Game of Shadows: Barry Bonds, BALCO, and the Steroids Scandal that Rocked Professional Sports by Fainaru-Wada Mark & Williams Lance

Author:Fainaru-Wada, Mark & Williams, Lance [Fainaru-Wada, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2006-03-23T00:00:00+00:00

Invisible “BT”—injectable…the more genetically gifted the athlete the more BT works.

Invisible “NP”—injectable…works best on a high protein diet.

Invisible “HD”—cream…works best taken 3 times per day.

Trash recon also yielded evidence about the athletes who obtained the drugs. There was a handwritten note to Conte from Kevin Toth, the U.S. shotput champion. “Vic, you are the man,” he wrote.

Another note in the trash was written by Regina Jacobs, a distance runner who, at age 39, had set the world record in the 1,500 meters. The note, to Conte and his right-hand man, Jim Valente, read: “…All that I have accomplished this season would not have been possible without your support.”

In BALCO’s trash, Novitzky also found many Federal Express receipts from professional baseball players. They were addressed to Greg Anderson, whom Novitzky knew as a suspected steroids dealer, as Barry Bonds’s personal trainer and as an associate of Conte. The agent discovered paperwork from current and former San Francisco Giants Benito Santiago, Marvin Benard, and Armando Rios, from Jeremy Giambi, and from Gary Sheffield. In January 2003, BALCO investigators had seen Sheffield working out several times with Bonds and Anderson at the World Gym 100 yards from BALCO.

Novitzky’s two-hour trash recon on the mild, windless night of Monday, March 3, 2003, was particularly productive. He found more of the usual evidence: a pill jar for a diet drug called hydrochloride diethylpropion; a half-full bottle labeled “Ecdysten, Russian Anabolic Compound, Dietary Supplement”; and four empty pill sheets of omifin, a women’s fertility drug also known as Clomid, which was thought to mask steroid use in men.

And, for the first time, Novitzky found documents pertaining to Bonds.

He knew Bonds was a BALCO client because Conte had bragged on the Internet about his association with the outfielder. Still, the agent hadn’t found any direct evidence tying Bonds to the steroids ring. Now, one Bonds item in the trash seemed curious: a fax from Conte to Jim Schmaltz at Muscle & Fitness magazine, describing the slugger’s weight and nutrition program as designed by BALCO. (Novitzky didn’t know it, but Muscle & Fitness’s splashy article about Bonds was scheduled to be published in June.)

The other Bonds-related documents in the BALCO garbage that night seemed more unusual and incriminating.

The first document showed that a sample of Bonds’s blood had been sent to a laboratory for steroid testing. Novitzky had seen this type of document many times in the trash, but never one with Bonds’s name on it. A second document heightened Novitzky’s interest: It showed that BALCO had tried to conceal that the sample was actually from Bonds.

During his investigation, Novitzky had come to believe Conte was pretesting his athletes—sending their samples to independent labs for analysis to make sure the performance-enhancing drugs they were taking would go undetected by drug testers. Now the agent had evidence Bonds was among those being pre-tested. Bonds’s sample had been sent to LabOne, a huge testing laboratory headquartered in Kansas. But the next day, BALCO vice president Valente had sent an affidavit to LabOne, swearing the sample was mislabeled.

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