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The four people arrested yesterday were Naomi Loomis and Robert Loomis, the husband and wife who own the pharmacy; Mr. Loomis’s brother, Kenneth Michael Loomis, a pharmacist at the company; and Kirk Calvert, the company’s marketing director.

All four face charges of criminal diversion of prescription medications and prescriptions, criminal sale of a controlled substance and insurance fraud, The Associated Press reported. Mr. Soares’s investigation was disclosed Tuesday by The Times Union of Albany on that newspaper’s Web site.

The Times Union named several professional athletes as having been customers of Signature or other online pharmacies that were subjects of the two-year investigation, though Mr. Soares would not confirm any of those names, saying he could not reveal more information “without compromising an investigation.”

One of those named in the Times Union story was Gary Matthews Jr., a center fielder for the Angels. Scott Leventhal, Mr. Matthews’s agent, did not return messages left for him on Tuesday.

Tim Mead, the Angels’ vice president of communications, said yesterday that the team had become aware of the story on Tuesday morning, and that Angels officials met with Mr. Matthews the same day to show him the story.

“It’s a very general story. There are a lot of things in it that are kind of sketchy,” Mr. Mead said. “But we made Gary aware of it, and there will be more down the road.”

Before the 2006 season with the Texas Rangers, Mr. Matthews, 32, had played for six teams in seven seasons and was considered a journeyman outfielder, unable to impress teams enough for them to want to retain him.

But Mr. Matthews’s modest stature changed when he had a breakout season with the Rangers, batting .313 with 19 homers and 79 runs batted in. The timing was good for Mr. Matthews, who became a free agent after his increased production in 2006 and signed a 5-year, $50 million contract with the Angels.

A spokesman for the National Football League said that officials with the district attorney’s office had not contacted the league and that they had become aware of the investigation only on Tuesday.

A spokesman for Major League Baseball also said that the organization had learned of the investigation only through media reports and had no comment on it.

Another customer was Dr. Richard A. Rydze, 56, of Pittsburgh, a physician who tends to members of the Pittsburgh Steelers as well as private patients.

Mr. Rydze said on Tuesday that he was first approached by federal agents from New York in December, who told him during a brief meeting that he had been “caught in the line of fire” of the investigation into Signature.

They urged him to stop using Signature immediately and to switch to a local distributor, he said in a telephone interview. Mr. Rydze said he obliged, severed ties with the firm, and didn’t hear from anyone else associated with the investigation again.

He began using Signature, he said, after meeting company representatives at a booth during an anti-aging conference in Las Vegas in late 2005. For more than a year, he said, he paid the company $90,000 to $100,000 for growth hormone drugs, prescribing them to patients in his private practice who suffered from orthopedic ailments, tendon injuries or growth hormone deficiencies.

But he said he never prescribed the drugs to any members of the Steelers.

“I never have, never would and never will,” he said. “My involvement was not abusive. I was doing things by the rules.”

Anabolic steroids, human growth hormone and other performance-enhancing drugs have proliferated on the Internet just as legitimate business has. A prescription can be approved by a doctor in any country, based on as little as an online questionnaire, with no face-to-face contact.

The state and federal laws against illegal prescriptions are rarely enforced, as drug agencies focus on heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine.

At least seven different federal and state agencies worked with Mr. Soares’s office on the investigation, including New York State health, insurance, and drug enforcement officials, the Florida attorney general, and the United States Justice Department and Internal Revenue Service.

According to an individual with direct knowledge of the investigation, the raids are part of a national effort aimed at pharmacies and doctors — the primary suppliers of performance-enhancing drugs — rather than the trainers and coaches who use them.

That individual, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigations are still under way, said that investigators found more steroids and human growth hormone at the Florida pharmacy than they had originally expected.

The individual also said the raids were related to the arrests of two doctors and the owner of a pharmaceutical distribution company on Feb. 23 in Rhode Island.

In that case, according to The Associated Press, the owner of a New Jersey pharmaceutical company and two doctors from New York were charged in an alleged scheme to illegally prescribe anabolic steroids and human growth hormone to bodybuilders in several states, the United States Attorney’s Office in Rhode Island said on Feb. 23.

Daniel McGlone, 54, owner of American Pharmaceutical Group, and Ana Maria Santi, a former doctor who has been stripped of her license to practice medicine, were charged in an 80-count indictment handed up last week by a federal grand jury in Providence, R.I., according to The Associated Press. Victor Mariani, a licensed physician with a practice in New York City, was charged separately and has agreed to plead guilty, prosecutors said.

Reporting was contributed by Amy Green from Orlando, Fla.; Lee Jenkins from Los Angeles; and Murray Chass, Jack Curry, Serge F. Kovaleski, Michael Schmidt and Duff Wilson from New York.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: 4 Tied to Pharmacy Are Arrested in Inquiry Into Steroid Sales. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
4 Tied to Pharmacy Are Arrested in Inquiry Into Steroid Sales