Since late October, some of the world’s greatest athletes have entered a federal courtroom and testified before a grand jury. On Thursday, San Francisco Giants slugger Barry Bonds is scheduled to join the parade.
Those subpoenaed include Bonds’ fellow baseball superstar Jason Giambi of the New York Yankees; pro football players Dana Stubblefield and Tyrone Wheatley; boxer Shane Mosley; Olympic swimmer Amy Van Dyken and sprinters Tim Montgomery and Marion Jones, the world’s fastest humans.
All are clients of the Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative, a pharmaceutical company that agents from the IRS and other law enforcement groups raided in early September. Six weeks later, officials with the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, linked the lab and its owner, Victor Conte, to a syringe containing a newly developed “designer” steroid that top athletes purportedly used.
While the federal investigation continues, the sports world is bracing for what could become the biggest scandal involving performance-enhancing drugs in U.S. athletic history. At the center of both is Conte, a former professional musician who now portrays himself as a leading authority on athletic nutrition and performance despite a lack of formal scientific training.
He has been in the spotlight before. Court records show Conte for years has been the subject of fraud accusations, including some leveled by a cousin who worked with him and told the IRS about alleged Medicare scams and kickbacks. But his friends describe him as a driven businessman with a sharp mind and a knack for charming famous athletes.
Conte, who along with his lawyers did not respond to requests for an interview, has denied involvement with steroids. But the Anti-Doping Agency says he is behind the newly discovered “designer” steroid tetrahydrogestrinone, or THG.
Four Oakland Raiders football players and at least five elite track athletes reportedly have tested positive for THG, uncovered when an anonymous track coach gave the anti-doping agency names of athletes supposedly using it. The coach also gave the agency evidence of the steroid in a syringe he said came from Conte.
“What we have uncovered appears to be intentional doping of the worst sort,” said Terry Madden, chief executive officer of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, an independent non-profit group that oversees drug-testing and punishment enforcement in athletes who perform in Olympic sports.
Conte is perhaps best known for his theories about how the presence or absence of certain minerals in the blood can be used to predict athletic performance–a theory that neither has been proven nor debunked, but has gained him a loyal following among some of the world’s top athletes.
BALCO’s Web site claimed affiliations with such stars as NFL quarterback John Elway, tennis champions Jim Courier and Ivan Lendl, and the 1992-1994 Seattle Supersonics NBA teams. Bonds and Oakland Raider Bill Romanowski, one of the players said to have tested positive for THG, have praised Conte in interviews.
“He is brilliant,” said Richard Goodman, a colleague of Conte’s for years. “He has a photographic memory. He doesn’t forget things that he reads, and he reads medical articles and research voluminously.”
According to Goodman, Conte’s enthusiasm for chemistry is rivaled only by his love of athletes.
“Victor is extremely impressed by elite athletes,” he said. “Perhaps much too impressed by them. I’m not sure he realizes they’re really just like the rest of us.”
Three years ago, Conte stood by the side of shot-putter C.J. Hunter after Hunter tested positive for steroids at the 2000 Sydney Olympics. He blamed Hunter’s results on contaminated over-the-counter nutritional supplements.
And he was in Paris at the World Track and Field Championships in late August, in keeping with his reputation as an insider.
“He was in the warm-up area with credentials, and a lot of people took umbrage at that,” said Brooks Johnson, director of USA Track and Field’s high performance center.
A week later, the IRS raided Conte’s lab. Shortly afterward, Conte wrote state officials to cancel BALCO’s laboratory license, saying the facility was closing for financial reasons.
An athletic-musical mix
Conte, 53, competed in high jump, long jump and triple jump at Fresno City College in 1968 and 1969 and later became a professional musician nicknamed “Walkin’ Fish.” He was a member of the Oakland-based Tower of Power in 1978 and played bass on the album “We Came to Play.”
Lenny Pickett, musical director for “Saturday Night Live” and former tenor saxophone player for Tower of Power, recalled Conte as a good musician with a ready sense of humor.
“I always kind of liked him,” Pickett said.
Conte was “sort of big on physical fitness, even back then,” Pickett said. “Nutritional products and things like that. He always kept himself in good shape.”
Tower of Power, still together today, peaked in the 1970s. The band’s popularity on the West Coast led to early contacts with Oakland Raiders such as All-Pro defensive back Jack Tatum, who came to the band’s shows.
“In the Bay Area, Tower of Power was like the Beatles,” Pickett said. “We always knew a lot of athletes.”
Conte’s first involvement with nutritional supplements came through his former wife, Audrey, who opened a business called Millbrae Holistic Health Center. It is unclear when the business started, but it appears on the couple’s 1984 tax return.
Around the same time, Conte began developing a theory that testing athletes’ blood for trace mineral deficiencies, and then administering nutritional supplements to fix those deficiencies, would improve sports performance.
In 1984, Conte filed papers with the California Secretary of State establishing BALCO, the company that would perform the blood tests to detect mineral deficiency. Four years later, he formed a related business, SNAC System Inc.
In those years, Conte worked with Ladislav Pataki, a Czechoslovakian shot-putter and exercise scientist. Pataki now says Conte took his ideas and then ushered him out of the business.
