Some time in February 2015, a promising young Auckland cricketer visited the website clenbuterol.co.nz. He bought three 10-millilitre bottles. One contained trenbolone acetate, a steroid used mostly to promote muscle growth in cattle; another held testosterone enanthate​, one of a variety of testosterone-based products that have some permitted uses in New Zealand, such as in female-to-male gender reassignment procedures; the third had the website's marquee product: clenbuterol. A decongestant used to treat asthma but also effective at enhancing weight loss. The three products cost about $300.

"I didn't put too much emphasis on if it was legal or not legal," the man said.

"If it's there and people are buying it, you know friends have used it or whatever, it's all been certified to use with visa purchases and you're getting it delivered you can kind of expect it not to be illegal."

It was illegal. The purveyor of the drugs would soon be arrested, convicted and jailed for two years and about 100 of his customers would be identified as athletes potentially in violation of their sport's anti-doping laws. The cricketer and many of Townshend's other customers spoken to by Stuff attested to the website's apparent legitimacy. Not that everything was entirely legal, just less sketchy-looking. When they made contact, someone emailed straight back. If they bought something, it arrived in the mail a few days later. Most of these sorts of websites were more anonymous than that. "It said .co.nz on the end," one customer said, "It didn't say .org or .com."

"It was strange," said another, "You see these things online all the time, but nothing to the sort of professional level these guys are doing it."

"I'd never personally ever seen anything like it."

READ MORE: * Christchurch high-flyer's illegal body-building drugs business ends in jail * Doping investigation nets up to 100 New Zealand athletes * 'Do the crime – take the punishment', says former NZ sevens player banned for doping breaches

'Professional' was probably overdoing it. Clenbuterol.co.nz was the brainchild of one man: Joshua Francis Townshend, a former army recruit and hairdresser from Christchurch. Townshend had already been caught with steroids and manufacturing and packing equipment in 2013. A year later he was cautioned in writing after Medsafe, the medical regulatory body run by the Ministry of Health, intercepted a package containing 900 tablets of metandienone – a type of steroid. Undeterred, he went on to set up clenbuterol.co.nz, registering for the domain name as Aaron Clarke of 21 Jump St, Darfield. In the face of further search warrants, seizures, Facebook blocks and domain shutdowns, he continued to sell performance and image-enhancing (PIED) drugs.

Eventually, he would preside over an unprecedented drug-dealing operation, carving a deep, tenticular reach in New Zealand sport. He imported raw ingredients and manufactured them into drugs himself. He arranged with six friends to use bank accounts in their names for payments. In one year, the website cleared $350,000 in sales.

"He's smart, but he's dumb," said one person who knew him at the time.

"He's got the brains. He just uses them for the wrong things."

Clenbuterol.co.nz started life on July 11, 2014, when Townshend registered it using the fake name and fake 1980s TV-inspired address. It wasn't exactly a covert operation. He had been advertising on Facebook since that April, and started the dedicated 'NZ Clenbuterol' Facebook page, with a link to the website, in late June. "We provide same day and overnight shipping of liquid Clenbuterol for research purposes within New Zealand," the website said.

It was flagged almost immediately. Police got a tip-off about the website via the Crimestoppers hotline and referred it on to Medsafe the same month. Also in July, Facebook emailed Townshend to inform him his ad had been declined because it promoted a health product that claimed to result in an ideal body/physical image. Townshend ignored the warning and kept placing ads until Facebook disabled his account that November. Facebook also removed his NZ Clenbuterol page three times for the same reason. Each time, Townshend started a new page.

In the meantime, Medsafe alerted Shopify, the shop front hosting clenbuterol.co.nz, and Townshend was forced to move to another provider, Big Commerce, shortly afterwards. Big Commerce took the website offline in September 2015, without any prompting from Medsafe. Townshend was forced to register a new domain name – www.enzed.gear.com – under a new pseudonym to keep selling his product.

The electronic trail may have left little doubt Townshend was peddling steroids online, but to build a stronger case, Medsafe needed physical evidence that that was actually what he was doing. On August 25, 2014, a man named Kim Richards sent Townshend an email: "can you get me other gear to get me big." Townshend replied with a list of products and prices. On September 2, Richards ordered one bottle of testosterone enanthate for $120. A month later the parcel was delivered.

Kim Richards didn't exist. Neither did Jamie Small or Sam White, two other men who either bought or inquired about PIEDs around the same time. They were aliases invented by Medsafe. The testosterone bought by Richards and a bottle of clenbuterol bought later by White would be used as evidence against Townshend.

So too would some authentic orders. On February 20, 2015, a man in Nelson ordered a suite of products from the website, including nolvadex, arimidex, testosterone enanthate, dianabol and clenbuterol. The order arrived the next week, but the dianabol was missing. That, and another bottle of testosterone enanthate, were couriered on March 9. They never arrived. A week later, the man emailed Townshend:

"Courier packet has not been delivered and it has been taken by the manager at Nelson. This probably isn't a good thing."

