who looked for trouble. He may have been both.
The facts are hazy, but what is known is that Ekermans competed in bodybuilding and owned a supplement shop, TTT Nutrition (later renamed TTT Legacy in his honour). He was known as one of the heavies around town. Ekermans was every inch the alpha male: he loved fast cars and bikes and bred pit bulls.
Having travelled from his home on the East Rand to Cape Town, he was winding down with drinks at a trendy Camps Bay spot one Friday night. No-one is entirely sure what happened, but there was an altercation much later — some say he had gone after a bag snatcher — and he was stabbed in the neck. There were claims that he was tight with Wainstein, but Stent, who was a friend, denied that his death had anything to do with steroids.
“Tyrel was involved in steroids, but his death had nothing to do with steroids. There are two stories, the one about the handbag, the other that it was a hit. Tyrel wasn’t an angel, but he wasn’t a bad guy either. He was my best friend.”
Stent doesn’t buy the theory that Ekermans was killed because he was part of a steroid-selling operation. “He sold on a small level; he was a small-time hustler.” He did mention that Ekermans’ brother was a high-ranking member of the Hells Angels motorcycle club in Cape Town. Stent said his friend had owned a supplement shop and wasn’t coy about steroids. “In bodybuilding, you can’t hide it; it’s not taboo.”
Having been involved in bodybuilding for many years himself, Stent has often entered the orbit of steroids. He said they are so prevalent in SA, dealers have taken to importing steroid-making kits and manufacturing ’roids in their kitchens. According to Underground Anabolics, a book by William Llewellyn published in 2010, customers use raw steroid powders to assemble their own products, a practice known as “home brewing”. The remaining materials, which in the case of injectable steroid assembly may include an oily carrier, antimicrobial agents, co-solvents, glass vials, syringe filters and a hand crimper, are obtained from other sources.
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“Steroids are everywhere, in every sport — even archery and chess,” said Stent. “A lot of young people are using and misusing steroids. I competed, and I’ve been around it, but it’s never been a gangster industry. It’s run like a business.”
A dangerous business, apparently.
More than once during my foray into the netherworld of steroids, people recommended I get in touch with Mike Bolhuis. “He’s the oke who goes after the bad guys,” said one. Big by size and reputation, Bolhuis is a straight-shooting crime fighter, a specialist investigator who brooks no nonsense. We met at his swanky home office, which sits on a sprawling compound in Roodeplaat, northwest of Pretoria. Swaying palm trees and a flamboyance of flamingos in and around a garden pond presented an incongruous backdrop.
Now in his 60s, he still works out and has trained as a cage fighter and grappler skilled in hand-to-hand combat. He has cracked a few heads in his time — all part of the job.
He is known for his efforts in curbing gang violence and drug-related crimes, and steroids have swirled around his life for most of the 40-plus years he has been an investigator. “I had guys who used to work for me who had to sleep with lung resuscitators because their chests were so big and heavy that they couldn’t breathe. I know some who died because of steroids, because of their massive size. I know guys who cannot control their urine, who sleep with nappies, because of steroids,” he said.
Beyond his own instincts, which indicate that steroids are popular in SA, Bolhuis couldn’t point to official statistics. He said that the dysfunction within the police has allowed for a free-for-all.
The way Bolhuis tells it, the fractured nature of the police force and its reputation for corruption create fertile ground for steroid dealers and users, who operate with impunity. Few are charged, much less prosecuted. “The police are very corrupt. A minority aren’t corrupt. They say they don’t have support and if they pursue a case alone, they’ll just get ousted.”
Yet this isn’t strictly true, as there have been several law-enforcement successes in recent years. In 2019, Pretoria police raided a farmhouse in the Vasfontein area of Hammanskraal. Led by national police commissioner Gen Khehla Sitole, officers arrested three individuals, including the owner of the home, a registered pharmacist who supplied steroids to a former convict.
The ex-con had been arrested in 2015, was convicted and, two years later, sentenced to 15 years plus a fine of R900,000‚ with the jail term suspended for five years. In the raid the police confiscated large amounts of steroids and chemicals‚ a tablet presser‚ a mixer‚ a tablet-coating machine (for the colouring of tablets), two pistols and a loaded shotgun, along with several rounds of ammunition.
The steroids might not all have been channelled to regular customers — ducks and chickens on the farm were said to be larger than normal.
Several more high-profile busts occurred the following year, two in the Pretoria region and another at a game farm in Bela-Bela, 100km to the north. Steroids and associated goods with a value of R3m were confiscated in three separate raids, two at high-end residential estates. One of the estates, Silver Lakes, had been the scene of a R20m steroids bust six years previously. The joint operation involved several police units and authorities from Mpumalanga and Pretoria.
When policemen do get involved in investigations, they steal the stuff themselves. They resell it and it’s back on the market
— Mike Bolhuis, specialist investigator
Notwithstanding these successes, Bolhuis thanks his lucky stars he never was a policeman before he became a private investigator.
“I can look with a fresh eye at the police and see what they do. They’re not doing things right; haven’t done so for 20 years or more. The other problem is that when policemen do get involved in investigations, they steal the stuff themselves. They resell it and it’s back on the market.”
It’s this environment that Bolhuis believes has helped nourish the growing — and illegal — trade in steroids. “Steroids are extremely popular, especially among sportsmen,” he said. “The pressure to get bigger and better drives that.”
The quest to pack on size inevitably leads to experimentation and “stacking” — taking several steroids at once — and a dependence on performance-enhancing drugs. Bolhuis said making money overrides any ethical considerations for sportsmen. “If they can achieve it with steroids, they’ll do it.” His investigations have revealed that steroids are both imported and locally produced, with a growing trade in homemade blends.
“Steroids can sometimes be upped with drugs,” said Bolhuis. “That could be anything from ephedrine and cocaine to a touch of LSD. It could be a concoction. That’s what a lot of these guys do, especially those dealing in the underground. They want to be big, always exercise as little as possible, but swell up very big because they don’t want to train for hours and hours. They train a bit, but they bloat very quickly.”
Inevitably, Bolhuis tends to deal mostly with the messy end of steroids, where violence and murder have occurred. “We usually receive the cases at the end, where somebody has been killed or things have gone seriously wrong, where there were overdoses or where we get a tip-off about gangsters not loving each other any more. There’s no honour among criminals.”
* 'Guns and Needles', R270, is published by Penguin Random House
• Clinton van der Berg, the head of communications at SuperSport, is a former sports editor of the Sunday Times
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