Rick Collins on Performance-Enhancing Drugs: Law, Sentencing, and Smarter Defense Strategies

Rachel Kugel: Hey, I’m Rachel Kugel and this is Rachel Defends You. Today I have such a special guest Rick Collins, the defense lawyer for the Fit and Jacked.He is a nationally recognized authority on federal steroid law, on performance enhancing drug cases.

He’s written extensively on the topics of all of those types of drugs, and he’s really become the foremost authority on these types of cases. He served on the sentencing commission for revising federal sentencing guidelines in steroid cases, and he’s consulted and appeared in the 2008 documentary, bigger, stronger, faster.

And he just knows all there is to know about performance enhancing drugs, steroids, et cetera, and their kind of convergence with the criminal court system. Rick and I met in court, so we really are, we’re not just out here talking about it, but we’re actually in the trenches every day. We met defending real life clients in real life court and I’m so excited to have him here today.

Thank you so much for joining me.

Rick Collins: Thank you for having me, Rachel.

Rachel Kugel: Rick, tell us first of all, like, how did you end up, I mean, I know a little bit about your background just because you become friendly. I know that you have been a regular criminal defense attorney like me, and then over the years really fell into this really cool niche that I think you’ve really gotten the control on in this market.

Tell us, how did you end up as the lawyer for the Fit and Jacked?

Rick Collins: Well first, when I saw you over at 100 Centre Street, which is, where I think you practice regularly and where I practiced for five years, pretty much every day I was in that building. Five years straight handling bread and butter criminal defense cases, mostly for indigent clients.

Prior to that, I was in the district attorney’s office, so I was a prosecutor in the Nassau DA’s office, and came to the side of light, as they say. But when you first come to that side of light, you really need to build the private practice. And one way for lawyers to do that is to do assigned counsel work. And so I did that in Manhattan. Many of the best war stories of your career will be from those assigned cases. I was feeling nostalgic when I saw you because I was in a building I hadn’t been in in decades, because my practice has changed.

And I was looking at courtrooms and jury rails where I could remember many years ago delivering the summation of my life.

And you know, here it is now there are new lawyers standing at that rail who will never know about that summation. It actually made me think about all the lawyers who came before me who may have stood at that rail and delivered,litigated and argued their hearts out, sort of same place, just separated by the dimension of time.

I was feeling nostalgic that day. It was nice to be back there. I remembered so many great memories in that building. I think we go through different phases of life, whether it’s high school, college or law school for us. And then for some, it’s either legal aid, a prosecutor or an entry level legal job.

Rachel Kugel: And then little by little you find the right path. And for me, as you know, Rachel, as we talked about. You’re fit and jacked.

Rick Collins: Yeah. I was competitive. I competed in a separate track from my professional career. I’ve had a diverse life of passion.

I was an actor for a while and I’ve done a lot of television and movie low budget stuff. But I was a competitive bodybuilder. So I came from the background of health and fitness, of diet and exercise, nutrition and training and all the discipline that comes from being a competitive bodybuilder.

 I’ve written an article about how I think bodybuilding made me a better lawyer because you really do learn lessons of perseverance, discipline and sacrifice and overcoming obstacles, whether it’s an injury or an illness. You really learn how to adapt and persevere.

So that was my track separate from the law. Like I said,I did five years of mostly assigned council work and then gradually began to build a private practice with my partners. Over the years, and I’m not saying it was any great imagination or foresight on my part.Sometimes things just happen organically and if you just follow what you’re passionate about and what you’re interested in, life takes you in an interesting way.

And it’s ironic because the year that I went into private practice, which was 1990, was the same year that the United States Congress decided that anabolic steroids should be treated like heroin and cocaine and put into the same federal statute, the Controlled Substances Act with all these more traditional drugs of abuse.

And suddenly you had a disconnect between the guys in the trenches, in the gyms who were using these things with the idea that maybe they were training aids or super vitamins but didn’t really think of themselves as drug criminals. And now the courts, the law enforcement agents, the prosecutors, the judges, and even the defense lawyers had no idea.

There was a complete disconnect and an information gap, and so I created a website called steroidlaw.com to try to bridge that gap and that led to me becoming a monthly columnist for a bodybuilding magazine called Muscular Development Magazine that I wrote for 25 years. That led to me writing a book called Legal Muscle, which is a book about

Rachel Kugel: That’s a great title.

Rick Collins: Yeah. About kind of steroid culture, law, policy, medicine, health, et cetera. Ultimately to appear with a lot of other great, informed people in bigger, stronger, faster, the documentary on steroids.

I’m just very blessed that my practice has morphed. I do miss those days in 100th Centre Street for sure. But most of my practice now is federal cases. I think I told you in court, I think I’ve counted that I’ve practiced law or been involved in the defense of steroid and related cases in 40 different federal courthouses. It might even be more now spread out across the country.