"You'll need to call them," Townshend replied, "It will be fine."

"I did. The woman told me the manager had it locked in his office. It's been there for a week."

"OK, she will still need to let you know what's going on."

"What's the worst that can happen? Confiscate and give a slap on the wrist? She said that all she knows is that it's in the managers office and he was away so she didn't no anyhting else [sic]."

"They can't prosecute you at all. Its not a crime to send it."

"OK I'll let you know how I got on."

The conversation continued the next day: "Just be aware you don't have to tell them what's in it," Townshend said, "Say it's supplements."

"What do you think I should say if they tell me they no what it is," the customer replied.

"Just tell them it was sent from a friend it's a gift. Its probably leaked or something but see what they say." Later that day, the man reported back: "He said that it was an item of interest of medsafe that was banned as where investigating where it came from in chch. Be careful mate. Maybe change to small boxes so it's not an identical packet. I'll chuck though some extra money if you want to cover using aa larger size package [sic]. Just fill with random crap and put it inside?" He gave Townshend a new name and address to send to.

"Thanks mate, nah it's all good," Townshend replied, "I'll resend today for free."

The net was closing. In April 2015, investigators searched a business premises Townshend rented on Wordsworth St in central Christchurch and seized vials and pills containing prescription medicines (they also found the Medsafe warning letter from 2014 for the 900 tabs of metandienone, addressed to a Samantha Robertson). In September, in a storage unit Townshend had access to, they found active pharmaceutical ingredients used to make PIEDs. Nearly $30,000 worth. In a safe at the house where Townshend was living – an upmarket area of Christchurch's Port Hills – they found a kilogram of clenbuterol powder. By the strength and prices he had been selling the drug in spray form on his website, it was worth around $15 million. On October 6, Townshend was served with summons for three charges and ordered to appear in court.

Throughout, he was unrepentant. Court records show inconsistent but still seizable sales numbers after the first raid. Even after the summons, Townshend used Labour Weekend to send out 150 orders. He also sent an email to customers notifying them he would cease trading in four weeks: "Due to pressure put on us from authorities and clients we will no longer be qupplying [sic] products after the last day of November. Over the last few months we have had problems with shipping and dispatching orders. The amount of threats and disgusting treatment by some customers is astounding considering the risk we have taken to provide these products for you. Although we have not always had orders out on time, we have made sure every single order has been sent, sometimes twice at our own cost. Please keep in mind what you are buying before you threaten to 'report' us to the police, and that we have fought to protect your details from the authorities."

That fight was about to end. Investigators now had access to Townshend's computer and the thousands of emails on it recording names, dates and doses of drug purchases. Joshua Townshend would be the first casualty of clenbuterol.co.nz, but he wouldn't be the last.

Catching drug cheats has not been big business in New Zealand sport. The Sports Tribunal lists 124 anti-doping decisions on its website dating back to 2003 – only a few more than the number of athletes thought to be ensnared in the Clenbuterol NZ fallout – and many of them involved the use of substances more criminal than performance-enhancing: cannabis, methamphetamine, etc. The country has enjoyed a reputation, perhaps undeserved, as being above the fray on such matters.

"As far as I know, it is unprecedented in New Zealand," Christchurch lawyer Willie Hamilton, a member of the tribunal's legal assistance panel, said of Townshend's case.

"The fact that they'll be bringing between 75 and 100 prosecutions, or are likely to, that's on a completely different scale."

It's not just the numbers that are noteworthy, but their breadth. Previous cases involving PIEDs were largely confined to sports like bodybuilding and powerlifting. Of the 11 Clenbuterol NZ cases heard so far, seven have been for rugby players and two each for cricket and ice hockey. Drug Free Sport New Zealand (DFSNZ) has added a new section to its website to publish all the decisions.

Most of Townshend's customers are thought to have bought his wares for aesthetic reasons [the 'I', not the 'P', in PIED]. Still, several of those customers attested to the growing prevalence of steroids generally, whether for performance or image enhancement.

"I do know a lot of guys that take stuff," one, who asked not to be named, said. "Not off [Townshend], but I do know a lot of people."

"At the time it was normal table talk amongst fellow gym goers," said Manaaks Pivac, who bought one bottle of clenbuterol spray from the site for "a hard-out gym goer" friend, "A completely normal thing."

"That was probably only one site of multiple sites and local people and people in Auckland that [my friend] and other guys would use. It was like buying anything, like using any old store online."

