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White opens a dossier to a Department of Motor Vehicles photo of a smiling Greg Anderson. "This is the guy," says a fellow agent on the drug task force. "He lives at the gym. He's pals with Bonds." White and three other agents are meeting at a crowded office on the San Francisco peninsula. The date is April 17, 2003, and White is about to go under. Considerable resources have been assembled: Jeff Nedrow, an assistant U.S. attorney, has been assigned to head a complex multiagency investigation. White has been lucky while working with Nedrow before; he feels good about his selection. At the federal level Novitzky will handle an IRS support network and direct the operation. He has already enlisted Dr. Don Catlin, the doping expert who heads UCLA's Olympic Analytical Laboratory, the premier testing lab in the nation. Dr. Catlin has given Novitzky a primer on steroids and drug cheating. White represents the statewide BNE, and local law enforcement will complement his work. The core group of investigative agents will remain small and secretive. Their goal: to infiltrate BALCO and Bay Area Fitness, find out if Bonds is taking steroids and, if he is, discover how he's been beating the system.
 Agents hand White $300 to open a six-month gym membership and give him an electronic wire to record Anderson and other suspects. He notes Anderson's 1966 birth date -- making him 37 -- and shakes his head at his 225 pounds. "He looks like a big boy," White says.
Anderson's role in beefing up Bonds has been known since the 2001 season. After breaking the home run record, the superstar thanked his trainer before a packed stadium. If you want Bonds, the agents reason, start with Anderson. Three years earlier small busts in San Mateo revealed that individuals were selling steroids out of Bay Area Fitness. If Anderson is supplying Bonds, agents conjecture, he is getting the drugs from another Burlingame operation -- BALCO.
White's supervisor points to a photo of a trim, proud man with a receding hairline: Victor Conte. "This guy is the owner of BALCO. We think he's the guy supplying the steroids." White scans head shots of the gym's owner and the front-desk girl as he gets the rundown.
The empire of the 53-year-old Conte consists of two parts: a medical testing lab for athletes, BALCO; and a nutritional-supplement company, SNAC, which licenses and markets a vitamin supplement called ZMA. (Apparently little more than zinc, magnesium and B6, it sells for $25 a bottle.) According to his website, Conte, a former musician with no formal training in chemistry, began offering athletes blood-test analyses in 1984. Using an "inductively coupled plasma spectrometer," he claims he can study the mineral levels in elite competitors' blood and theorizes that "magnesium supplementation" might significantly improve athletic performance. Conte also claims to do mineral analysis and custom nutritional supplementation for Olympic sprinters Tim Montgomery and Marion Jones. Bill Romanowski, the notoriously violent Oakland Raider, was one fan of the popular ZMA. (Conte later tells the San Francisco Chronicle that SNAC earned $10 million over the years from the sale and licensing of ZMA.)
To White it sounds like quackery.
The specter of steroids hovers above Conte. One of his prominent clients, Olympic shot-putter C.J. Hunter (then married to Marion Jones), flunked tests for the steroid nandrolone at the 2000 Sydney games, and Conte rushed to his defense. During a 1999 prescription-drug probe in Colorado, Romanowski's wife claimed that BALCO had given him human growth hormone (she later said she meant ZMA). Conte, who took on Barry Bonds as a client the winter before Bonds's huge 2001 season, uses his website to claim that ZMA helped the slugger shatter Mark McGwire's single-season home run record with 73. And then there is Barry Bonds, who does things unheard of for a 37-year-old, belting homers farther and more often than he ever had before. The payoff is huge: In 2002 the Giants signed Bonds at double his previous yearly rate -- $90 million, spread over five years. He responded to the suspicions about him with pure arrogance. When a Sporting News reporter asked about steroids, Bonds replied, "You can test me and solve that problem real quick."
A few weeks after the April 17 meeting, White, Novitzky and a handful of other agents meet at the San Jose Federal building. According to White, Novitzky names Bonds, Jason Giambi and other major leaguers as targets of the investigation. Cracking down on BALCO just for money laundering would never merit such energy from law enforcement, but a connection to Bonds would launch it into headlines around the country. Prosecutor Nedrow sets the tone. "Gentlemen, this case is going to have to be done by the numbers," he says. "With all of the attorneys and the athletes, everything and everybody will be under scrutiny." |