Rachel Kugel: The thing is you’ve become known for this and hyper niched for this, that you are literally the guy we might be sitting both in New York, but if someone gets in trouble in California, they can call you.

You might have to co-counsel or whatever with boots on the ground. But the point is, you’re the guy that the big guns call in when they get popped for something like this. And I think that’s why I’m so excited to have you, it’s such a specialized area of law, criminal law in general touches drugs often, right?

I mean, that’s just the nature of the beast. We deal a lot in substance issues and substance use. I’m interested to know your thoughts on why performance enhancing drugs are illegal? Because it’s kind of counterintuitive in a way. We think of drugs as something that has a deleterious effect on one’s abilities and causes people to rob houses to get money for the drugs and do all kinds of other illicit things. We think of drugs as this sort of negative component. When we talk about performance enhancing drugs, even that term performance enhancing, can you shed any light on why are these drugs illegal?

What’s the policy behind that? What’s the idea behind that?

Rick Collins: So there’s a great quote from a former prosecutor from San Diego who once said, nobody ever knocked over a liquor store for anabolic steroids, right? So you don’t have the same association with societal, urban decay or people laying in an alley and not showing up for work or anything like that.

But the story of how steroids became criminalized as controlled substances doesn’t get told very often, and most people don’t know it. The secret of it is that in 1988, there was the Olympics in Seoul, Korea, and a Canadian sprinter by the name of Ben Johnson became the fastest man alive, and he ran the hundred meters, broke all the world records, beat the American Carl Lewis.

And then tested positive for anabolic steroids. Before that, there had begun to become some whispers that in sports people were using these performance enhancing chemicals to get an advantage. So there was this equitable issue that was arising. And then when Ben Johnson beat the American, the sports journalist world went absolutely crazy.

The United States Congress responded by holding hearings in the late eighties. Interestingly, the DEA, the American Medical Association, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the FDA, all sent representatives to say, steroids don’t belong in the Controlled Substances Act.

But Congress wanted to get steroids out of sports, and their solution to do that was to criminalize them.

But it’s interesting because it’s almost like the tail wagging the dog. Because the percentage of people who are using steroids to cheat in sports, in drug tested sports is a minority. The overwhelming majority of people who use anabolic steroids for non-medical reasons are using them for cosmetic reasons.

They’re using them to look more fit or jacked. People who want a better looking body, who want a six pack, who want a bigger chest, who want a stronger bench press. And we live in a very vain society. Every drug has side effects. Steroids outside of a medical context and without any supervision or monitoring or review for contraindications before.

The use is not good. We don’t wanna encourage people to use drugs in a self-help way. The risks and dangers were secondary to this idea of cheating, of people getting a leg up on each other in sports. And it’s ironic that most of my clients, through the years.

I’ve represented athletes accused of doping and professional athletes of various kinds on allegations of cheating in sports. But the vast majority of my clients and the vast majority of the population who are being arrested for anabolic steroids are really gym rats. People who want to look better.

 Maybe they’re insecure about their body. Maybe they want go beyond what nature intended. But I’ve always said that there’s a great analogy to Botox and liposuction and filling.

Rachel Kugel: And now the GLP ones and all that.

Rick Collins: A hundred percent. We celebrate those things even though there can be medical issues, but for some it’s just vanity.

Rachel Kugel: And a lot of people are at the ozempic and all that are just going for a weight loss kind of thing.

I remember being at 100 Centre Street and there would be units of the prosecutor’s office that were designed to be out there, you know, narc units that were out there looking for drug cases and street drugs and street crime.

Are there units of the federal prosecutor’s office that are looking for that. That’s the other thing I’m wondering, I mean,how much effort are we spending in America to bind gym rats that are using steroids?

Rick Collins: Right. So I don’t think that there’s a huge push at this point to get the users.Although, I’ve represented people. who were personal users of steroids. Let’s say a guy orders a package of steroids from China or Thailand, and this was very common probably 20 years ago. Now the market has changed and it’s mostly people who import the powders, make them into injectable products here in the United States, and then sell them on social media. But back years ago, they were mostly importing finished product. Steroid users are pack rats. It’s a very different profile from the crackhead who goes out, buys some crack, gets high, gets sober, goes out and gets some more crack, comes back.

So steroids are used typically in cycles. So it’s a pre-planned period of weeks or even months of use, and sometimes it can be very complicated. Titrating doses with polypharmacy and stacking of steroids. And so they will often purchase enough.

So that they can make it through the whole cycle. So suddenly the guy imports a thousand tablets of steroids and I’ve actually seen local police saying, oh my, we’ve got a big time to, they’re looking at ’em as if it’s a thousand tabs of ecstasy, but it’s not. This is one cycle. I was involved in a lot of those cases.

