“Did you even know what flaxseed oil was at the time he presented it to you?”
“Not really. Not at all.”
Nedrow asked if the oil had any effect, and Bonds said, “I told him, ‘It’s not doing crap. I’m still in pain. I’m still feeling the pain.’ ”
Then Nedrow showed Bonds the “cream.”
“Yeah, this is that lotion stuff.” He explained, “I said, ‘I don’t want to be addicted to anything. I don’t want to be addicted to pain pills and stuff like this to take pain away.’ There’s got to be something that can loosen me up, you know, to take the arthritis pain away that I feel in the mornings when it’s super cold. . . . And he said, ‘Okay, let me check.’ And he goes, ‘Well, try this.’ You know? And he rubbed it right here.” Bonds pointed to the inside of his arm, near the elbow.
“And you didn’t ask him what it was?”
“No.”
“Did Greg ever talk to you about this cream actually being a steroid cream that would, you know, conceal steroids or testosterone in your blood?”
“No, no.”
“Did Greg ever give you anything that required a syringe to inject yourself with?”
“I’ve only had one doctor touch me. And that’s my own personal doctor. Greg, like I said, we don’t get into each other’s personal lives. We’re friends . . . I don’t talk about his business, you know?”
“Right.”
“That’s what keeps our friendship. . . . You know, I was a celebrity child, not just in baseball by my own instincts. I became a celebrity child with a famous father. I just don’t get into other people’s business because of my father’s situation, see.”
Nedrow asked, “Have you ever injected yourself with anything that Greg Anderson gave you?”
“I’m not that talented, no.”
The prosecutors carefully went through the calendars marked with Bonds’s initials, seized at Anderson’s house. Bonds denied any knowledge of them, and said he had no idea what the letters
G
,
E
, or
I
stood for, or any other entries on the papers.
“Let me be real clear about this,” Nedrow continued. “Did he ever give you anything that you knew to be a steroid? Did he ever give you a steroid?”
“I don’t think Greg would do anything like that to me and jeopardize our friendship. I just don’t think he would do that.”
“Well, . . . did you ever take any steroids that he gave you?”
“Not that I know of.”
“What do you mean, ‘Not that I know of’?”
“Because I have suspicions over these two items right here.” Bonds pointed to the “clear” and the “cream.” But he said he only became suspicious after the raid and ensuing publicity. “I’m thinking to myself, What is this stuff?” But he said he’d never asked Anderson.
Bonds acknowledged introducing other players to Anderson, and stressed that he didn’t trust the Giants’ trainers, like Stan Conte.
“Did the Giants’ training staff have any involvement in working with you with Mr. Anderson?”
“No way.”
“Okay . . .”
“We don’t trust the ball team. We don’t trust baseball.”
“Why not?”
“Because I was born in this game. Believe me, it’s a business. Last time I played baseball was in college. I work for a living now.”
The prosecutors turned to a urine sample that was dated 2000 and which had tested positive for two steroids. “So, I got to ask,” Nedrow said. “There’s this number associated on a document with your name, and corresponding to Barry B. on another document, and it does have these two listed anabolic steroids as testing positive in connection with it. Do you follow my question?”
“I follow where you’re going, yeah.”
“So, I guess I got to ask the question again. I mean, did you take steroids? And specifically this test is in November of 2000. So, I’m going to ask you, in the weeks and months leading up to November 2000, were you taking steroids?”
“No.”
“Or anything like that?”
“No, I wasn’t at all.” Bonds said he’d never seen or heard about any such results. Anderson would take the samples, “and he’d say, ‘Everything is fine.’ I wouldn’t think anything. And he’d say, ‘Barry, I need you to eat this much food or I need you to take this much vitamins.’ That was it. I trusted him, you know what I mean?”
It was almost 3:00 p.m. After a fifteen-minute break, the jurors reassembled, and Nedrow resumed, making little effort to conceal his skepticism. “I’m sorry, Mr. Bonds, but I have to ask because you are a professional athlete, and an enormously successful athlete, but your trust in Greg with these items that don’t have packages on them and trusting in his word, without looking at these results, I mean, that’s a lot of trust for somebody whose body is, as you said, your work, your life. Isn’t it?”
