I called the recruiting director at Altis, Andreas Behm, who also coaches the sprinters and hurdlers. Bidlow and Mossberg, he said, had simply “gone rogue.” The elite training center, he insisted, had no larger problem with doping.

‘Losing a True Hero’

The investigation of Moorcones stalled last year. The United States attorney in Phoenix had taken a hard look and given up because a federal agency — the F.D.A. or the D.E.A. — was not willing to bring a case. His distribution of peptides, they apparently decided, was not worth prosecuting. A lawyer for Moorcones demanded immunity for his client.

Moorcones shut down his website and claimed online that he was ill. Worried customers speculated that his own drugs had sickened him. “I feel for the guy,” one customer wrote. “The community of illegal experimental medicine is losing a true hero.”

Other clients speculated correctly that Mann was under investigation; they began to worry that their names had fallen into the hands of law enforcement. They were correct.

Moorcones politely bid everyone goodbye. “I’ve enjoyed serving everyone through the years,” he wrote on his Authentiquevie site.

Within months, investigators noticed that one of Moorcones’s prominent, high-volume customers had taken his business to a dealer in Florida, where anti-aging clinics peddling peptides and hormones grow like sugar cane. Other clients turned to an oft-investigated but still active peptide trafficker in Louisiana.

There was still much investigators did not understand about Moorcones’s operation. He distributed such massive volumes of illicit substances, but they were never able to determine the source of the drugs. Was he purchasing them from somewhere and reselling to athletes, or was he somehow manufacturing them himself? And were his parents aware of what they were shipping?