Rachel Kugel: That’s interesting. ‘Cause so much of the law and sentencing guidelines and all that is really about weights and whether things are for personal use. So that’s a very interesting legal component to all this.

Personal use is actually like a lot as opposed to an eighth or a quarter of weed as it used to be. But now it’s a bag of gummies or whatever. That’s an interesting legal issue that arises.

A lot of times, legislators make laws without thinking necessarily about the day to day. Then the law itself has to kind of catch up.

Rick Collins: Hundred percent. And I don’t see as many personal users arrested. When law enforcement does go after steroids, it’s typically for the underground labs, the guys who are making it and selling it and sometimes making a lot of money out of it.

And I’ve represented people who’ve made millions of dollars in trafficking and steroids. But you occasionally do get a car stop where there’s a gym bag filled with steroids. It’s a guy’s personal use. It’s a controlled substance. And so he’s getting charged with that or I’ve seen the girlfriend or wife who’s disgruntled for whatever reason, and calls up the police and you know, she’s maybe in the process of divorcing him or getting him outta the house or whatever.

And suddenly she turns over his steroid stash and there’s an arrest there. I’ve seen that, but mostly it is people who are importing the raw powders from China. Usually to a remailer who has nothing in the house so that there’s can be a claim, but I didn’t order this, I don’t know anything about this.

Once it comes into the country, then to sell it, to send it to the cook, who then esterifies the steroids and lookI’ve represented people who are underground chemists, lab guys who are fastidious and meticulous about quality control.So that, that’s phenomenal.

Still wouldn’t in any way condone buying something that was made by somebody in their kitchen or basement and injecting it into your muscles, but I’ve also seen those who were not very fastidious. In federal discovery, I might get videos taken of the lab during the execution of the search warrant, and you’ll see the cat walking over the various speakers and you’re saying to yourself, oh my God, somebody is injecting this into their body.

I’ve always said that we don’t want to encourage people to use drugs without a medical reason. But on the other hand, I think the controlled factor, criminalizing steroids really did a lot to disconnect the medical community away from steroids. Steroid users are less likely to go to doctors and tell their doctors about what they’re doing.

They’re more likely to go to the black market and buy substandard products. I think the law probably made steroid use more dangerous than it would’ve been if Congress had just left it alone.

Rachel Kugel: Yeah. And created a whole black market and that’s outside of taxes and everything else as well.

Rick Collins: I mean, it’s something that could have been taxed and part of the country’s revenue as well. It’s funny.You’d think we would’ve learned from alcohol prohibition that if there’s a demand, there will be a supply, and if you cut off the legitimate demand. What happens, you get a black market supply and it’s usually worse for it was Al Capone and bathtub gin and all of the things that were worse than the original.

I think we started to realize that with marijuana at some point and starting to roll it back, but we haven’t really done that with steroids, which is kind of ironic.

Rachel Kugel: It is ironic and it’s hard to see the sort of public policy wisdom of it because it doesn’t cause the street crime and the broken windows idea, you know, it’s not part of that.

So it’s hard to see, you know, I don’t know, it’s maybe just a runaway train from the sports. It’s hard to see the sort of wisdom of it. Can you speak to, I mean, I know you’re not a doctor yourself, but just having been in this field for as long as you have, like for someone like me who is not fit nor jacked. What is an anabolic steroid exactly? Like how does it work? What is it?

Rick Collins: Sure. So all anabolic steroids. Well, when we say the word steroid. Steroids a very broad term. Estrogen is a steroid.

Grandma’s prednisone tablets, those are all steroids.

Rachel Kugel: And there’s growth hormone too.

Rick Collins: So that’s a little different. We can talk about that too. But for steroids, all anabolic steroids are more accurately called androgenic anabolic steroids.

So it’s a combination. Those are the two components of the type of steroid that’s used for physical enhancement. Anabolic means muscle building. So it enhances protein synthesis and makes your muscles bigger and stronger. Androgenic is masculinizing because testosterone is the granddaddy of all anabolic steroids and it’s present in all of our bodies.

Every man, woman, and child has it. And it’s really what makes masculinity in the human species, right? So you have this dual component of it, which is why women who use anabolic steroids, anabolic androgenic steroids may become more, have some side effects of visualization, more so than men because it’s so far into the female body.

So when you take anabolic steroids, you get these positive effects, at least enhanced muscle building. The problems with them is that every drug has side effects, right? And very often the danger of a drug and side effects is the dose. So the more the dose, the greater the potential negative effects.