“It’s exactly right. You’re right. I did trust Greg. And I have other people that have put stuff on my skin, too.”
Nedrow showed Bonds a 2001 blood test indicating an extremely high level of testosterone, and Bonds said he’d never seen or heard of it either. He emphasized again that he didn’t discuss such things with Anderson. “We were friends, we grew up together. I mean, he works in a gym. I could suspect what goes on in a gym. I don’t work out in the richie gym where everybody is rich. I work out–”
Nedrow tried to get in a question.
“Can I finish?” Bonds asked. “I work in a dungeon gym. You know, my thinking of what they may be doing is their own business. That’s what I’m saying. So, it never became a conversation. Because, you see a bodybuilder in a gym, how many bodybuilders going to tell you, ‘This is all natural’? You know, they don’t talk about it. Whatever, you know. They’re only lifting weights.”
At about 4:00 p.m. Nedrow got to his last question. “With what you’ve seen today, do you feel comfortable as you sit here today saying that you have never taken steroids?”
“I feel very comfortable, very comfortable,” Bonds concluded.
Given the opportunity, several grand jurors asked questions of their celebrity witness, and they seemed especially interested in what Bonds had paid Anderson–$15,000 a year in cash, plus a bonus of $20,000, also in cash, after Bonds won the title for most home runs in a season. One asked, “Greg Anderson. When his house was searched, did he talk to you about the search?”
“I just asked him, ‘What’s it like getting your door blown down?’ Greg right now is down, you know? He’s a great guy. He’s a really nice person and a very good guy, you know. . . . You just don’t turn your back on somebody you’ve known for a long time. And I’m not turning my back on him.”
“Another question,” a juror added. “With all the money you make”–Bonds had earlier volunteered, unasked, that he was making $17 million a year–“have you ever thought of maybe building him a mansion or something?”
The question seemed to touch a raw nerve. “One, I’m black,” Bonds answered. “And I’m keeping my money. And there’s not too many rich black people in this world. And I’m keeping my money. There’s more wealthy Asian people and Caucasian and white. There ain’t that many rich black people. And I ain’t giving my money up. That’s why. And if my friends can help me, then I’ll use my friends.”
Nedrow seemed to think this line of questioning had gone far enough. “Actually, I think that’s it for Mr. Bonds,” he interjected. But a grand juror got off another question, about Bonds’s endorsement of BALCO and its products in an ad that ran in
Muscle & Fitness
magazine.
“They gave those protein shakes and stuff to my father, you know, and my friends. And no one . . . they never charged us for anything. So it was a favor, for a favor. I didn’t charge him for that thing. I didn’t get paid for that or nothing. It was just, thank you.”
“I would think the free publicity . . . just being seen in a picture is payment enough for BALCO, you know?” the juror observed.
“That’s true. BALCO never charged me for anything. They never asked me for a penny, nor did I ever pay them anything. And it was, you know, it was the least [I] could do. When my dad was sick, they sent up protein shakes for my father. Some things are worth more than money. I thought they were doing something in kindness for my family. And to me that’s priceless.”
Bonds was getting emotional. “You’re excused, Mr. Bonds,” Nedrow said. “Thank you very much. You’re free to go.”
At 4:30 p.m. Bonds emerged from his interrogation, seemingly relaxed, chatting with several of the grand jurors. Outside, dusk was gathering. Bonds and his entourage left through the underground garage, where a waiting car drove them into a heavy rain.
