Cash of steroid fraudster seized.

Byline: By Brenda Hickman

A Mr Big who masterminded a massive bogus steroids racket has had more than pounds 90,000 in assets seized by the courts.

Cancer sufferer Colin Dunn appeared on crutches when he was spared jail at Newcastle Crown Court for the racket.

Dunn, 65, who had been operating from a secret lab on a Tyneside industrial estate, has been forced to surrender cash and property, including an ML Mercedes Benz car.

Northumbria Police successfully applied for a confiscation order at court on Friday. Det Insp Phil Butler, of the force's economic crime unit, said: "We set out to seize assets which will be used to help in the fight against other criminals".

When police smashed the counterfeit steroids factory in North Tyneside it was estimated it had a potential earnings power of pounds 600,000.

Dunn, of Church Lane, Gosforth, Newcastle, set up the operation to con bodybuilders and raked in a fortune. He used a false name to rent Unit 11 at the Morgan Business Centre in Camperdown.

Dunn had paid cash for machinery and chemicals needed to make, bottle and pack the steroids. And he made sure the final products looked so much like the real thing his customers never realised they were counterfeit and from an unsterilised factory.

The crook collected payments in packets of cash sent to a Jesmond office centre, purportedly for a Tenerife property company, Newcastle Crown Court heard.

But police launched a surveillance operation on the unit where the metal shutters were always kept firmly down. They finally raided it in August 2003, and found the makeshift laboratory. Three men were arrested and admitted conspiracy to supply steroids between December 2000 and 2003.

Police were able to claw back a total of pounds 90,571.67p from Dunn in the successful confiscation order.

Judge Guy Whitburn told Dunn when he was sentenced last November: "You were the mastermind of a very sophisticated operation. It was clearly a profitable enterprise. It's difficult to say how profitable, but you were able to buy machines for cash and you also paid for the chemicals you required in cash".

He gave Dunn a two-year jail sentence but suspended it for two years after hearing he is seriously ill with cancer and heart disease.

Judge Whitburn told him: "You are only saved from going to prison by the fact you are suffering an extremely serious series of illnesses."

Another man was ordered to carry out 240 hours' community punishment and the third was given 100 hours' community punishment.

An indication of the scale of the operation was gleaned from inquiries which revealed Dunn had paid out pounds 3,000 in cash for printing labels and leaflets, pounds 10,000 for an ampoule-filling machine and a further pounds 5,000 for chemicals.