Some people who use anabolic steroids want the maximum physical enhancement. So they accept the maximum risks. There are risks to the heart and potentially the liver, if it’s oral steroids, injectables don’t really affect the liver that much, but orals do. And so there’s some greater possibility of stroke and heart attack, especially at higher levels. Plus, when you take anabolic steroids, you shut down the body’s natural biofeedback loop, saying, Hey, I’ve got all these circulating androgens in my bloodstream. Let’s shut down. And so the testes kind of go on vacation. They go out to the Caribbean and relax for a while in the sun, which causes some other problems, including potential infertility issues, temporary, possibly permanent in some rare cases, as well as other side effects that come from it.

Testosterone also metabolizes in the body into estrogen to some degree so that some men can get puffiness around the chest, which is like an estrogenic.

You know, weird estrogenic, reverse effect. Also, one of the metabolites of testosterone is dihydrotestosterone, which is a more harsh chemical. So you can sometimes see guys who use a lot of steroids get some acne, especially on the back and on the face. So there’s certainly cosmetic side effects and some potentially serious side effects, mostly dose related.

Again, encouraging the medical context for all of this would be a lot better than sending people to the black market and buying it from Big Joe on Instagram, right?

Rachel Kugel: And you always hear about roid rage and all of that. I remember in high school, guys would get into fights. I’m from the West coast, and people would be like, oh, they’re roid raging and that’s why they were getting in these crazy fights. Is that a real thing? Because even as we’re talking about potential legal problems, it would seem to me that legal exposure, certainly for possession, as you pointed out, certainly larger exposure for someone who’s in a lab creating or transporting, that kind of thing.

But then I would imagine there’s also this trickle down exposure where maybe you’re seeing more in domestic violence things and fights or is that just myth?

Rick Collins: So there’s research that shows that there’s a very small percentage of steroid users who seem to have some psychiatric effects, hypomanic behavior at high doses, usually a dose of over a thousand milligrams a week, which is probably five to 10 times what natural replacement of your own body’s levels would be. So again, high dose related, but that’s a very small percentage.

Rachel Kugel: Oh really? So it get that, ’cause that gets played up a lot.

Rick Collins: Well, yeah. The media plays up roid rage and frames up teens using steroids. So whenever I hear from journalists, they’re usually looking for something about those two things. And what I say is, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but most steroid users are not teens.

Most of the non-medical steroid users are people in their twenties, thirties, and forties who want to look better. And in terms of roid rage, it’s kind of rare and even the psychiatric experts who’ve talked about it say that it’s largely a media created myth. Now, can testosterone affect certain behavioral aspects?

It can. It can make people a little bit more aggressive, more assertive in some people. Testosterone is linked to status seeking behavior. That’s probably the best way to describe it.

Rachel Kugel: I’m shocked to hear that.

Rick Collins: Right. And that’s true in all species. So it’s funny if you give. If you put five male monkeys into a cage. They will quickly create a hierarchy so that the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 in pecking order. If you take that third monkey and they’ve done this experiment, if you take that third monkey and you inject him with a boatload of steroids he will become much more aggressive, not to one and two, but only to four and five because it’s following pre-existing social patterns, but just makes him more assertive to those.

But he doesn’t challenge the higher one. So it’s much more complicated than just this crazy kind of rage. A lot of people in the steroid community will say that steroids will typically make most people more of what they were. So if you were a a-hole at 180 pounds and now you’re 240 pounds, you have a lot more weight to throw around.

Rachel Kugel: You’re just gonna be a 240 pound asshole, right?

Rick Collins: Yes.You’ll be a bigger asshole than you were before. But if you are not that way and obviously I know thousands of steroid users from years and I find most are not that way. Most steroid users, if you look at the demographics,are gainfully employed, higher educated than the average, nationally. Very often in stable relationships. Many married. Who are doing it purely because of maybe the same sort of insecurity that makes somebody get Botox or liposuction or something like that.

We live in a very appearance conscious society. And so steroids are kind of just another facet to that.I like to say that social media, put steroids on steroids.

Rachel Kugel: Yeah, sure. It creates whole worlds and communities whereas maybe someone wouldn’t have known how, like when I, again, growing up in high school, I think the people that were doing it or looking for it were maybe going to Mexico, crossing the border that way.

Now literally an entire world is open to people. And I think it’s probably good and bad. I mean, it’s probably good in the sense that at least there’s people to talk to and to create some sort of cycles and getting all that information.

On the other hand, from a criminal standpoint, there’s probably a lot more in writing. It’s probably not great. That’s probably not, I’m just thinking like the criminal defense attorney that probably a lot more evidence out there. Than there was when guys met in their garage and had a weightlifting in their, you know.

Rick Collins: Yeah. Most of my cases are largely documentary in nature. because there will be payment processor records or emails or orders or packages. It’s not like the back alleys of some street heroin stuff.

Rachel Kugel: That’s really harder for you though, like that’s from a defense standpoint, that’s probably tougher. I mean, anything with more evidence is problematic for us. Are you seeing people get real time for this stuff?