NINE
“Everybody Is Doing It”
I
n his 2004 State of the Union address, President Bush focused again on the ongoing war against terror. He sidestepped issues like Iraq’s quest for weapons of mass destruction, which had caused such controversy the year before. On the home front, the president–an avid sports fan and former coowner of the Texas Rangers–zeroed in on performance-enhancing drugs in professional sports:
To help children make right choices, they need good examples. Athletics play such an important role in our society, but, unfortunately, some in professional sports are not setting much of an example. The use of performance-enhancing drugs like steroids in baseball, football, and other sports is dangerous, and it sends the wrong message–that there are shortcuts to accomplishment, and that performance is more important than character. So tonight I call on team owners, union representatives, coaches, and players to take the lead, to send the right signal, to get tough, and to get rid of steroids now.
A few weeks later, on February 12, 2004, Attorney General John Ashcroft personally announced the indictments of Conte, Valente, and Anderson at a Washington press conference televised live by ESPN. He was flanked by San Francisco U.S. Attorney Ryan, Novitzky, and other officials involved in the investigation. “The use of anabolic steroids in sports is a matter of great concern to the public,” Ashcroft said. “And I believe that the integrity of sports will be reinforced by enforcement actions. I believe there is already a question in the mind of the public. And it’s a question which is well founded given the indictment today.”
Picking up on the president’s message, Ashcroft stressed that “illegal steroid use calls into question not only the integrity of the athletes who use them, but also the integrity of the sports that those athletes play. Steroids are bad for sports, they’re bad for players, they’re bad for young people who hold athletes up as role models.”
Ryan, in turn, said, “Like anything in life, true success must be earned. Nothing can replace hard work and dedication.”
This was a lofty and important message, but once again, it focused exclusively on the athletes–the role models–not on anyone named in the BALCO indictment. Conte, Valente, and Anderson, as well as a fourth defendant, Remi Korchemny, a Russian track coach who had moved to the Bay Area and was seventy-one years old, were virtually unknown. The indictment identified six specific instances in which the defendants allegedly conspired to distribute steroids to two professional baseball players, two professional football players, and two track-and-field athletes. Two counts singled out the “cream” and the “clear,” alleging they were “designer steroids” that would enable athletes to escape detection. To conceal their illegal activities, the defendants used codes and shorthand abbreviations (“C” was the “cream,” for example), put the substances in unmarked plastic containers, provided athletes with false cover stories (“flaxseed oil”), and traded illegal drugs for product endorsements like Conte’s ZMA. But no athletes were named.
Pressed by reporters on whether there might be additional indictments, Ashcroft responded, “We do not want to signal in any way that we are closing the book.”
In San Francisco, the BALCO case was assigned to federal district court judge Susan Yvonne Illston, a 1995 Clinton appointee to the federal bench. A Stanford Law graduate and former trial lawyer who once defended the NFL in an employment case, she was praised by colleagues for a calm demeanor and keen intelligence, and had attracted little notoriety or attention in her eight years on the bench.
With the indictments of Conte and Valente, the BALCO investigation shifted to other potential dealers and distributors, especially coach Trevor Graham and his mysterious Mexican steroid source, identified by Tim Montgomery only as “Memo.” Graham had evidently had second thoughts about cooperating since submitting the syringe and implicating Conte. When Novitzky called him for an interview, he’d hired a lawyer. Novitzky and another agent flew to North Carolina, and on June 8, they met at Graham’s lawyer’s office in Raleigh. Graham insisted that his wife, Ann, sit in on the interview. She was a detective for the Wake County sheriff ’s office, specializing in illegal drugs.
Novitzky took out a proffer agreement, which stated that nothing Graham said in the interview could be used as evidence against him except in a “prosecution for false statements, obstruction of justice, or perjury.” Like the athletes who testified before the grand jury, Graham essentially had immunity as long as he told the truth, even though he was a coach, not a competitor, who’d been implicated both in testimony and by BALCO documents as a possible distributor of illegal drugs. His status was closer to Conte’s and Anderson’s than Montgomery’s or Bonds’s, and presumably he was only offered immunity because of his value as a potential witness against Conte. It was an unusual opportunity for Graham to come clean. His lawyer, Joe Zeszotarski, asked Graham and his wife to follow him downstairs for a private conference before Graham began answering Novitzky’s questions, where he presumably stressed the importance of telling the truth.