Hi-Tech CEO Draws 50 Month Prison Sentence
A link to this MSNBC report popped into my inbox just a few hours ago…
Writing the final chapter in a strange criminal saga, a federal judge has sentenced the president of a Georgia company that manufactures popular lines of herbal dietary supplements to 50 months in prison for illegally selling knockoff prescription drugs over the Internet.
U.S. District Judge Jack T. Camp also fined Hi-Tech Pharmaceuticals CEO Jared Wheat $50,000 and ordered him, the company and other individual defendants to forfeit $3 million in proceeds from the scheme.
…As first reported by msnbc.com in April 2007, prosecutors initially accused Wheat of running a “continuing criminal enterprise” — a racketeering statute typically used to prosecute organized crime syndicates — that could have sent him to prison for a minimum of 20 years and resulted in the forfeiture of his company. That charge was dropped during plea negotiations.
Nice guy. Reading the article, it’s clear he got off easy. And this criminal conviction is in ADDITION to the FTC action against him/Hi-Tech discussed in an earlier post.
Not-so-coincidentally, I wrote this paragraph in my review of one of Hi-Tech’s bodybuilding supps last year:
The cartoon imagery is appropriate for a “cartoon” supplement: given the lack of any credible human studies or data, it’s tough to take Hi-Tech’s claims seriously. Not a single ingredient in Sustanon 250 has been shown to be “highly anabolic” or even “muscle sparing” in any credible human studies. If you’re an older person with declining serum DHEA-S levels, the DHEA component might be useful, but for everyone else…well, let’s just say that a little skepticism is in order.
It never ceases to amaze me, just how crooked some of these guys can be. No, I had no idea at the time just HOW slimy this guy and his company were, but let’s just say I’m not real surprised.