Rick Collins: So I try to avoid that and I’ve had an amazing track record of avoiding, minimizing. So there are federal sentencing guidelines that apply if you have, depending on the volume of steroids, it ascribes to the guidelines to a particular range of months in federal prison.

The federal volume cap for steroids is 60,000 units. So if you have 80,000 units or a hundred thousand units, it caps at the same place roughly without any other enhancements. You might be talking about three to four years prison for somebody with no priors who’s not a leader or organizer and who doesn’t have other exacerbating aspects, but of course the guidelines are advisory now.

They’re no longer mandatory and so good. This is the opportunity for good lawyering. Good lawyering can make a huge difference. I’ve seen situations where because of the nature of the polypharmacy of steroid users and traffickers. Very often the people who sell steroids are also selling different chemicals that mitigate some of those side effects we talked about.

Something to block the estrogen, limit the DHT, conversion and other things like that, fat burners, stimulants. It’s not uncommon for agents to really not understand what is a steroid under the legal definition, as opposed to just counting all of it and adding all of that up.

And so I’ve had the opportunity to carve out what the real pot of steroids are. There’s also things called SARMs, which are selective androgen receptor modulators, which are not steroids, but are very similar. There’s also something called pro hormones, which are like steroids.

Sometimes they are, and sometimes they’re not. So good lawyering from somebody who really knows.

Rachel Kugel: You have to know your shit, and if you’re lucky as with Rick, you probably, I’m guessing more often than not, know more than the prosecutor on the other side, which also allow, I mean, about this very specific issue.

Rick Collins: Yeah. There’s no doubt about it. And I get called in as a consultant by other lawyers too, and I enjoy doing that. I’ll get a call from, sometimes the client will know who I am and will say to his defense lawyer in Arizona. I need you to call Rick Collins and I’ll get a call from a defense lawyer who’ll be a great defense lawyer who’s a trial lawyer, knows his or her stuff, but really doesn’t know this terrain.

And the prosecutor also has, most prosecutors have never handled a steroid case, so they don’t know the overwhelming majority. And the agents. So you’ve got the DEA involved, but they know more about coke and heroin and ecstasy and molly, and the FDA that sometimes gets involved, but they’re limited in what they know as well.

So I have the opportunity to come in. And really set the table for where the baseline should be of what we’re talking about.

Rachel Kugel: And that can be the difference between winning and losing jail and no jail. You know, that makes a huge difference in outcome.

And I always say too, like, good lawyers know their stuff and great lawyers know when to look for that person who knows about that very specific issue, like you, that’s the time to call in someone like Rick and say, take a look at this case, consult on it, because that can make all the difference for a client.

Plus it gives that person a whole area of law that maybe you hadn’t really considered, which is cool.

Rick Collins: I play nice with others. I’ll tell you a quick, funny story. I was called in on a case very similar to this. Two Texas lawyers, great guys,very knowledgeable, experienced criminal defense lawyers in Texas, had a steroid case with a wonderful gentleman who became a good friend of mine. I’m probably one of the only criminal defense lawyers whose clients follow me on Instagram and often become my friends.

I’ll be at the Mr. Olympia competition this coming weekend in Las Vegas, where I’ll see many past clients and friends. SoI really do love what I do and rickcollinsesq on Instagram, anybody who wants to follow me can do it. So this guy was a great guy and the prosecutor was looking for an eight year sentence on a steroid case, which is heavy hit.

 And so the defense lawyers were trying to get him down to a three year sentence. And again,depending on the guidelines and the volume and all of that. So they called me in and I realized that a lot of what was being counted as steroids under the definition of federal law, were not steroids.

They were steroid alike, but they were not steroids. So I came in initially as a consultant and then I was asked by the defense lawyers and the client to actually become main counsel on the case. And it’s funny because here you have this New York lawyer in Texas but the prosecutor in the case was not a Texan.

He was from DC and he had been sent to Texas and he didn’t get along that well with the Texas lawyers, but we had this sort of East Coast bond. He was very smart, very aggressive, one of the best assistant US attorneys I’ve dealt with. I think I’m actually connected with him on LinkedIn now ’cause I was so impressed by him.

But he was very aggressive and he wanted that eight years and he was fighting. My position is this should be a probationary sentence because you are wildly over counting this. And it came down to these different arguments he would make. He called me up one day and he said, all right, how about this?

He gives me this argument of how to interpret the guidelines. I was like, wow. I’ve never heard that argument. It is brilliant. It’s wrong but it’s brilliant and I’m very impressed. He goes, well, why is it wrong? So we wound up actually calling the US sentencing commission hotline to get a ruling on the interpretation of the guidelines.