“I think he is not a good person,” said Pataki, an Eastern European sports scientist who defected to the West. He said he did not sue Conte because he wanted to move on with his business.
Fact or fiction?
Whether Conte’s theory was valid still is debated. Johnson, track coach at Stanford from 1979 to 1992, said that while he thought Conte’s testing-and-supplements theory was “hocus-pocus and voodoo,” some of his runners bought into it.
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“The whole concept started out very innocently,” Johnson said. “Athletes gave hair samples that would be evaluated to determine what minerals were missing. Then, they would replenish them to be more healthy.
“Somewhere from that, which was beneficial and benign, it turned, if the allegations are true, into something tragic and flawed.”
Former U.S. Olympic judo coach Willy Cahill, a supporter, has said he took the entire 1988 team to Conte for testing and saw Conte use those tests to predict accurately that one competitor would win a medal.
“The only thing he gave them was a multivitamin,” Cahill said. “Not once did he ever say anything about drugs.”
BALCO expanded into other forms of medical testing. In the early 1990s, the lab performed testing on women to determine if their silicone breast implants had leaked. State regulators cited BALCO for misrepresenting test results and ordered the lab to stop offering the tests until it could provide more information about the validity of its test results.
In 1996, the state received a complaint the lab’s secretary was initialing reports somebody else conducted, that BALCO was changing abnormal test results to normal ones and that a lab executive was performing tests without the appropriate licensure. Investigators could not substantiate those complaints.
In November of 2001 state inspectors issued five citations to the lab for violations, among them failing to maintain an adequate quality control program.
BALCO also ran afoul of federal officials. In 1995, the lab began billing the federal Medicare program for blood tests after accepting referrals from a Florida company. Not long afterwards, federal prosecutors in Miami filed a lawsuit accusing both firms of Medicare fraud. According to court documents, investigators could not find documentation that the tests actually were performed and doctors said they never ordered the tests.
The Florida lab settled out of court. The charges against BALCO were dropped because the Florida lab paid BALCO and BALCO did not receive any money from the Medicare program, according to a law-enforcement official who worked on the case. Shortly afterward, according to court records, a new Medicare fraud scheme began involving Conte’s cousin, Michael, after Roberto Llanes, the owner of another Florida lab, visited BALCO and met with him. The two soon established Monterey Medical Laboratories in Watsonville, down the coast from San Francisco.
Llanes recruited doctors and clinics in Miami to submit blood and urine specimens to the firm, in some cases paying them kickbacks in exchange for their business.
In many cases, Llanes and MML billed the federal government for tests that doctors never ordered, according to court papers. Some patients who allegedly needed blood tests from MML were in fact dead, investigators said.
The California lab ultimately received about $1.2 million for performing tests referred by Llanes, court papers said.
On Feb. 17, 2000, Michael Conte and Llanes were indicted on federal Medicare fraud and money laundering charges. After pleading guilty and helping the government in its case against Llanes, Michael Conte “provided the government with substantial information regarding BALCO’s operation,” according to a letter from his attorney to the U.S. Attorney’s office in Sacramento.
The letter, written in the hope of reducing Michael Conte’s sentence, noted that he had “identified the transactions used to hide the kickbacks BALCO fraudulently provided.” The court file gives no further information on alleged illegal activity by BALCO and did not mention Victor Conte by name.
Earlier this year, the federal government sued BALCO, accusing the company of collecting more than $1 million for unnecessary testing billed through Llanes’ company. That case is pending.
It is unclear whether Michael Conte’s cooperation with the IRS is related to the current grand jury investigation. He was sentenced to 14 months in prison and ordered to pay $1.5 million in restitution. He was released from prison in April and now lives near Santa Cruz.
Reached by phone, he declined to discuss BALCO.
“The only Victor Conte I know is dead,” he said.
BALCO success mixed
In addition to Medicare billings, BALCO and Conte’s vitamin company are involved in the marketing of ZMA, a vitamin supplement sold via weightlifting magazines and on the Internet and endorsed by Bonds and Romanowski.
In interviews and advertising, Conte has claimed the supplement increases athletic performance.
But one researcher who co-wrote a study with Conte on the supplement’s effects believes he has gone too far in promotion.
Laurie Brilla, an exercise physiologist at Western Washington University, said more studies are needed before reaching the conclusion that ZMA works.
“There’s a lot of things that go on in marketing that are beyond my ability to control,” she said.
She and Conte shared a byline on the study. But Brilla said Conte made “just a couple of editorial changes.”
Despite high-profile endorsements, Conte’s business success has been mixed.
Tax returns filed as part of his 1997 divorce show his vitamin company lost money for most of the 1990s, but by 2000 made profits of nearly $1.2 million.
Court documents included income tax statements showing wild swings in income, from none (a $10,000 loss) in 1984 to $926,000 in 1995 to $65,000 in 1998 to $100,000 in 2000.
Conte now lives in a Tudor home in San Mateo, where few neighbors had heard of his laboratory. And for years, he has received his mail at a sports memorabilia shop in Burlingame.
The shop’s owner, Larry Israel, said Conte “believes the guy who turned in the syringe is a rival.”