Like buying anything. The quotidian task of illegally procuring drugs that, if you were affiliated with a national sporting organisation, could see you banned for years. The reckoning for offending athletes began shortly after Townshend was ordered to appear in court. Medsafe quietly informed DFSNZ of the prosecution and the likelihood that, as the body responsible for testing New Zealand athletes for PIEDs, it would need to review the evidence. This was a delicate process. In January 2016, a DFSNZ representative visited Medsafe's offices to review emails found on Townshend's database. They weren't allowed to copy any documents or take anything away, just look at what was there. A month later they visited again, this time to review spreadsheets prepared by Medsafe, and over the next year continued to examine electronic evidence until they had list of 107 names of athletes who may have breached their sport's anti-doping rules.

"To have identified approximately 100 athletes using a website selling these substances is extremely disappointing to us at DFSNZ, and should also be of great concern to the wider sporting community," DFSNZ chief executive Nick Paterson said in a statement. He declined to be interviewed for this story, but also observed at the time that many of the drugs Townshend sold were not of pharmaceutical grade. "Who knows what people were consuming or injecting themselves with?" (When ESR scientists tested the dianabol capsules seized in the second Nelson package, they should have found the active ingredient metandienone. There was no trace of any prescription medicine.)

Few of the names on DFSNZ's list would be familiar to the wider public. Of the cases heard so far, the most high-profile are probably former Waikato and New Zealand Sevens player Glen Robertson, and Queenstown brothers Mitchell and Lachlan Frear, both New Zealand ice hockey representatives. Most are amateurs. It is likely that at least some of them had no idea they were even subject to their sport's anti-doping rules.

"I've talked to mates of mine who are club rugby players and a lot of them are very surprised that they couldn't take a performance enhancer," Hamilton said.

"They say, 'I'm just a club rugby player, why are they worried about me?' They're worried about everyone."

'Everyone', meaning everyone subject to the rules, in this case New Zealand's Sports Anti-Doping Rules, devised by DFSNZ, and applicable to any person who is a member of a national sporting organisation or belongs to any club, team, association or league that has agreed to abide by them. This means liability could stretch to even the lowest levels of organised sport. Say you played in a softball team with your colleagues as part of a social competition. "They might be able to still get the hook into you if the competition was sanctioned by Softball NZ," Hamilton said, "[If] they provided the umpires and stuff. I play social touch [rugby] and I suspect that might still be." A good guide, he said, was if you had to pay a membership to compete in your chosen sport.

This is now the only avenue for disciplinary action. The deadline to prosecute anyone who sells, uses or possesses a prescription medicine without a prescription per the Medicines Act is 12 months after the offence was committed. For many of Townshend's customers, that expired before he was even charged and authorities knew who they were. The Sports Tribunal [or in the case of rugby, the New Zealand Rugby Union's own judiciary committee] is where they will face justice.

The cricketer who bought trenbolone acetate, testosterone enanthate and clenbuterol may yet be among them. He said he had not heard from DFSNZ or any investigative authority about a potential doping breach, but the Clenbuterol NZ bust is so big cases are being heard in tranches. The man rationalised his decision in that he wasn't playing cricket when he bought the drugs [stats website CricHQ has no data for him for the 2014-15 season] and, as a personal trainer, he had a professional interest to see what they were about.

"For me, playing an elite level of cricket, there's certainly no need for me to even consider taking any sort of enhancements whatsoever," he said.

"So therefore I wouldn't. Whereas if … all you've got going is gym and work, that's a different story."

Anti-doping rules may not be so understanding. The cricketer bought drugs in February 2015 and turned out for his club that October. An eight-month gap and an express lack of intent (he tried the products but they "didn't even work") may not be enough.

"It seems that the intended reading of the [Sports Anti-Doping Rules] is that as long as you are a member at the time they bring the prosecution ... you're under the rules," Hamilton said.

"The fact that you might have done something when you weren't a member, I think you'd have a very hard time persuading the tribunal that you shouldn't be subject to the rules if you later became a member.

"There's good policy reasons why you can't say 'I'm retired' for a year, go off and do whatever you want and come back bigger and stronger."

Josh Townshend's reckoning came on February 24, 2017. He had earlier pleaded not guilty to 292 charges but, when a case review was heard in the Christchurch District Court that day and the number whittled down to 129, he changed his plea. At sentencing, Judge David Saunders said Townshend's Clenbuterol NZ enterprise coupled with his earlier transgressions amounted to a "one-finger salute" to the courts and jailed him for two years. Defence counsel Josh Lucas said his client's offending was driven by a penchant for high living: "It was all an effort to impress everybody, including himself, probably."

"He liked to sell himself," one person who knew him said.

"I think he always wanted people to like him. It didn't matter what he was doing in his life, he just wanted everyone to like him. He would please one person by saying one thing and please another person by saying another.

"There is a saying for people like him: a leopard never changes his spots. I think he was always who he was. I think he's just very good at making you think that he can change. Deep down, I think he's stuck in [that] he knows he can make quick cash, so why would he go work for someone earning not even a quarter of what he could make?"

Josh Townshend was recently released on parole and has a job at a small engineering firm in central Christchurch. He declined to talk for this story.