It didn’t go his way. He called me up, he’s like, what do you want? I said, I want probation. All right. Done. And the guy got straight probation. I have a lot of stories like that. Rachel, I love what I do. I’m passionate about what I do. A lot of the clients that I represent are people who have spotted me in the gym for 30 years. And so to be able to have the skills and the passion and the knowledge to help them in a way that they otherwise couldn’t be helped. I’m just grateful.

Rachel Kugel: I think it also points out, ’cause I say it all the time too, as a private attorney that focuses on DWI defense on my side.

You know, you go to Thanksgiving dinner and people are like, how can you do that? This is horrible. You’re defending these drunk drivers. You know, people don’t realize how much the system can wrap in nice, normal, regular people. Good people. Maybe they made a bad call, maybe they had a bad day.

Maybe they, you know, a bad judgment. They’re but for the grace of God, right? And they don’t realize until you’re in it, until God forbid it happens to you or someone you love. You know, you look at it as this outside thing of like, oh, you’re defending drunk driver. I wouldn’t be pro drunk driver if you pulled me and put it that way.

Nobody’s pro drunk driver. But the reality is that most of the people I deal with are good people who either are falsely accused, made a mistake, had a momentary lapse in judgment, but they’re good people. Whether you’re talking about performance enhancing drugs, or deleterious drugs or alcohol, the reality is these types of things in real life, you know, it’s not black and white, like law and order, right?

In real life these are good people for the most part. I can count on one hand the amount of people that came through my office that I couldn’t call good people. You know what I mean? So I think that’s something that people on the outside don’t realize, and maybe they’re embarrassed sometimes too, especially in cases where drugs are involved because they are nice, normal, regular people.

They’re working people, business owners, whatever. And then they gotta call up Rachel or Rick and say, oh, I got popped with this or that. I can only imagine that. It feels crappy to make that phone call. So having someone who doesn’t judge ’em, you know, I always say one of my things is we don’t judge you, we don’t lecture you, we defend you.

 Because that’s not my place and most people are nice, normal, regular, good people, in my humble opinion.

Rick Collins: Right. And it’s a lesson. They learn a harsh lesson. They pay a price for it. It’s not like you’re walking away. Even a client who doesn’t go to jail on a case, it can be life changing.

Rachel Kugel: Empowering to live through something.

Rick Collins: For somebody charged with a federal case, there is no expungement of federal cases unlike New York State’s Clean Slate Act. It rides with you to the grave. Every job application, every mortgage application, it is with you. You can’t get out from under it, and it’ll impact you if you did not a single day in jail, let’s say.

 I get it all resolved in a way and you get straight probation or something. It’s still a heavy hit for a lot of people, especially somebody who’s never been in trouble before.

Rachel Kugel: And living through, you know, your cases or federal cases for the most part. So living through like the full weight of the US government coming at you, like the US attorneys.

It’s very different people, again, that aren’t in this world don’t necessarily know that the feeling on a hundred center street in criminal court versus the feeling when you walk into a federal court, it’s a whole other ballgame. Very serious, the prosecutors are very professional.

You know, I do mostly DWIs in New York and New Jersey. That means that very often it’s the prosecutor’s first trial. That’s what they give you, right? They’re not giving somebody a murder on day one. They’re giving them DUI. So that’s what I’m dealing with.

I’m not saying they’re not great, wonderful, smart, intelligent, whatever, but you walk into the US Attorney’s Office, there’s like dress codes and there’s just a whole different heaviness to it. And I’ve been on both sides of it and playing in that field is just a whole other level.

I can imagine for a client, especially someone who’s not a criminal and has never been in that experience, just living through that weight is life changing.

Rick Collins: Yeah. And it affects the family too.

And what we do for all the occasional bashing we take from the general public, I feel real good about it. And I know you do too.

Rachel Kugel: For sure. I wanted to talk just quickly about the DUI thing, ’cause that is my shtick. I’ve never seen a DUI on steroids. That’s a good book.

Rick Collins: That’ll be my next one.

Rachel Kugel: Good title. But I’ve never seen a DWI on steroids.

And I started thinking, just with the idea of having you coming on, is it possible? Could it happen? It is a controlled substance so it falls under its category. Do you think it’s possible? I mean, I can give you my take on it, but I’m curious.

They’d have to show that it had a negative impact. I think it would be really difficult.

Rick Collins: Steroids are typically recognized to have minimal psychoactive effects. So the whole concept of steroid use is not an immediate response.

It’s not like coke or molly. It’s that taking it over a period of time builds a physical change rather than any kind of psychiatric or psychological change. I agree with you on that, but I’ll give you something very interesting that was occurring for a period of time in Europe, in some Scandinavian countries, and that was something called Muscle Profile.

