On July 13 of 2017, a man by the name of Trace Adams was sentenced to more than 10 years in prison by the judges of Victoria County after being found guilty of multiple counts of the intention to distribute controlled substances, in this case illegal and illicit steroids.
According to court reports and the case brought forward by the prosecution, Mr. Adams was running any legal steroid trafficking ring out of his home that he shared with his father and his mother in Victoria County, Texas.
Police were first tipped off about this illicit steroid ring after an informant gave them inside information about a local fitness center that was selling illegal anabolic steroids out of the back room. Police almost immediately began implementing a sting operation and sent in multiple undercover agents over a six month block of time to purchase these drugs directly from Mr. Adam and some of his associates.
Nearly $40,000 in cash was handed over during these transactions and after Mr. Adams was busted by police and had his home searched by local police officers another $36,000 were discovered and seized through civil forfeiture. Interestingly enough, this civil forfeiture seizure was a big part of the defense of Mr. Adams, as his mother testified that she had learned through a variety of different police connections that the entire reason her son was being targeted was so that the police department could legally steal this money through the process of civil forfeiture and that’s why the prosecution was working so hard to send him away.
This defense was further bolstered by the defense attorney for Mr. Adams who stated to jurors that the police agents that pulled over the defendant for no reason whatsoever on the day that he was busted. The illegal steroids that were found inside of Mr. Adams vehicle were used to further improve the case against him, though the defense attorney argued that the evidence that was found during this search was inadmissible because they had pulled over his client without any reasonable cause whatsoever.
All of this legal wrangling and back and forth eventually became moved when Mr. Adams came forward and admitted to his part in both the possession of misdemeanor amounts of illegal steroids and his role as the point man for a major distribution network for these kinds of steroids as well.
This admission didn’t come early in the case, however, is right up until the middle of the trial Mr. Adams had been using a defense of his girlfriend planting the drugs in his vehicle to frame him – a defense that he had used in 2011 when he was caught with methamphetamine in his vehicle.
It wasn’t until after Mr. Adams realize just how ironclad the case against him was that he decided to start singing a different tune. He immediately became a lot more cooperative with the prosecution, begin to work with the local police department to better understand the illegal drug trade in the area, and offered to do all of this in exchange for a more lenient sentence than the one that he was staring down.
It turned out that Mr. Adams did in fact receive a more lenient sentence than the one that was initially proposed. During sentencing, Mr. Adams was told by the Assistant District Attorney. that he was pushing for 50 years in prison for these offenses and only because of his cooperation were the officials in law enforcement able to agree to reduce this penalty down to 10 years (with the possibility for parole) and a relatively small monetary fine of just $10,000.