And so parts of Scandinavia were very much anti PED, anti any kind of performance drug and anti steroid. It came to the point where gyms needed to identify themselves as drug tested gyms or non-drug tested gyms. There would be a smiley face put on the outside of a gym

if they were doing drug testing and a frowny. So of course the police knew where to go to get steroids at the frowny gym, there were even reports that they were going through people’s cars in the parking lot. There was a very celebrated case in Sweden where a young fit and jacked guy was walking down the street meets a lady, the lady, and he have some conversation. She’s admiring his trapezius muscles, and he doesn’t realize initially that she’s an undercover cop. She walks him back to the police station where she has him take a urine test under the theory that his traps were so big that it was an indication similar to a drunk driving analogy, right?

So if you stop the car, bloodshot eyes, glassy, flushed face, smell of an alcoholic beverage on the breath. These are indications for probable cause to believe that the person is impaired by alcohol. Well, her position was that these external were probable cause for him to be arrested for drug use for steroid use. And it wound up that he tested negative, he just had big traps.

See that sometimes a big trap is just a big trap. So there was a lot of review of whether this is a good thing or a bad thing.

Is muscularity a physical attribute indicative of drug use? I think they discontinued the practice after a while. I hope that’ll ever happen in the United States.

Rachel Kugel: Just thinking about it myself, I feel like it would be difficult because first of all, you’ve got performance enhancing drugs.

Part of DWI is showing that a drug has a deleterious effect on your ability to operate a car. I don’t think there’s anything that would do that in these drugs. There’s nothing that would make your reflexes be slowed or anything like that.

So I think that would be difficult. I also think as a purely evidentiary matter, even though it’s a controlled substance and it falls into that category. DWIs with drugs are proven with these drug recognition experts and it’s a problem with their methodology.

They only have like seven categories to choose from. And I don’t think this would fall into one of those categories. I don’t think it would fit into their box. On the other hand, I could certainly see, and I have represented people accused of DV, assaults and things like that, where someone on the other side tried to allege that steroids were part of that. Whether they were or not is another story, but certainly was part of the prosecutor’s theory, I’ve even had some sexual assault type cases where they tried to allege again that the steroid use was part and parcel of that.

Rick Collins: And I’ve seen those cases too. Sure.

Rachel Kugel: Yeah. I could also see instead of, you know, I get road rage cases, reckless drivings and criminal mischiefs and then I could see something like that maybe, you know, where they tried to allege storage involved. But a pure DWI, I’m gonna say, is gonna be a no go and it would be very difficult for the state.

Rick Collins: Yeah. How would they prove it? They’d have to prove that there were these drugs in his system. These steroids in his system, which might have been there from weeks earlier or months earlier.

Rachel Kugel: And which would’ve enhanced his performance.

Rick Collins: Yeah. Well, I mean, there are some claims that even hand-eye coordination in some sports is improved by some of these performance enhancing drugs. So, yeah, I don’t think they’d be able to do that.

Rachel Kugel: Plus I think it’s a limitation of, and it’s an interesting point on that DRE program, it’s a limitation of that, they claim these DRE guys are experts and, you know, drug involvement with the way individuals act, but it’s limited ’cause they only have seven boxes to choose from. So I think they’d have a problem there. So I know I’ve seen you on other podcasts and I know you’ve got some crazy stories. Do you have a crazy story you could share with us?

Like what’s one crazy good one that you’ve got?

Rick Collins: So I’ll circle back to kind of close where we started at 100 Centre Street.

Rachel Kugel: Love it. So lots of crazy things happen on 100th Centre Street.

Rick Collins: Oh man. We could share some stories about that, I’m sure. So there was a judge at one time who, because I was a bigger guy and coming out of the bodybuilding world, she would assign me the clients, the 18B clients who had either attacked or threatened their previous lawyers. And she took great delight when I would walk into her courtroom on one case.

Mr. Collins, so good to see you step up. I have the perfect client. He’s custom made for you. He’s sitting in the back, in the pens behind the courtroom. I should warn you. He’s very, very angry. His case is on for trial next week, and I expect you to be ready. He’s charged with robbery, drug sale and possession of a gun but I think you and he are gonna get along, famously, go in the back and see him.

As you know, you can’t turn down when a judge asks you to accept an assigned case. And so in the back I went and there he was in the little cage behind the courtroom. I went up to the bars and said, Mr. Williams, please step up. My name is Rick Collins. I’m gonna be a lawyer in this case. He was sitting on the bench and looked at me with his head half cocked for a little while. And didn’t respond initially. I’m looking at his paperwork and I see that he was, this is many years ago, an undercard professional boxer for Mike Tyson’s fights.

So he was a middleweight. But obviously a guy with some skills, who probably lost some of those skills, got involved in the drug trade and had unfortunate slide downward until he is on the street in a drug deal, gone bad with a gun. I said, please step up.

I want to talk to you a little bit. So he comes up and he’s standing there and he is looking at me eye to eye. And I said, listen, my name is Rick Collins. I don’t know what happened between you and your last lawyers. That has nothing to do with me. We’re gonna start fresh. Okay.

Your case is on trial next week, and I’m talking nicely to him about all the things I’m gonna do for him. And as I’m talking, he’s beginning to look angrier and his browse frowning more and he’s beginning to move a little bit closer to the bars. I ignore it and I keep going.

I said, we’re gonna pick a jury and it’s gonna be a jury of our peers. We’re gonna choose some jurors we may like and some jurors we won’t. If we don’t, we’ll talk about that and we’ll get rid of those jurors. We have certain peremptory challenges and challenges for cost, and I’m explaining the jury process to him now.

He’s getting closer to the bars and now he’s beginning to shake his head slightly from side to side as he is talking to me. And looking angrier than before. I go into the burden of proof. They’re gonna have to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt. They need a unanimous jury.

If the jury doesn’t find you guilty, beyond a reasonable doubt, we win. He’s moved a little bit closer to the bars and now he’s beginning to bite his bottom lip as he’s shaking his head and going back and forth. And now I’m going into, you don’t have to testify. No inference can be drawn.

I’m trying to do everything to just create some kind of connection with him so it’s not working. And so now he’s actually looking at me. Like he’s gonna hit me, the bars are far enough apart that I’m wearing a tie. He can get one hand, grab the tie, pull me to the bars. The guy was a middleweight boxer.

I mean, he’s gonna get 20 shots at me, face shots in before I can even pull away. Now I outweighed him by 40 pounds. If I was in there with him, I quickly over, I was a bouncer for many years. I’d have done a number on ’em inside, but in this context, I’m dead.

 So I ignore it. But at some point I can see this isn’t working, what am I gonna do? So I just, intuitively, made a decision, so I just stopped talking completely.

And I just looked at him and I moved closer to the bars. I began shaking my head and I began thorough my brow and I started biting my lip.

 And our faces got closer and he was looking at me like he’s about to hit me. And I was ready to hit him. He knew that I knew that he was close enough to the bars and I was moving forward. It was probably about 90 seconds where nobody said anything and we were just facing each other, making crazy eyes, biting our lips and shaking our heads at each other.

Then after about 90 seconds of that, I stopped and I looked at him. I said, do you want to talk about this case now?

And he went, yeah, I’d like to do that.

And from that moment on. We got along, we picked our jury, we tried our case. He was acquitted of the robbery. He was acquitted of the drug sale.

He got all the B felonies. He was acquitted on. He got the D felony lesser. When the time came, he got sentenced. He tried to hug me in the courtroom. And I said to myself, he wanted to see that the lawyer was standing up for him against the government, the federal government, or the state, it’s not a fair fight, right?

 They’ve got the resources. So he wanted to know that his lawyer would at least stand up. That wouldn’t be afraid, wouldn’t back down, wouldn’t cave, wouldn’t fold, would actually stand up. And if I couldn’t stand up to him, how could I stand up to the power of the state?

Rachel Kugel: That’s a beautiful point. When you’re dealing with difficult clients that is a good pushback to say, look, if I don’t push back with you. Then what chance do you have that I’m pushback with them.

 And I think that’s a good point. Plus people are really in a situation where they’re powerless and sometimes you have to do something to try to pull that power back. That’s fantastic. That’s amazing.

Yeah. Someday we’ll sit down, we’ll go through some more. I’m sure you’ll have some great ones too. We’ll be on a bench in a courtroom somewhere and have plenty of time to talk. God willing. Thank you so much. So before I let you go, just say where people can find you. I’m gonna put it all in the show notes too. But just if they’re listening to this, where can they find you?

Rick Collins: So I’m probably most active on Instagram, so they can find me.

Rachel Kugel: And it’s a great Instagram, by the way. It’s not a boring lawyer Instagram. So if you’re a lawyer doing marketing like I do, he’s a good one to follow for that too.

Because you see also the whole idea of really letting someone in on your life, you know, people hire those they know, like, and trust. And it’s not just you sitting there being a boring lawyer.

Rick Collins: Right. And it’s just who I am. And my clients like it too. They like to see my training videos.

They like to see how I’m doing in the gym. I put up some of my acting stuff.

Rachel Kugel: They can really know you.

Rick Collins: So I do that. It’s rickcollinsesq. I have a website devoted to my federal practice called rickcollins.com. So you can just go there. My phone number’s there.

My phone number’s on my Instagram as well. If you need me, I’m here. So thank you so much Rachel, for having me.

Rachel Kugel: Thank you so much. I can’t thank you enough. You’ve been amazing. Your stories are incredible and if you ever find yourself fit and jacked for the wrong reasons, call Rick and he’ll help you get it right. Thanks.